Russia’s debacle in Kharkiv

Andre Damon

By all indications, Russia has suffered a catastrophic military defeat near Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine, located in the country’s northeast.

Ukrainian soldiers fire into Russian positions from anti-aircraft gun in Kharkiv region, Ukraine, early Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2022. [AP Photo/Andrii Marienko]

In the course of six days, the Ukrainian military, armed and financed by the United States and NATO, has taken dozens of miles of territory. The Institute for the Study of War reports: “Ukrainian forces have penetrated Russian lines to a depth of up to 70 kilometers in some places and captured over 3,000 square kilometers of territory in the past five days since September 6—more territory than Russian forces have captured in all their operations since April.”

Borrowing the methods of the Stalinist Soviet bureaucracy, the Kremlin is responding to this catastrophe with lies and evasions. The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Russian forces are “regrouping,” a statement that is obviously false. It is impossible to deny that what is taking place is a rout and a massive military and political debacle.

The disaster in Kharkiv is the product of not only incompetent military leadership, but also, and more fundamentally, the bankrupt political strategy upon which Putin based his “Special Operation.”

Whatever the short term results of the defeats of the past week, the events continue the course of unending disasters produced by the Stalinist dissolution of the USSR and restoration of capitalism.

It will further intensify the crisis of the Russian regime, riven by factions that are arguing for a reckless escalation and those who are calling for concessions to be made to the US and NATO.

The Putin government’s decision to invade Ukraine was a desperate and reactionary response to the intensifying pressure of the US and NATO on Russia. Putin’s strategy, to the extent there was one, was to create the circumstances for a favorable negotiation of terms with the United States and its NATO allies.

Putin’s entire strategy in waging the war is bound up with the social outlook of the Russian oligarchic bourgeoisie, whose primary concern is to retain for itself control over the mineral and energy resources that the imperialists wish to plunder.

Putin sought to make an agreement with US imperialism that the Russian oligarchy could live with. Speaking for Russia’s capitalist oligarchy, Putin is far more concerned with domestic social opposition.

The US and NATO have shown, however, that they are uninterested in negotiation. They view the complete subjugation of Russia, including its carve-up into multiple statelets, as a critical strategic goal. Time and time again, the Kremlin has underestimated the determination of the US and its European imperialist allies.

The rapid breakthrough by Ukrainian forces is the result of the massive escalation of the conflict by the United States and NATO. American paramilitary forces are on the ground, directly coordinating the offensive. Ukrainian missile strikes are directed by the US intelligence agencies, which designate targets.

Increasingly, the rifles borne by Ukrainian troops, the armor they wear and the vehicles that transport them are all NATO-standard weapons, paid for by the US and its European allies. Most importantly, Ukraine has been provided with the forces to strike dozens of miles behind Russian lines in the form of the HIMARS guided missile system and M777 long-range howitzer, as well as the HARM anti-radar missile and the Harpoon anti-ship missile. Ukrainian troops are backed by the NASAMS anti-aircraft system, the same system that guards the White House.

The American media no longer seeks to conceal the extent of direct US involvement in the war. In the words of The Hill, the US has become “brazen” in its intervention in the war. “Over time, the administration has recognized that they can provide larger, more capable, longer-distance, heavier weapons to the Ukrainians and the Russians have not reacted,” former US Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor told the newspaper.

The New York Times, ecstatic over the Ukrainian advance, wrote: “Senior Ukrainian officials stepped up intelligence sharing with their American counterparts over the summer as they began to plan the counteroffensive that allowed them to make dramatic gains in the northeast in recent days, a shift that allowed the United States to provide better and more relevant information about Russian weaknesses.”

The Times quoted Evelyn Farkas, a top Pentagon official for Ukraine and Russia in the Obama administration, as saying, “These guys have been trained for eight years by [US] Special Ops. They’ve been taught about irregular warfare. They’ve been taught by our intelligence operators about deception and psychological operations.”

To refer to the conflict as a “proxy war” is an understatement. The Ukrainian army has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US military, which has armed, funded and trained it to the standards of the US Armed Forces.

The US-led offensive has resulted in a catastrophic loss of life, both for Ukrainian forces and for Russia, with reports of more than a thousand people dying per day in recent fighting.

The capitalist governments of the United States and Europe are absolutely determined to carry out their goal of subjugating Russia. The consequences, in terms of the lives of Ukrainians and Russians, along with the disastrous economic and social impact on workers throughout the world, amount to nothing in comparison to the geopolitical imperatives of the ruling class.

It is not ruled out that the Kremlin will conclude from this military catastrophe that it is necessary to wage a massive military escalation, which would itself only lead to an escalation by NATO. Paradoxically, the desperate efforts by the Kremlin to reach an accommodation with imperialism do not preclude a series of actions that could trigger a thermonuclear war.

Putin opened the Russian offensive against Ukraine with a condemnation of Vladimir Lenin. But for all Putin’s bluster, the world we inhabit today is the world Lenin described in his 1916 work, Imperialism, which demonstrated that war and colonial domination express the essential characteristics of the capitalist system.

The Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union based on the false belief that imperialism was merely an invention of Lenin, and that a capitalist Russia could reach a modus vivendi with European and American imperialism. The ensuing three decades have shown, however, that this was a colossal delusion.

