In a speech marking the 75th anniversary of NATO at the organisation’s summit in Washington on 9 July, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called it “not only the most successful and strongest, but also the longest-lasting alliance in history”.
Certainly, in terms of the military firepower wielded by its members, NATO is indeed the strongest such alliance ever. But some historians might dispute whether NATO’s 75-year endurance might have been exceeded by alliances that the French and English monarchies formed against each other during the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). And success or lack it of course depends on goals, which should be discussed in a little detail.
When NATO was formed with a dozen members in 1949, the ostensible purpose was to defend Western Europe in the event of a Soviet invasion, which was only slightly more probable than an invasion from Mars, given the enormous military, population and economic losses the USSR had suffered in World War II. The eagerness of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin for a lasting accommodation with Western capitalism was shown by his 1944 agreement with British PM Winston Churchill that postwar Greece should be a British “sphere of influence”, which meant that Greek Communists and other leftists were left without any external support as they were slaughtered in the country’s 1946-49 civil war, and by the Italian and French Communist parties, under instructions from Moscow, collaborating in the re-establishment of their respective capitalist states.
So, in terms of the alleged goal of preventing a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, NATO was certainly successful, if probably unnecessary. And this goal was achieved with remarkably little military effort: while NATO conducted military exercises that should more accurately be called “war rehearsals”, it conducted no actual military operations during the entire Cold War.
Some naive people might have thought, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, that NATO, having succeeded in its proclaimed goal, would be closed down, perhaps after a celebratory champagne reception. No. Having been deprived of one enemy, NATO went looking for more. Unsurprisingly, these enemies were always countries or organisations doing things the US government didn’t want them to do. The collapse of the Soviet “threat” made it easier to pursue openly the real aim of NATO, which was never defensive, but aggressive: extending the power and domination of the US and its allies further into Europe and Asia.
Governments of the participating countries generally refer to this military alliance by its initials, not by its name: North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In 1949, the name made some geographical sense since its dozen members were the US, Canada and ten Western European countries. But “North Atlantic” was never intended to limit the alliance’s scope of military interventions.
Moreover, NATO was not the only imperialist alliance that the US had in mind. The 1950s were a particularly active period. Greece and Turkey were added to NATO in 1952, and West Germany in 1955. Also in 1955, the US launched two not very successful military alliances in Asia. In February of that year, under the urging of the US and with the carrot of US economic and military assistance, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey established with Britain the Middle East Treaty Organization or Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). The US joined its military committee in 1958. CENTO accomplished very little, partly because of conflicts between Turkey and Iraq, and the Pakistan government’s annoyance at CENTO’s unwillingness to join Pakistan’s wars with India. The organisation was wound up in 1979, after the Islamic Revolution led to Iran’s withdrawal.
1955 was also the year of the founding of the South-East Asia Treaty Organization. This included exactly two South-East Asian countries—Thailand and the Philippines—one South Asian country (Pakistan) and five Westerners: the US, Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand. While this alliance did very little, it claimed to “protect” South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, which was later a pretext used by both the US and Australia for their war against Vietnam. It was dissolved in 1977.
Beginning within months of the dissolution of the USSR, NATO began more than a decade of military interventions (1992-2004) in the former Yugoslavia, involving naval, air and ground troop operations. This was part of a more general strategy of expansion into Eastern Europe.
One formal or legal obstacle for NATO expansion concerned Germany, which was divided into two states, West and East, until the end of 1990. Under the 1945 Potsdam agreement, Germany was under the ultimate control of the four WW2 allies: the US, UK, France and USSR. This meant that Moscow had a right to demand conditions on the absorption of East Germany by the West—and there were still Soviet troops stationed in East Germany. The US and West German government got around this problem by lying to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev about their intentions.
The National Security Archive (NSA) at George Washington University in the US has published declassified documents that show numerous assurances from NATO members that there would be no eastward expansion following German reunification. These promises were not written into a treaty, but they were recorded “in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors”, including US President George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State James Baker, CIA Director Robert Gates, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, French President François Mitterrand, UK Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major and NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner. In reality, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were invited to join in 1997 and Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2002. NATO now includes 32 countries, and hopes to include Ukraine in the future.
Article 5 of the treaty establishing NATO commits member countries to a joint defence of any member that suffers an armed attack. It has been invoked only once in 75 years: by the US after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks organised by Osama bin Laden. Since bin Laden was not acting officially on behalf of any state (and was a citizen of US ally Saudi Arabia), the US decreed that it was at war with an enemy called “terrorism”. This absurdity has served a purpose: any military intervention by NATO members, anywhere in the world, if it can be portrayed as fighting terrorism, can then be justified as an obligation under Article 5.
Thus in October 2001, “to detect and deter terrorism”, NATO launched naval patrols in the Mediterranean that have continued under different names to the present day. From 2009, NATO naval patrols were expanded to the coast of Africa. More recently, NATO members the US and UK have been involved in fighting the Houthi forces in Yemen, supported by NATO members Canada and the Netherlands.
NATO forces were involved in Afghanistan for 20 years (2001-21) as either combatants or “trainers” of the government military. In 2011, NATO aircraft enforced a “no-fly zone” that aided in the overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Since 2012, NATO has provided Patriot missile systems to help defend Turkey against Syria if the latter launches missiles in response to Turkey’s frequent and ongoing incursions to attack Kurds in Syria.
More recently, as the US seeks additional allies and prepares for a possible war with China (which Australia is now enlisted in through AUKUS), NATO is stepping up “partnership” with US allies in Asia. As the NATO website puts it, “NATO is strengthening dialogue and cooperation with its partners in the Indo-Pacific region—Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea and New Zealand ... NATO and its partners in the region share common values and a goal of working together to uphold the rules-based international order”.
Upholding the “rules-based international order” is the US code for its trade war against China and the construction of military alliances and bases. The recent NATO summit issued a communiqué that accused China of “ambitions and coercive policies that continue to challenge our interests, security and values” and said that Russia and China were seeking “to undercut and reshape”—guess what—“the rules-based international order”. You will seldom find such a blunt admission that “the rules-based international order” and US/NATO interests are the same thing.

