In a speech delivered Wednesday by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and an accompanying national security strategy document, the Biden administration has signaled the continuation, and escalation, of the Trump administration’s “great-power competition” with Russia and China.
But to an extent even greater than its predecessor, the Biden administration is singling out China as the greatest US adversary and target for conflict. In his remarks on the interim strategy document, Blinken concluded, “Several countries present us with serious challenges, including Russia, Iran, North Korea … but the challenge posed by China is different. China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power” to “challenge” the United States.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks on foreign policy at the State Department, Wednesday, March 3, 2021 in Washington. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Pool via AP)
Biden’s focus on the US conflict with China includes the explicit threat to wage war. “The United States will never hesitate to use force when required to defend our vital national interests,” the national security strategy document states. “We will ensure our armed forces are equipped to … defeat threats that emerge.”
The Trump administration’s realignment of US foreign policy toward conflict with China was widely viewed as its defining foreign policy stance. Trump’s “America first” nationalism—involving protectionism and mercantilist trade war policy, was inseparable from its orientation toward conflict with China.
Likewise, the Biden administration has made clear that it will continue Trump’s trade war policies.
“Some of us previously argued for free trade agreements because we believed … those deals would shape the global economy in ways that we wanted,” Blinken said. “Our approach now will be different. We will fight for every American job and for the rights, protections and interests of all American workers.” Foreign Policy argued earlier this month that Biden’s foreign policy is a “Kinder, Gentler Spin on ‘America First.’” This comparison is facile at best; many of the new administration’s statements seem neither kinder nor gentler. “Wherever the rules for international security and the global economy are being written, America will be there and the interest of the American people will be front and center,” the Biden national security document states.
A central focus will be the attempt to recruit the American population into supporting this conflict. The document states that “We must also demonstrate clearly to the American people that leading the world isn’t an investment we make to feel good about ourselves. It’s how we ensure the American people are able to live in peace, security, and prosperity. It’s in our undeniable self-interest.
To this end, both parties have for years worked to demonize China. Trump declared that COVID-19 is the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu,” while the Biden administration has continued to claim that the disease may have been created in a Chinese lab, while accusing China of genocide.
These appeals have had an effect on public consciousness. Nine in 10 Americans now see China as a competitor or an enemy, rather than a partner, according to a Pew research poll conducted last month. And two-thirds of respondents have “cold feelings” toward Beijing, up from 46 percent just two years ago.
“The fact that both Republican and Democrat administrations have framed the relationship as strategic competition and highlighted numerous threats that China has posed, it’s not surprising that more and more Americans—who are reading and hearing about this on a daily basis—are more and more concerned, and have an unfavourable view of China,” noted Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
In his book The Room Where It Happened, former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton, who on most foreign policy questions lines up with the Democrats, made the following assessment of the Trump Administration:
Trump in some respects embodies the growing US concern about China. He appreciates the key truth that politico-military power rests on a strong economy. The stronger the economy, the greater the capacity to sustain large military and intelligence budgets to protect America’s worldwide interests and compete with multiple would-be regional hegemons. Trump frequently says explicitly that stopping China’s unfair economic growth at US expense is the best way to defeat China militarily, which is fundamentally correct. These views, in an otherwise bitterly divided Washington, have contributed to significant changes in the terms of America’s own debate about these issues.
It was this viewpoint that guided the drafting of the 2018 national defense strategy under Secretary of Defense James Mattis, which concluded, “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”
Under Trump, the corollary to this approach was not merely trade war, but preparations for full-scale nuclear war. The White House’s withdrawal from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was aimed centrally at ringing China with nuclear missiles, and Trump accelerated a multi-trillion dollar build-up of US nuclear weapons. These preparations will continue under Biden.
The State University of New York (SUNY) system has reached a concerning milestone one month into the new semester of in-person classes. Since January 30 all SUNY schools have reported 3,000 cases of COVID-19. More than 2,000 of these have come from on-campus residents, with the other 1,000 occurring among students living off campus.
If SUNY students were their own county, they would far surpass any other county in New York for daily cases per 100,000. Even if only the on-campus cases were considered, the infection rate would still be dangerously high at 41.6 cases per 100,000 for February and 53.2 cases per 100,000 for the last two-week period. Either figure is higher than the 14-day average for New York state, which stands at around 40 cases per 100,000 during the same period.
Since the beginning of the fall 2020 semester, nearly 12,000 cases have been recorded. Over the course of the fall semester while in-person classes were in session, with data collected from August 28 to November 20, 5,251 students contracted COVID-19. A further 3,632 cases were recorded while classes were not in session between December 5 and January 29, likely driven by the general explosion in cases that occurred across the country during December and January.
In just one month, cases at SUNY campuses have surpassed half of the total infections for the entire fall semester. Even with overall cases declining in the country, SUNY is set to record more cases in just five weeks of in-person classes than during the two months students were home and daily case numbers were twice what they are now.
The rapid rise in case numbers has been driven by a few schools, in particular, which have reported disturbingly high rates of infection. Stony Brook University has recorded 139 cases among on-campus residents since January 30, and the University at Buffalo has reported 153, both over 1.25 percent of the total on-campus population.
SUNY Delhi’s 42 cases appears low, but it is a concerning 2.4 percent of the campus population. Similarly, SUNY Potsdam’s 57 cases constitute 2.5 percent of student residents, and SUNY Maritime’s 67 represent 3.4 percent.
Two of the state university system’s largest schools, Albany and Binghamton, are also facing large outbreaks. Albany’s 205 on-campus cases constitute nearly three percent of the residential population, and Binghamton’s astonishing 371 cases is 2.6 percent.
