Nuclear Stockholm Syndrome

Robert Jacobs

Bhaskar Sunkara’s recent opinion piece extoling the virtues of nuclear power and castigating its opponents as paranoid and ill-informed, is clearly motivated by his deep concerns over the dire impacts of global warming, which loom closer by the hour. Unfortunately, his arguments amount to little more than regurgitated industry talking points, in their traditional form of a Jeremiad.

First, Sunkara poses the decline of the nuclear industry in the West as an achievement of progressive political movements. Specifically, he cites the decline of nuclear power in Germany as attributable to a “Green party-spearheaded campaign.” This decline has been more reasonably ascribed to both market conditions and missteps by nuclear industry giants such as Westinghouse and AREVA. From its inception, nuclear power has been heavily dependent on government subsidies to appear economically viable (subsidies such as insurance and the disposal of waste largely configured as taxpayer burdens).

Rather than succumbing to its political opponents on the left, the industry has been sunk by its structural economic dysfunctions. In the US, this has sparked schemes to secure additional taxpayer subsidies in legislative fixes such as guaranteed returns for nuclear utilities, and outright bribery of legislators for taxpayer bailouts of failing companies.

The most simplistic recitation of nuclear industry talking points is when Sunkara dismisses concerns about nuclear waste, and extolls the mythic separation between “civilian” and “military” nuclear technologies. He asserts that most nuclear waste “can be recycled to generate more electricity,” an assertion that goes back more than half a century and has been ritualistically recited by an army of nuclear industry PR professionals before him…yet here we are 50 years later and very little spent nuclear fuel has actually been recycled. The most successful nuclear recycling nation is France which, nevertheless, is experiencing a “nuclear exit” and is unlikely to ever use this recycled fuel. AREVA, the French nuclear giant, has gone bankrupt. Reprocessing facilities like the Rokkasho plant here in Japan have never functioned properly, unless you consider their role enabling the stockpiling of plutonium by Japan to hedge against future weapon needs to be an elemental goal.

There is a difference between what can be done, and what actually happens. Rather than being recycled, hundreds of thousands of metric tons of spent nuclear fuel await “final disposal” in deep geological repositories. Some have been waiting for over 70 years. Just last week, a panel advising the EU on categorizing nuclear plant as “green” energy, and thus eligible to receive EU funding as a “sustainable investment,” concluded that the problems of nuclear waste preclude that designation.

I would point out that even though plastics manufacturers assure us that most plastic can be recycled, we still seem to be living a world with ever increasing amounts of plastic waste. Their greenwashing has not eventuated in a world full of plastics made from recycled materials. The market reality is that it is cheaper to manufacture new plastic than it is to manufacture plastic from recycled materials. Similarly, it is cheaper to discard spent nuclear fuel than it is to reprocess it.

Sunkara dismisses the irrevocable link between military and civilian nuclear technologies as imaginary. First, let’s consider the present imbrication. A 2019 Atlantic Council study places the value of the US civilian nuclear complex to the US national security apparatus at $26 billion annually simply in terms of the human capital assets: “In terms of nuclear technology innovation, export capacity, and geopolitics, a vibrant civilian nuclear energy sector is a critically important national security asset.”

However, the civilian operation of nuclear power plants also places future generations at military risk. I have written that, historically, nuclear reactors were “born violent.” That is to say, they were invented by the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s to manufacture plutonium for use in nuclear weapons, and were instrumental in killing almost 100,000 people in 1945. The “first” American commercial atomic plant in Shippingport, PA that went critical in 1958, was actually the 14^th industrial nuclear reactor built in the United States, the other 13 only manufactured plutonium, which by then formed the fissile cores of thousands of nuclear weapons.

In nuclear reactors used to make electricity, this plutonium is not separated out for use in weapons. However, all nuclear power plants remain plutonium production factories. The fact that most of those tons of plutonium remain in the spent fuel rods does not mean they will stay there forever. Thousands of years from now, some government or military may dig up the spent fuel in our deep geological repositories and separate that plutonium out to build nuclear weaponry. All it would take is the technology (technology we currently possess) and the will. We continue to manufacture that plutonium—perhaps for them to weaponize. Every nuclear power plant that operates adds to that inventory; more than 99% of existing plutonium was manufactured in nuclear reactors. In 1962, the US successfully detonated a nuclear weapon assembled with just such “reactor-grade” plutonium. Our generation’s use of nuclear power silently stockpiles fissile material that will remain militarily viable for millennia.

I too wish that the things that the nuclear industry says about itself were true—I wish it was green and renewable. I wish that there weren’t multiple uranium mining sites around the world with thousands of tons of uranium tailings abandoned and open to the elements, continuing to harm the health of generations born long after mining ceased. I wish that it didn’t take immense, carbon-intensive mining projects to extract uranium from the Earth, and then again to “deposit” the spent nuclear fuel from reactors back half a kilometer underground. Estimates before construction began at Onkalo spent fuel repository in Finland were that the site would entail a “half-billion-euro construction project will generate some 2,500 person years of employment,” and would take 100 years to complete. That is just to contain the spent fuel from five nuclear power plants. The United States, by contrast, has 94 commercial nuclear power plants. There is still no actual plan for the astonishingly large and carbon-intensive site it will take to bury the more than 140,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, with some hope of containing it for thousands of generations of future human beings. This doesn’t include the thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel from the nuclear reactors operated by the US military to provide the fissile cores of more than 70,000 nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

The panic-inducing impacts of anthropic climate change spark a desperate need for immediate reassurance and calming: we want to fix it now. We long to turn some corner that will change the situation. It is unlikely that the same short-sighted military-industrial technophilia that brought us to this climate crisis will flip over and provide us the urgent path to its resolution. Technological evangelists have been auditioning for the part of Climate Change Savior to anyone who will listen. Some proffer a Reagan-era Star Wars pitch: they will fill the skies with material to block the enemy (in this case sunlight rather than Soviet ICBMs). These geoengineering quick-fix schemes are more likely to cause unplanned outcomes than to achieve their missions.