Allen Myers

What is NATO?

When the US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, told an audience in Singapore recently that the US would not allow “coercion and bullying” of its allies by China, he must have been counting on a lack of historical knowledge (or a tolerance for hypocrisy) in his audience. Bullying and coercion, including threatened and actual military attacks, are not something new; they have been part of US policy in Asia (and elsewhere) for two centuries.
In the early years of US independence, its capitalists were of course mainly concerned with issues such as European wars, securing westward expansion by expelling or killing Native American peoples, and the developing conflict with the southern slavocracy. But they also never lost sight of the profits to be made from Asian markets and resources, and the danger that their European competitors would get in first and establish “spheres of influence” that excluded US capital. One sign of this was that the US Navy began creating a Pacific Squadron in 1821—almost two decades before official United States territory first reached the Pacific coast.
The Navy’s Pacific Squadron—and its East India Squadron, created in 1835—didn’t have long to wait before being put to use. During Britain’s First Opium War against China, which began in 1839, the East India Squadron intervened on the side of Britain, creating the conditions for the US to impose a commercial treaty on China in 1844. But the biggest plum at the time was Japan.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Japan had been ruled for 250 years by the Tokugawa shogunate, a feudalistic government that brought political stability and considerable economic and cultural progress after a period of civil wars. The shogunate maintained a firm policy of isolation from foreign influences, including trade. The only permitted foreign commerce was conducted through a government monopoly in the single port of Nagasaki. (The reluctance concerning foreign trade was strengthened by the example of British commerce—the opium trade—which had led to the First Opium War.)
US capital, eager to get as much as it could out of the developing exploitation of Asia, sent two US warships that arrived at Edo (Tokyo) Bay in 1846 with a letter requesting the opening of trade between Japan and the US. The request was rejected, so in July 1853, the US sent four warships under Commodore Matthew Perry with a similar letter from the US president.
This time, the Americans refused to accept “no” for an answer. Perry rejected the Japanese instruction to land at Nagasaki and threatened to burn Edo (the Japanese capital) to the ground, at which point the Japanese permitted him to land at a port near Edo. The US warships then proceeded to survey Edo Bay despite Japanese objections. After several displays of US firepower, Perry’s fleet departed, promising to return in a year.
In fact, it returned the following February, now boasting eight warships. Perry made it clear that the fleet wasn’t leaving until a treaty for the “opening” of Japan was signed, which happened at the end of March.
US Navy warships participated in the Second Opium War against China, which ended in 1860 with the US, Britain, France and Russia being granted direct access to Chinese ports and to Peking (Beijing). Citizens of these four powers were also given extraterritoriality regarding Chinese laws.
Even the US Civil War of 1861–65 did little to slow US expansion into Asia. The US bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, gaining a strong presence in north Asia. In 1893, the US seized control of the Hawaiian Islands, providing an important economic and military stepping stone for its interventions in Asia.
US capital faced considerable competition in pillaging the wealth of China. Its intervention largely lagged those of other major powers, such as Britain, which led the way in looting China, as well as France, Germany and Japan. This led US capital to fear that European powers would partition China into separate spheres of influence, excluding the US. In an effort to catch up, the US secretary of state (foreign minister) in 1899 announced the “Open Door policy”. This sought to have US competitors commit to allowing equal access for other countries in their spheres of influence.
That would have contradicted the whole point of a sphere of influence, so the other powers never gave more than lip-service to the policy, but the US continued to cooperate with them when it came to controlling China. Thus the US sent 1,200 marines as part of the international force that suppressed the 1900 Boxer Rebellion.
The US must have thought that sending those marines to China was a generous gesture to its imperialist allies, since at that time it was heavily involved in a much larger war against the Philippines. In the 1890s, to US capital, the remains of the declining Spanish empire looked ripe for the picking, with an ongoing 30-year uprising in Cuba and a growing independence movement in the Philippines. In April 1898, the US declared war on Spain, and on 1 May, a US fleet defeated the Spanish Navy in Manila Bay. 
