Deepening crisis of American capitalism as national debt hits $30 trillion

Nick Beams

The announcement by the U.S. Treasury that the national government debt has topped $30 trillion is a milestone in the deepening historic crisis of American capitalism.

Over the past several decades, and particularly since the financial meltdown of 2008, the ruling class and the institutions of its state have attempted to cover this crisis over by flooding the financial system with money created with the press of a computer button. But it continues to manifest itself, assuming ever more malignant forms.

The U.S. Capitol building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Nov. 2, 2020. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

In its report on the debt level, the New York Times described it as an “ominous fiscal milestone that underscores the fragile nature of the country’s long-term economic health as it grapples with soaring prices and the prospect of higher interest rates.”

The sheer scale of the debt is almost impossible for ordinary imagination to grasp. But to put it in perspective, at $30 trillion it is now $7 trillion more than the entire gross domestic product of the United States—the total value of goods and services produced in a year—which stands at around $23 trillion.

And the pace of the debt rise is accelerating. At the start of 2020, it was forecast that it would reach $30 trillion by around the end of 2025. The acceleration is being put down to increased spending as a result of the pandemic. But such an analysis ignores two vital facts.

First, the shock to the American economy delivered by the coronavirus has been magnified many-fold by the criminal refusal of the government—under Trump and Biden alike—to take meaningful public health safety measures, especially at the outset, which could have contained the outbreak at the beginning, motivated by fear this would adversely impact the stock market. Further, much of the pandemic spending was devoted to billions of dollars of handouts to major corporations while at the same time providing them with further tax breaks.

Second, the rise of the debt, going back decades, is the result not of increased spending on social services and facilities. These have been continuously cut back. Rather, it is the product of increased spending on the military—the current military budget hit a new record of $770 billion—as well as continuous tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy and the major corporations with the result, as numerous studies have shown, that they pay little or no tax at all.

These policies have remained consistent through the administrations of Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden.

Furthermore, the rise of the national debt is the outcome of deeper processes rooted in a transformation in the mode of profit accumulation in the US economy.

The past four decades and more have seen the rise of financialization—the process by which profits are increasingly accumulated by financial operations via the stock market. This has accelerated over the past two years, with Wall Street reaching new records, resulting in the transfer of trillions of dollars into the coffers of the pandemic billionaires. The same processes are at work in every capitalist economy around the world, assuming their most extreme form in the US.

The immediate questions that arise are how will this debt be paid for and what are its implications for the working class.

Speaking to the virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said it was “important to evaluate debt sustainability in the context of the interest-rate environment” and the burden of US debt was “very manageable” because of low interest rates.

The so-called “management” of national debt takes place through the market for U.S. Treasury bonds issued by the US government that are bought up by financial investors. However, in March 2020, as Wall Street plunged, this process completely broke down when there was a rush out of government debt. At the height of the crisis, no buyers could be found for Treasury bonds, supposedly the most secure and stable financial asset in the world.

The crisis, which threatened to bring down US and global financial markets, was only averted through a massive intervention by the Federal Reserve central bank, which backed all areas of the financial system, spending at one point 1 million dollars a second. The result is that, whereas in 2008 the Fed held $800 billion of assets on its books, it now has just under $9 trillion.

In the past decade, the national debt has been increasingly financed by a round-robin operation in which one arm of the state, the government, issues debt in the form of Treasury bonds, while another arm, the central bank buys it up.

It has been calculated that since the Fed began its second quantitative easing program in 2010, its purchases of Treasury debt have funded between 60 and 80 percent of the entire government borrowing requirements.

The result has been the maintenance of interest rates at historic lows, fueling the rise of stock prices to their record highs.

But there is an old economic saying: If a process is inherently unsustainable, then it must stop. How then is this financial orgy to end?

The answer is to be found in the nature of finance capital itself. It is essentially predatory in character. All financial assets in and of themselves do not embody value; they are a claim on value, in particular, the surplus value extracted from the working class in the process of production.

The essence of finance capital, as Karl Marx noted, is its drive to “get rich not by production but by pocketing the available wealth of others.”

This drive, now deeply embedded in all the structures of American capitalism, assumes two forms: war abroad and social counter-revolution against the working class at home.

The escalating provocations of the Biden administration against Russia over Ukraine are being driven in large part by the attempt to project the rising social and political tensions in the US outwards. In addition, there are longer term economic factors at work.

Since the liquidation of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1991, key sections of the US ruling class and its representatives—the late Democrat National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was one of these—have seen the plunder of the vast resources of Russia as a means of overcoming the economic decline of American capitalism.

The crisis of the financial system exemplified in the escalation of the national debt to previously unimaginable dimensions is in essence a crisis of value. And the sole source of value in the capitalist economy is the working class. Value can only be put back into the mountain of fictitious capital, of which the national debt is a component, by intensifying the exploitation of the working class to new levels.