At one time nuclear weapon producers imagined they too could geoengineer the planet to shape it to human desires. They tested the use of nuclear weapons to sculpt harbors into coastlines, and to release natural gas trapped in rock formations. These experiments led to some of the most significant radiological distributions and contaminated sites in the wide panoply of nuclear testing. Still, hyper-capitalist techno utopians like Elon Musk envision the key to human habitation on Mars is the detonation of a massive arsenals of thermonuclear weapons to shape it to our needs.

The nuclear industry will ignore its market dilemmas as long as taxpayers continue to backstop its investors. However, to believe that this massive, for-profit, military-based industry has concern for the welfare of the Earth and its inhabitants is akin to believing the plastic industry is actually beavering away to make the plastic waste disappear. Repackaging their talking points out of a genuine concern for living creatures is a resource they will continue to tap so long as it flows freely. Sunkara would do better to advocate for the mass social movements that have shifted giant industries towards social welfare in the past rather than preaching that the industries themselves are saviors. Time is obviously short, wrong turns are catastrophic.

Israel’s “government of change” shows its right-wing credentials

Jean Shaoul

Israel’s parliament rejected a move by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s newly formed “government of change” to extend a blatantly racist law, akinto South Africa’s apartheid laws, that bans residency or citizenship rights for Palestinians from the occupied territories married to Israelis.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, seated, smiles as he waits to pose for a group photo with the ministers of the new government at the President's residence in Jerusalem, Monday, June 14, 2021. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

The tied vote of 59 to 59, coming three weeks after the new government unseated long-standing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was sworn in, is widely viewed as a defeat for Bennett, who was unable to unite his coalition partners in what he referred to as a “referendum” on his new government.

Bennett, who is even more right-wing than Netanyahu, has a very tenuous grip on power. Far from being resolved, Israel’s political crisis is set to deepen.

While the vote means that tens of thousands of Palestinians can now apply for Israeli residency and citizenship, it will have no practical effect. Their applications would be rejected by the Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, notorious for her hatred of the Palestinians, pending new legislation to renew the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law.

Adalah, a legal advocacy groups for Israel’s Palestinian citizens said, “This law is one of most discriminatory and racist laws promulgated by Israel, and thus it must be condemned and revoked.” It added, “No democratic country in the world denies residency or citizenship to spouses of its own citizens on the basis of their spouses’ national, racial or ethnic affiliation, while simultaneously labelling them as enemies.”

According to human rights groups, the Citizenship and Entry Law bars almost 45,000 Palestinian families inside Israel and East Jerusalem from reuniting with their spouses and children and was designed as a means of limiting the number of Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship, or residency in the case of East Jerusalem.

The law, introduced in 2003 amid the second Palestinian intifada, must be renewed annually, as has happened for the past 17 years. This year it was torpedoed by the opposition parties, led by Netanyahu, not because they oppose the renewal, far from it, but because they saw an opportunity to destabilise the new government, a fractious coalition of eight parties spanning almost the entire spectrum of official Israeli politics.

Speaking on Monday before the vote, Netanyahu said, “With all due respect for this law, the importance of toppling the government is greater.” He added, “This isn’t just a law. It’s a law that exposes the fault-line in this government, whose purpose is to advance an anti-Zionist agenda.”

This attempt to brand the coalition as anti-Zionist focuses on the inclusion of the Islamist Ra’am party headed by Mansour Abbas. Netanyahu was referring to the “compromise” on the citizenship law that Bennett had proposed to his “liberal” partners in the coalition, Meretz, which supports the “two-state solution,” and Ra’am, whereby the legislation would be renewed for six months, while offering residency rights to 1,600 Palestinian families—a tiny fraction of those affected. This came in the wake of two failed attempts to get agreement from his partners, forcing him to twice postpone the vote. But his compromise was rejected by two Ra’am legislators, who abstained, as well as one member of Bennett’s own right-wing Yamina Party, who voted against the extension.

Netanyahu had sought to turn the vote into a no-confidence motion, but that would have required an absolute majority of 61 in the 120-seat Parliament, and so the government survived.

On Monday, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who as leader of the second-largest party in the Knesset cobbled together the unwieldly, eight-party coalition and would become prime minister in two years’ time if the coalition survives that long, made clear the compromise was not motivated by any democratic sentiments. He stated bluntly that the law was more about demographic engineering and “is of security importance.” He tweeted, “[There’s] no need to hide from the purpose of the [citizenship] law. It’s one of the tools meant to secure a Jewish majority in Israel. Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and our goal is that it will have a Jewish majority.”

The Bennett-Lapid bloc is united on little other than the need to remove Netanyahu, who is unpopular with the incoming Democratic administration of President Joe Biden and faces a criminal trial on charges of corruption. All its leading lights were once aides to Netanyahu, occupied senior government posts under his leadership and have no significant political differences with him. Their mission is to rescue the financial and corporate elite from the impending economic, social and political storm at the expense of Jewish and Palestinian workers within Israel/Palestine and the working class across the resource-rich Middle East.

