Let's "cut to the chase" . . .
(a cliché to be sure):
The first intersection of slapstick chase movies with the trick film - The Policeman's Little Run (aka La Course des Sergents de Ville, literally "The Run of the Village Constables"), directed by Ferdinand Zecca.
Preceding the Keystone Cops by 6 years, this slapstick-chase also includes a surprising trick-film sequence for added measure. The wall-climbing effect was previously done by Méliès, but here its impact is amplified by the scrolling camera.
Our politics isn't intended to shield the public from Covid-19
So George Monbiot declares, in his Opinion and ideas piece for the Guardian (Wed 18 March 2020):
The worst possible people are in charge at the worst possible time. In the UK, the US and Australia, the politics of the governing parties have been built on the dismissal and denial of risk. Just as these politics have delayed the necessary responses to climate breakdown, ecological collapse, air and water pollution, obesity and consumer debt, so they appear to have delayed the effective containment of Covid-19.
I believe it is no coincidence that these three governments have responded later than comparable nations have, and with measures that seemed woefully unmatched to the scale of the crisis.
I'm an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain's 'herd immunity' coronavirus plan, I thought it was satire
The UK’s remarkable slowness to mobilise, followed by its potentially catastrophic strategy – fiercely criticised by independent experts and now abandoned – to create herd immunity, and its continued failure to test and track effectively or to provide protective equipment for health workers, could help to cause large numbers of unnecessary deaths.
"I'm losing faith in the leadership'; an NHS doctor's story
But to have responded promptly and sufficiently would have meant jettisoning an entire structure of political thought developed in these countries over the past half century.Politics is best understood as public relations for particular interests. The interests come first; politics is the means by which they are justified and promoted. On the left, the dominant interest groups can be very large – everyone who uses public services, for instance. On the right they tend to be much smaller. In the US, the UK and Australia, they are very small indeed: mostly multimillionaires and a very particular group of companies: those whose profits depend on the cavalier treatment of people and planet.
Over the past 20 years, I have researched the remarkably powerful but mostly hidden role of tobacco and oil companies in shaping public policy in these three nations. I’ve seen how the tobacco companies covertly funded an infrastructure of persuasion to deny the impacts of smoking.
Climategate: Science of a Scandal review – the hack that cursed our planet.
This infrastructure was then used, often by the same professional lobbyists, to pour doubt on climate science and attack researchers and environmental campaigners.
The denial industry
I showed how these companies funded rightwing thinktanks and university professors to launch attacks on public health policy in general and create a new narrative of risk, tested on focus groups and honed in the media.
They reframed responsible government as the “nanny state”, the “health police” and “elf ’n’ safety zealots”. They dismissed scientific findings and predictions as “unfounded fears”, “risk aversion” and “scaremongering”. Public protections were recast as “red tape”, “interference” and “state control”. Government itself was presented as a mortal threat to our freedom.
Their purpose was to render governments less willing and able to respond to public health and environmental crises. The groups these corporations helped to fund – thinktanks and policy units, lobbyists and political action committees – were then used by other interests: private health companies hoping to break up the NHS, pesticide manufacturers seeking to strike down regulatory controls, junk food manufacturers resisting advertising restrictions, billionaires seeking to avoid tax.
Between them, these groups refined the justifying ideology for fragmenting and privatising public services, shrinking the state and crippling its ability to govern.
Now, in these three nations, this infrastructure is the government. No 10 Downing Street has been filled with people from groups strongly associated with attacks on regulation and state intervention – such as Munira Mirza, who co-founded the Manifesto Club; Chloe Westley from the TaxPayers’ Alliance; and of course Dominic Cummings, who was hired by Matthew Elliott, the founder of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, to run Vote Leave.
When Boris Johnson formed his first government, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), which has been funded by the tobacco industry, boasted that 14 of its frontbenchers, including the home secretary, the foreign secretary and the chancellor, were “alumni of IEA initiatives”.
The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, has published one book and launched another through the IEA, which he has thanked for helping him “in waging the war of ideas”. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, in a previous role, sought to turn an IEA document into government policy.
He has accepted significant donations from the organisation’s chairman, Neil Record. The home secretary, Priti Patel, was formerly a tobacco lobbyist.
One in five new Conservative MPs have worked in lobbying or public relations for corporate interests.
Modern politics is impossible to understand without grasping the pollution paradox.
