Thursday, March 26, 2020
CC News Letter 26 March - Lockdown or Curfew?
Dear Friend,
Indian state authorities need to understand that public lockdown under an extended health emergency like corona virus must be fundamentally different from a curfew imposed after a riot, when the assumption is that anyone on street is a potential trouble maker. Telangana chief minister is already threatening shoot at site orders to make people stay indoors. Minister, officials and prosperous people may have enough supplies at home to last them three weeks. How can ordinary people stay indoors for that long?
Environmentalist Kavitha Kuruganti has written to the government officials to ensure protection to farmers in this lockdown to ensure farming, harvesting, sales to ensure uninterrupted supply chains
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Binu Mathew
Editor
Countercurrents.org
Lockdown or Curfew?
by People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism
Indian state authorities need to understand that public lockdown under an extended health emergency like corona virus must be fundamentally different from a curfew imposed after a riot, when the assumption is that anyone on street is a potential trouble maker. Telangana chief minister is already threatening shoot at site orders to make people stay indoors. Minister, officials and prosperous people may have enough supplies at home to last them three weeks. How can ordinary people stay indoors for that long?
Support The Farmers To Ensure Uninterrupted Food Supply Chains
by Kavitha Kuruganti
Environmentalist Kavitha Kuruganti has written to the government officials to ensure protection to farmers in this lockdown to ensure farming, harvesting, sales to ensure uninterrupted supply chains
Yogi Adityanath In The Time Of Lockdown
by E A S Sarma
I find that, barely a few hours after your national broadcast, the Chief Minister of UP organised an elaborate function at Ayodhya and installed the idol of Sree Rama at Rama Janma Bhoomi in person. The attached picture shows not only the Chief Minister and the priests but also a closely packed crowd in the background. Is it not in total defiance of what your appeal meant to the public at large? Should one law apply to the special citizens of this country and another law for the ordinary ones?
WHO Director General Requests Global Humanitarian Response
In The Face Of COVID-19
by Countercurrents Collective
The World Health Organization Director General said on March 25, 2020: Now is the time for solidarity in the face of this threat to all of humanity.
The World Health Organization Director General said on March 25, 2020: Now is the time for solidarity in the face of this threat to all of humanity.
He said the coronavirus, officially COVID-19, pandemic has accelerated over the last two weeks and while coronavirus is a threat to people everywhere, what is most worrying is the danger the virus poses to people already affected by crisis.
The WHO chief said: People and communities that are already uprooted due to conflict, displacement, the climate crisis or other disease outbreaks are the ones we must urgently prioritize. Despite their resilience they do need our help today and this new plan lays out what has to happen right now, in order to save lives and slow the spread of this virus.
He implored leaders to stand together and heed this appeal.
He said:
The new Global Humanitarian Response Plan builds on that effort and sets a six-point action plan for how to prepare and respond to this emergency:
First, the public must be effectively prepared for the critical measures that are needed to help suppress the spread and protect vulnerable groups, like the elderly and those with underlying health conditions.
Second, ramp up surveillance and lab testing so that those with the virus can be identified quickly and isolated safely – helping to break the chains of transmission.
Third, prioritize treatment for those at highest risk of severe illness.
Fourth, slow, suppress and stop transmission to reduce the burden on health care facilities. This means safe hand washing; testing, isolating cases, and contact tracing, encouraging community-level physical distancing, and the suspension of mass gatherings and international travel.
For many on our planet following even this basic advice is a struggle but we as a global community must strive to make it possible.
Fifth, we are building the ship as we sail and it is critical that we continue to share learnings and innovations so that we can improve surveillance, prevention, and treatment. And ensure equitable access for the poorest to all R&D breakthroughs.
And finally, we need to protect the health and humanitarian supply chain so that our frontline workers are protected and able to travel freely as they give lifesaving care.
The WHO Director General said: Our message to all countries is clear: heed this warning now, back this plan politically and financially today and we can save lives and slow the spread of this pandemic.
History will judge us on how we responded to the poorest communities in their darkest hour.
His appealed: Let’s act together, right now!
Massive toll
On the same day, the WHO chief said in a media briefing: The pandemic continues to take a massive toll not just on health, but on so many parts of life.
He informed: The Government of Japan and the International Olympic Committee took a difficult but wise decision to postpone this year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games.
He thanked the Japanese Prime Minister Abe and the members of the IOC for making this sacrifice to protect the health of athletes, spectators and officials.
