Shanghai, a city of 26 million inhabitants and China’s commercial hub, has beaten back the Omicron variant in just two months with fewer than 600 deaths. The infrastructure and economy of the metropolis are intact, and steps are being taken now to lift the lockdown. Health and city officials announced Saturday they intend to formally end its lockdown after Wednesday, having already relaxed restrictions last week.
Meanwhile, Europe and the US have repeatedly lied to their population that little could be done against the contagious variant and had to go it alone as the opening of the economy essentially remains a priority. These lies have been accompanied by a scurrilous slander campaign against China, portraying its highly successful and widely popular Zero-COVID policy as an unacceptable infringement on the rights of the people.
US President Joe Biden joined the chorus last week, dismissing China’s pandemic policy as a failure while hailing India’s disastrous results as a triumph of democracy.
To put Biden’s blatant lie into context, China and India have comparable populations of over 1.4 billion people each. India’s official COVID death count is nearing 525,000, while China’s is just over 5,000, a hundred times less.
The disparity is actually even more dramatic. According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recent report on global excess deaths from January 2020 to December 2021, a more accurate measure of the impact of the pandemic, India suffered 4.74 million excess deaths, the most of any country.
During the same period, China experienced fewer deaths than would have been predicted, with a figure of negative 52,000 excess deaths. The measures taken to suppress the COVID-19 pandemic actually had a spillover effect in reducing deaths from other causes as well.
It also bears comparing the US and China on the state of the COVID pandemic considering Biden’s malicious statement. Since the pandemic, the US has reported over a million COVID deaths, with a population 4.2 times smaller than China’s. On a per capita rate, the “leader of the free world” killed one in every 330 of its own citizens. China’s per capita rate was an infinitesimal one in every 250,000 people.
At last count, the total number of COVID deaths in “autocratic” China has reached 5,226 across 31 provincial-level regions, far below even Hong Kong’s foray with Omicron that claimed over 9,000 lives with just 7.5 million people.
The Omicron surge in China commenced at the beginning of March. While daily infections were quickly stabilized in the northern province of Jilin, the delay in initiating strict measures in Shanghai led to an ever-accelerating community transmission there. On March 27, the spreading infections in the metropolis prompted a phased lockdown that placed the entire region into strict isolation.
Despite initial missteps and confusion stemming from a never-before-initiated and massive public health effort, the process of mass testing, contact tracing, isolation and quarantining, including administering medical care to those infected, within little more than two months, the tide of infections was reversed.
The COVID trendline in China since March 1. (Source: WSWS media)
After reaching a peak in the seven-day average of 26,109 daily cases on April 15, the seven-day average has declined to a low of 426 cases per day. According to the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, the country reported 293 new COVID cases yesterday, of which 211 were asymptomatic and 82 symptomatic. Seventy-eight of these cases were imported, leaving 215 cases of local transmission.
In Shanghai, the epicenter of the Omicron outbreak in mainland China, there were only 122 COVID cases reported over the last 24 hours. There were no reported deaths yesterday, leaving the total COVID deaths in Shanghai at 591.
By comparison, the US registered close to 110,000 COVID cases yesterday. However, given the near-complete dismantling of the COVID trackers across most states, these numbers are a gross undercounting. Despite the persistence of media discussion about the pandemic in the past tense, the seven-day average of deaths has up-ticked to over 370 per day, meaning more Americans will die in two days during the supposed lull in cases than Chinese citizens died in three months of an outbreak. In the time it has taken China to beat back COVID, with barely 600 deaths, another 50,000 Americans died from the disease.
Though the transition to normal operations in Shanghai comes at a deliberate pace, people are allowed out of their homes and local businesses are reopening. Most of the population is currently living in the lowest risk “prevention” category, meaning no cases have been detected in over two weeks.
From June 1, the city is loosening its PCR testing requirements from 48 hours to 72 hours for using public transportation or entry into public buildings. For those planning to leave the city, a PCR test within 48 hours is required, followed by a rapid antigen test within 24 hours, and entry into the city needs a PCR test within 48 hours.
According to Wu Huanyu, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention, when a community-acquired infection is detected, contact tracers proceed to the site and investigate close and secondary contacts to contain the spread and the resurgence. Additionally, these cases are gene sequenced to determine the origin of the COVID infection.
According to the city publication, Shine, “Nearly 1,700 key production companies, 450 financial institutions, and 580 foreign trade companies have restored operations in Pudong. A total of 660 supermarkets and 41 wet markets have reopened, along with landmark shopping malls such as the Taikoo Li Qiantan and 1 Yaohan, which have been receiving customers. All bus lines within Pudong will be restored from Monday, along with all community service centers.”
The capital city of Beijing responded quickly to the April 22 outbreak that threatened the city. Reuters reported yesterday that a government spokesman said during a recent news conference that the outbreak has been brought “effectively under control” without having to resort to a city-wide lockdown.
In the eight of Beijing’s 16 districts, with zero community cases for seven consecutive days, shopping malls, libraries, museums, theaters and gyms were opened on Sunday. Public transportation will resume in three districts, including the largest, Chaoyang. Indoor dining remains banned city-wide.
If the counterfactual outcome were posed, a recent peer-reviewed study from Shanghai’s Fudan University, published in the journal Nature Medicine, found that if China abandoned its Zero-COVID policy, Omicron would lead to 112 million symptomatic cases within six months, 5.1 million hospital admissions, and 1.6 million deaths.
Besides the complete overwhelming of their health systems, such an approach would have dire long-term consequences that include subjugating millions more to Long COVID and the possible emergence of new virulent strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The financial press has not even discussed the question of the impact on the global economy if China abandoned Zero-COVID. The current attempts to blame China for the world’s economic downturn are purely political. If the virus were allowed to spread without any public health measures to stem the tide of infections, the results would be catastrophic both to the population and to the world’s economy.
With new waves of infections being forecast, the ongoing toll of infections and reinfections on the population’s health would have untold consequences that would last for generations. Neither China nor any other country can suppress a global pandemic. Only the international working class can enforce a policy of global Zero-COVID, disregarding all the claims of corporate profit and “national security” that dictate the policies of all capitalist states.
The Chinese economy is facing some of its most serious problems in more than three decades as the government continues to battle to end the outbreak of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 through lockdowns of major cities and other public health measures.
Workers labor near a construction site with cranes near the central business district skyline in Beijing, China, October 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Last week Premier Li warned that China would struggle to reach positive economic growth in the second quarter of this year, after recording a 4.8 percent expansion in the first.
The situation was “to some degree worse” than it had been at the start of the pandemic in early 2020 when the Chinese economy contracted by 6.9 percent. Economic indicators had fallen significantly, and “difficulties in some aspects and to a certain extent are greater than when the epidemic hit us severely in 2020.”
“We will try to make sure the economy grows in the second quarter. This is not a high target and a far cry from our 5.5 percent goal. But we have to do so,” he said.
The official unemployment rate in China, which only covers urban dwellers, had increased to 6.1 percent. Li noted that unemployment for people aged 16 to 24 had risen to an historic high of 18.2 percent, with the jobless rate for migrant workers also increasing sharply.
Li’s focus on the growth and jobless rates is significant because the government regards strong growth as essential for maintaining what it calls “social stability.”
In a report of the address, based on transcripts, the Financial Times said Li had noted that “corporate liquidation had soared by more than 23 percent year on year in April when the whole of Shanghai entered a full lockdown that affected commercial operations across eastern China. Largely private sector small- and medium-sized enterprises [SMEs], which account for more than half or more of government revenues, economic output and employment, have been hit the hardest.”
The premier emphasised the importance of COVID prevention while maintaining production. “We must ensure both the smooth functioning of supply chains and COVID prevention are achieved,” he said, adding that “many SMEs and local authorities told me their worst days have come.”
Progress, he said, was not satisfactory, with some provinces reporting that only 30 percent of their businesses had reopened. “The ratio must be raised to 80 percent within a short period of time.”
