Saturday, April 18, 2020
CC News Letter 18 April - End of economic globalisation, rise of surveillance capitalism
Dear Friend,
The colonial and imperialist militaries, political and economic systems are defeated by the mutilating powers of the pestilence. The COVID-19 virus is controlling our so-called modern lifestyles and quarantining ourselves within walls of our rooms to reflect and reimagine. The ‘end of history’, ‘clash of civilisations’ and ‘there is no alternative’ were three rotten ideological theses advanced to established market led liberal democracy. The narratives were constructed and propagated to make people believe that capitalist world order is the only available alternative.
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Binu Mathew
Editor
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End of economic globalisation, rise of surveillance capitalism And the search for alternatives
by Bhabani Shankar Nayak
The colonial and imperialist militaries, political and economic systems are defeated by the mutilating powers of the pestilence. The COVID-19 virus is controlling our so-called modern lifestyles and quarantining ourselves within walls of our rooms to reflect and reimagine. The ‘end of history’, ‘clash of civilisations’ and ‘there is no alternative’ were three rotten ideological theses advanced to established market led liberal democracy. The narratives were constructed and propagated to make people believe that capitalist world order is the only available alternative.
Rationality in the Times of Corona
by Shashwati
The social implications of the corona pandemic in India are proving to be as grave as its pathological ones. The country’s resolve to fight corona- by no means insignificant- has, however, led to certain outcomes that have caused reprehensible damage to the social and moral constitution. The reported twenty-two people dying on the roads- trying to reach a ‘safer’ place from where, their ‘responsible’ fight against the virus would have begun- is no mean number.
The need is not to avoid Fiscal Deficit but to save lives
by Akhilendra Pratap Singh
At this juncture, we will have to insist on the government that it spends at least 6-7 lakh crores in cash and food grains to ensure the livelihood of the public and reorganize its entire economy in such a way, irrespective of the financial deficit in which more and
more part of the budget is spent on health, education, employment and agricultural development
Corona Prayer
by Rajkumar M
I deeply realize that it is the unbearable blunder of the human race that caused this colossal crisis! You gifted us this beautiful planet with a covenant that necessitated the human race to demonstrate Justice, Love and Righteousness so that Kingdom of Peace is established here. However, we are tempted to design our life system that crushes justice, kills love, and destroys righteousness!
US-China Trade War
by Naveed Qazi
For quite a while, world’s two largest economies, or superpowers, as a matter of fact, have been locked in a trade war. The result has been imposition of tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of each other’s goods.
The conflict between the US and China is not simply economic — it has political, cultural and military dimensions.
For quite a while, world’s two largest economies, or superpowers, as a matter of fact, have been locked in a trade war. The result has been imposition of tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of each other’s goods.
While U.S. President Donald Trump has long accused China of unfair trading practices, forced transfer of American technology, and intellectual property theft, China on the other hand believes that United States is trying to curb its rise as a global economic power. The reason behind it is China’s military expansion into the South China Sea, and its expansive Belt and Road Initiative, as well as an ambitious plan to move up the value chain ladder, which was outlined in 2015.
The trade war has changed the global landscape, disrupting supply chains, most notably in the technology sector. Lucy Colback, in an Oped for Financial Times wrote: “perhaps the most significant consequence of this is the potential for a longer-term decoupling of China and the U.S., and the emergence of two rival and separate spheres of influence, in both trade and technology.”
Trump’s “America First” campaign ignited the trade war in recent times, and the uncertainties around the trade war eventually harmed the global economy. Trump’s tariff policy aims to encourage American consumers to buy American products, by making imported goods more expensive. During his election campaigns, he wanted to bring more production back into the country, in order to protect U.S. jobs.
But, the reality lies somewhere else, as many Americans don’t care about these new developments. Americans would rather pay as little for computer, electronics or clothing, even if it means other Americans lose their jobs.
Many are also concerned about the political leverage of China over U.S. fiscal policy. If it was not China, that bought Treasury’s on a large scale, interest rates would have risen in U.S. and thrown the country into a recession. However, this would not be of China’s interests, as of now, because U.S. shoppers would then buy fewer Chinese exports.