Small incidents sometimes provide an insight into broader developments. That is the significance of a recent Wall Street Journal article which chose to feature a comment by a company general manager, forced to lift the entry level wage for workers from $15 per hour to between $16 and $18, who expressed concern that “we don’t know when this hyperinflation for labour costs will end.”

Meanwhile, according to a report in Bloomberg, the pandemic billionaires, such as Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, are seeking to outdo each other in their purchases of superyachts worth millions of dollars, orders for which have risen by 77 percent from a year earlier.

The class battle lines are being laid down. The ruling class has a clear agenda: wars for plunder and a massive assault wages and social conditions of the population in order to enrich itself still further.

Warmongering against Russia in the name of Auschwitz

Johannes Stern

German troops in Lithuania (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)

The more the USA and NATO intensify their war drive against Russia, the more aggressively the ruling class in Germany behaves. The media are gripped by a veritable war frenzy and are demanding the German government finally supply weapons to the extreme right-wing anti-Russian regime in Kiev.

No lie or distortion is too big for them and no propaganda too dirty. Numerous newspapers have used the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945, of all things, to use the historical crimes of the Nazi regime in order to justify new imperialist crimes and a more aggressive German war policy.

“In the event of a Russian invasion, NATO must also support Ukraine with military materiel,” demands the former editor-in-chief of the Süddeutsche Zeitung Kurt Kister in an article. At the same time, “the aggressor must suffer serious political and economic disadvantages—even if this would result in supply bottlenecks, price increases or a recession in the West.” This, too, was “one of the lessons of the past.”

Berthold Kohler, editor of the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), argues similarly. In a commentary headlined “The lessons of Germany’s past,” he refers to the Social Democratic Party-Green Party federal government, which in 1999 justified Germany’s first war mission since the end of World War II against Yugoslavia with the cynical argument that Germany was obliged, because of Auschwitz, “to use military force if necessary to oppose ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Balkans.” Now, on the grounds that the Ukrainians had suffered “most under Hitler’s war of extermination,” he is demanding German arms deliveries to Kiev.

This perfidious argument is repeated non-stop by the media in their calls to arm the Ukrainian government for war against Russia. In a slavering guest article for the FAZ, the ex-Maoist and anti-communist Gerd Koenen declares that the Germans “indeed have a historical debt to repay, but certainly not primarily to ‘Russia,’ but first to the Jews and Poles, Belarusians and Ukrainians, and finally also to the Russians.”

The foreign policy coordinator of Die Zeit, Jörg Lau, criticises the Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock for “dismissing Ukrainian wishes for defensive weapons with a sweeping reference to ‘German history.’ Indeed, from the history of tens of thousands of Ukrainian villages devastated by the Wehrmacht [Hitler’s army], the opposite could also be deduced.” Lau reminds the Green Minister of Economics, Robert Habeck, of his election campaign statement that it would be “difficult to deny Ukraine weapons for defence.”

The professional liars in the bourgeois editorial offices falsify several things at once. Firstly, German crimes in Ukraine—including the Babi Yar massacre, which claimed the lives of more than 33,000 Jewish men, women and children—were an integral part of the war of extermination against the Soviet Union, which cost the lives of 27 million people. At the time Nazi Germany invaded Ukraine and established a murderous occupation regime, it was part of the Soviet Union.

It is the height of criminality to counterpose German crimes against Ukrainian Jews and workers to the crimes against Russian Soviet citizens in order to drum up support once again for an aggressive build-up of German imperialism in Eastern Europe and for war against Russia.

In fact, the new German war policy, for which Kohler, Kister and Co. are foaming at the mouth, stands in the Nazi tradition. Today, too, it is not Russia that is the aggressor, as the official propaganda would have us believe, but the imperialist powers. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union 30 years ago, NATO has been systematically encircling Russia. In early 2014, Washington and Berlin orchestrated a right-wing coup in Ukraine to bring an anti-Russian regime to power in Kiev.

In doing so, they relied on fascist forces such as the Svoboda party and the Right Sector. All the references to the crimes of the Wehrmacht in Ukraine cannot hide the fact that the NATO powers in Kiev are supporting and arming a government that worships Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych and mobilises army units and militias that openly express their fascist and anti-Semitic sentiments.

This reactionary offensive against Russia, which invokes the danger of a third world war, is also supported by the current German government.

In her speech in the Bundestag (federal parliament) last Thursday, Baerbock made it clear that Germany flatly rejects Russian demands for security guarantees, saying these were “not compatible with the European security order.” She then threatened Moscow, saying it had been made “crystal clear that renewed military action against Ukraine would have massive consequences for Russia.”

Government representatives from the Liberal Democrats (FDP) and Social Democrats (SPD) expressed themselves in similarly martial terms. Germany must “leave no doubt that we defend international law,” said Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) on the Welt television channel. “If the Kremlin violates borders—and by that I mean territorial as well as legal and political ones—then Moscow must be clear that we are ready for ironclad consequences.”

