NATO intensified its provocations against Russia Monday, with the launch of two weeks of military exercises in the Black Sea region. Operation Sea Breeze will continue until at least July 10.
The largest ever NATO operation in the Black Sea takes place under explosive conditions, beginning just six days after Russian armed forced fired warning shots and then dropped four bombs in the path of HMS Defender, a British warship that entered Russia’s territorial waters off Crimea. The US ignored a request made June 22 from Russia's embassy in Washington—just hours before the UK warship incident—for Sea Breeze to be cancelled this year, with Moscow warning of the danger of military confrontation.
This week’s Sea Breeze manoeuvres, which have taken place annually since 1997, are the largest ever. Co-hosted by the US and Ukrainian navies, Sea Breeze 2021 will involve 32 countries, 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft and 18 special operations. It is being led by the Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 (SNMG2), an immediate reaction force which consists of four to six destroyers and frigates. A squadron of US Marines are taking part, with the main naval force involved the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet headquartered in Naples, Italy.
Ships and aircrafts from eight countries participate in the 2020 Operation Sea Breeze exercises (navy.mil/Ukraine Navy)
The NATO website states that “allies and partners” will participate from “Albania, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, France, Georgia, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Morocco, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Senegal, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States.”
2021 Operation Sea Breeze poster showing participating countries (Credit: navy.mil)
Last year Sea Breeze took place over just four days between July 20 and 24. with only ships, aircraft and personnel from the United States Ukraine, Bulgaria, Georgia, Norway, Romania, Spain and Turkey.
In a June 25 statement NATO said, “The exercise will focus on multiple warfare areas including amphibious warfare, land manoeuvre warfare, diving operations, maritime interdiction operations, air defence, special operations integration, anti-submarine warfare, and search and rescue operations.”
Ahead of the operation, the missile destroyer USS Ross sailed into the Black Sea on June 26. Kristina Kvien, the Chargé d'affaires at the US Embassy in Ukraine called this “a tangible demonstration of US support for Ukraine and is necessary now more than ever.” The statement noted, “Ross, forward-deployed at Naval Station Rota, Spain, is conducting naval operations in the US Sixth Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national security interests in Europe… Ross is one of four US Navy destroyers based in Rota, Spain, and assigned to Commander, Task Force 65 in support of NATO’s Integrated Air Missile Defense architecture.”
USS Ross begins its northbound transit into the Black Sea (Credit: U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. Sixth Fleet/Twitter)
While Sea Breeze was only formally announced this month, its planning has been worked out for months. In April, the London Times reported “according to senior naval sources' that “one Type 45 destroyer armed with anti-aircraft missiles and an anti-submarine Type 23 frigate will peel off from the Royal Navy’s carrier task group in the Mediterranean and head through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea.”
The Carrier Strike Group left the UK on May 23 and the Type 45 destroyer—HMS Defender—entered the Black Sea last week to carry out its provocation off the coat of Crimea, just a few miles from Russia’s major Black Sea fleet based at Sevastopol.
NATO’s statement announcing Sea Breeze denounced “Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014,” in response to which “NATO has increased its presence in the Black Sea. NATO supports Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, extending to its territorial waters. NATO does not and will not recognize Russia's illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea and denounces its temporary occupation.”
The exercise began despite Russia’s warnings last week against further incursions into its territory. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said after the Defender incident, “Over the past seven years, the intensity of flights of strategic bomber aviation of the US Air Force in Europe has increased 14-fold.” He noted that seven joint military exercises with the alliance countries are planned in Ukraine in 2021 alone.
The war danger is being heightened daily in one of the world’s major flashpoints. Russia’s response to NATO operations on its borders has been a substantial show of force. Russia’s Defense Ministry said that its navy closely monitored the USS Ross as it entered the Black Sea.
The previous day Russia began its own large scale military exercises in the eastern Mediterranean, where the main ship in the UK’s/NATO’s Carrier Strike Group, the HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, is located.
Russia’s manoeuvres involved several warships, two submarines, long-range Tu-22M3 bombers and other warplanes. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, two MiG-31 fighter jets capable of carrying Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, operating from the Moscow-run Hemeimeem airbase in Syria, practiced strikes on targets in the Mediterranean. The missiles can travel at 10 times the speed of sound and have a range of up to 2,000 kilometres (about 1,250 miles). The Washington Post reported that it was the “first time the warplanes capable of carrying Kinzhal have been deployed outside Russia’s borders.”
Russia’s submarine arsenal is also being massively upgraded. Last month the Russian Navy launched the Kazan, its first Yasen-M-class nuclear-powered guided missile submarine and the first of seven under construction.
This ratcheting up of Russia’s military operations follows the May 31 announcement by Defense Minister Shoigu that Vladimir Putin’s government will establish a further 20 military bases in the country’s west before the year’s end. NATO’s continuing encirclement and operations near Russia’s borders would “destroy the international security system and force us to take the relevant countermeasures,' Shoigu said.
