Ukraine war would threaten regional and global food prices

Jason Melanovski

A potential war between Ukraine and Russia, provoked by the United States and NATO, and the economic disruption it would inevitably cause, would have a disastrous effect on already rising regional and global food prices.

Ukraine—long known as the “bread basket” of Europe—is expected to be the world’s third largest exporter of corn and fourth largest exporter of wheat for the 2021-2022 harvest year, according to the International Grains Council. In addition, the former Soviet Republic of 40 million people is also a major exporter of barley, sunflower oil and rapeseed. Russia, meanwhile, is the world’s largest wheat exporter, and is expected to export 36.5 million metric tons of wheat for the 2021-2022 harvest year.

Any of the “crippling sanctions” that the Biden administration is threatening Russia with would prove disastrous for global food prices by further limiting the supply of wheat and grain.

The Pryvoz Market in Odessa, Ukraine. (Visavis/Flickr)

In early January, the United Nations Food Price Index reported that global food prices had already risen 28.1 percent in 2021, the highest level since 2008. According to UN senior economist Abdolreza Abbassian, food prices normally settle after production rises to meet demand. However, such a scenario is unlikely to occur in 2022.

Citing the high price of basic commodities, global climate change and the unceasing global COVID-19 pandemic, Abbassian wrote that such conditions “leave little room for optimism about a return to more stable market conditions, even in 2022.”

A disruption to Ukrainian exports would be especially damaging to countries in Africa and Asia such as Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh. Many of these countries are already considered “food insecure” and all of them import a large amount of Ukrainian wheat.

Alex Smith, a food and agricultural analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, wrote in Foreign Policy, “Of the 14 countries that rely on Ukrainian imports for more than 10 percent of their wheat consumption, a significant number already face food insecurity from ongoing political instability or outright violence.”

It should be noted that the “political instability” cited in Yemen, Libya and Afghanistan is the direct result of criminal interventions and wars by US imperialism.

While the poorer countries of Africa and Asia would suffer greatly, the major industrialized countries of Europe and North America would not be spared from a rapid spike in food prices caused by a US-provoked war in Ukraine.

Senior British Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood warned British consumers they should brace for even higher food prices.

“There will be huge impact on gas and oil prices and grain as well. The price of biscuits, can you believe it, will actually increase simply because Ukraine produces a third of the world’s grain,” Ellwood told the Times Radio.

Ukraine itself has already been hit by rapidly rising food prices, and the administration of President Voldymyr Zelensky has warned Ukrainians to expect a 10 to 20 percent jump in basic food prices in 2022.

Food prices in Russia likewise are rising, climbing 7.7 percent last year. In December, the Russian government responded to the crisis by capping prices on basic items like sugar and sunflower oil. The Kremlin also imposed export taxes on wheat and grain to discourage sales abroad.

In both countries, workers are forced to spend an even larger amount of their income on food than workers in Europe and North America, who are also struggling with rapidly rising inflation.

Over 60 percent of Russians spend half their monthly income on food, and average Ukrainians similarly spend more than 50 percent of their income on food.

While food prices rise in both countries, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to infect and claim the lives of ten of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians.

On January 29, Ukraine's Ministry of Health reported a record daily high of 37,351 new infections, surpassing the previous record set a day earlier. With an additional 149 deaths reported, the country officially passed 100,000 deaths. In November, the country regularly reported 700 to 800 deaths per day.

Rather than implementing any serious prevention measures, the Zelensky administration suggested schools move online and offered a $37 cash payment for vaccination.

In neighboring Russia the Omicron variant continues to cause case rates to explode .

While the world's capitalist governments continue to concern themselves with preparing what would be the biggest military conflict in Europe since the end of World War II in 1945, opinion polls in both Russia and the United States continue to demonstrate widespread opposition to a war over Ukraine.

In Ukraine itself, polls persistently show that Ukrainians are primarily worried over the rising costs of food and energy and the COVID-19 pandemic, rather than the threat of war with Russia.

According to a December 2021 opinion poll by Rating, 72 percent of Ukrainians consider inflation the most pressing issue, 70 percent stated the country was moving in the “wrong direction” under Zelensky and less than half believe a war will actually happen, despite the warmongering hysteria promoted by the Biden administration.

That the Biden administration and NATO are continuing to move towards war with Russia despite widespread working class opposition and concerns over rapid inflation and the ongoing pandemic is an indictment of the entire capitalist system.

Expiration of expanded tax credit throws millions of US children into poverty

Chase Lawrence

Amid a surge in the Omicron variant in the United States, the Democrats have allowed expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments to expire with 30 million families not seeing the payments on January 15 after just six months of the program.

The program, approved as part of President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) bailout, paid about $80 billion over six months for up to $300 per child each month and was set to expire in January 2022. The total amount paid amounts to a little over one fifth of the $350 billion in the ARP, which states can use for police, and a fraction of the total $1.9 trillion bill.

Students walk down the hallway at Tussahaw Elementary school on Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021, in McDonough, Ga. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

The end of the payments come as the Biden administration pushes forwards with its policy of keeping workplaces and schools open, with the predictable result being millions of workers and children getting infected and child hospitalizations soaring. Roughly 2,500 people are dying of COVID-19 in the US every day, with 900,000 people in the US having died from the virus to date. Twenty-seven children died and over 1.15 million were infected with COVID-19 in the week ending January 20.

Approximately 35 million families with 65 million children have relied on the expanded monthly child tax credits to make life a little more bearable. About four in 10 households receiving CTC checks from late July to September 2021 used the checks to pay off debt, according to the US Census Bureau.