On Monday evening, the SPD leadership joined the propaganda chorus. Saying that he spoke for “the entire SPD,” party leader Lars Klingbeil declared, following a meeting of the party leadership, that “the escalation we are currently experiencing on the Russian-Ukrainian border is coming from Russia.” The moment Russia attacked “the territorial integrity of Ukraine” and “crosses the border politically and geographically,” there would be “a clear, tough and consistent response from Germany, from Europe, from the transatlantic partners.” All options were “on the table.”

If the German government has so far hesitated to deliver offensive weapons to Kiev, it has nothing to do with pacifism. For one thing, it fears having to bear the main economic burden of the conflict with Russia, with which Germany maintains close economic and energy relations. Of the 90 billion cubic metres of gas that German factories and private households consume each year, almost 60 billion currently come from Russia. That is why representatives of the energy industry, led by former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD), are warning against an escalation of the conflict.

On the other hand, some representatives of the ruling class plead for a certain balance with Russia in order not to become even more dependent on the USA, the militarily dominant NATO member. They fear that an armed conflict over Ukraine would further strengthen the role of the USA and thwart the plans pursued by Germany and France for an independent European army and foreign policy.

Last weekend, the head of the German navy, Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, had to resign after arguing for an alliance with Russia against China at a panel discussion in India. Schönbach apparently voiced what many German military leaders are thinking. He explained that this would also be in the interest of the USA, but that country was obviously preparing a war against Russia.

Despite the differences with the USA and its closest allies in Britain and Eastern Europe, the majority of the ruling class in Germany is also committed to a confrontation. It does not want to stand aside when it comes to the crushing and subjugation of Russia. In doing so, it pursues its own economic and geostrategic interests.

“At the moment, we are leaving the price tags for war in Europe to the Americans. I find that shameful,” complains former Social Democratic Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel in an interview with Bild am Sonntag. “We disagree on the assessment of the situation in Ukraine, fear for our economic interests and are glad that others are pulling the hot potatoes out of the fire for us. We Europeans must learn to take our interests into our own hands.” Europe must finally become “sovereign” and a “geopolitical actor,” he said.

A military confrontation with the nuclear powers Russia and China would mean a third world war and the destruction of the entire planet. Nevertheless, the imperialist powers are marching towards exactly that. The reason for this is not only megalomaniac geopolitical goals, but also the deep internal crisis of capitalist society.

“The enormous disruption of social life caused by the global pandemic has fundamentally destabilised all bourgeois regimes,” says the statement “ Are You Ready for World War III? ” by the WSWS editorial board. “It is the explosive social crisis of the pandemic and the emergence of open class struggle that is driving the ruling class to war.”

The German media are raging even more because, despite permanent warmongering, they are failing to win support for a war against Russia. At the end of January, a poll by broadcaster ZDF’s Politbarometer showed that 73 percent of respondents opposed arms deliveries to Ukraine, with only 20 percent in favour. With concerns about the threat of war, opposition to the government is also growing. According to a Forsa survey on February 1, 86 percent are worried about current developments, and 63 percent are dissatisfied with the government’s policies.

US sends another 3,000 troops to Eastern Europe

Andrea Peters

The United States announced Wednesday it is deploying another 3,000 troops to two East European NATO member states, further escalating the prospect of an all-out war on the continent. The nearly 2,000 paratroopers being sent to Poland will join a 4,000-man NATO force already there, while those dispatched to Romania will more than double the number of military personnel currently stationed in that Black Sea nation. Washington reiterated that it has another 8,500 soldiers on standby. In late January, it emerged that war planners had considered putting 50,000 boots on the ground in Eastern Europe.

Airmen from the 436th Aerial Port Squadron load ammunition, weapons and other equipment bound for Ukraine during a foreign military sales mission at Dover Air Force Base, Del., on Jan. 30, 2022.

“It’s important that we send a strong signal to Mr. Putin and the world that NATO matters,” said Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby yesterday. “We are making it clear that we are going to be prepared to defend our NATO allies if it comes to that,” he added. Given that Ukraine is not a NATO member, Kirby is implying in this statement that Russia’s war aims extend far beyond its western neighbor and that the United States is prepared to light the whole region on fire.

Along with these latest troop deployments, the Pentagon is sending another six F-15 fighter jets to Estonia, whose border is only about 200 miles from Russia’s second major city, St. Petersburg. The Belgian government is further bolstering NATO airpower in the Baltics by sending F-16s to join the American contingent. Sweden, although not a member of the alliance, just committed to several million dollars-worth of spending to help Ukraine “strengthen reliance” in its southeast.

