Carbon Justice and Global Survival

Thomas Klikauer & Meg Young

Unlike rather known concept of “climate” justice, the idea of “carbon” justice is so advanced that it does not even have a Wikipedia entry, yet. One of the countries that might serve as a near perfect example for carbon justice is Australia. With its massive coal export, Australia is one of, or perhaps, “the” worst country polluting our world. Its coal export contributes substantially to global warming. Unmatched by others, Australia is poisoning our environment, not so much at home, but abroad.

If one would combine emissions from Australia’s exports with its local emissions, Australia contributes a colossal 3% to 4% to the world’s entire emissions. With a population less than the city of Shanghai (26.4 million), Australia (25.69 million) remains the world’s 6^th largest emitter behind super-polluters like the USA, China, India, Russia and Japan.

Globally, 76% of all emission are from fossil fuels to which corporations operating in Australia make a sizable contribution. Some of these corporations are what the philosopher Jeremy Moss calls carbon majors: BHP, Glencore, Yancoal, Peadbody, AngloAmerican, Chevron, Whitehaven, Woodside, ExxonMobil, and Santos. Combining their emissions results in them being the world’s 8^th biggest contributors to global warming.

This alone challenges the idea of an Anthropocene in favor of Capitalocene, as a handful of capitalism’s major corporations alone have the power to change our climate. Beyond that, around 63% of all global emissions over capitalism’s main period –1854 to 2010 – are traceable to the activities of just 90 global corporations. Capitalism has been creating global warming since many decades.

Yet, inside Australia, these carbon-intense corporations lobby Australia’s (mostly) neoliberal government. In this, they are kindly assisted by Australia’s corporate media (e.g. Murdochracy) winning election after election. In terms of propaganda, the triangle of ecocide – (1) mining corporations and corporate lobbying, (2) corporate media, and (3) Australia’s Liberal Party – largely define Australia’s debate on global warming.

They engineer PR slogans like, “we export coal we do not burn it, it is not our problem.” Hidden behind tabloid-slogans remains a dark fact. Just as tobacco corporations selling cigarettes to children, it is not their problem when children die of cancer.

Of course, Australia’s neoliberal Prime Minister (an ex-marketing manager) – commonly known as Scomo – likes to carry coal into parliament to show how harmless coals are. He also likes to fly to Glasgow’s blah-blah-blah Greenwash festival where he spoke to an empty room.

Unlike many Australians, the world has realized that Scott Morrison’s climate change policies are pure propaganda designed for his audience back home, which remains shielded from much of international news through Murdoch’s near-monopoly media apparatus owning 70% of print media, and up to 100% in Queensland. Only North Korea has a higher monopoly. Thankfully, Australia is called a democracy while North Korea is called a dictatorship.

Meanwhile, the tripod of corporate media, neoliberal politicians, and carbon majors (multi-national corporations) assures that most Australians are kept ignorant to ideas such as carbon justice. Key principles of carbon justice are concepts such as historical responsibility, polluter pays, inherited debt, and Utilitarianism’s no harm principle. Virtually all of these rely on a connection between contributing to a global harm (e.g. global warming), and being liable for the consequences these corporations and countries (guided by neoliberal governments) have caused. Someone will have to pay for all this, eventually.

Key to carbon justice is an acute awareness that climate change is a truly global problem. As a consequence, solutions also need to be global. This means that major emitter like mining corporations and countries that enable these corporations to pollute, can no longer claim, we just export coal – not our problem.

Worse, the disproportionally large contributions of these corporations to global warming assure that a global response can no longer be to simply focus on delivering benefits to mining corporations and a handful of countries that allow their business to flourish to the detriment of humanity.

One of the most serious problems in all that is the allocation of benefits (corporate profits) and burdens (the public and the environment) during an impending transition away from fossil fuels. In many countries, this has started several years ago. This transition might result in the potential bankruptcy of mining companies. It also creates what is known as stranded assets – oilfields and coal mines becoming worthless. Beyond all that, there is likely to be a loss in royalty revenues.

All this indicates that corporations might quickly vanish or that neoliberal governments will shield them from liability under the ideology of de-regulation, i.e. pro-business regulation. In short, the public might be left with un-rehabilitated mines, vast geographical areas that look worse than the dark side of the moon, and with potentially debilitating impacts on entire regions and local communities.

Set against this is the idea of fault-based justice which means that companies and corporations that are at fault are liable to repair the harm they have done. But before that, there needs to be an awareness on what coal corporations and other polluters do is harmful.

The business of coal corporations has to be a contribution – or at least a very likely contribution – to environmental harm. Creating greenhouse gas emissions obviously contributes to global warming. It does so independently of, where the coal is burned or dug up. And, so is the supply of coal extracting equipment, materials, tools, finances, etc. making dangerous emissions possible.

In a wider understanding, this will – or better “will have to” – include corporate lobbying as well as the neoliberal policy outcomes enabling mining corporations to be harmful to nature and its final consequence: threatening the very existence of humanity. Carbon justice sees to prevent this from happening.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or UNFCCC which has 197 countries as signatories, calls this a Scope 3 Justice in its Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Accounting and Reporting Standard. All this sounds very technical and complicated. Yet, it boils down to the fact that:

Scope 1+2: emissions are polluting discharges produced within a country’s borders from things such as, for example, mining, transport, power generation, agriculture, etc.

Scope 3: are emissions produced outside a country’s borders. These emissions result, for example, from products that are exported, such as, for example, coal.

In short, the concept of carbon justice not only includes harmful emissions made “inside” a country but also those created “outside” of a country when polluting products of a country – used elsewhere – are still harmful to the environment.

In other words, a cigarette produced by a tobacco corporation in country “A” and sold to children in country “B” is still harmful and causes cancer. A tobacco corporation in country “A” remains liable for the cancer it causes in children in country “B”. The neoliberal excuse that “cancer-causing tobacco is just an externality” does not bite, not legally, and not morally. It never has and never will be.

Here is how it works in the case of global warming: when a mining corporation digs up coal and sells it, these are scope 1+2 emissions (domestic). It is produced by extracting coal (e.g. dynamiting, running mine trucks, machinery, miles of conveyor-belts, etc.). Its scope 2 emissions come from products and goods (electricity to power the site), but also services (banking, corporate finance, insurance, etc.) that enable harmful mining operations. These are all responsible for the environmental harm they have created.

Scope 3 emissions are not only the responsibility of those countries and companies that use coal. They are also the responsibility of those producing coal. In short, burning coal elsewhere does not diminish the responsibility of those corporations that have contributed to carbon emission by producing coal in the first place. This is carbon justice.

To make sure that people do not become aware of the global environmental vandalism, the aforementioned tripod – 1. Neoliberal governments, 2. Corporate media, and 3. Corporations and their corporate lobbying – work very hard.

