Q. Can Alok Sharma, the UK Business Secretary, walk and fart at the same time?
A. Not sure.
He can manage a coronavirus crisis and Brexit, but not preparing for, and chairing COP26, the most important intergovernmental conference on the climate emergency since the Paris agreement, along with all the other participant nations' government delegates worldwide.
NGOs fear COP26 postponement could scuttle climate change policy
DW ran this story by Kathleen Schuster (02.04.2020):
The coronavirus pandemic has put the brakes on COP26, billed the most important climate conference since the Paris Accord in 2015. The delay casts further uncertainty on shaky climate pledges.
The UN's highly anticipated climate change conference, COP26, was officially postponed this week due to COVID-19.
"The world is currently facing an unprecedented global challenge and countries are rightly focusing their efforts on saving lives and fighting COVID-19. That is why we have decided to reschedule COP26," COP26 President Alok Sharma wrote in a press release.
Set to take place in the Scottish city of Glasgow from November 9-20, the conference was seen as a much-needed opportunity to revisit the watered-down deal reached at the end of COP25, held last year in Madrid.
"Rescheduling will ensure all parties can focus on the issues to be discussed at this vital conference and allow more time for the necessary preparation to take place," the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) said in a statement on its website.
Big expectations for Glasgow
Organizers and climate change activists had high hopes for COP26 after a disappointing showing at COP25 in Madrid.
Although the December conference went on for a record 12 days, negotiators not only failed to clinch a deal on a market mechanism that would establish rules on trading carbon credits, but were also unable to agree on how to help poorer countries protect themselves from the impacts of climate change.
COP26 was also going to be the first time the Paris Agreement would have been reviewed since 2015.
Under the accord, nearly 200 countries agreed to keep global temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by reducing emissions.
The will to implement global emission standards has suffered setbacks at the national level in recent years, with a rise in climate denial among world leaders like US President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and continued investments in fossil fuels across the globe.
NGOs call on governments to continue climate work
News of a delay to the highly-anticipated talks has drawn reactions from NGOs across the globe.
While conceding that the health, safety and security of citizens all over the world was currently the main priority, they were quick to remind leaders that the pandemic should not overshadow the climate crisis, which scientists warn is swiftly becoming irreversible.
"Governments must now find answers for the global health crisis, but they can't ignore climate protection," said Ann-Kathrin Schneider, the head of international climate policy at Germany's Union for Environment and Nature Protection (BUND), wrote on Wednesday.
Tasneem Essop, from the Climate Action Network (CAN), echoed this sentiment.
"Let us remember this pandemic is taking place against the backdrop of an ecological crisis," wrote Essop, whose network brings together roughly 1,300 environmental NGOS worldwide.
Emma Howard Boyd, the chair of the UK's Environment Agency, a nondepartmental public body, pointed out that environmental activism, like other major causes of the 20th century, would resume its mission.
The director of think tank Power Shift Africa, meanwhile, drew attention to the plight of developing nations where land and water systems are drying up.
"Before the pandemic countries were failing to deliver quick enough emissions reductions and support for the vulnerable. This delay, combined with the economic recovery investment being devised, gives leaders the opportunity to revise their climate plans," Mohamed Adow wrote.
"Economies in the rich north must not be kick-started with dirty investment that will lead to climate suffering in the global south," he added.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 was considered a pivotal year for climate change, with green politicians and activists hoping the momentum of historic environmental protests would lead to fundamental structural shifts in the energy sector away from fossil fuels.
The need for urgent climate action has been gaining greater momentum in recent years as increasing numbers of scientific reports point to the irreversibility of global warming if leaders fail to act.
Hot on the heels of revelations in its 2018 report that revealed how dire circumstances would become even with warming limited to only 1.5 degrees Celsius, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released two further reports last year, which warned that emissions were putting unspeakable pressure on both land and sea.
According to the IPCC, ocean warming has more than doubled since 1993 and, even if global warming were limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the impact on coastal ecosystems would still be "severe."
In a similar warming scenario, desertification of land would threaten the food supply for nearly 180 million people.
Earlier this year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said COP26 would need to operate under the assumption that goals for a 1.5 degree warming scenario would begin this year.
"We need to demonstrate, starting this year, how we will achieve emissions reductions of 45% from 2010 levels this decade, and how we will reach net-zero emissions by mid-century," Guterres said.
The UNFCCC confirmed on Wednesday that COP26 would be rescheduled for 2021, with a new date pending further discussions among its parties.
. . . there's a link from this story
. . . to this story by Ruby Russell (05.03.2020) that picks up the unfolding impact of coronavirus on the actions governments worldwide need to take to address the climate emergency.
China, the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluter, has no plans to cut its emissions anytime soon. Under its Paris Agreement pledges, Beijing has promised to hit peak emissions by 2030. So for the next decade, they're only going to go up.
Yet suddenly, this colossal, coal-powered economy has slashed emissions by 25%, according to numbers crunched by Lauri Myllyvirta at the University of Helsinki's Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Not because of the climate crisis, but the COVID-19 public health emergency.
"For something like this to happen virtually overnight is very much unprecedented," Myllyvirta told DW.
Wuhan, the 11 million-strong Hubei province city at the center of the coronavirus outbreak has been on lockdown since late January. With businesses and factories in the province shuttered, and hundreds of millions of people across the country rendered immobile by sweeping travel restrictions, the atmosphere above China in NASA satellite images appears virtually clean of nitrous oxide emissions.
NASA data shows a dramatic fall in nitrous oxide, a pollutant emitted from fossil fuels, after China put the breaks on its economy to contain coronavirus
Around the world, the aviation industry is predicting significant losses, British airline Flybe has collapsed, sporting events and international conferences have been cancelled, schools closed. Economists are warning of possible recession in Chinese trading partners Germany and Japan, while global growth is predicted to slow and oil demand has fallen faster than at any time since the 2008 financial crash.
All this looks like good news for the planet — at least in the short term. "Suppose you were a policymaker, and you were thinking about what you would do to lower emissions — you just got a pretty good instruction," says Amy Jaffe, director of the Council on Foreign Relations' Energy Security and Climate Change program.
Learning to localize
Jaffe says the virus is prompting us to change our habits in ways that could make a longer-term contribution to climate protection — working from home, video conferencing, working shorter weeks or staggering office hours to reduce traffic.
Companies might also conclude that what's good for the planet — localized production — is a sensible way to protect their supply chains from all kinds of risk, such as extreme weather events linked to climate change.
"They really need to go and think about all these events that could actually disrupt their supply chain and think about what they're going to do to make it more resilient," Jaffe told DW.
Still, the biggest share of emissions saved in China over recent weeks comes from the slowdown in manufacturing, and that's something few politicians would advocate as official policy beyond an immediate crisis.
Smokestack rebound?
In China, Myllyvirta says the pressure to resume business as usual is so great there have been reports of local governments ordering workerless factories to run their machines just to use up power, with the expectation that their superiors will be looking at electricity consumption as a sign of recovery.After the 2008 financial crash, "which also led to a dramatic drop-off in China's emissions and marked improvement in air quality because export industries went into freefall," Myllyvirta says the government launched a massive, construction-heavy stimulus program that saw emissions surge.
Such stories don't bode well for the climate in a post-crisis scenario when the country is keen to get the economy back up and running.
Myllyvirta says state investment in "smokestack industries" geared to maintaining the country's growth target could see rebound emissions more than cancel out savings over the last few weeks. He hopes China might instead opt for a path of slower, "high quality" growth, based on services, household consumption and investment in green technology and renewables.
Others argue that boosting consumption always comes at a cost to the planet, and the global obsession with expanding GDP makes little more sense than running empty production plants just to get the numbers up.
