Does the U.S. Chip Ban on China Amount to a Declaration of War in the Computer Age?

Prabir Purkayastha

Sanctions can at best slow China from taking the global lead in chip manufacturing. At their worst, they will raise the chances of chip wars spilling into a physical or economic sphere.

The United States has gambled big in its latest across-the-board sanctions on Chinese companies in the semiconductor industry, believing it can kneecap China and retain its global dominance. From the slogans of globalization and “free trade” of the neoliberal 1990s, Washington has reverted to good old technology denial regimes that the U.S. and its allies followed during the Cold War. While it might work in the short run in slowing down the Chinese advances, the cost to the U.S. semiconductor industry of losing China—its biggest market—will have significant consequences in the long run. In the process, the semiconductor industries of Taiwan and South Korea and equipment manufacturers in Japan and the European Union are likely to become collateral damage. It reminds us again of what former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

The purpose of the U.S. sanctions, the second generation of sanctions after the earlier one in August 2021, is to restrict China’s ability to import advanced computing chips, develop and maintain supercomputers, and manufacture advanced semiconductors. Though the U.S. sanctions are cloaked in military terms—denying China access to technology and products that can help China’s military—in reality, these sanctions target almost all leading semiconductor players in China and, therefore, its civilian sector as well. The fiction of ‘barring military use’ is only to provide the fig leaf of a cover under the World Trade Organization (WTO) exceptions on having to provide market access to all WTO members. Most military applications use older-generation chips and not the latest versions.

The specific sanctions imposed by the United States include:

• Advanced logic chips required for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing
• Equipment for 16nm logic and other advanced chips such as FinFET and Gate-All-Around
• The latest generations of memory chips: NAND with 128 layers or more and DRAM with 18nm half-pitch

Specific equipment bans in the rules go even further, including many older technologies as well. For example, one commentator pointed out that the prohibition of tools is so broad that it includes technologies used by IBM in the late 1990s.

The sanctions also encompass any company that uses U.S. technology or products in its supply chain. This is a provision in the U.S. laws: any company that ‘touches’ the United States while manufacturing its products is automatically brought under the U.S. sanctions regime. It is a unilateral extension of the United States’ national legal jurisdiction and can be used to punish and crush any entity—a company or any other institution—that is directly or indirectly linked to the United States. These sanctions are designed to completely decouple the supply chain of the United States and its allies—the European Union and East Asian countries—from China.

In addition to the latest U.S. sanctions against companies that are already on the list of sanctioned Chinese companies, a further 31 new companies have been added to an “unverified list.” These companies must provide complete information to the U.S. authorities within two months, or else they will be barred as well. Furthermore, no U.S. citizen or anyone domiciled in the United States can work for companies on the sanctioned or unverified lists, not even to maintain or repair equipment supplied earlier.

The global semiconductor industry’s size is currently more than $500 billion and is likely to double its size to $1 trillion by 2030. According to a Semiconductor Industry Association and Boston Consulting Group report of 2020—“Turning the Tide for Semiconductor Manufacturing in the U.S.”—China is expected to account for approximately 40 percent of the semiconductor industry growth by 2030, displacing the United States as the global leader. This is the immediate trigger for the U.S. sanctions and its attempt to halt China’s industry from taking over the lead from the United States and its allies.

While the above measures are intended to isolate China and limit its growth, there is a downside for the United States and its allies in sanctioning China.

The problem for the United States—more so for Taiwan and South Korea—is that China is their biggest trading partner. Imposing such sanctions on equipment and chips also means destroying a good part of their market with no prospect of an immediate replacement. This is true not only for China’s East Asian neighbors but also for equipment manufacturers like the Dutch company ASML, the world’s only supplier of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines that produces the latest chips. For Taiwan and South Korea, China is not only the biggest export destination for their semiconductor industry as well as other industries, but also one of their biggest suppliers for a range of products. The forcible separation of China’s supply chain in the semiconductor industry is likely to be accompanied by separation in other sectors as well.

The U.S. companies are also likely to see a big hit to their bottom line—including equipment manufacturers such as Lam Research Corporation, Applied Materials, and KLA Corporation; the electronic design automation (EDA) tools such as Synopsys and Cadence; and advanced chip suppliers like Qualcomm, Nvidia, and AMD. China is the largest destination for all these companies. The problem for the United States is that China is not only the fastest-growing part of the world’s semiconductor industry but also the industry’s biggest market. So the latest sanctions will cripple not only the Chinese companies on the list but also the U.S. semiconductor firms, drying up a significant part of their profits and, therefore, their future research and development (R&D) investments in technology. While some of the resources for investments will come from the U.S. government—for example, the $52.7 billion chip manufacturing subsidy—they do not compare to the losses the U.S. semiconductor industry will suffer as a result of the China sanctions. This is why the semiconductor industry had suggested narrowly targeted sanctions on China’s defense and security industry, not the sweeping sanctions that the United States has now introduced; the scalpel and not the hammer.