One of the top corporate lobbyists in all this is the Koch family who, incidentally, have very significant fossil fuel interests. The Koch brothers have spent over $127 million during 1997–2017 in lobbying for their cause: unhindered capitalism, neoliberal deregulation, and profit-making.

The Koch Machine support groups such as the non-scientific but highly neoliberal-free-market Ayn Rand Institute which is devoted to attacking climate science. The $127 million over ten years is a whopping $12.7 million per year – every year. It comes from just the one family – the Kochs!

By contrast, the entire budget of the United Nations’ The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC for 2018 was a meagre 7.7 million. In other words, just one family spends 1.7-times more money on destroying science than the IPCC can muster. No wonder we face the Uninhabitable Earth.

Back in the world’s largest coal-producing country, its very own corporate lobbying group – the Minerals Council of Australia – had spent A$22 million to defeat the Rudd government because it had dared to introduce a modest mining tax on corporate super-profits – the Minerals Resource Rent Tax.

It paid off handsomely. The incoming neoliberal government abolished the tax. This system is called democracy. Some call it, Media Capitalism. Noam Chomsky called it, The Spectacular Success of Propaganda.

Of course, much of the anti-global warming propaganda is dedicated to disconnect global warming from, for example, bushfires even though global warming has led to an 800% increase in bushfires. There is a more or less direct link between:

+ mining corporations and their corporate lobbying; and

+ supportive corporate media broadcasting anti-environmental propaganda; and

+ winning elections and the resulting neoliberal government that support mining corporations.

This triangle (1-2-3) of environmental annihilation assures that in Australia’s 2019/2020 bushfires, 1.5 billion animals were killed and 5,900 homes were destroyed. The estimated cost of all that was A$100 million. Yet, neoliberal governments work hard to eliminate the “coal / global warming” link. The calculation of mining corporations and neoliberal governments is that this would assure that the contribution model of carbon justice is delayed as long as possible. For obvious reasons, neoliberalism-loved “user pay” model is not applied here. Those who use coal to make profits are excused.

To fight such neoliberal hallucinations, the carbon justice model says that if companies and corporations contribute to harm climate change by knowingly impacting in a manner that could be avoided, then these corporations are liable for the harm and damages they have caused. To avoid any awareness of this, there is a relentless attack of neoliberal governments on climate science, scientists, and scientific institutions.

One of Australia’s prime apostle of neoliberalism is ex-PM Malcolm Turnbull who said in 2015,  “if Australia stopped exporting coal, the country to which we export would buy it from somewhere else.” A masterpiece of propaganda. It is a bit like saying, I will rob a bank because if I do not do it, someone else will.

Beyond that, carbon justice places mining corporations that have dug up coal in Australia and Australia’s government at the centre because that coal was mined in Australia, and not somewhere else. Cranking up the Liberal Party’s pro-coal propaganda, Turnbull’s very own predecessor – Tony Abbott – once said, coal is good for humanity.

Why do these neoliberal politicians say all that? Well, coal corporations have deep pockets. They finance elections. After all, in 2018–19, the value of exported coal and gas was A$120bn – very serious money.

Yet, the propaganda of saving jobs in the mining industry remains a mirage. The Australian Bureau of Statistics notes for 2020 that the coal industry employs about 39,000 people – a microscopic number given Australia’s 12.5 million workers. In other words, just 1-in-321 workers is employed by the coal industry – the other 320 workers are not employed by the coal industry.

Worse, mining corporations pay next to no taxes. Interestingly, in the financial year 2016 to 2017, the ExxonMobil Corporation paid no tax on its revenue of AU$8.3 billion. The Woodside Corporation also paid no tax on its A$6.5 billion in revenue.

Instead of paying taxes – like workers – mining corporations as a whole receive substantial subsidies from Australia’s neoliberal government – unlike workers. Since there are no exact numbers (for a good reason!), most estimates of tax subsidies range between $12 billion to $29 billion per year for Australia’s fossil fuel sector.

Yet, mining corporations do pay royalties on the coal, oil, and gas they extract. Royalties are not taxes. Royalties are monies paid to state governments for publicly- (or more correctly: Aboriginal) owned resources, such as coal. In one of Australia’s key resource states –Queensland– this state’s government receives a meagre 7% of the state’s budget from coal royalties – inconsequential. Among those who pay peanuts in taxes is coal giant BHP.

In terms of carbon justice, this means the following: if BHP were a country, its global warming enhancing mining emissions from its products (coal, gas, etc.) is larger than the combined domestic emissions of 25 million Australians. Yet, BHP is only “one” corporation making huge profits, paying no taxes, receiving taxpayers’ subsidies, employing next to no people, and working tirelessly to accelerate global warming.

So, what does all this mean? A 2020 report by an evil-anarchist organisation called Deloitte notes that, if unchecked, global warming could result in shrinking Australia’s GDP by A$3.4 trillion – trillion, not billion, and not million! – by 2070, with 880,000 jobs lost.

880,000 jobs is 22 times as many as currently employed in Australia’s coal industry. In other words, job losses because of global warming will outstrip coal jobs by a whopping 22-times. And this comes on top of environmental devastation in Australia and globally.

Another report commissioned by Australia’s very own oil industry lobbying body – the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association – found that the costs of decommissioning Australia’s 65 offshore oil platforms could reach $60 billion over the next thirty years. This figure does not include onshore gas, Australia’s huge coal mines and export terminals.

$60bn is a huge sum. In numbers, it looks like this: 60,000,000,000. The average house price in Australia is: $994,579. In other words, for the money decommissioning offshore oil rigs, 60,327 people could buy a house in Australia – a huge sum.

To finish up with big numbers, Australia’s fossil fuel industry employs just 0.19% of all workers but rakes in a whopping $350 billion (in 2016/17). No wonder, Australia’s prime corporate lobbyist – The Minerals Council – notes that Australia’s stable political (read: we can win elections) and legal systems (read: resulting in favourable laws), our proximity to markets and the cost of Australia’s fossil fuel resources (read: we pay peanuts in royalties and taxes) are all significant factors driving demand (read: we make money while hopefully off-loading the environmental damage onto the taxpayer).

In Carbon Justice, the philosopher Jeremy Moss suggests, “it is time to face the scandal of Australia’s true contribution to climate change.” In reality, the triangle of environmental death – (1) corporations and corporate lobbying, (2) supportive corporate media propagating supportive propaganda, and (3) frequently elected neoliberal governments – will assure that this is not going to happen.

Instead of merely facing a scandal, we face a stark choice of “socialism or barbarity” as Rosa Luxemburg once said. Between the 100 years of her murder and today, barbarity has mutated into the annihilation of planet earth – our common home. During the same 100 years, socialism has become what Hans A. Baer recently called democratic eco-socialism – pretty much the only chance we have if we want to survive.