Li reported that power generation, freight transport and new bank loans had all fallen in the first half of this month.
Data on the economy underscore the growing problems confronting government authorities. Earlier this month it was reported that industrial production, one of the key drivers of the Chinese economy, had fallen 2.9 percent in April, retail sales had dropped 11 percent and car sales had almost halved.
Since those figures were released, it has been revealed that industrial groups recorded their worst decline in profits since the start of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020, falling 8.5 percent compared to a year earlier.
A senior official at the National Bureau of Statistics, Zhu Hong, said that in April the Omicron outbreak “had a large impact on the production and operation of industrial firms and that manufacturing companies’ profits fell by 22 percent.
Authorities have eased financial conditions with the central bank cutting its five-year prime rate, used to set mortgages, from 4.6 percent to 4.45 percent. But such measures will do little to ease the crisis in the real estate sector where the giant Evergrande company is already in default. The problems in real estate, when all the flow-on effects are considered, are not being resolved as home sales continue to fall. The sector accounts for between 25 percent and 30 percent of the Chinese economy.
Earlier this month, China’s third-largest developer, Sunac, reported that it had missed a payment on a $742 million offshore bond.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the government and financial authorities were able to boost the economy through a massive stimulus package, involving increased spending and the expansion of credit. The stimulus was equivalent to around 13 percent of GDP.
That road is now closed because of the transformation in global financial conditions. All the major central banks, led by the US Fed, are now lifting interest rates in response to the surge in inflation. Fearing this will bring an upsurge of workers’ struggles in support of wage demands, they are seeking through higher rates to put a clamp on economic growth to counter this growing movement.
Global financial conditions are heavily impacting on China. The value of the yuan is falling—it dropped 4.5 percent in April—prompting a capital outflow.
As Sydney Morning Herald economics writer Stephen Bartholomeusz noted in a comment published last week: “The Chinese authorities are very aware that lowering their own [interest] rates too aggressively to try to stimulate activity could turn what’s already a steady outflow of capital into a fully-fledged and destabilising capital flight.”
The central government also appears to be pushing back against demands from local government authorities for increased assistance.
In his remarks to last week’s teleconference, Li said several provinces had appealed to the central government for support, but indicated resources were limited. “I am here to let you know my bottom line. There is a reserve fund managed by the premier. Other than that, local governments must raise funds [on your own.]”
China is also facing a food crisis in at least one part of the country. According to Li, Jilin, a large agricultural region in the north-east had been severely affected and grain output could “barely” match demand and warned that a bad summer harvest would create “huge problems.”
China was already experiencing major economic problems before the onset of Omicron—notably in the highly-indebted real estate sector.
But they have been significantly compounded by the refusal of governments worldwide to develop an international strategy for the elimination of COVID-19. Consequently, China is faced with the task of trying to deal with the virus on a national basis, under conditions where it is continually open to the reintroduction of infections from the rest of the world.
The growing demand from governments, corporations and finance capital is that China abandons its zero COVID program and adopt the “let it rip” policy, which has led to millions of unnecessary deaths in the rest of the world. If this were adopted it would lead to hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of deaths.
This in turn would create a crisis for the Xi Jinping regime because the zero COVID policy, despite some of the bureaucratic excesses in its implementation, enjoys wide support among the population.
The attitude of the major powers towards China on COVID is another expression of the policy they have essentially adopted from the outset—that nothing must be done that would impede the flow of profit and so they are demanding that China “open up.”
But their refusal to take action to eliminate the virus in order to prop up financial markets is now rebounding on the global economy, leading to the largest inflation hike in more than four decades and a significant slowdown, if not outright contraction, in the world’s second-largest economy which will exacerbate international recessionary trends.
The United Nations’ top human rights official, Michelle Bachelet, completed a six-day visit to China on Saturday with a press conference that offered muted criticisms of the country’s lack of basic democratic rights across a range of areas, including its labour laws and heavy use of the death sentence, and state policy in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang.
Michelle Bachelet (Flickr/UN Women)
The trip, however, provoked a storm of criticism and denunciation for its failure to meet the propaganda requirements of Washington and its allies for a denunciation of the Chinese government over its treatment of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang in the country’s west.
While stopping short of branding Bachelet a Chinese stooge, American officials, Uyghur exile organisations and the Western media dismissed the trip as a stage-managed affair that amounted to a cover-up and failed to aggressively expose China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed concern that “the conditions Beijing authorities imposed on the visit did not enable a complete and independent assessment of the human rights environment in the PRC, including in Xinjiang, where genocide and crimes against humanity are ongoing.”
Washington’s denunciations of China for genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang are the centrepiece of its hypocritical campaign against China over “human rights.” As with the illegal US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the vilification of Beijing is the propaganda component of American imperialism's economic and military preparations for conflict with China.
Blinken’s “concern” over Bachelet’s visit followed days after a keynote speech in which he declared China to be “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order”—that is, the post-World War II order dominated by the US.
The declaration that China is engaged in “genocide” of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang is a big lie—endlessly repeated without a shred of evidence through the mouthpieces of Western propaganda. Insofar that any attempt is made to substantiate the allegation of “genocide,” it is based on the tendentious claims of right-wing academics that China’s crude population controls are leading to the elimination of the Uyghur minority—even though similar heavy-handed methods are applied across China.
As Bachelet began her tour of China, the far-right, US-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation published documents purportedly hacked from police computer servers in Xinjiang, which it claimed include speeches by senior Chinese officials, local policing protocols, spreadsheets with records on more than 23,000 detainees, and images of people detained in 2018.
Adrian Zenz, who received and released the documents, is also responsible for the bogus “research” that centrally underpins the allegations of “genocide” and assertions that a million Uyghurs have been forcibly detained in re-education camps. He is a right-wing German commentator and born-again Christian who is closely connected to a network of anti-communist European and American think tanks and, undoubtedly through them, to the foreign policy and intelligence establishments.
Blinken’s “concerns” over Bachelet’s trip were amplified in more strident terms by Sophie Richardson, China Director of the US-based Human Rights Watch—an “independent” organisation that closely mirrors the “human rights” campaigns of the US State Department.
Richardson declared that she was “appalled and alarmed” that “the world’s leading human rights diplomat just failed to challenge the second most powerful government on earth over some of the gravest crimes under international human rights law.” She continued: “It is unacceptable to fail to robustly investigate crimes against humanity.”
Luke de Pulford, coordinator of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, lashed out at Bachelet, saying her trip “hit all the wrong notes.” He continued: “The whole debacle represents an appalling dereliction of duty and betrayal of Uyghurs.” The Alliance is an international grouping of politicians that includes some of the most rabid anti-China hawks such as US Senators Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez.
Uyghur exiles associated with the CIA-backed World Uyghur Congress and American Uyghur Association have also joined the chorus of denunciation. Dilxat Raxit, spokesperson for the World Uyghur Congress, declared that “resignation is the only meaningful thing she [Bachelet] can do for the [UN] Human Rights Council.”
Bachelet’s visit was the first by a UN High Commissioner for human rights in 17 years and was the subject of lengthy negotiations with the Chinese government. Her trip included two major cities in Xinjiang—Kashgar and Urumqi—with a visit to a prison and a former Vocational Education and Training Centre (VETC) in Kashgar. Bachelet met with Foreign Minister Wang Yi and online with President Xi Jinping, as well as civil society organisations, academics, and community and religious leaders.
Seeking to counter criticism of the trip, Bachelet stated: “I would say that, to that prison, the access was pretty open, pretty transparent. We asked many, many questions, and they answered all of them.” While subject to COVID-19 restrictions, she said: “With the people we were able to speak to, it was in an unsupervised manner.”
The Chinese government’s harsher measures in Xinjiang are imposed in the name of countering terrorism and extremism following a series of attacks by Uyghur separatists on Han Chinese. Bachelet raised concerns about allegations of the use of force at the vocational centres and unduly severe restrictions on religious practice. “It is critical that counter-terrorism responses do not result in human rights violations,” she said.