Promising to focus on policies that unite them, infrastructure and the economy, and which avoid the Israel/Palestinian conflict, they moved quickly to strengthen ties with the Biden administration and to launch an inquiry into the religious pilgrimage to Mount Meron last April that killed 45 people. But fatuous declarations notwithstanding, they cannot avoid the Israel/Palestinian conflict that is bound up with the establishment of the State of Israel as a Jewish homeland in the form of a capitalist state created by the dispossession of the Palestinian people and maintained through war and repression, and social inequality at home.

Bennett’s first act as prime minister was to approve Netanyahu’s decision to allow a provocative march by thousands of Jewish extremists through Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, to mark the anniversary of Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbours, and its illegal annexation. Initially conceived as a means of derailing Lapid’s efforts to form an anti-Netanyahu coalition, it was given the go-ahead by Netanyahu in his last days in office to appease his far-right supporters and destabilise the incoming government. The march was afforded full police protection, while additional police and military forces were deployed near the Gaza Strip and in towns with mixed populations of Jewish and Palestinian citizens.

Two days later, Bennett authorised airstrikes on Gaza, following the launching of incendiary balloons from Gaza that caused some fires in open fields in southern Israel. It came hard on the heels of Israel’s criminal 11-day assault, presided over by Netanyahu and now Bennett’s Minister of Defence Benny Gantz, on the besieged enclave that killed more than 250 Palestinians, including 66 children and 39 women, injured 1,900 more and destroyed numerous buildings and displaced at least 60,000 people. Since then, Bennett has prevented any financial and material assistance for reconstruction, estimated by the World Bank to cost $485 million, from entering Gaza where 62 percent of the population face food insecurity. He has refused to ease Israel’s blockade until Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group that rules the enclave, agrees to return the bodies of four Israelis missing in action in Gaza.

Bennett, a former settlement council leader who in 2012 said he would refuse a military order to evict settlers from the West Bank, has signaled that the settlement outpost Evyatar in the occupied West Bank, illegal even under Israeli law, will be allowed to go ahead. The outpost, set up quickly in the last few months, has sparked daily protests by local Palestinians in which at least four have been killed and hundreds injured by Israeli soldiers firing live rounds.

While the 50 settler families are required to leave the site, their makeshift homes will remain under the protection of a new military base to be established there. If, after reviewing the land’s ownership, the government decides that some or all of the land belongs to the Israeli state and not the local Palestinian farmers who have owned the land for decades, as tax returns dating back to the 1930s demonstrate, the settlers will be allowed to build a religious school on the site, in effect legalising the outpost.

UK universities cut arts, languages, humanities and social science degrees

Henry Lee

Universities in England are threatening a huge wave of course closures in the arts, languages, humanities and social sciences, derided by the Tory government as “dead-end courses”.

The World Socialist Web Site has reported on the University of Sheffield’s intention to close its Department of Archaeology, drawing opposition from staff and students. The decision that the department did not provide “value for money” came as the government is considering plans which would allow it to take more direct control of which courses receive funding.

A protest sign reading "Save Archaeology" on the Sheffield Minalloy House building of the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology (Credit: WSWS Media)

Course cuts are bound up with the marketisation of higher education which has escalated after the passage of the Higher Education and Research Act in 2017, under which the Office for Students (OfS) was mandated to “encourage competition between English higher education providers” and “promote value for money”. As higher education becomes a marketplace with brutal competition to recruit students and cut costs, universities are enacting corporate-style restructuring plans, “uneconomic” courses and jobs.

Since the first wave of the pandemic, universities have made redundant over 3,000 staff on temporary contracts, and have carried through or announced hundreds of job cuts among academic and office staff. These plans have met only token opposition from the University and College Union (UCU), which demands only that job losses be made “voluntarily”.

Initial attempts to cut costs on existing courses have developed into the wholesale closure of the many arts and humanities courses which are not among the government’s announced “strategic priorities”. OfS guidance sets out plans to halve the annual subsidy paid for these courses, from £40 million to £20 million, and eliminate the additional £64 million in funding which supports courses in London. Replacement grants totaling £10 million have been provided only to 11 “world-leading” prestigious arts institutions.

Along with the closure of archaeology in Sheffield, many universities are cutting English, history and language courses.

The University of Cumbria announced in May that it would not be running its English course for the coming academic year due to low enrolment. The University of Chester is threatening job cuts in the departments of archaeology, music, and performing arts, as well as engineering.

The University of Hull has begun to close its modern languages courses, not accepting any new students for the coming academic year, and has announced that part-time language courses are likely to be replaced by the “Rosetta Stone” language app. Aston University is to close its Department of History, Languages and Translation to new students from September 2022, threatening the loss of multiple courses and 24 jobs.

Last year the University of the Arts London announced the closure of its Drama Centre London, calling its funding “unsustainable”. The University of London has also announced that it will close the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Institute of Latin American Studies.

Universities have taken advantage of the pandemic to force through many of these changes, but the cuts are driven by a deep-rooted assault on higher education. The ruling class views expanded access to science and culture as an intolerable encroachment on the wealth of the oligarchy. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson set out the government’s vision in February, stating, “we need universities and colleges to work together to address the gaps in our labour market,” orienting government spending entirely towards providing an exploitable workforce for a growing digital technology sector and financial services industry.

While these plans are advanced with rhetoric about degrees providing “value” for graduates by increasing their potential income, the reality is that there will be more students for so-called “high value” degree subjects than there are corresponding jobs, forcing down the relatively high pay in these high-tech sectors. In addition, everything will be done to push the cost of this education and training onto individual students.

Graduates currently pay 9 percent of any income above £26,575 towards their student loan repayments for 30 years after graduating. A recent report from the Higher Education Policy Institute think-tank, headed by a former government adviser, proposes that the government could save around £4 billion in loan write-offs by reducing the repayment threshold to £19,000, costing even many of the lowest-earning graduates thousands of pounds.