Living in Epoch-Defining Times: Food, Agriculture and the New World Order

Colin Todhunter

agriculture

Farmerless farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented genetically engineered seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. Data platforms, private equity firms, e-commerce giants and AI-controlled farming systems.

This is the future that big agritech and agribusiness envisage: a future of ‘data-driven’ and ‘climate-friendly’ agriculture that they say is essential if we are to feed a growing global population.

The transformative vision outlined above which is being promoted by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation amounts to a power grab. Whether through all aspects of data control (soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, etc), e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy and patenting, synthetic lab-made food or the eradication of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty, the aim is for a relative handful of corporations to gain full control of the entire global food system.

Smallholder peasant farming is to be eradicated as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose their ‘disruptive’ technologies.

This vision is symptomatic of a reductionist mindset fixated on a narrow yield-output paradigm that is unable or more likely unwilling to grasp an integrated social-cultural-economic-agronomic systems approach to food and agriculture that accounts for many different factors, including local/regional food security and sovereignty, diverse nutrition production per acre, water table stability and boosting rural development based on thriving local communities.

Instead, what is envisaged will lead to the further trashing of rural economies, communities and cultures. A vision that has scant regard for the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food and the right of people to define their own food and agriculture systems.

But is any of this necessary or inevitable?

There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his paper The Myth of a Food Crisis (2020). Furthermore, there are tried and tested approaches to addressing the challenges humanity faces, not least agroecology.

Reshaping agrifood systems

An organic-based, agrifood system could be implemented in Europe and would allow a balanced coexistence between agriculture and the environment. This would reinforce Europe’s autonomy, feed the predicted population in 2050, allow the continent to continue to export cereals to countries which need them for human consumption and substantially reduce water pollution and toxic emissions from agriculture.

That is the message conveyed in the paper Reshaping the European Agro-food System and Closing its Nitrogen Cycle: The potential of combining dietary change, agroecology, and circularity (2020) which appeared in the journal One Earth.

The paper by Gilles Billen et al follows a long line of studies and reports which have concluded that organic agriculture is vital for guaranteeing food security, rural development, better nutrition and sustainability.

For instance, in the 2006 book The Global Development of Organic Agriculture: Challenges and Prospects, Neils Halberg and his colleagues argue that there are still more than 740 million food insecure people (at least 100 million more today), the majority of whom live in the Global South. They say if a conversion to organic farming of approximately 50% of the agricultural area in the Global South were to be carried out, it would result in increased self-sufficiency and decreased net food imports to the region.

In 2007, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) noted that organic models increase cost-effectiveness and contribute to resilience in the face of climatic stress. The FAO concluded that by managing biodiversity in time (rotations) and space (mixed cropping), organic farmers use their labour and environmental factors to intensify production in a sustainable way and that organic agriculture could break the vicious circle of farmer indebtedness for proprietary agricultural inputs.

Of course, organic agriculture and agroecology are not necessarily one and the same. Whereas organic agriculture can still be part of the prevailing globalised food regime dominated by giant agrifood conglomerates, agroecology uses organic practices but is ideally rooted in the principles of localisation, food sovereignty and self-reliance.

The FAO recognises that agroecology contributes to improved food self-reliance, the revitalisation of smallholder agriculture and enhanced employment opportunities. It has argued that organic agriculture could produce enough food on a global per capita basis for the current world population but with reduced environmental impact than conventional agriculture.

In 2012, Deputy Secretary General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Petko Draganov stated that expanding Africa’s shift towards organic farming will have beneficial effects on the continent’s nutritional needs, the environment, farmers’ incomes, markets and employment.

A meta analysis conducted by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and UNCTAD (2008) assessed 114 cases of organic farming in Africa. The two UN agencies concluded that organic agriculture can be more conducive to food security in Africa than most conventional production systems and that it is more likely to be sustainable in the long term.

The 2009 report Agriculture at a Crossroads by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, produced by 400 scientists and supported by 60 countries, recommended agroecology to maintain and increase the productivity of global agriculture. It cites the largest study of ‘sustainable agriculture’ in the Global South, which analysed 286 projects covering 37 million hectares in 57 countries, and found that on average crop yields increased by 79% (the study also included ‘resource conserving’ non-organic conventional approaches).

There are numerous other studies and projects which testify to the efficacy of organic farming, including those from the Rodale Institute, the Oakland Institute, the UN Green Economy Initiative, the Women’s Collective of Tamil Nadu, Newcastle University and Washington State University. We also need look no further than the results of organic-based farming in Malawi.

In Ethiopia, agroecology has been scaled up across the entire Tigray region, partly due to enlightened political leaders and the commitment of key institutions. But Cuba is the one country in the world that has made the biggest changes in the shortest time in moving from industrial chemical-intensive agriculture to organic farming.

Professor of Agroecology Miguel Altieri notes that, due to the difficulties Cuba experienced as a result of the fall of the USSR, it moved towards organic and agroecological techniques in the 1990s. From 1996 to 2005, per capita food production in Cuba increased by 4.2% yearly during a period when production was stagnant across the wider region.

By 2016, Cuba had 383,000 urban farms, covering 50,000 hectares of otherwise unused land and producing more than 1.5 million tons of vegetables. The most productive urban farms yield up to 20 kg of food per square metre, the highest rate in the world, using no synthetic chemicals. Urban farms supply 50 to 70% or more of all the fresh vegetables consumed in cities such as Havana and Villa Clara.

It has been calculated by Altieri and his colleague Fernando R Funes-Monzote that if all peasant farms and cooperatives adopted diversified agroecological designs, Cuba would be able to produce enough to feed its population, supply food to the tourist industry and even export some food to help generate foreign currency.

Serving a corporate agenda

However, global agribusiness and agritech firms continue to marginalise organic, capture public bodies and push for their chemical-intensive, high-tech approaches. Although organic farming and natural farming methods like agroecology offer genuine solutions for many of the world’s pressing problems (health, environment, employment, rural development, etc), these approaches challenge corporate interests and threaten their bottom line.

In 2014, Corporate Europe Observatory released a critical report on the European Commission over the previous five years. The report concluded that the commission had been a willing servant of a corporate agenda. It had sided with agribusiness on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and pesticides. Far from shifting Europe to a more sustainable food and agriculture system, the opposite had happened, as agribusiness and its lobbyists continued to dominate the Brussels scene.

Consumers in Europe reject GM food, but the commission had made various attempts to meet the demands from the biotech sector to allow GMOs into Europe, aided by giant food companies, such as Unilever, and the lobby group FoodDrinkEurope.

