Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government announces record military budget

Santiago Guillen

The Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government has announced the largest increase in military spending in history, including that under the military-fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco which ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975. It follows the decision of the German government to allocate €150 billion to the Germany army, the most since the fall of the Nazi dictatorship. This made Germany Europe’s strongest military power overnight.

Last week, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced Spain’s military spending would rise to 2 percent of GDP, more than double the current expenditure. This implies bringing the budget of the Ministry of Defense to €24 billion, more than double its current €10 billion budget.

Speaking to Spain’s RTVE public television, Sánchez said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine required a massive increase in military spending. He said, “We have woken up from a kind of mirage” since we thought that “at the gates of Europe a war was not going to happen, but we are living it, this is not a movie, it’s real.” Therefore, he assured, “common foreign and security policy and the complementarity between NATO and the EU must be strengthened.”

Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sanchez speaks to Spanish troops during his visit to Adazi Military base in Kadaga, Latvia, Tuesday, March. 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Roman Koksarov)

He blamed Putin exclusively and his “expansionist desire,” though Moscow’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine was provoked by NATO’s decades-long eastward expansion against Russia. Sánchez did not rule out that conflict could trigger a Third World War, which he says “must be avoided.”

The truth is that the PSOE-Podemos government’s promotion of militarism was already reflected in the Ministry of Defence’s 2022 budget, which rose 7.92 percent over a year ago. The government’s priorities are clear: it cut this year’s health budget 17.3 percent amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen 162,000 excess deaths in Spain according to The Lancet .

While it claimed there was no money for an elimination strategy for COVID-19, including lockdowns, contact tracing and subsidies to workers and small businessmen, and that the “economy could not stand any more lockdowns”, it showered the military with billions.

In fact, total military spending is actually more than double the Ministry of Defence’s budget, once military spending carried out by the Industry and Interior Ministries is counted. The latter runs the Civil Guard, an 80,000-strong force that carries out police activities, but which participates in foreign “peacekeeping missions”, including operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Angola, Congo, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Haiti, East Timor and El Salvador. It also joined in the US-led neo-colonial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to a report by the Center for Peace Studies, total Spanish military spending in fact reaches €22 billion, a 5.7 percent rise over the previous year. Investment in arms amounts to €4.5 billion. With the increase to 2 percent of GDP in the budget of the Ministry of Defence that Pedro Sánchez has pointed out, total military spending would rise to an astonishing €36 billion.

While officials claim the military spending increase is caused by the war in Ukraine, a rise in military spending has been planned for years. As in Germany, officials waited years for an opportunity to carry it out. The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party (Germany) have documented and condemned this conspiracy of the ruling class to resurrect German militarism.

Similarly, the PSOE and Podemos are seizing on the war to implement long-designed plans to promote militarism and raise military spending. The Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies, a Spanish Ministry of Defence think tank, published in 2019 a document titled “The Defence Financing Law: an urgent need.” It called to spend 2 percent of GDP on the military. The main obstacle, however, is historically rooted opposition to Spanish militarism in the working class. It stated:

“The reduced spending on this item [Defence] in our country is nothing more than a reflection of the scant political and social importance given to Defence, the result of both a non-existent national strategic culture, scarcely promoted by the Executive, and the scant relevance given by political actors. Also contributing to this is not only the lack of interest from government agencies in promoting the culture of Defence, but also the lack of educational and informative work by the government that allows, both at the level of citizens and the rest of the political parties, to move forward, explain and maintain sustained growth in defence spending.”

Along the same lines, the Elcano Institute, a think tank in Spain whose honorary president is the King of Spain, published an article in 2017 entitled “Defence spending in Spain.” It said, “The increase of 2 percent of GDP should be assumed as an urgent need for National Security” and that to overcome resistance to this increase, a “strategic communication exercise” was needed.

This policy is massively unpopular among workers. According to a report by the Funcas foundation, only 21 percent of Spaniards consider the military budget to be low, and “public opinion is unfavourable to allocating state resources to the military.” On the other hand, 60 to 80 percent of the population thinks that insufficient resources are dedicated to health, pensions, care, scientific research and protecting the environment.

Working class memory of the past crimes of the Spanish ruling class have proven to be obstacles to remilitarisation since Franco’s death in 1975. The army was associated with vicious colonial wars in Northern Africa and South America, and extreme violence against the working class at home. In 1936, generals led by Franco who had led the suppression of anti-colonial Moroccan resistance launched a coup, in alliance with German and Italian fascism. This led to the deaths of 500,000 Spaniards in a civil war and a 40-year military dictatorship.

Nevertheless, efforts to revive Spanish militarism did not stop after Franco. Under PSOE governments in the 1980s and 1990s, Spain joined the main structures of post-war European capitalism: the European Union and NATO. It ended conscription, banned the military from making public political statements, and allowed women to serve, while modernising the army for the neo-colonial wars of the 21st century.

Key to consolidating the “culture of defence” has been the branding of wars as “humanitarian”—in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Libya—by social democrats, Stalinists and pseudo-left groups. The Stalinist United Left worked for decades to lull workers to sleep, promoting these as “humanitarian wars.” Podemos for its part recruited former Chief of the Defence Staff Julio Rodríguez, who led the Spanish army’s participation in the US-led neo-colonial wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

The PSOE and Podemos intend for the working class to pay for Spanish militarism. Facing an unprecedented debt of 120 percent of GDP, they will impose further cuts in education, health care, pensions and social services. The PSOE and Podemos plan to crush social opposition and are already deploying 23,000 police to try to crush a nationwide truckers strike.