In December, the treaty ending the war gave the US the title to the Philippines. The US was already in control of Manila, but the Philippine independence forces were in control of the rest of the country, and on 12 June they formally declared independence. They had hoped that the US would withdraw once the war with Spain was concluded, but it soon became evident that hope was in vain. On 21 December, the US president issued a proclamation in effect annexing the Philippines.
Years of brutal warfare ensued as the US sought to take control of its new colony. Its overwhelming military superiority allowed the US to defeat the organised Philippine forces, but guerrilla resistance continued until 1906. US anti-insurgency tactics were strikingly similar to those used six decades later in Vietnam. Civilian peasants were forcibly relocated into concentration camps (called “strategic hamlets” in Vietnam), and the surrounding areas were declared free-fire zones. 
After a US infantry unit was ambushed with heavy losses on the island of Samar, General Jacob H. Smith ordered a march across the island, commanding his troops to “kill everyone over the age of 10” and to leave the island a “howling wilderness”. An estimated 2,000 to 2,500 civilians were killed.
Letters home from US soldiers often described atrocities they witnessed or participated in, including the widespread use of torture, and some of these accounts were reported in the press. For example, one such letter read:
“The town of Titatia was surrendered to us a few days ago, and two companies occupy the same. Last night one of our boys was found shot and his stomach cut open. Immediately orders were received from General Wheaton to burn the town and kill every native in sight; which was done to a finish. About 1,000 men, women and children were reported killed. I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger.”
The US state department estimates that the war “resulted in the death of over 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants”, adding that “as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, and disease”. The latter figure does not include the estimated 150,000–200,000 deaths from a cholera epidemic at the end of the war.
The US remained the colonial master of the Philippines until evicted by Japanese troops in World War II. In the meantime, it continued trying to ensure its exploitation of China, both by intervening in that country’s civil war and by countering Japanese capitalism’s attempts to conquer large parts of the country.
A US Marine Corps regiment was stationed in Shanghai for more than a decade leading up to World War II, mainly to protect imperialist settlements from troops of the Chinese Communist Party. US aid to the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek was directed against both the CCP and Japan, and was a factor in the eventual Japanese decision to go to war with the US.
Within days of the Japanese surrender, the US had sent 50,000 soldiers into north-eastern China to ensure that weapons taken in the disarmament of Japanese troops went to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces. But US efforts to secure more of the spoils were badly hampered by a large and mutinous “bring us home” movement that swept through US regiments in both Asia and Europe. The government was forced to spend several years essentially rebuilding its forces before risking another major military intervention.
Its next such Asian deployment occurred in Korea, which had been arbitrarily divided by the US and the Soviet Union to manage the disarming of Japanese troops there. As the Cold War developed, the two zones were hardened into competing autocratic governments, both claiming to be the sole legitimate government of all Korea, which went to war with one another in 1950. The US immediately intervened, in what was supposedly a United Nations operation but in which the US supplied 90 percent of the troops.
In the next three years, US bombers so flattened North Korea that pilots complained they had run out of targets. After US forces approached the border with Manchuria, and China intervened on the side of North Korea, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff drafted orders to drop atomic bombs on air bases in Manchuria and in Shandong province if China used them to launch air strikes against US forces.
Space doesn’t permit, and it is perhaps unnecessary, to detail more recent events—like the long US war against Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia); Washington’s encouragement and support of Indonesia’s General Suharto, and his regime’s slaughter of a million suspected communists and leftists; and United States backing for the Indonesian invasion of Timor-Leste. (For more on US intervention in China and Taiwan, see my article in the 8 May Red Flag.)
The inescapable conclusion is that neither former president Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia”, nor the economic warfare against China by presidents Trump and Biden, nor the current preparations for a possible shooting war are in any sense a departure from the long-term US goal of dominating Asia economically and—to the extent necessary to ensure economic domination—politically and militarily. The strategic importance and difficulty of that goal, compared to pursuit of the same goal in Europe, the Middle East or other regions, can of course change with circumstances, requiring “pivots” by Washington administrations. But one thing is certain: US capital will not pivot away from coercion, bullying and open warfare until it is finally defeated.