Of households earning less than $35,000 per year, 91 percent used the money for food, utilities, rent or mortgage, clothing, or education costs between July 21 and September 27, 2021, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

The CBPP, a liberal think tank, had warned that 10 million children would be at risk of falling below the already extremely low poverty line or becoming even more impoverished should the payments expire, with another 27 million expected to lose all or part of the credit, and all 65 million recipients losing some credit.

The expanded tax credit was found to keep 3.7 million children out of poverty last year according to an analysis by Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy, with the rate of childhood poverty expected to jump as much as 5 percent from 12.1 to 17.1 percent in the early part of 2022. Some estimates put the reduction in childhood poverty at close to 30 percent from the program alone.

At his press conference on January 19, President Biden indicated the White House would not try to reinstate the program, saying he was “not sure” if the CTC would go into a new and even more watered-down version of the failed Build Back Better social infrastructure legislation.

The Build Back Better legislation was severely cut back, and then scrapped entirely due to the opposition of right-wing Democratic Senators Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, despite Democrats enjoying majorities in both House and Senate as well as holding the presidency.

Under Biden, the federal eviction moratorium started under the Trump administration has come to an end, as well as federal jobless aid and other federal assistance programs. The predictable consequence of the Democrats’ failure to continue the expanded child tax credit will be a further impoverishment of millions of working people and their children as their standards of living continue to erode, aided by inflation, which rocketed upward in December reaching the highest rate in 40 years.

Xenia, Ohio city councilman Will Urschel, who is also vice president of the Bridges of Hope nonprofit, told the Dayton Daily about evictions, “The moratorium is finished, families with children had their tax credit terminated in December, COVID unemployment benefits are gone.” Comparing the precarious position families are being put into, he said “It’s like Jenga. When’s the tower going to fall?”

Urschel stated that “The consensus was a lot of families were using that to supplement their income. With the termination of that, in next couple months, families are going to be struggling to meet basic needs.”

Biden’s proposal for extending the CTC payments was shot down by Manchin on the basis that it does not exclude those without employment income, such as grandparents on fixed income as well as parents who are students or disabled, with Manchin going on Fox News in December to declare his opposition.

Manchin opposed the “fully refundable” tax credit, which is available to people who have no taxable income, unlike the pre-pandemic program. Manchin demanded the inclusion of a work requirement in a permanent tax credit plan, as well as an upper limit requirement of $60,000 per family—meaning families who increased their incomes would lose the tax credit, as well as families living in urban areas, which on average have high cost of living.

Republican senators echoed Manchin’s opposition to the “fully refundable” tax credit, with Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine turning reality on its head claiming the “fully refundable” tax credit “went to very high-income people.”

Under the old rules, 23 million children did not qualify because their families did not make enough money, being required to earn at least $36,000 a year according to Megan Curran, policy director at the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy, speaking to NPR. Curran and her Columbia colleagues project a jump in the child poverty rate by a third or more between December and January alone.

Hunger was already on the rise in December. Twenty-one million Americans did not have enough to eat in early December, according to the US Census Bureau, as relief payments ended and inflation ate away at workers’ incomes. Hunger, particularly among children, will no doubt be exacerbated for the poorest segments of the American population by the end of CTC.

Millions of working class and poor families will be losing hundreds of dollars per month at a point at which more than half of Americans cannot afford $1,000 in unplanned expenses, according to a recent survey by personal finance company Bankrate.

The survey found little difference in the ability of different age groups to cover a surprise expense. Inflation is responsible for a large part of this, with Bankrate finding that prices were rising at the fastest pace in nearly 40 years. Nearly half (49 percent) of adults surveyed cited inflation as the reason they were saving less. The Personal Saving Rate reported by the Bureau of Economic Analysis fell by almost 3 percent between August and November 2021.

The elimination of the CTC has been demanded by sections of big business, as a “disincentive to work” with the aim of forcing workers to risk their lives in the pandemic, taking whatever low wage work is available.

In the end, this policy is a confirmation of the law of capitalist production laid out by Karl Marx in his landmark work Capital: that an industrial reserve army kept at, or below, near-starvation levels of existence is necessitated by modern capitalist industry such that it can be called upon in times of expansion and thrown to the curb in times of contraction.

That millions of poor children are going hungry and tens of thousands of families are being evicted constitutes a social crime. The resources clearly exist to wipe out hunger, childhood poverty, homelessness, and every other major social ill facing modern society. Yet the government, the entire political establishment, and American capitalism have deliberately cut off limited aid provided at the outset of the pandemic in order to coerce workers back into unsafe and underpaid jobs, as well as to redirect social spending to war and bailing out the financial oligarchy.

No constituency for social reform exists within the ruling class. The elimination of hunger, poverty, and the coronavirus requires a mass movement of the working class on the basis of a socialist program to expropriate the financial oligarchy, put its massive wealth under workers’ control to pay for the social programs to eliminate these social ills along with other pressing social issues.

Chinese foreign minister signals support for Russia over Ukraine crisis

Peter Symonds

In China’s most forthright yet comments on the mounting US confrontation with Russia over the Ukraine, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned Washington and its allies not to “hype the crisis.” He called on all parties to “remain calm and refrain from doing things that stimulate tension.”

Wang made the remarks in a virtual meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken last Thursday. The Biden administration and American media have deliberately manufactured extreme tensions over the Ukraine by repeatedly declaring that Russia is on the point of invasion—a claim that even the Ukrainian president has publicly denied.