Podemos does not represent an alternative to this. While it claimed to oppose the budget, it was involved in the anti-Russia drive from the beginning, supporting NATO’s crippling sanctions against Russia and arming Ukraine. These weapons are now being used by the far-right Azov battalion, which has recently published videos of its members armed with weapons supplied by the Spanish government.

Escalating tensions over Solomon Islands security pact with China

John Braddock

In a defiant speech to the Solomon Islands parliament yesterday, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare denounced as “very insulting” the backlash from Australia and New Zealand to his government’s negotiations with China. A draft “security cooperation” agreement between the Solomons and China would allow Beijing to send military forces and ships to the small Pacific Island state.

The online leaking of the draft agreement last week met with immediate uproar in Canberra, Wellington, and Washington. Sogavare declared that the regional imperialist powers viewed the Solomons as their “backyard” and pointed to “discussions in the Australian public media encouraging the invasion of Solomon Islands to force a regime change” to stop the deal. He said this was “a decision by a sovereign nation that has its national interest at heart,” adding that there was “no intention whatsoever to ask China to build a military base” in the country.

The outraged response to the draft agreement by Washington and its local allies, Australia and New Zealand, points to the growing drive to counter China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific amid a build-up to war. US imperialism is determined to maintain dominance in the strategic region that it has regarded as an “American lake” since the end of World War II.

Speaking on Radio New Zealand (RNZ) on Monday, NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the proposed deal as “gravely concerning.” She hypocritically declared that it could lead to the “militarization of the region.” Australia’s Defence Minister Peter Dutton similarly stated: “We don’t want unsettling influences. And we don’t want pressure and exertion that we’re seeing from China to continue to roll out in the region.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern answers a question during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand. (Robert Kitchin/Pool Photo via AP)

NZ Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said the pact would “destabilise the current institutions and arrangements that have long underpinned the Pacific region’s security. This would not benefit New Zealand or our Pacific neighbours.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Honiara can request a military intervention “to assist in maintaining social order, protecting people’s lives and property, providing humanitarian assistance, carrying out disaster response, or providing assistance on other tasks.”

Further, China may “according to its own needs and with the consent of Solomon Islands, make ship visits to carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in Solomon Islands, and the relevant forces of China can be used to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands.”

Charles Edel, the chair of the Centre for Strategic & International Studies, a leading Washington think tank, said the agreement would be “deeply problematic for the United States and a real cause of concern for our allies and partners.” The establishment of a base in the Solomon Islands by “a strategic adversary” would “significantly degrade” Australia and New Zealand’s security, he said.

New Zealand High Commissioner Georgina Roberts directly raised the matter with Sogavare, while Ardern has sought contact with Beijing over the draft. The Sydney Morning Herald noted that since Australia has not had any high-level ministerial contact with Beijing for more than two years due to diplomatic hostilities, New Zealand is a key negotiator with the Chinese government.

Along with several other Pacific states, the Sogavare government in 2019 switched the Solomons’ diplomatic ties from Taiwan to China as Beijing has increased financial aid to the region. Following riots and an attempted coup in Honiara last November, China donated police equipment and sent six police trainers to work with Solomon Islands’ officers.

The coup attempt, which saw moves to storm the parliament, was carried out by supporters of Daniel Suidani, the premier of Malaita province. Suidani maintains his own “foreign policy,” with ties with Taiwan, and has barred Chinese personnel and investments from Malaita. He is financed and politically supported by Washington. Visiting Fiji in February, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told an online meeting of Pacific leaders that the US planned to establish an embassy in Honiara to counter China.

Australia and New Zealand had military personnel and vessels in Honiara during the recent crisis, ready to intervene in their own interests. Ardern told RNZ there were “leadership level talks” with the Solomon Islands at the end of last year. “We expressed some concern over the direction of travel that Solomons was taking in terms of their security arrangements with China,” she said.

NZ Defence Minister Peeni Henare has revealed that both countries will maintain elements of their respective “assistance forces” in the Solomon Islands. According to Henare, Dutton wants to expand the deployment of Australian troops and police, while NZ will be “reassessing its contribution.” Both want to “show strong signals” that Solomon Islands and the Pacific are “definitely in our collective backyard,” he said.

Ardern told the media that Pacific countries are “sovereign nations which are entitled to form their own security arrangements.” However, a NZ Defence Ministry Strategic Assessment released last December asserted New Zealand’s “freedom to act in support of shared interests and values” against any competitor who sets up a military base or dual-use facility in the Pacific. This means intervening wherever Chinese influence is deemed a threat to New Zealand’s interests as a minor imperialist power or those of its allies.

A clamour is erupting to prepare for such a reckless course of action. Defence analyst Paul Buchanan told the New Zealand Herald the Chinese could establish a secure base for further operations. “If you have forward-deployed boats then you can intimidate people, you can go to Vanuatu, you can go to Tonga,” he said. If China established a foothold further east, perhaps in Fiji, then it will “have the ability to straddle the most important checkpoints in the southwest Pacific,” he declared.

Prominent pro-US academic Anne-Marie Brady has implicitly demanded a regime change operation in the Solomons. Following a comment in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 25, in which she called for a “cull of sacred cows,” including an “over-emphasis on sovereignty,” Brady told RNZ the Solomon Islands was a “failed state” ruled by a “corrupt elite.” She hysterically declared that New Zealand “could be cut off and encircled” by China’s navy.

