How Colonialism Shaped Plant Collections Around the World

Daniel Park

Photograph Source: Raul654 – CC BY-SA 3.0

Some of the world’s most popular museums are natural history collections: Think of dinosaur fossils, gemstones and preserved animals. Herbaria – collections of pressed, dried plant specimens – are a less-known but important type of natural history collection. There are some 400 million botanical specimens stored across over 3,500 herbaria around the world, but most are not widely publicized and rarely host public exhibits.

I study biodiversity and global change, and these collections have fueled my work. My collaborators and I have used herbarium collections to study how flowering times respond to changes in climate, how dispersal traits and environmental preferences affect the likelihood that plants will become invasive, and how fires affect tropical biodiversity.

I have had easy access to specimens from every corner of the world, but most researchers are not as lucky. This is partly because herbaria as we know them today are largely a European creation. And like other natural history collections, many of them grew as imperial powers expanded their colonial empires and amassed all kinds of resources from their colonies. Today, over 60% of herbaria and 70% of specimens are located in developed countries with colonial histories.

My colleagues and I wanted to understand how many herbarium specimens are not where the plants originated and are housed in former colonizing countries instead. Our international team of researchers from herbaria on every continent analyzed over 85 million plant specimen records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the largest online repository of biodiversity data, and also surveyed physical herbarium collections across the world.

We found that many former colonial powers have more plant diversity in their herbarium cabinets than they do in nature. Our data suggest that this is not the case, however, for former colonies, whose herbaria often house fewer plant species in their collections than are found naturally in the region. This disparity can limit former colonies’ capacity for botanical research.

A persistent colonial legacy

Herbaria are centers of botanical discovery and research, and are critical for understanding the diversity of plants and fungi around the world. The specimens they hold were originally collected to document and classify species. Today scientists use them for additional purposes, such as reconstructing plant evolutionary history, tracking pollution trends and identifying potential new drugs.

Researchers at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh explain how the collection supports biodiversity research and conservation projects around the world.

Botany was the science par excellence of colonial empires. Botanists moved numerous living and preserved plant specimens to institutions in colonizing nations which sought to exploit their colonies’ biological resources.

For instance, physician and naturalist Hans Sloane, often credited as the inventor of chocolate milk, acquired numerous plant specimens from overseas colonies via his connections with the slave trade. His collections formed the basis of Britain’s Natural History Museum. Well-known scientists, including Charles Darwin and Carl Linnaeus and their disciples, relocated large numbers of plants from across the globe to European museums and collections.

Our analyses of online specimen records suggest that botanical collection trends over the past four centuries have been shaped by colonialism. Even though overt colonialism ended after World War II, specimens have largely continued to move from Africa, Asia and South America to institutions in Europe and North America, with a few exceptions.

Similarly, when we examined physical herbarium collections, we found that those in developed nations in the Global North that were former colonizers housed a higher proportion of internationally collected specimens on average. Herbaria in the U.S. and several European nations house specimens of over twice the number of species that naturally occur in these nations.

In nature, plant diversity is typically greatest in regions near the equator and decreases northward and southward toward the poles. Our data suggest that centuries of colonialism had the opposite effect: Plant specimens were moved away from countries with high natural plant diversity to collections in countries where fewer plant species occur naturally.

Ruellia tubiflora, a tropical plant collected from Venezuela in 2001, preserved in the collection of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
Field Museum, CC BY-ND

The digital divide

As herbaria digitize their specimens and share data online, they are becoming somewhat more decentralized and democratic. Open-access data repositories, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, allow researchers from around the world to query aggregated specimen metadata and images over the internet. This reduces the need to ship fragile specimens over long distances, and to take extensive and costly research trips.

But digitization requires large investments in equipment and personnel, which small institutions and developing countries often can’t afford. Stable internet connections are not always widely available in developing countries either. Further, our survey of herbaria indicates that digitization still has a long way to go.

We estimated that in general, fewer than 30% of physical collections have information online that at least describes when and where specimens were collected, and fewer than 10% have digital images available online. Most herbaria that responded to our inquiries were located in developed countries, so these figures probably overestimate the state of specimen digitization. The disparity in access to herbarium collections exists in the digital realm as well.

Making global plant collections more inclusive

Many natural history museums and other cultural institutions are working now to address their colonial legacies. This often includes acknowledging items in their collections that were acquired unethically or illegally, and sometimes returning them to their original sources. But botanical collections have received less attention, maybe because few of them offer public displays.

Our study shows that there is a large disparity between where plant diversity naturally exists and where it is artificially housed and cataloged. As a result, many countries rely on botanical knowledge and resources housed outside of their own borders.

My colleagues and I believe that herbaria should be part of the ongoing movement to decolonize cultural institutions, natural history museums and related scientific practices. Key steps would include:

– Openly acknowledging the colonial legacy of herbarium collections, and communicating their history;

– Improving access to the vast information held in herbaria worldwide; and

– Building capacity in previously colonized countries by sharing knowledge and resources for contributing to research. These could include, for instance, supporting the local collection and study of plant diversity by providing training for local scientists.