He expressed the hope: The next year’s Olympics and Paralympics will be an even bigger and better celebration of our shared humanity – and I look forward to joining.
He said:
“We have overcome many pandemics and crises before. We will overcome this one too.
“The question is how large a price we will pay.
“Already we have lost more than 16,000 lives. We know we will lose more – how many more will be determined by the decisions we make and the actions we take now.
“To slow the spread of COVID-19, many countries have introduced unprecedented measures, at significant social and economic cost – closing schools and businesses, cancelling sporting events and asking people to stay home and stay safe.
“We understand that these countries are now trying to assess when and how they will be able to ease these measures.
“The answer depends on what countries do while these population-wide measures are in place.
“Asking people to stay at home and shutting down population movement is buying time and reducing the pressure on health systems.
But on their own, these measures will not extinguish epidemics.
“The point of these actions is to enable the more precise and targeted measures that are needed to stop transmission and save lives.”
He called on all countries who have introduced so-called “lockdown” measures to use this time to attack the virus.
He said:
“You have created a second window of opportunity. The question is, how will you use it?
“There are six key actions that we recommend.
First, expand, train and deploy your health care and public health workforce;
“Second, implement a system to find every suspected case at community level;
“Third, ramp up the production, capacity and availability of testing;
“Fourth, identify, adapt and equip facilities you will use to treat and isolate patients;
“Fifth, develop a clear plan and process to quarantine contacts;
“And sixth, refocus the whole of government on suppressing and controlling COVID-19.
“These measures are the best way to suppress and stop transmission, so that when restrictions are lifted, the virus doesn’t resurge.
“The last thing any country needs is to open schools and businesses, only to be forced to close them again because of a resurgence.”
He said:
“Aggressive measures to find, isolate, test, treat and trace are not only the best and fastest way out of extreme social and economic restrictions – they’re also the best way to prevent them.
“More than 150 countries and territories still have fewer than 100 cases.
“By taking the same aggressive actions now, these countries have the chance to prevent community transmission and avoid some of the more severe social and economic costs seen in other countries.
“This is especially relevant for many vulnerable countries whose health systems may collapse under the weight of the numbers of patients we’ve seen in some countries with community transmission.
He said: Today I joined United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Under-Secretary General for UNOCHA Mark Lowcock and UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore to launch the Global Humanitarian appeal, to support the most fragile countries who have already suffered years of acute humanitarian crises.
The WHO chief said:
This is much more than a health crisis, and we’re committed to working as one UN to protect the world’s most vulnerable people from the virus, and its consequences.
We also welcome the Secretary-General’s call for a global ceasefire. We are all facing a common threat, and the only way to defeat it is by coming together as one humanity, because we are one human race.
Citing the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, he said: We are grateful to the more than 200,000 individuals and organizations who have contributed to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. Since we launched it less than two weeks ago, the fund has raised more than US$95 million. I would like to offer my deep thanks to GSK for its generous contribution of US$10 million today.
He said:
Although we are especially concerned about vulnerable countries, all countries have vulnerable populations, including older people.
Older people carry the collective wisdom of our societies. They are valued and valuable members of our families and communities.
But they are at higher risk of the more serious complications of COVID-19.
We are listening to older people and those who work with and for them, to identify how best we can support them.
We need to work together to protect older people from the virus, and to ensure their needs are being met – for food, fuel, prescription medication and human interaction.
He reminded: Physical distance does not mean social distance. We all need to check in regularly on older parents, neighbors, friends or relatives who live alone or in care homes in whatever way is possible, so they know how much they are loved and valued. All of these things are important at any time, but they are even more important during a crisis.
He said: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for compelling and creative communications about public health.
He said: In these difficult times, film and other media are a powerful way not only of communicating important health messages, but of administering one of the most powerful medicines – hope.
Coronademic: Venezuela’s drives obstructed
by Farooque Chowdhury
The way imperialism is reacting to Venezuela in the face of the pandemic is nothing but a show of its demonic character, inhuman character.
The entire human world is fighting to defeat a demon today. It’s coronademic – coronavirus pandemic. The fight demands a globally concerted, unified effort. Venezuela should not be left lurching in the pandemic-wilderness even if one of its original sins is to resisting imperialism. But, the Bolivarian Republic is being obstructed in its fight against the pandemic. Imperialism is carrying on the “noble” job.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has expressed its fear: the United States is going to be one of the epicenters of the pandemic.