According to a recent B.B.C. report, U.S. has imposed tariffs on more than $360 billion of Chinese goods, and China, in retaliation has levied tariffs on more than $110 billion of U.S. products, lately. This has led to higher costs for U.S. businesses and consumers. In this scenario, the annual trade deficit wouldn’t likely change, which has risen and fallen, over the years, and hovered around $345.6 billion, in 2019. When it comes to U.S. companies competing with cheap Chinese goods, they must reduce their costs, or go out of business. To reduce costs, they often outsource jobs to China, or India.
If Trump were to start a continual trade war, the most immediate effects would be felt by American companies such as Walmart, which import billions of dollars of cheap goods. The price of these goods would skyrocket, because of new set tariffs. The end result would likely be a war of attrition that China is infinitely in a better position to win.
In current times, China’s foreign currency reserves now stand at more than $3 trillion. In contrast, the U.S. has foreign exchange reserves that levitate at $120 billion. An increase of tariffs would automatically trigger penalties in the World Trade Organisation, and might even lead to WTO’s collapse, which would then lead to higher tariffs against U.S. exports. While all of this might take a little while, China would likely emerge unscathed, but the scenario will be catastrophic for American businesses and employment.
In August 2019, when US Treasury Department officially designated China as a currency manipulator, the news had prompted further selling in global financial markets and raised speculation that China could take even more aggressive steps to devaluate its currency. A year earlier, exporters from most U.S. states also experienced dismal sales to China. Total U.S. merchandise exports to China fell 11% to about $107 billion, according to U.S. Commerce Department. Particularly hard hit were Texas, Florida and Alabama –each state saw sales plunge to more than 25%.
As the trade war has dragged, the companies have had to consider finding alternative sources of inputs for their production chains, too. It was less simple than buying completed goods, from new vendors, and switching to new component suppliers that come with friction costs as well as, potentially higher prices. With the result, trust, quality assurance, and logistical networks were all to be rebuilt. As the chain is not well oiled, at least to start with, the manufacturers lose.
Also, due to an uncertainty paralysis around the globe, nearly one third of respondents to an AmCham China survey said that they had delayed or cancelled their investment decisions. In a September 2019, EUCham survey, nearly two thirds of respondents said that they had left their strategies unchanged, but were monitoring the situation closely. A previous questionnaire of the same survey reflected that majority respondents were trying to adapt to the trade war, while the remaining had delayed investment and expansion decisions.
The conflict between the US and China is not simply economic — it has political, cultural and military dimensions. For these reasons, the trade war will unlikely diminish anytime soon. Over the longer term, the U.S. and China would split into two spheres of influence, one centered around the U.S. and abiding by its standards — from technology to governance — and another centered around China.
Former Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen had also warned that competition between the United States and China could also slow the development of artificial intelligence, 5G mobile networks and other technology related to America’s national security.
During the Future Forum panel discussion, the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf noted that even the Americans don’t seem to have decided what they want. Mr Wolf said that the phase one trade deal came “in the context of America going through a massive rethink in its relations with China, and it hasn’t made its mind up yet”.
With phase one trade deal signed, it is now possible for China to respond to Trump’s tariff pressure. The deal tests the limits of U.S. power, however, in the past, the Trump administration has sent contradictory messages, at times insisting U.S. companies to get better access to the Chinese market, and at other times, ordering the U.S. companies to leave China.
The centerpiece of phase one deal is a pledge that China will buy some $200 billion in U.S. goods and services. In return, the United States will suspend some of the new tariffs Trump previously announced. But, this appeal to managed trade will ultimately increase Chinese leverage over U.S. So long as U.S. exports depend on the appeasement of Chinese politicians, the threat that China will pull the plug on the system will continue to hang over U.S.–China trade relations.
According to an Oped by Geoffrey Gertz in Brookings: “the phase one deal does not achieve any of the complex structural reforms U.S. policymakers have been seeking around industrial policy, the Made in China 2025 program, and broader state influence in the economy. Earlier experiences suggested neither U.S. diplomatic appeals nor WTO trade restrictions would sway China into giving up these core aspects of its economic model. The lesson of the phase one deal is that aggressive tariffs won’t either.”