The greater the risk to public health and wellbeing a company presents, the more money it must spend on politics – to ensure it isn’t regulated out of existence. Political spending comes to be dominated by the dirtiest companies, ensuring that they wield the greatest influence, crowding out their cleaner rivals. While nobody has a commercial interest in the spread of coronavirus, the nature and tenor of the governments these interests have built impedes state attempts to respond quickly and appropriately.
Get Brexit done!
Brexit (remember that?) could be interpreted as an effort to bridge the great split within the Conservatives, caused by the rising power of dirty money. The party became divided between an older, conservative base, with a strong aversion to novelty and change, and its polar opposite: the risk-taking radical right. Leaving the European Union permits a reconciliation of these very different interests, simultaneously threatening food standards and environmental protections, as well as price controls on medicines and other crucial regulations, while raising barriers to immigration and integration with other nations. It invokes ancient myths of empire, destiny and exceptionalism while potentially exposing us to the harshest of international trade conditions. It is likely further to weaken the state’s capacity to respond to the many crises we face.
The theory on which this form of government is founded can seem plausible and logically consistent. Then reality hits, and we find ourselves in the worst place from which to respond to crisis, with governments that have an ingrained disregard for public safety and a reflexive resort to denial. When disasters arrive, its exponents find themselves wandering nonplussed through the wastelands, unable to reconcile what they see with what they believe.
'You're not welcome'
Witness Scott Morrison’s response to the Australian fires and Boris Johnson’s belated engagement with the British floods. It is what we see today, as the Trump, Johnson and Morrison governments flounder in the face of this pandemic. They are called upon to govern, but they know only that government is the enemy.
Q. Is George Monbiot right?
A. Yes he is!
Modern democracy is for sale to monster capital. Just look at any of the previous posts in the Re:LODE Radio project!
The Guardian's Journal section for today includes this cartoon by Steve Bell. Somehow Steve Bell has distilled a complex political present with a complex political history, and the outcome is national bocialism, with echoes of dysfunctional Stalinist statism.Dear Steve. Thank you.
Nationalism is a modern curse when it comes to tackling the challenges of today. Only an international response to the present health and environmental crisis will work. This is also the case with surmounting the stumbling block of global capitalism, so vital to the survival of humanity. Unlike our politicians, the scientific community is working 24/7, in international efforts on the challenge to human health and survivability when it comes to both a pandemic and catastrophic climate change. However, right wing politics has a different and dark agenda in its bid for power.
Today's Guardian Journal section Europe now has two articles that cast some light on this dark agenda.
Coronavirus has sent Europe into shock. But we have the tools to recover writes Natalie Nougayrède in this Europe now piece for the Guardian Journal (Wed 18 March 2020):
Governments are scrambling to reimpose old borders but we, European citizens, should launch our own solidarity network
Postwar Europe’s institutional set-up was meant to epitomise international cooperation and solidarity, and to set a form of global example in the process. Will any of that survive now as countries start to wall themselves in? And what can we citizens do about it?
After Donald Trump signalled last week that the US wanted to de facto seal itself off from Europe, I remembered an oped by two of his senior team members published in 2017. “The world is not a ‘global community’, but an arena where nations ... compete for advantage,” they’d written. With Covid-19, that “arena” is put into even sharper focus. And nationalist reflexes are hardly a Trumpian monopoly these days. (Reports that Trump offered a German biopharmaceutical company a fat sum of money to secure a vaccine exclusively for the US only added to a general go-it-alone picture.)
There isn’t much official coordination or sticking-together on display in Europe itself. National governments, including Germany’s, have sealed their national borders to neighbouring states or are increasing controls. The rationale for much of this can be mind-boggling. Borders don’t stop the virus. Some of what’s at work is that rightwing populist credos have in recent years infected entire swaths of our continent’s politics. For them, there is only one single measure of collective self-identification and solidarity: the ethno-national level. Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, to take an example, lost no time holding “foreigners” responsible for the pandemic.
As events spiralled and with the death count mounting, I wondered about empathy and solidarity: what triggers them? What does a pandemic crisis say about our capacity for such feelings and modes of action? And could grassroots, citizens’ initiatives possibly course-correct some of the egoism of states?