On Monday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin warned against any attempt “to disrupt and undermine” relations between China and Pacific countries. He also pointedly denounced the US-led military build-up and exercises in the region, backed by Australia and NZ, saying this was threatening regional peace and bringing “nuclear proliferation risks to the Pacific Ocean.”

Australia and New Zealand are now putting pressure on countries throughout the Pacific to fall into line. Australian Prime Minister Morrison has already approached Fiji and Papua New Guinea (PNG) to help persuade the Solomon Islands to end its deal with Beijing. According to Ardern, New Zealand will use “bilateral relationships” and the 18-member nation Pacific Islands Forum to raise issues related to the “militarisation of the Pacific,” which she again stressed “is our backyard.”

The Solomon Islands is expected to be on the agenda as Mahuta meets this week with Fiji's Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama. Ardern said she was confident New Zealand and Fiji aligned on “many geopolitical affairs.” In fact, both Fiji and PNG have long-standing diplomatic and financial links with Beijing. An article in the SMH on Tuesday pointedly warned that Canberra needed to “pay attention to PNG,” following China’s Solomon Islands deal.

As pandemic funding dries up, BA.2 has become dominant COVID-19 variant in the US

Benjamin Mateus

Daily confirmed COVID-19 infections in the US have stopped declining and plateaued as the BA.2 subvariant of the Omicron variant has come to dominate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that BA.2 represented nearly 55 percent of all sequenced cases in the US last week. Globally, the BA.2 accounts for close to 90 percent of all recently sequenced SARS-CoV-2 viruses.

Sixteen states have reported a rise in the 14-day average of new infections, of which nine are in the Northeast, where BA.2 makes up 70 percent of sequences and daily infections are up by 50 percent. These findings are corroborated by wastewater surveillance.

Other regions of the country also see signs of an upturn in cases. These include the Southeast, specifically South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, the Southwest, Great Plains states, and, finally, the Northwest and Alaska.

Overall, the average number of new cases is just above 29,000 infections per day. The numbers dying each day from COVID continue their decline and currently stand at an average of 750 per day. There have been almost 81.7 million COVID cases and just over one million reported COVID deaths in the US, based on the Worldometer COVID dashboard.

Children and their caregivers arrive for school in New York, Monday, March 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Despite the lull in cases, the US is in a precarious place as it has essentially dismantled all its meager mitigation measures and tracking dashboards and flying blind once more. Real-time data is speculative and reliant on whatever reporting systems remain in place.

It is crucial to remember that when BA.2 became dominant just two to three weeks ago in European countries like the UK, France, and Germany, COVID cases there turned rapidly upwards. Accompanying these changes has been a rise in hospitalizations and deaths. Additionally, these countries have substantially higher rates of vaccination and boosters than the US.

Given the projections that the US will experience a similar if not more extensive community spread than seen in Europe, then cases could quickly rise by more than tenfold if BA.1 to BA.2 peak comparisons hold. This implies that daily infections could reach above 300,000 per day at their peak by mid to late April.

The situations in the US and across many high-income countries are similar. Regardless of the political party in charge, governments have entirely disregarded the continued dangers posed by the pandemic. With each wave of infection, they have systematically, step by step, undermined their public health measures to protect the well-being and life of their populations.

Daily COVID cases for select countries on a per capita basis. (Source: Our World in Data)

In an editorial statement published by Nature on March 23, 2022, the journal warned, “The pandemic might have taken upwards of 18 million lives, disabled many more than that and gut-punched the global economy, yet surveillance and reporting of the virus’s movements are starting to slow just at a time when a highly infectious subvariant of Omicron, BA.2, is spilling out across the world and case rates and hospitalizations are creeping back up.”

As the statement notes, “These cutbacks are not based on evidence. They are political, and they could have disastrous consequences for the world.” Accurate information becomes a political weapon—censorship functions to disarm the working class by dismantling public health information trackers. Even the refusal by the World Health Organization (WHO) to designate BA.2 with a Greek letter signifying it as a variant of concern undermines efforts to convey the real dangers posed by the ever-evolving SARS-CoV-2 virus to the world’s population.

The frequency of reporting COVID cases, deaths, hospitalizations, critical care admissions, and length of stays has been drastically curtailed across the United States. The lack of real-time data at the local level implies that public health departments will have little to offer by way of accurate information for their health systems to act on. However, the actual state of health systems has become a moot point.

One only must look back over the last six to eight months when the Delta and BA.1 waves swept across the US like a tsunami wave. State and local governments did little to heed or respond to the dire warnings and pleas made by health care workers and health system administrators when facing imminent collapse.

This colorized transmission electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2—also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus that causes COVID-19—isolated from a patient in the U.S. Virus particles are shown emerging from the surface of cells cultured in the lab. (Source: NIAID-RML)

And to assure no further encroachment on US economic activities and profit incentives by future waves of infection occur, conveniently, the White House and Congress have declared that all funding for any forthcoming pandemic response has dried up despite ample monies available for war—including billions overnight for Ukraine. The lack of funding will make tracking the virus even more difficult through testing, genomic sequencing, and wastewater surveillance.

Perhaps the irony of it all is that even as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just authorized a second booster dose—a fourth dose—for those ages 50 and older and for immunocompromised individuals, the White House announced, “The federal government does not have adequate resources to purchase enough booster vaccine doses for all Americans, if additional doses are needed.”