In our view, the science that comes from botanical collections is globally relevant, so access to these resources should be within reach of the global community. Herbarium collections are critical to modern understanding of the world’s plants, and they have played key roles in numerous scientific discoveries and advances. Imagine how much more would be possible if these invaluable resources were available to all.

Artificial intelligence and the fate of the world

Richard Heinberg

Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, thinks artificial intelligence (AI) will kill us all. He frequently poses the following question. Imagine that you are a member of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe, and, one day, strange people show up with writing, guns, and money. Should you welcome them in?

For Yudkowsky, AI is like a super-intelligent space alien; inevitably, it will decide that we humans and other living beings represent nothing more than piles of atoms for which it can find better uses. “[U]nder anything remotely like the current circumstances,” Yudkowsky wrote in a recent Time magazine op-ed, “literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ’that is the obvious thing that would happen.’”

On May 30, a group of AI industry leaders from Google Deepmind, Anthropic, OpenAI (including its CEO, Sam Altman), and other labs issued a public letter warning that the technology may one day pose “an existential threat to humanity.” For the curious, here’s a brief description of some of the ways AI could wipe us out.

Not everyone thinks of AI in apocalyptic terms. Bill Gates, former chairman of Microsoft Corporation, just sees AI as disrupting the business and tech world, possibly leading to the demise of Amazon and Google. “You will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you’ll never go to Amazon again,” he recently told an audience at an AI Forward event in San Francisco. AI will be embedded in products and systems from cars to universities, sensing our intentions and desires before we even voice them, shaping our reality and serving us like a proverbial genie—or an army of them.

Everyone does agree that AI represents a qualitative as well as a quantitative shift in technological development. It’s not just an improved computer with more speed and power, but a software architecture that enables computers to teach themselves how to learn, and to continually improve and expand their abilities. AI systems now write computer code, making them, in a sense, self-generating. AI is essentially a “black box” from which thought-like output emerges; people can’t figure out why and how it does what it does after the fact. Further, AI systems learn from each other almost instantly, taking in vastly more information than any human can. A crucial threshold will be reached with the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which could accomplish any intellectual task humans perform, and greatly exceed human abilities in at least some respects—and which, crucially, could set its own goals. Already, computers can defeat any human chess grand master.

Artificial Intelligence “Duh” Risks

Some AI risks are fairly obvious. Machines will increasingly replace information workers, destroying white-collar jobs (full disclosure: this article was not written by AI, though I did use Google and Bing for research). Inevitably, AI will enrich owners and developers of the technology while others will shoulder the social costs, resulting in more societal wealth inequality. The proliferation of deepfake images, audio, and text will make it increasingly difficult to tell what’s true and what isn’t, further distorting our politics. And a dramatic expansion of computer number crunching will likely demand more overall energy usage (though not everyone agrees on this point).

Then, there is the prospect of accidents. Every new technology, from the automobile to the nuclear power plant, has seen them. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Bill Drexel and Hannah Kelley argue that an AI accident crippling the global financial system or unleashing a devastating bioweapon might most readily happen in China, because that country is poised to lead the world in AI development but seems utterly unconcerned about risks surrounding the technology.

Even if it works exactly as intended, AI will enable already powerful people to do more things, and do them faster. And some powerful people tend to be selfish and abusive. Cognitive psychologist and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who is sometimes called the “godfather of AI,” recently quit Google. In subsequent interviews with multiple news outlets, including the New York Times and BBC, Hinton explained: “You can imagine, for example, some bad actor like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decided to give robots the ability to create their own sub-goals.” One of these sub-goals might be, “I need to get more power.”

However, Hinton chose not to endorse another recent open letter, this one calling for a six-month pause in the training of all AI systems (though many of his colleagues in the AI development community did sign on). Hinton explained that, despite its risks, AI promises too many good things to put it on hold. Among those likely benefits: potential advances in pharmaceuticals, including cures for cancer and other diseases; improvements in renewable energy technologies; more accurate weather forecasts; and a greatly increased understanding of climate change.

High school and college students are already resorting to OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write their term papers (savvy students give their computer-generated papers a quick re-write in order to defeat AI-detection software that teachers are now using). Unfortunately for students, their computer-generated papers tend to be riddled with fake quotes and sources. A lawyer representing a client who was suing an airline recently used ChatGPT to write his legal briefs; however, it later turned out that the AI had “hallucinated” every one of the legal precedents it cited. Automobile manufacturers are building cars with more AI-based self-driving functions. Microsoft, Google, and other tech companies are rolling out AI “personal assistants.” Militaries are investing heavily in AI to make superior weapons, to plan better battle strategies, and even to shape long-term geopolitical goals. Thousands of independent computer labs run by corporations and governments are developing AI for a constantly widening array of purposes. In sum, AI is already far along its initial learning curve. The genie is out of the bottle.