In his book Ordinary Virtues, Michael Ignatieff quotes a speech Eleanor Roosevelt gave at the United Nations in 1958. She was speaking about human rights conventions, but the gist of her text can apply to the notion of human solidarity at large. “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person ... Without concerted citizen action … we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
Being the global centre of the pandemic means we in Europe hold a specific responsibility in the way we react to this situation, and in how we behave also towards others beyond our shores. Perhaps it helps to think a bit about how we approached the climate crisis as a collective cause for mobilisation (think of the Paris climate agreement). Why couldn’t we now clearly identify Covid-19 as another danger that needs to be addressed collectively – and take up the task as citizens to make that message loud and clear? However different, both these perils have this in common: they transcend all national boundaries and they threaten lives. The “us” versus “them” logic of nationalists and populists becomes absurd in the face of these phenomena.
So here’s a question. While governments scramble, is it too early to think of launching a Europe-wide citizens’ online campaign for solidarity in the age of the coronavirus? Could people create a movement that says, let’s help each other as much as we can, and in ways that cut across the national divides many of our governments are resorting to?
Videos of Italians in lockdown singing from their balconies to keep their spirits up have been admirable. Could some of that gusto spread and morph into a Europe-wide flurry of videos chanting our empathy and willingness to show solidarity with one another? Wherever we may live and whatever language we may speak, sending that kind of message across our “Corona-centre” continent would hold special meaning, surely not just for ourselves now, but for others also, and perhaps for the future as well.
To be sure, for the moment we are stunned by the shock of what’s unfolding and bewildered by what is yet heading our way. Also, still too many people seem confused or in a form of denial as to the exact extent of what we’re facing. Until just days ago, some people in Paris thought best to keep partying, or to attend crowded public protests. Likewise in Ireland, videos of people celebrating in packed bars last weekend have caused outrage.
Trust in institutions and resistance to fake news are being put to the test. Pessimists will say our European capacity to come together and show generosity, or even elementary openness to others, has already been entirely blunted by the crises of the past decade (our numbness to Syria’s killing fields is, to me, the greatest case in point). We are no doubt now in severe, introspective, fear-and-fragmentation European mode.
But for those who still believe we can be a community of a kind, and that our continental space (or the world beyond) should not be turned into an “arena”, now is the time to ask ourselves how we will want to look back at this phase of our collective history. How will we want future generations to look back at us, and what kind of message do we want to send to the rest of the world? And please note, with every mention of Europe I include the UK. We are one continent, and the virus is among us all. Discord or “social distancing” among nation-states makes no sense in the face of an invisible enemy in our midst which makes no distinction about its victims.
And look around: ordinary virtues aren’t absent at all. Gestures of empathy and solidarity are multiplying at a local level – medical students volunteering to help hospitals, or neighbours helping the elderly get food. Why not invent something symbolically similar at a wider, transnational level, and by making use of digital tools? Politicians have done little of this. But citizens can show the way.
Artists, creators, start-ups, activists, anyone or any network that’s part of the fabric that binds us together in beautiful, meaningful ways under ordinary circumstances, could take a stand for cross-border solidarity in these extraordinary circumstances. Scientists and medics are of course sharing and coming together. Why not extend that to other parts of our societies? It’s obvious that our only chance to somehow mitigate this catastrophe is to act together, or at least to act in ways that are closely attentive to others, not blind or negligent towards them.
Many of us are now hunkering down at home, and it’s all but natural that we focus on immediate day-to-day needs, the health of loved ones, saving our work or our livelihoods, in our entirely up-ended lives. But if our claims to human empathy have any meaning at all, then now is a good time to think of building up a pan-European chorus of voices for solidarity. Sure, it won’t in itself bring us any closer to a vaccine, nor immunise us against the virus, but it could help immunise us against something else – the nasty undercurrents of nationalism that are lurking under the surface. As we Europeans stand at the epicentre of it all, it’s up to us to make solidarity viral.
The Print edition of the Guardian Journal headlines
Natalie Nougayrède's article thus:
Nation states are reverting to old ways. We don't have to
In the LODE project of 1992, and in Re:LODE 2017 the historical context of "nationhood" and "nationalism", applies in different ways to all of the places where LODE cargo was created and wrapped for protection in sheets of a local newspaper purchased on the same day.
In the Information Wrap for Friedrichskoog on the North Sea coast of Germany the following article appears:
A nation is a daily referendum . . .
Mapping stereotypes
The follow up to the question that the French historian Ernest Renan (1823–1892) asked in his 1882 lecture "What is a Nation?" ("Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?") includes the idea that a nation is "a daily referendum", and that nations are based as much on what the people jointly forget, as what they remember, and this observation is frequently quoted in historical discussions concerning nationalism and national identity.Renan's essay begins by pointing to the category confusion often made between the idea of nationhood and of racial or linguistic groupings, a form of confusion which he says can produce "the gravest errors". His corrective approach is to conduct an autopsy-like examination, "in an absolutely cold and impartial fashion."