A managed contraction
"The only time we see emissions significantly reduce is when countries — or the globe — goes into recession," says Jon Erickson, an ecological economist at the University of Vermont's Gund Institute who studies emerging infectious disease vectors in relation to climate change.
"These moments really point to how intimately greenhouse gas emissions are tied to economic growth," Erickson told DW.
While recessions are good for the climate, they're terrible for people — particularly those who already benefit least from our fossil-fuel economies. Among the hardest hit by China's coronavirus response are low-waged migrant workers already living precarious lives.
Global supply chains have been disrupted by the virus
Yet advocates of a managed contraction of economic activity to protect the climate say shocks like the current outbreak illustrate the stark choices before us.
"We never want to do things in crisis mode," Erickson says. Instead, we have a "five to 10 year window" to "completely transform the economy so that the worst side of the contraction can be reduced, so that we can protect those who are most vulnerable."
If that sounds ridiculously optimistic, recent weeks at least suggest that when a crisis is deemed urgent enough, the world can act big and fast.
"If we truly treat climate as an emergency, as we are treating this pandemic as an emergency, we have to have a similar level of international coordination," Erickson says, starting with rapid scaling-back of fossil fuel investments.
A taste of future crises
Transmitting person-to-person and sending economic tremors across six continents, coronavirus has highlighted how closely interconnected our global community is. The ripple effect through supply chains also reveals our collective responsibility for emissions, as China's factories supply businesses and consumers in the West.
Neglecting that responsibility could mean crashes and crises far more painful than anything we've seen yet.
With a global death toll of over 3,000, COVID-19 still appears far less deadly than fossil fuels, which, according to a recent study that Myllyvirta co-authored for Greenpeace, are responsible for 4.5 million air pollution-related deaths each year, aside from climate impacts. But scientists warn that warmer, wetter conditions are increasing the probability of such outbreaks. No one knows how deadly the next one might be.
"This is an opportunity to talk about planned economic stabilization, and talk about planned degrowth," Erickson says. "The economy will contract, it will hit limits, it will crash, it will collapse on its own. That's going to hurt the most."
And, it will hurt the poor and the vulnerable most, all across the world.
India fears that the virus could spread fast in its largest slum.
'We're very afraid'
Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Shaikh Azizur Rahman reporting for the Guardian (Tue 7 Apr 2020):
It was the news that many in India had feared. A 56-year-old man who lived in Dharavi, India’s largest slum, where almost 1 million people are densely packed together in a 2 sq km area in Mumbai, had tested positive for coronavirus. He died shortly after.
It has prompted a scramble by local authorities to halt the virus before it takes hold in this overcrowded, unsanitary enclave, which was the inspiration for Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire.
But the prospect of attempting to contain transmission in a place where 10 people often live in a single room, more than 80 people share a public toilet and where many houses do not even have running water is already proving daunting to local officials. So far there are five known cases in Dharavi, while 25 people have been taken into special quarantine facilities and another 3,500 placed under home quarantine.
“We are doing everything we can to make sure it does not explode and that there is no community spread, but it is a big challenge to contain this,” said Kiran Dighavkar, the assistant municipal commissioner for G-North ward of Mumbai.
It appears that the 56-year-old garment worker who was the slum’s first victim had made two trips to the local Lokmanya Tilak municipal general hospital over the course of a week, presenting first with a fever and then severe respiratory problems, before he was tested by doctors. With no foreign travel history, he had not been considered high risk. But on 29 March, he tested positive for the virus and died four days later.
There was initial confusion over how this man, who had never been abroad and lived with seven family members in a small flat adjacent to Dharavi, could possibly have contracted the virus. Yet while his family were initially uncooperative, it later emerged he had hosted several men who had attended a religious gathering of the Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic movement, in Delhi several weeks ago, which has since been linked to hundreds of coronavirus cases across India.
The response by the authorities was swift. The area where the victim had lived was sealed off and remains so, and his family was taken into quarantine and all those in the building, or who were considered high risk, have been tested. A new 51-bed hospital in the Dharavi area, specifically to treat coronavirus patients, has also been acquired, with eight intensive care beds, though it is feared if the virus takes hold this will not be nearly enough.
Other cases in the slum include a 30-year-old woman with no foreign travel history, and authorities are searching for the dozens who attended her birthday party a week ago.
“There are already many health issues in Dharavi,” said Dighavkar, who added that one of the main obstacles in tackling the spread of coronavirus was a social stigma that prevented people from coming forward with symptoms.
“But we are hopeful that they have good immunity because they have been exposed to many viruses, especially through using the community toilet, so we are hoping that if we find the high-risk contacts and put them in quarantine, we will be able to control it.”
Babbu Khan, a municipal councillor in Dharavi, said he feared many more people were already infected and warned that undetected cases could “wreak havoc” in the slum, where the disease was likely to “spread like wildfire”.
“For the slum-dwellers it is very difficult to stay safe from a coronavirus-infected neighbour in this incredibly congested slum of Dharavi,” said Khan. “When five people have already tested positive for the virus, there must be many more people around who are already infected. We know that many people carrying the virus remain asymptomatic, but still continue to spread the infection.”
He added: “In Dharavi, 99% of the residents do not have their private toilets and they use public toilets. One seat of a public toilet is used by 50 or 60 slum-dwellers daily. There is a very high possibility that the infection of coronavirus is spreading or has already spread through these public toilets.”
Overall Mumbai has one of the highest concentrations of coronavirus cases in the country and on Monday, three doctors and 26 nurses of Wockhardt hospital in Mumbai tested positive, bringing the total number of cases in the state of Maharashtra to 809.
Within Dharavi, fear has already begun to take hold. Mohammad Shafi Alam Shaikh, 53, who trades in school bags and lives in the MP Nagar area of Dharavi along with his wife and four children, said many people were very scared about the “new disease”.
“Many of my neighbours are very nervous and staying indoors,” he said. “They are coming out of their homes only to use public toilets. All of them say that it is very difficult to escape the infection in such congested slums. They all are afraid of being infected.”
Many mosques in the slum are using their public announcement system to spread awareness about Covid-19. But Shaikh said most of the advised measures for hand-washing and social distancing were an impossibility for the people of Dharavi.
“Many people do not have food at home and so in search of provisions and food handouts, people are being forced to stay outside their homes for a long time. At places like ration shops and free food delivery points people are still gathering in big numbers,” said Shaikh. “So we are very afraid of a fast spread of the virus.”
Struggling for our 'daily bread' . . .
WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the poorest from each community would struggle for their 'daily bread' as more and more countries implemented lockdowns of various degrees.
He added poverty was a global problem, not one unique to India, and governments should take each individual into account when implementing measures.
Only a global and international collaborative effort by all national governments will be able to tackle these two crises.
Dirty air increases risk of respiratory problems that can be fatal for coronavirus patients
Damian Carrington Environment editor for the Guardian reports (Tue 7 Apr 2020) under the headline:
Air pollution linked to far higher Covid-19 death rates, study finds
Air pollution is linked to significantly higher rates of death in people with Covid-19, according to analysis.
The work shows that even a tiny, single-unit increase in particle pollution levels in the years before the pandemic is associated with a 15% increase in the death rate. The research, done in the US, calculates that slightly cleaner air in Manhattan in the past could have saved hundreds of lives.
Given the large differences in toxic air levels across countries, the research suggests people in polluted areas are far more likely to die from the coronavirus than those living in cleaner areas. The scientists said dirty air was already known to increase the risk of acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is extremely deadly and a cause of Covid-19-related deaths, as well as other respiratory and heart problems.