A reduction of the tuition fee cap from £9,250 to £7,500 was proposed in the Augar Review of Post-18 Education and Funding in 2018, but it has nothing to do with reducing the massive debt burden of most graduates. It notes that the government currently has “very limited control over the substantial taxpayer investment in higher education” since the universities receive tuition fees directly. The review proposed replacing lost tuition income by direct funding of subjects, giving the government a financial leash with which to enforce its reactionary, philistine agenda.

University senior management teams, whose enormous salaries make them closer to corporate executives than academics, have not waited for direct government intervention to fall in line with the marketised system and its consequences for course closures. The Johnson government, however, will also use any greater control over finances to massively accelerate the process.

It will also use these powers to enforce a regime of censorship of critical academics and legitimise the far-right on campus under the cover of its fraudulent “free speech” campaign. Last year the government threatened to cut funding to universities which did not accept the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which slanders critics of Israel as antisemitic. The government’s “free speech” campaign on campuses is part of an attempt to claim that right-wingers and peddlers of racist and discredited pseudo-science are the victims of censorship.

While academics and other higher workers face the same far-reaching attacks, the UCU has kept all their struggles isolated and strictly limited. UCU members in Hull passed a motion against course closures in February, but the union has dragged out the negotiation process, with a strike ballot only starting last month and ending on July 9.

Plans by the Universities of Sunderland, Kingston and London South Bank to end their history courses—condemned by the Royal Historical Society and many staff and students—have been answered by the UCU with months of “consultation” and no plan to unify its members in a single fight. The union has responded to similar attacks at Aston University merely by beginning a petition. After the University of Portsmouth cut over half of the jobs in the English Literature department, the UCU boasted of having proposed “an alternative which retains the substantial cut to the staffing budget without job cuts”.

The UCU and the National Union of Students are hostile to the growing mass opposition of students to the marketisation and privatisation of higher education. Addressing student rent strikers earlier this year, who raised the issue of marketisation, UCU General Secretary Jo Grady described their political perspective as “a bit niche”. NUS President Larissa Kennedy bluntly claimed that “nobody cares”.

The pandemic has acted as a trigger event, accelerating the marketisation process which was already causing havoc within the university system, and setting off a wave of opposition among students. The battle in higher education is between two irreconcilably opposed perspectives: the capitalist, which insists the working class be given only the education required to produce a technically competent labour force, with knowledge of the arts, history and culture limited to the ruling and affluent middle class; and the socialist, which insists on the right of everyone to the education and free time necessary to access the highest achievements of human civilisation.

Ukraine, UK to carry out “Cossack Mace” military exercises

Jason Melanovski

The armed forces of Ukraine and the United Kingdom (UK) are set to begin a series of military exercises this week known as “Operation Cossack Mace.” The exact dates for the drills to take place have not been announced but the Russian Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported on Tuesday that they were already ongoing.

SSO fighters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine during training (Photo: Wikipedia/ArmyInform)

The joint military drills were named in honor of Ukrainian Cossack General Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who led a 1648 Cossack uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that resulted in the massacre of thousands of Jews.

While the stated purpose of the exercises is to “improve the compatibility between British and Ukrainian military formations, strengthen mutual relations, joint planning and perform battalion and tactical operations,” they are clearly aimed at preparing for a land conflict with Russia.

In addition to Ukraine and the UK, military personnel from the United States, Denmark, Sweden and Canada will also participate in the planned exercises.

Taking place just two weeks after a dangerous naval incident in the Black Sea in which Russian patrol ships fired warning shots on the British destroyer warship HMS Defender, after it had provocatively crossed into waters claimed by Russia off the Crimean peninsula, the exercises are certain to further inflame relations between Russia and Ukraine.

While Ukraine and NATO often declare that their military exercises are “defensive” in nature, “Cossack Mace” differs in that it openly states that its forces are practicing for an offensive. According to the statement by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU): “defensive actions will be worked out, followed by an offensive to restore the borders and territorial integrity of the country that has been attacked by a hostile neighboring state,” clearly alluding to Russia.

In February this year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky endorsed a strategy aimed at recovering Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea that was annexed by Russia in March 2014, following an imperialist-backed far-right coup in the Ukrainian capital Kiev. The move triggered a major military crisis in the Black Sea region in April. Zelensky has recently provocatively threatened to impose a full blockade on territories in East Ukraine that are controlled by Russian-backed separatists.

In addition to this week's exercises, later in July, Ukraine, the United States, Poland and Lithuania will take part in another military land drill known as “Three Swords 2021,” that will reportedly include over 1,200 servicemen and more than 200 combat vehicles.

This week, Zelensky also announced that the country would be receiving Mark VI high-speed combat boats from the United States in the upcoming year.

In its ongoing provocations against Russia, the Zelensky government is driven in no small measure by a deepening domestic crisis.

Zelensky, who was initially elected above all as a repudiation of the militaristic policies of former President Petro Poroshenko, has not only continued but also escalated the unpopular policies of his predecessor. Europe's poorest country remains mired in an ongoing civil war in Eastern Ukraine that has killed 14,000, displaced 1.4 million and left 3.5 million in need of humanitarian assistance.

The social and political crisis has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fall-out. A recent opinion poll by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology found that 52.7 of Ukrainians now disapprove of Zelensky's administration.

The ongoing military exercises and equipment procurements signal that Ukraine is continuing the integration of its military forces with Western imperialism. However, the Ukrainian ruling class has yet to receive any assurance that it will ever be officially included into NATO. The continued failure of Ukraine to receive an official invitation has left the Ukrainian ruling class apoplectic.