Russian President Vladimir Putin gives his annual state of the nation address in Manezh, Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, April 21, 2021. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Wang clearly signaled Beijing’s support for Moscow, declaring that Russia’s “reasonable security concerns should be taken seriously and resolved.” Russia has repeatedly called on the US and its European allies to guarantee that Ukraine will not be inducted as a NATO member—a move that would bring the US-led military alliance to the Russian border.

Indirectly referring to NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, Wang pointedly told Blinken that European security could not be guaranteed by “strengthening or even expanding military blocs.”

China’s opposition to aggressive US moves in the Ukraine is connected to concerns about Washington’s warnings of a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan—claims, which like those directed against Russia, have been manufactured out of thin air. The Biden administration has exploited these unsubstantiated allegations of “Chinese aggression” as the pretext for strengthening ties with Taiwan, breaching longstanding US diplomatic protocols on the status of the island.

Wang declared that the US attitude toward China had not substantially changed since President Biden met his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in November. The Chinese foreign minister accused the US of continuing to make mistakes in relation to China, “causing new shocks to the relationship between the two countries.” He warned the US against playing with fire over Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province, and against “interference” in the Beijing Winter Olympics, due to start on Friday.

Later this week, Xi is due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is flying to Beijing to attend the Olympics in part to demonstrate his opposition to the US-led diplomatic boycott of the event. It will be Xi’s first in-person meeting with a foreign head of state since March 2020 when he met with Pakistan’s president.

As tensions mounted over the Ukraine, Putin and Xi held an online meeting in mid-December in which the Russian president reportedly called Xi his “dear friend” and said relations between the two countries had reached “an unprecedented high level.”

Xi called for greater joint efforts to effectively safeguard the security interests of both countries as “certain international forces” were interfering in the internal affairs of China and Russia and “trampling on international law” under the guise of human rights.

A steady stream of commentary in the US and European media speculates on the growing strength of relations between Moscow and Beijing, the consequences for a US-led conflict with Russia, and the prospect of China “taking advantage” of the Ukraine crisis to invade Taiwan.

A Financial Times article today along these lines is entitled “Ukraine conflict shines light on deepening ties between Beijing and Moscow.” Its “evidence” for China’s intentions is the rantings of a right-wing Chinese nationalist blogger who declares that the Ukraine crisis “will be a historic opportunity for us to solve the Taiwan problem.”

The flimsy character of the argument reflects the topsy-turvy world of US propaganda in which concocted threats of Russian and Chinese invasions are used to justify US military provocations against both countries. As the US and its allies put troops on alert and provided arms to the Ukraine, the US Navy mounted a series of major military drills in the South China Sea and waters off Taiwan.

As the Financial Times itself acknowledged, the 2014 Ukraine crisis, “ruptured Russia’s relations with the west and drove Moscow into China’s arms.” Or to put it more accurately, mounting US threats and provocations against both Russia and China, aimed ultimately at their break-up and subordination, has driven the two countries into a quasi-alliance.

China’s backing for Russia is in contrast to its equivocal response to the 2014 conflict, which was provoked by a US-backed far-right coup in Kiev that ousted a pro-Russian Ukrainian government. China blamed Western “foreign interference for causing the crisis,” but did not back Russia’s annexation of Crimea or its support for separatists in Eastern Ukraine.

In 2014, China abstained on UN resolutions regarding the Russian annexation of Crimea and still does not recognise Crimea as part of Russia territory. At the same time, while it rejected US and European sanctions on Russia, China tacitly allowed Chinese corporations, including its huge state-owned banks, to abide by the sanctions, to avoid being cut off from US financial markets and the international banking system.

Since 2014, however, Russia and China have steadily strengthened their diplomatic, economic and strategic relations. According to the Financial Times, between 2013 and 2021, China’s share of Russia external trade doubled from 10 to 20 percent. At their meeting in December, Xi and Putin noted that bilateral trade in the first three quarters of 2021 exceeded $US100 billion for the first time, and was expected to hit a new record for the full year.

Russia and China have strengthened their military ties through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, established in 2001. Starting on January 21, China, Russia and Iran held their third joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman to “strengthen security” and “multilateral cooperation.” This followed naval drills by Russia and China off the Russian coast in the Far East in October and joint military exercises in northwestern China in August, involving some 13,000 troops and hundreds of aircraft as well as artillery, anti-aircraft batteries and armoured vehicles.

Alexander Korolev, an analyst based at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, told the Financial Times that more frequent and substantive joint exercises, collaboration on weapons development, regular consultations on military and security issues and long-running military personnel exchanges were enabling the Russian and Chinese militaries to jointly operate in real wars in the future.

At his press briefing last Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian declared that China and Russia see their relations as a priority. “There is no ceiling to China-Russia mutual trust, no forbidden zone in our strategic cooperation and no limit on how far our longstanding friendship can go,” he said.

Zhao Mingwen, a former Chinese diplomat, made a similar point to the Financial Times, even though Russia and China are not formal allies. “You could say we are even more allies than allies,” he said. The two countries would support each other in conflicts if provoked by external powers. “If China were forced to unify Taiwan by force and the US intervened, I believe Russia would not sit by idly,” Zhao said.

The strengthening military ties between China and Russia in the face of US threats highlights the utter recklessness of US foreign policy. Having driven China, now the world’s second largest economy in the world, and Russia, with its huge nuclear arsenal, into each other’s arms, the US is deliberately stoking a conflict over the Ukraine. Any war in the Ukraine, far from being a local affair, would threaten to rapidly escalate into a catastrophic war on a global scale.

US-NATO war threats against Russia intensify war dangers facing India

Deepal Jayasekera

Escalating US-NATO war threats against Russia on the false pretext of defending Ukraine from an imminent Russian invasion have exposed the reactionary role of the Indian bourgeoisie.