A separate report from scientists in Italy notes that the high death rates seen in the north of the country correlate with the highest levels of air pollution.
The scientists said their findings could be used to ensure that areas with high levels of air pollution take extra precautions to slow the spread of the virus and deploy extra resources to deal with the outbreak. Air pollution has already fallen because of widespread lockdowns, but the scientists said ensuring cleaner air in the future would help reduce Covid-19 deaths.
The study, by researchers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston,analysed air pollution and Covid-19 deaths up to 4 April in 3,000 US counties, covering 98% of the population. “We found that an increase of only 1μg/m3 in PM2.5 [particles] is associated with a 15% increase in the Covid-19 death rate,” the team concluded.
A small increase in exposure to particle pollution over 15-20 years was already known to increase the risk of death from all causes, but the new work shows this increase is 20 times higher for Covid-19 deaths.
“The results are statistically significant and robust,” they said. The study took account of a range of factors, including poverty levels, smoking, obesity, and the number of Covid-19 tests and hospital beds available. They also assessed the effect of removing from the analysis both New York City, which has had many cases, and counties with fewer than 10 confirmed Covid-19 cases.
Prof Jonathan Grigg, from Queen Mary University of London, said the study was methodologically sound and plausible, but had some limitations, for example, important factors such as smoking were not measured at the individual level.
“Clearly, we urgently need more studies, since locally generated particle pollution will bounce back once the lockdown is eased,” he said.
COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University & Medicine
The US has the third highest death toll to date, after Italy and Spain. A second study focusing on Italy, published in the journal Environmental Pollution, said: “We conclude that the high level of pollution in northern Italy should be considered an additional co-factor of the high level of lethality recorded in that area.”
It noted that northern Italy was one of Europe’s most polluted areas and that the death rate reported up to 21 March in the northern Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna regions was about 12%, compared with 4.5% in the rest of Italy.
“It is well known that pollution impairs the first line of defence of upper airways, namely cilia, thus a subject living in an area with high levels of pollutant is more prone to develop chronic respiratory conditions and [is more vulnerable] to any infective agent,” it said.
Medical scientists warned in mid-March that air pollution exposure could make Covid-19 worse. Early research on Covid-19 had suggested that the weakened lungs of smokers and former smokers made them more susceptible to the virus.
While lockdowns have caused air pollution to fall dramatically, a comprehensive global review published in 2019 found that over long periods air pollution may be damaging every organ and virtually every cell in the human body.
As the Chinese city of Wuhan, the source of this global pandemic reopens, TIME magazine asks: Is China ready?
Here are some extracts from the article by Charlie Campbell in Shanghai, April 8, 2020:
When Wuhan’s lockdown was first announced Jan. 23, the world was aghast: sealing off 11 million people—a population larger than New York City—had never been attempted in human history. On March 24, after no new local infections were recorded for several days running, officials announced plans to end the measure. Meanwhile, one-third of the world now lives under “stay at home” orders as the coronavirus that was first reported in the central Chinese city rampages across every continent.
Wuhan’s reemergence will provide lessons for leaders across the world weighing their own sacrifices—in terms of both lives and economies. But many across China fear that the political considerations that allowed the coronavirus to take hold in the first place could play out once again as officials try to jumpstart business and project the image that they have all but beaten the disease.
Officials say 2,535 people died from COVID-19 in the sprawling capital of Hubei province—three quarters of China’s total. The figure is much disputed. Independent estimates, based on the number of urns distributed when the bereaved began collecting the ashes of loved ones from funeral homes from Mar. 30, put the total dead above 40,000.
Many question China’s numbers in general—such as the report that there were no new COVID-19 deaths on Monday (the first such day since January). Suspicion has been created by China’s failure to include asymptomatic cases—which are also infectious—in official statistics until April 1. New analysis by the American Enterprise Institute published Tuesday estimates China had 2.9 million COVID-19 cases instead of the 80,000 officially recorded.
Hastily erected fences still flank housing compounds, and only people able to display a green health code on their mobile phones are allowed to access them. Schools and universities remain closed and many apartment blocks will implement their own quarantines and curfews for another month at least. “Are you sure Wuhan is unlocked?” asked one user on China’s Twitter-like microblog Weibo. “How can I take a train if I can’t even get out of my apartment building?”
Those who manage to leave the city will likely face the opposite problem. Many apartment buildings in big cities have banned “heroes” from Hubei and across the country some vigilante villagers have set up roadblocks where people from Hubei are not allowed to pass. In many parts of the country, residential committees—the neighborhood eyes and ears of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—are insisting upon an additional 14 days quarantine.
More than 55,000 people were booked to leave Wuhan on 276 trains to cities across China train on Wednesday, according to China’s state-run Global Times, most of them to the factories of the Guangdong province, bordering Hong Kong. But many Chinese are fearful that loosening travel curbs may seed new infection clusters. On social media, the pervading reaction isn’t gratitude, but fear.
“Don’t unlock Wuhan until everyone is tested!” wrote one Weibo user. “Asymptomatic patients will spread [the disease] to the whole country!” wrote another. “I don’t intend to meet anyone who come out of Wuhan after Apr. 8.”
A large number of people will also be returning to Wuhan to pick up their lives. Wuhan’s former mayor said at least five million residents left the city before the lockdown, inadvertently spreading the coronavirus to South Korea, Japan, Thailand and elsewhere in China. Those who return will face an uncertain future.
A huge government stimulus package is in the pipeline for Wuhan—including $2.8 billion in preferential loans, according to the city government—though all anticipate tough times ahead. “People are broke, don’t have disposable income, and aren’t spending on leisure and entertainment,” says Jacob Wilson, CEO of media and marketing firm Wuhan Social. “It’s going to be a huge struggle for local businesses.”
In attempting to boost the economy, officials may again be tempted to revert to the habits that led them to downplay the severity of the initial outbreak. On Monday, a meeting of China’s highest committee charged with managing the COVID-19 crisis, chaired by Premier Li Keqiang, “warned against any lowering of guard” in the fight against the disease. But the meeting also stressed the imperative of getting China back to work.
In turn, CCP propaganda has highlighted the fact that the majority of new infections are imported. However, TIME knows of one Shanghai resident who developed a fever but wasn’t tested for COVID-19 because, as the doctor explained, “you haven’t left China recently.”
“Now that the Chinese Communist Party has shifted to a public narrative of resolute victory over the coronavirus, it means setbacks must be blamed on external elements, as the alternative—that Beijing acted too quickly in normalizing the economy—is unthinkable,” says Jude Blanchette, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The fear is that, despite the official warnings, economic imperatives will eclipse public health ones. George Goodwin, a biology teacher in Wuhan from Reno, Nev., who worked for the U.S. Center for Disease Control before moving to China, sought treatment at a hospital in Wuhan for a severe cough in mid-March. Doctors performed a CT scan but didn’t test for the coronavirus, presuming his symptoms were a reoccurrence of bronchitis.
“There’s still the concept of saving face,” he says. “Everybody wants the city to open up again.”
Propaganda and/or celebration?
Bread and circuses?
Meanwhile . . .
. . . as Wuhan reopens Donald Trump stokes fresh coronavirus row!
Helen Davidson reporting for the Guardian (Wed 8 Apr 2020) writes:
US president accuses World Health Organization of China bias as New York records its highest daily death toll and Wuhan lockdown eases
Donald Trump has criticised the World Health Organization (WHO), and by implication Beijing, saying the global body is “China centric” and “biased” towards the rival superpower.
As Wuhan, the city at the centre of the outbreak, began to return to normal life, Trump said the WHO had “been wrong about a lot of things”, and threatened to put a hold on WHO funding. When asked if that was a good idea during a pandemic, Trump denied saying it, and then said they would “look at it”.