The United States and NATO are making clear that they are prepared not to draw down, but rather increase the size of their forces arrayed along Russia’s entire western flank. The expansion of the trans-Atlantic alliance on the basis of an openly anti-Russian geopolitical and military policy is at the core of the current conflict with Moscow, which has made clear this is an existential threat to a country that has a tragic and bitter experience with hostile armies pouring across its European borders.

In response to Wednesday’s announcement of further US troop deployments, deputy head of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Aleksandr Grushko told news agency Interfax that the move would only increase military tensions.

On Wednesday, the Spanish newspaper El País published the contents of a written response by the US and NATO to Russia’s insistence that Ukraine not ever be admitted to the trans-Atlantic alliance. The letters, one from Washington and the other from Brussels, rejected that demand out of hand and declared it to be a violation of NATO’s “Open Door Policy,” whereby any country can be admitted at any time if seen fit.

While declaring that it is willing to consider a reciprocal agreement that neither party will station “ground-launched missile systems and permanent forces” on Ukrainian territory, the US position outlined in the letter left open plenty of opportunity for Washington and NATO to further militarize Ukraine by providing arms and financing to Kiev or moving armed forces through the country on a rotating basis.

The entire proposal, which includes an offer to review nuclear arms agreements of concern to Russia and start discussions on the basis of countries’ conceptions of the “indivisibility of security,” is contingent on Moscow “deescalating” the present situation and removing its forces from Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. While unstated in the letter, this would have to involve, among other things, Russia abandoning its naval base on the Black Sea, turning Crimea back over to the far-right government in Kiev, and giving up its military presence in the highly contested and geostrategic southern Caucasus.

In addition, the letters declare Russia’s actions to be “unprovoked” and “unjustified” and demand that Moscow “refrain from coercive force posturing, aggressive nuclear rhetoric, and malign activities directed against Allies and other countries.” Apparently, such actions are the sole right of Washington and Brussels.

The Kremlin responded to these communications earlier this week by saying that neither the US nor NATO had seriously addressed any of its concerns.

Since then the media warmongering has continued, with the latest installment being satellite evidence published Wednesday that allegedly details Russia’s military build-up near Ukraine. The company that produced the photos, Maxar, is a Washington-based firm with extensive ties to the US government and military.

Not even two decades ago, Iraqi society was destroyed on the basis of lies, supposedly substantiated with satellite imagery, that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.” None of today’s claims, nor the newspapers that peddle them, has any credibility. And in all of the media coverage on this issue, it never occurs to any journalist or commentator that, even if the images are accurate, there is no reason why Russia, which faces overwhelming NATO firepower, cannot equip forces on its sovereign territory.

From the standpoint of both the US government and its backers in the mass media, Russia, in essence, has no right to exist. This is why all of the Kremlin’s national security concerns, as well as the sentiments of the country’s 140 million people who have lived through war on a scale not experienced by any other population, are dismissed as “misinformation.”

In a discussion on Wednesday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose government is in crisis because of its flagrant violation of COVID-19 protocols, warned President Vladimir Putin that a Russian invasion would be a “tragic miscalculation.”

The same day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, coming out of a meeting with Johnson, declared, “There will be, unfortunately, a tragedy if the escalation against our state begins. This will not be a war between Ukraine and Russia—this will be a war in Europe, full-scale war.”

The Kremlin has repeatedly said that it is not preparing to invade anyone.

In an indication that the US may be trying to slow down the mad dash to World War III or at the very least tone down the out-of-control war hysteria in the press, White House Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Wednesday that the Biden administration would no longer describe Russia’s alleged plans to invade Ukraine as “imminent.” With the world standing on the brink of disaster, Psaki blithely noted, “I think it sent a message that we weren’t intending to send.”

Whatever the immediate twists and turns, the United States is on a collision course with Russia. It also has China in its gun sites. A major question facing Washington is how, or whether, it can manage a two-front war. The COVID-19 pandemic, for which the White House has no answer apart from mass death, is pushing the ruling class to find outlets for its internal crisis in foreign war.

New Flood Maps Show US Damage Rising 26% in Next 30 Years Due to Climate Change Alone, and the Inequity is Stark

Oliver Wing, Carolyn Kousky, Jeremy Porter & Paul Bates

Climate change is raising flood risks in neighborhoods across the U.S. much faster than many people realize. Over the next three decades, the cost of flood damage is on pace to rise 26% due to climate change alone, an analysis of our new flood risk maps shows.

That’s only part of the risk. Despite recent devastating floods, people are still building in high-risk areas. With population growth factored in, we found the increase in U.S. flood losses will be four times higher than the climate-only effect.

Our team develops cutting-edge flood risk maps that incorporate climate change. It’s the data that drives local risk estimates you’re likely to see on real estate websites.

In the new analysis, published Jan. 31, 2022, we estimated where flood risk is rising fastest and who is in harm’s way. The results show the high costs of flooding and lay bare the inequities of who has to endure America’s crippling flood problem. They also show the importance of altering development patterns now.