The US in Asia: a long history of aggression

In the years following World War Two, as numerous direct colonies won formal independence, there was a widespread belief, or at least a hope, that political independence would lead fairly rapidly to significant economic progress. No longer under the control of foreign exploiters, the ex-colonies would be free to undergo economic development like that which had occurred in the wealthy capitalist countries. With assistance from benign international institutions and former colonisers who had seen the error of their ways, the “underdeveloped” global south, renamed “developing countries”, would soon “catch up”, and the huge economic differences between countries would be overcome.
As is obvious today, it didn’t happen. In 2015, not quite 1 billion people in twelve “first world” countries had a per capita GDP of US$44,392; 6.2 billion people in 148 “third world” countries had a per capita GDP one-tenth that size. Why, and how?
The “why” is relatively easy, while the “how” requires a bit more detail and analysis. Despite the nonsensical propaganda they produced, European imperialists didn’t colonise Africa, Asia and the Americas out of noble motives. Their motive, pure and simple, was greed. When a combination of their weakening in the world war and the uprisings of colonised peoples forced them to grant political independence, that didn’t make them stop being greedy. It just made them modify their techniques of exploitation.
The underdevelopment of the global south was not some kind of natural misfortune, like a drought or poor soil or geographical isolation. It was something inflicted on the colonies by their Western colonisers—something concisely summarised 50 years ago by the Guyanese Marxist Walter Rodney in the title of his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
Of course, it was easier for imperialists to plunder the southern countries when they had direct political control over them. They could engage in what amounted to looting and piracy: forced labour or slavery, direct expropriation of land and other wealth, taxes remitted to the imperialist centres, destruction of industries that might compete against imperialist companies.
Forced to give up direct political control, the imperialists nevertheless continued exploiting the former colonies in more subtle ways. Capitalist competition, promoted as a pathway to growth, was in reality a deliberate dead end. The wealth extracted from colonies over decades or centuries had built large, technically advanced businesses in the imperialist centres. Conversely, the exploitation meant that the former colonies lacked the capital that would have been necessary to create industries that could compete with the imperialists.
No problem, declared the ideological servants of imperialism: the former colonies can borrow the capital they need in order to develop; then they can repay the loans from the profits of their new industries. One of several flaws in this argument was that many citizens of former colonies thought it a bit unfair that they should have to borrow money that had been stolen from them, and then pay interest to the thieves.
This is where international bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund come in. They pose as independent, well-meaning sources of capital for the “developing” economies. In reality, they are, and have always been, controlled by the governments of the wealthiest imperialist countries. This ensures that loans go only to governments that don’t rock the boat—the boat that is carrying the enormous interest payments that poor countries must make to both bilateral “donors” and to the IMF/WB mafia.
These interest payments are transfers from poor countries to wealthy ones, and are a significant part of what keeps the global south poor. A 2020 study of 63 “impoverished countries” by the Jubilee Debt Campaign, based on IMF and World Bank figures, found that their external debt servicing in 1998 consumed an average 16.6 percent of government revenue. Partial debt relief for some of the most indebted countries reduced that figure to 5.5 percent by 2011, but it then started rising again, reaching 11.1 percent in 2018. The COVID pandemic will have undoubtedly raised it further. The World Bank notes of the pandemic’s impact: “Low- and middle-income countries’ external debt-to-GNI [gross national income] ratio rose to 29 percent in 2020 from 27 percent in 2019, and the debt-to-export ratio increased to 123 percent from 106 percent in 2019”.
These figures stand like an ironic commentary on the idea that “development” loans would make it possible for poor countries to build industries that increased their incomes and repaid the loans. Even if these countries were to do the impossible for a year and devote all of their export revenues—that is, every cent of export sales, not just the profits—they would still not be able to pay off their full foreign debts.
The owners of the imperialist economies of course never intended for their governments to help poor countries create industries that could compete against them; imperialist corporations are not suicidal. So “development” in the poor countries is restricted to fields that continue the transfer of wealth to the rich countries: direct imperialist investment, the profits of which of course go to the investing corporations; and natural resource extraction and industries characterised by low- or at best medium-level technology, which have correspondingly low rates of profit.
Capitalists in the global south are confined to the least productive, and therefore least profitable, fields. As a result, much of the value created in the south is transferred to the imperialist countries in the course of trade: the poor countries import overpriced goods and sell their own products for less than their real value. The amounts of money transferred in this way, called “unequal exchange” by economists, are staggering. 
A recent article in the journal New Political Economy attempts to quantify the sum for the years 1960-2018. The authors write: “Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $62 trillion (constant 2011 dollars) ... Appropriation through unequal exchange represents up to 7% of Northern GDP and 9% of Southern GDP”. That is not a typo: the global south was deprived of $62 trillion. Such value transfers are the underlying cause of situations such as the current disaster in Sri Lanka.
If imperialist corporations seem to have arranged everything for their own benefit, it must be recognised that they can’t do it all on their own. Even in the time of direct colonies, to maintain control, the colonisers needed collaborators within the colonial population. After political independence, imperialism still required a social layer that would cooperate to keep the system ticking over profitably.
It found the components of that layer among local capitalists, large landowners and would-be capitalists. In some cases, they might have come from among the open collaborators. In others, they came out of the movements for independence, from those leaders whose visions didn’t go beyond a change of personnel at the top.
Because of the huge sums of value appropriated by the global north, the capitalists of the global south generally cannot compete with the major imperialist industries. Aside from situations of natural monopoly (oil, for example), capitalists in the poor countries have to rely on low-profit areas such as manufacturing consumer goods that northern capitalists have abandoned or assembling electronics for high-tech imperialist companies. In these labour-intensive industries, the poverty and low wages of the south allow them to compete, and they are driven to maintain those low wages as a matter of their own survival.
So, while southern capitalists might sometimes feel that they are oppressed by imperialism and, if they have the opportunity, might put some pressure on imperialist corporations for improved terms of their collaboration, they know well that they share class interests with the imperialists and have a common enemy in the working class. If Marx called competing capitalists a “band of warring brothers”, we might call imperialists and southern capitalists a “band of squabbling big brothers, little brothers and occasional distant cousins”.
This is why southern capitalists are never reliable allies of working people and poor farmers in any struggle against imperialism. It is why the possibility of a radical popular movement forming government in a third world country always arouses the threat of imperialist intervention against it, to ensure that the country’s capitalists remain in charge.