“We’re going to investigate it, we’re going to look at it. But we will look at ending funding, yeah, because you know what, they called it wrong, and if you look back over the years even, everything seems to be very biased toward China. That’s not right.”
Trump has previously questioned China’s reported numbers of infections, saying last week said they were “a little on the light side”, and referred to the outbreak as the “Chinese virus”, prompting complaints from Beijing.
The fresh salvo came against a background of a worsening death toll in the US, with New York state reporting on Tuesday its highest single-day increase, with 731 fatalities. At least 3,544 people have died in New York city alone from Covid-19.
How queer?
The Village People recently gave the US president permission to play their gay anthems. Huh? But ‘Macho Man’ is queer, even when Donald Trump plays it at rallies says VICE
So "Macho Man" US president Donald Trump thinks this is all playing his tune, creating distractions, by giving conflicting statements about the future of US funding to the World Health Organization.
In a bid to find a scapegoat for the dire situation in the US, Trump began blaming the WHO for ’calling it wrong'. The president then said: ‘We’re going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO.' But when pressed by reporters, he conceded that he was just ‘looking at’ a possible suspension.
Meanwhile . . .
Trump’s early inaction has come under renewed scrutiny as new reports show his top trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote several memos weeks ago warning of the potential, dire impacts of the coronavirus
. . . The New York Times reveals that:
A top White House adviser starkly warned Trump administration officials in late January that the coronavirus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death.
The warning, written in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, is the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront a crisis that had already consumed China’s leaders and would go on to upend life in Europe and the United States.
“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” Mr. Navarro’s memo said. “This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”
Dated Jan. 29, it came during a period when Mr. Trump was playing down the risks to the United States, and he would later go on to say that no one could have predicted such a devastating outcome.
Mr. Navarro said in the memo that the administration faced a choice about how aggressive to be in containing an outbreak, saying the human and economic costs would be relatively low if it turned out to be a problem along the lines of a seasonal flu.
But he went on to emphasize that the “risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked” given the information coming from China.
In one worst-case scenario cited in the memo, more than a half-million Americans could die.
A second memo that Mr. Navarro wrote, dated Feb. 23, warned of an “increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1.2 million souls.”
At that time, Mr. Trump was still downplaying the threat of the virus. The administration was considering asking Congress for more money to address the situation, and the second memo, which circulated around the West Wing and was obtained by The Times, urged an immediate supplemental spending appropriation from Congress of at least $3 billion.
“This is NOT a time for penny-pinching or horse trading on the Hill,” Mr. Navarro wrote in the second memo, which was unsigned but which officials attributed to him. It was unclear whether Mr. Trump saw the second memo, whose contents were first reported by Axios.
The second memo seemed aimed at members of the White House Task Force established by Mr. Trump to manage the crisis, and reflected deep divisions within the administration about how to proceed and persistent feuding between Mr. Navarro and many other top officials about his role and his views.
“Any member of the Task Force who wants to be cautious about appropriating funds for a crisis that could inflict trillions of dollars in economic damage and take millions of lives has come to the wrong administration,” the memo said.
Among other things, the memo called for an increase funding for the government to purchase personal protective equipment for health care workers, estimating they would need “at least a billion face masks” over a four-to-six-month period.
The administration ended up asking for $2.5 billion. Congress then approved $8 billion.
Mr. Navarro is now the administration’s point person for supply chain issues for medical and other equipment needed to deal with the virus.
The January memo written by Mr. Navarro was dated the same day that Mr. Trump named the task force to deal with the threat, and as the administration was weighing whether to bar some travelers from China, an option being pushed by Mr. Navarro.
Mr. Trump would approve the limits on travel from China the next day, though it would be weeks before he began taking more aggressive steps to head off spread of the virus.
Questions about Mr. Trump’s handling of the crisis, especially in its early days when he suggested it was being used by Democrats to undercut his re-election prospects, are likely to define his presidency. Mr. Navarro’s memo is evidence that some in the upper ranks of the administration had at least considered the possibility of the outbreak turning into something far more serious than Mr. Trump was acknowledging publicly at the time.
Neither Mr. Navarro nor spokespeople for the White House responded to requests for comment.
The memo, which was reviewed by The New York Times, was sent from Mr. Navarro to the National Security Council and then distributed to several officials across the administration, people familiar with the events said. It reached a number of top officials as well as aides to Mick Mulvaney, then the acting chief of staff, they said, but it was unclear whether Mr. Trump saw it.
Mr. Navarro is a well-established China hawk who has long been mistrustful of the country’s government and trade practices. Both Mr. Navarro and Matthew Pottinger, the chief deputy at the National Security Council, were among the few officials urging colleagues in January to take a harder line in relation to the growing threat of the coronavirus.
But their warnings were seen by other officials as primarily reflecting their concerns about China’s behavior — and their concerns look more prescient in hindsight than they actually were, other officials argue.
With the subject line “Impose Travel Ban on China?” Mr. Navarro opened the memo by writing, “If the probability of a pandemic is greater than roughly 1%, a game-theoretic analysis of the coronavirus indicates the clear dominant strategy is an immediate travel ban on China.”
Mr. Navarro concluded at one point: “Regardless of whether the coronavirus proves to be a pandemic-level outbreak, there are certain costs associated with engaging in policies to contain and mitigate the spread of the disease. The most readily available option to contain the spread of the outbreak is to issue a travel ban to and from the source of the outbreak, namely, mainland China.”
He suggested that under an “aggressive” containment scenario, a travel ban may need to last as long as 12 months for proper containment, a duration of time that at that point some White House aides saw as unsustainable.
The travel limits subsequently imposed by Mr. Trump did not entirely ban travel from China, and many travelers from the country continued to stream into the United States.
Mr. Navarro was at odds with medical experts like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who had argued that such travel bans only delay the eventual spread.
Mr. Navarro alluded to that debate on Saturday during a separate argument with Dr. Fauci in the Situation Room about whether the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine was effective in treating or preventing the virus, according to two people familiar with the events.
In the memo, Mr. Navarro cautioned that it was “unlikely the introduction of the coronavirus into the U.S. population in significant numbers will mimic a ‘seasonal flu’ event with relatively low contagion and mortality rates.”
He noted the history of pandemic flus and suggested the chances were elevated for one after the new pathogen had developed in China.
“This historical precedent alone should be sufficient to prove the need to take aggressive action to contain the outbreak,” he wrote, going on to say the early estimates of how easily the virus was spreading supported the possibility that the risks were even greater than the history of flu pandemics suggested.
By Maggie Haberman (with Mark Mazzetti) April 6, 2020
CBS News published a timeline of what Trump has said on coronavirus
By Kathryn Watson Updated on: April 3, 2020
Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, last week during a coronavirus news briefing at the White House. On the left of the picture, and out of focus, is Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law and leading the White House response to the coronavirus threat.
Nepotism at the heart of a democracy?
This report by Tom McCarthy in New York for the Guardian (Sun 5 Apr 2020) appeared in the print edition (Mon 6 Apr 2020) with the headline:
'Downright scary': alarm raised over Kushner's role
Tom McCarthy writes:As the leader of the federal government effort to distribute emergency equipment to the states, Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, has mostly shied from the public stage, but he now is working in history’s spotlight.
His vast responsibilities include weighing requests from governors for aid and coordinating with private companies to obtain medical equipment, work he carries out from a special post created for him inside the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where his team is called “the Slim Suit crowd” for their distinctive tailoring, the New York Times has reported.
Kushner’s team was credited with coordinating a planeload of medical supplies that arrived in the US from China last week.