Also in response to her critics, Bachelet explained that a thorough and detailed investigation was never going to be possible and was not the purpose of her six-day trip. She suggested that Chinese authorities could “potentially rethink policies that we believe may impact negatively on human rights”—touching on Tibet, Hong Kong, the death penalty, and the implementation of labour laws among other areas.
In broad outline, Bachelet voiced the anti-China “human rights” agenda that the US and its allies have been advancing for years. The public attacks on her trip for not being sufficiently strident and condemning reflect the advanced character of the US-led confrontation with China. Even as it is pursuing a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the US is escalating its efforts to isolate, encircle and weaken China in preparation for conflict.
A question posed at Batchelet’s press conference on Saturday pointed to the utter hypocrisy of the US “human rights” campaigns against China and other countries. A reporter from state-owned China Central Television asked Batchelet whether her office planned to investigate human-rights violations by the US, noting the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Bachelet simply noted that her office had published a report on systemic racism involving US police.
Far more egregious human rights abuses and crimes against humanity can be laid at the door of US imperialism. In the name of the war on terror, for instance, the US invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and levelling social and physical infrastructure. The US not only carried out systematic torture and set up the hellhole of Guantanamo Bay, but made deep inroads into democratic rights within the US in the name of combatting terrorism.
It goes without saying that no action has been taken by the UN or the UN Human Rights Commission over these monstrous crimes. China, along with all the major powers, gave its tacit support for these illegal wars.
The Mid-Level Professionals Programme (MLPP) is a new recruitment initiative for talented and highly qualified mid-level professionals who wish to start and/or advance their careers as International Civil Servants at UNESCO.
What Type of Scholarship is this?
Fellowship
Who can apply?
Must be a national of a UNESCO Member State. Qualified candidates from non- and under-represented Member States are strongly encouraged to apply.
The MLPP selection process is based on the standard UNESCO recruitment process. Standard educational and work experience requirements for professional positions at P-3 and P-4 level apply.
Language requirements
Candidates should demonstrate an excellent knowledge of at least one working language of the Secretariat (English or French). A good knowledge of the other working language is an asset, or in some cases, is required.
Knowledge of Arabic, Chinese, Russian or Spanish could be required or would be an additional asset.
Which Countries are Eligible?
While recruitment is open to candidates from all UNESCO’s Member States, priority consideration, at equal competence, will be given to candidates from non- and under-represented Member States and to internal candidates.
How to Apply for Fellowship?
Positions included in the MLPP are advertised for two months. Before applying, please check the requirements carefully to ensure that you are eligible and qualified.
Please note that all candidates must complete an on-line application and provide complete and accurate information. No changes can be made to the application once submitted.
Applications will be reviewed to determine if candidates meet the basic eligibility requirements (i.e., experience, education, language, etc.).
Assessments and Interviews
Evaluation of candidates is based on the criteria established in the vacancy notice and may include pre-recorded video interviews, written tests and/or other assessments, and competency-based interviews with live panels.
Only candidates selected for further evaluation/assessment will be contacted.
Notification of Appointment Decisions
Candidates will be notified of the outcome of their application.
Unsuccessful interviewed candidates will receive feedback.
Household energy bills will grow 23 times faster than wages and 38 times faster than benefits by the end of this year, according to research published yesterday by the Trades Union Congress (TUC).
October’s scheduled £800 rise in fuel bills—on top of April’s 32 percent increase—means gas and electricity bills will have risen by 119 percent in just one year. By contrast, wages will have increased by just 5.2 percent, while benefits will have risen by only 3.1 percent.
(Credit: PxHere)
Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s £15 billion Cost of Living package will make barely a dent in the cost-of-living crisis engulfing tens of millions of people.
14.5 million people are living in poverty, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Data from Loughborough University reveals that goods and services for a typical family with two young children are about £400 a month more expensive than they were last year. Rising energy prices added another £120 to families’ monthly costs, with cheaper tariffs ended.
While the Johnson government has claimed that “work is the best route out of poverty”, 57 percent of impoverished Britons—some 8 million people—are already in work. Wages are lower now than in 2008, with the Office for Budget Responsibility predicting that pay will not return to pre-2008 levels until 2025.
“If real weekly wages had continued growing at the pre-2008 rate, they’d now be £111 per week higher than they are”, the TUC found. Public sector pay fell by £30 in March alone, while average weekly earnings fell by £16 per week. These figures are a staggering self-indictment of the TUC and its affiliated unions that have presided over 17-years of outright wage suppression—the longest wage freeze on some measures since the Battle of Waterloo.
Delivering his package of measures on Thursday, Sunak declared, “no government can solve every problem, particularly the complex and global challenge of inflation.” But the surge in energy and food prices is a direct outcome of policies pursued by capitalist governments to enrich the financial oligarchy.
Surging corporate profits are responsible for 60 percent of increases in inflation, according to a recent report on global income inequality published by Oxfam. The charity found that corporate profits grew more during the pandemic than in the previous 23 years, as governments directed trillions of “bail-out” funds into the coffers of the banks and corporations.
This year’s Sunday Times Rich List showed the wealth of the top 20 entrants grew by £30 billion in the past 12 months and has more than doubled in the past 10 years. The High Pay Centre (HPC) that monitors the income of top earners, reported this week that if household wealth had grown at the same rate as the top 20 Rich List entrants since 2012, every UK household would be £205,000 better off.
The HPC commented, “Imagine the difference that the £30 billion increase in the wealth of the top 20 people on the list could have made if invested in hospitals, schools, green energy, public transport or support for the world’s poorest countries, rather than accruing to people who were already billionaires anyway.”
After months of evaluation, the National Security Agency of the United States decided in April to award a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Amazon Web Services (AWS), over an outcry from rival tech giant Microsoft.
Known as “Wild and Stormy,” the contract is not the same as the much reported and similarly priced $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract from the Department of Defense that was also the subject of competing bids from AWS and Microsoft.
That contract was scrapped in July 2021 by the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden after years of squabbling between the two contenders, in the wake of the DoD’s decision under then-President Donald Trump to award the bid to Microsoft, a transparent effort to punish Amazon and its then CEO Jeff Bezos.
Although the NSA originally awarded the Wild and Stormy cloud contract to AWS in the summer of 2021, a challenge from Microsoft led the Government Accountability Office to direct the agency last October to reevaluate contract proposals from both bidders. The NSA ultimately went with the original AWS bid.
Commenting on the 10-year federal contract, an NSA spokesperson told Federal News Network the Wild and Stormy contract “is a continuation of NSA’s Hybrid Compute Initiative to modernize and address the robust processing and analytical requirements of the agency.” Microsoft has said it will not challenge the decision.
NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland [Photo by Fort George G. Meade Public Affairs Office / CC BY 4.0]
The Wild and Stormy contract stipulates that AWS will be the sole bidder holding the rights to the construction of the NSA’s cloud facility.
This is a reversal from the government’s previous decision to void the JEDI contract last year. At that time, the decision to scrap the single-provider method for a “multi-vendor” approach was favored because it “puts the agency a little more in the driver’s seat to select what they want,” stated Shawn McCarthy of the government analytics firm IDC Government Insights to the FNN.
The Hybrid Compute Initiative is a sweeping plan by the NSA to modernize its GovCloud environment. It aims to move massive amounts of data and computing power away from the agency’s global network of internal servers to cloud networks, provided by private vendors.
According to John Sherman, former Chief Information Officer of the Intelligence Community in 2020 when Hybrid Cloud Initiative was announced, such private networks would contain “very significant [signals intelligence] holdings.”
After the September 11, 2001 attacks and the passage of laws like the Patriot Act, the Total Information Act of 2002 and similar measures gave the US government sweeping powers to spy on people around the world. The NSA suddenly found itself in need of data storage capabilities to handle the increasing amount of data it collected.
A February report released by the NSA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) noted hundreds of “concerns” that a “wide swath” of the agency’s surveillance activities had the potential to be criminally abused.