SUNY Administration building (Wikimedia Commons)
However, large schools in urban areas are not the only ones facing considerable outbreaks. SUNY Cortland, which suffered from some of the highest case numbers last semester, has recorded 189 on-campus cases and 261 cases for on- and off-campus students among their 3,885 residential students in rural New York. Using just the on-campus cases, that is 4.8 percent of the campus population.
Even higher is SUNY Geneseo, another relatively small school in rural New York. Geneseo was largely spared from COVID-19 in the fall but has recorded 225 on-campus cases among 4,443 students, a five percent infection rate that is the highest in the entire SUNY system.
To further stress how high these case numbers are, the average daily infection rate must be considered. Using the total of 3,000 SUNY students infected during February, the daily average infection rate was 60.6 per 100,000 students. In just the last two-week period, the average was 73.6 per 100,000 students.
No matter how the data is examined, the numbers do not lie: the reopening of college campuses during a deadly pandemic has been disastrous. It is only by chance that no SUNY students have been killed by the virus, and no one knows what long-term health effects these infections will cause. Even more concerning is the role that these outbreaks may play in expanding cases in the surrounding communities.
Multiple studies have provided evidence to show that outbreaks at universities across the country can result in higher case numbers in the surrounding communities. With limited contact tracing resources for studying this phenomenon, it is difficult to know the real extent to which SUNY campuses are linked to outbreaks in other areas.
There are warning signs that this is already occurring.
Broome County, where Binghamton is located, had been experiencing a persistent drop in daily case numbers since mid-January. Average daily infections per 100,000 dropped from a peak of 98 on January 12 to 29.9 on February 14. But this trend reversed around the same time that cases began to explode on campus, and daily infections in the county are now over 44 per 100,000 people.
Even after college students are taken into account, the daily case numbers are still beginning to swing upwards. This could be for a variety of reasons, but the correlation is significant enough to warrant consideration and concern.
Other counties with SUNY schools have early warning signs as well. Livingston County, where SUNY Geneseo is located, has seen an uptick in cases in the past week following a several week decline. Cortland County has seen its decline in cases stall over recent weeks. Albany, Erie and Suffolk counties, all home to large universities with large outbreaks at SUNY schools, have all seen cases begin to rise recently.
With new more transmissible variants of the coronavirus spreading throughout New York, there is a real possibility that colleges and universities will act as vectors for these new variants and amplify their spread, both on and off campus.
Larry, a freshman student at Edinboro University in northwestern Pennsylvania near western New York, which is also experiencing a surge in COVID-19 cases. There were 83 confirmed student cases since January 11. He expressed his concern about the situation at SUNY schools to the World Socialist Web Site.
“I personally think that the SUNY schools have done a really bad job of handling the pandemic outside of testing everyone each week now. The SUNY chancellor is using his power of being close to the New York governor for gain in order to make the SUNY schools look better than they actually are doing.
“They’re now opening sports and intramurals to students on top of more in-person classes, and all it is doing is allowing for a better chance of further spread of the virus.
“I think [James] Malatras being the chancellor of the SUNY schools as well as playing a major role on the governor’s COVID-19 board gives way too much power to him to make this work so they can try to maximize profit. They are just hurting way too many people with the virus.”
He concluded, “I seriously think this is all a big business ploy in order to make the [businesses] of the country better. I strongly feel that nothing will be done with public education during my lifetime. They don’t care about the normal people of the country.”
Eligible Countries: A list of 39 relevant countries have been developed, all of which are potential partner countries for Norwegian development cooperation.
Africa: Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe
Other Countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, East Timor, Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Palestine, Peru, Sri Lanka, Vietnam
About the Program: NORPART shall enhance the quality of higher education in Norway and selected partner countries in the Global South through academic cooperation and mutual student mobility. The programme is funded by the Ministry of Education and Research and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The programme will support academic partnerships and student mobility with an emphasis on the Master and PhD level. The programme addresses both higher education policy and development policy goals.
Objectives of NORPART: The programme shall lead to:
Strengthened partnerships for education and research between developing countries and Norway
Increased quality and internationalisation of academic programmes at participating institutions
Increased mobility of students from developing countries to Norway, including mobility in connection with work placements
Increased mobility of students from Norway to developing countries, including mobility in connection with work placements
Offered Since: 2016
EligibilityCriteria: In order to be eligible, applications must meet the following requirements:
The applicant must be an accredited Norwegian higher education institution. The application must include at least one partner that is an accredited higher education institution in one of the NORPART partner countries.
A curriculum vitae (CV) for the project coordinator must be uploaded.
Applications must be written in English and be submitted fully completed, including attachments, through SIU’s online platform for applications and reporting (Espresso) within the call’s final deadline.
All project activities described in the application must be completed within the project period defined in the duration below.
Failure to meet the above criteria will lead to dismissal of the application.
Selection criteria: The eligible applications’ relative strength will be assessed on the degree to which they are deemed able to meet the following selection criteria:
The project’s relevance to the overall aim and objectives of the programme
The quality of the project design, including:
the application’s overall clarity and quality
correspondence between project goals, proposed activities, budget allocations and expected project results
demonstration of cost-effectiveness
the sustainability of the project results
the project’s feasibility, including the feasibility of the plans for student mobility
The quality of the partnership, including:
complementarity, experience and expertise of the project team
level of formalised commitment
potential for long-term collaboration between the partners
the degree to which the partnership is based on mutual academic interests and capacity within relevant academic programmes at the participating institutions
documented synergies with other funding programmes, such as Erasmus+, Horizon 2020, other international and regional programmes for higher education and research in the partner countries, NORHED, NORGLOBAL and other Norwegian-funded programmes.