With the world’s attention focused on the dangerous events in the Black Sea, Russia’s military, including destroyers and fighter jets, also carried out military exercises on June 19 within 35 miles of Hawaii. According to the Daily Mail, these were the “largest war games since Cold War” and involved “at least 20 Russian warships, submarines, and support vessels, flanked by 20 fighter jets…”
The Russian Defence Minister said that during the exercise, two detachments “worked out the tasks of detecting, countering and delivering missile strikes against an aircraft carrier strike group of a mock enemy.”
NATO’s reckless provocations against Moscow can spill over into outright conflict at any time—a danger the military heads of the major imperialist nations is well aware of.
Speaking at the Chalke Valley History Festival in England, just two days after Russia fired upon HMS Defender, General Sir Nick Carter, the head of the UK’s armed forces, pointed out that such events could rapidly escalate out of control into a shooting war. “The thing that keeps me awake in bed at night is a miscalculation that comes from unwarranted escalation,” he said.
In an extraordinary intervention given that Sea Breeze was just hours away from launch, Carter, an anti-Kremlin hawk, said, “The sort of thing we saw in the Black Sea on Monday and Tuesday is the sort of thing it could come from. It wouldn’t have done on that occasion but it’s the type of thing one needs to think quite hard about.”
For four days, tens of thousands of Palestinians have taken to the streets across the West Bank demanding an end to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas. The mass anti-PA protests followed the death of Nazar Banat, an activist and critic of the PA, who died after being arrested and beaten by security forces on Thursday morning.
Protesters marched through the streets accusing the PA of killing Banat and chanting slogans that included “Go away, go away, Abbas,” “Abu Mazen [Abbas] is a traitor,” “The people say, ‘Down with the Authority!’” and “The people want to overthrow the regime!”
Some 15,000 people took part in Banat’s funeral procession in the southern city of Hebron on Friday, chanting, “Your blood won’t be in vain,” while several hundred Palestinians gathered for Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, chanting anti-Abbas slogans and accusing the PA of acting as “Israel’s spies.”
Angry demonstrators carry pictures of Palestinian Authority outspoken critic Nizar Banat and chant anti PA slogans during a rally protesting his death before clashing with riot police, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Saturday, June 26, 2021.
More demonstrations are planned, while protests in support have taken place internationally, in Boston, Beirut, London and Amman.
The protests highlight the growing anger on the part of the Palestinians over terrible economic and social conditions amid the systemic corruption of the PA, which serves as Israel’s subcontractor in the decades-long Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, while enriching a handful of Palestinian families. The PA is dominated by the Fatah movement within the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) that was led by Yasser Arafat, the international symbol of Palestinian resistance, until his death in 2004.
In a pre-dawn raid Thursday morning, at least 20 Palestinian security force officers arrested the 44-year-old father of five Nazar Banat, who had long been a vocal critic of Abbas and the PA on social media, excoriating the PA for its corruption, close security cooperation with Israel’s military forces and handling of the pandemic. One of his last Facebook posts attacked Abbas for his botched effort to secure vaccines from Israel that turned out to be too close to their expiry date to be used in time.
A former member of Fatah, Banat had campaigned on the Freedom and Dignity List in the election that Abbas called off in April after it became clear his Fatah faction would lose. The PA cited as a pretext Israel’s refusal to guarantee that Palestinians in East Jerusalem would be able to vote. Suha Arafat, Arafat’s widow, called for PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh to resign after Banat’s murder.
Banat had been arrested and detained eight times in the last 14 years, most recently seven weeks ago, and survived several assassination attempts. He was, according to Al-Jazeera, in hiding and sleeping at the home of one of his uncles in the H2 area of Hebron that is under the direct control of Israel’s security forces, suggesting that the Israeli security forces had given the PA permission to enter the neighbourhood and arrest him.
The Hebron governorate claimed that Banat’s “health deteriorated” after his arrest and he was taken to hospital semi-conscious where he was later pronounced dead. A Palestinian coroner, however, stated that Banat had died within one hour of his arrest due to “blows to the body including to the head, chest, and lower and upper parts of his body,” with evidence of bruises and fractures across his body. This prompted an angry demonstration later that day in Ramallah, the seat of the PA administration, that was broken up with great force by the PA’s security forces.
Palestinian security forces launched tear gas and stun grenades against protesters in Ramallah on Saturday, attacking the crowd, hitting at least four journalists, including a reporter for the Middle East Eye, all of whom were clearly identifiable as reporters, and confiscating their mobile phones. They blocked demonstrators from approaching the presidential offices in the city centre, closing off the area and forcing shops to close. Video clips have circulated of plainclothes security forces beating and dragging a protester across the road. Other protests took place in Al-Bireh and Hebron.
While Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has promised an investigation, no one believes it will reveal the truth or that anyone will be held accountable or punished.
The United States, Canada and the European Union issued the usual pro forma expressions of concern over Banat’s death, condemning the security services’ actions. Such statements are utterly hypocritical given that the imperialist powers play a major role in funding, training and politically justifying the PA’s security services in Israel’s interest.
The PA’s security services were set up under the 1993 Oslo Accords that criminalized the armed struggle while supposedly promising a mini-Palestinian state through negotiations with Israel. The various branches employ 83,000 people or one security officer for every 50 Palestinians in the occupied territories, one of the highest ratios in the world. They account for nearly half of all the PA’s employees at a cost of almost $1 billion, a sum equal to around 30 percent of total international aid to Palestinians.