The report concluded that the commission had eagerly pursued a corporate agenda in all the areas investigated and pushed for policies in sync with the interests of big business. It had done this in the apparent belief that such interests are synonymous with the interests of society at large.

Little has changed since. In December 2021, Friends of the Earth Europe (FOEE) noted that big agribusiness and biotech corporations are currently pushing for the European Commission to remove any labelling and safety checks for new genomic techniques. Since the beginning of their lobbying efforts (in 2018), these corporations have spent at least €36 million lobbying the European Union and have had 182 meetings with European commissioners, their cabinets and director generals: more than one meeting a week.

According to FOEE, the European Commission seems more than willing to put the lobby’s demands into a new law that would include weakened safety checks and bypass GMO labelling.

Corporate influence over key national and international bodies is nothing new. From the World Bank’s ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ and the influence of foreign retail on India’s NITI Aayog (the influential policy commission think tank of the Government of India) to the Gates Foundation’s role in opening up African agriculture to global food and agribusiness oligopolies, democratic procedures at sovereign state levels are being bypassed to impose seed monopolies and proprietary inputs on farmers and to incorporate them into a global agrifood chain dominated by powerful corporations.

But there are now also new players on the block. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others are closing in on the global agrifood sector while the likes of Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and Cargill continue to cement their stranglehold.

The tech giants entry into the sector will increasingly lead to a mutually beneficial integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, seeds, fertilisers, tractors, etc) and those that control the flow of data and have access to digital (cloud) infrastructure and food consumers. In effect, multi-billion dollar agrifood data management markets are being created.

In India, Walmart and Amazon could end up dominating the e-retail sector. These two US companies would also own India’s key consumer and other economic data, making them the country’s digital overlords along with Google and Facebook.

The government is facilitating the dominance of giant corporations, not least through digital or e-commerce platforms. E-commerce companies not only control data about consumption but also control data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved.

These platforms have the capacity to shape the entire physical economy. We are seeing the eradication of the marketplace in favour of platforms owned by global conglomerates which will control everything from production to logistics, including agriculture and farming.

The farmer will be told how much production is expected, how much rain is anticipated, what type of soil quality there is, what type of (GM) seeds and proprietary inputs are required and when the produce needs to be ready.

E-commerce platforms will become permanently embedded once artificial intelligence begins to plan and determine all of the above.

In April 2021, the Indian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers. The MoU seems to be part of the AgriStack policy initiative, which involves the roll out of ‘disruptive’ technologies and digital databases in the agricultural sector.

CropData will be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details, profile of land held, production data and financial details.

In addition to facilitating data harvesting and a data management market, the Indian government is trying to establish a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country, so that ownership can be identified and land can then be valued, bought or taken away.

The plan is that, as farmers lose access to land or can be identified as legal owners, predatory global institutional investors will buy up and amalgamate holdings, facilitating the further roll out of high-input, corporate-dependent industrial agriculture.

This is an example of stakeholder-partnership capitalism, much promoted by the likes of the World Economic Forum, whereby a government facilitates the gathering of such information by a private player which can then, in this case, use the data for developing a land market (courtesy of land law changes that the government enacts) for institutional investors at the expense of smallholder farmers who will find themselves displaced.

By harvesting information – under the benign-sounding policy of data-driven agriculture – private corporations will be better placed to exploit farmers’ situations for their own ends.

Imagine a cartel of data owners, proprietary input suppliers and retail concerns at the commanding heights of the global economy, peddling toxic industrial (and lab-engineered) ‘food’ and the devastating health and environmental impacts associated with it.

As for elected representatives and sovereign state governments, their role will be highly limited to technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.

But none of this is set in stone or inevitable. The farmers victory in India in getting the corporate-friendly farm laws repealed show what can be achieved, even if this is only viewed as a spanner in the works of a global machine that is relentless.

New world order

And that machine comprises what journalist Ernst Wolff calls the digital-financial complex that is now driving the globalisation-one agriculture agenda. This complex comprises many of the companies mentioned above: Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Amazon and Meta (Facebook) as well as BlackRock and Vanguard, transnational investment/asset management corporations.

These entities exert control over governments and important institutions like the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Federal Reserve. Indeed, Wolff states that BlackRock and Vanguard have more financial assets than the ECB and the Fed combined.

To appreciate the power and influence of BlackRock and Vanguard, let us turn to the documentary Monopoly: An Overview of the Great Reset which argues that the stock of the world’s largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors. This means that ‘competing’ brands, like Coke and Pepsi, are not really competitors, since their stock is owned by the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies and banks.

Smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies: Vanguard and Black Rock.

A 2017 Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028 together will have investments amounting to 20 trillion dollars. In other words, they will own almost everything worth owning.

The digital-financial complex wants control over all aspects of life. It wants a cashless world, to destroy bodily integrity with a mandatory vaccination agenda linked to emerging digital-biopharmaceutical technologies, to control all personal data and digital money and it requires full control over everything, including food and farming.

If events over the last two years have shown us anything, it is that an unaccountable authoritarian global elite knows the type of world it wants to create, has the ability to coordinate its agenda globally and will use deception and duplicity to achieve it. And in this brave new Orwellian world where capitalist ‘liberal democracy’ has run its course, there will be no place for genuinely independent nation states or individual rights.

The independence of nation states could be further eroded by the digital-financial complex’s ‘financialisation of nature’ and its ‘green profiling’ of countries and companies. If we take the example of India, again, the Indian government has been on a relentless drive to attract inflows of foreign investment into government bonds (creating a lucrative market for global investors). It does not take much imagination to see how investors could destabilise the economy with large movements in or out of these bonds but also how India’s ‘green credentials’ could be factored in to downgrade its international credit rating.

And how could India demonstrate its green credentials and thus its ‘credit worthiness’? Perhaps by allowing herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that the GM sector misleadingly portrays as ‘climate friendly’.

As for concepts such as localisation, food sovereignty, self-reliance and participatory democracy – key tenets of agroecology ­– these are mere inconveniences to be trampled on.

Olivier De Schutter, former UN special Rapporteur on the right to food, delivered his final report to the UN Human Rights Council in 2011, based on an extensive review of scientific literature. He concluded that by applying agroecological principles to the design of democratically controlled agricultural systems we can help to put an end to food crises and address climate variabilities and poverty challenges.

De Schutter argued that agroecological approaches could address food needs in critical regions and double food production within 10 years. However, he notes there is insufficient backing for organic-based farming which seriously hinders progress.

But it is not just a case of insufficient backing. Global agribusiness and agritech corporations have leveraged themselves into strategic positions and integral to their strategy has been attacks on organic farming as they attempt to cast it as a niche model which cannot feed the world. From the false narrative that industrial agriculture is necessary to feed a growing population to providing lavish research grants and the capture of important policy-making institutions, these firms have secured a thick legitimacy within policy making machinery.