In line with the Sustainable Development Goals’ commitment to leave no one behind, the following cross-cutting issues will be assessed as they pertain to all the three abovementioned selection criteria: Gender perspectives and gender equality in project activities; female participation in project activities, including student mobility; inclusive practices towards indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and other vulnerable or marginalised groups of society; and transparency and anti-corruption measures.
Please note that the selection criteria correspond to various compulsory fields in the online Espresso application form, and that the application’s ability to meet these relative criteria will be assessed on the basis of the description provided. In order to ensure coherence and a logical order in the description of your project, please read the relevant help texts in the online application form as well as the “Guidelines for applicants” carefully. Remaining questions may be directed to SIU.
Value: The total funds made available in this call are approximately NOK 90 million. Each application may be awarded up to 5 000 000 Norwegian kroner (NOK).
Duration: The call is open to long-term project cooperation with a project period from 1 January 2022 to 31 December 2026.
How to Apply: A seminar for applicants will be held online Wednesday 17 March 2021. More information will be made available on this page shortly.
About the Award: Siemens Stiftung is launching its first open, competitive E-Mobility Innovation Call “Electric Mobility Made in Africa for Africa,” which emphasizes innovative technical solutions and circular economy approaches. The pre-seed funding is intended to jump start visionary African entrepreneurs, start-ups, and social ventures that are developing innovative e-mobility solutions in manufacturing, exploring innovative business models and creating mobility services (such as apps or delivery services).
The foundation is seeking applications from entrepreneurs headquartered in Africa who are pursuing the uptake and mainstreaming of e-mobility in Africa – both companies that are already generating revenue and companies in the earliest stages of development are encouraged to apply. A high representation of female employees on staff is relevant.
Eligible Field(s): The E-Mobility Innovation Call 2021 emphasizes four areas of Siemens Stiftung’s Electric Mobility and Circular Economy Program:
• Manufacturing • Charging, batteries, and the circular economy • Business development • Services (apps, customer engagement, delivery services)
Type: Contest
Eligibility: To be eligible, applicants must meet the following criteria:
Registered and operating as a legal entity in Africa at the time of submission
Business focus on application and implementation of e-mobility in the African mobility sector
High representation of female employees on the company’s staff
Provide financial & accounting information
Making a contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals
Actively support the empowerment of women
Product and/or service from one of the focus areas from the Siemens Stiftung E-Mobility Program
Eligible Countries: African countries
Number of Awards: 5
Value of Award: Siemens Stiftung’s E-Mobility Innovation Call promotes the most promising, catalytic, and bankable innovations from African countries. The winners will receive a financial prize and the opportunity to pitch their business and products to a wider audience in our webinar series:
Furthermore, Siemens Stiftung will support the winners in promoting their companies to a wider audience, reflecting the foundation’s commitment to inclusive, digital, and socio-economic growth of African entrepreneurs and social businesses in electric mobility and the circular economy.
The Senate Parliamentarian has dealt a strong blow to the Fight for $15 movement by ruling that a federal minimum wage increase cannot be included in the stimulus bill. Senator Bernie Sanders is pushing back with an amendment to take tax deductions away from large, profitable corporations that do not pay at least $15 an hour.
This is just the latest battle in a struggle over big business wage practices that goes back decades. There was a time when landing a job with a large corporation was, even for blue collar workers, a ticket to a comfortable life — good wages, generous benefits, and a secure retirement. Women and workers of color did not share fully in this bounty, but they generally did better at big firms than small ones.
All this began to unravel in the 1980s, when big business used the excuse of global competition to chip away at the living standards of the domestic workforce. This took the form of an assault on unions, which had played a key role in bringing about the improvements in the terms of employment. In meatpacking, for instance, what had been a high-wage, high-union-density industry turned into a bastion of precarious labor.
When large corporations off-loaded a substantial portion of their employment costs, they created a higher burden for the public sector. As their pay and benefits shrank, workers turned to the social safety net to fill the gap. Programs such as Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) that were originally designed for employees of small firms and for the unemployed became a lifeline for the workforce at some Fortune 500 companies.
From a social point of view, this was a good thing — but it also created a situation in which taxpayers were in effect subsidizing the labor costs of mega-corporations. This became an issue in the early 2000s with regard to Walmart, and there were unsuccessful efforts in states such as Maryland to require large firms to spend more on employee healthcare.
Although the issue receded from public attention, figures such as Senator Sanders have sought to keep it alive, putting the main focus on the employment practices of Amazon.com. In 2018 Sanders helped pressure the giant e-commerce firm to raise its wage rates by introducing legislation that would have taxed large companies to recoup the cost of government benefits given to their employees.
Now the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, Sanders is continuing his effort from a position of even greater influence. In the lead-up to the Senate Parliamentarian’s ruling, he held a hearing on whether taxpayers are subsidizing poverty wages at large corporations. As in 2018, just highlighting the issue had a concrete impact. At the hearing the chief executive of Costco announced that his company would raise its minimum pay rate to $16 an hour. This came a week after Walmart hiked its rate to $15 but only for a portion of its workforce.
After years of wage stagnation, it is heartening to see that large companies are beginning to feel some pressure to boost their wage rates. Yet rises of only a few dollars an hour will not do the trick. Pay needs to be substantially higher than $15 an hour. That’s why the real solution to the problem is not voluntary corporate action but rather collective bargaining. Amazon and Walmart could assist their workers much more by dropping their opposition to unionization.
Having a voice at work would solve not only the pay problem but also the crisis in healthcare coverage and other benefits. The scope of that crisis was made plain by another speaker at the Senate Budget Committee hearing. Cindy Brown Barnes of the Government Accountability Office summarized research showing that an estimated 12 million adults enrolled in Medicaid and 9 million adults living in households receiving food stamp benefits earned wages at some point in 2018.