The process of separating the sanctions regime and the global supply chain is not a new concept. The United States and its allies had a similar policy during and after the Cold War with the Soviet Union via the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) (in 1996, it was replaced by the Wassenaar Arrangement), the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Missile Control Regime, and other such groups. Their purpose is very similar to what the United States has now introduced for the semiconductor industry. In essence, they were technology denial regimes that applied to any country that the United States considered an “enemy,” with its allies following—then as now—what the United States dictated. The targets on the export ban list were not only the specific products but also the tools that could be used to manufacture them. Not only the socialist bloc countries but also countries such as India were barred from accessing advanced technology, including supercomputers, advanced materials, and precision machine tools. Under this policy, critical equipment required for India’s nuclear and space industries was placed under a complete ban. Though the Wassenaar Arrangement still exists, with countries like even Russia and India within the ambit of this arrangement now, it has no real teeth. The real threat comes from falling out with the U.S. sanctions regime and the U.S. interpretation of its laws superseding international laws, including the WTO rules.

The advantage the United States and its military allies—in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and the Central Treaty Organization—had before was that the United States and its European allies were the biggest manufacturers in the world. The United States also controlled West Asia’s hydrocarbon—oil and gas—a vital resource for all economic activities. The current chip war against China is being waged at a time when China has become the biggest manufacturing hub of the world and the largest trade partner for 70 percent of countries in the world. With the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries no longer obeying the U.S. diktats, Washington has lost control of the global energy market.

So why has the United States started a chip war against China at a time that its ability to win such a war is limited? It can, at best, postpone China’s rise as a global peer military power and the world’s biggest economy. An explanation lies in what some military historians call the “Thucydides trap”: when a rising power rivals a dominant military power, most such cases lead to war. According to Athenian historian Thucydides, Athens’ rise led Sparta, the then-dominant military power, to go to war against it, in the process destroying both city-states; therefore, the trap. While such claims have been disputed by other historians, when a dominant military power confronts a rising one, it does increase the chance of either a physical or economic war. If the Thucydides trap between China and the United States restricts itself to only an economic war—the chip war—we should consider ourselves lucky!

With the new series of sanctions by the United States, one issue has been settled: the neoliberal world of free trade is officially over. The sooner other countries understand it, the better it will be for their people. And self-reliance means not simply the fake self-reliance of supporting local manufacturing, but instead means developing the technology and knowledge to sustain and grow it.

Sunak prepares scorched earth UK November budget

Robert Stevens

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is readying a UK autumn budget based on up to £50 billion in spending cuts or tax rises.

According to reports it is set to be more devastating for the working class than Conservative government budgets imposed by then Chancellor George Osborne between 2010–16, dubbed by his Prime Minister David Cameron the “age of austerity”, which led to the excess deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Sunak’s Chancellor Jeremy Hunt was brought into government nine days ago at the behest of the financial markets and Bank of England, in the last days of the short-lived Truss government, in order to tear up her unfunded tax giveaway budget for big business and replace it with “eye-wateringly” brutal austerity. Naming his new cabinet this week, Sunak ensured Hunt remained in place.

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss appoints Jeremy Hunt as her new Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Cabinet Room of No. 10 Downing Street. October 14, 2022 [Photo by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Hunt intended to unveil a debt-cutting austerity plan on October 31, but on Wednesday this was put back to November 17 on the basis that it would become a standard Autumn Statement—in all essentials a full budget.

The Financial Times pointed out that Hunt was able to do this as he had thrown out his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng’s giveaways entirely based on borrowing, thus immediately lowering government borrowing costs in the bond markets. The “calmer markets” had given “the government some economic breathing space”, it stated.

On Thursday, the Telegraph reported an assessment by the Resolution Foundation that, based on “the interest rate paid on government gilts reducing rapidly – and the international gas price falling… the delay of the fiscal statement would save the Treasury between £10 billion and £15 billion. Ministers had been facing an estimated black hole in the Treasury’s finances of about £35 billion.” The newspaper declared, “there is growing confidence in Downing Street that more minor changes to public finances than previously thought may be necessary.”

Within 24 hours all projections of smaller cuts were blown out of the water, with three national newspapers and the BBC reporting that the spending cuts and tax rises required would be “up to £50 billion a year.”

Relaying the government’s real intentions and allaying the markets, the FT reported, “Ministers were alarmed some media coverage on Thursday suggested that swingeing spending cuts and tax rises could be avoided on November 17, because of an improved outlook for government borrowing costs.” All four media outlets cited a “Treasury source” insisting, “Markets have calmed somewhat, but the picture is still bleak… People should not underestimate the scale of this challenge, or how tough the decisions will have to be. We’ve seen what happens when governments ignore this reality.”