Far from securing their safety from Israel’s military oppression and settlement expansion, the PA’s multiple security services serve to suppress the Palestinian people in the interests of the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisie, without even the fig leaf of democratic control, accountability or elections. The recently cancelled vote was the fifth abortive attempt to hold elections since the last in January 2006, when the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group Hamas, much to everyone’s surprise, defeated Fatah.
Abbas suspended the PA’s security coordination with Israel in May 2020 in protest over President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” that purported to bring “peace” based on Israel’s annexation of the settlements, but he resumed relations with Israel in November when it became clear Democrat Joe Biden had won the presidency. This was despite the PA’s rejection of the Abraham Accords under which the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain—with the green light from its puppet master Saudi Arabia--Morocco and Sudan established formal diplomatic relations with Israel.
Israel’s withholding of the tax transfers due to the PA during the suspension of relations, amounting to some $1 billion, brought the PA to the point of bankruptcy, forcing it to declare a state of emergency amid the COVID pandemic.
The resumption of security coordination with Israel signified Abbas’s recognition that the PA cannot exert authority and its leaders secure access to privileges or wealth without the security services, as well as the tacit acceptance of the Abraham Accords.
This decision portended ever greater concessions to Israel, including the ending of payments to the families of the 4,500 Palestinian political prisoners held in Israel jails, to avoid Israel’s punitive sanctions on the Palestinian banks transferring the funds. At the same time, the decision to resume relations with Israel intensified the divisions within Fatah and antagonised Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has increasingly orientated towards Iran.
The 11-day assault on Gaza in May further discredited Abbas. The PA stood back as Israel violently suppressed protests in support of the Palestinians facing eviction in Sheikh Jarrah and other neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound during Ramadan and bombed Gaza, bolstering Hamas’s popularity.
Washington and the major powers have insisted that any aid for reconstruction in Gaza must be channeled through the PA in order to shore it up at the expense of Hamas, with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visiting Ramallah in May in a show of support for Abbas, whose approval rating has sunk to an all-time low.
The PA has stepped up its political arrests and the detention of people without trial in the West Bank as the Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel protested against the actions of the Israeli authorities in East Jerusalem, the vigilante gangs of Jewish extremists that incited violence in mixed towns and cities and the bombardment of Gaza. This comes amid Israel’s arrest of more than 2,150, of whom 90 percent were Palestinian Israelis, up until June 10.
The situation has exacerbated the internal divisions within the PA, with Nasri Abu Jaish, the PA’s minister of labour, resigning on Monday and pulling his Palestinian People's Party out of the PA due to “its lack of respect for laws and public freedoms.”
Over the last several years, news of a “racial wealth gap” has flooded America’s airwaves and print media. According to those pushing the concept, white Americans have a great deal more in all respects than black Americans, and that, therefore, race-based remedies tailored to upper income blacks—such as reparations, set-asides, and affirmative action—must be deployed.
New apartment buildings are under construction overlooking Central Park, Tuesday, April 17, 2018, in New York. (AP Photo - Mark Lennihan)
These racialist politics share one common feature: They leave untouched the actual source of social inequality for workers of all races—capitalism.
The concept of the racial wealth gap, and the attendant idea of “white privilege,” have been promoted by academics for some time, but it is only recently that they have appeared broadly in the news media. An analysis of newspaper articles on the archive Newspapers.com shows that the terms “racial wealth gap,” “racial wealth divide,” “racial inequality,” and “white privilege” appeared 4,689 times in the 1990s and then more than tripled in the 2010s, reaching 15,758 mentions. Over the 2020s—that is, just the last year-and-a-half—there have already been 10,658 references to these terms. By contrast, during the 1960s, the height of the civil rights era, they only appeared 4,560 times.
The deluge coincides with a massive growth in overall wealth and income inequality in the US and globally. The wealthiest 10 percent of US households owns 34.5 times more than the bottom 50 percent, and over the course of just 2020 they increased their fortune by more than $18.8 trillion—about $1.53 million per household, with far higher going to the super-rich. As the richest of all races have seen their fortunes climb into the stratosphere and their counterparts in the bottom 90 percent have seen theirs stagnate and crumble, an obsessive focus on race has emerged. It is being pumped into the veins of American society. The purpose is to transform a looming class war into a race war.
The argument that the racial wealth gap is the most salient feature of American society today is, to be blunt, a fraud. It is based on the tendentious selection and presentation of data. There is nothing about it that is remotely progressive or left-wing, much less Marxist, as those on the political right claim.
Before delving into the data, it is essential to underscore one point. Race is neither biologically real nor socially immutable. But when it comes to the creation of categories of people for the purposes of social analysis, it is assumed that it is. The data spin around the idea that there is some sort of clear distinction as to what constitutes a “white household” and what constitutes a “black household,” even though people have always formed, and increasingly continue to form, family bonds across these lines.