The Ukrainian government’s public denials of US allegations that a Russian invasion is imminent has exposed the NATO powers’ case for a military build-up as a blatant fraud. While New Delhi clumsily tries to balance between its military-strategic partnership with Washington and its longstanding military ties to Moscow, Washington and its NATO allies are driving towards a global military confrontation with Russia.

India’s strategic partnership with the US has developed over the last two decades under successive governments led by both the ruling Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) and the Congress. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP government, India has become a front-line state of the US war drive against China. However, Washington is pressing India to line up with it not only against China but also against Russia.

Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modi addresses a gathering ahead of Bihar state Assembly elections in Patna, India, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Aftab Alam Siddiqui)

While New Delhi enthusiastically lined up with Washington against China, as it has a decades-long rivalry with China and its main South Asian ally, Pakistan, it has resisted growing US demands that it break ties with Russia. Indeed, for decades, starting in the time of the Soviet Union, New Delhi had close economic, political and military ties with Moscow. The US-India partnership developed rapidly, on the other hand, after the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union.

As US war threats against Russia over Ukraine intensified, Washington’s pressure on India to align with its war drive against Moscow has also increased.

In a telephone conversation held with Indian Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla on January 19, US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman discussed “Russia’s concerning military build-up on Ukraine’s borders,” according to a US State Department statement.

Indicating the dilemma confronting India, the Modi government has not made any clear official statement on talks or its attitude towards US accusations against Russia and associated war preparations. Instead, India kept silent on the issue for weeks. Indian officials cited by the media said that “with key strategic partners on both sides, any hasty moves may shrink the already tight diplomatic space New Delhi has.”

When total silence became untenable, Indian officials cautiously remarked on the issue on January 28. Arindram Bagchi, spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs, said in a media briefing: “We have been closely following the developments relating to Ukraine, including ongoing high-level discussions between Russia and the US. … We call for a peaceful resolution of the situation through sustained diplomatic efforts for long-term peace and stability in the region and beyond.”

Indian calls for “peaceful resolution” of US-Russia conflict do not constitute a peace policy from New Delhi. Rather, it sees stepped-up tensions between Washington and Moscow, and eruption of military conflict between them, as cutting across its own geopolitical interests and war plans in the region.

Moreover, a US military intervention against Russia exploiting Ukraine as a pretext risks drawing China into the conflict on Russia’s side. Indicating the discussions in China’s political establishment, China’s Global Times, which is known to be close to the Chinese army, carried an opinion piece by its former editor, Hu Xijin, titled, “If US provoked China or Russia, the other won’t be indifferent.” The article openly warned Washington that its moves for “strategically squeezing China and Russia at the same time” will push “China and Russia together to strike back.”

A conflict between the NATO alliance and Russia in Europe would rapidly spread to Asia. India and China have been in a tense military stand-off along their border known as Line of Actual Control (LAC) since mid-2020, and opposes any further consolidation of the existing partnership between China and one of India’s traditional strategic partners, Russia.

While India has developed its military-strategic partnership with the US to a much higher level, signing three foundational agreements, including securing US military access to Indian air and sea ports, and having the designation of “major defence partner” from the US, it still largely depends on Russian military supplies. According to a study by the Stimson Center, Russia remains the origin of over almost 86 percent of military equipment used by India. India signed a major agreement in October 2018 to purchase five S-400 air defence systems from Russia.

The US has been raising concerns over India’s moves to purchase the S-400 systems from Russia, with the possibility of invoking US sanctions under CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act). Although the US earlier hinted that India might get an exception from sanctions for the S-400 deal, US officials have now again raised the possibility of the S-400 deal coming under sanctions they plan to impose on Russia.

At his daily press briefing last Thursday, US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said, “I think it [India’s procurement of S-400s] shines a spotlight on the destabilising role that Russia is playing not only in the region but potentially beyond as well. … When it comes to CAATSA sanctions, you’ve heard me say before, we haven’t made a determination with regard to this transaction, but it’s something we continue to discuss with the government of India given the risk of sanctions for this particular transaction under CAATSA.”

This increasing pressure underscores one central point. Whatever reluctance New Delhi has had in lining up with Washington against Moscow, the Modi government’s moves to turn India into a front-line state against China have clearly strengthened Washington’s hand in its preparation for war with Russia.

Moreover, deliberate official policies of mass infection in the COVID-19 pandemic, which have led to millions of deaths in the NATO countries and in India, have massively intensified internal class tensions and accelerated the imperialist powers’ resort to war hysteria to direct mounting social tensions outwards.

Microsoft to become third-largest video game company through $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard

Luke Galvin & Tim Avery

On January 18, technology giant Microsoft Corp. announced it would acquire video game company Activision Blizzard (also known as Activision Blizzard King or ABK) for $68.7 billion. The acquisition, expected to close between this July and the summer of 2023, will be the largest in the history of the video game industry and will make Microsoft the third-largest gaming company by revenue.

In 2021, Microsoft as a whole earned $168.08 billion, up 18 percent year-over-year, while ABK—with nearly 10,000 employees in studios worldwide—earned $9.05 billion, up 18.2 percent. The two companies in the gaming field still larger than Microsoft will be Sony and Tencent, which earned $81.77 billion and $73.8 billion in 2020, respectively.

Newsweek commented that the record purchase was set to push Microsoft “far higher up the gaming charts—and gaming is set [to] generate higher revenues than even Windows for the company, underlining the importance of the deal.” The lucrative deal far eclipses “the $7.5 billion that Microsoft paid for ZeniMax and its subsidiaries (most notably Bethesda Softworks) back in 2020.”

