Out-Of-Pocket Healthcare Expenditure, Covid-19 and Impoverishment in India

Iffat Jahan Azhar & Mohammad Akram

According to World Health Organisation (WHO), healthcare services, all over the world, aim to ensure that necessary services are accessible to people at affordable prices. But it seems different in low and middle income countries including India, where government’s spending on healthcare is very little and healthcare financing is heavily relying upon out-of-pocket expenditure made by individuals. In India, healthcare services are provided by public as well as private sectors. However, the share of the private health sector is much more than the public sector in the overall utilization of health services in India due to lack of facilities provided in public sector, low health expenditure by the government and highly developed private health care sector.

India’s total health care spending is 3.6% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as per the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2018. According to latest budget, the government expenditure on healthcare is only 1.6% of the GDP in FY20, while the National Health Policy in 2017 proposes to increase this to 2.5% of the GDP by 2025. However, India’s public health expenditure is amongst the lowest in the world. According to Hooda, low and inadequate public spending in health sector has been a generic problem of India. In a recent period, the spending level is noticed to be lower than the required level of resources; in fact, it cannot even meet the minimum level of basic healthcare facilities in the country (Hooda, 2015). Low investment in health by Indian government is unable to cover the full spectrum of healthcare needs. This has resulted in low utilization of public healthcare facilities. According to NITI AAYOG report, the country’s health system lags behind many comparable countries on multiple dimensions including public financing for healthcare, level and depth of health insurance coverage as measured by household exposure to out-to-pocket expenditure to health.

Indians are the sixth biggest out-of-pocket (OOP) health spenders in the low-middle income group of 50 nations, as IndiaSpend reported in May 2018. As per the latest National Health Accounts (NHA) 2016-17, the OOP expenditure as a percentage of total health expenditure has declined from 64.2% in 2013-14 to 58.7 in 2016-17 but still dominates in India. This high share of OOP health expenditure imposes an extreme financial burden on households because the fees and cost of treatment is very high in private facilities and unaffordable for people with low income. However, this OOP health expenditure is constraining expenditure on other necessities and leading to a loss of welfare both at micro (household) and at macro (national) levels (Garg & Karan, 2008). OOP expenditure on health is one of the biggest reasons for people falling into poverty in India.

According to National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) 71st round, held in 2014, the cost of hospitalisation in a private facility increased 4.2 times as compared to that in a public facility. New data from the National Health Accounts (NHA) published by the union health ministry reveals that medicines are the biggest financial burden on Indian households. According to National Health Profile 2018, around 43% of the total OOP spending went in buying medicines. Because of the shortage of medicine in most of the public health facilities patient are forced to buy it from private pharmacies with their own money. According to Ladusingh & Pandey, the high OOP health care expenditure expose households to substantial financial risk and in extreme situation can push households to poverty. Hence, health cost keeps people poor, and push those just above the poverty line back into poverty. Evidence shows that medical poverty owing to high OOP expenditure increased from 32.5 million in 1999–2000 to 50.6 million in 2011–12. Every year, 3.5 to 6.2% of the population of India is pushed into poverty due to high OOP expenditure (Dash & Mohanty, 2019).

The main causes of high share of OOP health expenditure in India is low government allocation for healthcare. However, government often projects low coverage of health insurance in India as the main cause of high OOP expenditure. Health insurance is often seen as means to finance household healthcare expenditure. It provides financial protection to the population from being trapped in poverty. But NSSO’s 75th report shows that less than 20% of the population is covered by health insurance in India. That is, only 14.1% in rural areas and 19.1% in urban areas had any form of health coverage. This leaves the vast majority of Indians exposed to health related financial shocks. Hence, more than 80% of the population pays from their pocket at the time of healthcare services. Patients end up spending out of their pockets on medicines, doctors’ fees, bed charges, diagnostic tests, drugs at public and private hospitals and pharmacies despite various public healthcare schemes. This high OOP payment for healthcare and lack of comprehensive insurance coverage has exposed vulnerable households to the risk of impoverishment.

With this healthcare system, India is currently facing coronavirus pandemic. Shortage in medical care facility centres, medical supplies and inability to provide adequate testing are the major medical issues of concern. Loss of employment and reverse migration of lackhs of workers from the major cities have become other serious problem caused by Covid-19 and the consequent abrupt lockdowns. Governments are trying to expand facilities to deal with this situation. Though the government of India has made some efforts to rationalize the treatment price in case of Covid-19 cases by coming out with the package for Covid-19 under Ayushman Bharat, but those who are not covered under this scheme have a fear of burden of Covid-19 treatment cost because data shows that the average treatment cost in the case of Covid-19 is very high in private hospitals. Even a single test of Covid-19 costs Rupees 4,500/- in private labs. Trapped between reductions in income and often complete loss of employment due to lockdown and the state of not having any insurance coverage, the lower as well as middle income families either go to over-burdened government facilities for treatment or get pushed under poverty while seeking treatment in private hospitals or even completely get perished. Many just don’t have the privilege of even thinking of a proper medical care.

At this point of time it is a reminder that government needs to rapidly introduce several large scale interventions to increase the income of the lower and lower-middle classes by offering direct employment opportunities or compensatory income benefits along with increasing the spending in healthcare and standardising the hospital packages for all morbidities including Covid-19 patients so that those without enough income or health insurance coverage could not be exploited with excessive high pricing by private medical care and can think of getting the most necessary medical care.

Sri Lankan government responds to rising COVID-19 infections by abandoning expatriate workers

Saman Gunadasa

This week, the Sri Lankan government stopped planned air flights to bring Sri Lankan migrant workers back home from the Middle East. The decision was made after it was discovered that many were infected with the coronavirus.

On May 26, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s media division announced that a “new mechanism is to be formulated to repatriate Sri Lankans.” Information about the “new mechanism” has not yet been released.

On Wednesday, Army Commander Shavendra Silva, head of the National Operation Centre for the Prevention of COVID-19, told the media that 157 coronavirus cases had resulted from workers returning from abroad. “If more Sri Lankans were repatriated from Middle Eastern (ME) countries,” he said, “there’s the possibility of more infected patients.”

Workers jostle to get seat in bus at Kottawa (Credit: WSWS)

Between May 24 and 28, the number of confirmed infections in Sri Lanka spiked by 383, to a total of 1,524. The increase was a new record and saw the government allocate two additional hospitals—in Hambantota and Teldeniya—to deal with the growing number of cases. The surge was a result virus-infected migrant workers returning from Kuwait, Dubai and Qatar, along with increased cases among Sri Lankan sailors.

The migrant workers have correctly pointed out that they became infected because Colombo refused to organise their prompt repatriation. There are still more than 16,000 migrant workers stranded with lapsed visas in Kuwait alone.

On April 21, the Kuwaiti government granted a “general amnesty period” so these workers could leave the country. The Sri Lankan government, however, failed to immediately organise their return, even as the pandemic rapidly spread in Kuwait.