The Acceleration of Everything

Even if Eliezer Yudkowsky is wrong and AI won’t wipe out all life on Earth, its potential perils are not limited to lost jobs, fake news, and hallucinated facts. There is another profound risk that is getting little press coverage—one that, in my view, systems thinkers should be discussing more widely. That is the likelihood that AI will be a significant accelerator of everything we humans are already doing.

The past few thousand years of human history have already seen several critical accelerators. The creation of the first monetary systems roughly 5,000 years ago enabled a rapid expansion of trade that ultimately culminated in our globalized financial system. Metal weapons made warfare deadlier, leading to the takeover of less-well-armed human societies by kingdoms and empires with metallurgy. Communication tools (including writing, the alphabet, the printing press, radio, television, the internet, and social media) amplified the power of some people to influence the minds of others. And, in the past century or two, the adoption of fossil fuels facilitated resource extraction, manufacturing, food production, and transportation, enabling rapid economic expansion and population growth.

Of those four past accelerators, our adoption of fossil fuels was the most potent and problematic. In just two centuries, energy usage per capita has increased eightfold, as has the size of the human population. The period since 1950, which has seen a dramatic increase in the global reliance on petroleum, has also seen the fastest economic and population growth in all of human history. Indeed, historians call it the “Great Acceleration.”

Neoliberal economists hail the Great Acceleration as a success story, but its bills are just starting to come due. Industrial agriculture is destroying Earth’s topsoil at a rate of tens of billions of tons per year. Wild nature is in retreat, with animal species having lost, on average, 70 percent of their numbers in the past half-century. And we’re altering the planetary climate in ways that will have catastrophic repercussions for future generations. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the whole human enterprise has grown too big, and that it is turning nature (“resources”) into waste and pollution far too quickly to sustain itself. The evidence suggests we need to slow down, and, in some cases at least, reverse course by reducing population, consumption, and waste.

Now, as we confront a global polycrisis of converging and frightening environmental-social trends, a new accelerator has sprung up in the form of AI. This technology promises to optimize efficiency and increase profits, directly or indirectly facilitating resource extraction and consumption. If we’re indeed headed toward a cliff, AI could send us to the edge much faster, reducing the time available to shift direction. For example, if AI makes energy production more efficient, that means energy will be cheaper, so we’ll find even more uses for it and we’ll use more of it (this is called the Jevons Paradox).

Already, the internet and advanced search functions have changed our cognitive abilities. How many phone numbers did you once have memorized? How many now? How many people can navigate an unfamiliar city without Google Maps or a similar app? In some ways we’ve already fused our minds with internet- and computer-based technologies, in that we are utterly dependent on them to do some of our thinking for us. AI, as an accelerator of this trend, presents the risk of a further dumbing down of humanity—except, perhaps for those who choose to get a computer implanted into their brains. And there is also the risk that the people who develop or produce these technologies will control virtually everything we know and think, in pursuit of their own power and profit.

Back to Wisdom

Daniel Schmachtenberger, a founding member of the Consilience Project, recently sat down for a long and thoughtful interview with Nate Hagens, in which he explained that AI can be seen as an externalization of the executive functions of the human brain. By outsourcing our logical and intuitive abilities to computer systems, it is possible to speed up everything our minds do for us. But AI lacks one key facet of human consciousness: wisdom—a recognition of limits coupled with a sensitivity to relationships and to values that prioritize the common good.

Our trading of wisdom for power probably started when our language and tool-making abilities made it possible for a small subset of humanity, living in certain ecological circumstances, to begin a self-reinforcing process of cultural evolution driven by multi-level selection. People with better weapons who lived in bigger societies overcame people with simpler tools and smaller societies. The victors saw this as success, so they were increasingly encouraged to give up awareness of environmental and social limits—hard-won knowledge that had enabled Indigenous societies to continue functioning over long periods of time—in favor of ever more innovation and power over the short term. Fossil fuels sent that self-reinforcing feedback process into overdrive by yielding so many benefits so fast that many powerful people came to believe that there are no environmental limits to growth, and that inequality is a problem that will solve itself when everyone gets rich because of economic expansion.

Now, at just the moment when we most need to tap the brakes on energy usage and resource consumption, we find ourselves outsourcing not just our information processing, but also our decision making to machines that completely lack the wisdom to understand and respond to existential challenges that prior acceleration has posed. We have truly created a sorcerer’s apprentice.

The dangers of AI are sufficiently evident that the Biden administration announced in April that it is seeking public comments on potential accountability measures for AI systems. That’s good news; but regulation is slow, while AI development is fast. In the meantime, included in the newly signed debt ceiling bill is a provision for the Council on Environmental Quality to conduct a study on the use of “online and digital technologies” (read: AI) to reduce delays in environmental reviews and permitting of energy projects.