Activision headquarters in Santa Monica, California (Photo credit–Coolcaesar)

Microsoft’s self-congratulatory January 18 press release begins by explaining how the purchase of Activision will bring “the joy and community of gaming to everyone, across every device,” and concludes by boasting about the financial bonanza to come: “With Activision Blizzard’s nearly 400 million monthly active players in 190 countries and three billion-dollar franchises, this acquisition will make [Microsoft’s] Game Pass one of the most compelling and diverse lineups of gaming content in the industry.”

There are a few clouds in this sunny sky. The acquisition was announced in the midst of a strike by ABK employees that began December 9, after a dozen quality assurance workers were suddenly laid off at subsidiary Raven Software. The end of the strike was announced January 22. Employees also staged walkouts in July and November after California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) sued ABK over allegations of widespread sexual harassment and unfair treatment of female employees.

These job actions must be seen in the context of the broader global surge of working class struggle. Workers are increasingly fighting back against a ruling class that has forced them to return to the job despite the severe risks posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. While many employees in video gaming are able to work remotely, the industry is notorious for long hours of mandatory overtime, or “crunch,” and the consequent toll taken on workers’ physical and mental health.

Meanwhile, members of a decidedly wealthier layer appear to be sorting out their differences by way of #MeToo-style attacks, forcing the resignations of a number of executives and senior developers at ABK. Microsoft certainly benefited from the barrage of bad press; ABK’s stock price stood at $91.51 the day before the DFEH suit was announced, plunged to a low of $50.78 on December 1 and soared to $82.31 immediately after Microsoft announced the acquisition.

Microsoft’s purchase of ABK is only the latest in a string of acquisitions, including Mojang (Minecraft) in 2014; Playground Games (Forza Horizon), Undead Labs (State of Decay), Ninja Theory (Hellblade) and Obsidian Entertainment (The Outer Worlds) in 2018; and, as noted, ZeniMax in 2020, with its Bethesda Game Studios (The Elder Scrolls, Fallout), id Software (Doom), MachineGames (Wolfenstein) and Arkane Studios (Dishonored,Prey).

To name just a few titles, the purchase of ABK will give Microsoft direct ownership over the Call of Duty series of military shooters, the competitive multiplayer shooter Overwatch and the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft. The purchase will also give Microsoft access to King, the highly successful mobile games company responsible for Candy Crush Saga, allowing the giant firm to extend its reach into video games for smartphones and tablets.

Microsoft’s main competitor in the home console space is Sony. Whereas almost all games available for Microsoft’s Xbox consoles are also available on other platforms, many ground-breaking titles are only available for Sony’s PlayStation consoles. Recent PlayStation exclusives are impressive displays of graphical fidelity (Demon’s Souls), processing power (Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart) and believable motion-capture performance (the Uncharted series, The Last of Us Part II, God of War).

Call of Duty Vanguard (2021)

Other sizable video game corporations include Tencent, which largely operates within China, and Nintendo (Pokémon, Zelda), which occupies something of a unique niche in the market. Whereas Microsoft and Sony push high-end hardware and market games to an adult demographic, Nintendo’s Switch console is no more powerful than a smartphone, and it usually markets games toward children and parents.

At the same time, many of Nintendo’s games are impressive feats of design. Games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Metroid Dread have managed to capture mass audiences through innovative gameplay as opposed to graphical spectacle.

Significant developers and video game companies still exist outside those already mentioned, such as Take-Two Interactive (Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto), Capcom (Street Fighter, Resident Evil) and countless independent or “indie” developers, but the trend is, unsurprisingly, toward cartelization. ABK itself is a product of the merger of Activision and Blizzard in 2008 and the acquisition of King in 2016.

Through buying ABK, Microsoft may hope to deal a direct blow to Sony by transforming ABK staples like the Call of Duty series, which earns nearly $2 billion annually, into Xbox exclusives. While Microsoft has vaguely stated it will not have existing ABK games removed from PlayStation, denying Sony access to future Call of Duty games would be a major blow to the latter.

Meanwhile, Microsoft also views the ABK acquisition as a means of staking a claim in the development of the metaverse, a futuristic game- and social media-like virtual reality world where users communicate and interact with each other. Billions of dollars are being invested in hardware and software development with the expectation that the metaverse will be the next enormously profitable tech phenomenon. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated in the ABK press announcement, “Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms.”

While playing games has been a part of human activity for thousands of years, the jury is still out as to what precise role video games will play in the development of cultural life. There is no doubt that great numbers of young people in particular spend an inordinate amount of time at present playing mindless and even reactionary games (the Call of Duty series first among them).

Video games are themselves an artistic medium, with both a vast appeal and potential. On the one hand, they are games—that is, systems of rules designed to be played with. On the other hand, they are aesthetic, audiovisual experiences, with the tools of film and television production at their disposal.

Some video games are more or less pure art objects, some are pure games akin to chess or baseball, and the vast majority are something in-between. A video game might be entertaining to play but artistically unsatisfying, or it might be artistically satisfying but not entertaining. The most memorable video games are exceptional combinations of game design and artistic expression, such that one can hardly tell where the one begins and the other ends.

Despite the tremendous obstacles imposed by the profit motive and the control of the major studios, talented artists and designers have still managed to produce impressive, sensitive, and engaging work in the field of video games (which we hope to highlight in future reviews), just as talented artists have still managed to produce such work in film and television.

The intensifying drive by a few massive corporations to dominate and control access to video games—which are already difficult to access due to prohibitive hardware costs—is a naked display of greed that, if allowed to continue, cannot possibly benefit the medium or human culture as a whole.