Each “racial group” in fact subsumes within it populations with extremely different histories. So-called “white households” may include the children of Appalachian coal miners, Soviet-Jewish immigrants from the Caucasus, Persians from modern-day Iran, Spaniards from the Mediterranean, Arabs from Morocco, the great-great-great grandchildren of American slaves, dispossessed Palestinians, and so on. So-called “black households” might include some of the same groups, as well as Caribbean islanders, individuals from the Indian subcontinent, French immigrants of west African descent, etc.
But census forms, surveys, and medical histories require Americans to adopt some sort of racial identity. The resulting data is then utilized to argue that race is the overwhelming determinant of social reality—regardless of whether it is personally meaningful or significant in explaining any given individual’s place in the social structure. All other factors—such as language, culture, citizenship status, time of arrival in the United States, role in the labor force, and, above all, class—are regarded as small change in the face of the concept of race.
Thedata
When investigating the racial wealth gap, mean and median wealth for different racial groups is commonly cited to demonstrate the existence of universal “white privilege.” Analysts and commentators draw on different data sources, generally surveys, the census, and tax records, of which the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is frequently cited.
In 2020, the Federal Reserve published the results of its 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). The data were picked up by the media, with news articles on the findings appearing in many press outlets. According to the SCF:
In 2019, the typical white family had $188,200 in wealth and the typical Black family had $24,100… [T]he typical White family has $50,600 in equities they could tap into in an emergency compared to just $14,400 for the typical Black family and $14,900 for the typical Hispanic family… The typical White families’ home value is $230,000 and the typical other families’ home value is $310,000. The typical Black and Hispanic families’ home values are lower, at $150,000 and $200,000, respectively…. While the typical Black or Hispanic family has $2,000 or less in liquid savings, the typical White family has more than four times that amount [emphases added].
In the Federal Reserve’s ten pages of analysis of the SCF, “typical” appears 25 times. The use of the word gives the impression that the great majority of whites possess eight times more, own homes worth $80,000 more, and have quadruple the financial reserves of their black counterparts. This implies that white families are overwhelmingly comfortable and secure, and that they have tidy bundles in the bank.
But this is an intentionally distorted portrait of social reality. In order to arrive at it, analysts have to do several things. First, they attach to mathematical measures a social meaning that they lack. Second, they remain silent about the scale of inequality that exists within racial groups, and within societyas a whole, both of which dwarf by many times the racial wealth gap. Third, they focus on strata of whites and blacks and make no mention of the absolute numbers of people that these percentages encompass. Because the white population is five to six times the size of the black population, even if lower percentages of white households are poor, in aggregate tens of millions of whites—actually more—share the same level of social deprivation as the most oppressed minorities.
Returning to the question of the median wealth of white versus black households, it is essential to realize that the description of this value as reflective of the wealth of the “typical” or “average” white family in the US is deceptive. A median is a halfway point in a data set. When dealing with wealth and income, in which there is a massive chasm between the best and least-well off, a median is often a better measure of the overall situation than a mean (commonly referred to as an “average”), which is pulled upward by the super wealthy and extremely high-income earners. However, under situations in which there are very high levels of inequality, a median also hides more than it reveals.
Using the median, SCF data found that half of all white families own more, and half own less, than $188,200, compared to $24,100 for the fiftieth percentile division among black families. But what is lost by focusing on the median for the white population as a whole is the fact that among those who own less than the median, tens of millions of families own vastly less. Massive numbers of white households are not experiencing anything like this allegedly “typical” reality.
According to SCF data, the bottom 20 percent of white households—18.6 million (using an average household size of 2.53, about 47 million people)—own virtually nothing or are so indebted that the total value of their wealth is negative. Their reality is shared by the 30 percent of black households—4.5 million (approximately 11 million people)—and 20 percent of Latino households—3.4 million (an estimated 8.6 million people). Using different data, economist Gabriel Zucman calculated in 2014 that as much as 50 percent of the total US population—nearly 160 million people at the time—has zero or negative wealth.
In other words, forthe tens of millions of householdsthat have zero or negative wealth, the “racial wealth gap” is a meaningless concept. It does not exist. Regardless of skin color, no one has anything. A more “equitable” distribution of wealth across the lower strata of racial groups would not pay a single bill for a poor black family, for the simple reason that you cannot divide something that does not exist.
The United States is a sea of multi-racial destitution. According to the analysis of SCF data by Matt Bruenig with the People’s Policy Project, the poorest 10 percent of the US population is about 54 percent white, 27 percent black, 12 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent some other group. The next most impoverished layer is 42 percent white, 32 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent other. And the third one up from the bottom is 53 percent white, 20 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic and 7 percent other. When one gets to the top three deciles of wealth holders, the racial composition begins to strongly favor whites. The largest imbalance exists in the highest tier. The racial wealth gap is primarily meaningful for elite African Americans, who are frustrated at being underrepresented where the vast majority of net worth is concentrated.
Looking at the middle of the wealth pyramid, white households whose net worth puts them in the fifth decile (the 40th to 50th percentiles) control just 1.5 percent of the total $93.82 trillion possessed by white households, according to the Federal Reserve. Imagining this tiny share could be spread evenly among all families in that decile group, it would amount to about $151,200 per household. This is $30,000 shy of the median wealth of white households as a whole, which is $188,200, and about 16 percent of the mean wealth of all white households, which stands at around $950,000.