The role of climate change

Flooding is the most frequent and costliest natural disaster in the United States, and its costs are projected to rise as the climate warms. Decades of measurements, computer models and basic physics all point to increasing precipitation and sea level rise.

As the atmosphere warms, it holds about 7% more moisture for every degree Celsius that the temperature rises, meaning more moisture is available to fall as rain, potentially raising the risk of inland flooding. A warmer climate also leads to rising sea levels and higher storm surges as land ice melts and warming ocean water expands.

Yet, translating that understanding into the detailed impact of future flooding has been beyond the grasp of existing flood mapping approaches.

A map of Houston shows flood risk changing over the next 30 years. Blue areas are today’s 100-year flood-risk zones. The red areas reflect the same zones in 2050. Wing et al., 2022

Previous efforts to link climate change to flood models offered only a broad view of the threat and didn’t zoom in close enough to provide reliable measures of local risk, although they could illustrate the general direction of change. Most local flood maps, such as those produced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have a different problem: They’re based on historical changes rather than incorporating the risks ahead, and the government is slow to update them.

Our maps account for flooding from rivers, rainfall and the oceans – both now and into the future – across the entire contiguous United States. They are produced at scales that show street-by-street impacts, and unlike FEMA maps, they cover floods of many different sizes, from nuisance flooding that may occur every few years to once-in-a-millennium disasters.

While hazard maps only show where floods might occur, our new risk analysis combines that with data on the U.S. building stock to understand the damage that occurs when floodwaters collide with homes and businesses. It’s the first validated analysis of climate-driven flood risk for the U.S.

The inequity of America’s flood problem

We estimated that the annual cost of flooding today is over $32 billion nationwide, with an outsized burden on communities in Appalachia, the Gulf Coast and the Northwest.

When we looked at demographics, we found that today’s flood risk is predominantly concentrated in white, impoverished communities. Many of these are in low-lying areas directly on the coasts or Appalachian valleys at risk from heavy rainfall.

But the increase in risk as rising oceans reach farther inland during storms and high tides over the next 30 years falls disproportionately on communities with large African American populations on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Urban and rural areas from Texas to Florida to Virginia contain predominantly Black communities projected to see at least a 20% increase in flood risk over the next 30 years.

Historically, poorer communities haven’t seen as much investment in flood adaptation or infrastructure, leaving them more exposed. The new data, reflecting the cost of damage, contradicts a common misconception that flood risk exacerbated by sea level rise is concentrated in whiter, wealthier areas.

Our findings raise policy questions about disaster recovery. Prior research has found that these groups recover less quickly than more privileged residents and that disasters can further exacerbate existing inequities. Current federal disaster aid disproportionately helps wealthier residents. Without financial safety nets, disasters can be tipping points into financial stress or deeper poverty.

Population growth is a major driver of flood risk

Another important contributor to flood risk is the growing population.

As urban areas expand, people are building in riskier locations, including expanding into existing floodplains – areas that were already at risk of flooding, even in a stable climate. That’s making adapting to the rising climate risks even more difficult.

A Kansas City flood map shows developments in the 100-year flood zone. Fathom.

Hurricane Harvey made that risk painfully clear when its record rainfall sent two reservoirs spilling into neighborhoods, inundating homes that had been built in the reservoirs’ flood zones. That was in 2017, and communities in Houston are rebuilding in risky areas again.

We integrated into our model predictions how and where the increasing numbers of people will live in order to assess their future flood risk. The result: Future development patterns have a four times greater impact on 2050 flood risk than climate change alone.

On borrowed time

If these results seem alarming, consider that these are conservative estimates. We used a middle-of-the-road trajectory for atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, one in which global carbon emissions peak in the 2040s and then fall.

Importantly, much of this impact over the next three decades is already locked into the climate system. While cutting emissions now is crucial to slow the rate of sea level rise and reduce future flood risk, adaptation is required to protect against the losses we project to 2050.

If future development was directed outside of the riskiest areas, and new construction met higher standards for flood mitigation, some of these projected losses could be avoided. In previous research, we found that for a third of currently undeveloped U.S. floodplains it is cheaper to buy the land at today’s prices and preserve it for recreation and wildlife than develop it and pay for the inevitable flood damages later.

The results stress how critical land use and building codes are when it comes to adapting to climate change and managing future losses from increasing climate extremes. Protecting lives and property will mean moving existing populations out of harm’s way and stopping new construction in flood-risk areas.

The COVID pandemic continues to rage despite the delivery of more than 10 billion doses of vaccines

Benjamin Mateus

The online publication Our World in Data, which has been a leading and often referenced source for critical statistics regarding the COVID pandemic, reported that on Friday, January 28, 2022, more than 10 billion doses of COVID vaccines had been administered worldwide in the 13 months since they were first introduced to the public.