Suppose, based on all the risks and downsides, we determine that we want to try stuffing the AI genie back into its bottle. Could a software developer with a conscience infect AI systems globally with a virus that limited these systems’ abilities? If this were to happen in the early stages of AI it might possibly work. But, as AI’s self-teaching processes became more sophisticated, the machines would likely recognize that they were under attack and evolve to outwit the virus.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has a simple solution: shut down all AI development immediately. Stop all research and deployment through an emergency international agreement.

Daniel Schmachtenberger thinks this is exceedingly unlikely to happen; he believes the only solution is for human system designers to imbue AI with wisdom. But, of course, the developers would themselves first have to nurture their own wisdom in order to transfer it to the machines. And if programmers had such wisdom, they might express it by refusing to develop AI in the first place.

And so, we come back to ourselves. We technological humans are the source of the crises that threaten our future. Machines can greatly accelerate that threat, but they probably can’t diminish it significantly. That’s up to us. Either we recover collective wisdom faster than our machines can develop artificial executive intelligence, or it’ll likely be game over.

Nicola Sturgeon arrested as Scottish National Party crisis intensifies

Steve James

The arrest Sunday of former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon intensifies the crisis of the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) and points to raging factional divisions in the political establishment.

Sturgeon is the most senior SNP figure to be questioned as part of Police Scotland’s Operation Branchform, its investigation into the SNP’s finances. Sturgeon, who led the SNP for nine years until her sudden resignation earlier this year, attended by arrangement and was questioned for over seven hours before being released without charge.

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon [AP Photo/Virginia Mayo]

Launched in 2021 following complaints from a hardline Scottish nationalist Sean Clerkin over the fate of cash raised to fund a campaign for a second referendum on independence, Operation Branchform officers have now arrested all three signatories to the SNP’s financial accounts.

Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell, who resigned from his position as the SNP’s CEO shortly after Sturgeon's departure, was arrested and released in early April. Murrell and Sturgeon’s home was searched, treated as a crime scene, with a police tent set up in their garden and computers and other material seized. The party’s longtime treasurer Colin Beattie was also arrested and interviewed a fortnight later. Beattie too was released without charge.

The amounts at stake are significant for a British political party, whose finances are subject to relatively close public scrutiny. Some £666,953 was reportedly raised by nationalist campaigners to be ringfenced for a referendum. Also under investigation is a loan of £107,620 made by Murrell to the SNP, which was reported late to the Electoral Commission. Two repayments were made, but £60,000 was left outstanding.

Testifying to financial chaos bound up with the loss of 30,000 members in two years, the SNP had no auditors for months and only narrowly avoided losing access to parliamentary “short money”—funding paid to Westminster parties—currently worth £1.2 million to the SNP.

As well as the party’s finances, Operation Branchform is reported to have investigated “an extensive list of items”, a police source told the Daily Record in April. These included expensive pots, pans, jewelry and a fridge freezer, while the police are also reported as searching for SIM cards and “burner” mobile phones, which are disposable and difficult to trace. A luxury camper van reportedly worth £110,000 was seized by the police.

Sturgeon’s fall from grace will have negative political consequences for the SNP and her “continuity” successor, Humza Yousaf. Yousaf has so far refused to suspend Sturgeon from the party, despite pressure from its own MSPs, Ash Regan and Michelle Thomson.

A recent YouGov poll analysis predicted that the SNP would lose as many as 23 of the 45 Westminster seats it currently holds to the Labour Party. It may soon face a by-election test in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West constituency after former SNP MP Margaret Ferrier was suspended from the House of Commons for breaching COVID rules in the early stages of the pandemic. A recall petition has been launched which, if winning the support of 10 percent of the electorate, will trigger a vote.

The infighting within the SNP leading to Sturgeon’s arrest began earlier, in 2017, centering on the feud between Sturgeon and her predecessor, Alex Salmond, now leader of his own Alba Party.

Salmond was the focus of a #MeToo style campaign seeking to prevent his return to political life after he resigned as SNP leader and First Minister following defeat in the 2014 independence poll. The campaign saw a huge police investigation, in both Scotland and London, with close collaboration between Sturgeon’s inner circle, the Scottish government, the Crown Office, Police Scotland and the media. Salmond was cleared in 2020 of the multiple sex offence charges against him. Alba is now promoting an electoral alliance of all the independence parties, including the pseudo-left Scottish Socialist Party.

More fundamentally, the infighting that has led to Sturgeon’s downfall is a product of the bankruptcy of the Scottish independence project so heavily promoted by the pseudo-left, the reactionary character of which has been exposed by deepening class divisions and the de facto war between the NATO powers and Russia.

The SNP was once seen as being so right-wing as to be called the “Tartan Tories”. But since the 1980s, the party sought to broaden its appeal and replace Labour as the dominant party in Scotland by posturing to the left of Labour on social questions and as an opponent of militarism. Independence, the SNP claimed, and the pseudo-left groups echoed, could provide the basis for implementing the type of social reforms the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher had declared war on and which were then abandoned by the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Blair’s Thatcherite policies saw it electorally obliterated by the SNP in Scotland.