The GAO had more difficulty determining the portion of these populations employed at large corporations. That is because only a limited number of the state agencies administering Medicaid and food stamps collect and update employer information on recipients.
The partial data is still revealing. Among the six states providing employer information for Medicaid recipients, Walmart was in the top ten in all, while McDonald’s and Amazon were in five. Among the nine states providing employer information for food stamp recipients, Walmart was in the top ten in all, while McDonald’s was in eight and Amazon was in four.
These findings provide valuable information for the Sanders campaign against poverty wages. Companies such as Amazon—which recently reported that its annual revenues in 2020 were up 38 percent and its profits nearly doubled to $21 billion—can well afford to pay employees a living wage and provide the benefits necessary for a decent standard of living.
Public safety net programs are essential to society, but those who are employed by mega-corporations should not have to make use of them.
As the COVID-19 death toll mounts, Tamil nationalist parties in Sri Lanka are appealing to India’s ruling Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This comes amid growing war tensions driven above all by US imperialism. The incoming Biden administration, which recently bombed Iranian-linked militias in Syria, is also threatening China, intensifying tensions across the Indian Ocean region between China and Washington’s main regional ally, India.
The class content of Tamil nationalist appeals to the BJP is virtually self-evident. The BJP is a violently anticommunist party with a long, bloody tradition of inciting communal massacres of Muslims. It has adopted the “herd immunity” policies championed by US imperialism on the pandemic, as well as allying with Washington against China. By appealing to the BJP, the Tamil nationalists are seeking virulently right-wing alliances to pursue “herd immunity” policies, whip up communal hatred and back imperialist war policies against working class opposition.
Indian Prime Minister Modi of the BJP (Source: Wikipedia)
They are responding to the February 15 comments from BJP Chief Minister of Tripura state Biplab Deb, who said that Home Minister Amit Shah wanted the BJP to take over Sri Lanka. “We have to expand the party in Sri Lanka, Nepal and win there to form a government,” Deb quoted Shah as saying. Deb also attacked the Chinese Communist Party, “The communists claimed that their party was the world’s largest party. But Amit Shah made the BJP the largest party in the world.”
Maravanpulavu Sachchidanandan, who leads Sri Lanka’s Hindu-extremist Shiva Senai, soon endorsed Deb’s remarks. Calling the BJP “the safest movement for Hindus in the South Asian region,” he hailed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a global protector of Hindus, calling for the building of the BJP in Sri Lanka. “Only such a movement and leaders like Modi and [Indian Interior Ministry] Amit Shah can resolve the problems of the Hindus in Sri Lanka. This is why we have decided to start the BJP here.”
This is a provocative, barely veiled threat of violence against the working class. The BJP has sought to violently repress mounting strikes and farmers protests against its austerity agenda and also mass protests that erupted before the pandemic against its anti-Muslim citizenship law. Moreover, the Indian state has already invaded and occupied much of the Tamil-majority north of Sri Lanka between 1987 to1990.
Nonetheless, several prominent Tamil nationalist politicians in Sri Lanka have supported Deb. Tamil National Party leader K. Shivajilingam, who joined an east-to-north march in Sri Lanka led by Hindu clerics last month, endorsed the call of the Hindu fanatics, saying, “There are communist parties all over the world. In that case, why should there not be another international in the name of the BJP?”
He denounced the Sri Lankan government’s decision to award a Chinese company a contract to generate electricity and solar power on three small islands off Sri Lanka’s northern coast. “The Eelam Tamils will never permit Chinese companies on this soil,” Shivajilingam said, adding, “This [Chinese contract] must be immediately withdrawn. If not, we the Tamil people will take things into our own hands; that the government must understand.”
Shivajilingam threatened that if the Sri Lankan government did not toe an anti-China line, US and Indian troops could invade Sri Lanka. “In the Indo-Pacific region, if you were to act against India and the United States, certainly there would be a major conflict. … There is no guarantee that perhaps American or Indian troops might not land and stay in the North and East” of Sri Lanka.
He threatened to back an ethnic partition of Sri Lanka, with India annexing the Tamil Eelam state. “Understand that many countries in the world are broken and fragmented. If you want, the island of Sri Lanka would be divided into two parts, one for the state of Tamil Eelam and another for the state of Sri Lanka. Understand that the Chief Minister would be elected, and everyone would have to go to [India’s] New Delhi Parliament and Upper House.”
Addressing the Modi government, he pledged, “You must seek your security. We, the Eelam Tamils, will stand by it.”
Other Tamil nationalists endorsed founding the BJP in Sri Lanka, speculating that it could help their maneuvers with the Sri Lankan government in Colombo. Tamil National Alliance (TNA) official S. Shritharan said he would “welcome” the BJP into Sri Lanka if it supported ethnic Tamil control of the North and East. He added that “the Sinhala nation must accept the art, culture, autonomy, sovereignty, Tamil nationalism and language of the Tamil people.”
Such remarks expose the violent shift to the right by the Tamil nationalists amid the pandemic and mounting geostrategic tensions in the region. Since the defeat and massacre of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fighters at the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009, Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim workers and youths have increasingly mobilized together in strikes and protests against austerity and police-state policies. This staggered and terrified Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese and Tamil bourgeois parties, cutting across their nationalist politics.
While the Tamil bourgeois nationalists reacted in fear of the movement from below, they pursued an ever more openly neo-colonial, communal strategy. In 2015, they supported the US-backed regime change operation in Colombo to oust then-President Mahinda Rajapakse, whom Washington saw as too close to China, and set up a US-backed, pro-austerity government. After it collapsed in 2019, however, and the Rajapakse brothers returned to power, the Tamil nationalists became ever more hysterical in their right-wing, anti-China rhetoric.