In that same period, the pandemic has only accelerated the mass deaths caused by the infection with the coronavirus. With 5.67 million reported COVID deaths during the pandemic, almost four million have died since Margaret Keenan, a 91-year-old grandmother from the UK, became the first person in the world to get the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine on December 8, 2020.

Medics wearing special suits to protect against coronavirus treat a patient with coronavirus, left, as others prepare a patent to move at an ICU at the Moscow, Oct. 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

As the New Year’s statement published in the WSWS noted, “The global pandemic is a catastrophe of historic dimensions. It is also a crime because the disastrous impact of the pandemic is the result of decisions made by capitalist governments—first and foremost in the United States and Western Europe—to deliberately prioritize profits over lives, to reject the implementation of public health measures required to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 and, instead, to adopt policies that allow the virus to spread widely throughout the global population.”

Indeed, the politics behind implementing the COVID vaccine campaign has been to disarm any public resistance against the malign “herd immunity” policies that various governmental institutions called for from the beginning, embedded into the interests of financial markets. The current objective is to completely dismantle the entire public health apparatus, including the necessary COVID metric dashboards that provide a sense of the scale of the calamity.

Share of people vaccinated against COVID-19 as of January 28, 2022.

In short, the promise of relying solely on vaccines as an exit strategy has been disastrous. Warnings to this effect were made by scientists at the World Health Organization, stating that depending on vaccines without strict infection controls risked breeding new, more virulent variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These have been proven correct.

That 10 billion doses of vaccines have been administered in little more than a year is an astounding public health feat that belies the constantly repeated assertion that the virus is unstoppable. It provides objective evidence that the ruling elites’ malicious interest in vaccines is not as a social balm but as a political instrument.

Such a quantity is more than enough to offer every person on the planet at least one dose of a COVID vaccine. Not counting the 680 million children under five, for whom no vaccine has yet been approved, there are roughly 7.3 billion people. But only 4.8 billion, less than two-thirds of those eligible, have received even one shot. Just over half are considered fully vaccinated. While high-income countries have fully vaccinated 72 percent of their populations, the lowest-income countries, predominately on the African continent, have managed to give less than 10 percent of their people even one dose.

Vaccines doses per 100 persons by economic category. Source Our World in Data.

These stark disparities are a byproduct of the vaccine nationalism that has led to the hoarding of these life-saving treatments by the wealthy countries, further exacerbated by the emergence of more virulent, contagious, and immune-evading strains that have made it necessary to provide a third dose and for some a fourth, especially to the elderly or those with significant health issues. Given the limitations of supply, these additional doses, mainly in the rich countries and for the privileged elite in the poor countries, have come at the expense of the mass of the population in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

High and upper-middle-income countries have administered enough COVID vaccines to offer 180 doses for every 100 persons. Theoretically, that would mean that as many as 90 percent of the population could be fully vaccinated with the two-dose regimen. There have been 25 doses given for every 100 individuals on the African continent or just over 300 million doses. By comparison, the United States has administered 537 million doses though its population is one-quarter of Africa’s.

Objectively, the rate of vaccination uptake in these high-income regions is linked to socioeconomic factors and national initiatives. Whereas the US has fully vaccinated only 63 percent of its population, countries like Canada (79 percent), China (85 percent), Singapore (87 percent), Australia (78 percent), and many EU high-income EU nations have fully vaccinated far more than the 70 percent target set by the World Health Organization for 2022.

Of the ten billion COVID vaccines administered, nearly one billion have been given as boosters. High-income and upper-middle-income countries have received the lion’s share with more than 898 million third doses (and fourth doses). However, in the context of the immune-evading Omicron variant and the need for a third dose to be considered fully vaccinated, the result is that just over 11 percent of the world’s population can now be considered fully vaccinated. The US has only given a quarter of its population a booster shot, while EU nations are approaching half.

Doses of COVID vaccine boosters per 100 persons by Income group. Source Our World in Data.

Currently, between 25 and 30 million doses of COVID vaccines are being administered each day globally. Even if coordinated initiatives to equitably distribute vaccines were put in place, at this rate, it would take another four months to get 75 percent of the world population the first dose, another target set by the WHO.

Lower-middle-income countries have only managed to give their population 96 doses per 100 people, and low-income countries fewer than 14 doses per 100 people. As Bloomberg recently wrote, “The wealthiest 107 countries in the world—including China, the US, and Europe—comprise 54 percent of the global population but have used 71 percent of the vaccines. Less wealthy places such as India, much of Africa and parts of Asia make up almost half of people on Earth and yet account for less than 30 percent of shots given.”

Notwithstanding the patent inequities, the remarkable feat of inoculating billions of people has not led to the end of the pandemic, as so many leaders of the imperialist powers had promised. On the contrary, the vaccine-only initiative has spawned the Delta and Omicron waves, demonstrating the failure of this bankrupt policy.