The Sri Lankan workers, many of whom are destitute and currently staying in unsafe and overcrowded accommodation, even staged a protest outside the Sri Lankan embassy in Kuwait. Several workers spoke out on a YouTube video calling on Colombo to get them back home.

R. Wickremanayake, a Sri Lankan printer in Sharjah, a city in the United Arab Emirates, told the WSWS that his salary was cut by 50 percent last month and then reduced by 40 percent in May. His previous 1,600 dirhams ($US435) monthly salary is now just 640 dirhams.

Social-distancing not possible as workers board bus in Kottawa (Credit: WSWS)

The government hospitals were full of patients and migrant workers were instructed to remain where they were even if they became ill, he said. The Sri Lankan government had done nothing more than advising the migrant workers to be careful and register their locations.

There are over one million Sri Lankan migrant workers in the Middle East, one component of the multi-million-strong South Asian workforce toiling in that region for low wages and in horrible working conditions.

The cash-strapped Sri Lankan government depends on up to $7 billion in annual remittances from these workers. Successive Colombo governments have hypocritically praised these workers as the “lifeblood of the country,” but the real attitude of Sri Lanka’s ruling elite was blurted out by Mahindananda Aluthgamage, a former minister and ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna leader. Appearing on the Derana talk show this week, he referred to the infected workers as “bombs.”

While Middle Eastern governments want to send back the migrant workers, Colombo is not interested. Discouraging expatriate workers from returning home, Ravinatha Ariyasinha, Sri Lanka’s foreign ministry secretary, said: “Our plea to these employees, as we did to students some time ago, is to ask them to carefully calibrate the possible loss of jobs or loss of educational opportunity or major delays which can occur with their return.”

The attitude of the Sri Lankan capitalist class towards these workers echoes observations made by Friedrich Engels about the British bourgeoisie in his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England: “For it [the bourgeoisie] nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted.”

On May 26, as it was rejecting the stranded Sri Lankan migrant workers’ appeals, Colombo continued its reckless reopening of the economy, ending the daytime lockdown for all districts, including the country’s most virus-affected commercial centres in Colombo and Gampaha.

Army Commander Silva, however, cynically declared: “We are winning the war against the deadly virus. What I expect from the public is to bear with us for another few weeks by strictly adhering to health and security advisories, paramount being physical distancing and hygiene.”

These health directives cannot be observed by workers, who have to travel on overcrowded buses or railways and endure workplaces where social distancing is impossible.

The Rajapakse government’s callous indifference towards the plight of the stranded migrants is the same as its attitude towards workers inside Sri Lanka. The government has not bothered to even issue an estimate on national job losses or the numbers of people with no income. There is no official information on whose wages and pensions have been slashed, and whose working hours have increased.

Like its counterparts around the world, the Sri Lankan government, with the support of a compliant media, is covertly practicing “herd immunity” policies that allow the virus to spread unhindered and infect the most vulnerable sections of society.

From the outset, the Rajapakse government downplayed the deadly disease when the first case was discovered in January and claimed that the problem was “under control.”

Colombo is disregarding World Health Organization (WHO) advice and attempting to paint a rosy picture of the situation, asserting that Sri Lanka is “open for business.”

WHO emergencies head Dr. Mike Ryan said on May 25 that COVID-19 cases were still “increasing in Central and South America, South Asia and Africa,” and that “infection rates could rise again more quickly if measures to halt the first wave were lifted too soon.”

According to figures released yesterday by the national health bureau, daily average tests conducted in Sri Lanka between February 18 and May 27 were just 883, one of the lowest rates in the world.

Child poverty and hunger set to spike in Puerto Rico

Alberto Escalera

A recent study conducted by the Institute of Youth Development (IYD) in Puerto Rico is warning of a sharp increase in the already shameful level of child poverty in the US colony due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The increase in the number of youth living in extreme poverty is by no means a phenomenon limited to places like Puerto Rico. Poverty and hunger among children across the globe, including in countries like the United States, have now reached levels without modern precedent.

According to the authors of the IYD study, “Los efectos del Covid-19 en la niñez de Puerto Rico: Vulnerabilidades, proyecciones y recomendaciones,” in the absence of significant measures to mitigate the trend, the percentage of children living in extreme poverty in Puerto Rico is likely to rise this year from 58 percent to a staggering 65 percent. The study highlights that within the first four months of 2020, an additional 244,000 residents of Puerto Rico fell below the federal poverty line, including 43,000 children.

Even before the pandemic, Puerto Rico, with a current population of just over 3 million, was reeling from a decade-long economic recession, chronically low labor force participation rates and a public debt crisis that served as a pretext for years of severe austerity policies. These conditions provoked an exodus of approximately 500,000 people during the same period. A significant number of those that left Puerto Rico were of prime working age, resulting in a demographic shift in which people age 60 and older now represent 26 percent of the population. Approximately 40 percent of the elderly in Puerto Rico also live below the poverty line.

As the IYD study points out, working families in Puerto Rico were already facing elevated levels of economic and food insecurity as well as associated health risks when the pandemic struck. The high percentage of single-parent households and workers susceptible to layoffs due to economic closure are additional factors that have deepened the social impact of the pandemic.

Despite the important exposures of capitalism’s failures contained in the IYD report, the narrow political perspective of its authors leads them to deflect from the structural roots of poverty down the blind alley of policy recommendations which, even in the unlikely event of being fully implemented, will do nothing to address the structural roots of poverty.

For example, the authors advocate for an extension of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC) to Puerto Rico, as well as a combination of cash payments to the working poor and unemployed and tax credits to employers. These paltry measures, which are already being implemented to some degree in the mainland US, have done little to stem the increase in poverty there, particularly among children.

Another policy prescription proposed by the report’s authors calls for including Puerto Rico in the federal Pandemic EBT program enacted by the US Congress this past March. The EBT program, which is intended to compensate for the lost school meals of school-aged children due to school closures by placing the value of those meals on debit-like, electronic cards that families can use to purchase food, has been plagued by a series of problems since its inception.

Under the EBT program, families receive $5.70 for each day of school missed due to the pandemic. In states like Texas, where the school year ends earlier than in other parts of the country, this amounts to just $285 per school-aged child. In New York state, families are set to receive a meager $420.

It is important to highlight that according to the Consumer Price Index Summary included on the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website, April saw the largest monthly increase in food prices since February of 1974. This increase in food prices is taking place amid the mass dumping of foodstuffs and euthanizing of livestock while scores of people go hungry.

A recent New York Times article pointed out that as of May 15, only 15 percent, or 4.4 million of the 30 million children who qualify for the EBT program, have received any benefits since it was started in March. In addition to delays stemming from the patchwork of state and federal nutrition programs and the lack of centralized data collection system on a national level, many state governors have either postponed applications to the EBT program or refused to participate altogether. This apparent lack of urgency on the part of many state governors can only be understood as part of the cynical strategy being pushed by the ruling class to starve working families back to work under dangerous conditions.