These conglomerates regard organic approaches as a threat, especially agroecology which adheres to a non-industrial, smallholder model rooted in local independent enterprises and communities based on the principle of localisation. When people like De Schutter assert the need for a “democratically controlled” agroecology, this runs counter to the reality of large agribusiness firms, their proprietary products and their globalisation agenda based on long supply chains, market dependency, dispossession and the incorporation of farms and farmers into their agrifood regime. And as we can see, ‘democracy’ has no place in the world of the digital-financial complex.

The 2015 Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology argues for building grass-root local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on truly agroecological food production. It says that agroecology should not be co-opted to become a tool of the industrial food production model; it should be the essential alternative to it.

The declaration stated that agroecology is political and requires local producers and communities to challenge and transform structures of power in society, not least by putting the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of those who feed the world.

According to Pat Mooney of the ETC Group, this involves developing healthy and equitable agroecological production systems, building short (community-based) supply chains and restructuring and democratising governance systems that could take 25 years to accomplish: in effect a ‘long food movement’.

We are currently living through epoch-defining changes and the struggle for the future of food and agriculture is integral to the wider struggle over the future direction of humanity. There is a pressing need to transition towards a notion of food sovereignty based on agroecological principles and the local ownership and stewardship of common resources.

Global arms sales rise amid pandemic

Joshua Seubert

In this Aug. 5, 2019 photo released by the U.S. Air Force, an F-35 fighter jet pilot and crew prepare for a mission at Al-Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. (Staff Sgt. Chris Thornbury/U.S. Air Force via AP)

While the coronavirus pandemic is running rampant, hospitals are overcrowded and thousands of people are dying of COVID-19 every day, arms exports are exploding worldwide. This is according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report published in December. According to the report, the 100 largest arms companies sold $531 billion worth of weapons in 2020—a 1.3 percent increase in sales compared to 2019.

The defence industry has been largely immune to the economic impact of the pandemic. While the global economy shrank by 3.1 percent in 2020, most of the 100 largest defence companies increased their sales. Only 15 companies in the top 100 saw their sales decline by a few percentage points.

“The industrial giants were shielded from losses by sustained state demand for military goods and services,” SIPRI researcher Alexandra Marksteiner noted. “In much of the world, military spending has increased, and some governments have accelerated payments to the arms industry to cushion the impact of the crisis.”

Leading the way in arms sales is the United States, which accounts for 41 of the hundred largest arms producers, who increased their exports by 1.9 percent and achieved total sales of $285 billion last year. This corresponds to 54 percent of the world total. As of 2018, the top five arms companies are all based in the US.

The Chinese arms industry stands far behind the US in second place, selling $66.8 billion worth of defence goods. Since Chinese arms companies were first included in the SIPRI rankings in 2015, their arms sales have increased by 17 percent.

The 26 European arms companies account for 21 percent of sales, or $109 billion, according to SIPRI. The UK alone reported record sales of $37.5 billion, a 6.2 percent increase. The UK's largest arms manufacturer BAE Systems, the only European arms manufacturer in the top 10 of the SIPRI ranking, increased its arms exports by 6.6 percent to $24 billion.

Exports by French companies fell by 7.7 percent, mainly due to Dassault's slump in deliveries. This will not be a continuing trend, a defence ministry spokesperson stressed to French news agency AFP. With arms exports of $24.7 billion, French arms companies still account for 4.7 percent of the turnover of the top 100, meaning France is still one of the five largest arms exporting nations in the world.

The export turnover of Italy's leading arms groups increased by 2.4 percent between 2019 and 2020. Together, Italy's two largest arms corporations, Leonardo SpA and Ficantieri, account for 2.6 percent of the total sales of the top 100, with export sales of $13.8 billion.

Germany's four largest arms exporters increased their 2020 sales by 1.3 percent to $8.9 billion. The German defence company Rheinmetall (27th) increased its sales by 5.2 percent compared to the previous year, partly due to higher sales of armoured combat and transport vehicles.

The defence sales of Hensoldt (78th place), which specialises in military electronics, grew by 7.9 percent in 2020. Overall, the share of German defence companies in the total turnover of the top 100 is 1.7 percent.

A large part of the arms exported from Germany goes to reactionary monarchies and military dictatorships. In 2020 alone, the German government approved arms deliveries worth around one billion euros to states such as Egypt (752 million euros), Qatar (305 million euros), the United Arab Emirates (51 million euros) and Kuwait (23 million euros).

The trend continued last year. From January 1 to November 3, 2021, the German government approved exports of arms and other military equipment worth 3.78 billion euros. Twenty-seven percent of exports go to countries outside the EU and NATO. Weapons worth 181.1 million euros are destined for the bloody Sisi dictatorship in Egypt, and military equipment worth 134.1 million euros for the government of the far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.

The total turnover of trans-European arms companies in the ranking also increased, amounting to $16 billion in 2020, or three percent of the top 100's total. Airbus Group (ranked 11th) alone reported $12 billion in arms sales in 2020—5.7 percent more than in 2019. MBDA (ranked 30th), a joint venture specialising in missiles, reported sales of $4.05 billion in 2020.

Russian defence sales, which account for five percent of global sales, fell for the third year in a row. Most recently, falling by 6.5 per cent—from $28.2 billion in 2019 to $26.4 billion in 2020. According to SIPRI, this is mainly due to the Russian government's diversification of product portfolios, according to which the share of civilian products must be 30 percent of total production by 2025 and 50 percent by 2050.

The decline in Russian arms sales contradicts the propaganda of the imperialist governments and media, which consistently portray Russia as the aggressor. In fact, it is the NATO powers that are massively arming and escalating the conflict with the Putin regime.

The increase in arms sales during the pandemic underlines the priorities of the capitalist ruling class. While there are supposedly no resources to fight COVID-19, hundreds of billions are being poured into armaments and war. The defence budgets of the leading imperialist powers have also continued to explode in the last two years.

In mid-December, the US Congress approved the largest military budget in history, at $770 billion. In Germany, the “traffic light” coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Liberal Democrats (FDP) is planning another massive increase in the military budget. As Finance Minister of the outgoing grand coalition of the Christian Democrats and SPD, the now Chancellor Olaf Scholz increased defence spending in the last two years of the pandemic by more than 10 billion to officially over 50 billion euros.

UK National Health Service overwhelmed as COVID surge escalates

Richard Tyler & Robert Stevens

A staggering 3.7 million people were infected with COVID in Britain in the last week of 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics latest estimate. This was an increase of around 60 percent from the 2.3 million in the week to December 23.