The pandemic has brought these conflicts to unprecedented intensity. The Modi government has been shaken by the mass strikes by public sector workers and protests by farmers. Now, as infections and deaths again mount across South Asia, all factions of the bourgeoisie are pursuing a murderous “herd immunity” policy, provoking bitter opposition among workers and youth.
There are signs that Tamil nationalists’ pro-BJP rhetoric may have gone too far, from the standpoint of Washington and New Delhi. On February 24, US Ambassador to Sri Lankan Alaina Teplitz met with TNA officials Mavi Senadhirasa, S. Sritharan, and C.V.K. Sivagnanam. She also met Jaffna Mayor V. Manivannan of the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF). Manivannan reportedly hailed Vice President Kamala Harris for her Tamil ancestry and appealed for US assistance. After these meetings, several of their online videos of the Hindu east-to-north march were taken down.
The Tamil nationalists’ endorsements of the BJP are nonetheless a warning to workers in Sri Lanka and internationally. The workers and toiling masses do not and cannot forget the horrific trail of blood and pillage left behind by the Indian army in 1987-90 in areas of Sri Lanka it occupied, but the Tamil nationalists are seeking allies in New Delhi. However, the bourgeois nationalists are pressing on to the right, as international class and geopolitical tensions reach explosive dimensions.
It is three decades since the Indian intervention in Sri Lanka and the Stalinist regime’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, the Indian bourgeoisie and the Tamil nationalist parties have fully integrated themselves into the imperialist-dominated world capitalist market and shifted far to the right. The Tamil nationalists’ anti-China outbursts, aiming to curry favor with US imperialism and Modi, are inseparable from their bitter hostility to the working class.
By appealing to Modi, they seek allies against a renewed upsurge of workers struggles, notably in Sri Lanka—with strikes by tea plantation workers, health care workers protests against the disastrous pandemic response and mass protests across the North and East in September.
The alternative to the reactionary politics of the Sri Lankan and Indian regimes and to their Tamil nationalist allies is advanced by the Socialist Equality Party. It counterposes to the plots of New Delhi, Colombo and the Tamil nationalists the international mobilization and unification of the working class, across all the region’s ethnic and state boundaries, in a struggle for state power and for socialism. It is the only way to halt the imperialist war drive and impose a scientifically-based policy to stop the pandemic.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak presented a £65 billion budget yesterday for the Conservative government funneling a vast tranche of money into the coffers of big business.
It was trailed that Sunak would extend the jobs furlough scheme, under which around 11 million workers whose companies are unable to operate during pandemic lockdown have received up to 80 percent of their wages paid by the state. At the end of January, it was still supporting 4.7 million workers. But even with the scheme in place, Sunak was forced to acknowledge that since last “March, over 700,000 people have lost their jobs.”
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak leaves No 11 Downing Street for the House of Commons to deliver the 2021 Budget. 03/03/2021. London, United Kingdom. (credit: Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street-FlickR)
The government’s herd immunity policy has led to at least 135,000 dying in the pandemic, and the presence of several highly contagious variants of the virus in Britain. But for the ruling class the continued flow of profits is all that counts. The Tories have laid out a roadmap to reopen the entire economy by June 21, with all schools open from next week.
Knowing that, in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s own words, this will result in “more infections, more hospitalisations and… more deaths,” the government fears an explosion of social and political opposition. In an effort to prevent this the furlough scheme is being extended until October—at a cost of around £20 billion. But beginning in July, immediately after the economy is fully opened, furlough support will be cut each month with employers expected to pay 10 percent towards the hours their staff work, increasing to 20 percent in August and September when the scheme will end.
Sunak also announced the continuation of the £20 a week increase to the Universal Credit welfare benefit, claimed by millions of unemployed workers during the pandemic, for another six months.
More than double this amount was handed over to big business, bring total government spending on the crisis to more than £400 billion. Sunak said that since the start of the pandemic, “Our economy has shrunk by 10 percent—the largest fall in over 300 years. Our borrowing is the highest it has been outside of wartime. It’s going to take this country—and the whole world—a long time to recover from this extraordinary economic situation. But we will recover.”
The recovery he refers to is in the profits of corporations and the fortunes of the super-rich, to be paid for out of the hides of the working class.
Sunak explained, “The government is providing businesses with over £100 billion of support to get through this pandemic,” adding, “so it is fair and necessary to ask them to contribute to our recovery.”
This contribution amounted to a Corporation Tax increase from 19 percent to 25 percent to be introduced in two years’ time, in 2023, which the government stressed “will remain the lowest rate in the G7.”
While the Corporation Tax increase was given all the headlines, a massive “Super Deduction” £25 billion two-year tax break scheme for business was rolled out immediately that cancels this increase out. This allows large corporations to invest in “plant and machinery” and “reduce their taxable profits by 130 percent of the cost,” said Sunak. “Under the existing rules, a construction firm buying £10 million of new equipment could reduce their taxable income, in the year they invest, by just £2.6 million. With the Super Deduction, they can now reduce it by £13 million.”
Sky News economic editor Ed Conway described the super-deduction boon to business as “pretty extraordinary. I’ve never heard of anything like this certainly being used in the UK… The cost more than outweighs the cost coming back from Corporation Tax increases.”
In another giveaway described by Sunak as a “£6 billion tax cut for business”, the holiday for business rates will continue until the end of June and will be cut by two-thirds for the rest of the year. For eligible retail, leisure or hospitality businesses with a rateable value below £51,000 they would “over the next financial year, pay no business rates whatsoever.” Another £5 billion in new grants for businesses was announced for when they reopen from next month.