For years, the agency addressed the problem of storage by adding new servers. But by 2010 it became clear cloud computing would provide the most efficient means of sharing classified data among various intelligence agencies. This also made information discoverable by analysts performing queries in one common space.
Reporting on the Wild and Stormy contract has largely been limited to government and tech-focused publications, but some commentators in and around the Democratic Party have expressed anxiety over the award. Speaking on The Hill’s “Rising” TV program earlier this month, Jacobin editor David Sirota said, “We don’t actually know the details of this contract. It’s shrouded in secrecy” due to “national security” reasons, Sirota complained.
Other commentators have pointed to the Biden administration’s alleged “hypocrisy” in awarding the NSA cloud contract to Amazon despite the White House’s previous pledges that it would prioritize contractors that allow their employees to join unions.
Writing for Salon, journalist Chris Hedges noted Biden “invited Amazon Labor Union president Christian Smalls and union workers from Starbucks and other organizations to the White House at the same time it re-awarded a $10 billion contract to the union-busting Amazon and the National Security Agency for cloud computing.”
In a revealing statement, Hedges continued, “Withholding the federal contracts until Amazon permitted free and open union organizing would be a powerful stand on behalf of workers.”
Far from hypocrisy, the awarding of the contract to Amazon confirms the important role that the company plays as a part of the critical US infrastructure, as well as the military-intelligence apparatus. Hedges does not explain how helping the NSA to improve and update its surveillance tools would be taking “a powerful stand on behalf of workers.”
The Biden administration is not promoting various trade union apparatuses at Amazon because they are “pro-worker.” On the contrary, it is a way to both restrain the class movement of workers in this key part of the economy, as well as a way to more closely coordinate its policies of class war at home and war with Russia and China abroad with its private sector partners.
In no uncertain terms, the vaccine-only strategy has proven to be an abysmal failure, not only in protecting society as a whole from the COVID-19 pandemic. It also does little to protect against Long COVID (technically known as post-acute COVID-19 syndrome) or death after the post-acute phase of a breakthrough infection.
The insistence on a vaccine-only strategy lies not in any health care rationale, but in the need to protect the capitalist class from any intrusion on their insatiable appetite for extracting surplus value out of the workforce.
The findings in a recent study published in Nature Medicine, conducted by the Veterans Affairs (VA) St. Louis Health Care System and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, have significant public health implications. They confirm once again that the basic public health measures proven so effective for centuries, including quarantining, contact-tracing and eliminating an infection entirely (Zero-COVID, not “living with the virus”), remain the only assured strategies to protect the life and well-being of the population against a dangerous pandemic.
The stated purpose of the VA study was to address an important knowledge gap. Given the waning immunity from previous vaccinations and rising risk of breakthrough infections, did people with breakthrough infections develop Long COVID and at what rates? As the authors noted, “Addressing this knowledge gap is important to guide public health policy and post-acute COVID-19 care strategies.”
For their study, they compared nearly 34,000 documented breakthrough infection cases (COVID patients who had proof of previous vaccination) to almost 5 million contemporary patients of similar age, gender and medical co-morbidities who had no documentation of prior infection. (This huge number is made possible by the large population served and monitored by the VA).
Though the study didn’t state the age of their studied population, a report prepared by the National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics in March 2019 found the median age of VA patients was around 64 and they were predominantly male. Based on economic status, they fared slightly better than non-veterans.
The study found the incidence of breakthrough infections was approximately one for every 100 individuals at six months after being fully vaccinated. The study period was from January 1, 2021, to October 31, 2021, prior to the Omicron phase of the pandemic.
According to the authors of the study, those who survived breakthrough infections still had nearly twice the rate of death when compared to the contemporary VA patients who never were infected. Their excess rate of death by six months after the breakthrough infection was about one in every 75.
This compares to one out of every 73 elderly people—those over 65 and older—who have died of COVID complications directly. In other words, elderly people who have a breakthrough infection are no better off than elderly people who were never vaccinated at all.
The study found that the risk of death was highest in the first three months after a breakthrough infection, and the higher death rates persisted at least until six months, the duration of the study. Other research found excess death from COVID continued for at least a year.
Additionally, the study noted that the increased risk of dying persisted even for those who had mild disease and did not need hospitalization after their breakthrough infection. On the other hand, those with breakthrough infections that required ICU admission had a nearly six-fold increase in dying in the first six months after they had recovered from COVID.
Those who had breakthrough infections also had an increased risk of symptoms associated with Long COVID, at rates 50 percent higher than their uninfected counterparts.
All people infected with COVID, both those with breakthrough infections and those unvaccinated, are at risk for developing health conditions that threaten their well-being and life. These include higher risks of cardiovascular, blood clotting, kidney, neurological, gastrointestinal and pulmonary disorders. They also suffered from fatigue, mental health disturbances, and muscle and joint pains.
When compared to previously unvaccinated individuals who became infected with COVID, those with BTI had a lower risk of excess death by one-third, meaning that vaccines protected them from death in the six months after recovering from COVID, but only slightly.
The lead author of the study, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of Washington University Medical School, told Healthline, “Essentially, we wanted to know if vaccines can protect us from Long COVID and how much protection is conferred by vaccination. We were hoping to see that vaccines would be protective, but, alas, the results showed otherwise,” calling the vaccines an “imperfect shield.”
The Omicron surge appears to have impacted the elderly even more than Delta, despite the relatively high rate of vaccination for those over 65. Nearly two-thirds of people that died during the Omicron surge were over the age of 75. This figure was only one-third during the Delta phase.
A New York Times analysis indicated that the share of COVID deaths among people over 65 started climbing since its low in September 2021 in part due to waning immunity, though vaccines have reportedly continued to be effective against severe disease, hospitalization, and deaths in the acute phase of the infection.
Share of breakthrough infections during Delta and Omicron waves across Washington state
Also, the proportion of breakthrough infections has been much higher during the Omicron phase. Some of the most comprehensive data on breakthrough infections comes from the Washington state Department of Health. During January 2022, at the peak of the Omicron wave, more than 50 percent of COVID cases were breakthrough infections, with 44 percent on average during December 2021 through February 2022.
Additionally, Harvard School of Medicine recently published findings that Omicron was intrinsically as virulent as previous strains of SARS-CoV-2, suggesting that the claims of “milder” cases were in large part due to the high level of antibodies in the population from prior infections and vaccinations.
And a recent New England Journal of Medicine study underscored the important fact that after a booster shot, vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease, let alone breakthrough infections, declined to 40 percent after six months, making essentially everyone at risk for reinfection.
Less publicized, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also published data on Long COVID for those infected between March 2020 to November 2021. They found that one in five adults 18 years and older subsequently developed health conditions related to their previous COVID infection, corroborating the VA data.
According to Long COVID Initiative, a website of resources for patients and communities, nearly 23 million US residents, or 7 percent of the population, are living with Long COVID. Seven million are experiencing disabling Long COVID. The expected financial burden for the current year stands at $386 billion. These figures do not include costs incurred by businesses or governmental agencies which will be pushed on to the backs of the afflicted.
The most common symptoms that last at least seven months include brain fog (58 percent), post-exertional malaise (72 percent), and fatigue (80 percent) implying that it may be impossible to perform demanding jobs for a significant number in the population, who face the growing economic hardships caused by the present inflationary crisis that is sweeping the globe.
These figures from the VA study, when applied on a world scale, suggest the staggering impact on the international working class of the policy of “learning to live with the virus.” If the vaccines offer little protection against Long COVID, as Arijit Chakravarty of Fractal Therapeutics told us recently, “If the whole world was vaccinated tomorrow, and we spent just three years ‘learning to live with COVID’ under the current strategy, we could well have over a billion people living with Long COVID.”