The rich country is in a mess with fear of running out of medical equipment required to fight the virus within days.
The world health officials had warned the world was entering a critical period that would determine just how deeply the pandemic slices through countries. The WHO said infections and deaths globally from coronavirus are apprehended to increase “considerably”.
Venezuela has planned to bring back home its citizens, around 800, from the US. With that purpose, Conviasa, the Venezuelan national airline, arranged a special flight.
But, no way. There’s the US sanction on the airline, part of the basket of smashing sanctions imposed on Venezuela. Conviasa’s entire fleet is barred from the US. The evacuation plan had to be abandoned.
Jorge Arreaza, the foreign minister of Venezuela, censured the US move. Arreaza tweeted Tuesday: “We denounce that the US insists on its air blockade of Venezuela and still refuses to authorize direct humanitarian flights [through] LAConviasa or other lines, to bring back more than 800 compatriots stranded in the US and registered in the system of our Chancellery.”
The Venezuelan foreign minister announced Monday that hundreds of Venezuelans were scheduled to return home on a flight; and the evacuation operation was waiting for response from the US. Until Tuesday, there was no US response.
Nicolas Maduro, the President of Venezuela, has urged the US to make an exception in the humanitarian initiative. Maduro said in a statement: The US government cannot prevent us from going for humanitarian reasons. It must lift the sanctions. Conviasa’s planes are ready to travel to any place in the world where Venezuelans want to return home.
The Empire’s intransigence against the Bolivarian republic is widely known. Other than sabotaging the republic in the areas of economy, energy and diplomacy for years and imposing sanctions on the country’s political leadership and vital institutions and economic organizations including the hydrocarbon organization, the Empire organized armed gangs, and political mobilizations with thin presence of persons. It tried to enthrone a proxy-king – Guaido – in Venezuela with heavy money and diplomatic support only to be met with a crashing nosedive.
To fight the coronavirus pandemic, Venezuela asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a $5 billion loan. The IMF bosses rejected the emergency request of Venezuela.
Requesting the fund from the Rapid Financing Instrument, Maduro sent an emergency letter to Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF president. The fund was requested to strengthen Venezuela’s coronavirus detection and response systems.
An AP report said: The IMF was not “in a position to consider” Venezuela’s request. The IMF doesn’t have “clarity on recognition” of the Maduro government.
The background story of the IMF argument is that Guaido. The US and a number of its camp followers recognize the proxy as president of Venezuela although Guaido has no legal standing.
However, the IMF has not formally taken a position on the issue. That means, the IMF has to go by existing arrangement: Maduro Government is still the legitimate government of the country. But the international lender has not stood by that fact. Moreover, at this time of crisis, denying fund to Venezuela is standing for death of people, which the IMF has confirmed by its action. The Fund has also shown its stand: Don’t go by fact. The fact is: Guaido doesn’t command any arrangement for taking necessary steps to fight the coronavirus pandemic. That proxy does have neither political will nor capacity to reach the people of Venezuela. His thin gatherings, the way he fled away from airport, his dependence on conspiracies hatched by imperialism are the evidence of his lack of contact with the people. At this time of crisis, contact with people and mobilizing people is the urgent need. The IMF denies looking at ground-level facts. It’s not that the Fund doesn’t understand ground-level fact and the fact’s utility. It’s that the Fund likes to makes the Bolivarian Republic suffer, push it gradually to death.
The imperialist world order knows its enemy very well. The order uses every opportunity to make Venezuela’s days difficult. Twitter blocked the accounts of Vice-President Delcy Rodriguez, who heads Venezuela’s presidential commission on the fight against the spread of COVID-19. The dirty step by Twitter led Venezuela’s foreign minister to write on Twitter:
“Vice-President Delcy Rodriguez leads the presidential commission against COVID-19.
“The inhuman and reckless gesture is that Twitter restricts @DrodriguezVen and @ViceVenezuela accounts, which are the sources of information necessary for the people of Venezuela in these unforeseen circumstances.”
During writing the related report, while trying to switch to the above-mentioned Twitter accounts, a notification is given that these accounts are temporarily restricted. However, Rodriguez’s English language account was available for users.
Several multilateral bodies have called for easing US economic sanctions on Venezuela and other global South nations fighting the pandemic.