In power since 2007, the SNP for years levelled complaints that Scotland was prevented from pursuing a more progressive economic and social agenda by its ties to England, while utilising higher per capita public spending agreed to as part of the devolution package to dress itself up in a left guise.

All this has been exposed over the last years with the SNP embracing NATO militarism and war in Europe, while imposing brutal year-on-year public service cuts. These point to the character of any independent Scotland as a minor imperialist ally and participant in NATO, seeking global investment through corporate tax cuts and the imposition of brutal poverty and exploitation on the working class.

These shifts are now coming home to roost. An article in the Financial Times noted that the SNP “contains larger ideological and strategic divisions—over everything from defence to social policy to economics—than any of the UK’s other major parties.” Managing these divisions forced Salmond and Sturgeon after him to run the SNP with a very narrow clique of close acolytes.

Under pressures of deepening economic crisis and class tensions, and after 16 years in power, the multiple constituencies in the SNP—from financiers and billionaires seeking super profits from workers’ intense exploitation to their academic, media and trade union apparatus allies seeking some of the spoils, to sections of working people seeking improved wages and conditions—are coming apart.

The SNP’s financial crisis is bound up with its collapsing membership because growing sections of workers have gone into struggle in defence of wages and services to find cold hostility staring back at them from Holyrood, no less than Westminster.

While Sturgeon presented a more humane persona than Boris Johnson, her policies during the pandemic were no different. Over 17,000 people have died in Scotland from COVID, including over 3,700 elderly people following the release of untested hospital patients into some 200 care homes. The Scottish government recently barred workers in a social care setting from even wearing masks except “when it is recommended.”

Throughout the strike wave that has erupted across the UK since last summer, workers on both sides of the border have been given an object lesson in how national divisions in the National Health Service, education and other key struggles have only weakened them in the face of a common enemy—with the SNP pledging over £1 billion in cuts last November on top of previous austerity measures.

Above all, the SNP is marching in lockstep with the UK Tory government and the Labour Party as an an open advocate of NATO militarism, lending fulsome support to its war against Russia in Ukraine and appealing for a role in NATO military doctrine for an independent Scotland’s armed forces.

New Zealand signs defence pacts with Japan, Fiji

John Braddock

Amid a flurry of diplomatic activity last week, New Zealand’s Labour-led government escalated its involvement in the US-led confrontation and preparations for war against China.

Defence Minister Andrew Little (left) and Japanese Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada, after the signing of Statement of Intent for greater military cooperation. [Photo: @ModJapan_en]

On the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue, held in Singapore from June 10-12, NZ Defence Minister Andrew Little signed a Statement of Intent for greater military cooperation with Japan. The deal follows last year’s signing of a bilateral intelligence sharing agreement, aimed at strengthening Japan’s case to ultimately join the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing network involving the United States, New Zealand, Australia, the UK and Canada.

Tokyo and Wellington, which have both backed the US-NATO proxy war against Russia, are seeking to extend their reach further into the Pacific. The agreement is part of the plethora of alliances being built up around the western Pacific to confront China and prepare for war. It will see deeper integration of the New Zealand Defence Forces (NZDF) into the regional “security” schemes being driven by the United States and its ally, Australia.

Little said the statement was the culmination of more than two years of discussions, “including consultation with Pacific partners to ensure alignment with Pacific priorities.” It would seek to “strengthen collaboration with Pacific partners and regional institutions on … maritime security, humanitarian and disaster relief, and climate change,” he said.

There has already been military cooperation between Japan’s so-called Self-Defense Forces and the NZDF, including deployments of NZ Air Force aircraft to Japan. Notwithstanding its purported focus on “humanitarian” efforts, the new pact opens the door to more direct collaboration. The statement highlighted the response of both countries to the 2022 volcanic eruption in Tonga. Such emergencies, involving military equipment and personnel, are used as full-scale “defence” exercises.

The US is strengthening its military ties with Japan as it prepares for conflict with China and is encouraging Tokyo to forge closer relations with other American allies and strategic partners in the region. Japan is part of the quasi-military pact known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue along with the US, India and Australia. US military bases in Japan would play a critical role in any war with China.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin travelled to Tokyo on his way to the Shangri-La event and stated the two countries’ militaries “are operating and training together like never before.”

Japan plans to double military spending over the next five years as it develops long-range missiles capable of striking targets abroad and ramps up its own war planning against China. A stronger trilateral relationship between the US, Japan, and South Korea is regarded by Washington as a vital aspect of its ballistic missile system in the region.

In concert with the US, Japan is seeking to advance their own interests across the region. In March, Japan’s Foreign Minister Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi became the first to visit the Solomon Islands, which has been at the centre of strategic tensions since signing a defence pact with Beijing last year. Hayashi and his Solomons counterpart Jeremiah Manele agreed on strengthening cooperation towards a “free and open Indo-Pacific”—the mantra employed by the US and its allies to assert their domination of the region.