Indeed, the pandemic in permanence means that the more than 1 million dead in the US and 20 million across the globe are just the beginning of the continued death and debilitation that will befall the world’s humanity. Despite these horrific and grim figures and the success of a Zero-COVID policy best exemplified by China, the ruling elites demand all consideration of human health be subordinated to the health and prosperity of the markets.
All the major wars and military interventions of the United States over the last quarter century have begun with pretensions of grand moral purpose.
In Iraq, the American population was told a madman was developing weapons of mass destruction. In Afghanistan, the Taliban Jihadists needed to be removed to free the country and Osama Bin Laden found. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi obstructed the country’s yearning for “democracy” and “human rights.”
By conservative estimates, between 755,000 to 786,000 people have died directly from combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen since US led conflicts began there, largely civilians. In Libya, where tens of thousands were killed, the country has been ruined by a decade of civil war. Total estimates of deaths from American-led conflicts over the last quarter century begin far higher, from 3 million to as high as 12 million, due to the catastrophic impacts of medical, nutritional and infrastructural breakdown.
This staggering destruction belies the pretension that these wars of aggression were based on anything remotely resembling a moral purpose.
It is no secret that war has at its base more fundamental economic and geopolitical causes.
Why would it be the case that in the United States—a land where everything revolves around money—war, one of the country’s greatest exports, would be an exception? Does the Middle East, the centerpiece of the “war on terror,” just happen to be the global focal point of the cheapest future reserves of oil and gas? Is it merely a happy coincidence for the Pentagon that Gaddafi and Hussein sat on two of the largest untapped supplies of that sought-after commodity?
As Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve and key architect of US economic policy, stated in a 2007 memoir, “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.” Greenspan was harshly rebuked for even making this simple observation.
Wars, of course, require vast mobilizations of economic and political resources. Tens of trillions of dollars have been spent by the US conducting war over the last twenty-five years. And, while some grow horribly rich off this expenditure, the high costs would not be paid unless they reaped an outcome.
Imperialism and the driving forces behind US/NATO encirclement of Russia
It is in this context that the current drive towards war against Russia must be understood. A serious understanding of any major military conflict must analyze these economic and geopolitical forces. However, the media coverage of the escalating war in Ukraine is devoid of any such analysis.
To the extent that these issues are mentioned, it is in the most puerile and one-sided fashion: Russia bullies its neighbors through its important supply of natural gas, and the US and Europe seek to heroically intervene to stop this. No questions, however, are asked, as to what interests the United States and its European allies have in Ukraine or, for that matter, Russia.
If an honest historian of war sought to understand this conflict, they would be compelled, regardless of their conclusions, to at least ask the following questions:
What are the economic and geopolitical interests of expanding NATO and the EU eastward?
What is the importance of geopolitically and economically controlling Ukraine?
What interest would the United States have in dismembering Russia into smaller states with no military forces? How might they seek to accomplish this?
What is the relationship between the present war in Ukraine and the United States’ geopolitical goals in Eurasia?
The American ruling class does have answers to these questions, they just prefer not to share them too publicly.
As far back as 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US national security advisor and architect of US foreign policy in Ukraine stated, “America’s capacity to exercise global primacy” depends on whether the US can prevent “the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic Eurasian power.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Brzezinski, speaking for American imperialism on the heels of the dissolution of the USSR, had specifically in mind Russia. He argued that Ukraine was critical to the US asserting its hegemony against Russia in Eurasia. “Without Ukraine,” he wrote, “Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” Of course, Brzezinski’s friends at the State Department and the Pentagon never questioned the central premise, that the US has the right to “exercise global primacy,” nor tallied the corpses of that ambition.
Following the 2014 coup in Ukraine, during which the US and Germany intervened to remove pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, Brzezinski laid out the American military’s intention of drawing Russia into a prolonged and costly invasion of Ukraine.
In an article, “The West Should Arm Ukraine,” published by the Atlantic Council in 2014, Brzezinski speaks of a Russian invasion of Ukraine as a near certainty. He emphasizes that US and NATO countries should provide
weapons designed particularly to permit the Ukrainians to engage in effective urban warfare of resistance. There’s no point trying to arm the Ukrainians to take on the Russian army in the open field… If the major cities, say Kharkiv, say Kiev, were to resist and street fighting became a necessity, it would be prolonged and costly. And the fact of the matter is—and this is where the timing of this whole crisis is important—Russia is not yet ready to undertake that kind of an effort. [Emphasis in the original]
Ultimately, the US and EU gave over $20 billion of military and economic aid to Ukraine between the 2014 coup and 2019—backing Ukraine’s war against Russian separatists in the Donbas which took the lives of thirteen thousand people, mainly ethnically Russian civilians, another fact conveniently absent from the war coverage. Now, the US is in the process of flooding Ukraine with armaments, including advanced anti-tank missiles, artillery, and other gear. The US is on track to spend over $40 billion this year alone, which does not include arms from European states.
Brzezinski’s strikingly accurate anticipation of the present “prolonged and costly,” largely urban war contradicts, in its logical anticipation of what was to come, the two-dimensional propaganda that Putin, a mad man, invaded Ukraine out of irrational, imperial ambitions. However desperate and reactionary Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was, the fundamental causes of the war are found in these deeper, calculated ambitions of US imperialism in Eurasia following the dissolution of the USSR, involving the aggressive expansion of NATO eastward.
Lenin on imperialism
In his work, Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism, written in 1916, Lenin argued that the increasing technical development of world capitalism—the socialization and concentration of the forces of production—had ushered in a new and final era for capitalism, the imperialist epoch. While the incredible development, or socialization, of the productive forces called for socialist ownership, an increasingly narrow handful of financial oligarchs controlled the productive forces in the form of tightly controlled cartels and monopolies ruled by finance capital—what today appears as the gigantic multinational corporation, connected in a web of ties to the major banks and financial institutions.
Lenin stressed that imperialism was not a policy choice but an inescapable drive of advanced capitalist production in the imperialist epoch. “Domination,” Lenin wrote, “and violence that is associated with it—such are the relationships that are most typical of the ‘latest phase of capitalist development’; this is what must inevitably result, and has resulted, from the formation of all-powerful economic monopolies.”
Vladimir Lenin
Lenin emphasized that, among other things, this development and concentration of the productive forces under finance capital would motivate a rapacious hunt to control the world’s key resources. “The more capitalism develops,” he wrote, “the more the need for raw materials arises, the more bitter competition becomes, and the more feverishly the hunt for raw materials proceeds all over the world, the more desperate becomes the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.”
The transformations in the world economy identified by Lenin in 1916 have only intensified. The development of the productive forces over the last 100 years makes the turn of the century capitalist economy seem only like a shadow of its current size and complexity.
Controlling raw materials is not crudely about a country hoarding resources for its own use. It is equally, if not more so, about ensuring that key commodities and markets remain in the hands of an alliance of imperialist powers led, in today’s world, by the United States.
In this context, the importance of denying access to these materials (or having the capacity to deny access in the event of war) to adversaries is also pivotal. In the RAND Corporation’s detailed analysis of how the United States could win a war against China, for example, it states, “If China is vulnerable to critical shortages in a war with the United States, it could be… in oil supplies, of which it imports about 60 percent and has a declared strategic reserve of just ten days.” The bulk of China’s oil comes from the Persian Gulf region, which the US dominates.
Importantly, Lenin also noted that it was not just a question of the current production of raw materials. Lenin explained that finance capital “is also interested in possible sources of raw materials, because present-day technical development is extremely rapid, and because land which is useless today may be fertile tomorrow…”
In other words, the leading capitalist firms strive to anticipate their future need for raw materials from across the globe, to prepare themselves for the incessant pace of technical development.
The vast riches of Russia
The purpose of this essay is to contribute to the World Socialist Web Site’s analysis of the historical and political origins of the escalating threat of armed conflict between the US and Russia. Particularly, it examines the role of geostrategic resources in the drive of US/NATO forces to dominate the Eurasian landmass.