The government calculated that a delay in its budget plans would mean the Office for Budget Responsibility would base forecasts not on data that included the economic volatility of Truss’s time in office, but on calmer conditions. However, in reporting the new £50 billion cuts plan Friday, the Times noted, “The OBR has yet to provide final forecasts but is expected to downgrade significantly its March forecast of growth of 1.8 percent next year. The Bank of England and other forecasters are now expecting a recession and the OBR may follow suit.”

The cost of borrowing is still much more expensive for the government than at the beginning of the year, with the Times pointing out, “Although yesterday ten-year gilt yields were back at similar levels to before Truss’s mini-budget, at about 3.5 percent, this compares to 1.5 percent in March.”

The FT reported, “The huge [upcoming] budgetary tightening of about 2 percent of gross domestic product would be the equivalent of chancellor George Osborne’s austerity Budget of 2010 if most of the amount was secured through spending cuts.” It added, “Sunak and Hunt met on Thursday to discuss the ‘pretty grim’ fiscal outlook”.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (left) and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt (centre) at the first Cabinet meeting in 10 Downing Street the morning after assuming office. October 26, 2022, London. [Photo by Number 10 Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Everything is being considered for the axe, including welfare benefits and the state pension, relied on by tens of millions, by keeping payment increases well below the rate of inflation. According to Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham and Joe Mayes, based on sources at the Treasury and Office for Budget Responsibility, “The government has drawn up a menu of 104 options to cut spending to get public finances back onto a sustainable track.”

The Telegraph’s Christopher Hope commented Wednesday that he was told by “informed sources that the plans worked up by the Chancellor show that the Treasury is looking at double-digit spending cuts across the board for all departments. One said that Mr Hunt has penciled in cuts between 10 percent and 15 percent.”

Hunt, who carried out brutal cuts as health secretary (2012-2018) in the Cameron/May governments—demanding £22 billion in cuts—declared after ripping up Kwarteng’s budget “I’m going to be asking every government department to find further efficiency savings.” On Thursday, the Times reported that Hunt met with Osborne, “as he draws up an autumn statement expected to set out painful spending cuts and tax rises.”

Sunak and Hunt have been careful not to adhere to any previous spending commitments including a manifesto pledge to maintain the state pension “triple lock.”

Maintaining the triple lock means the state pension and pension credit benefit rise each year in line with the highest of three possible figures: CPI inflation, average earnings, or 2.5 percent. CPI inflation currently stands at 10.1 percent.

Were the budget only to increase benefits in line with earnings, they will rise by just 5.5 percent, costing the poorest around £7 billion annually. According to the Resolution Foundation, tying to earnings would result in annual savings of £5.6 billion if applied to the state pension and pension credit. An additional £2.4 billion would be cut from public spending if the formula was applied to working-age benefits such as universal credit.

Given the importance of the vote of pensioners to the collapsing electoral position of the Conservatives, and with some of the party’s MPs pledged to vote against a budget that axes the triple lock, Tory-backing newspapers are demanding larger cuts elsewhere instead. On Friday the rabidly right-wing Daily Express launched a front-page campaign calling on readers to “Join Crusade to Save Triple Lock”.

Central to these populist calculations is that the government has already saved at least £1.6 billion in pension costs due to the mass deaths of over-65s during the pandemic. Hundreds are still dying from COVID every week, the overwhelming majority pensioners.

According to Office for Budget Responsibility data published in March 2021, with 144,000 lives already lost at that stage to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, the Treasury had factored in paying £1.5 billion less in state pensions. The OBR stated that “with virus-related deaths rising sharply again in recent months, we have revised up the number of excess pensioner-age deaths in 2020-21 from 90,000 in our November forecast to around 100,000 in this one.” As a result, spending on pensions fell by £600 million in 2020/21 and £900 million in 2021/22, relative to its March 2020 forecast.

Since March last year COVID deaths have surged to over 209,000, with tens of thousands more pensioners dead.

Savage austerity is being imposed on a working class already bled white. Out of a 68 million UK population, 14.5 million people live in poverty, including 8.1 million working-age adults, 4.3 million children and 2.1 million pensioners.

Research published in September by the Legatum Institute found that even if the previous energy cap on annual average bills stayed at £1,971, another 1.3 million people would be thrown into poverty. Under measures enacted by Truss, average household prices were capped at £2,500. In junking Kwarteng’s budget, Hunt ditched plans to extend the cap beyond next April, when bills are predicted to shoot up to over £4,300 annually.

The most accurate level of inflation, RPI, is heading towards 13 percent, but this is being outstripped by food inflation which has soared to 14.5 percent. For the poorest who rely on budget food items it is even worse, with the cost of these rising by 17 percent.