Earlier in June, both United States President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken shot down Zelensky's statement on Twitter that Ukraine had been assured a spot in NATO at the alliance's annual summit in Belgium. Zelensky wrote, “Commend @NATO partners’ understanding of all the risks and challenges we face. NATO leaders confirmed that [Ukraine] will become a member of the Alliance & the #MAP is an integral part of the membership process. {Ukraine] deserves due appreciation of its role in ensuring Euro-Atlantic security.”

Just minutes later Zelensky's comments were contradicted by US president Biden who stated, “It depends on whether they meet the criteria. The fact is, they still have to clean up corruption. The fact is, they have to meet other criteria to get into the action plan. And so it’s, you know, school’s out on that question. It remains to be seen.”

Regarding Ukraine's status, Secretary of State Antony Blinkin stated that “nothing changed – this goes back to 2008,” referring to a 2008 NATO conference which first proposed that the former Soviet republic could potentially join one day. In order to do so, Ukraine would have to receive an official Membership Action Plan, which despite Zelensky's begging, has yet to occur.

While NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had previously expressed optimism regarding Ukraine's chances to enter NATO, his stance changed following Biden's comments and declared that Ukraine needed “to do more” and that Ukraine's entry “was not the focus of this summit.”

Prior to the 2014 US-backed coup, Ukraine had maintained a non-aligned status in regards to NATO. In 2014, it embarked on a course of integration with NATO. In February 2019, the Ukrainian government passed a constitutional amendment, stating its commitment to join both NATO and the EU and in June of last year became a member of NATO’s Enhanced Opportunities Partnership program.

US-Ukrainian relationships were further strained in May when the Biden administration announced that it would, for the time being, not impose additional sanctions on the Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2. Zelensky complained that he learned of the decision through the press and not through any direct contact with the Biden administration. Speaking to Axios, Zelensky said that he was 'very unpleasantly surprised' by Washington’s decision.

The pipeline's completion could potentially cost the Ukrainian government billions in yearly transit fees that are collected on Russian gas headed to European consumers.

Ukraine’s growing relations with China are another major point of contention. In March, after years of pressure from the US, the Ukrainian government seized the assets of the country's major aerospace company, Motor Sich, in order to lock out Chinese investors from acquiring the company. The United States had denounced the move by Chinese aviation firm Skyrizon to acquire a controlling stake in the Ukrainian company, stating that these “predatory investments and technology acquisitions in Ukraine represent an unacceptable risk of diversion to military end use.'

Despite the obvious interference of the US, Zelensky denied any pressure from his major NATO military backers.

Following several public rebuttals of Ukraine’s NATO aspirations in recent months, the Ukrainian government has notably sought to make amends with China by signing an infrastructure agreement that will see Chinese companies working on road, bridge and rail transit projects within Ukraine. Speaking to the Global Times on Sunday, Song Kui, president of the Contemporary China-Russia Regional Economy Research Institute, said, “If Kiev can recognize the situation and get rid of the country's dependence on the West, the prospects for China-Ukraine cooperation are good.”

The deal was only completed after Ukraine agreed to remove its signature from a joint international statement calling for independent observers to be allowed to investigate alleged human rights abuses against Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang region. The allegations have been regularly promoted by the United States as a foreign policy weapon against Beijing. While the agreement was signed in late June, the Kiev government only publicized it this week.

Biden administration rolls out red carpet for Saudi prince implicated in Khashoggi murder

Bill Van Auken

Prince Khalid bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s deputy defense secretary and younger brother to the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS), was given the red-carpet treatment in Washington this week, meeting with top US diplomatic, military and security officials.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Saudi Prince Khalid bin Salman (Twitter)

The prince is the first senior member of the Saudi ruling family to visit the US since Democratic President Joe Biden took office last January. A month later, his administration released an assessment by the US intelligence agencies confirming what the entire world already knew: the savage October 2018 assassination and dismemberment of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul could only have been carried out on the order of Crown Prince bin Salman. The Biden administration ordered sanctions against the assassins and the senior advisor who supervised their bloody work, but took no action whatsoever against MBS himself.

The crown prince’s younger brother Khalid is no stranger to Washington. He was the kingdom’s ambassador to the US between 2017 and 2019 during the assassination and its aftermath. When he first arrived in Washington, he threw a lavish dinner party at the Saudi embassy for CEOs like Blackrock’s Larry Fink and Lockheed Martin’s Marilyn Hewson, along with top US government officials. The evening featured a performance by Gladys Knight.

After Khashoggi was butchered by the Saudi death squad, the prince repeatedly denounced “malicious rumors” that the journalist had been abducted and killed at the Istanbul consulate, insisting that the royal family was only concerned for his welfare. Incontrovertible evidence—including Turkish audiotapes recording the death squad killing Khashoggi and then cutting up his body with a bone saw—made this pretense increasingly untenable. After intelligence reports surfaced that Khalid himself had played a key role in setting up the assassination, instructing Khashoggi that he could pick up documents he needed for his marriage at the Istanbul consulate and assuring him he would be safe, he quietly abandoned his diplomatic post. Now he is back and receiving a royal welcome.

During his campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, candidate Biden vowed that his administration would make the Saudi monarchy “pay the price” for Khashoggi’s savage murder and that he would turn its rulers into “the pariah that they are.”

He further pledged that a Biden administration would not sell the Saudis armaments used in “murdering children” in Yemen. He passed over in silence the fact that when he was vice president in the Obama administration, the US funneled some $100 billion in arms to the Saudis and provided extensive logistical support without which Riyadh could not have carried out their war crimes against the Yemeni people.