The central task is to mobilize the working class in opposition to imperialist war. This requires a break not only with all of the forces of the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left that defend the US/NATO war drive, but those who claim that Russian nationalism offers a solution to the catastrophe created by the dissolution of the USSR.

It is necessary to make a warning: The debacle suffered by the Russian military over the past week only presages a further and even more bloody escalation of the war. The imperialist powers smell blood in the water, and they will redouble their efforts to conquer and subjugate Russia.

Russia’s debacle will only further embolden the most reactionary forces within Ukrainian society, as well as the US war planners, to believe they can reproduce this success by triggering a war with China over Taiwan.

But this escalation will at the same time intensify the war on the populations of the United States and Europe, who will pay the cost of the war in the form of surging prices and falling living standards. Already, the war has triggered a collapse in workers’ living standards amid a staggering escalation of military budgets, as prices for natural gas have surged ten-fold in Europe.

Pakistan faces massive humanitarian crisis as unprecedented flooding continues

Sampath Perera

Unprecedented flooding—arising from and demonstrably tied to climate change— continues to ravage Pakistan, with the official death toll rising by more than 250 since last week.

1,391 people are now reported as having perished due to the floods, which have inundated a third of the impoverished South Asian country. A further 12,700 have been injured. On Friday, Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Agency reported that 36 new fatalities had been recorded within the previous 24 hours.

An aerial view of Shahdadkot, Khairpur Nathan Shah, Mado, Faridabad, Mehar and other cities of Sindh, Pakistan covered with flood water in 2022. [Photo by Ali Hyder Junejo / CC BY 4.0]

The official death and injury counts are widely recognized to be gross undercounts, since many areas remain totally cut off due to the destruction of hundreds of bridges and other infrastructure. Furthermore, there is a growing threat of infectious disease.

More than 33 million people, or one in every seven Pakistanis, are variously described as displaced, homeless or directly affected by the floods. Among these are 16 million children.

Even prior to the devastation wrought by the floods, nearly half the population was considered food insecure. Millions of people are now forced to live in makeshift shelters or barely maintained camps. Due to a lack of emergency supplies at these sites, many people are sleeping in the open air.

Flood survivors face shortages of food, drinking water, and sanitary supplies. The lack of toilets has compelled camp residents to relieve themselves outside in the surrounding areas. Worst affected by these unbearable conditions are children and pregnant mothers. According to the United Nations Population Fund, there are 650,000 pregnant women among those affected by the floods, of whom 73,000 are expected to deliver this month.

The absence of adequate sanitary supplies has created ideal conditions for the spread of infectious diseases. Skin infections and stomach flu, spreading widely among those in the camps, have been attributed to the unavailability of toilets. More than 134,000 cases of diarrhea and 44,000 cases of malaria have been reported in Sindh alone. Other mosquito-borne infections are also spreading, with Karachi reporting 1,265 dengue cases in August and 347 cases in the first five days of September.

There is virtually no coordination of rescue efforts to locate people stranded by the floods. Nor are the relief efforts, largely entrusted to the armed forces, in any way commensurate with the scale of the crisis. 81 of the country’s 160 districts have been affected by flooding, and with heavy rain forecast for the coming days a rapid receding of the flood waters is unlikely.

The National Flood Response Coordination Centre (NFRCC) reported Wednesday that the military flew 20 helicopter sorties during the preceding 24 hours, rescuing 217 stranded individuals while delivering 30 tons of relief items to affected areas. The navy and air forces are also running rescue and relief missions, but of a smaller scale.

Despite a slight drop in water levels in recent days, Manchar Lake, the country’s largest fresh water lake, is under constant threat of bursting its banks, which could cause a massive loss of life. To prevent such an outcome, several planned breaches have been made in the lake, which is situated in the central part of Sindh province. As anticipated, the breaches have led to the flooding of many nearby villages and forced the evacuation of several hundred thousand people. On Wednesday, officials in Bhan Syedabad issued an evacuation alert to 150,000 residents, and 10,000 displaced people who had sought refuge there.

The provincial government of Balochistan, the poorest and least developed province in the country, described 32 of its 34 districts as “calamity hit” as of September 1. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in the north is also badly affected.

There are fears the flooding could wash away the ruins of Mohenjo-daro, one of the world’s most important archeological sites, which dates back to 2,500 BCE. Floodwaters have not yet touched the site, but it has been damaged by the exceptionally heavy rains, with several walls collapsing. A centre of the Harappan or Indus Valley civilisation, Mohenjo-daro has an elaborate ancient drainage system that has helped it survive previous floods. The site is considered the best preserved ancient urban settlement in South Asia.

On Aug. 30, the United Nations issued an urgent appeal to member states for $160 million to provide flood victims with food, shelter and medical supplies. Despite the massive humanitarian crisis, even this meagre amount has not been raised in the intervening week-and-a-half.

The top priority for Pakistan’s interim government, which is led by a coalition of the big-business Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) and People’s Party (PPP), is to restrict spending to the limits specified by the International Monetary Fund, as part of a loan bailout package.

To date, the government has allocated just 70 billion rupees or US $314 million for cash handouts to the more than 33 million flood victims—many of whom have seen their homes, crops and livestock destroyed.  