The Trump administration continues to insist these problematic issues will be resolved in a phase two deal. But, its highly unlikely that it would happen. By using different tactics, U.S policymakers have always had a limited ability to change Chinese behavior. The moot problem is that Washington needs a strategy that deals with China as it is, not as it hopes it might be. That’s how the problem with China would be resolved.
Naveed Qazi has written six books in fiction/non fiction category, and can be mailed at naveedqazi@live.com
The Coronavirus Liability Craze: Holding China Accountable
by Dr Binoy Kampmark
Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts takes up the theme that is being pushed by assortment of talking heads across the pandemic infested world: “Should China pay compensation for unleashing COVID19 on the world?” The answer is implicit in the question; intention and causality are assumed.
Politicians, as any political class, will nurse their favourite prejudice. And when there is a crisis, those prejudices will be fanned and praised to the heavens. For some politicians, who find the whole business of lockdowns and business restrictions all too much, someone has to pay for COVID-19.
Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts takes up the theme that is being pushed by assortment of talking heads across the pandemic infested world: “Should China pay compensation for unleashing COVID19 on the world?” The answer is implicit in the question; intention and causality are assumed.
In the United States, Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley and New York Republican Representative Elise Stefanik introduced a bicameral resolution in March demanding a “full, international investigation”. The resolution found “that the Government of the People’s Republic of China should be held accountable for the impact, of its decision to hide the emergence and spread of COVID-19, on the lives and livelihoods of the people of the United States and other nations.” With an arrogance that tends to accompany the aggrieved, the drafters of the resolution also wished any such investigation to be led by public health officials drawn from the US and “other affected nations”. Not that any conflict of interest was at stake: the US and allies were there to lecture the PRC about matters of liability. “Simply put,” raged Congresswoman Stefanik, “China must, and will be, held accountable.”
President Donald Trump’s former deputy assistant secretary for policy and economic development is even more gung ho. “Based on China’s culpability,” writes Gavin Clarkson, “President Trump and Steven Mnuchin should immediately extract reimbursement, starting with the $1.1 trillion in US Treasury Department bonds Communist China currently holds.”
In the land of the lawsuit, courts are already being busied by claims about Chinese impropriety and bungling. A class action complaint was lodged in Florida last month “for damages suffered as a result of the Coronavirus epidemic”. The accusation: that China and its various arms of government “knew that COVID-19 was dangerous and capable of causing a pandemic, yet slowly acted, proverbially put their head in the sand, and/or covered it up for their own economic self-interest.” Such conduct had caused “incalculable harm” and injury “and will continue to cause personal injuries and deaths, as well as other damages.”
This brings that old hoary chestnut of sovereignty into play, and even those sympathetic to the argument that Chinese officials have behaved abominably find little room to overcome it. The Foreign Immunities Act of 1976 protects, in the words of a federal court decision, “foreign sovereigns from the burdens of litigation, including the cost and aggravation of discovery.” As the well-cited Queen’s Bench case of Mighell v Sultan of Johore (1894) put it, a sovereign could never waive immunity except through submitting to the jurisdiction of the court “by appearance to a writ.”
The Florida class action suit attempts to sidestep the obstacle of sovereign immunity by claiming an exception for commercial activities and for death and harm “caused by the tortious act or omission of that foreign state or of any official or employee of that foreign state while acting within the scope of his or her employment.” Another ground is even more adventurous, and one floated by Israeli-based attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner: the fanciful argument that China’s conduct amounted to “support for terrorism”. Deliberate concealment of “a deadly medical crisis” and concerted cover-ups were not among “the protected acts of a sovereign state or of responsible leaders.”
The neoconservative British-based Henry Jackson Society has taken an interest in the whole question of PRC liability, putting the claim in a report that China’s balance sheet of damages comes in at £3.2 trillion from G7 countries alone. “The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was bound by international law, in the form of International Health Regulations (2005), to report timely, accurate and detailed public health information.” The PRC failed to do this throughout December 2019 and January 2020. “In fact, it appears at least possible that this was a deliberate act of mendacity.” (The authors seem to cast aside those common historical tendencies: negligence through error; damage caused by complacence.) The report’s central sentiment is resentment: had the detection and sharing of accurate information taken place in good time, “the infection would not have left China.”