Omicron case rates explode in Russia

Andrea Peters

A medic wearing a special suit to protect against coronavirus treats a patient with coronavirus at an ICU at a hospital in Poltavskaya village, Krasnodar region, south Russia, Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2022. (AP Photo/Vitaliy Timkiv)

In a mirror image of the Omicron crisis gripping Europe and the United States, Russia is seeing its COVID-19 case rates skyrocket. Like the governments in Washington, Berlin, Paris and London, the Kremlin is doing nothing to contain the virus.

On Friday, the country registered another 98,040 infections over the previous 24-hour period, a number that Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov acknowledged that same day to be undoubtedly an undercount. Omicron has been detected in 74 of Russia’s 82 regions, and the situation is getting worse in 32 of those.

Officially, coronavirus deaths in Russia now total 329,443. However, the country’s main statistical agency, which also counts those who have technically died from a comorbidity, estimates the number to be many times higher. There have been more than 929,000 excess deaths since the onset of the pandemic. While daily fatalities have fallen to about half of what they were during the recent Delta surge, that number is expected to rise in coming weeks.

In an extraordinary expression of the impact of COVID-19 on the Russian population, Moscow State University researcher Vera Karpova told Bloomberg at the end of December that life expectancy in the country has fallen by three years due to COVID-19, wiping out a decade’s worth of gains. President Vladimir Putin acknowledged the rise in mortality rates in his end-of-the-year remarks, describing it as a “geopolitical” as well as a “humanistic” problem, but offered no solution.

Currently Omicron is tearing through the under-17 population, with cases increasing among children by 14 times in comparison to two weeks ago. Fifteen percent of all newly recorded instances of the disease are now among kids.

In Moscow, child infections leapt from 2,000 to 28,000 in a seven-day period and hospitalization rose tenfold. A three-week halt has been placed on non-emergency hospital treatments for children, apart from those with cancer and other life-threatening diseases that cannot be delayed. Overall, the number of people admitted to medical facilities due to COVID-19 in the country’s capital is now close to what it was during the previous peak.

Alexander Gorelov of the Institute of Epidemiology, which is under the direction of Russia’s consumer watchdog agency Rostrebnadzor, told Gazeta.ru this week that Omicron is especially dangerous for kids two to five years old because it attacks the upper respiratory system and can cause severe bronchitis. Symptoms can be as bad as those seen in adults.

Federal authorities have said that they will not order a nationwide shift to online learning, much less any other sort of lockdown. But across the country, schools are shuttering due to outbreaks, exposures and shortages of employees.

In Tambov, after infections increased by five times, regional authorities announced a cancellation of all K-12 classes from now till February 7. In Tyumen and Buryatia, in-person learning has been halted for two weeks. In Perm, where COVID-19 cases have doubled among children, schools shuttered on Thursday. In the city of Volgograd, home to just over 1 million people, 92 schools are closed. In Saint Petersburg, extra-curricular activities have been halted. In Tver, which has not ordered a universal shift to online learning, health officials are adding another 300 beds to the region’s children’s hospitals.

Some of these regions and others—Sverdlovsk, Kursk, and Nizhny Novogord, for instance—are also taking a handful of extremely limited mitigation measures, such as restricting the operations of drinking establishments, night clubs and restaurants. Moscow, however, with a population of 20 million in the city and surrounding region, is doing nothing. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin declared this week that he would not shut down the city, but rather open up more hospital beds in the city. In other words, people can just get sick.

In doing so, Sobyanin is following the lead of the Kremlin, which has announced a similar response. Former Russian president and now deputy chairman of the Security Council Dmitri Medvedev said Friday, “There is no sense in a lockdown now, particularly under conditions of the appearance of new variants.” He admitted that such a measure, if put in place for just two weeks, would stop the spread of COVID-19, but claimed it was simply impossible to do.

Anna Popova, head of Rostrebnadzor, made clear the same day that the government is completely aware of the impact of ending mitigation measures. She noted that cases are spiraling out of control in those regions that were the earliest to roll back all restrictions, a fact which she described as “unfortunate.”

Anticipating a massive wave of sickness, the government has recruited 81,000 professors and students from medical schools, including those in the first years of their education, to provide care. In addition, it is investing 300 million rubles, about US$3.85 million, in research into a vaccine suitable for 6- to 12-year-olds.

But it is already clear the vaccine-only approach, adopted in nearly all countries except China and a handful of other states in Asia, cannot contain the pandemic. Barely 50 percent of Russia’s population is vaccinated, and the vaccination rate, which ticked up during the Delta surge, is slowing again. The government just halted the production of more doses of EpiVacCorona, one of the country’s vaccines, due to lack of demand.

Alexander Ginzburg, director of Russia’s leading epidemiology research center, warned this week that new variants of the virus are on the horizon. Russia would need 80 percent of the population to have some degree of immunity due to vaccination and/or prior infection to arrest the spread of Omicron. Without this he explained that mutations would ultimately render Russia’s vaccines ineffective. Ginzburg added that Omicron is just as dangerous as Delta for the unvaccinated who are elderly or have chronic conditions.

The domestic crisis hitting Russia comes alongside a massive escalation of tensions with the US and NATO. These are on the brink of erupting into armed conflict and drawing the world into World War III. Moscow has no answer to either disaster.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred the US into ever-more reckless and mad policies directed again Russia as it seeks to convince the American population that the greatest threat it faces are the occupants of the Kremlin and not those of the White House. President Putin, who presides over a population that is opposed to war and terrified of both it and the ferocity of American aggression, cannot offer anything to 146 million people beleaguered by two years of sickness and death.