But some of those familiar with Kushner’s record at the White House and in his prior professional life question why the government’s response to the coronavirus threat is being run by the president’s 39-year-old son-in-law.
“It scares the hell out of me,” said David Pepper, the chair of the Ohio Democratic party, who offered bipartisan words of praise for the crisis response of his state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine.
“Kushner has terrible judgment, and I don’t remember a decision he’s been involved with that hasn’t just been bad – they’ve been horrible. And the idea that everything has to go through the very flawed judgment of Jared Kushner is downright scary, and I believe at this point is costing American lives.”
Early this year, Kushner reportedly advised Donald Trump that the coronavirus was not that dangerous – more a threat to public confidence, and the markets, than to public health. Trump stuck with that message for six tragic weeks, between the confirmation of the first US case and a belated federal decision to speed the development of test kits.
And it was Kushner who helped write a disastrous Trump Oval Office speech on 12 March announcing a European travel ban that sent markets into a tailspin and travelers crowding into airports. It was Kushner who solicited help from the father of the fashion model Karlie Kloss, his sister-in-law, to ask a Facebook group of doctors what should be done about the virus.
Pepper expressed concern that when a governor calls the White House, she has to talk to Kushner, who then decides, apparently unilaterally, what the state really needs.
In a rare appearance in the White House briefing room Thursday, Kushner said some governors did not have precise knowledge of their state’s inventory of ventilators and delivered a lecture on the art of management.
“The way the federal government is trying to allocate is, they’re trying to make sure you have your data right,” Kushner said. “Don’t ask us for things when you don’t know what you have in your own state, just because you’re scared.”
Walter Shaub, a former director of the Office of Government Ethics under Barack Obama, reacted strongly on Twitter, calling Kushner a “feckless nepotist who presumes to criticize governors striving to fill the void left by this previously unimaginable federal failure!”
Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist for The New York Times said, writing in her column April 2, 2020:
Putting Jared Kushner In Charge Is Utter Madness
Trump’s son-in-law has no business running the coronavirus response.
Reporting on the White House’s herky-jerky coronavirus response, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should make all Americans, and particularly all New Yorkers, dizzy with terror.
According to Sherman, when New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state would need 30,000 ventilators at the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided that Cuomo was being alarmist. “I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity,” Kushner reportedly said. “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top expert on infectious diseases, has said he trusts Cuomo’s estimate.)
Even now, it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant, but he said something similar on Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing: “People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.”
Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — have been failures.
Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees. “Behind the scenes, Kushner takes charge of coronavirus response,” said a Politico headline on Wednesday.
This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy.
This story was followed up by Guardian Opinion columnist Arwa Mahdawi (Tue 7 April 2020), who mentions how the opinion piece headline in the NYT was changed from an original version that read:
Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed.
In her Opinion piece;Why Jared Kushner could be the most dangerous man in the US;
Arwa Mahdawi writes:
On Thursday, Kushner, who has taken on vast responsibilities in the Trump administration’s response to Covid-19, made his first public appearance at the White House daily coronavirus briefing. His moment in the spotlight seemed to serve as a wakeup call for the US. All of a sudden, it was glaringly obvious how dangerous Kushner’s hubris is. “I for one became even more fearful of [Covid-19] when I saw how inept” Kushner is, said the Republican pundit Meghan McCain on Monday.
McCain’s fears were widely shared. Kushner was supposedly at the press briefing to explain the work he has been doing. However, despite him repeating the word “data” 13 times, it quickly became clear that he has no idea what he is doing. He doesn’t even seem to know what the purpose of a federal stockpile of medical equipment is. “It’s supposed to be our stockpile,” he explained haughtily to reporters. “It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”
Kushner’s bizarre statement stunned people. Who did the guy think that the federal stockpile belongs to if not the United States of America? The first family and their friends? Kushner may as well have stood up there and said: “We’re not in this together – you’re on your own.” An opinion column in the New York Times the following day declared: Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed. (The headline was later changed, for reasons unknown, to Putting Jared Kushner In Charge Is Utter Madness.)
Mahdawi says further that:
Wherever Kushner is, questionable deals, questionable ethics and a crowd of yes men seem to follow. The world is constantly remade to reflect the reality that he wants to see. Indeed, shortly after the backlash to Kushner’s comments about the federal stockpile, the government’s website appeared to change to more closely reflect Kushner’s assertions. According to a spokesperson, this change had been in the works for ages; it was nothing to do with Kushner’s ego.
This kind of weak and incompetent leadership on the coronavirus crisis, a leadership of the right, a leadership of campaigners for the status quo, a leadership of the climate denial machine, reveals how an adequate response to the climate emergency demands radical change.
This video comparison of two national leaders relationship to a political internationalism shows the stark differences on offer to electorates.
This video was uploaded to YouTube by the Guardian Sep 27, 2018, in a montage of two leaders with contrasting values and personal qualities. The Guardian says of this video:
In her first speech to the UN General Assembly, New Zealand's prime minister Jacinda Ardern espoused global cooperation and kindness, in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s portentous rejection of globalism earlier in the week
Leadership . . .
Martin Rowson on the Queen's coronavirus broadcast - cartoon - Guardian Mon 6 Apr 2020
In the print edition of the Guardian on Tue 7 April 2020 an Opinion piece by Simon Jenkins was published below Martin Rowson's brilliant cartoon of 1940's Tribute Auditions in the familiar shades of Brexit inspired nostalgia. His article in the print edition is headlined:
Leadership matters. Who is in charge?
This paragraph from Jenkin's piece encapsulates a current predicament, and not limited to the UK governmental crisis, but a more general malaise in modern democracies, where leadership and authenticity seems to be a constructed extension of reality show entertainment rather than the driving of effective policy:
Democracies vote for leaders, not anarchists. Every leader’s style is different. Attlee could hardly have been less like Churchill, Heath less like Thatcher, Brown less like Blair. All depended on their close relations in Downing Street with advisers and cabinet colleagues – and suffered when these broke down. Johnson decided from the start that he would not harbour critics in Downing Street, preferring the second rate to the second thought. He made his own indispensability a feature of his rule. In normal times, that is unwise. In a crisis it is stupid.
Entr'acte
Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan
Johnny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It's somethin' you did
God knows when
But you're doing it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin' for a new friend
A man in the coonskin cap, in the pig pen
Wants eleven dollar bills, you only got ten
Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin' that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone's tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the D.A. Look out kid
Don't matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don't tie no bows
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows
Oh, get sick, get well
Hang around a ink well
Hang bail, hard to tell
If anything is goin' to sell
Try hard, get barred
Get back, write braille
Get jailed, jump bail
Join the army, if you fail
Look out kid
You're gonna get hit
But losers, cheaters
Six-time users
Hang around the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin' for a new fool
Don't follow leaders, watch the parkin' meters
Oh, get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance
Learn to dance, get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don't steal, don't lift
Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift
Look out kid
They keep it all hid
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don't wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals
Don't want to be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don't work
'Cause the vandals took the handles
The film clip was used in September 2010 in a promotional video to launch Google Instant. As they are typed, the lyrics of the song generate search engine results pages.
Don't follow leaders, watch the parkin' meters
A reflection of values . . .
Is Donald Trump a narcissist? Narcissism as a term is employed in many discourses, especially psychological, cultural and behavioural discourses. More recently in a public and political discourse the term is often used by critics to explain what is going on under a Trump administration.
Jennifer Senior, Opinion Columnist for The New York Times, set out a number of concerns in an opinion piece published on Oct 11, 2019. She writes under the headline and subheading:
We are all at the mercy of the Narcissist in Chief
To say that we find ourselves in a dysfunctional relationship is an understatement.