The floods were preceded by extremely high temperatures in March and April, which regularly surpassed 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) and in some places 50 degrees. This was followed by an early start of the monsoon season and rainfall that was three to eight times the average during July and August. The extended heat waves accelerated long-term glacier melting in the Himalayas and Hindu Kush mountains. This has triggered a phenomenon known as glacial lake outburst-floods, as large bodies of water formed by melting glaciers suddenly overflow their makeshift banks and rush down the mountainside to inundate lower-lying areas. In addition to the deadly flash floods, the glacial lake outbursts have triggered devastating landslides.

Dr. Fahad Saeed, the “regional lead for South Asia” for Climate Analytics, an international climate science and policy analysis organization, told BBC the devastating floods in Pakistan are “absolutely a wake-up call” to governments around the world. “All of this is happening when the world has warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius. Any more warming than that is a death sentence for many people in Pakistan.”

Ahead of his visit to Pakistan on September 9, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addressed the continuing refusal by global powers to respond to climate change. “There is a lot of attention,” said Guterres on the war in Ukraine. “But people tend to forget there is another war—the war we are waging on nature, and nature is striking back, and climate change is supercharging the destruction of our planet. To deal with climate change, that is the defining issue of our time, with a business-as-usual approach is pure suicide.”

Such purely rhetorical protests are falling on the deaf ears of the major powers.

Guterres did not mention that the United States is the leader in scuttling an effective response to climate change. This week, Washington pledged $30 million to assist Pakistan’s climate change victims, less than a dollar for every person impacted. This pitiful sum pales into insignificance compared with the tens of billions of dollars in military assistance the US has poured into Ukraine to expand a war against Russia that has already killed tens of thousands on both sides and threatens to trigger a catastrophic nuclear conflagration.

Last week Pakistan’s government placed flood damages at $10 billion, but that figure has been dramatically revised upwards as the scale of the disaster becomes more apparent. Its new estimate is $30 billion or more than 60 percent of Pakistan’s $47 billion national budget. According to Pakistani authorities, more than 5,700 kilometers of roads have been damaged, over 240 bridges destroyed or rendered unusable, and more than a million dwellings either washed away or heavily damaged. UNICEF says 18,000 schools have been damaged or destroyed.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported on August 29 that nearly 80 percent of the crops in Sindh, the country’s second largest province, have been ruined. Among the worst affected is the cotton crop. Raw cotton is Pakistan’s third largest export and is vital to Pakistan’s textile industry, the country’s biggest export earner.

The destruction of crops will also drive up food prices, under conditions where Pakistan, like countries around the world, is being battered by energy and other price increases. Earlier this month, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics reported the inflation rate has reached an all-time high of 45.5 percent.

The biggest inflation driver came from the removal of subsidies for energy products, which caused prices to skyrocket. As part of an agreement with the IMF, which last week released a $1.16 billion loan tranche to Pakistan, the government is bound to increase gas prices by a further 53 percent. In addition, according to Dawn, it is pledged to revive the general sales tax on petroleum products and slash other price subsidies. The gas price increase alone is intended to generate 786 billion rupees in additional revenues for the government, more than 10 times the sum Islamabad has committed to support the tens of millions of flood victims.

Meanwhile, the floods in Pakistan are disrupting the food supply to Afghanistan, worsening the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in that landlocked country. There are also 1.3 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan, of whom 420,000 are estimated to be living in the areas worst hit by the floods.

Prague: Mass protest against war and inflation reveals crisis of political perspective

Markus Salzmann & Peter Schwarz

Seventy thousand people demonstrated in the Czech capital of Prague on 3 September against rising energy prices and the NATO war in Ukraine, and demanded that the government resign.

They are rebelling against a social catastrophe that is dragging large sections of the working and middle classes into the abyss.

[AP Photo/Petr David Josek]

The former Eastern bloc country’s economic and social crisis, which has been simmering for years, worsened dramatically following the imposition of European Union sanctions against Russia. Before the sanctions, the Czech Republic used to get 90 percent of its gas and 50 percent of its oil from Russia. Now it is dependent on gas supplied from Germany, which is charging horrendous prices. Germany itself is in the midst of a huge energy crisis.

Czech electricity prices are among the highest in Europe and are driving masses of small and medium-sized enterprises into bankruptcy. The country’s official inflation rate was 17.5 percent in June and is expected to exceed 20 percent by the end of the year, according to the Czech National Bank.

The working class is being impoverished at a breathtaking pace. According to figures from the Czech Statistical Office, real wages in the second quarter of 2022 were 9.8 percent lower than a year ago. At the end of 2021, 9 percent of Czechs received an income below the official poverty line. This figure is now already 16 percent. Some 750,000 of the country’s 10 million inhabitants are bankrupt and can no longer pay their debts.

Although outrage at these untenable conditions drove tens of thousands onto the streets, the crisis found no progressive expression at the demonstration. The rally was dominated by nationalist and right-wing slogans. It began with the playing of the Czech national anthem and was submerged in a sea of national flags. Its official slogan was “The Czech Republic First”.

The speakers and organisers were mainly from the right-wing and ultra-right camps. ANO, the party of oligarch and former prime minister Andrej Babiš, supported the protest, as did Tomio Okamura’s far-right SPD. Corona deniers and smaller far-right parties were also prominently represented.