The ruling elite were assured that the state coffers would always be available to them, with Sunak promising “if further action is needed as the situation evolves—I hope the whole House knows, I will not hesitate to act.”
The budget confirmed that the ruling elite is hell-bent on a class war agenda post-Brexit to finish the “Thatcher Revolution”.
Describing the budget as “The first in almost fifty years outside the European Union,” Sunak announced eight new Freeports which are “special economic zones with different rules to make it easier and cheaper to do business. They’re well-established internationally, but we’re taking a unique approach.”
Britain’s Freeports would have “Simpler planning—to allow businesses to build; Infrastructure funding—to improve transport links; Cheaper customs—with favourable tariffs, VAT or duties; And lower taxes—with tax breaks to encourage construction, private investment and job creation.”
Among the Freeports announces were ones on the Thames in London, East Midlands Airport and another covering the entire Liverpool City Region in the northwest of England.
Tax breaks for corporations are to be paid for with stealth taxes on workers’ wages. Sunak announced a freeze to the threshold for income tax for the lowest paid until 2026, after a small rise this April. The lowest paid start paying 20 percent income tax from when they earn £12,500 a year. The freeze will cost workers £2 billion next year and £8 billion a year within five years. New changes mean that by 2026, a million more workers will be in the higher rate of tax, and 1.3 million more who are currently outside of the tax system will be paying the basic rate.
Sunak announced an increase of just 2.2 percent in the National Living Wage, with the Daily Mirror noting, “It equates to a pay rise of just 19p an hour for basic-rate workers—the majority of whom have already taken a 20 percent hit over the past year due to mandatory furlough.”
There is not a scintilla of difference between the pro-business policies of the Tories and the Labour Party. Responding to the chancellor, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer insisted, “Our economy is still shut and our businesses are on life support, so it is right that corporation tax is not rising this year or next.”
Starmer grotesquely compared the “the millions of key workers who are having their pay frozen,” and “the families paying more in council tax and the millions of people who are out of work or worried about losing their job” to “businesses being swamped by debt”.
In anticipation of the budget, on February 18, Starmer delivered a grandiosely titled speech, “A new chapter for Britain,” insisting that the government not increase tax on business, including Corporation Tax, at a time when Sunak was hinting at a rise.
Leading Blairite Alan Johnson in a Guardian op-ed this week boasted, “With enterprises struggling, the Conservatives have lost their trust. Labour can now be the party of business.”
“There are those on the far left who think it’s the duty of the party to impose tough taxes on business, and they recoil at the thought of Labour opposing Tory proposals to increase corporation tax,” he wrote. But Labour opposing a Corporation Tax increase was “smart politics.”
It was only the political embarrassment caused by Starmer’s initiative that forced a recalibration, with Labour backing the delayed Corporation Tax increase and Starmer maintaining his stance of “constructive opposition” to the Tories. But had Shadow Chancellor Annelise Dodds delivered a Labour budget it would have likely been more right-wing and anti-working class than that offered up by the multi-millionaire Sunak.
A rocket attack on the sprawling Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq’s western province of Anbar early Wednesday has heightened the threat of a further escalation of US military aggression in the country and the wider region.
Iranian rockets targeting the the Ain al-Assad air base in January 2020. (Credit: https://en.irna.ir)
The 10 rockets that fell on the base, which houses US and other NATO troops, claimed no casualties, but one US civilian contractor died of a heart attack while sheltering during the assault. Iraqi security officials said little damage was inflicted on the base, while witnesses told local media they had seen flames and a long plume of black smoke.
Raising the prospect of another round of US military action, President Joe Biden told reporters, “We are following that through right now... we’re identifying who’s responsible and we’ll make judgments.”
The rocket attack follows last week’s US air strikes against facilities near the Iraqi border used by Iranian-backed Iraqi Shia militias in Syria. Those strikes, the first military action ordered by the new Democratic president, were initially reported to have killed 17 people, while later reports said that just one person died.
While there was widespread speculation that the rockets fired on Ain al-Asad were in retaliation for the US strike in Syria, as of Wednesday evening no group had claimed responsibility. The area surrounding the base is overwhelmingly Sunni and not under the control of the predominantly Shia Hashed al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an official arm of Iraq’s military, which the US military attacked last week in Syria.
The US claimed that last week’s air strikes were in retaliation for a February 15 rocket attack on a US base in Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital Erbil, which killed a single military contractor from the Philippines. That attack, however, was claimed by a little known group, while it was disavowed and condemned by the PMF.
There are no doubt many forces with motives for attacking the US military in Iraq, where the American intervention that began in 2003 led to an estimated one million deaths.
Anger against the continuing US occupation—officially numbered at 2,500 troops—soared in January of last year after President Donald Trump ordered the drone missile assassination of Gen. Qassem Suleimani, considered the second most powerful figure in Iran, after he arrived on an official state visit at Baghdad’s international airport. Also killed in the drone strike was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the de facto leader of the PMF militias, along with several aides to both men. Following this drone massacre there were massive protests, and the Iraqi parliament voted for a resolution demanding the immediate withdrawal of all US and other foreign forces from Iraq.
The possibility cannot be discounted that remnants of the Islamic State (ISIS) are staging missile attacks against US bases, including with the potential motive of provoking US retaliatory attacks.
In any case, the Biden administration is pursuing its own ends in resuming US military violence in the region. Last week’s US air raid represented the first American attack inside Syria since December 2019, on the eve of the January 3 Suleimani assassination.