Given the new immune evading variants, the second boosters would bolster the immune system against what is most likely to be a broad-based community infection regardless of previous immune status. In the UK, during their current surge, upwards of 6 to 9 percent of the population became infected weekly with the BA.2 subvariant.

Peter Marks, director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, reported yesterday: “Current evidence suggests some waning of protection over time against serious outcomes from COVID-19 in older and immunocompromised individuals. Based on an analysis of emerging data, a second booster dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine could help increase protection levels for these higher-risk individuals.”

He added that “the data show that an initial booster dose is critical in helping to protect all adults from the potentially severe outcomes of COVID-19. So, those who have not received their initial booster dose are strongly encouraged to do so.”

The US has barely budged above the 65 percent threshold of fully vaccinated people. On December 1, 2021, only 60 percent had been fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, only 29 percent have received a booster, of which half were administered in the last four months. By comparison, the US’s counterparts in Europe have managed to nearly double this figure. Even Brazil has overtaken the US in boosters administered. These take on important context as the US faces its brunt with BA.2.

Yet, any booster shot given now would require at least two weeks before the immunity can fully establish itself. With the speed that the BA.2 spreads, even the recent jabs will have little impact on those getting their vaccines.

This makes it even more imperative to implement a Zero-COVID elimination strategy, which would include the shutdown of schools and nonessential workplaces across the country with full compensation for those affected to stem the spread of the virus and protect the most vulnerable from another assault while measures are once more put in place to vaccinate the population. Indeed, with current daily infection numbers at present low, elimination could be achieved in a few weeks.

However, the reality for the ruling elites is far from such simple, practical considerations; the protection of the population is not a factor in their calculations.

The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that the federal government did not have enough vaccine doses remaining in its current stocks under all their scenarios to fully cover the US population through a fourth dose. Even under the limited projection of providing a fourth dose to only those ages 65 and older, there would remain a deficit of 162.5 million doses. Under the FDA authorization, the deficit increases to 225 million doses.

The White House has also announced that the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) COVID-19 Uninsured program would be discontinued without new funding. The program was essential to reimburse health care providers for the costs of delivering COVID-19 testing and treatment services and administering vaccines to the more than 28.9 million uninsured Americans. As of March 22, 2022, HRSA stopped accepting reimbursement claims for COVID infections, and on April 5, 2022, claims for vaccination will end.

The BA.2 variant will have real consequences for the health of the American working class and the fragile finances of many health systems that operate on razor-thin margins. Though COVID hospitalizations have dropped considerably off the BA.1 wave, health systems blind to the subsequent surge in COVID infections may face another deluge of cases over the intervening weeks. The pandemic will undergo its next deadly iteration unless the working class, which has a critical interest in its own well-being, intervenes to stamp out the virus and put it to an end.

Russia, Ukraine hold peace negotiations as US continues to ratchet up tensions

Clara Weiss

The Russian and Ukrainian negotiating teams met on Tuesday for talks hosted by Turkey’s Recep Erdogan in Istanbul, on ending the month-long war in Ukraine.

The talks, initially scheduled for two days, ended after the first day, with both sides speaking of “positive signs.”

Ukraine has submitted its proposals for a “peace agreement” to the Kremlin, which include:

1) In exchange for security guarantees from a number of states, including Russia, Ukraine would accept a formally neutral status, involving a guarantee that the country would not join any military alliance (i.e., NATO), not host foreign military bases and not conduct joint military exercises with alliances, unless all states that had issued security guarantees agreed;

2) Talks about the status of the Crimean Peninsula would be held for the next 15 years, during which neither Russia nor Ukraine would try to resolve the dispute through military means;

3) Ukraine would not try to return the Donbass, controlled since 2014 by pro-Russian separatists, through military means;

4) Russia would accept Ukraine’s entrance into the European Union.

People gather amid the destruction caused after shelling of a shopping center, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, March 21, 2022. (AP Photo/ (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

These proposals would be tantamount to Ukraine reneging on its current military strategy, adopted in March 2021, which explicitly aimed at retaking Crimea and the Donbass. The strategy was one of the main provocations that led up to the current war. However, right after the meeting had ended, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that he was not willing to make concessions on Ukraine “territorial integrity,” i.e., the status of Donbass and Crimea.

Russia, for its part, declared that it would “drastically” reduce its military operations in the direction of Ukraine’s capital Kiev and Chernigov, to facilitate further negotiations. The Kremlin will now review Ukraine’s proposals and said Vladimir Putin would be ready to meet with Zelensky once a peace agreement had been drawn up.

Even before the talks, there were signs of shifts in Russia’s military strategy. On Friday, the vice-head of Russia’s general staff and head of the military operation in Ukraine, Sergei Rudskoi, declared that the focus of Russian military operations would now shift to the Donbass in East Ukraine, because the “first phase” of the operation had been “successfully completed.”

While several Russian air strikes on targets in West Ukraine have since been reported, media reports have also pointed to an apparent retreat of Russian forces in large parts of southern Ukraine as well as around Kiev.

Over the past month of war, Russia’s army has suffered heavy losses. While the Defense Ministry now acknowledges that 1,351 Russian troops have died and 3,925 were wounded, estimates by the Pentagon put the figure as high as 7,000 dead and almost 30,000 wounded. For comparison, in the almost ten-year long war in Afghanistan from December 1979 to February 1989, Soviet forces lost just under 15,000 troops.