Sections of the country’s trade unions, citizens’ initiatives as well as the Social Democrats (CSSD) also called for support for the rally, and the Communist Party (KSCM) even provided its own speaker, leading many commentaries to refer to a “cross party front” of the left and right. The Czech head of government, Petr Fiala, against whom the rally was directed, denounced it as a “Russian propaganda and disinformation campaign” organised by “pro-Russian persons close to extremist positions”.

In reality, Fiala and the five parties in his governing coalition bear the main responsibility for allowing the right and far right to exploit social discontent. Fiala’s ODS party has its origins in the Civic Forum, which played an instrumental role in the so-called Velvet Revolution that led to the fall of the Stalinist regime in 1989.

The velvet glove of the “revolutionaries” of that period quickly revealed its iron fist directed above all at the Czech working class. They rejected Stalinism not because it oppressed the working class, but because it prevented them from making a career and enriching themselves as the middle class had done in the West.

Under its first leader, Vaclav Klaus, the Civic Forum moved rapidly to the right. It competed with ex-Stalinists in the social-democratic CSSD to see who could seize the largest share of former state-owned property. Under conditions of unbridled avarice and greed, Civic Forum and CSSD governments and coalitions broke up time and time again over corruption scandals, only to emerge anew in a different composition and form.

In 2017, Andrej Babiš, the country’s second richest man, came to power, using his wealth and right-wing populism as political weapons, much like Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Donald Trump in the US. In 2019, in one of the largest demonstrations in the country’s history, 250,000 demanded Babiš resign over corruption. He was able to remain in office, however, for two more years until the current government replaced him.

The Fiala government is a coalition of five parties: the ODN, the Christian Democrats, the liberal TOP 09, the Pirate Party and the local mayoral party STAN. Their common feature is opposition to Babiš and support for the EU and NATO and its war against Russia.

The Czech Republic has supplied Ukraine with large quantities of weapons, and Fiala was one of the first heads of state to travel to Kiev after the war began, together with the Polish and Slovenian heads of government. His Defence Minister Jana Černochová rejoiced at the murder of Darija Dugina, a Russian close to Putin, comparing her death to the murder of Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler's governor in occupied Czechoslovakia. Five days before the mass demonstration, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz gave a militaristic speech in Prague at Fiala’s invitation, advocating the militarisation of Europe under German leadership.

At the same time, the Fiala government has only contempt for the social misery of the Czech population. The chairperson of TOP 09, Markéta Pekarová Adamová, advised citizens to put on an extra jumper in winter as a measure against the impending lack of energy, while other government members have philosophised about the health benefits of poorly heated rooms.

The Fiala government is also even more corrupt than the predecessor regime led by Babiš. A leading politician of the STAN party, which won a fifth of the vote at its first showing based on its anticorruption campaign against Babiš, was arrested by the anticorruption police in June. “The sums illegally raked in by Hlubuček and another ten people with connections to the STAN party make Babiš look like a saint,” commented the German daily taz.

The central political problem in the Czech Republic is the lack of an independent perspective to guide working class opposition to the untenable social conditions and corrupt bourgeois parties. Decades of Stalinist repression and anti-socialist propaganda have left a legacy of confusion and disorientation.

A major contributor to this situation was the falsely named “communist” KSCM, which, like the social-democratic CSSD, emerged from the Stalinist state party and maintains relations with the German Left Party at a European level. The KSCM adhered to a pseudo-socialist rhetoric and achieved its best election result in 2002 with 18.5 percent of the vote. In some regions it was on occasion the strongest party.

In fact, the KSCM is pro-capitalist and nationalist and has repeatedly cooperated with the most right-wing forces. For example, from 2017 to 2021 it helped the oligarch Babiš gain a parliamentary majority with a tolerance agreement. At the recent rally in Prague, KSCM speaker Josef Skála explicitly advocated a cross-party front with the far right. “We need to join forces, we on the left of the political spectrum, and we also need a patriotic democratic right, and vice versa,” he roared.

Schlumberger Foundation Faculty for the Future Fellowship 2023/2024

Application Deadline: 11th November 2022

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Developing Countries and Emerging Economies

To be taken at: Top universities abroad

Accepted Subject Areas: Physical sciences and related disciplines

About Fellowship: Each year, The Faculty for the Future fellowships, Launched by the Schlumberger Foundation, are awarded to women from developing and emerging economies who are preparing for PhD or post-doctoral study in the physical sciences and related disciplines at top universities for their disciplines abroad. Grant recipients are selected for their leadership capabilities as for their scientific talents, and are expected to return to their home countries to continue their academic careers and inspire other young women.

Offered Since: 2004

Type: PhD/Post-Doctoral, Fellowship

Selection Criteria: A successful application will have gone through four selection rounds, with the reviewers paying particular attention to the following criteria:

• Academic performance;
• Quality of references;
• Quality of host country university;
• Level of commitment to return to home country;
• Commitment to teaching;
• Relevance of research to home country;
• Commitment to inspiring young women into the sciences.

Eligibility: Applicants must meet all the following criteria:

• Be a woman;
• Be a citizen of a developing country or emerging economy;
• Wish to pursue a PhD degree or Post-doctoral research in the physical sciences or related disciplines;
• Have applied to, have been admitted to, or are currently enrolled in a university/research institute abroad;
• Wish to return to their home country to continue their academic career upon completion of their studies;
• Be very committed to teaching and demonstrate active participation in faculty life and outreach work to encourage young women into the sciences;
• Hold an excellent academic record.