Why is the global south still poor?

Glenn Greenwald is justly known for his journalism exposing the crimes of empire and the establishment, including the liberal establishment. This made all the more surprising and disappointing his recent article titled, “<a href="https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-bizarre-refusal-to-apply-cost">The bizarre refusal to apply cost-benefit analysis to COVID debates</a>”. Greenwald claims that “rational cost-benefit analysis” regarding COVID “has been bizarrely declared off-limits”. He writes that there is a “pervasive and deeply misguided refusal to assign any costs to the harms caused by anti-COVID policies themselves”.
What is rational or otherwise in particular analyses can be a matter of dispute, but it is obviously false to say that there is a paucity of public discussion of the costs of anti-COVID policies. Just to take the United States, on which Greenwald’s article focuses, from the very first lockdowns, there have been a huge number of media and business complaints about the measures destroying “the economy”. Greenwald does not even mention this campaign, let alone its success in forcing the premature easing of public health restrictions, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Instead, he cites only psychological-social harms to children from school closures and other anti-COVID health measures. But it is equally false that the discussion of such harms has been “declared off-limits”. Is Greenwald not aware of the US state governors and legislators who are not only forcing schools to reopen regardless of circumstances but also trying to ban masks because of their supposed harm to children?
Greenwald is here following the economic elites and their political agents. They shifted emphasis from harms to “the economy” to harms to children when it became evident that the former campaign failed to persuade enough working people that they are selfish if they put concern for their own and their children’s health and lives ahead of the profits of their employers.
A meaningful comparison of the costs and benefits of policy choices is possible only if there is a reasonable degree of knowledge about what their sizes will be. Regarding COVID, there can only be speculation on that. Greenwald stresses that deaths of under-18s in the US since the start of the pandemic total only 361. Such a low number, he says makes unjustifiable health measures such as school closures. However, that statistic doesn’t help much, because those deaths were neither a cost nor a benefit of anti-COVID measures.
They are one indicator of the danger that COVID represents for the young. But a calculation of the benefits of anti-COVID measures would have to compare the current death toll with what it would have been if no public health measures, such as school closures, had been adopted. Nobody knows what that would have been, except that it could have been large (and may still be). Children in lockdowns are generally more isolated than adults, many of whom are still working and are involved in a household’s shopping and other external activities. It could be argued that at least some of the reason for fewer COVID cases and deaths among children is due to the effectiveness of anti-COVID policies.
Furthermore, Greenwald limits his argument to the number of child deaths. Yet long COVID is serious problem, even though children may not be as severely affected as adults. 
“Evidence from the first study of long covid in children [in Italy] suggests that more than half of children aged between 6 and 16 years old who contract the virus have at least one symptom lasting more than 120 days, with 42.6 percent impaired by these symptoms during daily activities”, notes a March article (i.e. before the rapid spread of the Delta variant) in New Scientist. 
“The UK Office for National Statistics’s latest report estimates that 12.9 percent of UK children aged 2 to 11, and 14.5 percent of children aged 12 to 16, still have symptoms five weeks after their first infection. Almost 500,000 UK children have tested positive for covid-19 since March 2020.” 
On those figures, in less than half a year, something like 60-70,000 UK children have contracted some degree of long COVID. And no-one yet knows how long long COVID will last.
The situation is becoming more serious with Delta. Already, Florida and Texas, and possibly other US states, have no unoccupied paediatric hospital beds—so it is likely that there will be indirect child deaths caused by COVID.
Then there are family members, who are also ignored by Greenwald. Children can obviously be a vector for transmission of the virus to the adults in their homes. The 27 August New York Times reported on a recent study of an outbreak at a California primary school. There, a teacher not wearing a mask spread the virus to twelve of her 24 pupils. Another six children in a different classroom were also infected, as were eight family members of the students.
Finally, the more children there are infected, even if not seriously ill, the greater is the likelihood of the virus mutating.
Even if we had reliable figures on the children harmed by anti-COVID measures and those who would die or suffer prolonged illness in the absence of those measures, how would we compare the two? A corporation considering a change in production methods, for example, can normally calculate the likely costs and benefits in dollar terms. But how many children with psychological injury A equal y dead children? How many cases of B caused by school closure are equivalent to z cases of child long COVID?
Insurance actuaries would answer by converting everything into money: estimating how much injury A will cost in the individual’s lost productiveness and medical expenses, and the value of the production lost by the child who dies or suffers long COVID rather than spending a lifetime at work. That is, cost-benefit analysis in this case depends on regarding human beings as capitalism regards them: nothing but sources of income or expense and disregarding any other aspect of human life.
This relates to a central problem of Greenwald’s proposed COVID cost-benefit analysis. In the corporation’s calculations, costs and benefits accrue to the same “person”—the corporation; this makes the decision easy if one of the two magnitudes is significantly greater than the other. But in an analysis regarding all or a large part of a society, the cost-bearers and the beneficiaries are likely to be quite different groups. They might even be different classes.
Greenwald ignores that reality, writing as though it were a question of total costs and benefits for US society as an undifferentiated whole. This is particularly obvious when he employs a rather silly analogy with private automobile usage. Americans, he says, are okay with car crashes being the number one cause of death for people under the age of 55, because a “rational cost-benefit analysis” tells them that banning or severely restricting the use of private cars would make things even worse (ignoring that US society restricts private automobile usage in numerous ways, such as traffic laws).
Most people in the US have a car for the simple reason that that is the only practicable way for them to go about their daily lives. Analysis, whether rational or otherwise, has nothing to do with it: they have no real choice.
The main beneficiaries of private automobiles are not the individual owners; indeed, taking account of all the costs (depreciation, insurance, registration fees, petrol, taxes for road construction and maintenance, the danger of death or serious injury), it seems likely that their benefits are considerably outweighed. The chief beneficiaries of public dependence on private automobiles are the big automobile and oil corporations, the manufacturers of tyres and other automobile equipment, the construction companies paid to build the ever-expanding networks of highways, the banks that finance car purchases—in short, the very wealthy people whose lobbying and money determine what is acceptable and unacceptable in public policy.
Similarly, regarding COVID, we should think about who benefits and who pays. Greenwald’s one concession to class in the article is that it is easier for rich people than for poor people to avoid the inconveniences of COVID restrictions. He doesn’t seem to notice that it is also easier for them to avoid death or severe illness.
Lockdowns and similar measures certainly affect working people and the poor. That’s why we should insist that such measures be implemented in a way that minimises harm—for example, by governments paying an adequate subsidy to laid-off staff. But it is also the case that a large part of the cost of lockdowns and similar anti-COVID measures falls on capitalists. Not all of them, and not equally, but when businesses can’t exploit their workers, they can’t make profits. 
So while the world’s wealthiest people have increased their wealth during the pandemic, some large and very large corporations, like airlines, have suffered major losses. Also among the losers are many medium-sized and small businesses—layers often under economic stress even before the pandemic struck. This explains why the most ferocious COVID deniers and anti-vaxxers tend to be concentrated among the right-wingers and racists attracted to demagogues and conspiracy theories about the causes of their financial difficulties.
For leftists, or for honest journalists with no particular political viewpoint, it is a serious mistake to be taken in by the capitalists’ feigned concern for the welfare of children.