Following that assassination, Iran staged a limited retaliation, firing missiles into the same Ain al-Asad air base that was hit by rockets on Wednesday. While no US troops were killed in the 2020 missile strike, it was later reported that more than 100 soldiers suffered concussive brain injuries. The Trump administration decided not to take any military action in response to the Iranian attack.
The unilateral US air strikes last week in Syria, carried out in violation of international law and with no congressional authorization, represented a dangerous escalation of US militarism, with the potential of triggering a catastrophic new war in the Middle East and beyond.
The US action was aimed in large measure against Iran. The Biden administration claims it is seeking to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 nuclear deal struck between Iran and the major powers, which was unilaterally abrogated by Trump. Yet it has taken a hard line against Tehran, insisting that it will not rejoin the agreement until Iran reverses the increases in uranium enrichment it carried out in protest over both Washington’s ripping up of the accord and the European powers’ refusal to challenge the draconian sanctions imposed under the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign.
This sanctions regime, which has killed many thousands of Iranians, including from the coronavirus pandemic, remains in place under the Biden administration. Meanwhile, Washington has indicated it will demand a re-negotiation of the JCPOA to include tight restrictions on Iran’s conventional ballistic missile program as well as a rollback of Iranian influence throughout the Middle East, thereby firmly subordinating the country to the drive for US hegemony in the region.
More broadly, the attack on Syria signaled the Biden administration’s pursuit of more aggressive US imperialist policy globally, escalating the interventions and provocations carried out under Trump from the Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe, the South China Sea and beyond.
On Monday, the US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) delivered a report to Congress calling for additional spending of roughly $27 billion between 2022 and 2027 in preparation for a “great power” confrontation with China. The report calls for “new missiles and air defenses, radar systems, staging areas, intelligence-sharing centers, supply depots and testing ranges throughout the region,” DefenseNews reported.
An unclassified executive summary obtained by the military website quoted Adm. Philip Davidson, the commander of INDOPACOM, telling Congress that the proposal provides “several flexible deterrent options including full [operational plan] execution if deterrence should fail.” By “full execution,” the admiral is undoubtedly referring to nuclear war.
US President Joe Biden held his first bilateral head-of-government meeting as president with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau via video conference last week. The Feb. 23 meeting adopted a comprehensive plan to expand and strengthen the US-Canada economic and military-strategic partnership to pursue trade war against their common great-power rivals and modernize military infrastructure in preparation for war.
President Joe Biden speaks after holding a virtual meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Underscoring that the Canada-US alliance is a key element in advancing both imperialist powers’ predatory global ambitions, the Trudeau-Biden summit was given the character of a joint cabinet meeting. It was attended by leading personnel from both governments, including US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, their Canadian counterparts, respectively, Mark Garneau, Harjit Sajjan and Chrystia Freeland, and US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford.
The Roadmap for a Renewed US-Canada Partnership, issued by Biden and Trudeau at the summit’s conclusion, outlines plans to expand cooperation across the board with the aim of reasserting North American imperialist world dominance. The “blueprint” for a “whole-of-government” partnership includes plans to modernize NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command), secure “strategic” production chains and minerals critical for military and high-tech industries, and make North America the world leader in “clean” energy industries.
The mainstream media largely treated the meeting as a pro forma event, which recycled traditional boilerplate rhetoric about the strength of Canadian-American friendship and was held to demonstrate the return to bilateral “normalcy.”
To be sure, Biden did want to draw a sharp contrast with Trump, who repeatedly roiled Canada-US relations, including by threatening to scrap NAFTA. But the Roadmap does not represent a return to “business as usual” in US foreign policy, which, as a preliminary matter, would be bad enough, as millions of people in the war-torn countries of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya can attest.
Rather, it represents an intensification and revamping of the eight-decade-old military-strategic partnership between Washington and Ottawa under conditions of unprecedented global capitalist crisis. The coronavirus pandemic, acting as a trigger event, has exacerbated the rivalries between the major powers, increased social inequality, and led to a radicalization of the working class that places mass class battles on the order of the day. To defend the wealth and advance the global interests of the capitalist oligarchies that rule the US and Canada, Ottawa and Washington are forging a “renewed partnership” to enhance North American “competitiveness,” i.e., mount savage attacks on the working class at home, and pursue “strategic competition” against their common great-power rivals.
Preparations for great power conflict
The two leaders agreed to modernize the North American Aerospace Defence Command to strengthen continental defence capabilities. This initiative, the Wall Street Journal estimates, will cost US $40 billion. Canada’s proposed portion of this massive sum, $6 billion, is equivalent to a third of Ottawa’s $19 billion (CAN $23.4 billion) annual defence budget.
As part of the Roadmap, Trudeau and his Liberal government also reaffirmed their pledge to rapidly increase annual defence spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product, an increase of more than one third from its current level. This was coupled with a bilateral commitment to strengthen NATO, which for more than seven decades has been pivotal to projecting US imperialist power in Europe and the Middle East.
Established during the Cold War, NORAD is seen by military planners in Washington and Ottawa as critical to the great-power confrontations of the future, especially with Russia and China. Its purpose is discussed in ever more openly aggressive and provocative terms. Whereas in the past its existence was justified with claims about the need to stop incoming missiles from the Soviet Union or Russia, it is now bluntly stated that instead of taking out the “arrows,” Canada and the US must strike the “archer,” i.e., carry out first-strike attacks on launch sites in Russia and China.
The mad plan to modernize NORAD for potential war with nuclear-armed Russia and China will invariably involve renewed pressure for Canada to join the US ballistic missile defence shield. Canada’s military establishment has long favored Canada joining the missile shield, but governments have dared not proceed because of widespread public opposition to participating in a program which, its name notwithstanding, is aimed at making a catastrophic nuclear war “winnable.”