Number of fellowships: Several

Value of Award: Faculty for the Future grants are awarded based on the actual costs of studying and living in the chosen location, and is worth USD 50,000 for PhDs and USD 40,000 for Post-doctoral study. Grants may be renewed through to completion of studies subject to performance, self-evaluation and recommendations from supervisors.

How to Apply: Interested candidates may Apply below

Visit Scholarship Webpage for Details

Government of Ireland Research Masters and PhD Scholarships 2023

Application Deadline: 21st October 2021

Eligible Countries: National and International

To Be Taken At (Country): Ireland

About the Award: The aim of the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship, hereinafter referred to as the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship, is to support suitably qualified research master’s and doctoral candidates pursuing, or intending to pursue, full-time research in any discipline.

A number of targeted scholarships are offered in collaboration with strategic funding partners.

Type: Masters, PhD

Eligibility:

• Applicants must fulfil the following criteria:
  
  • have a first class or upper second-class honours bachelor’s, or the equivalent, degree. If undergraduate examination results are not known at the time of application, the Council may make a provisional offer of a scholarship on condition that the scholar’s bachelor’s, or the equivalent degree result is a first class or upper second-class honours. If a scholar does not have a first class or upper second-class honours bachelor’s, or the equivalent, degree, they must possess a master’s degree. The Council’s determination of an applicant’s eligibility on these criteria is final;
  • must not have had two previous unsuccessful applications to the programme, including strategic partner themes. This includes applications since 2010 to the EMBARK Scheme previously run by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology, and the Government of Ireland Scholarship Scheme previously run by the Irish Council for Humanities and Social Sciences;
  • in the case of applications for a research master’s scholarship, applicants must not currently hold, or have previously held, a Council Postgraduate Scholarship;
  • in the case of applications for a doctoral degree scholarship, applicants must not currently hold, or have previously held, any Council Postgraduate Scholarship other than those which would enable them to obtain a research master’s degree
• Applicants will fall under one of two categories based on nationality and residency. For category one, applicants must meet BOTH of the following criteria:
• be a national of a European Union member state, Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein or Switzerland
  AND
• have been ordinarily resident in a European Union member state, Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein or Switzerland for a continuous period of three of the five years preceding 1 October 2021.

All other applicants will fall under category two.

While the majority of scholarships will be awarded to applicants who fall under category one, a proportion of awards will also be made to exceptional applicants who fall under category two. Please note that the Council may request documented evidence of an applicant’s nationality and residence.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: 

• a stipend of €16,000 per annum
• a contribution to fees, including non-EU fees, up to a maximum of €5,750 per annum
• eligible direct research expenses of €2,250 per annum

Duration of Program:

• Research master’s degree: 12 months
• Structured research master’s degree: 24 months
• Traditional doctoral degree: 36 months
• Structured doctoral degree: 48 months

How to Apply: Potential applicants should read the 2022 Call Documents like the FAQ as well as Terms and Conditions carefully to ascertain whether or not they are eligible to apply. Indicative versions of the applicant, supervisor and referee forms are provided for information purposes only. All participants must create and submit their forms via the online system.

Visit Program Webpage for Details

European Central Bank hikes interest rate with more to come

Nick Beams

The European Central Bank (ECB) has increased its base interest rate by 0.75 percent (75 basis points), the largest hike since the first days of the euro, and warned that more rises are to come.

European Central Bank at Frankfurt, Germany (Photo: Thomas Wolf, CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

In remarks at a press conference following the meeting of the central bank’s governing council yesterday, ECB President Christine Lagarde said interest rate increases would continue for up to five of the next policy-making meetings.

“We took today’s decision and expect to raise interest rates further, because inflation remains high and is likely to stay above our target for an extended period,” she said in her opening statement.

Energy price increases, responsible for 38 percent of the inflation surge, and rising food prices, combined with supply chain bottlenecks, were the main factors, but their effects are spreading.

“Price pressures have continued to strengthen and broaden across the economy, and inflation may rise further in the near term,” she said.

In response to a question, she said, “[w]e want all economic actors to understand that the ECB is serious” about countering high inflation.

But in response to another question, she made clear that monetary policy was not going to reduce energy prices. That being the case the issue which arises is: Why are the rate hikes being carried out in the name of “fighting inflation”?

The issue was not addressed directly in Lagarde’s opening statement nor by questions from journalists at the press conference. But all the participants know that the aim of the policy is to prevent so-called “second round effects,” that is, the drive by workers for wage rises to counter the massive attacks on their living standards.

This issue was only approached somewhat tangentially when one journalist asked what level of recession it would take for the ECB to reverse its policy. Lagarde replied that the present monetary policy was still stimulating the economy—another warning that more rises are to come. The ECB was “determined” to do its job, she said.

Asked whether it was going too far, as evidenced by the tightening of conditions in credit and bond markets, Lagarde said the ECB was “far away” from the rate needed to bring down inflation to its target rate of 2 percent.

On the economic outlook Lagarde said after a rebound in the first half of the year, “recent economic data point to a substantial slowdown in the euro area, with the economy expected to stagnate later in the year and in the first quarter of 2023. Very high energy prices are reducing the purchasing power of people’s incomes and, although supply bottlenecks are easing, they are still constraining economic activity.”