The question of reallocating resources from school meal programs to needy children during the COVID-19 pandemic recently provoked mass outrage in Puerto Rico, which was excluded from the Pandemic EBT program approved by Congress in March.

After weeks of schools being closed due to the pandemic, the Puerto Rico Department of Education (DE) finally opened up a limited number of school lunch facilities, comedores escolares, on May 6. Only 10 of Puerto Rico’s 78 municipalities, including San Juan with a population of over 300,000 residents, initially opened school lunch facilities to serve one hot meal a day to needy children.

A wave of protests eventually forced the DE to expand the number of open school lunch facilities to 105, an amount that remains woefully inadequate to address the needs of 180,000 low income, school-aged children that qualify for free meals in Puerto Rico. Last week, a group of parents successfully petitioned a Puerto Rico court to order the DE to open as many school lunch facilities as necessary. However, school officials in Puerto Rico have yet to make public any plans to carry out the court ruling.

Amid worsening economic downturn, European Union moves to set up bailout fund

Nick Beams

The European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, has set out a €750 billion economic recovery plan to try and counter the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its economy amid fears that unless action is taken the bloc could disintegrate.

Under the plan, set out in a speech by the commission president Ursula von der Leyen to the European Parliament in Brussels on Wednesday, the money would be raised by the commission in capital markets and then distributed to member nations in order to finance stimulus packages. It would be financed either by a special tax or increased contribution from EU member states.

Of the €750 billion, €500 billion would be in the form of non-repayable grants with a further €250 billion issued as loans.

But there is no guarantee that the proposal, which requires the unanimous approval from the 27 member nations of the EU, will go ahead because of substantial divisions within the organisation.

The proposal to make grants has been opposed by the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and Sweden. Dubbed the “frugal four,” they have insisted that there should be an emergency fund financed by loans only. But this has been rejected by southern states because it would only add to their already high levels of government debt.

The move to establish the new fund comes amid warnings that the effects of the pandemic on the European economy are far more serious than had been initially anticipated. In a webinar with students on Wednesday, European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde said the euro zone would shrink by between 8 and 12 percent this year.

This recession, twice as deep as that resulting from the global financial crisis of 2008, was the outcome of the “sudden stop of activity” due to the pandemic. It had slowed down the “pace of life, the pace of growth, the creation of value” and would have “lasting effects despite all the measures we are taking,” she said.

The ECB launched a €750 billion bond buying program in March and is predicted to increase its purchases by a further €500 billion when its governing council meets on June 4.

In its biannual financial stability review, issued earlier this week, the ECB warned that rapidly rising government debt levels could lead to a reassessment of sovereign risk and “reignite pressures on some countries where debt levels are already high.”

Overall aggregate government debt in the euro zone is predicted to rise from 86 percent of GDP to more than 100 percent. Public debt is already at record levels in a number of countries, approaching 200 percent in Greece, 160 percent in Italy, 130 percent in Portugal and just below 120 percent in France and Spain.

The ECB warned that a more severe downturn than expected could set public finances on an “unsustainable path in highly indebted countries” and that a “negative feedback loop” could re-emerge where a downgrade in ratings for banks holding large amounts of government debt feeds into sovereign debt ratings. This so-called “doom loop,” which appeared in the euro zone in the financial crisis of 2012, could affect Italy, Portugal and Spain, “where bank ratings are closest to non-investment grade.”

The proposal for an EU-funded bailout mechanism was only made possible by a surprise decision by Germany on May 18 to agree with France on a proposal for a €500 billion fund to be made available in the form of grants.

The decision was taken against strong internal opposition in Germany against any measures in which the richer EU countries would fund the economies of the poorer ones. This opposition was given expression in a ruling by Germany’s constitutional court on May 5, which challenged the legality of the country’s Bundesbank taking part in the ECB’s asset purchasing program.

The court said the government had to carry out a “proportionality assessment” of the ECB’s asset purchases to ensure their economic and fiscal policy effects were within the ECB’s mandate, that is, the purchases did not involve funding the debt of other governments. It threatened to order the Bundesbank to block asset purchases unless this assessment was done within three months.

The decision raised wide concerns about the future of the European Union and the ECB. Financial Times economics commentator Martin Wolf wrote that the court decision had “launched a legal missile into the heart of the EU.” The “extraordinary judgement” was “an attack on basic economics, the central bank’s integrity, its independence and the legal order of the EU.”

It opened the way for courts in other countries to decree that their national central banks could not take part in policies they disliked and “pretty soon, the ECB will have been sliced and diced into a nullity.”

The German court decision appears to have been at least partly responsible for the switch by the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel to throw its support behind an EU-backed bailout fund. Previously Berlin had opposed any suggestion that money from a fund should be distributed in the form of grants rather than loans.

But according to a “senior German official,” cited in a report by the Financial Times, the “moment of reckoning” came when the court cast doubt on the legality of the ECB’s bond buying program so far as the Bundesbank was concerned and some other policy had to be developed.

In April, as the effects of the pandemic were spreading, French President Emmanuel Macron warned in an interview with the Financial Times that the euro zone and the “European idea” would fail if the EU did not set up a fund to issue common debt and finance member states according to their needs rather than the size of their economies.

These sentiments were echoed in recent comments by Merkel that the economic impact of the virus was so great that it could “endanger the European Union’s cohesion” and “the national state alone has no future.”

The proposal for the bailout measures has nothing to do with meeting the needs of the mass of the European population, now confronted with the worst economic and social conditions since the 1930s.

It appears that Paris and Berlin, which both utilise the EU to enhance their economic and political power globally, have made the decision that economic and financial stops have to be pulled out to try to save it.

But whether the plan even goes ahead in the face of opposition within the EU itself is another question.

The Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, told Politico on Wednesday: “We need to take everyone’s interests into account and there are very different interest groups: the southern countries, who fundamentally always want more; the East Europeans, who have an interest in preventing everything from flowing south; and, of course, those who have to pay for it all, the net payers.”

A diplomat from the Netherlands, along with Austria a member of the “frugal four,” told the Wall Street Journal: “Negotiations will take time. It’s difficult to imagine this proposal will be the end-state of those negotiations.”

Russia’s right-wing opposition tries to gain from COVID-19 crisis

Andrea Peters

The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a political crisis inside Russia, as the Kremlin struggles to bring the outbreak under control and address its economic fallout. With the situation exacerbated by a simultaneous steep drop in global oil prices, the Ministry of Economic Development revealed yesterday that it anticipates a decline in gross domestic product by as much as 7.5 percent this year.

President Vladimir Putin’s poll numbers have fallen to historically low levels, as social anger mounts over the conditions facing the country’s health care workers, official efforts to cover up the scale of the death toll, and the government’s failure to take any meaningful action to shield the population from the impact of mass layoffs and falling real incomes. Following the approach taken in every major country, the Kremlin “reopened” the economy more than a week ago in a reckless effort to force people back to work, even as the country’s coronavirus cases approach 380,000, the third-most diagnosed cases on the planet.