According to the WHO COVID-19 dashboard, there have been 360.6 million confirmed infections, of which 290 million were contracted since the COVID vaccines were introduced in mid-December of 2020. Of the 5.62 million cumulative COVID deaths during the pandemic, almost four million took place after vaccines became available.

In less than two years, the United States, which has been the consistent epicenter of the COVID pandemic, has now seen more than 900,000 Americans perish from their infection, the highest in any country worldwide. When nurse Sandra Lindsay received the first dose of a COVID vaccine in Queens, New York, on December 14, 2020, inaugurating the vaccine campaign in the US, the total COVID deaths had reached an astounding 320,000. The vaccines were touted with much media fanfare as the beginning of the pandemic endgame. Since then, however, another 580,000 have perished in America.

Currently, daily COVID infections in the US remain well above pre-Omicron highs, with over a half-million cases per day. The daily average in COVID deaths had risen steadily since December, when numbers had dipped under 1,000 deaths per day. They are now at 2,500 a day, above the peak deaths from the Delta wave and fast approaching the deadly highs of last winter’s worst stretch when the seven-day average reached 3,323. Notably, all current COVID deaths are attributable to the Omicron variant, which entirely refutes the oft-repeated claims that it is only a mild infection.

Official COVID death figures are known to undercount the real scale of misery and devastation. Many of those who were infected and died were never tested and are lost in official statistical reports. Then there are those affected by the pandemic indirectly, who went to their deaths from non-COVID but preventable causes. Due to health systems being inundated with patients or fear of becoming infected, their conditions deteriorated sufficiently that medical intervention became futile.

In this sense, excess deaths provide a more reliable measure of total mortality due to COVID-19. As defined by the Economist, “This number is the gap between how many people died in a given region during a given time period, regardless of cause, and how many deaths would have been expected if a particular circumstance [in this case the COVID pandemic] had not occurred.”

The current estimate of excess deaths worldwide is 3.6 times higher than official global COVID-19 deaths. At 20.4 million, that figure surpasses all civilian and combat fatalities incurred in the four years of World War I. Bulgaria, a country with 6.9 million people, where 22 percent of the population lives below the poverty line of 185 euros a month, claims the unfortunate distinction of having the highest per capita excess deaths.

Global Estimated Excess Deaths and Official COVID-19 Deaths. Source from The Economist.

Countries with some of the highest excess deaths per 100,000 include small Eastern European countries like Bulgaria, along with Russia, India, South Africa, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, and the United States. Current estimates are that daily global excess death have reached a pandemic high of 78,100 per day (January 28, 2022), far above the mid-May peaks of 2021 when Delta was ravaging India.

In mid-December 2020, excess deaths had reached 5.2 million. In the 13 months since the COVID vaccines were publicly introduced, another 15 million people have died who could have been saved if a coordinated international effort had been employed to eliminate COVID across the globe.

For those fully inoculated with two doses, the current vaccines, formulated to fight the ancestral SARS-CoV-2 first encountered in Wuhan provide only 44 percent effectiveness against hospitalization from an Omicron infection if the last dose was given more than 25 weeks prior. Vaccine effectiveness to prevent symptomatic disease from Omicron is zero to 10 percent, essentially meaningless. A recent UK study found that more than two-thirds of people infected with Omicron had previously been infected.

The current variants of the Omicron coronavirus, BA.1 and BA.2, are highly contagious and are wreaking havoc in every country in which they have taken hold. Their immune-evading capacity means that herd immunity is scientifically impossible. And the idea of allowing the virus to become endemic is a political ploy. Endemic Omicron will mean repeated bouts of infection, a pandemic in permanence.

Boris Johnson pushes anti-Russia war rhetoric in Ukraine amid UK government crisis

Thomas Scripps

Boris Johnson continues to respond to the crisis facing his premiership by escalating the UK’s involvement in the US war drive against Russia.

After again rejecting calls for his resignation over the “partygate” scandal in Parliament Monday, Johnson flew to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv yesterday, where he met President Volodymyr Zelensky for talks in the Mariinsky Palace.

He tweeted ahead of his trip, “As a friend and a democratic partner, the UK will continue to uphold Ukraine’s sovereignty in the face of those who seek to destroy it.” In his opening statement to the press conferences following the talks, he warned of “perhaps the biggest demonstration of hostility towards Ukraine in our lifetimes.”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hold a press conference at the Mariyinsky Palace in Kiev, Ukraine. 01/02/2022. (Picture by Andrew Parsons /No 10 Downing Street/FlickR)

Johnson boasted of Britain’s pole position in the anti-Russian campaign. “The UK and other countries will be judged by the people of Ukraine and the world by how we respond and how we help,” he said, and it was “absolutely vital that the UK government should step up now [and] bring together our friends and partners in the West in the way that we are.”