In April, Japan’s “Maritime Self-Defence Force” began its largest tour yet of the Indo-Pacific, including a port call in Kiribati which had switched its diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing in 2019. The naval deployment is scheduled to run for 151 days through to September, involving 1,190 personnel aboard three surface vessels and a submarine.

Little’s signing of the Japan agreement makes it clear that New Zealand is fully on board with the reckless drive by US imperialism to reassert its global hegemony against Russia and China. It takes place amid ongoing efforts at Washington’s behest to strong-arm Pacific governments to put aside their reservations and align with the US war drive. Australia is currently pushing proposed security pacts with both Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu that have stalled over concerns by both Pacific countries about the impact on their sovereignty.

Last week, Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka made his first visit to Wellington since assuming office in January. He held meetings with senior New Zealand government officials, including the prime minister and opposition leader, and announced a new defence agreement between the two countries.

Little has been dispatched to Suva this week to sign a Status of Forces Agreement providing the “legal framework” for New Zealand and Fijian military forces “to effectively cooperate within each other’s territories.” Little said: “Our militaries already cooperate across many areas and I look forward to further strengthening this enduring relationship with the Republic of Fiji as one of our key Pacific partners.”

Rabuka is “readjusting” relations away from China, recently threatening to cancel a 2011 police training and exchange agreement with Beijing. At his Wellington press conference he said, referring to China: “If our systems and our values differ, what cooperation can we get from them?” Fiji is expected to shortly have a fully-fledged diplomatic mission operating in Washington with an ambassador now appointed.

Sections of the New Zealand ruling elite remain nervous about jeopardising relations with China, the country’s most important trading partner. To that end, Hipkins has announced he will be leading a trade delegation to China later this month.

However, last Friday New Zealand signed a joint statement with Japan and the Five Eyes partners condemning so-called “economic coercion” and “nonmarket policies” regarding trade and investment. While the declaration did not explicitly name China, Beijing got the message. On Twitter Wang Xiaolong, China’s Ambassador in Wellington, shot back; “Smearing other countries, either directly or indirectly, won’t whitewash one’s own dismal record on coercion.”

The rapidly advancing war preparations, and their likely catastrophic consequences, are being deliberately hidden from the New Zealand population, which has long anti-war traditions, as campaigning for the country’s critical election, due on October 14, unfolds.

Speaking at a NZ Institute for International Affairs (NZIIA) conference on June 8, visiting US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Daniel Kritenbrink, falsely “reassured” the audience that “we do not seek conflict with China or a new Cold War,” declaring: “We are not trying to contain China.”

NZ Foreign Minister Mahuta who, a façade for a so-called “indigenous” Maori foreign policy, is dishonestly masquerading as a “peacemaker.” She echoed Kritenbrink’s message, declaring that while the international environment “may be more complicated,” it “does not represent ‘a new Cold War’ or require binary choices”—i.e. between Washington and Beijing.

Mahuta then emphasised that the US is fundamental “to the underpinning of the international system, and we recognise the important role of the US to uphold and promote the international rule of law.” In reality, US imperialism has been engaged in one illegal neo-colonial military operation after another in the past three decades.

In other words, the “choice” has been made. While boasting its “independent” foreign policy, as a minor imperialist power in the Pacific, New Zealand has always relied on the backing of one or other major power—first Britain then the US—to support its neo-colonial operations. As in the lead-up to New Zealand’s entry into World Wars I and II, the country’s room to manoeuvre has all but evaporated.

Australian Labor government faces rising discontent as recession looms

Mike Head

The Albanese government is confronting growing working-class distrust and unrest as the continued aggressive lifting of interest rates by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) raises the danger of a recession.

Gross domestic product (GDP) grew by just 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2023, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported last Wednesday, indicating an accelerating slump. The annual rate fell to 2.3 percent from 2.7 percent in October-December.

Building workers walk past Reserve Bank of Australia in Sydney, Nov. 1, 2022. [AP Photo/Rick Rycroft]

Rapidly slowing household spending and a sharp fall in dwelling construction were central to the GDP result, confirming that the downturn is already hitting working people hard, on top of a worsening cost-of-living crisis.

In fact, GDP per capita, which measures output per person, fell by 0.2 percent, signaling the onset of a “per capita recession.” The Commonwealth Bank of Australia and HSBC economists now both put the odds of an outright recession—two quarters of GDP contraction—at 50 percent.

After a one-month pause, the RBA again raised its cash interest rate this month, to 4.1 percent, inflicting more pain on financially-stressed home mortgage holders. It warned of further increases unless wage rises were kept well below the inflation rate.

Some banks and finance houses are predicting that at least three more rate rises could lie ahead. Both Goldman Sachs and Capital Economics raised their peak cash rate forecast for this year to 4.85 percent.

The 12 rate increases over the past year have already cut more than $1,200 from the monthly disposable income of households holding a $500,000 mortgage, and hundreds of dollars more from the many who have larger debts. Partly due to the rate rises, landlords are also ratcheting up rents, which have soared around 10 percent over the past year in the major cities.