The Kremlin announced earlier this week that it will hold postponed Victory Day celebrations, which were to take place May 9 in Moscow, on June 24. The parade, which at the very least will bring thousands of soldiers to the capital city—the center of Russia’s COVID-19 outbreak—threatens a new surge in the pandemic. The government is willing to risk this, as well as the possibility of another postponement, because it needs the display of state authority, nationalist hoopla, and feeling of shared sacrifice that the commemoration of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II generates, as a counter to the political tensions developing because of the pandemic.

Alexei Navalny

As Russia’s government tries to shore up its position, Alexei Navalny, the leading spokesperson of the liberal opposition and a self-styled “anticorruption” politician, is working to capitalize on mass discontent and steer it in a right-wing direction. Through his social media accounts and the Navalny Live program—a YouTube forum where he discusses political issues—he works to present himself as a platform through which health care workers can air their grievances and specialists can challenge official data on the pandemic.

According to a late April poll by the Levada Center, Navalny’s popularity, while still low, is rising. In Moscow, he has more support than Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and the far-right head of the Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. In the country as a whole, he has a higher rating than Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, who has been promoted in the media as the city’s champion in the battle against COVID-19.

The material Navalny rebroadcasts on his Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram from medical workers sometimes strikes a nerve. A nurse in Saransk describes a bureaucratic nightmare of ineptitude and indifference; she and her family all came down with COVID-19 and received no help from the authorities. She was made to work despite being severely ill, and then threatened with fines for allegedly violating her quarantine when she was finally sent off to self-isolate. The nurse’s mother succumbed to the illness, a death unrecorded in COVID-19 mortality data because she also suffered from diabetes, which will be registered as the official cause of death.

Medics in Simferopol, exhausted and angry, read out a statement denouncing the government’s failure to pay them promised bonuses. Doctors seeking to expose the conditions under which they work reveal they are muzzled, fired or threatened with firing. Physicians’ publications of the names of their dead colleagues show an extremely high mortality rate for medical workers. Special place is given to videos by Leonid Volkov, a Yale-trained, right-wing ally of Navalny’s, to raise questions about the government’s questionable virus counts. The Doctor’s Alliance—a supposedly “independent” trade union founded in 2018 to tap into protests over the disastrous state of Russia’s health care system—is put forward as a force for change.

All of this is interspersed with, as is typical for Navalny, corruption revelations of different sorts. The children of top bureaucrats are receiving various government awards; former Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev has a fancy yacht; the speaker of the Russian parliament is hiding his wealth.

As Navalny noted in a May 20 interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the US government-funded news outlet, “right now the degree of protest activity among citizens is probably one of the highest in recent times.” Just a few days earlier, he insisted that the opposition is fit to rule because “it needs the support of the people and the growth of that support.” Navalny is calling for a boycott or a “no” vote on proposed changes to the constitution, which Putin views as key to further consolidating power at the federal level. They are expected to be put to a popular referendum at some point in the coming months.

Despite Navalny’s efforts to present himself as an advocate for the people, his limp populism is a weak cover for a right-wing program. His “Five steps to support the citizens of Russia and its economy”—which is supposed to be an answer to the government’s miserable measures—consists of a few paltry payouts to individuals and their children, a short-term suspension of utility payments, and significant tax breaks and bailouts for small and medium-sized business. There is no indication that the business interests Navalny criticizes for their corruption would be asked to give up the tiniest fraction of their wealth. Notably absent from Navalny’s media presence is any mention of the mass COVID-19 outbreaks among oil field workers and gold miners, employed by two of Russia’s largest corporations: Gazprom and Polyus.

What stands behind the populist feint that Navalny is attempting in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic is a standard-fare, right-wing program of free markets, economic austerity, cutting taxes and red tape for corporations, the privatization of semi-state-owned enterprises, and the deepening of Russia’s bonds with global finance capital. Navalny and his entourage have extensive ties to the American state, media, and foreign policy establishment, with an examination of his political allies and advisers showing a revolving door of individuals moving from “opposition” politics in Russia to think tanks and media outlets in the US. Navalny has a long history of close involvement with far-right politics, including marching alongside Russia’s fascists and spitting vitriol about immigrants.

As evidenced by his regular promotion in the American press as a “democrat” doing battle against Putin’s despotism, Navalny has a significant level of support among forces in the United States that are at the center of the anti-Russian campaign that threatens to provoke a world war. As the Kremlin is further destabilized by the coronavirus pandemic and the spreading global economic crisis, Navalny may be increasingly pushed forward by those who view the Putin government’s control of Russia’s wealth as an intolerable limit to their own desires to exploit the Eurasian landmass and its people.

White House considers expelling Chinese graduate students and researchers

Shuvu Batta

On Thursday, based on reports given by US state officials, the New York Times broke news that the Trump administration plans to expel some three to five thousand Chinese graduate students and researchers. The same day, Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn introduced a bill in Congress that would ban all visas for Chinese nationals admitted for study in science and mathematics.

Officials acknowledged that the plans to expel these individuals are not based on any direct evidence of espionage or trade theft, but rather on “suspicions.” The suspicions are drawn out from the student or researcher’s prior history as a student in one of the many universities sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army(PLA) of China.

Beating the drums for war, Senator Cotton said last month: “If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America; they don’t need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America… those Chinese students, go back to China to compete for our jobs, to take our business, and ultimately to steal our property and design weapons and other devices that can be used against the American people.”

Cotton, alongside the rest of the US ruling class, is demonizing the whole of the 360,000 Chinese student population in the country, essentially branding them as agents of the Chinese State. They are trying to divert domestic social opposition against the state towards China, by using phrases such as “our property” and “our weapons” while 40 million people are unemployed, US billionaires gain over $400 billion in wealth, and cities begin to riot.

Universities have emerged as a critical battleground in this process. The plan to expel students follows recent attacks on scientists of Chinese descent in the country, who have been arrested on charges of “economic espionage.” Nine leading universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown are currently under investigation for connections to China’s “Thousand Talents Program,” a recruiting program for leading international experts in scientific research.

According to a study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, partially funded by the Australian Ministry of Defense, “since 2007, the PLA has sponsored more than 2,500 military scientists and engineers to study abroad and has developed relationships with researchers and institutions across the globe.” The collaboration is highest in the Five Eyes countries (military and intelligence alliance dominated by the US) and then Germany/Singapore. The study recommended that policymakers and officials put increased pressure on universities while building strong ties to the military apparatus, to secure research and protect against “economic espionage.”

Over the past few decades, China has managed to transform its military with many of the latest advances in science into a force capable of adequately resisting and even defeating the United States. According to leading Pentagon Official David Ochmanek, “In our games [computer simulations], when we fight Russia and China,” with blue representing the United States, “blue gets its ass handed to it.” The attack on Chinese scientists and students, in addition to diverting social tension, is also a crude attempt to block the development of China’s military as it stands in the way of US imperialism’s ambition to gain domination of the Asia-Pacific.