He
had no doubt that the European nations existing at the time, such as
France, Germany, England and Russia, would continue to exist for
hundreds of years, but that; "The establishment of a new Roman or
Charlemagnian Empire has become an impossibility
He had no doubt that the European nations existing at the time, such as France, Germany, England and Russia, would continue to exist for hundreds of years, but that; "The establishment of a new Roman or Charlemagnian Empire has become an impossibility
His belief was that nations developed from the common needs of the people, who consisted of different social groups seeking a "collective identity". He praises the eighteenth century for its achievements in regards to humanity and the restoration of the pure identity of man, one which was free from misconceptions and socially established variances, but he discredits the theory that race is the basis for the unification of people.
His thinking on nationhood led him to the conclusion that neither language nor religion are a sound basis for solidarity because language “invites people to unite, but does not force them to do so” and "religion has become an individual matter".
The United States and England are nations divided by a common language rather than united as an English speaking nation, and countries no longer operate on the basis of forcing people to choose between one religion or the another.
Renan
recognised the complete opposite in what he thought was a unique
element of the European nation-forming experience, the mixture of races,
origins and religions, where conquering people often resulted in the
conquerors adopting the religion, manners, and marrying the women of the
people they conquered.
Renan recognised the complete opposite in what he thought was a unique element of the European nation-forming experience, the mixture of races, origins and religions, where conquering people often resulted in the conquerors adopting the religion, manners, and marrying the women of the people they conquered.
Renan's most memorable observation is that:
"Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation."He says that historical research, by revealing unwanted truths, can even endanger nationhood. All nations, even the most benevolent in later practice, are founded on acts of violence, which are then forgotten. "Unity is always achieved by brutality: the joining of the north of France with the center was the result of nearly a century of extermination and terror". He believes that people unite in their memories of suffering because alleviating grief requires a “common effort” which serves as a foundation for unity. Members of a community feel as though they have accomplished something great when they are able to survive in adverse conditions. This leads to one of the most frequently quoted statements in the essay:Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.
The Information Wraps for Friedrichskoog, Lübeck, Linken and Szczecin have a number of articles that relate to nationalism, internationalism and globalisation in general, especially in relation to Europe, and to Germany in particular.
Friedrichskoog
Nasty Nationalism?
Lübeck
Breaking up?
Linken
More a "takeover" than a union?
Szczecin
Identity politics in Poland
These four articles (chosen from amongst many others equally relevant) are associated with these four places along the LODE Zone Line ,and provide contextual information on the way identity and nation play a part in the deformation of civic values, especially when the impossible recovery of lost identity results in hate crime and violence. In 1992 the LODE Information Wraps identified aspects of this global phenomenon. In 2017 it points to the regressive politics of denial, including the syndrome of climate change denial, and the climate denial information machine, and that is articulated through the Re:LODE Radio project.
Climate science denial
Climate science denial
Germany has an unholy new alliance: climate denial and the far right
Bernhard Pötter - Opinion piece (Wed 18 Mar 2020)
A dead bird of prey lying in the grass near a windfarm is the stark image on the home page of a new German website. “Climate change – we have got a couple of questions” is the headline that greets visitors, but the questioners already seem to know the answers to their 16 questions. “Due to an alleged climate emergency, new laws are to be passed prescribing a new way of life for us, one that will have adverse environmental effects and could lead to the deindustrialisation of Germany.”
Klimafragen.org is the latest attempt to question the scientific and social consensus around the climate crisis in Germany. The authors, all from well-known climate-denier institutions and conservative political circles, list areas where they say Germany’s climate policy still has blindspots, notably over climate models, sea levels, energy conversion and counter-opinions. Parliamentary groups in the Bundestag, they argue, should provide answers to their questions, although some are based on outdated findings. According to the organisers, about 33,500 people have signed up, seeking answers.
A similar petition fizzled out in September 2019: then, Fritz Vahrenholt, a former Social Democratic party (SPD) environment minister in Hamburg, ex-chief executive of a subsidiary of the energy giant RWE and well-known climate change denier, wrote to members of the Bundestag. His letter outlined his own “model calculation”, according to which plants can absorb very much more CO2 than science suggests. The author of a study he cited later contradicted this interpretation.