How this affected Britain is keenly felt. “Inadequate and inaccurate information” from the PRC hampered the UK’s response. Reliance was placed upon World Health Organization reports drawing upon faulty Chinese data claiming, at that point, that “there were no cases of medics contracting the diseases”. Much of this is undeniable, but the authors are desperate to find a guilty culprit, one who will stand up and shoulder the blame.
The report, having reduced the issue of claimed Chinese malfeasance and the pandemic to a matter of Us and Them, err on the matter of “the rules-based international system”, always cited when things do not go the way of Western industrialised states. Forgotten in such enthusiastic exhortations is the sense that such a rules-based system was imposed by the imperialist’s gun and statute book. To preserve that system “and to protect taxpayers from punitive liabilities, the world should seek to take legal action against the PRC for the breaches of international law and their consequences.”
The report fits the current mood among a good number of British Conservatives who see China as needing a good clipping, wings and all. A number of senior Tories, with former Deputy Prime Minister Damian Green leading a call, badgered Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a letter worried about the “damage to the rules-based system caused by China’s non-compliance with international treaties.” As with the Henry Jackson Society, the letter underlined those “Legally binding international healthcare regulations [that] require states to provide full information on all potential pandemics.” China, the petitioners claim, failed to abide by them, a grave omission that “allowed the disease to spread throughout with extraordinary serious consequences in terms of global health and the economy.”
Green was already ripe for persuasion, having suggested the adoption of an attitude towards the PRC “similar” to that towards Russia “in the more peaceful stages of the Cold War.” A reconsideration of relations was required. “Whatever your view of how well any Western government is handling the crisis it is clear that a deeper look at the long-term interdependence of Western capitalism and Chinese communism will take place.”
Compensation claims of this sort tread in murky waters. Historical wrongs will be revisited and Chinese responses to such accusations and urgings are already being heavily referenced by Britain’s own ruinous exploits during what is termed the “Century of Humiliation”. “Cool, great, you just pay us back for the Opium Wars,” came a Twitter comment, and not without merit. As The Economist put it in 2017, “Britain and China see each other through a narcotic haze”, but it was a haze very much forced upon China at its moment of weakness. That same year, President Xi Jinping, in an address in Hong Kong, that last outpost of British Empire, referred to a poisoned legacy that enfeebled a state. “After the Opium War, China has been repeatedly defeated by countries which were smaller and less populous.” There is little basis to assume that the PRC intends to acknowledge those, let alone be defeated by, the even smaller courts of those countries.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
COVID-19 and the Wasting Disease of Normalcy
by Brian Terrell
Fifty one years later, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the very notion of normalcy is being questioned as never before. While Donald Trump is “chomping on the bit” to return the economy to normal very soon based on a metric in his own head, more reflective voices are saying that a return to normal, now or even in the future, is an intolerable threat to be resisted. “There is a lot of talk about returning to ‘normal’ after the COVID-19 outbreak,”
says climate activist Greta Thunberg, “but normal was a crisis.”
“But what of the price of peace?” asked Jesuit priest and war resister Daniel Berrigan, writing from federal prison in 1969, doing time for his part in the destruction of draft records. “I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their loved ones, in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise.”
From his prison cell in a year of mass movements to end the war in Vietnam and mobilizations for nuclear disarmament, Daniel Berrigan diagnosed normalcy as a disease and labeled it an obstacle to peace. “’Of course, let us have the peace,’ we cry, ‘but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.’ And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven… because of this we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace.”
Fifty one years later, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the very notion of normalcy is being questioned as never before. While Donald Trump is “chomping on the bit” to return the economy to normal very soon based on a metric in his own head, more reflective voices are saying that a return to normal, now or even in the future, is an intolerable threat to be resisted. “There is a lot of talk about returning to ‘normal’ after the COVID-19 outbreak,” says climate activist Greta Thunberg, “but normal was a crisis.”
In recent days even economists with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and columnists in the New York Times have spoken about the urgent necessity of reordering economic and political priorities to something more human- only the thickest and cruelest minds today speak of a return to normal as a positive outcome.