Hip hop celebrity, millionaire Kanye West emerges as full-blown anti-Semite

Nick Barrickman

Hip hop celebrity and multi-millionaire Kanye West has revealed himself to be a full-blown anti-Semite and fascist over the past few weeks, producing widespread outrage.

The furor erupted when West premiered a line of clothing at his Yeezy Paris Fashion Week show in early October, featuring the phrase “White Lives Matter” emblazoned on it. The phrase is widely associated with neo-Nazi circles. The clothing drew swift condemnation.

Celebrity, rapper, millionaire, Ye/Kanye West at the red carpet of the Met Gala in New York City, New York in 2019. [Photo by Cosmopolitan UK / CC BY 3.0]

This episode did not stop West, who then posted an October 8 screed on Twitter declaring he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” making use of a military term (“defcon 3”) meaning “force readiness increased above normal levels.”

The rapper then asserted that Jews “have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.” These comments resulted in West being barred from his accounts on Twitter and Instagram, where he had posted similar comments.

West doubled down a week later on the Drink Champs podcast, blaming “Jewish Zionists” for the media backlash. “Jewish people have owned the Black voice,” he ranted on the podcast. “Either it’s through us wearing the Ralph Lauren shirt, or it’s all of us being signed to a record label, or having a Jewish manager, or being signed to a Jewish basketball team, or doing a movie on a Jewish platform like Disney.” Despite this, West claimed that he, “as the blood of Christ,” could not be considered an anti-Semite.

West also referenced the views of far-right propagandist and personal friend Candace Owens on the podcast, falsely claiming the 2020 police murder of George Floyd was caused by the presence of drugs in his system rather than by brutal, deadly force on the part of law enforcement.

West has received support from and emboldened ultra-right elements. On Saturday, a group of neo-Nazis hung a banner from an I-405 freeway overpass in Los Angeles proclaiming “Kanye is right about the Jews.” They were photographed giving the Nazi salute. What precedent is there for a major American entertainer to be celebrated by fascist trash?

CNN reported Thursday that “[s]everal people who were once close to” West revealed the celebrity had “long been fascinated” by the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. 

CNN cited an unnamed business executive who had broken ties with West due to his “obsession” with the fascist leader. “He would praise Hitler by saying how incredible it was that he was able to accumulate so much power and would talk about all the great things he and the Nazi Party achieved for the German people,” the individual alleged.

Various businesses have severed links to West. In the past week, shoe designer Balenciaga, Vogue, the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the MRC Entertainment studio, Amazon, Adidas and Gap have cut ties with the 45-year-old rapper. According to Forbes, the loss of West’s Adidas partnership cost him over $1 billion, capping “a stunning, self-induced downfall for one of the brashest and most volatile personalities to have graced Forbes’ pages.”

This followed a statement by media entertainment CEO Ari Emanuel, published in the Financial Times, calling on businesses to separate themselves from West.

Music streaming platform Spotify declared it would not remove West’s music. According to Spotify executive Daniel Ek, the de-platforming of West’s music, which has 51 million listeners on the service, was “up to his label,” and that the rapper’s songs violated no policy. West’s former label, Def Jam, ended its contract with him in 2021, and the rapper’s current label G.O.O.D. Music is self-owned.

West’s behavior is the latest in a series of inflammatory outbursts over the years. The rapper’s fame and wealth, reaching far beyond his actual talent, has played a central and negative role here.

In 2018, the World Socialist Web Site commented on West’s promotion of President Donald Trump and his description on TMZ Live of American slavery as “a choice” that black people had personally made. Former TMZ staff member Van Lathan recently noted on a podcast that West had also made pro-Nazi remarks during his slavery rant at the publication.

Donald Trump and Ye/Kanye West meeting in the White House on October 11, 2018. [Photo: The White House]

“He said something like, ‘I love Hitler, I love Nazis.’ Something to that effect when he was there,” Lathan said to the “Higher Learning” podcast. He added, “they took it out of the interview for whatever reason. It wasn’t my decision.”

In 2013, the rapper wore a jacket adorned with the Confederate flag, famously remarking that “It’s my flag now.” The rapper-producer’s music has contained various affronts, including sampling the famous anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” for a paranoid, narcissistic song about partying, drug usage and other trivial subjects (2013’s “Blood on the Leaves”). West has made innumerable self-aggrandizing statements and gestures since the beginning of his career.

Prior to his embrace of the far-right, West’s public displays of backwardness and money worship were celebrated and encouraged by the media, “left” publications included.  For these types, such behavior was entirely excusable, when carried out under the banner of racial politics.

As the Socialist Worker, speaking for the entire middle class left, proclaimed in 2009:

It can never be forgotten that Kanye is indeed a Black man living in a white man’s world. He is a performer in an industry that is greatly dominated by exploitation and oppression. As LBoogie over at Democracy and Hip-Hop Project explains: “Kanye’s arrogance, his braggadocio, his loud-mouth interventions are scattered pieces of an anti-racist sentiment that historically has been a rallying cry for people of color to reclaim what is rightfully ours.”