After he took office and ordered the release of the sanitized US intelligence report on the Khashoggi assassination, Biden declared that his objective was to “recalibrate and not rupture” US-Saudi relations. This week, the character of that “recalibration” has clearly emerged. While there was a shamefaced character to the encounter—there was no advance notice of the Saudi prince’s visit—Khalid bin Salman was given a welcome that is unprecedented for a deputy defense minister from any country.

At the State Department, he held talks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland and Counselor Derek Chollet. At the Pentagon, he met with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark Milley. He was granted audiences with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and met with other senior members of the National Security Council dealing with the Middle East.

The official statements issued by the different US government agencies hosting the Saudi prince were all virtually identical. The State Department said that the discussions were on “regional security, support for Saudi Arabia to defend itself against cross-border attacks, and improving human rights.”

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tweeted: “Enjoyed seeing Saudi Vice MinDef during his meeting w/@DOD_Policy. Emphasized US commitment to our defense partnership, expressed concerns over Iran’s destabilizing activity, the importance of ending the war in Yemen ...”

The White House released a statement on the meeting with National Security Advisor Sullivan stating that the two discussed the “longstanding partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia, regional security, and the U.S. commitment to help Saudi Arabia defend its territory as it faces attacks from Iranian-aligned groups. They also discussed the importance of coordinating efforts to ensure a strong global economic recovery, to advance the climate agenda, and to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East. Mr. Sullivan emphasized the importance of progress in advancing human rights in the Kingdom.”

This official double talk only makes clear that no number of assassinations, beheadings, torture and imprisonment of journalists and dissidents will alter the fact that Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy has served for three-quarters of a century as a pillar of US imperialist hegemony and social counter-revolution in the Middle East and today functions as a key partner in Washington’s anti-Iranian axis.

The pro forma references to “advancing human rights” came at the end of each official statement, serving as window dressing for Washington’s unwavering support for one of the most tyrannical regimes on the planet.

Similarly, while talking about ending the war in Yemen, every statement stressed US assistance to the defense of Saudi territory, an oblique reference to the sporadic rocket and drone attacks carried out by Yemen’s Houthi rebels against Saudi facilities in retaliation for a six-year Saudi-led war that has claimed a quarter of a million lives and brought more than 13 million Yemenis to the brink of starvation.

Claiming to aid in the defense of the Saudi monarchy’s territory provides a means of continuing US arms sales to Riyadh, the US military-industrial complex’s number one foreign customer, under the pretext that they are “defensive” weapons. Meanwhile, US military personnel and contractors continue to provide logistical aid without which the Saudi military could not carry out the slaughter in Yemen.

Arms contracts concluded under the Trump administration are being fulfilled by Biden. This includes a massive $23 billion package for the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—a key participant in the Saudi-led assault on Yemen—which consists of F-35 combat aircraft, armed drones, and $10 billion worth of bombs and missiles, hardly defensive material.

While Biden had pledged that US arms sales would be evaluated according to “American values,” it is abundantly clear that principal “value” under consideration is that of the arms corporations’ profits. They have reliable champions within the state apparatus. Defense Secretary Austin was on the board of directors of Raytheon Technologies, one of Saudi Arabia’s foremost arms suppliers, while his predecessor, Mark Esper, was a chief Raytheon lobbyist before joining the Trump administration.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Saudi prince’s return to Washington is the lack of protest or outrage from within either the US political establishment or the corporate media over a principal accomplice in the brutal state murder of a journalist inside a consulate being treated like a visiting dignitary. The normalization of such crimes will only ensure that they will be repeated.

In back-to-back briefings on Tuesday and Wednesday, US State Department spokesman Ned Price read out statements on the Saudi prince’s visit without a single reporter asking about his role in the butchering of Khashoggi.

During these same briefings, Price called attention to the determination of Secretary of State Blinken to “reaffirm the administration’s emphasis on human rights when it comes to our China policy,” regurgitating the propaganda about “genocide” against Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, while adding a claim that LGBTQI accounts had been deleted from the China-based social media platform WeChat.

Washington’s official welcome for Prince Khalid bin Salman exposes the hypocrisy of the Biden administration’s “human rights” pretensions, and their selective invocation in the pursuit of “great power” confrontation with China and Russia.

US sees a rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations as the Delta variant becomes the dominant strain

Benjamin Mateus

“Vaccine nationalism, where a handful of nations have taken the lion’s share, is morally indefensible.” Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, World Health Organization

The Director-General’s comments this week, without naming names, are directed against the deleterious response of the US, along with other wealthy nations, to the current iteration of the pandemic. No other country has so emphasized vaccine nationalism in its response to the pandemic, at the detriment of the rest of the poorer nations facing their catastrophes with the coronavirus.

A sign warning of COVID-19 dangers remains in place Tuesday, June 15, 2021, outside the entryway of a state office building in Jefferson City, Mo. (AP Photo/David A. Lieb)

Nonetheless, as the Delta variant dominates all previous versions across the US, in conjunction with a vaccination campaign that has slowed to a crawl, the US itself is in a precarious position despite Biden’s professed optimism.

“Today we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus … we can live our lives, our kids can go back to school, our economy is roaring back,” President Joe Biden brazenly remarked during the Independence Day celebration on the South Lawn of the White House, which ushered in the complete abandonment of all public health measures to stem the rising tide of COVID-19 infections. [emphasis added]

Meanwhile, the seven-day average of vaccinations has tapered off below 733,000 jabs a day. Yesterday, only 437,117 doses of the COVID-19 vaccines were administered. Only 47.6 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated.