Russia is the largest country in the world. While its economy is relatively minuscule compared to the imperialist powers, its landmass spans across two continents, with a total size of 6.6 million square miles. The runners up, Canada (3.8 mi²), China (3.7 mi²) and the US (3.6 mi²) are significantly behind in terms of size. Russia alone comprises 11 percent of the entire world’s landmass.
Map showing the eastward expansion of NATO since 1949 (Credit: Wikimedia)
In this vast landmass are an array of important minerals and resources.
Russia produces roughly 40 percent of the EU’s natural gas and almost 12 percent of the world’s oil. Russia is also the second largest holder of coal reserves in the world, 175 million tons. These resources play a key role in the ongoing conflict. Amid tightening global energy supplies, these resources are a major impediment to US imperialism globally, but particularly in its effort to combat the rise of China. This issue will be the subject of a future article.
In addition to hydrocarbons, Russia contains massive quantities of basic metals. Russia is the third largest reserve holder of iron, with 25 billion tons. It also holds the second largest reserve of gold (6,800 tons) and is near tied for the fifth spot in silver. The country is also the largest producer of diamonds, producing, on average, about a third of the world’s diamonds last decade.
While each of these resources deserves attention in understanding the geostrategic ambitions of the United States and its allies, this article looks at a lesser-known aspect of global resource politics: critical minerals. Critical minerals refer to a host of metals and minerals increasingly vital to global production which, over the next two decades, are expected explode in demand. Russia sits on substantial sources of a diverse array of critical minerals that the US believes will be crucial to global economic and political power in the 21st century.
Critical minerals and the growth of the productive forces
The United States and its imperialist allies are in a scramble for so-called critical minerals and metals. The US currently has a list of fifty minerals it deems critical. Some, like aluminum or platinum, are relatively well known. Others—such as neodymium, a rare earth, or rhodium, a member of the platinum metal group—are barely known even though they are increasingly vital to the global economy.
Driving the growth of the importance of these minerals is the advancement of the electronics industry and its integration into many other manufacturing processes and finished products.
Industries once conceived of as separate from electronics have driven new demand for all sorts of advanced digital and high-performance equipment. Cars, for example, “now have more tech in them than computers,” according to a report by the logistics company DHL. McKinsey, the global consulting firm, predicts the semiconductor industry will grow from $590 billion in 2021 to over $1 trillion in 2030, with automobile semiconductors tripling in size from $50 billion to $150 billion.
Critical minerals are necessary for this explosion in high-tech gadgetry. As the Semiconductor Industry Association writes, “In many instances, there are no known alternatives to these materials that satisfy our functional needs, and therefore a secure and continuous supply of critical materials is of critical importance to our industry.” Some $40.4 billion worth of minerals goes into the semiconductor industry alone each year.
Another key force behind the rush to control these resources is the renewable energy transition. While insufficient for the dramatic changes needed to address climate change, substantial demand increases have begun in renewable technologies. The electronic vehicle (EVs) and battery storage market are set to grow explosively from $185 billion in 2021 to $980 billion by 2028.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), which operates under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), released a report in 2021, The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions, which made careful estimates of the future demand growth for a series of minerals. The IEA noted that even in its less ambitious Sustainable Development Scenario, global demand for lithium would increase 42-fold between 2020 and 2040. During the same time, the agency predicts that global demand for graphite would multiply by 25, cobalt by 21, nickel by 19, and rare earth metals by seven.
These astonishing estimates are a cause of concern for the OECD and the US-led geopolitical order it represents. As Fatih Birol, the IEA’s director, stated last year, “the data shows a looming mismatch between the world’s strengthened climate ambitions and the availability of critical minerals that are essential to realizing those ambitions.” This “mismatch” has the potential to plunge economies into disarray and, importantly, constrain the imperialist ambitions of the United States.
The United States, China and critical minerals
Among the fifty critical minerals cited by the US government, what is remarkable is that barely any of them are primarily produced within the United States. Due to a mixture of geology and economics, the US only produces the majority of its supply for five out of the fifty minerals on the list. Twenty-nine of the fifty minerals are 100 percent imported, and forty are 75 percent or more imported.
This reliance of the US on foreign supplies of critical minerals has been a source of deepening worry within the American ruling class, especially as it prepares for a military confrontation with China.
In September 2020, the Trump administration signed into law Executive Order 13953 which declared a national emergency confronting the US in its securing of critical minerals. The order stated, “These minerals are indispensable to our country,” but “we presently lack the capacity to produce them in processed form in the quantities we need … For 31 of the 35 critical minerals, the United States imports more than half of its annual consumption. The United States has no domestic production for 14 of the critical minerals and is completely dependent on imports to supply its demand.”
Almost half a year later, in February 2021, the Biden Administration signed Executive Order (EO) 14017 to “strengthen the resilience of America’s supply chains.” The order added to Trump’s EO 13953, giving jurisdiction to the Department of Energy to investigate supply chain risks and offer recommendations.
President Joe Biden listens during an event in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex, Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The results of the first year of this order were released on February 24, 2022, the same day as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in a “Plan to Revitalize American Manufacturing and Secure Critical Supply Chains.” Two days prior, a meeting promoting the measures as they pertain to critical minerals was held. In attendance was the head of the United Steelworkers, Tom Conway, who Biden then met with privately to ensure the union would stop a national oil strike and back the war drive. During this meeting, Biden stated that his administration had helped facilitate billions of dollars of new investments into “critical minerals like lithium, graphite, rare earths… which are badly needed for so many American products.”
On March 31, 2022, Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to secure “reliable” supplies of these minerals. The act is a war time order dating to the Korean War that allows the government, in the name of national defense, to control and direct private investment.
The concern of the American state is not simply that it does not produce and control these vital resources, but rather that China, the principal target of its geostrategic ambitions, does.
China dominates the processing of critical minerals. It also plays a major role in the extraction (mining) of many minerals as well. In contrast, the United States leads neither the extraction nor processing of any of these major minerals. The strongest example is the rare earths. This set of 17 minerals, now vital to the global electronics and defense industry, is almost exclusively processed in China. The US produces more than 10 percent of the world’s rare earths but is dwarfed by China.
For a period, the US had been content enough to allow China to dominate the processing, and to a lesser extent, the mining of these minerals. Extracting and processing metals and minerals is one of the most environmentally hazardous parts of global industry. Doing so cheaply means rampant pollution and toxic waste that constitutes a major human health problem. China has served as the sweatshop of the capitalist economy for several decades. With the productive operations of the imperialist nations concentrated in the immense factory towns of China, including electronics, it made sense to concentrate global economic mineral processing there, including its waste.
Increasingly over the last fifteen years, however, the United States has viewed China as an existential threat to its global hegemony and has reoriented its global military strategy to “contain,” that is hem in and subjugate, China. Creating competing supply chains for these vital materials is a key part of this effort.
Under the Obama administration, a massive re-pivoting of the US armed forces was conducted to encircle China and assert American political and economic power in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2016, then Army Chief of Staff General Mark A. Milley, noting a “rising China,” declared that in the coming decades a war between the United States and a major adversary “is almost guaranteed.” In March 2021, outgoing head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Phil Davidson, warned of the potential for war with China within six years. Just a few months later, in November, General Milley, now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that a war could even occur within the next two years.
It does not take much imagination to consider how a war, directly comprising 40 percent of the world’s economy and almost two billion people, could quickly unravel into a third world war of catastrophic proportions.
While the US military spends trillions of dollars of preparing for this conflict, it is particularly concerned about the question of rare earth and other critical minerals which are vital to the general economy as well as sophisticated weaponry. The general strategy of US imperialism to stop the rise of China and subjugate its vast domestic market to American finance capital, thinks the Pentagon, will not succeed without larger, better protected supply chains for these critical minerals. The US has major leverage over China when it comes to China’s oil imports, but China has leverage over the US when it comes to critical minerals.
As the March 31 White House press conference announcing the use of the Defense Protection Act to secure critical minerals stated, “The United States depends on unreliable foreign sources for many of the strategic and critical materials necessary for the clean energy transition—such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese for large-capacity batteries… We’ve had to import a significant portion of them—close to 100 percent importation—from other countries, particularly China.”