However, the US’s attacks against Chinese scientists and students risk undermining their own technological and scientific level.

According to the National Science Foundation, compared to 69 percent of Europeans, over 90 percent of Chinese STEM students have remained in the US after a decade. More Chinese scientists move to the United States than vice versa. An analysis by Jenny J. Lee and John P. Haupt of the University of Arizona found that if papers by Chinese coauthors were left out, the number of science and engineering publications by US-based scientists would have declined about 2 percent from 2014 to 2018.

In response to Thursday’s news, a Bloomberg Opinion piece asked the question “Although the vast majority of scientific articles by Chinese researchers are published in their own language, the best researchers publish in English. That makes their work easily accessible to Americans in their native tongue, an enormous advantage. Would the U.S. really be better off if its scientists had to learn Chinese?”

Since the start of 2020, despite growing military and trade tensions, collaboration between American and Chinese researchers has increased, primarily due to the outbreak of COVID-19. Researchers have exchanged crucial details about the virus, but the developing attacks on China will lead to a disintegration of such efforts and will ultimately undermine the development of a vaccine. Rather than international collaboration, US imperialism and its allies have instead escalated national divisions and rivalries.

Canada has moved forward with the extradition trial of a top executive of Huawei, a Chinese company that is leading the 5G industry. Australia has expanded the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, giving it the authority to interrogate those suspected of “espionage and politically motivated violence.” Under the direction of Washington, India has escalated border tensions with China, risking the outbreak of war. In opposition to China, the United Kingdom is considering extending visa rights to 300,000 Hong Kong residents, which follows the US announcement of increased anti-China sanctions.

Rise in deaths attributed to pneumonia suggests official US coronavirus death toll is grossly undercounted

Bryan Dyne & Benjamin Mateus

Data collected by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that tens of thousands of deaths attributed to pneumonia were more likely caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and that the real death toll from COVID-19 is nearly 50 percent higher than the officially reported number of about 103,000.

According to provisional data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), there were at least 63,752 deaths caused by the pandemic from the week ending April 4 through the week ending May 2, reflecting the sharp rise in cases in the United States beginning in mid-March. During that same period, there were 47,812 pneumonia deaths, which is 65 percent higher than normal, based on seasonal averages.

Assuming that these excess deaths were actually caused by the pandemic, either directly by the virus or by those who fell sick and were afraid to get treated at a hospital, this would bring the COVID-related mortality in April to 92,524. Extrapolating through May, this would bring the actual number of dead as a result of the coronavirus to just under 150,000.

A person is taken on a stretcher into the United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas after going through testing for COVID-19 (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

And even these numbers are likely an underestimate. The CDC itself notes that mortality reporting is often behind by two months. Connecticut has not submitted its tally for pneumonia and influenza deaths since April 25, and North Carolina has not submitted such data since April 18. The most recent data collected, from the week ending on May 16, is at most 30.6 percent complete.

The likely higher numbers are corroborated by data from the website statista.com, which shows that from February to May 16, the number of COVID-19 deaths was 73,639, and that the number of pneumonia deaths was 89,555. Subtracting the seasonal average for pneumonia leaves 32,555 fatalities unaccounted for. Assuming again that these excess deaths were all caused by the pandemic, this brings the COVID-19 total during that period up to 106,194, an increase of 44 percent.

A review of this data also makes clear that the deadliness of the coronavirus dwarfs that of influenza. The data from statista shows 6,253 deaths from the flu, barely eight percent of the deaths from COVID-19. And even those, the site notes, also include “deaths with pneumonia or COVID-19 also listed as a cause of death.”

The unexplained sharp increase in pneumonia deaths is notable in many of the states that rushed to reopen as early as possible. In Colorado, which let its stay-at-home order expire on April 26, there are 919 coronavirus deaths recorded for April in the CDC’s provisional database and 762 fatalities from pneumonia, more than three times the seasonal average. If the excess deaths are counted as COVID-19, the state’s coronavirus mortality rate jumps by nearly 60 percent. Similarly for Mississippi, which loosened restrictions starting April 27, the real mortality rate is likely at least 49 percent higher.

The under-counting of COVID-19 deaths is being obfuscated by the CDC. There is a notable discrepancy between the pneumonia death count cited by the CDC and that cited by its NCHS unit, which is three times as high. The WSWS contacted the CDC to inquire about this discrepancy. The nurse responding on the phone admitted she was new and was unable to render much assistance, though she did agree there was a discrepancy. The call was then transferred to a manager who was also not able to explain the data. The call was transferred to the NCHS, then further transferred to the office of the director and a message was left on their answering machine requesting a callback. No callback came.

Even the 150,000 deaths calculated here could well be an undercount. Pneumonia may not be the only cause of death concealing the lethality of COVID-19, which is not just a respiratory disease, but attacks the lungs, heart, liver and brain. While the CDC does not have national data on heart disease for this year, state public health offices have published data which suggest that some cases of heart disease are ultimately derived from the pandemic.

In Michigan, for example, deaths from heart disease were up 20 percent in April from the total the previous year. Strokes, another potentially fatal symptom of the coronavirus, were up 18 percent from the previous year.

These issues are going to become more pronounced as the White House and state governors press for an even more rapid return to work. From the beginning, the chief concern of President Donald Trump and his cohorts in Washington has been to not spook the markets. The dangers of the pandemic have been downplayed since January, with Trump refusing to implement mass testing until well after the disease had achieved a beachhead in New York City and other areas of the country.

At the same time, the actual collection and reporting of the data itself has been muddled and suppressed. Last week, the employee in charge of Florida’s coronavirus database was fired after refusing to manipulate the data to justify Governor Ron DeSantis’ back-to-work order, an incident which has gone largely unreported in the national news. The CDC itself has come under fire for conflating nasal swab tests for the virus and antibody tests as both confirming the presence of coronavirus in a person, when the agency itself knows that these tests measure two different things, and that the latter test gives inaccurate results about half the time.

These are not coincidences. While no doubt some deaths caused by the coronavirus were mistakenly labeled as pneumonia or some other disease by an overworked coroner or medical examiner, workers should be suspicious that there is a concerted effort by the entire political establishment to manipulate data on the pandemic in order to facilitate its campaign to force the re-opening of factories, offices and plants while thousands are still dying of the coronavirus.

Mass anger erupts throughout the US in protests against police murder of George Floyd

Anthony Bertolt

Protests and demonstrations have erupted throughout the US in an explosive reaction to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In Minneapolis, thousands gathered on the same block where Floyd was killed and marched to the Minneapolis Third Police Precinct building. Multiple fires were burning Thursday, including at the Third Police Precinct, which remains on fire at the time of writing. The Minnesota National Guard announced late last night that 500 soldiers had been activated and were preparing to deploy.

Also late Thursday night, US President Donald Trump threatened to deploy the military against the demonstrators and shoot protesters. “I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American city, Minneapolis,” Trump tweeted. “Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.”