Early in the pandemic, the Australian journalist John Pilger reminded the world of the baseline normal that COVID-19 exacerbates: “A pandemic has been declared, but not for the 24,600 who die every day from unnecessary starvation, and not for 3,000 children who die every day from preventable malaria, and not for the 10,000 people who die every day because they are denied publicly-funded healthcare, and not for the hundreds of Venezuelans and Iranians who die every day because America’s blockade denies them life-saving medicines, and not for the hundreds of mostly children bombed or starved to death every day in Yemen, in a war supplied and kept going, profitably, by America and Britain. Before you panic, consider them.”
I was starting high school when Daniel Berrigan asked his question and at the time, while there obviously were wars and injustices in the world, it seemed as though if we did not take them too seriously or protest too strenuously, the American Dream with its limitless potential was spread before us. Play the game, and our hopes would “march on schedule” was an implied promise that in 1969 looked like a sure thing, for us young white North Americans, anyway. A few years later, I abandoned normal life, dropped out after a year of college and joined the Catholic Worker movement where I came under the influence of Daniel Berrigan and Dorothy Day, but these were privileged choices that I made. I did not reject normalcy because I did not think that it could deliver on its promise, but because I wanted something else. As Greta Thunberg and the Friday school strikers for climate convict my generation, few young people, even from previously privileged places, come of age today with such confidence in their futures.
The pandemic has brought home what the threats of global destruction by climate change and nuclear war should have long ago- that the promises of normalcy will never deliver in the end, that they are lies that lead those who trust in them to the ruin. Daniel Berrigan saw this a half century ago, normalcy is an affliction, a wasting disease more dangerous to its victims and to the planet than any viral plague.
Author and human rights activist Arundhati Roy is one of many who recognizes the peril and the promise of the moment: “Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
“Every crisis contains both danger and opportunity,” said Pope Francis about the present situation. “Today I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world. This is the opportunity for conversion. Yes, I see early signs of an economy that is less liquid, more human. But let us not lose our memory once all this is past, let us not file it away and go back to where we were.”
“There are ways forward we never imagined – at huge cost, with great suffering – but there are possibilities and I’m immensely hopeful,” said Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, on Easter. “After so much suffering, so much heroism from key workers and the NHS (National Health Service) in this country and their equivalents all across the globe, once this epidemic is conquered we cannot be content to go back to what was before as if all was normal. There needs to be a resurrection of our common life, a new normal, something that links to the old but is different and more beautiful.”
In these perilous times, it is necessary to use the best social practices and to wisely apply science and technology to survive the present COVID-19 pandemic. The wasting disease of normalcy, though, is the far greater existential threat and our survival requires that we meet it with at least the same courage, generosity and ingenuity.
Brian Terrell is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and is quarantined on a Catholic Worker farm in Maloy, Iowa
Stay Safe; Stay Home
by Mitali Chakravarty
Daring COVID-19’s jaws,
Did the Homeless really have a Choice?
(IL)Logic in the service of prejudice: Why the blame on Tablighi Jamaat with the use of wrong math?
CO-Written by Akshat Jain & Divij Oberoi
What happened to Buddhists after the defeat of the Mauryas is happening to Muslims in India today. This tweet by Hilal Ahmad, associate professor at Centre for Study of Developing Societies, sums up the atmosphere that has been created: If the communal propaganda on corona virus continues like this we might see HINDU WATER and MUSLIM WATER shops at every railway station VERY SOON!
A Critique of Shamsul Islam’s article on Tablighi Jamaat
by Abhay Kumar
A rejoinder to Shamsul Islam's article, "Muslims of India Get Punished Despite Tablighi Jamat’s Having Tag of Good Muslims Form BJP – RSS Rulers"
Myths and Reality Opposed?
by Sally Dugman
I’m glad that people in the USA keep being told facts about Covid-19. In fact, we are bombarded by tv, other forms of announcements and emails by friends about the facts. I’m happy at it all because some people have trouble distinguishing between facts and fiction.
Kashmiris: Whom to trust ?
by Firdous Hameed Parey
It is the space of governance which has shattered the dream of million Kashmiris. Because of bad leadership even after 70 years Kashmiris are still waiting for good governance. There is a need to fill this gulf between common masses and leaders. It
would be better to end this long drama of forgery and distrust.
Internet Ban in Kashmir and Its Impact on People
by Bilal Ahmad Dar
India’s Internet shutdown in Kashmir is the longest ever in a democracy
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