As recently as six months ago, Jacobin magazine was defending West, asserting that his “turbulent antics and generalized disorder” were “an essential piece of the remarkable—and remarkably chaotic—career he has built.”

His former champions are embarrassed now that West, still possessed of over $400 million in personal wealth despite his falling out with his corporate sponsors, has openly made common cause with far-right and fascistic elements.

The advocates of identity politics have continued to make excuses for West in light of the recent developments. “[I]t’s all very well to cancel Ye, but as a Black purveyor of anti-Blackness and antisemitism, he was low-hanging fruit,” writes the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah. The critic demands that blacks be given the “structural power” to “cancel the rabidly racist White men in our culture and politics, just as we’ve done for an ignorant Black rapper who makes really ugly shoes.”

Apologists for West attribute his anti-Semitic rants to mental problems. Fascist demagogues have not generally been known for their psychological stability, but West’s outburst is hardly an isolated event. The WSWS only 11 days ago took note of a rant by Donald Trump and the overall growth of anti-Semitism in the US.

The WSWS perspective pointed out that anti-Jewish propaganda has invariably been used in the modern era as “a weapon of the capitalist class aimed at diverting class tensions and providing a convenient scapegoat for mass anger over deteriorating social conditions” and that “anti-Semitism assumes a particularly toxic character during times of extreme social and economic crisis, emerging in explosions of violence.”

West comes from a middle-class background; his mother is a former college professor. He is quite conscious about what he is doing, or as conscious as such a person can be.

Many media publications have sought to separate West’s crude comments from his supposedly “genius” musical persona, in the hopes that he might recover his reputation (and money-making powers). “Eventually, he finds some way to make a comeback, be it via apologizing or releasing a game-changing album,” speculates a commentary in the Washington Post.

Whatever West’s individual fate, a Rubicon has been crossed. A popular cultural icon has openly embraced fascist ideology. Elements in the upper-middle class and ruling elite are reviving all the political filth of the 20th century as the capitalist system enters into terminal crisis.

New COVID wave in New Zealand

Tom Peters

COVID-19 cases, deaths and hospitalisations are continuing to increase sharply in New Zealand. A third Omicron wave is spreading unimpeded as a result of the Labour Party-led government removing all public health measures.

Yesterday the Ministry of Health reported 3,168 new cases, up from 2,430 on the same day last week—a 30 percent increase. This included 379 new reinfections, 12 percent of the total. There were 272 people in hospital with COVID, up from 203 a week earlier.

Medical staff talks to a shopper at pop-up community COVID-19 testing station in Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, April 17, 2020. [AP Photo/Mark Baker]

The official figures underestimate the actual spread. Messages encouraging people to get tested if they have symptoms have largely disappeared, as part of the government’s efforts to encourage maximum complacency about the deadly coronavirus.

Last week 41 new deaths were reported among people who had COVID—up from 34 deaths the previous week. They included one child aged between 10 and 19, one person in their 30s, two in their 40s, one in their 50s, five in their 60s and 31 over the age of 70.

The ministry of health has linked 2,095 deaths to COVID since the pandemic began—nearly all of which occurred this year following the Ardern government’s adoption of the criminal policy of mass infection.

The real death toll is certainly higher. The ministry records that 1,075 more people died within 28 days of contracting COVID; it asserts that 695 of these deaths were not COVID-related and 380 were from unknown causes. These claims should be treated with scepticism: only last week the ministry admitted that it vastly undercounted COVID hospitalisations in recent months.

Highly infectious Omicron sub-variants have been identified in New Zealand, including BQ.1.1 and the XBB variant, which is widely described as a “nightmare variant” that can evade antibodies generated by previous infections and possibly vaccinations. In Singapore, which has a similar sized population to New Zealand, XBB is fueling around 40,000 to 50,000 reported cases per week, compared with 16,000 last week in NZ.

There are growing warnings about the looming wave of Long COVID. So far, more than 1.8 million total infections have been recorded, out of a population of 5 million people, suggesting hundreds of thousands of people will develop long-term health problems.

This week, the health ministry’s official “Unite against COVID-19” Twitter page published a short video statement by Auckland University virologist Dr Natalie Netzler, who said: “A lot of people aren’t aware that every time you catch a COVID infection, your risk of having other severe issues start to rise.”

Netzler explained that “with reinfection, your chances of getting diabetes goes up almost double. Your chances of getting mental health issues like anxiety and depression goes up double, and there are even more risks, higher risks, for things like blood clots, or breathlessness, or chronic fatigue: your risks of those go up three times with reinfection compared to that first infection. So it’s really important that we do everything we can to try and prevent ourselves getting sick, not just once, but many times with COVID.”