Police move through an area during demonstrations Thursday, May 28, 2020, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Trump called the protesters “THUGS” and said that he “just spoke to [Minnesota] Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Demonstrations were also held in New York City, where 33 protestors were arrested after a scrum with police. Hundreds of people also participated in demonstrations in Columbus, Ohio; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Pensacola, Florida; Louisville, Kentucky; and Los Angeles, California. In Columbus, protesters attempted to break into the Ohio statehouse.

Several hundred gathered in downtown Louisville and marched through the streets to demand the arrest of the cops who killed Breonna Taylor in March. In Denver, Colorado, a protestor was hit by a car that forced its way through the crowd.

Floyd was murdered Monday after being seized by four Minneapolis cops who were responding to an alleged “forgery in progress.” As of Thursday, none of the cops involved in the murder had been arrested or charged.

Floyd repeatedly cried out for help, screaming “I can’t breathe” and “I’m gonna die,” as Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck and Tou Thao helped keep the crowd from interfering.

At a Thursday afternoon press conference, Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey attempted to placate protesters and pleaded with them to “be better than we have been.” Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arrodondo joined in the plea to restore order in the city. “I know that there is currently a deficit of hope in our city… But I will not allow anyone to continue to increase that deficit by re-traumatizing those folks in our community,” he said.

Popular anger was further stoked Thursday by the comments of the prosecutor who has jurisdiction over the case, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman. He told reporters that there is “other evidence that does not support a criminal charge… I will not rush to justice.”

Freeman is responsible for the decision to not bring charges against the officer who killed Jamar Clark in 2016, sparking days of protest, as well as the more than half-a-year delay in deciding to charge and arrest the officer who shot and killed Justine Damond in 2017.

The eruption of anger is not only over the killing of George Floyd. This is only the latest in an unending string of killing and brutalization. Every year, the police in the US kill 1,000 people in cities and states throughout the country, whether run by Democrats or Republicans.

To the outrage over police violence is added the explosive situation created by the response of the ruling class to the coronavirus pandemic. Trillions have been handed out to the rich, while tens of millions of workers are out of work and will not have a job to return to.

The Trump administration is seeking to utilize mass social distress to force a return to work that will lead to a sharp spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths. Already, more than 100,000 people have died from the coronavirus.

From the representatives of the ruling elite, there have been the usual hypocritical statements that follow every horrific police killing. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who was vice president under Barack Obama, declared that the killing of Floyd is “part of an ingrained systemic cycle of injustice that still exists in this country.” The Obama Justice Department repeatedly whitewashed police killings, refusing to bring federal charges against killer cops.

This is combined with the efforts of Democratic Party figures like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to frame police violence as a product of racial conflict, as they did in speeches at the Minneapolis protest on Thursday.

There is no doubt that racism was involved the killing of Floyd and other incidents of horrific police violence. The most backward and fascistic layers are deliberately recruited into the police. The Trump administration in particular has encouraged unrestrained police violence with impunity.

However, the police are fundamentally an instrument of class rule. As social tensions reach a breaking point in the United States, the ruling class is turning ever more directly to the mobilization of its apparatus of repression.

American ruling class exploits the pandemic to escalate assault on jobs and wages

Jerry White

Another 2.1 million workers in the United States filed for unemployment benefits last week, according to the US Labor Department. This brings the total number of workers filing for jobless benefits to 40.8 million in the ten weeks since the pandemic led to the closure of much of the country’s economic activity in mid-March.

This number, which substantially understates the real scale of joblessness, is still a shocking 24.7 percent of the country’s labor force of 164.5 million people. Economists expect that May’s official unemployment rate, which will be released next Friday, will hit 20 percent, up from 14.7 percent in April.

Estimates of the real jobless rate exceed the historic record of 24.9 percent set in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression. Millions of jobless workers are not counted in the official toll because they are undocumented immigrants, self-employed or so-called gig workers. Others not counted include those working part-time jobs and those who have given up looking for non-existent jobs. In addition, millions are not counted as unemployed because overwhelmed state agencies have not processed their claims, depriving them of any jobless benefits.

A woman carries a box of food away as hundreds others impacted by the COVID-19 virus outbreak wait in line at a Salvation Army center in Chelsea, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Nevertheless, several states have staggering official jobless levels, including Washington (31.2 percent), Nevada (26.7), Florida (25.0), Hawaii (23.4), Michigan (23.1), California (20.6) and New York (19.9).

According to a University of Chicago report, 42 percent of the jobs that have been lost will never return. Major corporations are using the pandemic to accelerate restructuring plans drawn up long before the present crisis.

This week, Boeing announced it will cut 13,000 jobs, mostly in the US but also in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. American Airlines, which got a hefty portion of the $50 billion government bailout of the airlines, supposedly to retain employees, will slash 5,000 jobs, or 30 percent of its workforce.

This is part of a global trend. After receiving a multi-billion-dollar bailout from the French government, the Renault-Nissan auto alliance has released plans to close factories in France, Spain and other countries and slash more than 20,000 jobs. German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen plans to cut up to 15,000 jobs, or around 10 percent of its workforce, by 2025, with half the cuts in Germany.

After a decade of declining real incomes for workers, those returning to work are now facing the prospect of a new round of wage and benefit cuts. A Bloomberg News report cited the comments of Bruce Fallick, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, who said the circumstances of a public-health crisis probably make pay cuts more palatable to workers than they would normally be—at least initially.

Wage-cutting will hit every sector of workers, from nurses, grocery, delivery and other essential workers the corporate media has hailed as “heroes,” to office workers at Google, Facebook, Twitter, JPMorgan Chase, Walmart and other companies that are extending their work-from-home policies.

“Once people work from home, there will be an employment arbitrage,” Forbes recently noted, as companies “decide that a person working at home in Montana has the same skills as someone in Chicago, but will take a much lower salary. It will be hard for employees to negotiate for raises, as management will believe that they could easily find a replacement somewhere else within the United States or abroad.”

Meanwhile, corporations that have been handed billions of dollars by the federal government are proceeding to turn the bailout money over to their executives and investors.

In the name of “equal sacrifice,” major corporations have announced cuts to the base salaries of their chief executives. This is nothing but show, however. Base salaries account for only a tenth of the median pay of chief executives at the largest 500 US companies, with the bulk coming from stock awards.

Based on an examination of regulatory findings, Reuters found that scores of companies, including Uber, Delta Air Lines and Hilton hotels, had already made or were considering changes to pay plans to shield top executives from the economic fallout of the pandemic, even as profits plummeted and the companies slashed thousands of jobs.

Reuters reported that Sonic Automotive, which runs nearly 100 car dealerships, “changed its executive compensation plan from awarding stock based on performance to allowing executives to buy company stock, starting in 2021, at the depressed prices that shares hit on April 9 of this year. Their value has risen 67 percent since April 10, as a result of the stock market bubble produced by the Federal Reserve’s intervention and massive government stimulus spending. This has happened as sales fell about 40 percent year-on-year since the start of the pandemic, and the company furloughed or laid off 3,000 workers.”