The casualty figures among Russian senior military leaders have been particularly staggering. Reports suggest that 15 generals and senior officers were killed, with Business Insider noting that the “the Russian officer elite is being decimated in Ukraine.”

Tuesday’s peace talks came just days after a visit by US President Joe Biden to Warsaw, in which one highly provocative “gaffe” followed another: First, Biden told members of the 82nd US Airborne Division that “you’re going to see when you’re there” how strong the resistance in Ukraine is, suggesting that they would soon be deployed to the war zone. Then, on Saturday, he publicly announced what has long been an aim of US strategy — regime change in Moscow, and declared that the US had to be prepared for “decades” of war.

Biden, who had earlier denounced Putin as a “war criminal ,” deliberately bringing US-Russian relations to the brink of collapse, also called the Russian President a “butcher.”

While quickly walked back by his staff, either one of these public statements by the US President could have formed the basis of a major military escalation of the war. They were, unsurprisingly, interpreted by Russian foreign policy circles as a clear sign that Washington had no interest whatsoever in a peaceful resolution of the war.

On Monday, Biden made yet another extraordinary statement, claiming that the US was “helping train the Ukrainian troops that are in Poland”—something both the White House and the US military had earlier denied. Also on Monday, the White House submitted a request to Congress for yet another record war budget of $813 billion for 2023, including $682 million for Ukraine.

It is thus hardly surprising that, when asked about the outcome of talks and the Kremlin’s assurance that it would scale back its military operation around Kiev, Biden displayed everything but enthusiasm: “I don’t read anything into it until I see what their actions are.”

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby similarly dismissed the Kremlin’s assurances, claiming that “nobody should be fooling” themselves by believing them.

A recent piece in Foreign Affairs indicates that, even if Washington were to accept some kind of settlement of the war for the time being, it would only be one that, in all but words, ensures the continued status of Ukraine as a proxy of imperialism. In the piece, A. Wess Mitchell, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia under Trump from 2017 to 2019, argued that “a deal doesn’t have to be a death sentence.”

Even while accepting formal neutrality, he argued, Ukraine could get an agreement “that ensures that renunciation of NATO membership does not come at the expense of the country’s self-defense or its prospects for an economic and political future in the West.”

Such an agreement would involve “a commitment [by the West] to support its military development with foreign assistance and weapons procurement”—i.e., a continuation of the massive multibillion-dollar weapons shipments to Ukraine that have been under way for years and have been dramatically accelerated with the war .

However, it is everything but certain that any sort of deal would be accepted by either Washington or the Ukrainian far right, which wields enormous influence in Ukrainian politics and the state apparatus and is now heavily armed with NATO weapons and tanks.

Since the war began, the Ukrainian secret service (SBU), which openly places itself in the tradition of the Nazi collaborationist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), has conducted a campaign of terror against members of the Ukrainian negotiating team and pro-Russian oppositionists. One member of the negotiating team was killed, and at least one other arrested on charges of “treason.” Many more politicians have been arrested or disappeared.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the oligarch Roman Abramovich, who has been involved in peace negotiations with Ukraine, as well as several members of the Ukrainian negotiating team, may have been poisoned during talks earlier this month. The report was based on a joint investigation by the Journal with Bellingcat, a highly dubious “investigative” consortium with documented ties to NATO. Bellingcat was also behind the “revelations” about the alleged poisoning of right-wing US-backed Putin critic Alexei Navalny.

The Wall Street Journal was quick to suggest that “hard-liners in Moscow” were behind the suspected poisoning However, if, indeed, there was an attempted poisoning of Abramovich and other negotiators, it may just as likely have been perpetrated by the Ukrainian SBU or any of the numerous far-right militias in the country that have time and again proven, including through assassinations, that they will do everything in their power to prevent a settlement of the conflict.

UK COVID memorial wall anniversary: The pandemic still raging, the criminals still at large

Thomas Scripps

Today’s day of reflection, marking the first anniversary of the National Covid Memorial Wall in London is one of the few genuine expressions of the popular response to the pandemic. It combines sorrow at the enormous and needless loss of life with a call for those responsible to be brought to justice.

The wall was begun when the first red heart was painted on the 500-metre wall facing the Houses of Parliament, across the River Thames. It is the project of campaign group Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK.

People look at the 500 metre long National Covid Memorial Wall, May 2021 (WSWS Media)

A silent procession along its length will take place at 3.30pm, with a petition calling for the wall to be made a permanent memorial to be handed into Downing Street at 4.30pm. It currently has over 100,000 signatures. A candlelit procession will take place at 8pm.

These vigils are held in the face of a government determined to erase the memorial wall in the heart of Westminster. Last May, Prime Minister Boris Johnson pointedly endorsed a different memorial tucked away in St Paul’s Cathedral, telling Parliament: “Like many across this Chamber I was deeply moved when I visited the COVID memorial wall opposite Parliament and I wholeheartedly support the plan for a memorial in St Paul’s cathedral which will provide a fitting place of reflection in the heart of our capital.”

Johnson et al fear and despise the memorial wall as a testament to the crimes they have committed and now continue, and of the overwhelming popular hostility to his government.

Each individually drawn heart represents one of the more than 188,000 lives lost to the pandemic. This appalling death toll is the direct result of government policy, summed up by Johnson’s infamous outburst, “No more fucking lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!” A day after this statement became public, Johnson scurried to the memorial at night so he could claim to have visited without having to encounter the people whose loved ones his government murdered.