The statement is an indictment of the Labour government, which is doing “everything it can” to help the coronavirus spread. One Twitter user replied to Netzler’s video by suggesting that the ministry “change their account name to ‘Act individually against COVID’, because ‘uniting’ and acting collectively are no longer @nzlabour policy. More truthful tweets would be like: ‘You’re in grave danger, and you’re on your own. Good luck.’”

Last October, acting on the orders of big business, the Ardern government abandoned its zero-COVID policy, which had kept New Zealand mostly free from the virus up to that point. This year, with the assistance of the trade unions, all businesses and schools reopened, shutdowns were banned, and mask mandates and other protections were progressively dropped.

The sharp rise in COVID hospitalisations, as well as chronic understaffing, is fueling a worsening crisis in public hospitals. Across Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Waikato, Health NZ has 112 full-time nursing vacancies in hospital emergency departments (EDs) alone.

Nationwide, nearly one in four people showing up to EDs have to wait more than six hours to be seen—up from one in 10 when the Labour Party-led government was first elected five years ago. In the MidCentral region and Capital and Coast region, 45.2 and 43.8 percent of patients wait longer than six hours.

The death of a 50-year-old woman in June has been linked to overcrowding at the Middlemore Hospital ED in Auckland. Two more deaths, at Christchurch Hospital and Wellington Hospital, are under investigation.

One of these was a four-year-old boy, Sebby Chua, who died last month from suspected complications after a strep throat infection. His parents told the media he was initially misdiagnosed and sent home from Kenepuru Hospital. Admitted to Wellington Hospital’s ED a few days later, he had to wait more than three hours before a blood sample was taken.

After another four hours, during which time Sebby’s parents say he received only pain medication, he died. His mother Abegail Chua told Newshub: “I really want to know why he wasn’t assessed properly and why nothing was done within the first seven hours.”

The crisis is just as severe in primary care. In New Plymouth, which has about 80,000 people, Radio NZ (RNZ) reports that not one of the city’s 17 clinics is accepting new patient enrolments.

Christchurch general practitioner Angus Chambers told RNZ on October 25 that people there were also struggling to get appointments. The urgent care facility at his clinic sometimes has “wait times of four or five hours,” he said. “We’ve never ever had that before, and it’s extremely stressful for everybody really, patients and our staff.”

In the latest sign of the growing anger among healthcare workers, some 4,200 primary healthcare nurses held a nationwide four-hour strike on October 27 in protest against an insulting below-inflation pay offer of 3 percent.

The biggest obstacle facing workers in healthcare, education and every other sector is the trade unions, which enforce the government’s policy of mass infection and have for decades accepted stagnant wages, deteriorating levels of staffing and poor conditions.

Pentagon national strategy document targets China

Andre Damon

The US military published three strategic documents Thursday outlining plans for conflict with China and Russia and declaring that nuclear weapons form the “bedrock” of US military strategy.

The publication of the National Defense Strategy, the Nuclear Posture Review and the Missile Defense Review comes less than two weeks after the Biden administration published its National Security Strategy, which pledged that the United States will “win” in conflict with Russia and China in what it called a “decisive decade.”

President Joe Biden meets with military leaders, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, left, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

The documents double down on the fundamental assertions of the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which declared that “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”

Introducing the National Defense Strategy, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called China America’s “pacing challenge” while Russia was an “immediate and sharp threat.”

Austin said China remains the one adversary “both with the intent to reshape the international order and increasingly the power to do so.”

The National Defense Strategy calls China the “most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security,” and the Nuclear Posture Review asserts that “by the 2030s, the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.”

Commenting on the significance of the documents, the Atlantic Council made clear that the documents’ references to “conflict” should be understood as references to “kinetic conflict”—i.e., shooting war.

Combined with the emphasis on “Campaigning,” it sends a strong message that the world is actively contested now, and that the Department of Defense (DOD) and all of the US government is not just preparing for potential kinetic conflict, but engaged already in active contestation focused on China, and secondarily Russia.

The NDS’s focus on “Campaigning” will signal that DOD and other US departments are already conducting operations to disadvantage China—tantamount to a new Cold War. The era of DOD claiming that its activities—freedom of navigation operations, reconnaissance flights, multilateral exercises—are merely “things we have always done” is over.

In March 2020, as he was campaigning for president, Biden promised to repudiate the “first use” of nuclear weapons, writing, “I believe that the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring and, if necessary, retaliating against a nuclear attack. As president, I will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with the U.S. military and U.S. allies.”

Biden’s nuclear strategy document not only rejects that view, but positively articulates a sweeping view of nuclear weapons as forming the “bedrock” of US military strategy.