Against all claims that Omicron could be controlled by the government’s minimal “Plan B” measures, one in 15 people in England and one in 10 in London were infected. In Scotland and Wales, one in 20 people had the virus, and in Northern Ireland one in 25.

Even these figures are an underestimate as they only include those living in private households, not cases in hospitals, care homes and other settings. There is a resident population of almost 500,000 highly vulnerable elderly people in care homes alone.

The UK is now recording well over a million COVID cases a week. Following the record near 220,000 announced Tuesday, another 194,747 were announced Wednesday.

Deaths remain constantly high with another 343 announced yesterday. Most of these were in England, with the 314 deaths NHS England compiled from four days of data after delays over the New Year. Figures published by the Office for National Statistics show there have now been 174,000 deaths registered in Britain where Covid was mentioned on the death certificate.

The lie that Omicron is a mild variant is exposed by the rapid increase in hospitalisations. As of January 4, there were 17,276 people in hospitals nationwide with COVID, a rise of over 5 percent. This figure did not include data from Wales and Northern Ireland. Nearly 1,000 (911) are seriously ill requiring ICU beds.

Nursing staff in an National Health Service hospital (Credit: WSWS Media)

As a result of the surge, hospitals face record numbers of staff absences. On New Year’s Eve, one in 10 National Health Service (NHS) staff were absent, including 50,000 either ill or isolating with COVID. This situation worsened drastically in the first days of January, with NHS trusts around the country serving hundreds of thousands of people declaring “critical incidents”.

By Monday evening, six NHS trusts had declared critical incidents. By Tuesday night, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to admit that several trusts were “at least temporarily overwhelmed”, this had risen to at least 12.

Yesterday Downing Street confirmed that more than 20 hospital trusts have declared critical incidents over COVID. This includes University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust and Blackpool Teaching Hospitals, responsible for sites across Lancashire including Blackpool Victoria Hospital, Fleetwood Hospital, Clifton Hospital, Morecambe Bay, Westmorland General Hospital, the Royal Lancaster Infirmary and Furness General.

Aaron Cummins, chief executive of University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay told staff via Twitter that sickness absence had risen from seven to 10 percent over the last week, equivalent to 240 missing staff. Dr Sakthi Karunanithi, public health director for Lancashire, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the county was bracing “for a tsunami of Omicron cases”.

At Great Western Hospital in Swindon, chief executive Kevin McNamara reported more than 180 staff were off sick with COVID-19, while patients faced delays due to the high demand for beds. “Our Covid inpatient numbers are currently at 67 patients confirmed or suspected—an 81 percent increase, from 37 on Christmas Eve. We always knew that January would be a tough month for everyone, and our modelling shows that it is likely to get tougher in the next few weeks,” he told the local press.

University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust, including Derriford Hospital and the Royal Eye Infirmary, declared a critical incident Tuesday. Chief operating officer Jo Beer messaged that with nearly 500 absences, staff had been redeployed to manage the increasing pressures. Rising ambulance demand meant A&E departments were now at full capacity.

United Lincolnshire Hospitals earlier declared a critical incident affecting four hospitals. Its sites were unable to maintain safe staffing levels, which had led to “compromised care”. Absences due to illness or quarantining with Covid-19 doubled in the month before Christmas, with 150 staff isolating on Boxing Day.

At least 17 hospitals in Greater Manchester, an area with a population of 3 million, were forced to pause non-urgent surgery and outpatient appointments Tuesday due to rising COVID cases and staff absences. By Wednesday, all non-urgent surgery was paused at every hospital in the conurbation. Yesterday, the Manchester Evening News reported, “Nearly one in four patients [in local hospitals] outside of ICU have Covid, with 96pc of beds occupied. Normally hospitals aim for no more than around 85pc.”

In the north east, four hospitals have suspended adult visiting, affecting County Durham and Darlington, Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland, and North Tees and Hartlepool. Staff absences have shot up by 135 percent due to COVID since December 24.

The true number of trusts and hospitals declaring a critical incident is likely to be much higher as NHS England has not revealed which trusts have only reported these internally without making any public statement.

In Scotland, Covid-related absences among NHS staff are at their highest since March 2021, running at an average of 3,316 each day. Those affected include 1,765 nursing and midwifery staff, 65 medical and dental staff, and 1,466 other staff.

In Wales, the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board said staff absences due to the rise in Covid cases has meant cutting services. It asked people in the Gwent region only to attend hospital if they were “absolutely desperate”. Opening hours at the Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr minor injuries unit were cut due to staff shortages.

In Northern Ireland, nearly 4,000 NHS staff were absent last week due to Covid, where there were 30,000 confirmed cases in four days across the new year.

Despite a growing mass of evidence that the population faces a grave danger, a compliant media is doing everything to play down the crisis. BBC health correspondent Nick Triggle plays a key role spreading propaganda in support of herd immunity. After Johnson’s declared Tuesday that his government would “ride out this Omicron wave without shutting down our country once again,” Triggle said the government’s opposition to further lockdowns was correct, claiming that they did not stop the spread of the virus but merely delayed it.

Triggle cited a study by Warwick University released before Christmas, which found that to have impacted the current growth of infections due to Omicron, any lockdown would have to have been implemented on December 26 or earlier. It was now “largely too late to have an impact on the peak of cases and hospitalisations,” he asserted. This is justifying today’s swinishness with yesterday’s. Neither Triggle or any other journalist was advocating a lockdown on December 26, despite Omicron having been in circulation for a month by then and known to be far more transmissible than any other variants. They all faithfully echoed, albeit without the crudity, Johnson’s October 2021 statement that there should he “no more f**king lockdowns”.

The real motivation behind opposition to a lockdown and the required closure of schools is that it will cut-across the interest of the money-mad capitalist class and super-rich. This is what Triggle means when he states that although a lockdown could help the NHS, this “had to be balanced against the cost to the economy”.

In the absence of such vital measures, infections will inevitably rise even further, producing more hospitalisations and deaths.

Nothing serious is being done to prevent the collapse of the NHS. Instead, the government is responding to an unprecedented staffing crisis by relaxing quarantining and testing requirements!

The UK Health Security Agency has announced that from January 11, it is no longer necessary to confirm a positive lateral flow test with the more accurate PCR test. In such cases, the individual must self-isolate, but can return to work after seven days (rather than 10 as previously) if they can demonstrate two further negative lateral flow tests on days six and seven.

Afghans protest Washington’s starvation strategy

Bill Van Auken

Protesters have marched through the streets of Kabul over the past weeks demanding that the United States lift its financial blockade and end its illegal seizure of Afghanistan’s financial assets, which together are driving an economic meltdown in Asia’s most impoverished country.