When it comes to COVID, Glenn Greenwald sings from the ruling-class songbook

As governments fight over which country will get the most vaccines soonest (and at the best price) and whose pharmaceutical companies will make the most money, it’s easy to think that there’s no other realistic way of producing and distributing the vaccines needed to roll back and, hopefully, eventually stop the coronavirus epidemic. In December, the People’s Vaccine Alliance reported that rich countries, with 14 percent of the world’s population, had bought up 53 percent of all the vaccines likely to be successful—which was enough to vaccinate their populations three times over.
So it is not surprising that the increase of vaccines approved or nearing approval—I think there are now around seven or eight—seems not to have done much, if anything, to reduce the cutthroat competition or the prices.
The propaganda claims that only the prospect of huge profits can persuade pharmaceutical companies to invest in developing and producing vaccines, and so, in the end, the market has to rule in this situation (even though some of the privately patented vaccines were developed wholly or in part by government subsidies).
But there is evidence that it could be done differently. Cuba—a poor country with about half the population of Australia, and which has been labouring under a United States economic blockade for six decades—has begun a Phase 3 test of Soberana 2, the vaccine considered the most effective among the four that its scientists have been developing and testing. Soberana 2 is a recombinant protein vaccine, which does not require extreme refrigeration.
If the Phase 3 test is successful, the Cubans hope to inoculate their entire population by the end of this year. But they are planning to produce up to ten times the number of doses that are required for Cuba. The country—partly because of the US blockade—does not have the capacity to produce the planned 100 million doses in one year. The government is therefore seeking to partner with pharmaceutical companies in Europe or Canada to produce Cuba’s patented vaccine.
The extra vaccine is to be exported, but not at the excessive prices demanded by Big Pharma. Cuba’s past practice with its patented medical treatments is that it seeks to recover its costs: it provides the treatments free or at concession prices to poor countries and charges near market rates for licences to wealthy countries. This approach is part of Cuba’s well-known medical missions to scores of countries around the world. The United Nations estimated in 2019 that 30,000 Cuban doctors were providing health services in 67 countries in that year. This is one of the factors that has won Cuba much international good will and support against the US.
Cuba’s development of a vaccine is certainly not a “miracle of the market”. It’s a matter of what a society considers important. As part of a strategy to survive against the blockade and ongoing threats from the US, not long after Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the government decided to specialise in medicine and microbiology. It is not a coincidence that the name of the vaccine, Soberana, is the Spanish word for “sovereignty”.
Perhaps, in the not too distant future, “soberana” might become an international term meaning “Health doesn’t have to depend on pharmaceutical company profits”.