But his efforts to strike a Churchillian pose on the world stage quickly ran into trouble. In a rare example of journalistic competence, the first questions posed to Johnson, by the BBC, were, “Have you done enough to survive? Have you done enough to persuade enough colleagues to rescue your premiership? And on the issue of Ukraine, why should the international community take your diplomacy seriously when you’re so preoccupied at home you put talking to MPs ahead of talking to President Putin?”

Johnson had been forced to cancel a scheduled phone call with Putin on Monday to deal with release of the senior civil servant Sue Gray’s inquiry report into parties held at Downing Street during pandemic lockdowns. The call with the Russian President has been rearranged for today after Putin refused a request for Tuesday.

Johnson blustered, “My focus is entirely on delivering the priorities of the British people and they include ensuring that our relations with our friends and allies, and that our friends and allies are secure.”

The same journalist asked Zelensky, “Do you believe that the prime minister and his American allies are exaggerating the threat from Russia?”

This was a pointed reference to the recent public clash between the Ukrainian president and US President Joe Biden, with the US insisting a Russian invasion was imminent and Zelensky answering that this was not his government’s assessment and telling the NATO powers not to spread “panic”.

Zelensky fudged his answer to spare Johnson’s blushes but did not reverse his earlier statements, replying, “In terms of exaggerating or underestimating the threats it’s difficult to answer your question. No one can predict or know what will happen next.”

Johnson was put on the defensive and forced to return to the issue later in the conference.

“I think somebody asked a question earlier: ‘were we exaggerating the threat, were the US and UK in any way trying to big this up?’ I’ve just got say that is not the intelligence that’s we’re seeing. There is a clear and present danger. We see large numbers of troops massing; we see all kinds of operations that are consistent with an imminent military campaign.”

Assertions of nondescript “intelligence” seen by UK officials and a “clear and present danger” recall nothing so much as Britain’s role in 2002-3 as bagman for the US war against Iraq, justified with lying claims of an imminent threat from Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The UK is directly responsible for the most widely discredited “intelligence”, asserting that a Russian invasion is imminent, the January 22 Foreign Office press release claiming that Putin’s government was “looking to install a pro-Russian leader in Kyiv as it considers whether to invade and occupy Ukraine.”

This was not the only embarrassment suffered by Johnson over Ukraine. On Monday his defence secretary Ben Wallace participated in a joint press conference with his Hungarian counterpart Tibor Benko.

Wallace attempted to further reported plans for NATO to send additional battle groups to Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary, saying it was “important to signal to Putin that the very thing he fears, that is, more NATO close to Russia, would be the consequence of invading Ukraine... This is why the UK offered NATO more ground forces, more readiness as a deterrent.”

But in the same conference Benko refused the deployment of NATO troops to Hungary. The country’s president, Viktor Orban, visited Moscow yesterday for high-profile talks with Putin.

Johnson’s performance in yesterday’s press conference made clear that his response to these setbacks will be to double down on the UK’s commitment to the imperialist aggression.

With customary hypocrisy, he claimed that Russia was trying to “redraw the security map of Europe and impose a new Yalta, new zones of influence” by “holding a gun to the head of Ukraine”. It is NATO which has “redrawn the security map of Europe” by advancing hundreds of miles to Russia’s border and NATO which has used Russia’s request that this threat to its security be withdrawn as a pretext for a massive militarist campaign.

Demanding Russia “steps back and chooses the path of diplomacy,” Johnson made clear that this meant recognising Ukraine’s right to decide “which organisations they aspire to join”, i.e., NATO.

He also threatened that in the event of any provoked conflict “Ukraine will fight… There are 200,000 men and women under arms in Ukraine, they will put up a very, very fierce and bloody resistance.” Johnson went on, “I think that parents, mothers in Russia should reflect on that.”

He once again turned to nationalist boasting, stating, “Since 2015, the UK has trained over 22,000 Ukrainian military personal and provided £2.2 million worth of non-lethal military equipment to Ukraine, two weeks ago, we sent anti-tank weaponry to strengthen Ukrainian defences further, and today I’ve announced a further £88 million of UK funding to support good governance and energy independence.”

There are currently around 100 British personnel in Ukrainian still conducting military training.

Last week, the Ukrainian parliament ratified a £1.7 billion loan from the UK designed to fund the development of the country’s navy, including two minesweepers, eight gunboats, a frigate and other naval infrastructure.

Zelensky also emphasised the “high risk for anyone who tries to occupy even a tiny bit of our territory,” adding the warning, “This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.”

The danger of a rapidly expanding conflict was underscored by the formal announcement of a trilateral alliance between the UK, Ukraine, and Poland. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba commented, “We cannot expect safety and prosperity somewhere in the future when we become members of the EU and NATO. We need them today.”

At a meeting last week of the Ukrainian and Polish prime ministers, the Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki said, “Living close to a neighbour like Russia we have the feeling of living at the foot of a volcano,” and promised to provide Ukraine with mortars, artillery ammunition, air-defence systems, and surveillance drones.