A deadly and highly infectious novel virus has been allowed to run rampant through the population for the last two years. Its spread was only briefly interrupted by lockdowns forced on the Conservatives by an angry public and implemented to prevent a revolt in the working class prompted by the collapse of the National Health Service.

With every reopening of the economy, the government moved closer to its objective of “learning to live with the virus”.

The consequences are staggering. As well as the terrible loss of life, three quarters of a million have at some stage been hospitalised with the virus. As of January 31, 1.5 million people were suffering with Long COVID—685,000 of them had been ill for more than a year.

In remembering the dead, the memorial wall is an indictment of those responsible. It also draws attention to the ongoing dangers posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which the government is doing its best to hide.

Having ended all public health measures to combat the spread of the virus, reporting of cases is being steadily scaled back and funding to key surveillance studies cut. Testing will no longer be universally free from next month.

But for all these efforts, the reality of “living with COVID” is becoming ever clearer. According to the weekly Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey, nearly 3.5 million people were infected with COVID in the week ending March 19, a one million increase on the week before. England’s infection rate of one in 16 people is close to its historic high of one in 15 and Scotland’s rate of one in 11 is the highest ever.

Government claims that the vaccination programme has rendered these numbers irrelevant are lies. Vaccination is a vital instrument in controlling the virus, but is undermined by a vaccine-only strategy which allows it to both continue circulating and mutating.

Imperial College London Professor of Immunology Danny Altmann published yesterday, “Why the UK can’t rely on boosters to get through each new wave of Covid”. He writes, “The vaccines rapidly induce hugely high levels of protective, neutralising antibodies in most people, but these levels wane within months of each sequential dose…

“[N]ew evidence from the past two years suggests that encounters with different variants of Covid or different vaccine types can alter the effectiveness of later jabs in surprising ways—an effect called immune imprinting. This raises the possibility that booster performance could be even less predictable and effective in the future.”

As of January 31, nearly 600,000 of the then 14.8 million total recorded infections in the UK were re-infections. Many people have been fallen ill three times with different variants.

Moreover, there are indications that the government’s relentless propaganda to declare the pandemic “over” is sabotaging the vaccine rollout. Less than half of the 560,000 severely immuno-suppressed people in the UK have received a fourth vaccination shot, on offer since September.

People adding to the National Covid Memorial Wall. The wall is adjacent to Saint Thomas’ Hospital in London. Each heart represents one of the more than 150,000 people who have died of COVID-19 in Britain. (credit: WSWS media)

Claims that the emergence of the Omicron variant means that COVID’s spread can be tolerated are proving disastrous. Driven by the rising wave of infections, hospitalisations have risen significantly, with the number of COVID patients increasing from 10,554 on February 26, to 17,440 last Thursday. For over-75s, the weekly rate of admission for COVID patients is at its highest level in a year. The number of people being treated primarily for COVID increased 50 percent in the two weeks to March 24.

Since Johnson announced his “Living with COVID” strategy on February 21, nearly 4,000 people have been killed by the virus at a rate of 110 a day, equivalent to roughly 40,000 a year. According to the latest survey Long COVID figures jumped by 200,000 in a month, with 35–49-year-olds in the most deprived areas the most likely to be affected.

Unable to simply sweep the pandemic and its response under the carpet, the government has sought to defuse public anger using the tried and tested method of a public inquiry. Like every other before it, this is a stage-managed affair, designed to spend as long as possible asking the wrong questions. The chairperson, retired judge Lady Hallett, was directly appointed by Johnson. Her terms of reference exclude bringing the guilty to justice.

Anyone who wants to know where this is heading should look at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, looking into 72 deaths in one tower fire on one night, now in its fifth year and with no end in sight. In that time, the corporations involved in the refurbishment of the tower, still raking in profits, have been granted immunity from prosecution.

Johnson can promise a “frank and candid” COVID inquiry because he knows his own protection is assured.

The Labour Party poses as a supporter of the memorial wall and the campaign to make it permanent. This is revolting cynicism. The Johnson government could not have got away with its crimes in the last two years if it had not been supported by Labour every step of the way—with the party and the trade unions signing up to every unsafe reopening of the economy and of schools that became the main vectors for the virus.

Biden unveils 2023 budget with massive spending on the military and police

Patrick Martin

President Joe Biden revealed his administration’s 2023 budget proposal Monday afternoon, featuring the largest ever US military spending and a substantial increase for domestic police repression.

President Joe Biden speaks from Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol to mark the one year anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol by supporters loyal to then-President Donald Trump, Thursday, Jan. 6, 2022, in Washington. (Greg Nash/Pool via AP)

While Biden gave lip service to increasing spending on domestic social programs and taxing billionaires, this was for show, given the narrow margin of Democratic Party control in both the House and Senate. More significant was his declaration that “fiscal responsibility” would be the priority of his administration.

In his brief address as he stood alongside budget director Shalanda Young, Biden outlined his priorities as “First, fiscal responsibility. Second, safety and security. And thirdly, investments needed to build a better America.”

He then reiterated, “The first value is fiscal responsibility. The previous administration as you all know, ran record budget deficits. In fact, it went up every year under my predecessor. My administration is turning that around. Last year, we cut the deficit by more than $350 billion. This year, we’re on track to cut the deficit by more than $1,300,000,000,000. That would be the largest one-year reduction in the deficit in US history.”