Contradicting US, Ukrainian President Zelensky denies Russian attack imminent

Alex Lantier

For weeks, Washington and its NATO allies have stoked a global war crisis with Russia, claiming that NATO must prepare to defend Ukraine from Russian invasion. Yesterday, in a stunning rebuke to NATO, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denied that a Russian invasion was imminent and asked NATO to dial down its war rhetoric.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky (en.kremlin.ru)

Yesterday morning, senior Ukrainian officials told CNN that a call between Zelensky and Biden “did not go well.” They said Biden claimed “that a Russian attack may be imminent, saying that an invasion was now virtually certain,” according to CNN. They said Zelensky, on the other hand, “restated his position that the threat from Russia remains ‘dangerous but ambiguous,’ and it is not certain that an attack will take place,” CNN reported, urging Biden to “calm down the messaging.”

The US National Security Council (NSC) initially denied this account. “Anonymous sources are leaking falsehoods,” said NSC spokeswoman Emily Horne. “President Biden said that there is a distinct possibility that the Russians could invade Ukraine in February. He has said this publicly and we have been warning about this for months. Reports of anything more or different than that are completely false.”

Zelensky then gave a press conference, however, publicly reiterating statements Horne had denied he had made to Biden. Zelensky was urging NATO heads of state to stop inciting panic with talk of an imminent NATO war with Russia over Ukraine, he said: “I started talking to the leaders of the countries and to explain to them that we need to stabilize the economy. They are saying ‘tomorrow is the war.’ This means panic.”

“The possibility of an attack exists, it has not disappeared and it is not less serious than in 2021,” he said, but adding that “we do not see an escalation greater than” last year, and that he was taking this danger in stride. “We are grateful for the assistance, but we have learned to live with this and develop with this,” he said. “We have learned to protect ourselves, to defend ourselves, and those are our lives to lead.” Given Russia’s overwhelming military superiority over Ukraine, this statement indicates that Zelensky does not fear an all-out Russian invasion.

Zelensky accepted an invitation from Putin for talks: “I’m not afraid of any format of the meeting, bilateral, OK, I don’t care, I’m ready. … I do support serious dialogue.”

Similarly, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba also dismissed the risk of a Russian invasion: “The number of Russian troops amassed along the border of Ukraine … is insufficient for a full-scale offensive along the entire Ukrainian border. They also lack some important military indicators and systems to conduct such a large full-scale offensive.” He concluded: “We can say 100 times a day invasion is imminent, but this doesn’t change the situation on the ground.”

NATO war propaganda stands exposed as a pack of lies. For weeks, led by Washington, the NATO powers have been holding war games and announcing new deployments in Eastern Europe. Countless pundits like MSNBC’s Colonel Alexander Vindman, who was involved in high-level US-Ukrainian talks, argued that Russian aggression meant that a NATO war to defend Ukraine was virtually unavoidable.

Saying that NATO is “almost locked into a course of action,” Vindman insisted that America had to prepare to fight Russia: “Why is this important to the American public? It’s important because we’re about to have the largest war in Europe since World War II. There’s going to be a massive deployment of air power, long-range artillery, cruise missiles, things that we haven’t seen unfold on the European landscape more than 80 years, and it is not going to be a clean or sterile environment.”

Now, the US-backed regime in Ukraine itself is making clear that NATO calls for war did not reflect Russian preparations for an invasion or Ukrainian requests for help. Rather, they were a provocation concocted by the Biden administration and echoed by the European imperialist powers. The aggressor was not Russia, but NATO.

Beyond its geopolitical appetites in Eurasia, the NATO powers are responding to the deep crisis caused by the pandemic, during which they suffered over 2 million COVID-19 deaths. Amid a massive new wave of cases from the Omicron variant, the NATO powers are moving to scrap whatever remaining public health measures still limited the circulation of the virus. As this policy provokes growing protests across North America and Europe, the NATO powers are trying to divert class tensions outward into an utterly reckless campaign for war with Russia.

The exposure of NATO lies makes all the more urgent the independent mobilization of the international working class against the danger of nuclear war.

Washington, which backed a far-right coup in Kiev that toppled a pro-Russian Ukrainian government in 2014 and set up the current regime, will not abandon its plans against Russia due to Zelensky. To the extent that popular opposition to war in Ukraine and internationally becomes an obstacle, Washington will intensify its far-right plotting of wars and coups.

At the same time, there are increasing signs that the Kremlin, fearing military encirclement and financial strangulation by NATO, is considering military action. They are also receiving unusually-open support from China, which fears that Washington could bring similar pressure to bear on it over Taiwan or other conflict zones.

In a column by its former editor Hu Xijin titled “If US provokes China or Russia, the other won’t be indifferent,” the Global Times, a paper known to be close to the Chinese army, issued a blunt warning to Washington.

“The US is strategically squeezing China and Russia at the same time. … It is pushing China and Russia together to strike back,” Hu wrote, adding: “But when it comes to resisting a US crackdown, Russia is not alone. Most of the Chinese people will support it and are willing to see the Chinese government assist Russia in this aspect. Because we know well that if Russia is crushed by the US, this will bring no good to China at all.”

The Kremlin is also mulling a response to the ultimatum delivered this week by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, demanding that Russia allow neighboring states such as Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova to join NATO and host NATO military facilities.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke yesterday, making clear that Moscow is considering a military response. He said, “If the choice is left up to Russia, there will be no war. We do not want war. But we will not either allow our interests to be grossly violated or ignored.”