Across the country, there are trends showing a rise in new cases. According to The New York Times tracker, the two-week change has seen a 35 percent rise to an average of 15,259 daily COVID-19 cases. These dire statistics are compounded by the report released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that the highly contagious variant is now dominant in the United States, accounting for 51.7 percent of all cases that were genetically sequenced, up from 30 percent just two weeks ago.

Despite these worrisome trends, White House press secretary Jen Psaki remarked that the administration would not impose new national mitigation measures, nor has the CDC changed its guidelines.

While Biden and his more than 1,000 guests were rejoicing over the return to normalcy, staff at Mercy hospital in Springfield, Missouri announced on July 4 that they had run out of ventilators for their patients. The chief administrative officer at the hospital, Erik Frederick, tweeted that his employees “spent the night looking for ventilators because we ran out.”

Of the 47 patients on the ventilators, “a lot of those” were due to COVID-19 infections. With a second COVID-19 ICU unit opened, there are calls for more respiratory therapists to relieve those working grueling long shifts caring for extremely ill patients.

Tweet from CAO Erik Frederick of Springfield Missouri Mercy Hospital (Twitter)

Considering the rapid spread of the Delta strain, Mercy’s network of hospitals across Missouri has mandated all employees will be required to be vaccinated by the end of September. The seven-day average of cases has now climbed above 1,000 infections per day after lows of 400 per day in the first week of June, a 150 percent increase.

The state was leading the US in the grim category of new coronavirus cases per capita (17.1 per 100,000) in the last week. Yesterday, they reported over 1,660 COVID-19 cases. The Delta variant caused 96 percent of all recent cases. Meanwhile, Missouri ranks 43rd nationwide on vaccinations, with barely 40 percent fully inoculated. The seven-day positivity rate on COVID-19 testing has exceeded ten percent. Neighboring Arkansas now has the highest per capita rate at 18 per 100,000.

The current surge in cases is attributed to recent clusters of unvaccinated people, mainly across Southern states with low vaccination rates. An analysis conducted by researchers at Georgetown University identified 30 clusters of counties, of which five of the most significant stretch across the Southeast and lower portions of the Midwest, spreading from Georgia to Texas, throughout Missouri, and parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.

CNN’s medical analyst, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, explained that the current vaccines had prevented serious illnesses and hospitalization though data recently published has public health authorities concerned about the Delta variant’s ability to evade the immune system. Reiner added, “We’ve been lucky with the variants so far that they’ve been relatively susceptible to our vaccine, but the more you roll the dice, the more opportunities there will be for a resistant variant.” These growing clusters are ideal for such developments.

Though across many states the actual number of cases remains small compared to previous surges, the 14-day rate of change is alarming. South Carolina has seen a 135 percent increase. Kansas is running at a 120 percent rise in numbers. Nebraska, Louisiana, and Tennessee are all over 100 percent. Arkansas is at 94 percent, and Mississippi, with the lowest vaccination rate in the nation, has seen the 14-day rate of cases rise at 86 percent. In fact, 32 states are seeing their COVID-19 infections climb, including highly vaccinated states like California, New York, and Illinois. Even hospitalizations have turned upwards again.

Nevada, where almost 40 percent of the state’s adult population remains unvaccinated, has the third-highest per capita rate of infections at 14 per 100,000. However, it has seen the sharpest rise in hospitalizations, more than 60 percent compared to two weeks ago. There are currently more than 440 COVID-19 patients admitted to hospitals in the state. Dr. Fermin Leguen, the district health officer in Clark County (Las Vegas), reported that 95 percent of all patients hospitalized in the last three months had not taken a vaccine.

On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical adviser, told host Chuck Todd, “In some places, some states, some cities, some areas, where the level of vaccination is low, and the level of virus dissemination is high, that’s where you’re going to see the spikes.” He had earlier noted that the inconsistency in vaccination rates across the country would see “two Americas.”

Dr. Mike Ryan of the WHO said it most bluntly: “The Delta variant, which is faster, it is fitter [and] will pick off the more vulnerable more efficiently than previous variants.” It should be added, as real-life experience with the Delta strain and the COVID-19 vaccines have grown, even fully vaccinated individuals carry a higher risk of breakthrough infections and becoming unknowing vectors of the coronavirus, further fueling the surges that are being predicted.

The US should only look to the UK to see what happens when the Delta variant becomes totally dominant. The average daily COVID-19 hospital admissions have increased by 47 percent in the last week. Even with more fully vaccinated people than in the US, these statistics should send shudders through state and federal officials. The UK has yet to end mandates for masks and social distancing, which will end on July 19. As the newly installed Health Secretary Sajid Javid told BBC Radio 4’s Today program, daily new cases could reach as high as 100,000 by August.

As Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding had remarked in one of his tweets, the US is only a month behind the UK. This means that when the Delta variant completely dominates all regions of the country, school children, numbering 50 million under 12 who are unvaccinated, will re-enter fully occupied classrooms for in-person instruction.

European states scrap social distancing as COVID-19 pandemic surges

Jacques Valentin & Alex Lantier

The COVID-19 pandemic, driven by the Delta variant, is surging in Europe. New COVID-19 infections across Europe rose by 43 percent over the last week to 548,000, as European governments end social distancing measures. Over 80 percent of the cases were concentrated in Britain (190,294 cases), Russia (168,035) and Spain (89,036), where cases rose 148 percent.