A similar sentiment has been expressed in the European press, with an article from the Telegraph stating, “China’s dominance of critical minerals may be as dangerous for Europe as Russia’s energy weapon… Europe has woken up very late to the global scramble for critical materials.”
Russia’s critical minerals
The deep need of American finance capital to dominate current and future sources of critical minerals, as well as the disproportionate control of China over them, forms an important part of the backdrop to the drive to war against Russia.
While Russia is not the exclusive provider of any major critical mineral, the analysis below details how it plays a leading role in the production of a variety of key minerals, holding an important piece of global reserves. In understanding the broader drive of the United States to dominate Eurasia and subjugate Russia, the role of these key resources cannot be overlooked.
Below is detailed several major critical minerals, their use, and the role of Russia in their production and reserves.
Nickel
Russia is one of the largest extractors of nickel in the world. It is usually ranked third or fourth, following Indonesia, the Philippines, and near tying with South Africa.
The world extracts almost 2.5 million tons of nickel every year. The largest use of this critical metal is steel. Stainless steel production requires infusing steel with other elements to create an alloy. So-called class one nickel, the purist form of nickel, makes steel stronger and harder, especially in low temperatures. It also provides heat and rust resistance.
Two-thirds of nickel production goes into stainless steel, which is in turn used in construction, ships, some cars, in the medical industry (for a variety of instruments), in energy and industry (particularly when lightweight, corrosive-resistant storage is required), as well as in cookware. Nickel also forms a variety of more sophisticated alloys used in the production of turbine blades (for jet engines, the shipping industry, and power plants), electronics (laptops, phones, digital cameras), and high precision measurement tools.
The IEA predicts that global nickel production needs to increase by a factor of 19 in the next 18 years to meet its Sustainable Development Scenario (SDS), a staggering multiplication of current production. Nickel sulfate powder is a key component of lithium-ion batteries, forming the main part of the battery’s cathode.
Russia’s role in global nickel production is reflected in the soaring price of nickel following the outbreak of war. Nickel was trading at less than $20,000 per ton in 2021. Now, it is just short of $30,000 per ton. In the first weeks of the war the price briefly increased by 100 percent. Russia has 6.9 million tons of nickel reserves, or seven percent of the world’s total. Russia is the fourth largest holder of reserves.
Virtually all of Russia’s production occurs in the Norilsk arctic circle region under the Nornickel company, Russia’s largest metal company (excluding iron and steel). Nornickel is frequently ranked as one of the top two nickel producing companies in the world. The Kola Division of Nornickel, its major source of production, is located near the border of Finland in the arctic circle, a boarder that could rapidly become militarized following Finland’s request to join NATO. The region is also the seat of substantial copper and palladium production.
The quality of Russia’s nickel is also of note. While Russia only produces 10 percent of the world’s nickel, it produces 20 percent of its class one nickel—the more valuable refined form used in advanced steel and alloy production—due to the higher quality reserves found in Russia.
Platinum-group metals (PGMs)
Russia is one of the leading producers of platinum-group metals (PGMs). PGMs include six metals that have similar chemical and physical properties and are also frequently found together in mineral deposits. Though distinct from nickel, PMGs are found in the same ore and sometimes extracted in-tandem. The three most important are palladium, platinum and rhodium. The others are osmium, iridium and ruthenium. A remarkable 25 percent of all manufactured goods either contain PMGs or require it in the manufacturing process, according to the commodity consulting firm Agiboo.
Rhodium (Wikimedia)
Russia is roughly tied with South Africa as the leading producer of palladium. A report by Columbia University on critical minerals notes, however, that the South African supply of palladium has been “wracked by strikes for the past decade,” making it less reliable. The world produced roughly 210,000 kilograms of palladium in 2019, according to the US Geologic Survey. Russia produced 40 percent of that.
As in nickel production, Russia’s extraction of this critical mineral is centered on Nornickel, which is the world’s largest private producer of palladium. Production is dominated by two specific mines run by the company, Oktyabrsky and Taimyrsky, both located in the arctic circle, in the far north of Siberia. The two mines are so important that a flood that affected them last year halted one fifth of the world’s palladium supply. Both mines produce rhodium and platinum as part of the same general extraction process.
The price of palladium has surged in recent years. Before 2019, the price hovered around $30,000 per kilogram. Over the last two years it has grown to an average of roughly $75,000 per kilogram. At the beginning of the war, it briefly went over $100,000 per kilo as commodity traders reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Palladium’s central use is as a catalyst. Half of the world’s supply of palladium and platinum is used for catalytic converters. Catalytic converters transform toxic combustion exhaust from cars (carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide) and other vehicles into carbon dioxide and water. They are found in virtually every modern vehicle and are essential for reducing pollution. The two other main PMGs, platinum and rhodium, are also used for the same purpose. More stringent exhaust regulations require larger quantities of these PGMs.
Rhodium has experienced an even greater surge in price the last few years. Rhodium went from $2,500 per ounce at the beginning of 2019 to $23,890 per ounce in 2021 (after the scare of the Oktyabrsky and Taimyrsky floods in Russia). It is now closer to $17,000 an ounce, about seven times its price a few years ago.
The surge in the price of rhodium and palladium is so strong it has led to a massive rise in catalytic converter thefts. According to the US state of Colorado, thefts of catalytic converters in the state increased over 5,000 percent between 2019 and 2021. Russia is the second largest producer of rhodium and platinum in the world. However, unlike with palladium, South Africa is substantially ahead of Russia in their production due to South Africa’s larger reserves.
Beyond catalytic converters, PGMs are used in virtually all electronics and a wide variety of other devices and industries. While they are used in small quantities, their ubiquity in electronics leads to strong demand. Four of the PGMs are used to coat electrodes, making them essential for the electronic industry. Platinum and ruthenium are necessary for the magnetic component of hard disk drives, which still makes up most of global electronic storage.
Platinum is also used in fiber-optic cable and in aircraft turbines (coating the blades to protect against corrosion). The medical industry requires PGMs. For example, palladium is used in dental crowns and PGMs are generally used in chemotherapy drugs and radiation therapy. Other PGM uses include petroleum hydrocracking, sensors, water treatment, pacemakers and defibrillators, jewelry, LCD screens, fuel cells, and high-end industrial crucibles in the metallurgic industry.
Rare Earth Minerals
At present, China dominates global rare earth mineral production and processing. Rare earth elements (REEs) are a collection of 17 different minerals increasingly important to advanced electronics production. They are not rare absolutely speaking, but they are rare to find in sufficient concentration to make them economical to extract.
Usually divided between the heavy and light REEs, these minerals are found in combination with each other. China extracts 60 percent of and processes close to 90 percent of rare earths. Their common application in advanced electronics, including military hardware, has prompted the American ruling class to raise alarm bells at China’s ownership over the rare earth value chain. In 2022, the Biden administration announced a major initiative to stimulate billions of dollars of investment into domestic REE production and processing.
Russia does not yet constitute a substantial portion of the REE processing or production chain. However, it does have major reserves that, if tapped, could contribute to global REE production. Russia has roughly 10 percent of global REE reserves, making it fourth after China, Vietnam, and Brazil in the rankings. REEs are used in the engines for electric cars, portable electronics, magnets (frequently required for electronics), generators in wind turbines, and military hardware. For example, a Virginia-class nuclear submarine is thought to require 4.2 tons of rare earths, and a F-35 fighter jet requires 427 kg.
Map of rare earth mineral deposits and imports (US Congressional Research Service, 2013)
The extreme climates of Russia’s REE deposits, the technology required to process REEs, and the high capital intensity of REE projects has, so far, prohibited Russia’s REE development. A leading research consultant at Deloitte, Dimitry Kasatkin, told S&P Global Market Intelligence in 2019, “Russia will require time and favorable external conditions, such as low geopolitical and economic risks,” to develop its REE potential. However, the breaking apart of Russia into smaller states with close economic control by US and other imperialist nations could provide that investment and the “low geopolitical and economic risk” needed to develop those REE projects.