White Household Wealth Share by White Wealth Decile (2019)
The fifth decile of black households possess only 0.9 percent of the approximately $4.46 trillion held by all households in this racial categorization. If we divided this share up evenly among fifth-decile black households, we find an average wealth for black families of about $26,760. White households in the parallel bracket, in other words, own about 5.5 times more than black households because African Americans are overrepresented among the poor. According to the racial wealth gap proponents, having $151,200—which as Federal Reserve data show will be largely comprised of a partially paid off mortgage and a small retirement fund—is an incredible level of “white privilege.”
Black Household Wealth Share by Black Wealth Decile (2019)
However, when we consider the privilege that accrues to the richest households of all races, the real stratification in society becomes evident. Today, the top 10 percent of white households control 74.4 percent of all the wealth for that group. The situation for rich blacks is similar. They have 70.6 percent of everything held by their racial category as a whole. Imagining that this is divided equally among the white households in the top 10 percent, each would have a net worth of $7.5 million. The equivalent number for black households is “only” $2.1 million.
Inequality is greater among black households than among white households. The average wealth of top white households and the fifth decile of white households—technically families that fall somewhere near the middle of the wealth pyramid—differs by a factor of nearly 50. Comparing black households at the top to blacks in the fifth decile yields a difference of 78.5 times.
Looking at the data cross-racially, we also see big differences between the wealthiest black families and middle class white families, with the former being 14 times richer than the latter. This gives the lie to the claim that “all whites” enjoy “skin privilege.”
Fifth vs. Top Decile Average Wealth of Black and White Households (2019)
The gap between the wealthiest white and wealthiest black households is 3.5 times, tiny compared to what exists more broadly in society. But because the volume of assets at stake at the upper echelons is so large, such a discrepancy is intolerable to the richest African Americans.
Since the first quarter of 2020, total white household wealth has grown by $21.3 trillion and total black household wealth has increased by $1.12 trillion. Again, the racial wealth gap proponents point to the fact that white household wealth grew by far more than that of black households. But as the increase for both groups was driven by an extraordinary run-up in stocks, of which the bottom 50 percent of the population owns just 0.7 percent compared to 87.2 percent for the top 10 percent, virtually all of this wealth has been captured by the rich of all races. Of the entirety of the wealth generated over the course of 2020, the bottom half of the population shared in just 2.8 percent.
In addition to net worth, it is often emphasized that “typical” white families have significantly more back-up reserves than blacks and Hispanics. Again, an image of relative security is imposed on white families. But this betrays, on the part of the government analysts, journalists, and academics with six-figure salaries, a complete lack of understanding of how what most people have really stacks up against the economic burdens they face.
The SCF data show that the average black, Latino, and white families have somewhere between $14,000 and $50,000 of equities (including stocks, mutual funds, and retirement accounts) that theoretically could be transformed into cash in the event of an emergency. In addition, the “typical” white family has $8,000 in liquid savings compared to the “typical” black family with just $2,000. That is, white households, it would appear, have about four times as much.
But these numbers simply do not apply to the bottom 20 to 30 percent of any racial group, who own nothing. And four times a pittance is still a pittance. While some white households are in a better position to hold out against financial blows for a longer period of time, in the event of a job loss, unexpected medical bill, major home repair, or similar disaster, tens of thousands of dollars can swiftly evaporate.
A 2018 report, based on a survey also conducted by the Federal Reserve, found that four out of ten adults said they could not cope with an unexpected expense of just $400—the equivalent of a set of tires blown out on a freeway or a flu test not covered by insurance—without taking out a loan, overdrawing on their bank account, borrowing from a friend or family member, or simply not paying the bill. Among this group are tens of millions of people from all races.
This data took on a human face during the COVID-19 crisis in the form of miles-long lines of cars that appeared at food banks. Those queues were made up of families of all backgrounds who, it seems, somehow did not get the memo about their net worth, equity, and liquid savings calculated by the “racial wealth gap” specialists.
It must be stressed that the way the Federal Reserve measures net worth minimizes the wealth of the very richest, who are very adept at hiding their fortunes, while overstating the wealth in the working class. In its calculation of household net worth, the Federal Reserve includes unfunded pensions, for instance, of which 99 percent are promised to government employees. When the 2019 SCF data were released, analysts highlighted the fact that more white households tend to have pensions and retirement accounts than black households. However, as Gabriel Zucman and Emanuel Saez noted in September 2020, unfunded pensions are not backed by anything. They actually have no real value.
Conclusion
The overrepresentation of black families in the poorest strata of society is the outcome of history—namely, specific forms of capitalist exploitation for which racism provided ideological justification, including slavery and sharecropping. Historically, African Americans have suffered from horrendous forms of prejudice and discrimination, with many pushed into the most oppressed layers of the population as a consequence. But the origins of racism do not lie in the “DNA” of white people, as is claimed by the NewYorkTimes 1619 Project, but in capitalism. The capitalist class foments divisions among workers in order to exercise its rule. All those who insist that the racial wealth gap, not the class gap, is most important division in society do the same.