The COVID vaccine you haven’t heard about

Americans are being told that the riot in the national Capitol building promoted by Donald Trump was the work of “extremists”. To some, the term may seem a handy catch-all to refer to the crowd of white supremacists, proto-fascists, misogynists, climate denialists, QAnon delusionists, evangelical terrorists and brain-damaged Twitterholics involved, but its vagueness makes it easily susceptible to misuse.
People who are the opposition to those various categories are, respectively, BLM supporters, anti-fascists, feminists, environmental activists etcetera. But what is the opposite of “extremist”? It can only be something like “centrist”, “moderate”, “middle of the roader”, “liberal” or “conservative”, or perhaps “Joe Biden”. None of these offer any serious and consistent support for the political forces fighting the ultra-right.
And if it’s a dangerous fault to differ from the centre, then it follows that BLM activists, anti-fascists and so on should be suppressed as much as (in practice, more than) the Capitol rioters. Both “left” and “right” varieties of centrism in the US (and in Australia and probably elsewhere) are already pushing the line that there is an equivalence between the Capitol racists and the millions who protested to demand an end to police murder of Black people. Australian Deputy PM Michael McCormack explicitly stated that the two “demonstrations” were the same, because both supposedly involved “violence”.
If there’s going to be a campaign against extremism, the term needs to be defined more precisely. Surely, a willingness to let others suffer and/or die when one has the means to prevent it has to count as extremism. But the centrist politicians defend a system that allows it to happen every day, every hour.
In rich countries, there is more than enough wealth to support the entire population through a lockdown sufficient to wipe out the coronavirus, for example. But it doesn’t happen because that would reduce profits, and even involve extra taxes on the rich. In Australia last year, the combined wealth of billionaires grew by more than 50 percent, according to Bloomberg. In the US during less than a year of the pandemic, the total wealth of the country’s billionaires increased by more than US$1 trillion. With the US death total approaching 400,000, every time an American has died, the wealth of billionaires has increased, on average, by $2.5 million.
Michael McCormack repeats the racist slogan “all lives matter”. The real position of the billionaires and their politicians is, “Only our lives matter”.
So who are the worst extremists?

'Extremism' in the centre

The federal government is planning to introduce a written test on “Australian values” for migrants seeking to become citizens. Media reports indicate that the test will involve multiple choice questions. While the government has not yet disclosed the precise questions, the Guardian’s account listed some examples of what they might be. I quote some of them below. Since the Guardian report did not provide any alternative answers to the questions, I have added my own.
 
1. Why is it important that all Australian citizens vote to elect the state and federal parliament?
a. You’ll be fined if you don’t vote. That goes for council elections too. 
b. Choosing the least objectionable person or party from a list of social misfits will train your powers of discrimination.
c. The candidates spend great quantities of lobbyists’ money to persuade you to vote for them, and we wouldn’t want all that money to be wasted.
d. Voting for people who won’t do what you want is better than you doing what you want.
e. All of the above.
 
2. Should people in Australia make an effort to learn English?
a. Yes. State and federal parliamentarians in particular seem unable to construct a sentence that makes any real sense.
b. What’s wrong with Newspeak?
 
3. In Australia, can you encourage violence against a person or group of people if you have been insulted?
a. Yes, but it’s much easier to do so if you own a major newspaper.
b. Not unless the insulters are poorer than you.
c. Yes, but it’s much easier to do if you’re a racist MP.
d. If they are Muslims, an insult isn’t necessary.
e. All of the above.
 
4. In Australia, are people free to choose who they marry or not marry?
a. Since December 2017, they are legally free to do so. That’s why we didn’t have a test question like this before then.
b. Yes, but watch this space. You don’t think the losers in that vote have given up, do you?
c. Yes, but if either of the spouses is political, or of a dark skin colour, the police may tell you that the wedding reception violates health regulations.
d. All of the above.
 
5. Do you agree that men and women should be provided equality of opportunity when pursuing their goals and interests?
a. Yes, equality with each other, but not equality with people of a higher social station. Ambiguities like this reinforce answer “a” to question 2.
 
6. Should people’s freedom of speech and freedom of expression be respected in Australia?
a. Yes. It will make us stand out from the rest of the capitalist world.
b. Yes, provided they can pay for it.
c. Yes, in NSW when permitted by Gladys Berejiklian-Petersen.
d. Yes, when there are enough police available to ensure that such expression doesn’t seriously threaten to change anything.
e. All of the above.