As NATO discusses possible sanctions and a cut-off of Russian gas exports, Lavrov added: “As for the menace of sanctions, we told the Americans, also at the presidential level, that … if they are accompanied by a complete blockade of the financial and economic systems controlled by the West, this will be the equivalent of breaking relations” with Russia. He said that the Kremlin would take retaliatory measures if this happened: “These measures can be very different. I will take decisions based on the proposals that our military command will present.”

Russia is already mounting a highly unusual total mobilization of its navy. Some 140 vessels of all four Russian fleets—the North Fleet, Baltic Sea Fleet, Black Sea Fleet and Pacific Fleet—will join exercises in the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and the Mediterranean and Okhotsk seas.

Ina Holst-Pedersen Kvam of the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy raises that these exercises likely aim to secure stretches of ocean in which Russian ballistic missile submarines can hide. She notes: “It is a fact that in a potential conflict, these submarines will operate from so-called bastions underneath the Arctic Ocean ice, with nuclear attack submarines and other forces as ‘gatekeepers’ to secure the operational freedom of these submarines.”

The purpose would be to threaten NATO that Russia has the ability to launch a devastating strategic strike, obliterating the United States and its NATO allies in a hail of nuclear ballistic missiles.

Supreme Court poised to end racial preferences in university admissions

Ed Hightower

On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States granted review of two consolidated cases concerning racial preferences in college admissions, for which the court will likely hear oral arguments this October.

The Supreme Court building in Washington, Sunday, May 3, 2020. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Commentators has widely expected that the first case—Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard—would end up at the Supreme Court. In that case, the plaintiffs are a group of Asian Americans and whites who argued that the Ivy League school’s remarkably stable acceptance rate of African Americans and Latinos over decades could not have been accomplished without an illegal quota system. The plaintiffs lost in the trial court and in the First Circuit Court of Appeals.

While prevailing at trial and on appeal, Harvard came out of court with considerable egg on its institutional face. The litigation uncovered internal admissions emails and memoranda depicting a culture of anti-Asian sentiment. While African American and Hispanic applicants scored well for intangible “leadership” qualities, notes on the applications of Asian Americans wallowed in racial stereotypes, describing otherwise qualified candidates as “quiet/shy; science/math oriented.” One evaluator described an Asian applicant derisively “he’s quiet and, of course, wants to be a doctor.”

The Harvard trial also underscored the fact that applicants from wealthy backgrounds cruised into the school in huge numbers while qualified candidates of all ethnic backgrounds vigorously compete for a handful of seats.

The second case also has the SFFA as plaintiff, but this time against an elite public institution: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While the facts of the case are similar, the UNC case raises the legal issue of whether the US Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause prohibits the consideration of race in admissions decisions, an issue that is absent from the Harvard case, which concerns Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Procedurally, the Supreme Court made the highly unusual move of skipping over the Court of Appeals and putting the UNC case directly on the high court’s docket. This fast-tracking has happened only 14 times since February 2019 and prior to that, not a single time for 14 years. Given the composition of the Supreme Court, the move indicates a haste to overrule precedents allowing for some consideration of race in university admission—whether in private or public universities.

There is no genuinely progressive force on either side in these cases.

Racial preference—in university admission, employment, and now, alarmingly, in healthcare—rests on the unstated premise of scarcity. There are only so many spots at great universities, only so many professional posts, good jobs, vaccines, etc. That is what is meant by references to equality of opportunity, of equal access to this and that privilege. Socialists reject this scarcity premise with contempt, in contrast to both the Democratic and Republican wings of the ruling class.

A broader historical review of the Democratic party’s turn to identity politics is beyond the scope of this article. But briefly put, the former party of slavery and secession took on a new role in the 20th century: that of diverting popular movements into safe, bourgeois political channels. For a period, the Democratic Party championed limited social reforms such as the New Deal and the Great Society. As the post-war economic boom gave way to stagflation and class war, the party—with the help of phony socialists like Michael Harrington—turned ever further from economic populism and sought instead to build an electoral base among women and minorities of the upper middle class. While the policy behind this shift was more budget-friendly—it was easier to advance a relative handful of people in select groups than the entire working class—the political right cynically seized the mantle of equal treatment under the law.

On the other side of the cases, the Students for Fair Admissions is a pet project of American Enterprise Institute fellow Edward Blum, who funded the legal attack on the Voting Rights Act in the case Shelby County v. Holder. The result of that 2013 Supreme Court decision was the end of the preclearance provision of the VRA which allowed state legislators to devise voter repression schemes with a free hand. Changes in voter procedures—eliminating Sunday voting, requiring valid photo ID at the polls—target likely Democratic voters: youth and African Americans, and low-income people of all races.

The social forces behind the SFFA could care less about the unequal treatment of Asian Americans. Elements around the Republican party first cultivated the Wuhan lab lie and whipped up an atmosphere of suspicion and hostility to Asian Americans with violent repercussions. Nor would these forces hesitate for an instant to use nuclear weapons to annihilate the entire Peoples Republic of China, should the opportunity arise.

While the Democratic Party and the section of the bourgeoisie it speaks for believe that racial quotas in the military command, corporate America, academia and in the higher-paid professions adds a bit of social stability to a grotesquely unequal society, the Republican faction is unconcerned with stability in the conventional sense. Instead, the party of Trump offers itself as men of violence who will crush opposition, including rising working-class militancy, by force.

In this context of unprecedented crisis, the right-wing dominated Supreme Court is poised to end racial preferences in university admissions—not as part of a general advance of democratic rights—but as a sop for the racialist militia forces that increasingly comprise the popular base of the Republican Party.