The salient points in this article include firstly, an analysis of his behaviours:
From the beginning of his presidency (and even before), mental health professionals have sounded the alarm about Trump’s stability — most notably Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale and editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” Opinion writers have discussed his narcissism openly; so have administration officials, though only in private.
But last week, the lawyer George Conway decided it was time to write the definitive if-it-walks-like-a-duck analysis of Trump’s pathologies for The Atlantic. (Conway is a conservative, but about as bearish on Trump as his wife, Kellyanne, is bullish.) Poring over the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, he notes that the telltale characteristics of a pathological narcissist map perfectly onto Trump’s personality, ocean for ocean, tree for tree.
Has an exaggerated sense of his talents? Check. (See “in my great and unmatched wisdom,” “I alone can fix it,” etc.) Requires excessive admiration? Check. (See the infamous cabinet meeting in which members came not to brief Trump but to praise him.) Has a stupefying incapacity for empathy, is interpersonally exploitative, suffers excessively from envy and envies excessively? Check, check, check.
Conway argues that narcissistic personality disorder is crucial to framing the way we understand both this president and his presidency, which is true.
So Conway supports Senior's premise. When considering more authoritative sources for ascertaining Trump's behaviour, let's refer to the work of psychiatrists Sandy Hotchkiss and James F. Masterson's Why Is It Always About You?: The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism (2003).
One Shamelessness: Narcissists are often proudly and openly shameless; they are not bound emotionally by the needs and wishes of others. Narcissists hate criticism, and consider it "toxic", as criticism implies they are not perfect and need to change. Narcissists prefer guilt over shame, as guilt allows them to dissociate their actions from themselves - it's only their actions that are wrong, while their intention is good.Check!Two Magical thinking: Narcissists see themselves as perfect, using distortion and illusion known as magical thinking. They also use projection to "dump" shame onto others.Check!Three Arrogance: A narcissist who is feeling deflated may "reinflate" their sense of self-importance by diminishing, debasing, or degrading somebody else.Check!Four Envy: A narcissist may secure a sense of superiority in the face of another person's ability by using contempt to minimize the other person or their achievements.Check!Five Entitlement: Narcissists hold unreasonable expectations of particularly favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves special. Failure to comply is considered an attack on their superiority, and the perpetrator is considered an "awkward" or "difficult" person. Defiance of their will is a narcissistic injury that can trigger narcissistic rage.Check!Six Exploitation: Can take many forms but always involves the exploitation of others without regard for their feelings or interests. Often the other person is in a subservient position where resistance would be difficult or even impossible. Sometimes the subservience is not so much real as assumed. This exploitation may result in many brief, short-lived relationships.Check!Seven Bad boundaries: Narcissists do not recognize that they have boundaries and that others are separate and are not extensions of themselves. Others either exist to meet their needs or may as well not exist at all. Those who provide narcissistic supply to the narcissist are treated as if they are part of the narcissist and are expected to live up to those expectations. In the mind of a narcissist, there is no boundary between self and other.Check!
It looks like seven out of seven as far Re:LODE Radio is concerned, and Re:LODE Radio is also reminded of a particular aspect of the Greek myth that is often overlooked.
Narcissus - the myth
Narcissus did not realize it was merely his own reflection and fell deeply in love with it, as if it were somebody else. This would explain why Jared Kushner is where he is. Trump is, unknowingly, in love with his own image repeated in the lacklustre and incompetent son-in-law Kushner. Indeed, the whole Trump family scenario is redolent of ancient Greek mythology, but of the tragi-comic aspect rather than the heroic.
When it comes to a reflection of values the following points made in Senior's article relate to the electorate, including those who oppose Trump and those who support him, and give an insight into what we might call the "democratic problem" when it comes to the hegemony of the United States in a globalised world order. This problem, discussed further in this post, is the fact that, and to quote from Samir Amin's seminal work Eurocentrism:
Today, American democracy is the advanced model of what I call low intensity democracy. It operates on the basis of a total separation between the management of political life, based on the practice of electoral democracy, and that of economic life, ruled by the laws of capital accumulation. What is more, this separation is not subject to radical questioning, but is rather part of what is called the general consensus. But this separation destroys all the creative potential of political democracy. It castrates representative institutions, making them impotent when facing the market, whose dictates are accepted without question. (pages 48-49)
Jennifer Senior considers the Trump phenomenon and the experience of an American electorate, deeply divided at a time when it might be considered that leadership's prime responsibility is to devote all efforts to uniting the nation in a common cause to tackle these two immediate crises. She continues her column thus:
But it is also crucial to understanding the electorate’s response to Trump — particularly the traumatized majority that opposes him.
“We wake up each day much like the kid of a narcissistic parent wakes up, in the sense that we don’t know what the crazy parent is going to do,” said Brian Baird, formerly a Democratic member of Congress, and before that, a professor of psychology with a private practice in Washington State. “Yet we have to somehow go to work each day and act like things are normal.”
And there’s the rub: You can no sooner quit your president than you can quit your family. If you look at the children of pathological narcissists, noted Baird, their symptoms look a lot like many of ours: “Anxiety, foreboding, depression, anger, frustration, fear, bewilderment at the state of the universe.” Their minds have been annexed; they doubt their perceptions. “What they know to be real,” he said, “is itself challenged by this person’s actions and statements and deeds.”
(Online, in fact, there’s a shadow universe of children of pathological narcissists, who argue that “what’s happening on a national level is activating and retraumatizing a lot of people who have been gaslighted in the past,” in the words of the writer and memoirist Ariel Leve.)
Naturally, there are limits to how far one can take this analogy. Trump got 46 percent of the vote in 2016, and polls say that roughly 43 percent of Americans still support him. They most likely feel emboldened by the president, not traumatized by him. But the distressed-children model would explain why congressional Republicans who privately despise the president still support him in public. “They live in fear that the narcissist will turn on them,” said Baird. So they try to manage the unmanageable. They keep two sets of books, function with two different brains, and buy in — at least partly — to Trump’s grandiose message: You’d be worthless without me.
Journalists have a different problem. If pathological narcissists derive their power from attention, we ought not to give it to them. But under ordinary circumstances, almost anything that comes out of the president’s mouth is considered news. Maybe it’s time, in earnest, to re-examine this notion. An Australian journalist, recently writing for The Guardian, noted that we often render Trump more coherent than he in fact is, spinning word salads into orderly sentences, rendering caprice as deliberate policy.
We’re still playing chess while the president is playing checkers.
But there are signs that this is changing. Even Fox News, the in-house organ of the executive branch, has begun to buckle under the strain of covering such an impossible personality, and Trump has started to howl in return.
That’s the trouble with pathological narcissists: You can never love them enough.
The New York Times readers responses to Senior's column includes this from Henry J. Friedman, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School:
To the Editor:
Re “We Are All at the Mercy of the Narcissist in Chief,” by Jennifer Senior (column, Oct. 12):
As a psychiatrist who contributed a chapter to the “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” I have often been asked whether he meets the definition of a narcissist, to which I have answered, half in jest,“No, rather he gives narcissism a bad name.”
President Trump’s grandiosity and paranoid retaliatory behaviors are so far beyond those shown by what in contrast could be called “ordinary narcissists” that he requires a category beyond narcissism. The proper category would be “destructive dictator,” because Mr. Trump, like Hitler and Stalin, has the personality of a grandiose-paranoid dictator who would destroy all he saw as his enemies while endangering the nation that he supposedly was advancing through his leadership.
That puts him far beyond the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder into a much more dangerous zone for our nation.