In a letter addressed to the G-20, the world’s twenty largest economies, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres advocated relief from international sanctions targeting Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and Zimbabwe. “I am encouraging the waiving of sanctions imposed on countries to ensure access to food, essential health supplies, and COVID-19 medical support. This is the time for solidarity not exclusion,” he wrote.
The UN Secretary General, as part of a global UN response plan, has launched an appeal Wednesday for about $2 billion in aid to 20 Southern countries including Venezuela fighting the virus.
Speaking from Geneva on Tuesday, Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, urged that broad sectoral sanctions targeting Venezuela, Cuba, and other nations be “eased or suspended” on the grounds that “impeding medical efforts in one country heightens the risk for all of us.”
The way imperialism is reacting to Venezuela in the face of the pandemic is nothing but a show of its demonic character, inhuman character.
Farooque Chowdhury writes from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Climbing the Deadly Curves of COVID-19 and Capitalism
Co-Written by Stan Cox and Priti Gulati Cox
As USA stumbles its way through the pandemic, Lucy Diavolo, an editor at Teen Vogue, has compiled stories of groups and communities from all over who are moving ahead on a broad front to
keep society functioning and prevent a humanitarian crisis.
Co-Written by Stan Cox and Priti Gulati Cox
An embroidery work illustrating the early course of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States—more images of which are posted here at the Sidewalk Museum of Congress—follows the exponential growth in number of confirmed cases. The cumulative number rose very slowly through February, reached 100 on March 2, then leaped to 1,000 by March 11 and blew past 10,000 a week later, on March 18. It took just six more days more to surpass 50,000.
By March 14, it had already become impossible to embroider fast enough to keep up with the exponential growth in cases. The embroidered work, halted at that time, is 17 feet long. Had it been possible to continue for one more week, it would have reached 155 feet in length. In one more week, it would have stretched a quarter mile.
Given the woefully inadequate testing that has been done in the United States, we can be sure that actual numbers of people infected with the novel coronavirus are several to many times the numbers above. Dealing with this huge and growing catastrophe will be a grueling and tragic experience.
Reverse Gears, Wrong and Right
In the absence of effective action or coordination by the Trump administration, state and local governments in hard-hit U.S. locations are adopting drastic measures aimed at limiting transmission of the virus—policies that only weeks ago would have been unthinkable, given their impact on local economies. And people everywhere are acting on their own, staying home and keeping their money in their pockets.
By throwing growth into reverse in all major economies, these governmental, collective, and personal actions aimed at slowing the spread of the virus have together accomplished what the Paris Agreement and other climate initiatives could not: a reduction in the rate of greenhouse emissions. This was no surprise. Past declines in economic activity, such as the worldwide financial crash and recession of 2008, also brought sharp but temporary emissions reductions.
This sudden, dramatic economic retreat is illustrating on a world scale the well-known, tight link between nations’ or regions’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and their greenhouse emissions. They rise and fall together.*
The economic growth pursued in normal times by governments worldwide, like the increase in COVID-19 cases, follows an exponential curve. (The adjective “exponential” is too often misinterpreted as “really fast” when it actually indicates multiplicative, accelerating growth.)
While existing in a wholly different time scale—3 percent per year versus 30 percent per day for the virus—the kind of growth required to make capitalist economies happy is as dire a threat to humanity in the long run as the COVID-19 pandemic will be in the short run.
An unmanaged economic decline triggered by a pandemic is of course a terrible means of reining in greenhouse warming. Many millions of low-income and marginalized Americans will endure horrendous suffering and hardship in the coming months.
Once this ordeal is finally over, economic activity will be restored, but that should be done in a way that achieves health and economic security for every household in the country, without returning the national economy to its insupportable expansionary path.
Now it has become apparent that Donald Trump, more concerned about the stock market than the death toll, wants the country to go back to business-as-usual by the end of March. The goal, shared by many red-state officials, would be to steepen the curve, not flatten it, getting the pandemic over with quickly so the crippled economy can supposedly get going again.
The business-as-usual route, if followed, would cause unimaginable misery, creating a flood of critically ill patients by May-June, overwhelming the nation’s ICU-bed capacity 30 times over, and causing 2.2 million deaths.
Fortunately, Trump won’t get his way. State and local governments will press ahead with policies to stem the pandemic. Most likely, the nation will become an unsatisfactory mosaic, as blue state governments continue working to flatten their curves (with no federal help) and red states allow their curves to steepen catastrophically. That will produce no national recovery from either COVID-19 or the economic meltdown for the next year to year and a half.