Besides the energy price increases, the fall in the value of the euro, which has dropped to below parity against the US dollar—a slide of 12 percent over the past year—has also “added to the build-up of inflationary pressures.”

Asked about how this affected the ECB’s policy, Lagarde gave the standard response of central bankers saying it did not target the currency, but the level of the euro was taken into consideration on the inflation front.

She said in the context of the global economy risks were primarily on the downside, in the near term. And then, in an expression of the thinking in European ruling circles, she said that in a downside scenario prepared by ECB staff, “a long-lasting war in Ukraine remains a significant risk to growth, especially if firms and households faced rationing of energy supplies.”

Addressing the central but largely unstated focus of all central bank policy— the wage demands of the working class—Lagarde said the labour market had remained “robust” and this, together with “some catch-up for higher inflation, are likely to support growth in wages.” But she noted that recent wage agreements indicate that “wage dynamics remain contained overall.”

As is taking place around the world, the ruling financial elites are relying on the trade unions to suppress wage claims in the face of the highest inflation in 40 years, coming on top of three decades of real wage reductions.

In a note published at the end of last month, the finance firm ING said demand-side inflation in the eurozone remained weak and the output gap— the difference between what the economy is producing and its potential—was negative. Household consumption was below pre-pandemic levels, and retail sales had been on a declining trend since last November.

With eurozone inflation now above 9 percent, it said the latest data for negotiated wage growth for the second quarter came in at just 2.1 percent, meaning “there is no evidence of a wage-price spiral … but that the eurozone is mainly facing an unprecedented squeeze in real incomes.”

Across the Atlantic, in the US, there are growing calls for the Federal Reserve to continue to drive up interest rates even further in response to an upsurge of workers’ struggles for wage increases.

This week Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard, generally regarded as a dove on monetary policy, added her voice to those of other Fed officials calling for no let-up in the rate hikes, even as the threat of recession grows.

Speaking to a banking industry conference, before which she would have no doubt consulted with Fed Chair Jerome Powell given her position as number two at the central bank, Brainard said the Fed had to retain its nerve even as there was evidence of a slowdown in the economy resulting from previous rate increases.

“We are in this for as long as it takes to get inflation down,” she said. But, as Powell and others have acknowledged, interest rate increases will do nothing to reduce the price of gas or unlock constricted supply chains.

They are directed at suppressing wage claims, an issue to which Brainard referred as she noted that the US labour market continued with “considerable strength,” which was hard to reconcile with a “more downbeat tone of activity.”

In other words, the supply of labour, which Powell has insisted must be increased to overcome labour market “tightness,” must be increased. Within the capitalist economy this can only be done by driving up unemployment.

The extent of what is required has been outlined in a paper by three leading economists, one from Johns Hopkins University and two from the International Monetary Fund, cited by Jason Furman, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under the Obama administration, in an article in the Wall Street Journal.

The economists concluded that to get inflation down to the Fed target of 2 percent would require an average rate of unemployment rate of 6.5 percent in 2023 and 2024, a significant increase from the present level of 3.7 percent. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers has made similar comments, even calling for an unemployment rate of 10 percent for a year.

What this means in social terms is the layoff of hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of workers, thereby increasing the labour supply and further pushing down wages—the focus of the central banks in their so-called battle against inflation.

10 million children have lost parents or other caregivers to COVID-19, according to latest estimate

Patrick Martin

A research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics Tuesday estimates that 10.5 million children worldwide have lost parents or other caregivers to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Children ages 5 to 11 wait in line with their parents to receive the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a pediatric vaccine clinic set up at Willard Intermediate School in Santa Ana, Calif., Nov. 9, 2021. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

According to the letter by a group of seven doctors from Britain and several African countries, “Consequences for children can be devastating, including institutionalization, abuse, traumatic grief, mental health problems, adolescent pregnancy, poor educational outcomes, and chronic and infectious diseases.”

These findings are derived from new figures on excess deaths published by many countries and collected by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Economist magazine, and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle.

According to the WHO figures, described as the most conservative, the hardest-hit country is India, with an estimated 3.5 million children having lost one or more caregivers. Other Asian countries with large totals include Indonesia (660,000) and Pakistan (410,000). Some of the most populous countries in Africa also were severely affected, including Egypt (450,000) and Nigeria (430,000).

In the Western Hemisphere, the worst affected countries were Mexico, the United States and Brazil, which also have the largest number of total deaths for the region.

According to the summary of the report, “little is being done to care for children left behind,” and no actual tabulation of orphaned or bereaved children is carried out by any national government. 

One of the researchers, Juliette Unwin of Imperial College, London, explained the group’s findings in a commentary published in Scientific American on Wednesday:

As an epidemiologist, I am used to studying waves of infection and measuring the rise and fall of deaths. While the deaths of parents and grandparents from COVID crash and recede, the pattern of children affected by orphanhood resulting from the death of a caregiver is entirely different. In every country, the number of children affected inexorably rises, month after month. The death of a mother, father, caregiving grandparent or other relative is permanent and enduring. A child whose parent died at the start of the pandemic is still a child without that parent now.

Unwin noted that two out of three children whose parents died were between the ages of 10 and 17, and that three out of four children who lost a parent had lost their father rather than their mother. She continued: “Regardless of gender, however, in families where the primary breadwinner dies, death can be linked to sudden and lasting family economic hardship, whereas the loss of a primary socioemotional caregiver can decrease social connectedness.”