The dire conditions facing masses of black workers today arise out of a sweeping assault on living standards that started in the 1960s and 1970s and was overseen by both Democrats and Republicans, black and white. The advances of the civil rights movement and mass entry of African Americans into industrial work in northern cities during the post-World War II era had just begun to lift sections of that population out of the extreme poverty and oppression of the Jim Crow era. For a short time, some black workers began to share in the rising living standards of the American working class, experiencing modest gains that were won through hard-fought class battles. But the weakening global position of American capitalism led the US ruling class to determine that such concessions were intolerable. While the South, where many blacks lived, remained poor, deindustrialization hammered northern city after city, such as Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Cleveland, which were home to millions of blacks. African American workers shared the fate of their class as a whole: job losses, wage cuts, collapsing property values, the destruction of whole communities.
But a narrow layer, including a black elite, shared in the spoils of the wreckage. In the 1970s, as the assault on the working class intensified, affirmative action, “black capitalism,” and “black power” in the form of black mayors, police chiefs, and school boards were part of the thin gruel dished out to the residents of America’s hollowed-out cities. They did nothing for the overwhelming majority of the African American population, but a great deal for a small few. The obsession with the racial wealth gap is intended to obscure these class realities, hide this history, and drown class anger in a toxic swamp of racial hatred.
Social scientists expend incredible effort to suppress the reality of social class. Unlike race, class is not a scientifically false category. It arises objectively from control over the means of production. There are those who own great wealth and those who labor to produce it. But in contemporary American sociology, class is, at best, of tertiary interest, important to the allegedly more decisive categories of “race, gender, and sexuality” only as it “intersects” with them. More often it is treated as essentially meaningless.
Trotsky once explained that behind every social categorization is a political prognosis. Those that insist that universal “white privilege” is the cornerstone of modern American reality demand more racial “equity.” In doing so, they reveal more than they intend to. In the original meaning of the term, to have “equity” means to own stocks. Indeed, this is what they are after. It is to be achieved by impoverishing a section of the white population, ensuring that poor blacks stay poor, and growing the share of total wealth that goes to the African American population at the top. Class inequality is not only to remain untouched, it is to be defended, deepened, and expanded.
Washington ordered airstrikes against two nations simultaneously Sunday night, using F-15 and F-16 warplanes to rain an assortment of precision-guided munitions on two targets in Syria and one in Iraq.
Screenshot of footage of the United States military airstrikes on what they said were facilities used by “Iran-backed militia groups” near the Iraq-Syria border on June 27. (DVIDS via Storyful)
Sources on the ground reported five people killed on the Iraqi side of the border and one child killed and several other people wounded on the Syrian side.
Iraq’s Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi denounced the airstrike as “a blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty.” Syria’s Foreign Ministry told the official Sana news agency that the air raids demonstrated “the recklessness of US policies and the need for Washington to withdraw its aggressor forces” from the region.
The attacks were answered Monday by a militia shelling a US base in Syria and threats by Iraqi militias of retaliation against US forces.
This is second such bombing raid launched by the Pentagon against the Iraqi-Syrian border region since the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden came into office in January. The first, against a target in eastern Syria, came just one month after Biden entered the White House.
That February airstrike marked the first such US bombing inside Syria since the end of 2019, when the Trump administration brought the region, and potentially the entire planet, to the brink of war with its drone missile assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Suleimani. It signaled to the world what Biden’s vacuous slogan proclaiming that “America is back” really means: US imperialism is embarking upon an even more aggressive foreign policy under the Democrats, threatening the world with catastrophic new wars.
Ostensibly, both Monday’s and February’s attacks were carried out in retaliation against attacks on US bases inside Iraq by Iranian-backed Iraqi militias hostile to the nearly two-decade-long American occupation. In February, the Pentagon cited a rocket that was fired at the US base in Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital of Erbil. The latest airstrikes were justified as a response to militia attacks using drones against several targets, including a secret CIA facility.
One of the remarkable characteristics of the latest attacks is their failure to elicit any significant response or analysis, much less criticism, from within the US media and political establishment. A US president attacking two countries on the same day, in flagrant violation of international law and with no legal authorization from the US Congress, barely makes the news. Leading Democrats and Republicans both praised the action, with some suggesting that further aggression was in order against Iran.
Two decades after the launching of the “Global War on Terror” and the bloody colonial-style interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, illegal military actions by the United States launched without warning in any part of the globe have become fully normalized. While the Obama administration acknowledged “six theaters” in this “global war”—Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Somalia—the full list of countries and entities targeted by Washington remains classified under the Biden administration.
The Pentagon’s claim that Washington’s bombing and killing of Iraqis and Syrians was “pursuant to its right of self-defense” and designed to protect “US personnel” is nowhere questioned. The most obvious question is, if Washington is so intent on protecting its personnel, why doesn’t it withdraw them?