A COVID-19 patient under Ecmo (Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) remain unconscious, at Bichat Hospital, AP-HP, in Paris, Thursday, April 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly)

In several countries with smaller caseloads, however, infections are spreading even faster, pointing to the danger of a catastrophic rise of COVID-19 cases, despite ongoing vaccination campaigns. Weekly COVID-19 cases quadrupled in Luxembourg to 961, tripled in the Netherlands (to 11,480) and Greece (8,504), and doubled in Denmark (3,208). They rose around 50 percent in France (19,364) and Portugal (16,469).

On July 1, World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge had said: “Last week, the number of cases rose by 10 percent, driven by increased mixing, travel, gatherings and easing of social restrictions.” He also warned that the Delta variant will dominate in Europe by August, under conditions where 63 percent of Europe’s population still has not received its first vaccine dose. Half the elderly and 40 percent of health care workers are unvaccinated. On this basis, he warned that “there will be a new wave in the WHO European region.”

Kluge’s projections and warnings of a new wave of the pandemic exploding across Europe are being realized. Over 1.1 million people have already died of COVID-19 in Europe, but European governments are pressing ahead with unabashed contempt for human life, adopting opening policies leading to a new surge of millions of cases.

By eliminating social distancing rules that undermine business profits, they thus hope to intensify the funneling of social wealth to the top of society, after the pandemic last year saw bank bailouts increase Europe’s billionaires’ collective wealth by €1 trillion.

Britain is leading the trend that is unfolding across Europe. After France scrapped social distancing rules for businesses on July 1, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson aims to end mask requirements and social distancing measures by July 19. Epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson has warned that the UK could see 150,000 to 200,000 by the end of the summer, but Johnson bluntly demanded that the economy and corporate profits take priority over lives.

“We’re seeing rising hospital admissions, and we must reconcile ourselves, sadly, to more deaths from COVID,” Johnson said, adding: “We have to balance the risks of the disease and of continuing with legal restrictions, with their impact on people’s lives and livelihoods.”

An indication of the scope of the disaster that could result was a study last month from Public Health England. It showed that so far, 117 people have died of the Delta variant in Britain, including 50 who were doubly vaccinated, as vaccinations bring down the death rate to 0.13 percent. However, even if this far lower death rate were to maintain itself despite the vast increase in circulation of the virus, this would mean 200 to 250 deaths per day in Britain by the end of the summer if Ferguson’s projections were realized.

On the European continent, where vaccination rates are substantially lower, this could lead to even greater levels of death.

Yesterday, Russian officials rejected calls for more social distancing measures, as over 700 people die of COVID-19 every day. Russia, Europe’s largest country with a population of 146 million, leads Europe for COVID-19 deaths, at 140,775, just ahead of Britain (128,336) and Italy (127,731). Yet Russian Human Well-being Commissioner Anna Popova blandly declared, “there is no threat or risk now that would force us to go into lockdown or introduce tougher restrictive measures, there is no need for that today.”

In Spain, the incidence rate has surged to over 200 per 100,000 inhabitants, and over 600 among those under 30. The reproduction rate (R0), the number of people whom each infected person then goes on to infect, now stands at 3.3, the highest since the pandemic began. Super-spreader events at school holidays and nightclubs have played a major role. The region of Catalonia, where the incidence rate is at 380, said on Tuesday that it will close discos for 15 days starting this weekend.

Underscoring the risks faced by young people, El Pais reported that at the beginning of July, at least 600 people under age 30 were in intensive care and 80 had died due to COVID-19 in Spain.

This exposes the bitter cost in lives of the false reassurances spread by officials of Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government. Last month, Fernando Simón, the head of the Centre of Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies (CCAES), said: “We know that until we have at least 70 percent immunity things can happen, but we also know they cannot be like the past. … In no way can they be like what happened in winter, and that is true of Britain, too.”

Simón added that he was confident in supporting the elimination of the use of masks: “I believe that it will not cause any risk at all.”

As COVID-19 explodes in the Netherlands, Health Minister Ferd Grapperhaus said only that the government would see “in the coming days if tightening up the rules is justified.” The Dutch public health institute RIVM said that one in five new infections can be traced to a café, bar or club and that over 60 percent of cases are in among people under 30.

One so-called “COVID-free” party in Enschede on June 28 turned into a super-spreader event, after 180 of the 800 people attending tested positive. The party required a “corona admission ticket” showing that partygoers were vaccinated or had tested negative for the virus. Once admitted, however, they did not have to wear masks. Several people reportedly falsified their corona admission ticket, sharing a single QR code certifying they could safely attend the party.

In France, government spokesman Gabriel Attal reported Wednesday on a national security council meeting held by President Emmanuel Macron. He said that COVID-19 affects the 20-29 age bracket most heavily and is accelerating in 11 of France’s 12 regions, with the Paris and Marseilles regions worst hit. Inside the Paris city limits, the incidence rate has again climbed over 50 per 100,000, the government’s official “alarm limit.”

Nonetheless, Attal announced no new measures, merely asking citizens to get vaccinated. Only 34 percent of French people are fully vaccinated, compared to 51 percent in Britain.

Macron also intends to make users pay for COVID-19 tests starting immediately for foreign visitors in France, and in the autumn for citizens and permanent residents. While officials have said this aims to eliminate “comfort” testing and encourage everyone to get vaccinated, there are also reports that the government was concerned that the total cost of the tests could rise to several billion euros this year. And so, the government is abandoning one of the principal methods through which a track-and-trace policy would be implemented.

These announcements show that workers cannot rely on governments to stop the pandemic. The building of independent safety committees in workplaces and schools to monitor and adopt relevant safety measures to halt the spread of the virus is the way forward for workers and youth. The critical question is mobilizing the independent strength of the working class across Europe and internationally to impose a rational, scientifically guided health policy to prevent the coming surge from claiming further millions of lives in Europe and around the world.