This means that when the proposed tax increase on the billionaires and other revenue-raising measures are blocked by Republicans and the right wing of his own Democratic Party, Biden will insist that there can be no cuts in the military, given the ongoing confrontation with Russia and the supposed threat of China. Social spending will inevitably bear the brunt.

And whatever the outcome of the horse-trading and infighting in Congress, the budget is based on the rosiest of assumptions: no resurgence of COVID-19, substantial economic growth, and a cooling of inflation from the present rate of nearly 8 percent. Biden said that he was calling for an end to pandemic-driven fiscal assistance to state and local governments and subsidies to large corporations. Pandemic spending “will be dramatically less than last year,” even though the actual number of people infected and in need of care has increased.

Biden said that a new tax on billionaires would raise $360 billion over the next ten years. This is the latest iteration of a long-time Democratic Party con game, claiming that it supports higher taxes on the wealthy, and enacting changes in the tax code that the multi-millionaires then easily evade. The Democrats never propose any measures that would actually redistribute wealth away from the super-rich, because, as Biden said Monday, “I’m a capitalist.”

He also proposed an increase in the corporate income tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent. A similar plan went nowhere last year because of opposition by two right-wing Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Neither has changed their position, so that proposal is purely to support a bit of populist demagogy in the 2022 election campaign.

The Democratic president went through a litany of promises on social spending, including child care, universal preschool, health care, expanding research into fighting cancer and climate change, and alleviating poverty and homelessness. Biden is well aware that none of these proposals will pass Congress unless watered down to virtually nothing.

The heart of his domestic program was law and order. “The answer is not to defund our police departments,” he declared, “It’s to fund our police and give them all the tools they need… The budget puts more police on the streets for community policing so they get to know the community they are policing.” There would be more funding for federal police agencies as well, including the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).

The various domestic items pale by comparison with the massive outlays for the military, which will receive a record $813 billion, more than $2 billion a day. The bulk of this spending is for the acquisition of more and more weaponry—planes, ships, tanks, armored cars, advanced artillery, as well as $40 billion for the Department of Energy to build new and more destructive nuclear weapons.

There will also be a pay raise of 4.6 percent for military and civilian federal employees. The uniformed military and the employees of the Pentagon, CIA and departments primarily concerned with national security and domestic policing, such as Homeland Security, Justice, State, Veterans Affairs, Energy and Transportation, comprise the vast majority of federal employees.

The budget includes, for example, $42 billion for the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and expansion and maintenance of border fencing. Another $30 billion will go to various programs to beef up local and state police forces.

The reactionary Russian invasion of Ukraine, in response to the intransigent insistence of the US government and the European imperialist powers on the expansion of NATO right up to Russia’s borders, has become an all-purpose excuse for giving the Pentagon every dollar it seeks, and then more.

Biden cited the war in Ukraine repeatedly, and called for a “bipartisan unity agenda” in response to the supposed global threats of Russia and China.

The budget document spells this out: “We are at the beginning of a decisive decade that will determine the future of strategic competition with China, the trajectory of the climate crisis and whether the rules governing technology, trade and international economics enshrine or violate our democratic values.”

The New York Times cited this passage and then declared bluntly that the core of Biden’s message was not “an urgent appeal to address racial and income inequality, climate change and the struggles of the middle class, but to reassert American dominance in a dangerous and competitive world.”

Combined with the 2022 budget just given final passage by Congress six months late, the Pentagon will receive a whopping increase of 10 percent over the first two years of the Biden administration. And that assumes that the US and NATO do not become more directly involved in the war between Russia and Ukraine, in which case an additional huge increase can be expected.

Some of the more significant budget items include $6.9 billion for the European Deterrence Initiative, which supports NATO operations mainly in Eastern Europe, targeting Russia. This is nearly double the figure of $3.6 billion from 2022. Some $692 million will go to Ukraine to sustain its military operations against Russia.

A record $130 billion will be devoted to military research and development, including hypersonic weapons, biotechnology and microelectronics.

Another $40 billion in the Air Force budget will go to other agencies on a classified basis. This is known as the “black budget” and finances operations which the national-security state does not report even to Congress, let alone the American people.

The COVID-19 lockdowns in Shanghai and the fight for global elimination

Evan Blake

On Monday, authorities in Shanghai, the most populous urban area in China with over 26 million people, began a two-stage lockdown of the city. Residents east of the Huangpu River, which bisects Shanghai, will be under a strict “closed-loop” lockdown from March 28 to April 1, followed by all residents west of the river from April 1-5.

A health worker in protective suit takes a throat swab sample from a resident at an outdoor coronavirus testing site, Wednesday, March 23, 2022, in Beijing, China. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

During these lockdowns, all transit will stop, nonessential workplaces will close, and schools will switch to remote learning. Every resident will be given multiple PCR tests in an attempt to identify all COVID-19 infections and cut off every chain of transmission. All symptomatic infections will be hospitalized, and people with asymptomatic infections will be safely monitored in isolation centers.

The lockdown of Shanghai, a major financial and industrial center of world capitalism, is highly significant. It takes place under conditions in which China is struggling to contain the worst outbreak of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic in late 2019, fueled by the highly contagious, immune-resistant and virulent Omicron BA.2 subvariant.