Since the unanimous passage by the Democrats and Republicans of the CARES Act in late March, which authorized the US Treasury to spend trillions of dollars to take over the bad debts of banks and corporations, stocks have shot up by more than 35 percent. They are now just 10 percent below the record highs before the pandemic.

In the two months since Trump signed the CARES Act on March 27, the US death toll from COVID-19 has risen from 1,700 to over 103,000. Tens of millions have lost their jobs and are lining up for food assistance and face eviction as temporary moratoriums are lifted. During the same period, America’s billionaires have seen their net worth rise by $434 billion.

The ruling classes in every country are pursuing a homicidal policy of forcing workers back to unsafe workplaces even as the pandemic continues to spread, overwhelming new areas of the US and producing new nightmares in Mexico, Brazil, India and other countries. In every country, the capitalist governments are seeking to use economic pressure to force workers back, with Trump preparing to replace the $600 weekly supplement to unemployment benefits with a temporary $450 a week “back to work” bonus.

For the ruling class, workers are nothing more than “our human capital stock,” as Trump’s senior economic adviser Kevin Hassett said last week, to be herded back to work to produce the profits necessary to pay for the bailout of the rich.

But workers are not cattle. Prior to the pandemic, there was a major growth of social struggle and political radicalization of the working class in every country. In the US, the number of workers engaged in major strikes reached the highest levels in decades. The entire policy of the ruling class in response to the pandemic will produce a vast expansion of class conflict.

Workers must reject the false choice between their lives and their livelihoods. The fight against both the pandemic and the social catastrophe facing the working class is a fight against the financial oligarchy and the capitalist system. It is the fight for socialism.

The Future of Forever War, American-Style

Danny Sjursen

Covid-19, an ongoing global human tragedy, may have at least one silver lining. It has led millions of people to question America’s most malignant policies at home and abroad.

Regarding Washington’s war policies abroad, there’s been speculation that the coronavirus might, in the end, put a dent in such conflicts, if not prove an unintended peacemaker — and with good reason, since a cash-flush Pentagon has proven impotent as a virus challenger. Meanwhile, it’s become ever more obvious that, had a fraction of “defense” spending been invested in chronically underfunded disease control agencies, this country’s response to the coronavirus crisis might have been so much better.

Curiously enough, though, despite President Trump’s periodic complaints about America’s “ridiculous endless wars,” his administration has proven remarkably unwilling to agree to even a modest rollback in U.S. imperial ambitions. In some theaters of operation — Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Somalia above all — Washington has even escalated its militarism in a fit of macabre, largely under-the-radar pandemic opportunism.

For all that, this is an obvious moment to reflect on whether America’s nearly two-decade-old “war on terror” (perhaps better thought of as a set of wars of terror) might actually end. Predictions are tricky matters. Nonetheless, the spread of Covid-19 has offered a rare opportunity to raise questions, challenge frameworks, and critically consider what “ending” war might even mean for this country.

In some sense, our post-9/11 wars have been gradually subsiding for some time now. Even though the total number of U.S. troops deployed to the Middle East has actually risen in the Trump years, those numbers pale when compared to the U.S. commitment at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The number of American soldiers taking fire overseas has, in recent years, dropped to levels unthinkably low for those of us who entered the military around the time of the 9/11 attacks.

That said, in these years, even unwinnable, unnecessary wars have proven remarkably unendable. For evidence of this, look no further than that perennial war hawk Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Given the lack of success of the various campaigns run by U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, across that continent and the Pentagon’s stated desire to once again pivot to great-power competition with China and Russia, just before the pandemic arrived on our shores Secretary of Defense Mark Esper announced plans for a modest troop drawdown in parts of Africa. Appalled by even such minor retrenchments, Graham, leading a bipartisan group of lawmakers, reportedly confronted Esper and threatened to make his “life hell,” should the secretary downsize U.S. forces there.

Less than two months later, AFRICOM declared a public-health emergency at the largest of this country’s African bases in Djibouti amid concerns that even far smaller, more spartan American facilities on that continent lacked the requisite medical equipment to fight the spreading virus. Whether the pandemic facilitates Esper’s contemplated reductions remains to be seen. (A mid-April AFRICOM press release offering reassurance that the “command’s partnership endures during Covid-19” doesn’t bode well for such a transformation.)

Still, the disease will surely have some effect. Just as quarantine and social-distancing measures have transformed people’s lives and work in the U.S., Washington’s war fighting will undoubtedly have to adapt, too. Minimally, expect the Pentagon to wage wars (largely hidden from public view) that require ever fewer of its troops to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with allies and fewer still to die doing so. Expect Washington to mandate and the Pentagon to practice what might increasingly be thought of as social-distancing-style warfare.

Soldiers will operate in ever smaller teams. Just as senior leaders constantly counseled us junior officers in the bad old days to “put an Iraqi face between you and the problem,” so today’s and tomorrow’s troopers will do their best to place drones or (less precious) proxy lives between themselves and enemies of any sort. Meanwhile, the already immense chasm between the American public and the wars being fought in its name is only likely to widen. What may emerge from these years is a version of war so unrecognizable that, while still unending, it may no longer pass for war in the classic sense.

To grasp how we’ve made it to a social-distancing version of war, it’s necessary to go back to the earlier part of this century, years before a pandemic like Covid-19 was on anyone’s radar screen.

American Wars Don’t End, They Evolve

When, as a young Army lieutenant and later captain, I joined what were then called “surges” in Iraq in 2006 and Afghanistan in 2011, conventional foot soldiers like me were the main game in town. The doctrine of counterinsurgency, or COIN, then ruled the Pentagon’s intellectual roost. The trick, so key commanders believed, was to flood the war zone with infantry brigades, securing the conflict’s “center of gravity“: the locals. Behind the scenes, Special Operations units were already taking on ever-larger roles. Nevertheless, there were ample “boots-on-the-ground” and relatively high casualties in conventional units like mine.

Times have changed. Full-scale invasions and long-term occupations, along with COIN as a war-on-terror cure-all, long ago fell out of favor. By Barack Obama’s second term, such unpopular and costly campaigns were passé. Even so, rather than rethink the efficacy of imperial interventionism, Washington simply substituted new methods masquerading as the latest strategy of success.

By the time Donald Trump delivered his “American carnage” inaugural address, the burdens of Washington war-making had flipped. When I served in Iraq and Afghanistan, about half of the Army’s 40-odd combat brigades were deployed in those two regional theaters at any given time. The remainder were training for their next rotations and already on the “patch chart” where each unit’s logo indicated its future scheduled deployment. This was the life on the conveyor belt of American war that a generation of soldiers like me lived. By January 2017, however, the number of conventional brigades deployed in the war on terror could be counted on one hand.