Meanwhile, there is already a scramble to restore economic growth by, in part, rescuing ecologically ruinous industries (air travel, cruises, oil and gas). If, post-pandemic, growth is restored, emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other global-warming gases will return to their own dangerous growth trajectories.
Exponential growth of 3 percent annually, if restored, would double the size of the world’s affluent economies within 25 years, supercharging global warming. (That will happen in the same decades during which the international scientific community says greenhouse emissions must be reduced to zero if catastrophic warming is to be avoided.)
The Curtain Is Ripped Away
Millions in the United States have been rendered especially vulnerable to the coronavirus’s exponential growth by steep declines in workers’ rights, the lack of economic security for low-income and marginalized communities, and, of course, the absence of a universal health-care system. These failures have resulted from the pursuit of exponential growth in private wealth for the affluent minority through exploitation of the majority.
Both the virus and the economic impacts of efforts to contain the virus are laying bare the need for policies that shift economic power away from the owning and investing classes to the struggling majority and the public good.
It is often said of the suffering and destruction caused by hurricanes and earthquakes that there is no such thing as a “natural disaster.” The trail of sickness and death being left by the COVID-19 pandemic is likewise a highly unnatural disaster, a product of greed and exploitation. in the longer term, material resources and human labor must be directed not toward capital accumulation by the few but rather toward provision of basic needs and a good, healthy quality of life.
A functional government in Washington, if we had one, could learn from this terrible episode that its primary goal can and must be to achieve economic sufficiency for all and excess for none while at the same time driving fossil-fuel extraction and use down to zero, by law and on a deadline. All of that will require redirecting the nation’s resources away from wasteful and superfluous production toward ensuring economic security and good quality of life for the nation’s non-affluent majority.
Above all, COVID-19 has torn away the curtain of obfuscation and made the desperate need for publicly funded, universal health care and a robust public health system blindingly obvious. Amy Kapczynski and Gregg Gonsalves (professors of law and epidemiology, respectively, at Yale) recently wrote, “The Medicare for All component has been well mapped out, but less obvious, and just as crucial, is a new infrastructure of care. Envisioning a better, more just, and fairer response to coronavirus points us to what a new future would look like.”
They continued: “Ten days ago we joined a group of experts in writing an open letter to our federal, state, and local leaders, setting out the vast range of responses that we need to quickly expand our social immunity and protect the most vulnerable. It highlights many of the things that we need to do, but also need to abstract from to bring about a new politics of care.”
Spain is nationalizing all its private hospitals. The U.K. government has announced a plan to pay 80 percent of wages of workers being laid off, to keep them in their jobs whether they can work or not. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is set to send big bailouts to Big Business while just nibbling around the edges of the hard-charging crisis that’s hitting ordinary people.
As our country stumbles its way through the pandemic, Lucy Diavolo, an editor at Teen Vogue, has compiled stories of groups and communities from all over who are moving ahead on a broad front to keep society functioning and prevent a humanitarian crisis.
Also check out the site It’s Going Down, a “digital community center for anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements,” which offers a wide-ranging list of mutual aid groups mobilizing across the country in the time of COVID-19. These efforts are focused on people who are incarcerated, immunocompromised, economically insecure, homeless, isolated, homebound, and/or needing access to food or medicines. They are proliferating across the country, and we all should jump in. That is the kind of growth we need now.
Stan Cox (@CoxStan) is the author of The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (City Lights, May, 2020). Priti Gulati Cox (@PritiGCox) is an artist and the creator of the Sidewalk Museum of Congress outside the office of Kansas 1st District Congress member @rogermarshallmd in Salina, Kansas, where Stan and Priti live.
- Most “green growth” strategies depend on the assumption of rapid efficiency increases to reduce demand for energy and materials. But growth always undermines such efficiency gains. Improvements in the quantity of economic output per unit of resource input may impress at first, but they necessarily slow and eventually cease as they bump up against physical limits. As exponential economic growth proceeds, the material and energy resources required to support that growth will inevitably increase. See James Ward, Paul Sutton, Adrian Werner, Robert Costanza, Steve Mohr, and Craig Simmons, “Is Decoupling GDP Growth from Environmental Impact Possible?” PloS One 11 (2016): e0164733. The paper explains why the asymptotic efficiency curve becomes swamped by the exponential GDP-growth curve, concluding that “GDP ultimately cannot plausibly be decoupled from growth in material and energy use, demonstrating categorically that GDP growth cannot be sustained indefinitely. It is therefore misleading to develop growth-oriented policy around the expectation that decoupling is possible.”