In the wake of the Suleimani assassination, the Iraqi Parliament demanded the immediate withdrawal of all US and other foreign occupation forces. A year and a half later, 2,500 US troops remain on the ground, along with an unknown number of military contractors, CIA operatives and other personnel. A force of some 900 uniformed troops, backed by an unknown number of contractors are occupying Syria in blatant violation of the country’s sovereignty and with the express purpose of denying the government in Damascus access to oil reserves needed for the country’s reconstruction after a decade-long US-orchestrated war for regime change that has left it in ruins.
In both countries, Washington bases its occupation on the lie that American troops are there to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. ISIS, a Frankenstein's monster created by US backing for Al Qaeda forces in Syria, was decisively defeated in Iraq—in large measure by the very militias that the Pentagon is now attacking—in 2017, and lost its last hold on Syrian territory in March of 2019.
The real reasons for the continued military presence in the region are bound up with US imperialism’s desperate drive to reverse the decline of its global hegemony through militarism. The Biden administration, like the Obama and Trump administrations before it, made rhetorical promises to end the “forever wars” in the region, with the patent aim of directing the full force of Washington’s military apparatus against its “great power rivals,” first and foremost China.
They have all found it impossible, however, to extricate the US military from the Middle East, which remains a strategic battlefield in the confrontation with China, which has emerged as the region’s number one investor and the number one trading partner for countries that include Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
This was spelled out last week by Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr. in an online conference held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
Noting that China depends upon the region for half of its energy supplies, General McKenzie stated: “China's interests in the Middle East and North Africa extend well beyond oil. Straddling the world's major shipping routes, the region will remain key terrain in a geostrategic sense, long after we’ve completed the transition to renewable sources of energy. As such, it is one of the principal arenas for strategic competition between two systems with very different values ...”
The eruption of US aggression in the Middle East is part of a global escalation of imperialist militarism. Last week saw the dangerous provocation by the HMS Defender, in which Russian forces fired warning shots and dropped bombs in the British warship’s path after it deliberately entered waters claimed by Russia off of Crimea. Far from seeking to ease tensions, NATO is now launching Operation Sea Breeze, a massive two-week military exercise in the Black Sea that Moscow has warned can lead to confrontation.
Only a day before the provocation by the British ship in the Black Sea, the guided missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur was sent through the Taiwan Strait, provoking protests from Beijing. This is the sixth US warship sent through the Taiwan Strait since Biden took office on January 20, increasing the threat that the sensitive waterway will become a flashpoint for a US-China military confrontation.
Meanwhile, the Japan-based USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier strike group has been sent for the first time into the North Arabian Sea. While the Pentagon has claimed its deployment near the Persian Gulf is to provide security for US troops withdrawing from Afghanistan, it is far more likely that its arrival amid the US airstrikes is no mere coincidence, a preparation for wider military action, including against Iran.
Any one of these regions can provide the spark for a global military conflagration.
The normalization of war has been joined with the normalization of mass death as the ruling classes the world over subordinate the defense of human life to the pursuit of profit, even as yet another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic drives up an official toll that already numbers 4 million lives lost.
With the assistance of university managements, Australia’s US-linked intelligence agencies are intensifying their monitoring and screening of university workers as the Liberal-National government moves to block all links with Chinese universities.
Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra (Source: Wikipedia)
The stepped-up surveillance of academics goes hand in hand with increasing involvement of the universities in military projects related to preparations for a US-provoked war against China.
Evidence from Senate Estimates hearings earlier this month revealed that the Australian Research Council (ARC), which allocates government research grants, has been working with the spy agencies for several years to compile “sensitivity files” on researchers.
ARC chief executive Professor Sue Thomas told a hearing that the ARC had been collecting files, based on media reports and information provided by intelligence agencies, to ensure research grants were not issued to academics who may pose a threat to “national security.”
The ARC checks for “sensitivities” using a “tracker” developed by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a Canberra-based, government-subsidised and US-linked military policy think tank.
In true blacklisting fashion, ASPI previously publicly named 325 academics linked to the Thousand Talents Plan, allegedly a Chinese government research program. Such claims by ASPI have been based on flawed evidence, such as the number of Chinese academics and their international colleagues who are openly publishing articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
The ARC’s “sensitivity files” indicate widespread spying on academics, researchers and university workers. The ARC receives upwards of 6,000 grant applications each year, collectively involving more than 10,000 researchers from tertiary institutions across Australia.
In March, a parliamentary committee confirmed that five research grants had been secretly rejected last December, without clear reasons, from 18 referred for security checking by the intelligence agencies.
Universities themselves are employing corporate consultants and “foreign interference compliance officers” to conduct “security” checks on their staff as part of the federal government’s crackdown.
The universities of Sydney, New South Wales, Monash and Queensland have hired corporate advisory firm McGrathNicol to help detect the risk of “foreign influence,” including by auditing academics to check for “secondary loyalties.”
A “senior risk advisor” at McGrathNicol is John Garnaut, a former corporate media journalist and advisor to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, whose government introduced far-reaching, anti-democratic foreign interference laws in 2018, supported by the Labor Party opposition.
At the same time, the Liberal-National Coalition government has ordered the universities to supply lists of their agreements with “foreign entities” by this month, to be subject to possible veto under last year’s unprecedented Foreign Relations Act.