Deniers of manmade climate change don’t have an easy time in Germany. For years, a stable 80% of the population has been convinced of climate change, supports a switch to greener energy and backs tougher climate goals. Environmental campaigners regularly receive increased donations and report growing membership. In contrast to the US, UK or Australia, there is barely a single major German company that openly opposes climate science. And the media rarely give a platform to anyone sceptical about the scale of the climate crisis.
But what the deniers now have instead is a platform in the German parliament. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) challenges the scientific consensus on climate, describes climate policy as “hysteria” and mocks Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future school strikes movement, and has seats in the Bundestag and in all the German regional parliaments. The AfD has abandoned the previous cross-party consensus on the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Paris climate agreement. It sees itself as the defender of disputed diesel technology, rails against the supposed “eco-madness” and rewards climate change deniers – even those who challenge all the serious scientific findings – with invitations to address parliamentary committees. Strategically, the AfD is using climate politics as a key way to distinguish itself from the established parties. Its leader, Alexander Gauland, sees climate as the “third big issue for the AfD” after the euro and the refugee crisis.
The party receives public funding, yet is now the main destination for climate crisis denial. And increasingly the view that all this stuff about climate catastrophe can’t possibly be true is openly heard in the mainstream. After the IPCC’s special report on agriculture, for example, Gero Hocker, a Free Democratic party (FDP) MP, accused the experts of not looking hard enough at the details – but without backing up his accusation. His party colleague Nicola Beer describes the “supposed appearance of more extreme weather events” as “fake news”. A magazine published by the German Rotary Club published a piece that described the climate crisis as an instrument in the struggle against capitalism. “Climate change is a highly ideological, subversive concept that has made a utopia of ‘climate salvation’ [and] a goal of political action and a moral commandment,” it said.
The pushback on climate is partly down to the fact that the government has for so long shirked its responsibilities, according to Martin Kaiser of Greenpeace Germany. Rather than seeing the switch to a low-carbon economy as an opportunity and communicating accordingly, even members of Angela Merkel’s cabinet have talked about how expensive, difficult and disputed energy conversion is. “If the government is always in the business of playing off the social cost against ecology, rather than bringing the two together, we shouldn’t be surprised if populists take them at their word,” Kaiser says.
Deniers remain on the defensive. The Fridays for Future protests have been defining the debate, and while Germany’s coal phase-out isn’t due until 2038, the switch is now inevitable and has about €40bn of finance behind it. A climate protection law will steer Germany to net-zero emissions by 2050. Business lobbies are pressing for greater clarity on climate goals and renewables. And the Greens, who have for decades led the demand for greater ambition in terms of climate protection, enjoy 20% support in the polls – a new government in 2021 looks unlikely without them.
Carel Mohn, editor-in-chief of the factcheck website klimafakten.de, which is financed by the Mercator Foundation and the European Climate Foundation, doesn’t foresee a huge challenge from denialists. More worrying in his view are the “yes, but” sceptics who supposedly advocate environmental protection but then get in the way of real progress. The debate is also concerning because it shows just “how weak, badly organised and ill-prepared for their job” those politicians meant to be well informed on climate really are. He can barely think of a single official authority that issues rebuttals when politicians come out with demonstrably false statements on meat consumption, forestry protection or air transport.
Sometimes, though, you can rely on the climate deniers to trip themselves up, as the AfD group in the Bundestag often does. In a recent parliamentary question it asked for verification that 97% of scientists agree on the causes of global warming. The environment minister returned to the house to confirm that the figures were inaccurate: it’s 99.94%.
Bernhard Pötter writes for the German newspaper Tageszeitung
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .
In Startrek - The Wrath of Khan, Spock gives Captain Kirk a copy of Charles Dickens' book A Tale of Two Cities as a birthday present, and James Kirk reads the beginning of the first line. Dickens' famous opening sentence introduces the universal approach of his book, A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution, and the drama depicted within:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
In times of crisis there is always a chance that those working to change the status quo, for various reasons and purposes, both progressive and regressive, may achieve their desired goals.
For the Re:LODE Radio project it is the need to remove the stumbling block to us all dealing with the climate emergency, the stumbling block of currently existing global capitalism, that is the desired outcome.