Our leaders are terrified. Not of the virus – of us
by Jonathan Cook
A worldview that has crowded out all other thinking for nearly two generations is coming crashing down. It has no answers to our current predicament. There is a kind of tragic karma to the fact that so many major countries – meaning major economies – are today run by the very men least equipped ideologically, emotionally and spiritually to deal with the virus. That is being starkly exposed everywhere in the west, but the UK is a particularly revealing case study.
You can almost smell the fear-laden sweat oozing from the pores of television broadcasts and social media posts as it finally dawns on our political and media establishments what the coronavirus actually means. And I am not talking about the threat posed to our health.
A worldview that has crowded out all other thinking for nearly two generations is coming crashing down. It has no answers to our current predicament. There is a kind of tragic karma to the fact that so many major countries – meaning major economies – are today run by the very men least equipped ideologically, emotionally and spiritually to deal with the virus.
That is being starkly exposed everywhere in the west, but the UK is a particularly revealing case study.
Dragging their heels
It emerged at the weekend that Dominic Cummings, the ideological powerhouse behind Britain’s buffoonish prime minister Boris Johnson, was pivotal in delaying the UK government’s response to the coronavirus – effectively driving Britain on to the Italian (bad) path of contagion rather than the South Korean (good) one.
According to media reports at the weekend, Cummings initially stalled government action, arguing of the coming plague that “if that means some pensioners die, too bad”. That approach explains the dragging of heels for many days, and then days more of dither that is only now coming to a resolution.
This was 2 weeks ago. 1000s had already died all around the world, the WHO was already begging government’s to enforce distancing & to “test test test.” This gross negligence by the Johnson’s gov should never be forgotten nor forgiven.
Cummings, of course, denies ever making the statement, calling the claim “defamatory”. But let’s dispense with the formalities. Does anybody really – really – believe that that wasn’t the first thought of Cummings and half the cabinet when confronted with an imminent contagion they understood was about to unravel a social and economic theory they have dedicated their entire political careers to turning into a mass cult? An economic theory from which – by happy coincidence – they derive their political power and class privilege.
And sure enough, these hardcore monetarists are already quietly becoming pretend socialists to weather the very first weeks of the crisis. And there are many months more to run.
Austerity thrown out
As I predicted in my last post, the UK government last week threw out the austerity policies that have been the benchmark of Conservative party orthodoxy for more than a decade and announced a splurge of spending to save businesses with no business as well as members of the public no longer in a position to earn a living.
Since the 2008 financial crash, the Tories have cut social and welfare spending to the bone, creating a massive underclass in Britain, and have left local authorities penniless and incapable of covering the shortfall. For the past decade, the Conservative government excused its brutalist approach with the mantra that there was no “magic money tree” to help in times of trouble.
The free market, they argued, was the only fiscally responsible path. And in its infinite wisdom, the market had decided that the 1 per cent – the millionaires and billionaires who had tanked the economy in that 2008 crash – would get even filthier rich than they were already.
Meanwhile, the rest of us would see the siphoning off of our wages and prospects so that the 1 per cent could horde yet more wealth on offshore islands where we and the government could never get our hands on it.
“Neoliberalism” became a mystifying term used to reimagine unsustainable late-stage, corporate capitalism not only as a rational and just system but as the only system that did not involve gulags or bread queues.
Not only did British politicians (including most of the Labour parliamentary party) subscribe to it, but so did the entire corporate media, even if the “liberal” Guardian would very occasionally and very ineffectually wring its hands about whether it was time to make this turbo-charged capitalism a little more caring.
Only deluded, dangerous Corbyn “cultists” thought different.
Self-serving fairytale
But suddenly, it seems, the Tories have found that magic money tree after all. It was there all along and apparently has plenty of low-hanging fruit the rest of us may be allowed to partake from.
One doesn’t need to be a genius like Dominic Cummings to see how politically terrifying this moment is for the establishment. The story they have been telling us for 40 years or more about harsh economic realities is about to be exposed as a self-serving fairytale. We have been lied to – and soon we are going to grasp that very clearly.