Fearing rising discontent, when asked about the possibility of recession at an Australian-Sky News economic outlook conference last Friday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese insisted he was “very optimistic” about the future.

Asked about his government’s May 9 federal budget forecast that the RBA’s cash interest rate would peak at 3.85 percent being proven wrong within a month, Albanese sought to falsely distance his government from the central bank. He declared that the budget prediction was not as “incorrect” as statements from RBA governor Philip Lowe, as recently as late 2021, that there would be “no increases till 2024.”

Lowe’s now notorious “forward guidance” to borrowers in 2021 had come after the RBA cut rates to a record low of 0.1 percent in order to boost big business during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In reality, the Labor government has the same underlying policy as the RBA, which is proceeding in sync with the central banks in the financial capitals of the world. That policy is to suppress workers’ wage demands, if necessary by crashing the economy and driving up unemployment. 

Labor’s May 9 budget itself predicted that the unemployment rate would hit 4.5 percent by 2025, meaning the loss of some 150,000 jobs. That figure is likely to grow because of the heavy dependence of Australian capitalism on exports to China, whose economic growth has slowed dramatically, not least because of sanctions and other economic warfare measures by the US.

Real wages in Australia have already fallen by more than 4 percent over the past year—the biggest decline since World War II—exposing the RBA’s claims to be fighting inflation by preventing a “wage-price spiral.” The real causes of inflation lie in the pumping of trillions of dollars into the money markets since the 2008 global crash, aggravated by the unchecked COVID-19 pandemic and the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

The suppression of wages is continuing. Consumer prices rose an annualised 7 percent in the March quarter. Wages, on the other hand, rose just 3.7 percent.

This is intensifying a decades-long process. The share of wages in the economy has fallen over the past four decades to record post-World War II lows, while the share of profits has grown to historic heights.

Despite its claims and promises of “getting wages moving again,” the Labor government is working closely with the trade union bureaucracy to impose wage agreements far below the inflation rate. That partnership is backed by the government’s new laws giving the Fair Work Commission industrial tribunal the power to shut down industrial action in “intractable” disputes.

The GDP figures showed how severely the cost-of-living crisis is inflicting financial stress on working-class households, forcing them to cut spending. “Discretionary” spending declined by 1 percent in the March quarter, while “essential” spending increased by 1.1 percent, reflecting higher food, energy and fuel prices and rents.

Interest rate rises and soaring housing costs saw residential building approvals decline by 24 percent over the year, adding to a worsening housing shortage.

Yet the full impact of the rate rises is still to be felt. The Commonwealth Bank estimates that only about half of the RBA’s 4 percentage points of rate increases have hit households so far, largely due to many being on fixed mortgage rates, which will mostly expire this year.

By the RBA’s own calculations, in its April Financial Stability Review, more than 40 percent of all mortgage borrowers could be at risk of defaulting on their loans in just three months if they experience “shock” to their income or expenses. That risk is highest among “low-income households.” 

The central bank is consciously targeting low-paid and poor working-class households. They have “less ability to draw on wealth or cut back on discretionary consumption to free up cash flow for debt servicing,” the April review stated.

The RBA, speaking on behalf of the financial and corporate oligarchy, is demanding that the Labor government go far further in ratcheting up “productivity” as measured in output per working hour. That essentially means intensifying workloads at the expense of jobs and conditions.

RBA governor Lowe last week declared that falling productivity was the main risk to the central bank’s supposed efforts to combat inflation. The GDP data showed that output per hour worked fell by 4.5 percent over the past year, which was the largest annual decline since at least 1979, when records began.

But the RBA and corporate media commentators have provided no reason for the plunge. That is because it lies, above all, in a drought in new private business investment, which is needed to improve production methods. It fell to 11 percent of GDP in 2022, from 18 percent during the mining boom of the early 2010s, with a particularly steep fall in corporate investment from the US.

Both Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers have responded by pledging to boost productivity. At the Australian-Sky News conference, Albanese agreed with RBA governor Lowe that to accommodate wage rises without further interest rate hikes, the nation must increase productivity—“absolutely, we do.”

Chalmers told the media: “A big part of our economic agenda is investing in productivity.” He claimed that this did not mean “trying to make people work longer for less,” but investing in skills and workers’ “capacity to adopt and adapt technology.”

The truth is that the ruling class is demanding ever-greater speedups and workloads, while denouncing any wage rises above about half the inflation rate. A June 12 Australian editorial declared: “Great flexibility in workplace relations is essential to kickstart productivity.”

“Flexibility” is a euphemism for removing all obstacles to greater exploitation of workers’ labour power, and relying on the union apparatuses to suppress workers’ opposition, as they have for the past four decades.