These numbers provide an additional dimension for understanding the colossal impact that the coronavirus pandemic continues to have on the world’s population. As Unwin says, the millions of children who have lost parents will always have lost their parents. The loss will be a permanent feature of their lives, inflicting emotional and psychological damage. And the number will continue to grow as the death toll from COVID-19 rises.

And this does not include the millions more children whose parents have contracted Long COVID, which may make it impossible for them to carry out the critical tasks required of a primary caregiver.

In the face of these harrowing numbers, the Biden administration in the United States has said and done nothing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report in late 2021 which placed the number of US COVID-19 orphans at 140,000. Since then, the number of orphans has skyrocketed, but the CDC has published nothing on the subject throughout 2022.

Instead, the same day that the report on orphans was published by JAMA, the White House held a COVID-19 briefing, featuring all its leading public health figures engaged in happy talk about the great progress supposedly being made under Biden in dealing with the pandemic. The teleconference included Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 coordinator; Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s principal adviser on COVID-19; Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC; and Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra.

None of them addressed the devastating impact of the pandemic, either on orphaned children or on the population as a whole. All were silent about the fact that more people have died of COVID-19 during Biden’s tenure in the White House than during the administration of Donald Trump (650,000 compared to 400,000), even though vaccines have been available throughout Biden’s presidency. Nor were they asked by the complacent press corps, which adheres religiously to the false propaganda that the pandemic is over, or at least reaching the “end game.”

Dr. Jha, who never misses an opportunity to spread complacency about a virus that has already killed more than a million people in the United States and more than 20 million worldwide, claimed that the upcoming cold weather, which drives people indoors, would not be the occasion for the surges in COVID-19 that took place during the fall and winter of 2020 and 2021. 

“We know how to manage fluctuations in COVID-19 and do so safely,” he said. “If people step up and do what is necessary, we can get through this winter with far less suffering, far less death, far less disruption.” The language is revealing: In the event of another massive surge in hospitalizations and deaths, the White House will blame it on the failure of the American people to “step up.”

Fauci and Jha emphasized that COVID-19 had become a permanent feature of American life and that the population would need COVID-19 vaccines newly formulated each year to take into account mutations. “Barring any new variant curveball,” said Dr. Jha, “for a large majority of Americans, we are moving to a point where a single annual COVID shot should provide a high degree of protection all year.”

Dr. Fauci chimed in: “It is becoming increasingly clear that, looking forward with the COVID-19 pandemic, in the absence of a dramatically different variant, we likely are moving towards a path with a vaccination cadence similar to that of the annual influenza vaccine, with annual, updated COVID-19 shots matched to the currently circulating strains for most of the population.”

This argument entirely distorts the nature of the pandemic threat. COVID-19 is far more lethal than the flu and has the ability to transform into increasingly infectious and vaccine-evading variants. What Dr. Jha dismisses as a “curveball” is actually an absolute certainty: SARS-CoV-2 is constantly driven by evolutionary pressures to develop new variants which evade vaccines and prophylactic drugs.

The environment that fosters these mutations is provided by the policy of “living with the virus” or declaring COVID-19 “endemic” or “permanent,” because with billions of people being infected, the virus has ample opportunity to mutate. The only genuine protection against the pandemic is the elimination and eradication of SARS-CoV-2, which requires a systematic public health effort comprised of vaccinations, testing, isolation and quarantines and temporary lockdowns to deprive the virus of the hosts it needs.

On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration gave final approval to new vaccines formulated against a combination of BA.1, the original Omicron variant, and BA.5, the variant which is currently dominating. Biden scheduled a press statement for Thursday afternoon to hail that action and make another appeal for additional congressional funding for COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution, although it was cancelled after the death of Queen Elizabeth II in Britain.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II: A major political crisis for British imperialism

Chris Marsden

Queen Elizabeth II has passed away aged 96, after seven decades on the throne as head of the United Kingdom. Her death occurs at a time of acute economic, social and political crisis for British imperialism, including the deepest collapse of living standards since the Great Depression, a NATO proxy war against Russia waged on mainland Europe, and a rising wave of class struggle that threatens to erupt into a general strike.

The Queen during her 2015 visit to HMS Ocean in Devonport at a ceremony to rededicate the ship [Photo by Joel Rouse/ Ministry of Defence/Open Government Licence v3.0]

The ruling class now faces this perfect storm without its popular representative of state on which it has relied to project the myth of national unity and suppress social conflict.

In her role as head of state, the queen officially welcomed and held weekly discussions with an extraordinary total of 15 prime ministers. Her final act of service to the bourgeoisie, just two days before her death, was to appoint Liz Truss as prime minister, bestowing her authority on an illegitimate and despised government tasked with waging war on the working class.

The Telegraph acknowledged the importance of the Queen’s role, writing, “the Crown can help secure smooth and peaceful handovers of political power… as we have seen only this week. The Queen’s final public duty was to oversee a trouble-free transition of executive power that in other countries might have engendered a political and constitutional crisis. How many other nations can seamlessly change their head of state and leader of government in a week without tumult?... the country’s stability has owed a great deal to the Queen’s presence at its heart.”