Niobium
Niobium, atomic number 41 on the table of elements, is another critical mineral that Russia is endowed with. The chemical’s primary use is as an alloy to strengthen important structures. A small amount—0.1 percent of the final product—can be added to steel to increase its strength. This special steel can be used in gas piping and other critical infrastructure projects. Niobium is also used to create so-called super-alloys—extremely high-performance alloys that go beyond the best steel—for use in rocket engines. In its form as ferroniobium (used for steel), the market for niobium is set to double between 2015 and 2025.
Production of niobium is dominated by Brazil, which makes 66 out of the roughly 75 thousand tons produced yearly. Last year, however, Polymetal, Russia’s largest gold and silver producer, announced that the Tomtor mining project in the far east of Russia would add 700,000 tons of niobium oxide to global reserves. This is about four times the amount of reserves the United States contains, albeit far short of Brazil’s 16 million tons of proven reserves.
Tomtor is already known for its massive phosphate reserves, one of the three major fertilizers used in agriculture. The Tomtor mine is likewise the seat of Russia’s most significant REE reserves. Polymetal claims the mine is the third largest single deposit of rare earth minerals, following Mt. Weld in Western Australia and the untapped Kvanefjeld in Greenland, which is expected to be developed this decade into a major REE extraction site.
Cobalt
Global cobalt production is dominated by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which produces 70 percent of it. The DRC’s cobalt production is notorious for its reliance on slave-child labor. A little more than two years ago, the International Rights Advocates group sued Apple, Alphabet, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla alleging that the companies were complicit in the death of 14 Congolese child miners. The incident is just the tip of the iceberg of atrocities that are committed to produce this substance.
Like REEs, cobalt is essential for many electronic devices in small quantities. Cobalt is particularly important for the renewable energy transition. The IEA suggests that cobalt production must increase by 21 percent in its Sustainable Development Scenario (SDS).
Russia is the second largest cobalt-producing country. It produced about 6,100 tons, or four percent of the global share, in 2019. While far behind the DRC’s towering role, Russia has previously stated plans to increase its production by another 2,000 tons per year, raising its share of global output to eight percent this year. Some of these reserves are located on the seabed off Russia’s Pacific coast, north of Japan.
Graphite
Russia is the sixth largest producer of graphite in the world. Graphite, after lithium, is expected to increase the largest amount during the renewable energy transition.
Graphite is used for a variety of industries. Because it is highly conductive, it is frequently used in solar panels, electrodes, and batteries. Graphite is not as rare or expensive as the other minerals and chemicals listed above. Its production is also more geographically spread out, with the substance—a crystal form of carbon, commonly used in pencils— relatively abundant across the globe.
However, it is principally mined from China (650,000 tons), creating a deep source of unease in the American ruling class. The next largest producers are Mozambique (120,000 tons), Brazil (95,000), Madagascar (47,000), India (34,000), Russia (24,000) and Ukraine (19,000).
Russia, however, is trying to dramatically ramp up its production. It has two major companies, Dalgraphite and Uralgraphite, both of which are seeking to increase production as demand booms for EV batteries that use graphite in large quantities.
Lithium
While Russia is not a substantial producer of lithium, Ukraine’s eastern and predominately Russian region has substantial reserves. Lithium is the key ingredient of lithium-ion batteries used for electric cars, cell phones, laptops, and other electronics. A Tesla has an amount of lithium equivalent in weight to a bowling ball.
A 2022 paper from the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences suggested that Ukraine had some 500,000 tons of lithium that could be profitably mined in just its eastern region. While reserves are estimates that often get reassessed once production begins, this would make Ukraine the fifth largest holder of lithium reserves in the world, following Chile, Australia, Argentina and China.
Lithium (Wikimedia)
In November 2021, an Australian-owned firm called European Lithium announced that it had agreed to purchase a Ukrainian oil company, Petro Consulting, that had begun the permitting process to explore and potentially extract from two of Ukraine’s largest lithium deposits. Because many of these deposits are in the contested east of Ukraine, where the Ukrainian government has been waging a civil war against Russian separatists, the fate of the current war is tied to how these reserves are developed. The company’s announcement, however, noted that these reserves are still considered “conceptual” in nature and that further exploration was required to assess their potential.
Other important critical minerals
Russia is the third largest producer of scandium, a mineral sometimes classified as part of the rare earths. Scandium is used primarily in the production of super-lightweight alloys for high performance metallic items.
Scandium is, according to a Columbia University report, “used extensively in aerospace and defense sectors,” specifically in its form as an aluminum-scandium alloy. High-performance sports gear also makes use of the alloy. These alloys only contain less than a percentage of scandium, but that is enough to strengthen the material significantly. For example, only 15 to 25 tons of it is produced globally each year.
According to the US Geological Survey, Russia has been in the process of figuring out if it can make scandium effectively as a product of alumina refining in the Ural Mountains, this could significantly increase its output.
Russia is the third largest producer of titanium sponge. Titanium is produced in two ways as a sponge for its use in metallurgy or as a pigment. While Russia does not play a leading role in the pigment production of titanium, which is geographically dispersed, it plays a major role in the more valuable sponge production. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Boeing announced that it would stop buying Russian titanium for its aircraft.
Russia produces about 6 percent of the world’s aluminum. Tesla has been a major customer of this aluminum, primarily produced by the RusAl corporation. Much of RusAl’s operations are based on importing bauxite and alumina from Australia where it is mined. The refining process, like in other minerals, is extremely toxic and requires factories in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
Russia is a leading producer of polysilicon. Polysilicon is the most refined form of silicon, used in photovoltaic cells, or solar panels. Polysilicon is more the result of processing silicon ore and is therefore not particularly rare. China dominates over 80 percent of the supply of polysilicon. However, previously, as recently as 2009, Russia was the leader. Several projects, including one by Russia’s Nitol Solar company, have failed due to price volatility and insufficient capital, but with investment Russia could increase production. The price has tripled since 2019 due to booming solar use.
Conclusions
In the preface to A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990–2016, WSWS international editorial board chairman David North, wrote:
The existence of the Soviet Union and an anti-capitalist regime in China deprived the United States of the possibility of unrestricted access to and exploitation of the human labor, raw materials, and potential markets of a large portion of the globe, especially the Eurasian land mass. It compelled the United States to compromise, to a greater degree than it would have preferred, in negotiations over economic and strategic issues with its major allies in Europe and Asia, as well as with smaller countries that exploited the tactical opportunities provided by the US-Soviet Cold War.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, combined with the restoration of capitalism in China following the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989, was seen by the American ruling class as an opportunity to repudiate the compromises of the post-World War II era, and to carry out a restructuring of global geopolitics, with the aim of establishing the hegemony of the United States.
The escalating war between NATO and Russia is the devastating result of this process. Today, the military and policy strategists have their eyes set on one outcome: the total dismemberment of Russia.
Anders Östlund a fellow at the US State Department-funded Center for European Policy Analysis, and resident of Kiev, wrote, “Russia’s war against Ukraine will end with the break-up of the Russian Federation. It will be replaced by small, demilitarized and powerless republics with neutrality written into their constitutions.” Östlund’s vision of a broken apart, “powerless” series of states is a window into the general ambitions of the United States and its European allies in Russia.
Amidst the incredible development of advance electronics and renewable energy technologies, critical minerals are expected to boom in the coming decades. Russia is a leading source of these materials. In the future it could play an even larger role given sufficient investment.
The breaking apart of Russia and its domination by American capital would be a strategic steppingstone in the efforts of the American ruling class to impose a “new American century” through the subordination of China and Eurasia more broadly to its aims. Resources play a role in this. Amid the enduring need for oil and natural gas, as well as the rapidly growing need for critical minerals, Russia is seen as a vital landmass with a vast array of riches.