The new 'Aussie values' test: a sneak preview

One benefit – possibly the only one – of the UK government’s interminable Brexit negotiations/proposals/back stops/etceteras is the winged phrase of a “meaningful vote” by parliament on prime minister Theresa May’s deal(s) with the European Union.
Two or three votes on this issue are “meaningful”.
So what are the hundreds of other votes every year by the “mother of parliaments”? Meaningless? Political grandstanding? Paying off donors? Fooling the voters into thinking we’re doing something useful? Pretending that parliament is what determines things?
Probably “all of the above” would be the best answer, which would apply equally to Australia’s parliament and most other legislatures. Yes, we demand that parliaments enact particular progressive proposals into law. But such proposals derive their meaning from the ordinary people who have campaigned for them, not from parliamentarians.
If we normally had meaningful votes in parliament, we would also need to have meaningful parliamentary elections. Don’t hold your breath for either.

Brexit benefit

Why do capitalist governments see it as a problem if their country’s population is not continually expanding?
We’re told that, if a country’s average age is increasing, a growing proportion of the population will be retired, and the declining proportion of workers won’t be able to produce enough to provide for the retirees, whose pension payments will make up an increasing share of government spending.
It sounds like something we should be worried about. But it really isn’t. 
For a start, if life expectancy is increasing but population is declining or not increasing proportionately, it follows that children must be declining as a percentage of the total population. So, if the working age population has more retirees to provide for, there are also fewer pre-working age young people to be fed, housed and clothed.
According to a report by the Australian Centre for Financial Studies, over the 40 years to 2009, life expectancy in Australia increased from around 74 to 84 years for women and from 68 to 79 years for men. The number of working-age people for each person over 65 declined from around 7.5 to 5. But at the same time, the number of working-age people for each person under 15 increased from about 2 to 3.6. Overall, the number of working-age people relative to the number of children and retirees increased rather than declined: from about 1.7 to 2.
Second, if the government were genuinely concerned that there aren’t enough people working to provide for the needs of the old, there would be an easy and immediate solution: provide jobs for the 1.5 million unemployed and underemployed across the country.
Third, technological change means that the economy can produce more goods with fewer people. In the half century to 2017, Australia’s real per capita GDP increased from $28,000 to $69,000 (in 2014 dollars). For each Australian, whether young, old or in between, employed or unemployed, the Australian economy produced almost two and a half times as much in 2017 as it did in 1967.
What, then, is the point of the talk about “ageing population”? It is to conceal what the capitalists and their ideologists are really concerned about: that the ability of bosses to increase their profits depends on a constantly expanding population. It does so in two ways.
One, competition forces capitalists to reinvest at least part of last year’s profits, which means more people (workers) are needed this year, despite technological progress. For capitalists, employing the unemployed on a big scale is not a solution because high unemployment helps to keep wages down. More workers equal more profits, but only if unemployment persists.
Two, the profits created by those workers aren’t realised until the capitalist sells the products to someone. A constantly expanding population is one effort to provide that market.
There would be no need to worry about the age of the population if the aim was to provide for human need.

Should we worry about the ageing population?

“Banks and financial institutions should work on an ethical basis. They should be strong. They should be profitable. They should be robust. They should be above all ethical.” – Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen (quoted in the Guardian, 4 February).
First, let’s decipher the verbiage of the ALP’s spokesperson on how to make capitalist financial rip-offs more publicly acceptable.
If a bank, or any other capitalist corporation, is profitable, it is strong. Profits mean you have money, having money means you have strength. As for “robust”, its definition in a political context is: “strong, as used by politicians who want to repeat themselves and hope that listeners won’t notice that that’s what they’re doing”.
So the content of what Bowen said, minus the redundancies, was that banks should be profitable and ethical.
But what if profits and ethics conflict with each other, as the banking royal commission has revealed is the case – as in charging fees for financial advice to dead people and numerous other scams?
According to Bowen’s words, ethics come first: “above all”. Presumably, that means that banks should stop screwing their customers.
But bank managers (and bank owners) are human, if only barely. They don’t screw customers because they like to inflict pain; they do it because doing so is profitable. Capitalist law doesn’t require CEOs to be nice, but to make money.
So Bowen’s advice to banks was either self-contradictory (increase profits by stopping the practices you’ve found to be most profitable) or a recommendation to violate corporation law (forget about increasing profits).
The only thing that would have made his advice remotely sensible would have been to add: “Banks should exist outside capitalism”.
With that, I could agree. Let’s get rid of capitalism. Then banks, which won’t at all resemble current banks, can be ethical. Because they will be set up to serve people, not to make profits.

What is NATO?

The US in Asia: a long history of aggression

Why is the global south still poor?

When it comes to COVID, Glenn Greenwald sings from the ruling-class songbook

The COVID vaccine you haven’t heard about

'Extremism' in the centre

The new 'Aussie values' test: a sneak preview

Brexit benefit

Should we worry about the ageing population?

What Chris Bowen left out about the banks

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