The document, according to the US Defense Department’s fact sheet:

recognizes that nuclear weapons undergird all our national defense priorities and that no element of U.S. military power can replace the unique deterrence effects that nuclear weapons provide. Although the fundamental role of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack, more broadly they deter all forms of strategic attack, assure Allies and partners, and allow us to achieve Presidential objectives if deterrence fails.

In other words, the United States reserves the right to use nuclear weapons to respond to a non-nuclear attack, blurring the lines between “conventional” conflict and nuclear war.

In the Defense Department briefing, this point is elaborated. The NPR, a department official stated, “establishes a strategy that relies on nuclear weapons to deter all forms of strategic attack. This includes nuclear employment of any scale, and it includes high-consequence attacks of a strategic nature that use non-nuclear means.”

The publication of the document was rapidly condemned by arms control experts. “The Biden administration’s unclassified Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) is, at heart, a terrifying document,” wrote the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

“It not only keeps the world on a path of increasing nuclear risk, in many ways it increases that risk,” the UCS argued, by claiming that “the only viable U.S. response is to rebuild the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal, maintain an array of dangerous Cold War-era nuclear policies, and threaten the first use of nuclear weapons in a variety of scenarios.”

The organization continued:

The reality is, one phone call from the president and the issuing of a code shorter than a tweet could lead to the launch of hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles in less than five minutes, which would hit their targets in less than one-half an hour with warheads twenty times more destructive than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

While in fundamental continuity with Trump’s national security strategy, the document repudiates the rhetoric used by the Obama administration’s 2010 national defense strategy. As the New York Times writes of the Pentagon’s nuclear strategy,

But its contrast to the last document issued by a Democratic president, Barack Obama, is stark. Mr. Obama’s strategy—first issued in 2010 with Mr. Biden, who was the vice president at the time—aimed to drastically diminish the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. defenses and focused much of its attention on keeping nuclear material out of the hands of terror groups. At the time, China and Russia were considered full partners in the effort to contain North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and dissuade Iran from building nuclear weapons.

In its introduction, the National Defense Strategy asserts that the US military “will focus on safeguarding and advancing vital US national interests,” which include America’s “economic prosperity.”

This marks a significant development from Trump’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which largely referred to the use of military force to secure economic interests in the negative—asserting that it was China that was doing so. While this was the clear implication of the 2018 document, the definition of “national interests” advanced by the Pentagon’s 2022 document to include “economic prosperity” constitutes an even more open step toward advocating the doctrine that war is an acceptable means to secure economic aims.

A section of the 2022 National Defense Strategy

These documents, which were not seriously discussed in the US media, make clear the fundamental falsehood that the massive US military buildup this year is a response to “Russian aggression.” In reality, in the thinking of the White House and Pentagon war planners, the massive increases in military spending and plans for war with China are created by “dramatic changes in geopolitics, technology, economics, and our environment.”

These documents make clear that the United States sees the economic rise of China as an existential threat, to be responded to with the threat of military force. The United States sees the subjugation of Russia as a critical stepping stone toward the conflict with China.

These documents must be taken as a warning by workers all over the world. In asserting its global hegemony, American capitalism will go to any length. As shown by the horrifying legacy of the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, American imperialism is prepared to kill millions of people in the name of its campaign of global domination.

The eruption of American imperialism that began with the Gulf War in the same year as the dissolution of the USSR is more and more directly targeting Russia and China, which the United States sees as the principal obstacles to the untrammeled domination of the world. US strategists have long regarded the domination of the Eurasian landmass, with its vast natural resources, as the key to global domination.

Sri Lankan parliament passes constitutional amendment on executive presidency

Pani Wijesiriwardena

On October 21, the Sri Lankan parliament, with the support of the ruling and opposition parties, passed a new constitutional amendment. The 21st amendment, the government of President Ranil Wickremesinghe claimed, was to “limit the powers of the executive branch and ensure democracy through empowering the legislative.”

This is a blatant lie. This amendment does not limit the sweeping powers of the executive president but makes only cosmetic changes.

Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe arrives at the parliamentary complex in Colombo, Sri Lanka on Aug. 3, 2022. [AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]

The new amendment was introduced amid deep-going popular opposition to the executive presidency after four decades of savage attacks on democratic rights, including against the Tamil minority during the nearly three-decade war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

It also follows the mass demonstrations that began in early April involving millions of workers and the poor who demanded President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and his government resign. While these developments exposed the mass opposition to the entire political establishment, the opposition parties, trade unions and pseudo-left groups, constricted these protests to just Rajapakse and his regime.

The Wickremesinghe government has insisted that the foremost “democratic” element of the 21st amendment is the establishment of a Constitutional Council. This scraps a clause in the 20th amendment, adopted by the previous Rajapakse regime, which gave the president the power to directly influence the appointment of top bureaucrats in the state administration.