Women marched on December 29 carrying banners reading “Don’t kill us by hunger”, “Let us live” and “Joe Biden! The weather is very cold, and my children don’t have anything to eat at home.” A similar protest was held on January 2, and more are planned in both Kabul and other Afghan cities.

With its vindictive sanctions policies, Washington threatens to kill more Afghans by means of starvation over the coming months than it slaughtered in the 20 years of US war and occupation that ended in August.

Over one million children are at risk of dying over the winter. (Twitter)

With a cold winter setting in, the entire country is teetering on the brink of famine. “One million children [under the age of five] are so malnourished they are on the risk of dying in the coming months,” the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned last month.

The United Nations reports that just 2 percent of Afghanistan’s population has enough to eat. Twenty-three million people are confronting extreme hunger, while official statistics place 90 percent of the population below the abysmally low poverty line.

Mary-Ellen McGroarty, head of the World Food Program in Afghanistan, describes the country as “on the brink” of famine. “There is no province in Afghanistan today with less than 30 percent of their population either in crisis or emergency food insecurity,” she said recently.

Hospitals and feeding centers are seeing a doubling and even tripling of severely malnourished children brought in by desperate parents.

The country’s health care system is also on the brink of collapse as the spread of the Omicron variant makes a new surge in the COVID-19 pandemic inevitable. Nearly half of the country’s hospitals equipped to treat COVID patients have shut down in recent months, while the only remaining one for Kabul’s 4 million inhabitants cannot pay its staff, lacks basic medicines and supplies and is unable even to purchase diesel fuel to run generators used to produce the oxygen needed to save lives.

There are deepening concerns over the ominous threat of winter’s onset for Afghanistan’s hungry masses. Winter poses the additional danger of mountainous areas of Afghanistan being cut off by heavy snow, leaving whole populations without food or access to assistance. Eloi Fillion, the head of an ICRC delegation that was in Kabul on Tuesday, tweeted, “Heavy snow in Kabul today. Temperature might drop to -9 this week.” Fillion said that he had been told that people were “burning furniture, shoes or tyres to keep warm,” adding, “Due to economic collapse, thousands of Afghans are left with nothing to cope with increasing challenges.”

Protesters in Kabul demand US release Afghanistan's assets. (Twitter)

The Red Cross official left unstated the source of this “economic collapse.” Afghanistan’s population has long faced poverty and hunger, which have been exacerbated by a severe drought. The abrupt withdrawal of US troops and resulting collapse of the corrupt puppet regime put in place by the US occupation deprived the country of its main sources of income. Foreign aid accounted for 50 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product and 75 percent of the government’s budget, while the massive sums spent on the US war itself, much of it funneling into the hands of contractors and government officials, underpinned the corrupt and unstable economic setup. All of that has come to an end.

But there is no question that the overriding cause of the Afghan economy’s collapse is the US sanctions regime. Washington seamlessly transferred sanctions imposed on the Taliban as a “terrorist” organization during the period in which it was organizing an insurgency against the US occupation to the Afghan government itself, once Kabul fell to the Islamist movement on August 15.

Treating the government of a country of 39 million people and all of its agencies as a “foreign terrorist organization,” Washington has frozen nearly $10 billion in Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves held in the US, in effect stealing them from the country in violation of international law. The action has choked off the flow of cash, meaning that the minority of the population with jobs are going unpaid and those with bank savings are unable to access their money. Businesses are unable to purchase supplies or meet payrolls and are shutting down.

The “terrorist” sanctions have likewise paralyzed dealings between the Afghan central bank and local banks and businesses, on the one hand, and international banks and corporate entities on the other. The end result is the scuttling of deals to import food, medicine and other essential supplies. Remittances sent by Afghan emigres to their families have also been cut off, along with funds to pay employees of those relief agencies still on the ground.

The US has used its overriding influence within the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank to ensure that they abide by the American financial blockade.

Washington has glibly claimed that it has carved out exemptions from its sanctions regime for humanitarian assistance, but, as in the case of Iran and other countries targeted by such punitive measures, the sanctions are so sweeping and threatening that few financial or corporate entities have any interest in tempting fate by entering into dealings with Afghanistan’s government.

The Biden administration’s hard line on Afghanistan sanctions and its refusal to provide any assurances that it will not penalize banks or corporations entering into deals with the country’s government has been widely attributed to political concerns over showing any weakness in the wake of the chaotic US withdrawal completed at the end of August.

While such base political motives no doubt play a role, along with imperialist vindictiveness toward a population that forced an ignominious end to America’s longest war, Washington’s homicidal policy toward Afghanistan is driven by definite strategic aims and conceptions.

More than four decades ago, Washington launched Operation Cyclone, the largest in the CIA’s history, arming and financing mujahideen Islamist guerrillas in Afghanistan. The aim, cloaked in rhetoric about “freedom” and “democracy,” was to draw the Soviet Union into “its own Vietnam,” as former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put it. The ensuing decades of war claimed the lives of millions.

In October 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan under the pretext of a “war on terror” against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Washington’s aim was to consolidate a client regime in a strategic country of Central Asia—home to the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world—and on the borders of China, Iran and the former Soviet Union.

The same essential motivations can be detected in current US policy, couched by the Biden administration and its Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the hypocritical rhetoric of “human rights.” Washington has no intention of allowing China, Russia and Iran to fill the vacuum left by the US/NATO military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

According to the Financial Times , China has “expanded its presence” in Afghanistan since the fall of the US puppet regime, “with business groups exploring the country’s vast reserves of minerals like lithium and striking deals to buy agricultural products.”

US imperialism’s scorched earth sanctions policies serve to disrupt such economic ties and to create a crisis on China’s border, including the potential threat of renewed terrorist operations by Islamist Uyghur separatists.

At the same time, Pentagon officials have unveiled plans to resume drone missile strikes in Afghanistan, ostensibly aimed at Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K), a group that even the former Afghan puppet leader Hamid Karzai believes was brought into Afghanistan by the CIA. It has carried out a series of terrorist attacks aimed against the Taliban regime. Renewed US bombings will further destabilize the country.

Washington’s policies in Afghanistan are bound up with its broader preparations for war with its main strategic rival, China. If a million Afghan children die in the bargain, they will be seen, just like the tens of thousands of kids killed in US bombing raids and drone attacks, as collateral damage.

While ignoring the demands of the protesters in Kabul to release assets that could stem mass famine, the US State Department last week announced the appointment of a “Special Envoy for Afghan Women, Girls, and Human Rights.” The appointee, Rina Amiri, served as an aide to the late former US special envoy on Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, providing “human rights” window-dressing for the Obama administration’s military “surge.”

Amiri will beat the women’s rights drum to justify Washington’s murderous policy. A key propaganda point will center on the right of girls to attend school. This as Washington’s financial stranglehold is preventing teachers from being paid and forcing the closure of schools throughout the country, even as the children who would have attended them are starving to death.