That is why this week the Tory politician Zac Goldsmith, a billionaire’s son who was recently elevated to the House of Lords, described as a “twat” anyone who had the temerity to become a “backseat critic” of Boris Johnson. And it is why the feted “political journalist” Isabel Oakeshott – formerly of the Sunday Times and a regular on BBC Question Time – took to twitter to applaud Matt Hancock and Johnson for their self-sacrifice and dedication to public service in dealing with the virus:
Spare a thought this morning for health secretary @MattHancock who has such enormous responsibility right now and is working crazy hours trying to help the nation beat this. The hourly judgements he and @BorisJohnson have to make are so difficult.
Be ready. Over the coming weeks, more and more journalists are going to sound like North Korea’s press corps, with paeans to “the dear leader” and demands that we trust that he knows best what must be done in our hour of need.
Saved by the bail-outs
The political and media class’s current desperation has a substantive cause – and one that should worry us as much as the virus itself.
Twelve years ago capitalism teetered on the brink of the abyss, its structural flaws exposed for anyone who cared to look. The 2008 crash almost broke the global financial system. It was saved by us, the public. The government delved deep into our pockets and transferred our money to the banks. Or rather the bankers.
We saved the bankers – and the politicians – from their economic incompetence through bail-outs that were again mystified by being named “quantitative easing”.
But we weren’t the ones rewarded. We did not own the banks or get a meaningful stake in them. We did not even get oversight in return for our huge public investment. Once we had saved them, the bankers went right back to enriching themselves and their friends in precisely the same manner that stalled the economy in 2008.
The bail-outs did not fix capitalism, they simply delayed for a while longer its inevitable collapse.
Capitalism is still structurally flawed. Its dependence on ever-expanding consumption cannot answer the environmental crises necessarily entailed by such consumption. And economies that are being artificially “grown”, at the same time as resources deplete, ultimately create inflated bubbles of nothingness – bubbles that will soon burst again.
Survival mode
Indeed, the virus is illustrative of one of those structural flaws – an early warning of the wider environmental emergency, and a reminder that capitalism, by intertwining economic greed with environmental greed, has ensured the two spheres collapse in tandem.
Pandemics like this one are the outcome of our destruction of natural habitats – to grow cattle for burgers, to plant palm trees for cakes and biscuits, to log forests for flat-pack furniture. Animals are being driven into ever closer proximity, forcing diseases to cross the species barrier. And then in a world of low-cost flights, disease finds an easy and rapid transit to every corner of the planet.
The truth is that in a time of collapse, like this decade-long one, capitalism has only “magic money trees” left. The first one, in the late 2000s, was reserved for the banks and the large corporations – the wealth elite that now run our governments as plutocracies.
The second “magic money tree”, needed to deal with what will become the even more disastrous economic toll wrought by the virus, has had to be widened to include us. But make no mistake. The circle of beneficence has been expanded not because capitalism suddenly cares about the homeless and those reliant on food banks. Capitalism is an amoral economic system driven by the accumulation of profit for the owners of capital. And that’s not you or me.
No, capitalism is now in survival mode. That is why western governments will, for a time, try to “bail out” sections of their publics too, giving back to them some of the communal wealth that has been extracted over many decades. These governments will try to conceal for a little longer the fact that capitalism is entirely incapable of solving the very crises it has created. They will try to buy our continuing deference to a system that has destroyed our planet and our children’s future.
It won’t work indefinitely, as Dominic Cummings knows only too well. Which is why the Johnson government, as well as the Trump administration and their cut-outs in Brazil, Hungary, Israel, India and elsewhere, are in the process of drafting draconian emergency legislation that will have a longer term goal than the immediate one of preventing contagion.
Western governments will conclude that it is time to shore up capitalism’s immune system against their own publics. The risk is that, given the chance, they will begin treating us, not the virus, as the real plague.
This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/
Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
In the wake of Covid-19, We Must Reclaim our Secular and Inclusive Legacy
by Badre Alam Khan
Faizan Mustafa in his recent piece, appeared in The Indian Express, March 21, 2020 titled,
“Let us be frank on Secularism” argues that some kind of Hindu Rashtra (which will bring out values like liberalism, modernity, equality and cultural freedom) would help to bring out ‘peace’ and protect the rights of minority communities including Indian Muslims. This is rejoinder to his article
A viral climate of fear
by Dr Andrew Glikson
Where the virus may potentially claim the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, global heating above 4oC is bound to claim the lives of billions, yet most governments hardly listen to the science
Where the virus may potentially claim the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, global heating above 4oC is bound to claim the lives of billions, yet most governments hardly listen to the science
By the 25 March 2020 more than 4% of Covid-19 patients, nearly 19,000 people, tragically died worldwide, with more to come, and each death its own heartbreaking story. Many governments are listening to medical science, implementing essential measures to combat the plague, instigating social isolation and economic support systems in order to avoid a potential demise of hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives.