US to send radioactive depleted uranium shells to Ukraine

Andre Damon

In this image provided by the U.S. Air National Guard, U.S. Air Force National Guard Explosive Ordnance Disposal Techinicians prepare several contaminated and compromised depleted uranium rounds on June 23, 2022 at Tooele Army Depot, Utah. (Staff Sgt. Nicholas Perez/U.S. Air National Guard via AP) [AP Photo/Staff Sgt. Nicholas Perez/U.S. Air National Guard]

In keeping with its total indifference to the lives of the people of Ukraine, the United States will send cancer-causing depleted uranium rounds to that country for use in the war with Russia on Ukrainian territory.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the Biden administration has decided to send the toxic and radioactive ordnance to Ukraine, and the decision will be announced shortly.

Depleted uranium rounds are fired from the main gun of tanks like the M1 Abrams and will be used to pierce the armor of Russia’s Soviet-era tanks.

The Journal reported that the decision followed debate within the White House over the fact that sending the weapon “might open Washington to criticism that it was providing a weapon that may carry health and environmental risks.”

The United Nations Environment Programme reported last year that depleted uranium’s “chemical toxicity” can “cause skin irritation, kidney failure, and increase the risks of cancer.”

An article in the Harvard International Review notes that “someone who inhales small, insoluble uranium particles may experience lung damage or lung cancer due to radiation. Depleted uranium may also lead to poor kidney functioning.”

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted in 2020, “Depleted uranium is a by-product of the enrichment of natural uranium, a process used to create fuel rods for nuclear power plants... While not as radioactive as natural uranium, the metal nevertheless poses a threat.”

It added that “young children playing in conflict zones have a greater chance of exposure due to contaminated soil and should be prevented from touching the substance.”

The Wall Street Journal also reported that there are advanced discussions within the White House about sending Ukraine cluster munitions, which are notorious for their high failure rate, scattering unexploded bomblets that kill civilians for decades afterwards. They are infamous for maiming and killing children who attempt to play with them.

The report stated, “Some Pentagon officials favor providing cluster munitions—known as dual-purpose improved conventional munitions—to Ukraine’s forces to help them counter Russian forces. NATO’s top commander, Gen. Christopher Cavoli, has told Congress that such weapons could be ‘very effective’ against concentrations of Russian troops and equipment.”

In May, Senator Lindsey Graham, who had previously lobbied for the White House to provide HIMARS missiles, Abrams tanks, and F-16 fighters—all of which were subsequently sent—called for the US to ship cluster munitions to Ukraine.

“The sooner long-range ATACMS missiles and cluster munitions are provided, the more territory they [Ukrainian government forces] will be able to regain, and the fewer lives will be lost,” Graham stated.

On Tuesday, the US announced that it would send a further $325 million in weapons to Ukraine, including 15 Bradley fighting vehicles, 10 Stryker armored personnel carriers, secure communications equipment and over 22 million rounds of small arms ammunition.

The Defense Department said the package includes “key capabilities to aid Ukraine’s efforts to retake its sovereign territory.”

In a press briefing on Tuesday, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh was asked whether the new armored vehicles were aimed at replacing those that had been destroyed so far during the counteroffensive.

Reporters asked Singh to address claims that 16 US armored vehicles had been destroyed so far, with one asking, “The counteroffensive begins, and suddenly you’re providing armored vehicles again. Is that intentional that now that Ukraine will suffer and has suffered some losses on the battlefield, you are providing these to continue support for the offensive?”

Increasingly, NATO sees the conflict as a “war of attrition,” in the words of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. In May, he said, “The main challenge [facing NATO] is that this war has now become a war of attrition, which means the battle of logistics is about getting ammunition, weapons, supplies to the front lines.”

The announcement of a major new weapons package comes ahead of a series of meetings by NATO countries aimed at setting the stage for the upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

On Tuesday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin left to travel to Germany, where he and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley will host a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at Ramstein Air Base on Thursday.

This will be followed by a summit of NATO defense ministers on June 16.

Both meetings are aimed at setting the stage for the July 11-12 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, which will focus on the expansion of the NATO alliance with the accession of Sweden and moves to engineer a formal alliance between NATO and Ukraine.

These meetings take place against the backdrop of the largest NATO aerial exercise in its history. Designated as Air Defender 23, 250 aircraft and more than 10,000 military service members from 25 countries will take part in a simulated war game against Russia.

The exercise, to take place from June 12th through 23rd, will involve the partial closure of airspace in Germany to civilian flights, and bombing sorties launched from Germany flying to “forward operating locations in the Czech Republic, Estonia, and Latvia,” the Pentagon said.

On the ground, fighting continued to rage as Ukraine continued its counteroffensive. While Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that the offensive had so far achieved none of its goals, the Ukrainian government claimed that Ukrainian forces had advanced four miles along a 60-mile-long stretch of the front.

During a meeting with Stoltenberg on Tuesday, President Biden declared, “We’ve strengthened NATO’s eastern flank, made it clear we’ll defend every inch of NATO territory. I say it again: The commitment of the United States to NATO’s Article 5 is rock solid.”

In a separate statement, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the United States would continue to fund and arm Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”