Some, and probably most economists, think that capitalism can be reshaped in a progressive way, and that this current pandemic health emergency, and the economic consequences of dealing with this crisis, offers an opportunity to re-calibrate the system.Mariana Mazzucato, professor of economics at University College London and author of The Value of Everything, writing for the Guardian Opinion section (Wed 18 Mar 2020) wonders whether:
The Covid-19 crisis is a chance to do capitalism differently
The world is in a critical state. The Covid-19 pandemic is rapidly spreading across countries, with a scale and severity not seen since the devastating Spanish flu in 1918. Unless coordinated global action is taken to contain it, the contagion will soon become an economic and financial one too.
The magnitude of the crisis requires governments to step in. And they are. States are injecting stimulus into the economy while desperately trying to slow the spread of the disease, to protect vulnerable populations, and to help create new therapies and vaccines. The scale and intensity of these interventions reminiscent of a military conflict – this is a war against the spread of the virus and economic collapse.
And yet there is a problem. The intervention needed requires a very different framing from the one that governments have chosen. Since the 1980s, governments have been told to take a back seat and let business steer and create wealth, intervening only for the purpose of fixing problems when they arise. The result is that governments are not always properly prepared and equipped to deal with crises such as Covid-19 or the climate emergency. By assuming that governments have to wait until the occurrence of a huge systemic shock before they resolve to take action, insufficient preparations are made along the way.
In the process, critical institutions providing public services and public goods more widely – such as the NHS in the UK, where there have been cuts to public health totalling £1bn since 2015 – are left weakened.
The prominent role of business in public life has also led to a loss of confidence in what the government can achieve alone – leading in turn to the many problematic public-private partnerships, which prioritise the interests of business over the public good. For example, it has been well documented that public-private partnerships in research and development often favour “blockbusters” at the expense of less commercially appealing medicines that are hugely important to public health, including antibiotics and vaccines for a number of diseases with outbreak potential.
On top of this, there is a lack of a safety net and protection for working people in societies with rising inequality, especially for those working in the gig economy with no social protection.
But we now have an opportunity to use this crisis as a way to understand how to do capitalism differently. This requires a rethink of what governments are for: rather than simply fixing market failures when they arise, they should move towards actively shaping and creating markets that deliver sustainable and inclusive growth. They should also ensure that partnerships with business involving government funds are driven by public interest, not profit.
First of all, governments must invest in, and in some cases create, institutions that help to prevent crises, and make us more capable to handle them when they arise. The UK government’s emergency budget of £12bn for the NHS is a welcome move. But equally important is a focus on long-term investment to strengthen health systems, reversing the trends of recent years.
Second, governments need to better coordinate research and development activities, steering them towards public health goals. Discovery of vaccines will necessitate international coordination on a herculean scale, exemplified by the extraordinary work of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
But national governments also have a huge responsibility in shaping the markets by steering innovation to solve public goals, in the same way that has been done by ambitious public organisations such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) in the US, which funded what became the internet when it was solving the problem of getting satellites to communicate. A similar initiative in healthcare would make sure that public funding is geared to solving major health problems.
Third, governments need to structure public-private partnerships to make sure both citizens and the economy benefit. Health is a sector that globally receives billions from the public purse: in the US, the National Institute of Health (NIH) invests $40bn a year. Since the 2002 Sars outbreak, the NIH has spent $700m on coronavirus research and development. The large public funding going into health innovation means governments should govern the process to ensure prices are fair, patents are not abused, medicine supply is safeguarded and profits are reinvested back into innovation, rather than siphoned out to shareholders.
And that if emergency supplies are needed – such as medicines, hospital beds, masks or ventilators – the same companies benefiting from public subsidies in good times must not speculate and overcharge in bad times. Universal and affordable access is essential not just at national level, but at international level. This is especially crucial for pandemics: there is no place for nationalistic thinking, like Donald Trump’s attempt to acquire an exclusive US licence for the coronavirus vaccine.
Fourth, it is time to finally learn the hard lessons of the 2008 global financial crisis. As companies, from airlines to retail, come asking for bailouts and other types of assistance, it is important to resist simply handing out money. Conditions can be attached to make sure that bailouts are structured in ways that transform the sectors they’re saving so that they become part of a new economy – one that is focused on the green new deal strategy of lowering carbon emissions while also investing in workers, and making sure they can adapt to new technologies. It must be done now, while government has the upper hand.
Covid-19 is a major event that exposes the lack of preparedness and resilience of the increasingly globalised and interconnected economy, and it certainly won’t be the last. But we can use this moment to bring a stakeholder approach to the centre of capitalism.
Let’s not let lessons learned from this crisis go to waste.