For instance, the Army’s most recent round of deployments, announced this April, included just six brigades. Of these, two were aviation units and, among the ground forces, one was headed for Europe, another for Kuwait. Only two ground combat brigades, in other words, were slated for Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan and one of them was a reconstituted Security Force Assistance Brigade — essentially a skeleton crew of officers and noncommissioned officers meant to train and advise local troops. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s Special Operations forces, which had by then crested above 70,000, a figure so large as to raise questions about how “special” they remained, stepped onto that conveyor belt. America’s commandos now bear most of the burden of forever-war deployments and (modest) casualties.

A Two-Tier War-Making System

When the virus struck, the Pentagon had long been developing a bifurcated military machine with two separate and largely discrete roles. The commandos — with key assists from drones, CIA paramilitaries, local proxies, and private security contractors — continued to fight the lingering war on terror. They were generally handling the lethal end of American war, calling in airstrikes, while training, advising, and sometimes even leading often abusive indigenous forces.

Conventional active-duty brigades — reduced to 32 — were largely given quite a different task: to prepare for a future revamped Cold War with Russia and, increasingly, China. That crew — infantry, armored brigades, and Navy carrier squadrons — had the “new,” purportedly vital mission of checking, containing, or challenging Moscow in Eastern Europe and Beijing in the South China Sea. Senior generals and admirals were comfortable with such Cold War-style tasks (most having been commissioned in the mid-1980s). However, viewed from Russia or China, such missions looked increasingly provocative as ever more American riflemen, tanks, and warships regularly deployed to former Soviet republics or, in the case of the Navy, to Western Pacific waters that abut China, making the risk of accidental escalation seem ever more conceivable.

Meanwhile, those shadowy special operators were directing the ongoing shooting wars and other conflicts, which, though given precious little attention in this country, seemed patently counterproductive, not to say unwinnable. For the Pentagon and military-industrial-complex profiteers, however, such unending brushfire conflicts, along with a new great power build-up, were the gift that just kept giving, a two-tiered modus operandi for endless war-funding.

Enter the coronavirus.

In Cold Blood

Thought of a certain way, American war will, in the future, increasingly be waged in cold blood. While Covid-19 spreads virally through respiratory droplets, the disease of endless war continues to be blood-borne (even if ever less of it is American blood), ensuring that the social-distancing-style combat of the future could become even more of an abstraction here.

In addition, the preferred post-pandemic warriors of that future may not be uniformed soldiers, special or otherwise, or necessarily American — or in some cases (think drones and future robotic weaponry) human. U.S. war fighting has already been increasingly privatized. Only recently, Erik Prince, the former CEO of the private military company Blackwater, an influential Trump ally as well as the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, pitched the president on a far-fetched plan to privatize the whole Afghan War.

The Donald passed on the offer, but that it was even considered at such a high level suggests the role of private contractors and soldiers of fortune in future American war-making may be here to stay. In that sense, the recent fiasco of an armed raid led by former Green Berets-turned-mercenaries and aimed at the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro may prove as much a foreboding glimpse of the future as it was a farce.

When uniformed U.S. service members are deemed necessary, the trend toward using just handfuls of them to run an increasingly proxy-war machine is likely to accelerate. Such teams will fit well with public-health guidelines limiting gatherings to 10 people. For instance, drone ground control stations, essentially mobile trailers, require only a pair of operators. Similarly, the military’s newest cyberwar branch (formed in 2015) may not be made up of the hackers of Donald Trump’s imagination (“somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds”), but they, too, will work in tiny teams abroad, and at a great distance. Pushing those guidelines just a tad will be Army Special Forces A-Teams of 12 Green Berets each, which may prove to be core building blocks for a new American version of post-pandemic warfare.

Most disturbingly, American social-distancing ways of war will likely operate smoothly enough without suppressing terrorist groups any more successfully than the previous versions of forever war did, or solving local ethno-religious conflicts, or improving the lives of Africans or Arabs. Like their predecessors, future American wars in cold blood will fail, but with efficiency and, from the point of view of the military-industrial complex, lucratively.

Here, of course, is the deep and tragic paradox of it all. As the coronavirus should have reminded us, the true existential threats to the United States (and humanity) — disease pandemics, a potential nuclear Armageddon, and climate change — will be impervious to Washington’s usual military tools. No matter the number of warships, infantry and armored brigades, or commando teams, none of them will stand a chance against lethal viruses, rising tides, or nuclear fallout. As such, the Pentagon’s plethora of tanks, aircraft carriers (themselves petri-dishes for any virus around), and towers of cash (sorely needed elsewhere) will, in the future, be monuments to an era of American delusion.

A rational (or moral) system with any semblance of genuine legislative oversight or citizen input might respond to such conspicuous realities by rethinking the national security paradigm itself and bringing the war state to a screeching halt. Unfortunately, if America’s imperial past is any precedent, what lies ahead is the further evolution of twenty-first-century imperial war to the end of time.

Post-Pandemic War

Still, Covid-19 may prove the death knell of American war as classically imagined. Future combat, even if broadly directed from Washington, may be only vaguely “American.” Few uniformed citizens may take part in it and even fewer die from it.

During the prolonged endgame of wars that don’t really end, U.S. military fatalities will certainly continue to occur in occasional ones and twos — often in far-flung places where few Americans even realize their country is fighting (as with those four U.S. troops killed in an ambush in Niger in 2018 and the Army soldier and two private contractors killed in Kenya earlier this year). Such minuscule American losses will actually offer Washington more leeway to quietly ramp-up its drone attacks, air power, raiding, and killing, as has already happened in Somalia, with assumedly ever less oversight or attention at home. As in the Horn of Africa of late, the Pentagon won’t even have to bother to justify escalations in its war-making. Which raises a sort of “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there…” conundrum: if the U.S. is killing brown folks around the world, but hardly anyone notices, is the country still at war?

Moving forward, policymakers and the public alike may treat war with the same degree of entitlement and abstraction as ordering items from Amazon (especially during a pandemic): Click a button, expect a package at the door posthaste, and pay scant thought to what that click-request set in motion or the sacrifice required to do the deed.

Only in war, one thing at least stays constant: lots of someones get killed. The American people may leave their wars to unrepresentative professional “volunteers” led by an unchecked imperial presidency that increasingly outsources them to machines, mercenaries, and local militias. One thing is, however, guaranteed: some poor souls will be at the other end of those bombsights and rifle barrels.

In contemporary battles, it’s already exceptionally rare that a uniformed American is on that receiving end. Almost midway through 2020, only eight U.S. service members have been killed by hostile fire in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Yet many thousands of locals continue to die there. No one wants U.S. troops to die, but there’s something obscene — and morally troubling — about the staggering casualty disparity implicit in the developing twenty-first-century American way of war, the one that, in a Covid-19 world, is increasingly being fought in a socially-distanced way.

Taken to its not-unimaginable extreme, Americans should prepare themselves for a future in which their government kills and destroys on a global scale without a single service member dying in combat. After the pandemic, in other words, talk of “ending” this country’s forever wars may prove little more than an exercise in semantics.