China’s lockdown in Xi’an suppressing COVID-19 outbreak

Jerry Zhang & Peter Symonds

The lockdown underway in the Chinese city of Xi’an demonstrates again that public health measures combined with vaccination can suppress COVID-19 outbreaks as part of a strategy aimed at the elimination of the virus. It stands in stark contrast to the disastrous policies of other governments around the world that have allowed the virus, particularly the latest Omicron variant, to run rampant through their populations.

The outbreak, which has been identified as the Delta variant, has reportedly been traced to a flight to Xi’an from Pakistan on December 4. The first local confirmed case was discovered on December 9. Since then, three possible chains of transmission have been discovered, and the confirmed cases have been tracked and reported. After daily infection totals reached between 150 and 200 and the cumulative number of cases exceeded 1,600, it was decided to close down the city of 13 million on December 23.

Bicyclists wearing face masks to protect against COVID-19 wait at an intersection in the central business district in Beijing, Thursday, Dec. 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Xi’an has now been in lockdown for two weeks and the daily tally has fallen to less than 100. For the 24 hours on January 2, a total of 90 new local cases were identified, 80 of which were found in the quarantine area for close contacts. While it is too soon to declare the outbreak over, the figures continue to fall with yesterday’s report of just 35 new infections and a cumulative total of less than 1,800 locally acquired cases.

In line with the national policy of “zero COVID,” authorities in Xi’an, who have come under fire for allowing the virus to spread to other cities, have stated that the lockdown will only be lifted when there are no cases of community transmission.

The lockdown and associated public health measures, including mass testing and contact tracing, the establishment of quarantine centres and the provision of food and supplies, have required a huge mobilisation of resources.

Multiple rounds of testing of large sections of the city’s population have been conducted to identify new cases. As of December 28, 5,077 testing points have been set up, with more than 30,000 testing personnel and 132,900 related service personnel. Those who are deemed close contacts are required to quarantine in designated areas.

When the lockdown was initially imposed, one person from a household was permitted to go out to buy food and supplies once every two days. However, that policy was further tightened last week to prohibit all trips except for testing for COVID-19. To provide food and other daily necessities to the city of 13 million, Xi’an has mobilized 64,000 grassroots officials and 45,000 volunteers, many of whom are young students, ordinary workers and community residents.

The purchase of food and other supplies is mainly done by residents placing orders from businesses, and delivery by volunteers and community workers. In addition, food and daily necessities purchased by the government or donated by people from all walks of life are also distributed by volunteers and community workers.

There has also been an expansion of medical services throughout the city. A couple of reports indicate that Xi’an has built new hospitals in the course of the pandemic with another under construction with a capacity of 3,000 beds.

Beginning in mid-December, medical institutions from other parts of Shaanxi Province have sent more than 1,000 medical workers to Xi’an to support quarantine and large-scale PCR testing in the city. On December 27, 150 medical workers from the Air Force Military Medical University went to Xi’an to provide support. Donations of medicines and medical equipment have come from elsewhere in China.

The outbreak in Xi’an is the largest for 2021 and by some accounts the largest since the initial eruption of the virus in Wuhan in 2020. The lockdown has undoubtedly been a disruption to the daily lives of its 13 million residents. There have been reported delays in the housing of non-residents caught in the city, confusion over changing regulations, shortages of food and other necessities and in the worst cases, bureaucratic excesses, which have understandably led to complaints and criticism on social media.

The Washington Post reported last week that many people were short on food and had to subsist on vegetables. It noted: “People complained online of price gouging by delivery services. The hashtag ‘It’s hard to buy groceries in Xi’an’ had accumulated 300 million views on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.”

Not noted in the article was that the greatest difficulties confront migrant workers from outside Xi’an who stay in the densely packed urban villages in the city and have a disproportionately high number of infections. Most are stranded without access to kitchens and cooking utensils and are forced to survive on instant noodles. Unlike in other neighbourhoods where residents are asked about their needs for meat and vegetables, local officials simply ask migrant workers how many more packs of instant ramen they need.

In its article yesterday, “Tales of anguish emerge from China’s locked-down Xian, as hospitals demand patients be covid-free,” the Washington Post reported that a pregnant woman had miscarried after being denied treatment until she received a new negative result from a COVID test. While the article was compelled to acknowledge that China’s zero-COVID policy had been “largely successful,” it again played up food shortages.

Another case highlighted on China’s Xiaohongshu social media platform as yet unreported in the American media involves the death of a woman’s father who had not been admitted to hospital despite a negative COVID test because he came from a “medium risk” area that had had positive cases. He was eventually admitted, surgery was conducted on blockages in his heart, but he died. His daughter’s posts were widely viewed and commented on.

The opposition of the WSWS to the politics and authoritarian methods of the Chinese regime are well established. However, its response to the pandemic, whatever the flaws, is a scientifically-based strategy aimed at eliminating the disease and thus minimising deaths and damage to the health of the population. Moreover, as the US and international press has also been compelled to acknowledge, the policy is widely supported and reflects the broad sentiment stemming from the 1949 Revolution that social needs should prevail over private profit.

Most social media criticisms and complaints are written from the standpoint that the zero-COVID policy should be improved, not done away with. “We criticize government officials for their slow response and bureaucracy, but fortunately, we don’t have to face the increase of millions in a day,” one commented. “Just complaining is not enough––we need more volunteers to solve the current problems!” another said. “Why can’t the officials in Xi’an learn the effective experience of the past two years?” a third person wrote.

The standpoint of the Washington Post and the Western media generally is the opposite. They grossly inflate the shortcomings of “zero-COVID” to justify the criminal policies of their own governments and to encourage opposition within China to push for its abolition. While a largely upper-middle class layer is critical of their “loss of freedom” and argues on social media that China should also learn to “live with the virus,” that sentiment has become significantly muted amid the current COVID wave swamping the US and Europe.

The very same US and international media remains silent about the tragedies occurring every day throughout the rest of the world as a result of the “herd immunity” policy that is producing millions of daily infections, the breakdown of hospital systems and a rising toll of deaths and chronic health problems known broadly as long-COVID.

The figures speak for themselves. In Xi’an, less than 1,800 symptomatic infections have been identified since the beginning of the outbreak in early December, accounting for most of the cases recorded in China as a whole (population: 1.4 billion). The daily count in the United States (population: 330 million) for Tuesday exceeded one million for the first time in any country as Omicron surges.

The daily death toll in the US has averaged around 1,300 in December and early January bringing the overall death toll to well over 800,000. The total death toll in China since the COVID outbreak is less than 5,000—all but two occurred during the Wuhan outbreak in 2020. No deaths have been reported in Xi’an.