Since the beginning of March, COVID-19 infections have gradually risen across much of China, from a 7-day average of 119 daily new cases on March 1 to an average of 5,203 daily new cases on March 28, with a total of 75,037 infections identified this month. Tragically, on March 20 two people succumbed to the virus, the first deaths in China in over a year.

Chart showing COVID-19 infection data from China this month (WSWS Media)

Compared to the horrific waves of infection that have swept the rest of the globe, these figures are minuscule, but they are the worst that China has experienced since first eliminating COVID-19 in early May 2020.

China’s ongoing outbreak is entirely the fault of the Western imperialist powers, led by the United States. Refusing to follow the lead of China and other Asia-Pacific countries which implemented policies necessary to stop the pandemic in 2020, they have instead allowed the virus to circulate throughout the world and infect billions of people over the past two years. They have enforced vaccine nationalism and upheld the profit interests of the pharmaceutical monopolies, leaving 85 percent of all people in low-income countries entirely unvaccinated.

These homicidal policies have killed an estimated roughly 20 million people worldwide, according to the Economist’s tracker of excess deaths, while spawning ever more dangerous variants whose spread is increasingly hard to contain.

BA.2 is the most hazardous variant of SARS-CoV-2 to have evolved so far. It is believed to be roughly as infectious as measles, the most contagious pathogen known to man, as well as more immune-resistant than the Omicron BA.1 subvariant and as virulent as the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2.

The very fact that China has prevented the exponential growth of BA.2, as happened throughout much of the world with BA.1 and multiple countries with BA.2, is a testament to the strength of the “dynamic zero” elimination strategy that they have maintained.

However, the current outbreak is testing the limits of maintaining a Zero-COVID policy in China alone, and there are growing indications that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime is debating some sort of shift away from this strategy. In addition to the objective challenges of stopping BA.2, considerable pressure has been brought to bear by global finance capital, as well as sections of the Chinese bourgeoisie and upper middle class whose financial interests are impacted by lockdowns.

In contrast to previous citywide lockdowns which were open-ended until all cases were identified and transmission stopped, the Shanghai lockdown is bifurcated and confined to only 9 days. Furthermore, it is belated and should have begun at least a week ago, as cases have steadily risen in the city since mid-March. On March 16, Shanghai recorded 158 new infections, followed by 983 on March 23, and then a record 3,500 on March 27. Over the past two days, Shanghai has accounted for the absolute majority of all COVID-19 infections across China.

Prior to an abrupt change of course Sunday evening, Shanghai officials had repeatedly stated that there would not be a broader lockdown. Instead, they touted their “precise anti-epidemic measures,” which relied solely on mass testing, contact tracing, isolation and quarantine of infected and exposed people, and the targeted lockdown of individual neighborhoods.

In justifying this policy, officials explicitly cited the need to maintain economic growth. On March 20, Wu Fan, a member of the Shanghai government expert panel on COVID-19, stated, “Shanghai is irreplaceable to China’s economy. … If the whole city stood still for a week or 10 days, it could be beneficial to curbing the pandemic. But the loss would be unbearable for small businesses and ordinary people.”

These comments were made three days after a significant meeting of the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee, the country’s top decision-making body, at which Chinese President Xi Jinping stated that they must “strive to achieve the maximum prevention and control at the least cost and minimize the impact of the epidemic on economic and social development.”

An article published Monday in the CCP-run Global Times gives approval to Shanghai’s holding back from a lockdown until now, writing, “Some senior Chinese experts who closely follow the country’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreaks over the past years consider Shanghai’s exploration a courageous and necessary one, especially when more suggestions were made by epidemiologists in China and overseas to adjust China’s zero tolerance strategy in a more dynamic way in lowering the costs on social development and people’s livelihood, striking a balance between the regular anti-epidemic work and economic growth.”

The growing indications that China’s ruling elite is seriously considering an end to the Zero-COVID elimination policy are deeply concerning and must be opposed by the working class in China and internationally. Contrary to every portrayal of China’s pandemic policies in the Western media, they remain very popular in the Chinese working class.

The fundamental weakness of China’s Zero-COVID policy is its national character, which flows from the nationalist and pro-capitalist politics of the CCP. Encircled by world governments which are determined to let the virus rip ad infinitum, the CCP feels compelled to adapt to the homicidal policy of “living with the virus.”

In reality, any lessening of the Zero-COVID policy and even the adoption of a comprehensive “mitigationist” approach would prove disastrous for the Chinese masses. A report published on March 11 by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) modeled the impact that different pandemic scenarios would have in Guangdong province.

The “mitigation” strategy allowing for 50 percent of pre-pandemic travel and moderate public health measures would result in an estimated 55,205 total cases and over 500 deaths in 2022 alone in Guangdong. Extrapolated for all of China, over 600,000 people would likely be infected and over 5,500 would likely die in 2022. Under the “coexistence” scenario akin to the “herd immunity” strategy of the US and much of Europe, roughly 1.35 million people would die from COVID-19 in China in the rest of 2022 alone.

While such models may be useful in attempting to predict outcomes in the abstract, they cannot factor in the political significance of abandoning Zero-COVID and accepting a “mitigationist” position. As soon as this fatal step is taken, the virus will immediately become more difficult to contain and pressures will build to completely cave in to the “herd immunity” camp.

The pressures to abandon Zero-COVID must be overcome by the Chinese working class, in unity with workers in every country striving to end the needless suffering and death from COVID-19. The experience in China underscores the basic reality that there is no national solution to the pandemic.