One particular aspect of narcissism as a syndrome reflects something troubling at the heart of democracy in the United States, something that Samir Amin identifies in his groundbreaking book Eurocentrism, and what he calls; low intensity democracy.
There is a positive association between narcissism and individualism and a negative one between it and collectivism. One related study looked at differences in advertising products between an individualistic culture, America, and a collectivist one, South Korea.
In American magazine advertisements, it found, there was a greater tendency to stress the distinctiveness and uniqueness of the person; conversely the South Korean ones stressed the importance of social conformity and harmony.
This observation holds true for a cross-cultural analysis across a wide range of cultural outputs where individualistic national cultures produce more individualistic cultural products and collectivist national cultures produce more collectivist national products; these cultural effects were greater than the effects of individual differences within national cultures.
Low intensity democracy and communitarianism
The analysis by Samir Amin applies to the historical development of democracy in the United States, but is referenced in Re:LODE articles associated with the track of connections and Re:LODE Cargo of Questions, with the characteristics of modern democracy in present day India, and focused on the Cargo from Puri.
The Americanization of India . . . and the World?
Why does everyone in India think they are 'middle class' when almost no one actually is?
This question could apply to the United States as much as it does to India.
India and the United States are spoken of as the two "largest democracies", and in some respects do share characteristics that are troubling indeed, particularly in relation to the current global health crisis and the climate emergency. This is Samir Amin's take on these characteristics.
In Eurocentrism Amin looks at the historical formation of Earth's second largest democracy, the United States. The American ideology that Amin identifies, and that for him is the foundation of the liberal virus that is leading to the Americanization of the world, is, for Amin, strengthened by the successive waves of immigration that have taken place in the USA over the last two centuries. He says:
The combination specific to the historical formation of American society, a dominant biblical religious ideology and the absence of a workers' party, ultimately produced a still unparalleled situation, in which a de facto single party, the party of capital, hold the reigns.
The immigrants were certainly not responsible for the misery and oppression that caused their departure. On the contrary, they were the victims of it. But circumstances led them to abandon the collective struggle to change the common conditions of their classes or groups in their own country, in favour of adhering to the ideology of individual success in the host country. This adherence was encouraged by the American system, which suited it perfectly. it delayed the development of class consciousness, which, scarcely had it started to develop, had to face a new wave of immigrants that prevented its crystallization. But simultaneously, immigration encouraged the communitarianization of American society, because individual success does not exclude strong integration into a community of origin (the Irish, the Italians, and others), without which individual isolation could become unbearable. Yet, here again the strengthening of this dimension of identity, which the American system uses and encourages, is done at the expense of class consciousness and the education of the citizen. While in Paris the people got ready to assault the heavens (here I refer to the 1871 Commune), in the United States gangs formed by successive generations of poor immigrants killed each other, manipulated in a perfectly cynical way by the ruling classes. (pages 47-48)Q. Is communitarianism a stumbling block?
Amin continues:
In the United States, there is no workers' party and there never has been. The communitarian ideologies were not and are not a substitute for a working-class socialist ideology, even the most radical of them in the Black community. By definition, communitarianism is part and parcel of the context of widespread racism, which it fights on its own ground, but nothing more. (page 48)Samir Amin ends his chapter on Modernity in his seminal work Eurocentrism with these powerful thoughts and questions:
I do not know if the culturalist opponents of the real world and its evolutionary trends, understood as Americanization by some and Westernization by others, can be described as rational. Confronted by the threat of Americanization, some defend unique "cultural values," without throwing into question the general trends of the system, as if reality could be sliced like a salami, in order to keep a morsel for tomorrow. Others, having previously confused capitalism and the West and then forgotten the decisive reality of the former and replaced it with the gratuitous and false assertion of an eternal "West," think they can transfer the confrontation from the terrain of a constantly changing social reality to the heaven of an imaginary transhistorical cultural universe.The heterodox mix of this hodgepodge - the pure economics of imaginary markets, falsely egalitarian liberalism, and transhistorical culturalist imaginings - pompously sets itself up as new thinking, so-called postmodernist thinking. Since the bourgeois modernist critique has been watered down and reason has given up its emancipatory role, has contemporary bourgeois thought become anything then but a system that has seen better days? (Pages 20-21)
A. Yes. Communitarianism is a stumbling block to collective action in the face of a crisis. It divides, it segregates, it creates "the other"!
A recent example of this was captured in a NOW THIS NEWS report (Tuesday 7 April 2020):
NOW THIS NEWS In US news and current events today, these churchgoers said they won’t stop their mass gatherings in the midst of a global pandemic. Most U.S. churches have stopped in-person services to slow the spread of COVID-19, but this congregation continues to hold large gatherings. Most Americans are are under orders to stay at home, but some states have religious freedom exemptions.
While this type of individualistic communitarian ideology persists, in a form of Collective narcissism, a type of group narcissism, where individuals have an inflated self-love of their own ingroup, there is little chance of the formation an anti-capitalist political movement in the electorate to sort out the stumbling blocks either to this crisis or the next.
Q. But what about the Green New Deal?
The "establishment media" in the United States are under attack from the President, and none more so than CNN. While Donald Trump accuses CNN of being "fake news", its reporters do their best, as part of a highly professional organisation, to present "the facts", but not without various tinges and shades of gloss, as to be expected in an essentially conservative political milieu.
Here is what CNN says the Green New Deal actually is!
It's brilliant!
So, the people of the United States are diverse in every way you can imagine, and this is reflected in the range of political attitudes that includes an impressive backstory of progressive, socialist and anarchist struggle. These progressives, activists and protesters carry on "swimming against the tide", holding to principles long surrendered by many apologists of the status quo, and to what Noam Chomsky has called "the culture of terrorism", at the heart of the US political establishment.
Nancy Pelosi, the main figure of opposition to Trump in Congress, "throws shade" at Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal as "green dream", betrays a predictable political establishment response to the only viable and sustainable future policy for the United States. Nancy Pelosi is no friend to the denuded rainforests of Indonesia, but she became an inadvertent friend to the landgrabbers who replaced primary forest with the eco-desert of palm oil plantations.
This article on Medium (Dec 14, 2019) about how United States legislation led by Nancy Pelosi resulted in the production of palm oil and unleashed an environmental catastrophe.
Palm Oil Unleashed a Catastrophe
NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the world’s fourth-largest source of such emissions. Instead of creating a clever technocratic fix to reduce American’s carbon footprint, lawmakers had lit the fuse on a powerful carbon bomb that, as the forests were cleared and burned, produced more carbon than the entire continent of Europe. The unprecedented palm-oil boom, meanwhile, has enriched and emboldened many of the region’s largest corporations, which have begun using their newfound power and wealth to suppress critics, abuse workers and acquire more land to produce oil.
In addition to requiring carmakers to improve fuel standards, a longtime priority for Democrats, the bill updated and expanded renewable-fuel standards, requiring fuel producers to mix in soy, palm and other kinds of vegetable oil with diesel fuel and to use ethanol from corn and sugar in gasoline. The bill also set tough standards for how much cleaner, in terms of carbon, each of those categories of fuel had to become — 50 percent for diesel, 20 percent for gas — and empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to judge what qualified.
The expected gains were enormous. The switch to biofuels, the E.P.A. would later calculate, promised to stop the release of 4.5 billion tons of carbon over three decades, the equivalent of parking every single American automobile for more than seven years. Before the bill passed in December 2007, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “the shot heard round the world for energy independence.”