Climate change is already causing deaths, according to a new report global warming would cause an additional 250,000 deaths per-year from heat and extreme weather events, yet most authorities continue to ignore the scientific evidence of climate disruption that threatens to exceed +2 degrees Celsius and toward 4 degrees Celsius. Potentially this is leading to a demise of billions of lives and many species through extreme weather events.
Between 1998 and 2017, 526,000 people across the world died due to extreme weather events caused by climate change.
Health protection measures to restrict the effects of COVID-19 are essential, but the looming social and economic collapse is something else. It is not entirely clear why, in the majority cases, populations cannot continue to operate at safe distances using protective gear?
There has been no social and economic collapse in the west when:
- The estimated number of malaria deaths stood at 405 000 in 2018
- Seasonal flu kills 291,000 to 646,000 people worldwide each year,
- Each year there are 1.3 million to 4.0 million cases of cholera, and 21 000 to 143 000 deaths worldwide due to cholera.
Nor have societies and economies collapsed in the western world during genocidal atrocities such as in Korea, Viet Nam, Rwanda, Myanmar, the Middle East and Yemen, which killed millions, namely:
- When 6 million people were bombed in Vietnam
- When millions were killed in Rwanda and the Congo
- When millions of people were killed and fled the Middle East
- When half a million refugees had to escape Mien-Mar
Media reports depend on the profile of the victims. The effects on the share market are elevated above the health issue. Poor and dark-skinned people receive less attention. Memories are short and most people worry about one problem at a time. Nowadays the fatal consequences of a deliberate or accidental nuclear war and of global warming toward four degrees Celsius, as real as those of the pandemic, are hardly mentioned.
Andrew Glikson, Earth and climate scientist
Lives In Poetry
by John Scales Avery
John Scales Avery announces the publication of a book which presents an historical anthology of the poems of some of the world’s great poets, from very early times until the present, and from many countries and cultures. The book may be freely downloaded and
circulated
Capital punishment, armed conflicts and terrorist actions amidst Coronavirus
by Prof. Pritam Singh
According to Amnesty International which campaigns worldwide for abolishing death penalty, at the end of 2018, 106 countries had abolished the death penalty in law for all crimes, and 142 countries constituting more than two-thirds of all the countries in the world, had abolished the death penalty in law or practice. It is time that India moves in this direction of abolishing capital punishment. Let us hope that this exceptional period of loss of lives due to Corona virus pandemic lead to rethinking on the part of those in India who might have defended capital punishment.
The danger of the far right today
by Peter Taaffe
Mudde explains that the emergence of the far right since the onset
of the “fourth wave” beginning in 2000 has led to the “mainstreaming” of far right parties, by “traditional conservatives” but also sometimes even so-called left parties which have considered sharing power with them or at least borrowing parts of the far right’s programme. The overall effect was to legitimise and “mainstream” far-right ideas and parties so that these parties, which were gaining an average of almost 5% of the votes at the beginning of the twenty-first century, have been running at 7.5% from 2010 onwards.
BJP and Israel: Hindu Nationalism is Ravaging India’s Democracy
by Dr Ramzy Baroud
It was only a matter of time before the anti-Muslim sentiment in India turned violent. A country that has historically prided itself on its diversity and tolerance, and for being ‘the largest democracy in the world’ has, in recent years, exhibited the exact
opposite qualities – chauvinism, racism, religious intolerance, and, at times, extreme violence. The latest round of violence ensued on February 23, one day before US President Donald Trump arrived in Delhi on his first official visit to India.
Poetry In The Time Of Resistance
by Dr Sanjay Kumar
By poetry, artist and poet not only express their solidarity but expose ‘lived experience’ of the people and community. It also creates socio-political consciousness in order to evolve a egalitarian society. Political and social events historically inspire poets to react it its own time and space. Historically egalitarian art and literature born during resistance time, like USSR art and literature which still dominate on world stage against undemocratic regime. Poetry and poet will born again and again in future protests to resist the dark time. Once revolutionary German play-writer and poet Bertolt Brecht poem
will keep us reminding ‘In the dark times/ Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/ About the dark time’.
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