Under the new amendment, the Constitutional Council (CC), which is responsible to the parliament, will appoint senior personnel to nine commissions, including the public service, national police and elections. It will have ten members, including the prime minister, the speaker, an MP appointed by the president, a professor nominated by the University Grants Commission but appointed by the president, an MP appointed through the agreement of parliamentary majority, the leader of the opposition and an MP appointed by him. It also includes someone appointed by Sri Lanka Professionals Association, and a representative appointed by Ceylon Chamber of Commerce.

The CC will also have the power to propose names for the chief justice, judges to supreme court and the court of appeal, and other high officials, such as the inspector general of police.

Notwithstanding these changes, the president can, directly or indirectly, influence the first six members of the CC because they are ruling party MPs or are directly appointed by him. The council is therefore dominated by the president, parliament and big business, and has no real independence.

The 20th amendment to the constitution, which extended the wide-ranging autocratic powers of the executive presidency was introduced after Gotabhaya Rajapakse became president in November 2019. This included the power to remove the prime minister at any time and to take over any ministry. More significantly, the president had the power to dissolve any government after two and a half years of its election. These anti-democratic powers remain intact.

The executive presidency was originally established by the United National Party (UNP) government of President J. R. Jayawardene in 1978. Current Sri Lankan president, Wickremesinghe was a minister in that administration. It made the parliament a virtual rubber stamp, with the president given sweeping powers. The president is commander in chief of all the armed forces, can declare war and impose repressive laws.

Jayawardene calculated that stronger presidential powers were required to impose “open market” economic policies and transform the country into cheap labour platform. This meant suppressing workers’ resistance to government assaults on hard-won social rights.

During its 17-year rule, the UNP ruthlessly repressed all opposition to its social attacks. In 1980, it sacked 100,000 public employees and crushed their general strike for higher wages. Systematic communal provocations against the Tamil minority resulted in the eruption of the 26-year war against the LTTE. In 1987–1990, using the communalist provocations of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) as the pretext, the UNP unleashed a violent wave of repression against unemployed rural youth in the south of the island, massacring some 60,000.

With popular opposition to the executive presidency and the whole political establishment rising to boiling point, successive parliamentary opposition parties have pledged to abolish the hated presidency. These promises have been dumped, however, as soon as they won office.

Sri Lankan Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakse admitted to parliament on October 8 that International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Union and United Nations envoys often visited his ministry asking when the constitution would be amended and what provisions it would contain to restore democracy.

These international pressures would be eased, he said, but it would be helpful in obtaining IMF financial assistance if the amendment was passed.

President Wickremesinghe and his government are currently negotiating an emergency loan from the IMF to try and alleviate Sri Lanka’s catastrophic economic crisis, which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

The IMF and other financial institutions are not concerned about the democratic rights of the Sri Lankan masses. They calculate, however, that the pretence of so-called good governance measures would help to dissipate the mass opposition to the government, as it implements finance capital’s brutal austerity demands.

The support for the 21st amendment by all the opposition parliamentary parties speaks volumes. It highlights the bipartisan agreement of the ruling and opposition parties for IMF austerity and their readiness to use the executive presidency to crush social opposition if they come to power.

The limited criticism of the new amendment by the opposition parties, even as they endorsed it, is completely bogus.

During the parliamentary debate, Sajith Premadasa, leader of Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), the main opposition party, declared: “We are voting in favour of this amendment because we want to help get this country out of the economic crisis.” In other words, his principal concern was to appease the IMF.

JVP leader Anura Kumar Dissanayake supported the amendment while criticising ruling party MPs for having previously backed amendments that increased the president’s executive powers.

JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake [Photo: Anura Kumara Dissanayake Facebook]

The SJB leadership, then part of the UNP, as well as the JVP directly supported the 26-year communalist war against the LTTE, and all the associated repressive laws, including the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

These organisations silently endorsed President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s repeated issuing of essential public service orders, as well as states of emergency to ban strikes and suppress workers’ struggles. They also provided similar support to President Wickremesinghe who has imposed essential public service orders and strike bans on petroleum, electricity and health employees.

M. A Sumanthiran, a leading Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MP, criticised the new amendment, declaring that his party did not want to support any “tinkering of the constitution.” Six TNA MPs, however, voted in favour the amendment. None of this has anything to do with defending the democratic rights of the masses. The preoccupation of the TNA, a pro-US party which supports the IMF austerity, is to pressure Colombo to introduce constitutional changes for a power-sharing arrangement for the Tamil elite.

For their part, the trade unions, which are aligned with the ruling and opposition parliamentary parties, have maintained a guilty silence about these constitutional changes.

There is no section in the capitalist ruling class in Sri Lanka which defends democratic rights. From its formal independence from British rule in 1948, successive Sri Lankan governments have systematically used emergency powers to suppress the resistance of workers and the poor whilst fueling anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim provocations to divide the working class.