The law had a profound effect. Biodiesel production in the United States would jump from 250 million gallons in 2006 to more than 1.5 billion gallons in 2016. Imports of biodiesel to the United States surged from near zero to more than 100 million gallons a month. As fuel markets snatched up every ounce of domestic soy oil to meet the American fuel mandate, the food industry also replaced the soy it had used with something cheaper and just as good: palm oil, largely from Malaysia and Indonesia, which are the sources of nearly 90 percent of the global supply.
Lawmakers never anticipated that their well-intentioned plan — to help the climate by helping American farmers — might instead transform Indonesia and present one of the greatest threats to the planet’s tropical rain forests. But as Indonesian palm oil began to flood Western markets, that is exactly what began to happen.
Pelosi has never acknowledged that this catastrophe resulted from legislation that put America first!
This issue was touched on in an article on the Information Wrap for the LODE cargo from Pangandaran, Java.
A question . . .
. . . and response!
Profits come before carbon capture, the prevention of tree cover loss of primary forests, the human rights of Indigenous People and the future of the planet?
Today, in The Atlanta Voice an Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large, covers the story of Bernie Sanders bowing out of the campaign to secure the Democratic Party's nomination for the upcoming Presidential election.
#Election2020: Bernie Sanders steps aside with many accomplishments
Chris Cillizza writes:
Bernie Sanders bowed to the inevitable, and math, on Wednesday as he announced the end of his 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.
“While we are winning the ideological battle and while we are winning the support of so many young people and working people throughout the country, I have concluded that this battle for the Democratic nomination will not be successful,” the Vermont senator told supporters on a live-streamed call. “And so today I am announcing the suspension of my campaign.”
That announcement ends a five-year run that encompassed two presidential campaigns for Sanders. He finished second in both races — losing a protracted delegate fight to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and again watching as the Democratic establishment pick, former Vice President Joe Biden, again surpassed him in 2020.
Chris Cillizza considers that:
When Sanders began running for president on April 30, 2015, he was widely regarded as the longest of long shots — a liberal’s liberal who, while he had a demonstrated record of success in Vermont, would present very few problems for Clinton’s coronation as the Democratic nominee. So lightly regarded was Sanders that many “experts” believed that former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley would pose a more serious threat to Clinton’s chances than Sanders.
What Sanders understood long before Clinton, the Democratic establishment and much of the media, was that the base of the party was far more liberal than its top leaders in Washington. And had been for some time. And that base was sick to death of having their priorities ignored or shelved in pursuit of so-called “pragmatic” solutions.
Sanders channeled that frustration and alienation in two critical ways.
First, he unapologetically embraced longtime liberal policy totems like single-payer health care (“Medicare for All” as Sanders dubbed it), a $15 minimum wage and putting the threat of climate change front and center in the national debate.
Second, Sanders was, oddly, the perfect messenger for not only those liberal policies but for liberal voters too. His unkempt appearance, his wrinkled suits, the volume — loud! — at which he spoke all fit the un-politician that so many Democrats were looking for.
His age — Sanders was 73 when he first began running for president — also played a role — in a positive way. This was a man who, in the eyes of Democrats thirsty for someone who actually had long-held principles, had been saying the same stuff for decades. He was no recent convert to being a liberal. He had been waiting for people to come to seeing the world he did for lots of years.
Vox covered the story . . .
“Together we have transformed American consciousness as to what kind of nation we can become and have taken this country a major step forward in the never-ending struggle for economic justice, social justice, racial justice and environmental justice,” Sanders said in a speech to close his 2020 campaign. “Over the course of the last five years, our movement has won the ideological struggle.”
And, as Chris Cillizza says:
Which brings me to what Sanders’ two presidential campaigns didn’t prove: That a liberal’s liberal could win a majority of the Democratic presidential primary vote and be chosen as the party’s nominee over a more centrist candidate with establishment backing.
What Sanders had was a hugely enthusiastic base of supporters that included young people, liberals and Hispanics. What Biden had was overwhelming support among African American voters and solid backing from moderate and conservative Democrats.
As was the case in 2016 — when Clinton had the majority of non-white voters within the party — the Sanders coalition was simply not as big as his opponent’s. And — and this is critical — Sanders was never really able to convince those skeptical of him that he could and would represent their interests as the nominee. Too many Democrats viewed a vote for Sanders as a risk rather than as an opportunity. And it doomed him.
It’s possible that come 2024 or 2028 someone in the Sanders’ mold — Ocasio-Cortez turns 35 and could serve as president in October 2024 — will find a way to solve the problem that the Vermont democratic socialist couldn’t over the past five years.
But that’s a debate for the future.
But as far as the recent past goes it is important to flag up the 99%, in whose interests Wall St. was occupied back in 2011.
Another VOX article from nearly a year ago makes the claim that:
When Occupy Wall Street ended in 2011, it was widely viewed as a failure. But it has reshaped the very language we use to talk about politics and the economy.
Emily Stewart's article (Apr 30, 2019) appeared under the headline:
We are (still) the 99 percent
Occupy Wall Street was seen as a failure when it ended in 2011. But it’s helped transform the American left.
Here are a couple of excerpts from Emily Stewart's article that resonate with the challenges facing Extinction Rebellion now, especially as occupying any kind of public space has become socially irresponsible. The issue is about having clear political objectives, avoiding the infighting that usually plagues the left, and get organised, just like the right. First, the legacy:
Occupy was the birthplace of some left-wing ideas that have gained mainstream traction: Its “99 percent” mantra, which decried the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few at the expense of the many, has endured. It animated the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the resurgence of the Democratic Socialists of America, and it is in ways responsible for the some of the most prominent ideas in the Democratic Party right now: free college, a $15 minimum wage, and combating climate change. It was also a training ground for some of the most effective organizers on the left today.
Second, the point was to name the enemy:
Occupy’s project is better described not in terms of demands but instead grievances. The initial demand that Adbusters ad suggested was the creation of a presidential commission to end the influence of money over representatives in Washington, DC, but that was quickly abandoned, and while organizers debated on what their demands should be, they never landed on a consensus. The demands working group, I was told by multiple people, was one of the most hated groups at Occupy.
“People during Occupy were right not to make a list of 10 demands or be easily satisfied, because what they did was they blew open the options that people could think about,” said Sarah Leonard, one of the producers of the Occupy! Gazette during the encampment and now executive editor at the Appeal.
The point was to name the enemy.
“It was a bunch of really pissed-off people screaming at the world, and what they said wasn’t always coherent, but they were expressing a deep discontent with the way that things were,” Josh Harkinson, a journalist who covered Occupy for Mother Jones, said.
Eric Foner, a Pulitzer-winning historian and retired Columbia University professor, put the movement in historical context: “Occupy Wall Street did what radical groups throughout American history have tried to do, some of them have succeeded, some of them haven’t, which is to change the discourse,” he said.
However, he added, “Occupy Wall Street, like many radical movements, was much better in critique than in political agenda.”
The lack of agenda was what drove Andrew Ross Sorkin’s skepticism of Occupy in the New York Times in 2012 — a view he continues to hold today.
“It didn’t change policy or have the force that the Tea Party did, for example, which was its analogue at the time,” Sorkin told me in an email. “Having spent time myself in Zuccotti Park covering the movement, I would contend, at least in its early stages, it very clearly was about breaking up the banks, putting executives in jail and implementing banking regulation. None of that happened. There was a lot of infighting about what the group’s demands should be and its goals were amorphous.”
The Guardian wants to know . . .
A year on from the group’s major protests, we’d like to hear from those involved in the movement about their experiences, and their hopes for the future.
Share your thoughts
How do you feel about Extinction Rebellion a year since the climate rebellion?
Is the group still going strong, or has it lost momentum?
How has the group’s actions made an impact?
And what are your hopes for the future of the movement?
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