With her death, the crown falls onto the head of her son, Charles III. At 73, he is the oldest person to ever become king and has no popular support. His accession leaves little with which to conceal the deepening and irreconcilable social and political divisions that are the reality of life in Britain and throughout the world.

Amid the inevitable ritualistic fawning of the British media, the scale of the difficulties facing the ruling elite is acknowledged.

Martin Kettle wrote in the Guardian, “Do not underestimate the upheaval in British life that this dynastic moment will trigger. Elizabeth II spent 70 years as a low-key but extremely effective unifying force in a nation that is visibly pulling itself apart. Her passing will remove that force, which her heirs cannot assume they will be able to replicate. In its way, this succession will be one of the biggest tests to face modern Britain.”

The Financial Times stated, “The kingdom the Queen leaves behind confronts much larger questions than her own institution. Britain has lost its own strength and stay just as it is groping to define its place in the world for the decades ahead. Many other institutions of state appear outdated or tarnished and the survival of the 315-year-old United Kingdom itself is not necessarily assured.”

As monarch, Elizabeth played an essential role in preserving social and political stability, especially at times of heightened crisis for British imperialism.  She was placed in line to the throne as a result of the abdication of her uncle, Edward VIII in 1936, whose Nazi sympathies and those of his lover Wallis Simpson threatened to discredit the monarchy and provoke social and political conflict.

Her coronation in 1953 took place amid the protracted decline of British imperialism, just three years before the Suez crisis. She helped manage Britain’s eclipse by the United States and the retreat from empire as head of the Commonwealth—a civilised veneer behind which Britain was fully prepared to respond with utmost brutality when its vital global interests were threatened. From the savage repression of Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion when she first took office, the bloody occupation of Northern Ireland, Margaret Thatcher’s war for control of the Falklands/Malvinas and numerous criminal wars in the Middle East and North Africa, Britain’s Armed Forces have shrouded their crimes in the Union Jack while playing “God Save the Queen”.

As deference towards the monarchy faded, she led a political recasting that downplayed the Royal family’s fabulous wealth while investing as much dignity as she could muster in the archaic pomp and ceremony employed to lend bourgeois rule an air of timeless permanence and legitimise a system of hereditary privilege. This role as a symbol of national unity was never more important than at times of intensified class struggle.

However, from the 1980s on, the younger royals found it impossible to restrain themselves from public displays of wealth and privilege, as first Diana, then others were feted by the global super-rich and disgraced themselves in the process. In the last years before she died, the queen was forced to endure a bitter public rift with Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, as they sought greener pastures as international celebrities, and then the revelations of Prince Andrew’s involvement in billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operations.

Today, the earnest hope of the ruling class is that Charles’ time on the throne is short so that the carefully groomed and prepared Prince William can have a chance to restore a much-reduced monarchy’s public standing.

To facilitate this transition, events following the queen’s death have been meticulously planned. Operation London Bridge covers 12 days of official mourning, including her state funeral. This will be used once again to buttress the state apparatus and bury the class struggle beneath a torrent of patriotism, nationalist nostalgia and mawkish sentimentality.

Calls for national unity at a time of shared grief are already being used as a weapon against a growing strike wave.

The key role in these plans is being played by the trade unions and the Labour Party. Within an hour of the official announcement of the queen’s death, the Communication Workers Union (CWU) and the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) had suspended Friday’s postal strike and rail strikes planned for September 15 and 17. RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch fawned, “RMT joins the whole nation in paying its respects to Queen Elizabeth.”

On Friday morning it was announced that the annual Trades Union Congress, scheduled to begin Sunday, has been postponed.

Queen Elizabeth II, left, welcomes Liz Truss during an audience at Balmoral, Scotland, where she invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become prime minister and form a new government, September 6, 2022. [AP Photo/AP, File]

The trade union leaders will be joined in their own Operation London Bridge by the Labour Party leaders, whether nominally right or left.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer seized on the queen’s death to proclaim Labour’s commitment to national unity and class peace, writing, “Above the clashes of politics, she stood not for what the nation fought over, but what it agreed upon.” He pledged on behalf of his rotten party: “So as our great Elizabethan era comes to an end, we will honour the late Queen's memory by keeping alive the values of public service she embodied.”

Jeremy Corbyn maintained his own record of acting only in the “national interest”, tweeting, “My thoughts are with the Queen’s family as they come to terms with their personal loss, as well as those here and around the world who will mourn her death. I enjoyed discussing our families, gardens and jam-making with her. May she rest in peace.”

Notwithstanding her personal characteristics, however, the ability of the late queen to act as a symbol of national unity depended on the broader ability of the bourgeoisie to prevent social tensions from reaching the point of explosion.

The “Second Elizabethan Age” first proclaimed by Winston Churchill spanned decades following World War II in which capitalism was able to provide rising living standards for the working class and the reformist nostrums of the Labour Party and the trade unions appeared able to at least partially satisfy the demands of workers for a living wage, education, housing, health care and other essentials.

The precipitous decline of the monarchy beginning in the 1990s is only one expression of how all the political instruments of bourgeois rule, above all the trade unions and the Labour Party, now confront workers as the defenders of a system that is plunging them ever deeper into unbearable hardship and threatening their very survival as the war against Russia rages out of control. Whatever the immediate impact of the queen’s death, a decisive conflict between the working class and British imperialism is developing inexorably.