That legislation gives the foreign minister arbitrary powers to terminate relationships between a university and any “foreign entity” that the minister deems may “adversely affect Australia’s foreign relations or are inconsistent with our foreign policy.”
In April, the government used this power to tear up two vague agreements by the Victorian state government to participate in China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” infrastructure program. The universities are evidently next in the firing line.
A bipartisan parliamentary committee is conducting a scare-mongering investigation into the universities and other research bodies, such as the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
In their submissions to the inquiry both the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and Australian Federal Police declared, without providing any details, that Australian universities, researchers and their families are “at risk” from foreign states.
ASIO insisted that, while global collaboration has been the foundation of scientific and technological accomplishments, this had left Australian research institutions vulnerable to international partners with “different political, cultural and moral values”—a clear reference to China.
In his testimony, ASIO boss Mike Burgess revealed ASIO had 60 “engagements” with universities in 2020. He provided no further information.
Appearing before the committee, university chiefs pledged their loyalty. “Our universities and our researchers are not naive to geopolitical imperatives, and we support the Morrison government’s view that national security risks must be dealt with proactively,” Group of Eight (Go8) chief executive Vicki Thomson said, representing the eight most prestigious public universities.
The Go8 submission declared that its “beneficial” working relationship with the security agencies was already regarded as an “exemplar by the Five Eyes Plus group of nations and their leading research-intensive universities.”
The US-led global “Five Eyes” eavesdropping network conducts mass surveillance on millions of people around the world, as exposed by Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
Australian National University (ANU) vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt said the university’s relationship with the security sector had “ramped up dramatically” since 2018, when it expanded to include the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and the Office of National Intelligence. The ASD is the electronic surveillance agency that forms a direct part of the “Five Eyes” operations.
Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson said the universities were cooperating closely with the government in a University Foreign Interference Taskforce. She cautioned against duplication with this mechanism, only because that would “make it harder for universities to root out foreign interference.”
University of Adelaide vice chancellor and president Peter Hoj boasted that his institution had turned down seven collaborative research projects with overseas institutions due to concerns over foreign interference. This had come at “significant financial cost” and “put the renewal of staff employment contracts in jeopardy.”
In a statement to the committee, the University of Adelaide said it was “one of the most defence-engaged universities in Australia.” This underscores the connection between the anti-China crusade and the integration of the universities into military preparations. “We were granted just last week a renewal of our Defence Industry Security Program membership at the highest level for personnel and governance,” the statement read.
Through this program and other schemes, university managements have tied their institutions into joint research with US universities under the Pentagon’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, which the Australian government joined in 2017.
All this is happening with the complicity of the main university trade union, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). While expressing concern about the chilling impact of “sensitivity files” on academic freedom, it has not opposed them. Instead, NTEU national president Alison Barnes said the union would write to the ARC to ask for more information and to request procedural fairness for targeted academics to respond to allegations made against them.
Similarly, the NTEU has not opposed, let alone campaigned against, the Foreign Relations Act veto power but only expressed concerns about the lack of an appeal process or right of reply once a banning decision is announced.
Over the past three years, the Australian government has become a frontrunner in measures against China, including the repressive “foreign interference” laws passed in 2018, which Washington regards as a model for similar provisions internationally.
For the past decade, successive Liberal-National and Labor governments have increasingly placed Australia on the front lines of Washington’s plans for war to prevent China from challenging the global hegemony established by US imperialism after World War II.
It is now clear that the universities also have become global “exemplars” for measures to cut off research cooperation with China and prepare for war.
About the Award: The Volvo Environment Prize is awarded by an independent foundation. A Scientific Committee does the initial screening and evaluation of candidates. The International Prize Jury, a group of internationally renowned scientists, makes the final selection of prize laureate.
Type: Contest
Eligibility: The span of disciplines and activities for which nominations can be made is wide and includes all disciplines which have relevance to the environment. The research of nominees should be based on scientific grounds but must clearly show impacts outside of the specific discipline.
Eligible Countries: All
Number of Awards: Not specified
Value of Award:The Volvo Environment Prize is awarded annually. The Prize consists of a hand-crafted diploma, a glass sculpture and a cash award for SEK 1.5 million (approximately EUR 140,000 or USD 150,000). The award ceremony is in Stockholm in November each year.
How to Apply:Nominations must include the following:
A short letter of motivation
A detailed description of the research the nominee has conducted and how it adds to our knowledge around environmental science. Main achievements and their importance should be emphasized. Emphasis must also be placed on the impacts of the research outside of the particular discipline e.g. impacts on policy development, impacts on sustainability and/or contribution to changed behaviour.
CV of the nominee + list of published paper/s and links if available.
Letter/s of reference. Maximum 3 letters written by someone other than the nominator.
Nominations should be submitted in English using the official form available at www.environment-prize.com. When not feasible, please contact the secretariat info@environment-prize.com
When submitting nominations for a group of named individuals please send one nomination for each person (maximum 3 persons) and specify in the description of achievements that the nomination is for a shared prize.
A nomination remains valid for three years.
Please note that self-nominations are not accepted.