As part of their Roadmap, Washington and Ottawa also agreed to establish an “expanded Canada-US Arctic dialogue” to discuss “continental security, economic and social development, and Arctic governance.” The Arctic is becoming a major arena for geopolitical confrontation due to climate change, which is opening up the region’s shipping lanes to great power rivalries and inciting a race to control its increasingly accessible energy and mineral resources.
In a similar vein, the Roadmap pledged to “increase cooperation to strengthen cybersecurity, and to confront foreign interference and disinformation.” As part of their efforts to protect critical infrastructure in North America, the two countries will implement a “Framework for Collaboration on cybersecurity in the energy sector.”
The Canadian and US ruling elites intend to underpin these plans for war with closer economic cooperation, including by further developing the ever more explicit protectionist trade bloc consolidated under the Trump administration. The Roadmap heaps praise on the protectionist US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the replacement to NAFTA negotiated by Trump and Trudeau with the support of the trade unions.
The Roadmap takes explicit aim at China. It calls on both countries to “more closely align our approaches to China, including to address the challenges it presents to our collective interest and to the international rules-based order,” i.e., US global dominance. The document denounces the Stalinist regime in Beijing, which defends the interests of China’s capitalist oligarchy, for “its coercive and unfair economic practices, national security challenges, and human rights abuses.” This language is all but identical to the lurid denunciations of China made by the NDP and Canada’s other establishment “left” parties in recent months, including the unfounded allegation that Beijing is guilty of “genocide” against the Uyghur Muslim minority.
The document is no less strident in assailing Russia. It condemns Moscow’s “egregious mistreatment of Aleksey Navalny,” a far-right pro-imperialist stooge. It also denounces Russia’s “gross violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” a reference to the Kremlin’s response to the 2014 fascist-spearheaded coup in Kiev, which the US and Canada helped orchestrate. The Roadmap also notes that Biden and Trudeau discussed the situation in the Middle East and Venezuela, two areas where Canadian imperialism has supported its US ally in mounting regime-change operations.
Dominating the economy of the future
Despite Biden’s difference in style from Trump, he is pursuing a like protectionist economic agenda and with the same aim: to retain American global economic and geostrategic primacy against its rivals through trade war, diplomatic intrigue, and military conflict. While Trump framed this policy with far-right “America First” rhetoric and celebrated unilateral US action, Biden has emphasized his support for “multilateral” institutions and US-led “multilateral” initiatives against China and Russia.
This aggressive agenda is masked with phony blather about “democracy,” “human rights,” and “inclusiveness.” As part of the Roadmap, Canada announced its support for Biden’s convening of a “Summit for Democracy”—a cynically-titled initiative that will serve as a thinly-veiled cover for provocations and threats against China and Russia.
With a view to confronting Russia and China, but also their ostensible European and Japanese imperialist allies, the Roadmap calls for increased Canada-US collaboration to ensure North American dominance in key emerging technologies, including those essential for transitioning to non-carbon-based energy.
It announces that Canada and the US will “launch a strategy to strengthen Canada-US supply chain security.” This will include building “the necessary supply chains to make Canada and the United States global leaders in all aspects of battery development and production.” The document continues, “To that end, the leaders agreed to strengthen the Canada-U.S. Critical Minerals Action Plan to target a net-zero industrial transformation, batteries for zero-emissions vehicles, and renewable energy storage.”
The Critical Minerals Action Plan was developed in 2019 by the Trump administration and Trudeau government, with the aims of reducing the dependence of North America’s twin imperialist powers on China for 17 rare earths and minerals. These materials are crucial to the manufacture of missile systems, computer screens, electric vehicles, lasers, and other hi-tech devices, i.e., the key elements of the equipment required to wage military conflict and dominate the world economy in the decades to come.
These bilateral initiatives take place in parallel with Biden’s readying of an executive order to strengthen US supply chains. He is expected to order 100-day reviews of four strategically important economic areas: “computer chips, high-capacity batteries, pharmaceuticals and their active ingredients, and critical minerals and strategic materials, like rare earths.”
Biden and Trudeau also committed to initiating a “joint ministerial” dialogue on climate change with the aim of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. A major goal of this “dialogue” will be to press other “democratic” countries, under the guise of bogus pledges to fight climate change, to line up against China and Russia, which have poor emissions records, and accept Washington’s hegemony in emerging technologies and energy markets. The climate change initiative will “hold polluters accountable,” the Roadmap asserts, including by working to prevent “unfair trade by countries failing to take strong climate action.” That is, it will impose tariffs and other penalties on Russia and China, and attempt, as the Trump administration did, to banish Huawei and other leading Chinse-based tech firms from strategically significant markets.
The hollow references to “unfair trade,” coming from a country whose violation of international law is second to none, could just as easily be turned against erstwhile allies to enforce US imperialist demands. It is worth noting in this regard the bipartisan US opposition to the German-Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which Democrats and Republicans alike have denounced, including for its environmental risks.
In the run-up to the Trudeau-Biden summit, there was much media discussion about Canada pressing for an exemption from the “Buy America” provisions of Biden’s economic-stimulus infrastructure-building program. However, the White House would only promise at this point to take Ottawa’s concerns into account.
The refrain from Canada’s corporate and political elite, including the trade union bureaucracy, is that Ottawa must press for Washington to eschew “America First” protectionism in favour of a “North America First” agenda. They view expanding the Canada-US military-security alliance and new or enhanced partnerships on energy, strategic supply-chains and mineral “security” as vital. Vital to ensuring privileged access for corporate Canada to the US market and to upholding American capitalist hegemony, which is critical to the assertion of Canadian imperialism’s own predatory global interests.
