World Politics

Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, the World Health Organisation and climate campaigner Greta Thunberg have joined Donald Trump among a list of expected nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize, according to a survey of Norwegian MPs who are eligible to propose candidates and who have a track record of successfully guessing the winner.Ms Thunberg, Mr Navalny, and the WHO – for its Covax programme to secure fair access to Covid vaccines for poor countries – are likely frontrunners, research carried out by Reuters found. Nominations for the prestigious award close on Sunday.The climate activist, Russian opposition leader and global health body are backed by Norwegian lawmakers, who have nominated the eventual laureate every year since 2014, with the exception of 2019.Thousands of people, from members of parliaments worldwide to former winners, are eligible to propose candidates. A host of other figures including university professors and members of select international organisations can also put names forward.The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which decides who wins the award, does not comment on nominations, keeping secret for 50 years the names of nominators and unsuccessful nominees, while nominations do not imply an endorsement from the committee.But nominators can choose to reveal their picks. He said the now former president had “done more trying to create peace between nations than most other peace prize nominees”, citing Mr Trump’s role in brokering a peace deal between Israel and Middle Eastern nations. More

Much of the Arab world erupted in jubilant revolt 10 years ago against the dictatorial regimes whose corruption, cruelty and mismanagement had mired the Middle East in poverty and backwardness for decades.Now, the hopes awakened by the protests have vanished but the underlying conditions that drove the unrest are as acute as ever.Autocrats rule with an even tighter grip. Wars unleashed by leaders whose control was threatened have killed hundreds of thousands of people. The rise of the Islamic State amid the resulting wreckage ravaged large parts of Syria and Iraq and drew the United States into another costly Middle East war.Millions of people were driven from their homes to become refugees, many converging on the shores of Europe and beyond. The influx fuelled a tide of nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment that brought populist leaders to power in Europe and the US as fears of terrorism eclipsed concerns for human rights as a Western priority.Even in those countries that did not descend into war, more Arabs are now living in poverty, more are unemployed and more are imprisoned for their political beliefs than a decade ago.Only in Tunisia, where the protests began, did anything resembling a democracy emerge from the upheaval. The fall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the Tunisian President,  after a month of street protests in Tunis inspired demonstrations across the Middle East, including the mass protest on 25 January 2011 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that fixated world attention on what was prematurely labelled the Arab Spring.On its face, the Arab Spring failed, and spectacularly so – not only by failing to deliver political freedom but by further entrenching the rule of corrupt leaders more intent on their own survival than delivering help.“It’s been a lost decade,” said Tarik Yousef, director of the Brookings Doha Centre in Qatar, recalling the euphoria he initially felt when the fall of Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi in August 2011 enabled him to return home for the first time in years. “Now we have the return of fear and intimidation. The region has experienced setbacks at every turn.”For many of those who participated in the uprisings, the costs have been immeasurable. Esraa Eltaweel, 28, was partially paralysed after a bullet fired by security forces sliced through her abdomen and chipped her spine during a protest in Cairo in 2014. Some of her friends were killed. Others were imprisoned, including her husband, who is still incarcerated. Ms Eltaweel, who spent seven months in detention, has struggled to find work because of the stigma attached to political prisoners.“We didn’t achieve anything we aimed for. Things got worse,” she said. “We believed we could change the system. But it is so rotten that it can’t be changed.”Yet as long as the conditions that provoked the original uprisings persist, the possibility of more unrest cannot be ruled out, analysts say. More

COVID-19 has been ruthless in choosing winners and losers around the world. The obvious “losers” have been those countries led by right-wing nationalists: Brazil, India, Russia, the United Kingdom and (until recently) the United States. These five countries are responsible for more than half of the world’s coronavirus infections and nearly half the deaths.

Just as obviously, the “winners” have been the countries of Asia. Although China and South Korea were both hit hard early on in the pandemic, they have managed to recover quite dramatically. The rest of the region, meanwhile, has suffered nowhere near the same magnitude of adverse consequences that Europe or the Americas have experienced. Taiwan has had fewer than 1,000 infections and only seven deaths. Vietnam had had about 1,500 infections and 35 deaths. Thailand has had over 13,000 infections but only 75 deaths. Mongolia has had under 1,700 infections and only two deaths.

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Even the less fortunate countries in the region have managed to control the pandemic better than the West has. Burma has suffered over 130,000 infections, but just over 3,000 deaths. Malaysia has had 185,000 infections but only 700 deaths, while Japan has had over 360,000 infections but just under 5,200 deaths. Singapore has actually had the largest per-capita number of infections in the region but has registered only 29 deaths. The two relative outliers are the Philippines, with over 500,000 infections and 10,000 deaths, and Indonesia, with nearly a million infections and over 28,000 deaths.

High Marks

It’s not as if these countries have avoided the various surges that have taken place globally as a result of holiday travel, the loosening of restrictions or the new variants of the disease. But even among the outliers, the renewed outbreaks have been several magnitudes smaller than what Europe or the Americas have faced.

To give you a sense of how relatively successful even these outliers have been, imagine if the Trump administration had handled the pandemic as poorly as the worst-performing Asian nation. Rodrigo Duterte is in many ways the Donald Trump of Asia. But if the United States had managed to follow the Filipino example, the United States would now be facing 1.5 million cases of infection and only 30,000 deaths. Instead, America not long ago passed the 25-million mark in cases and the 400,000-deaths mark.

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Now imagine if the Trump administration had dealt with the pandemic as successfully as Vietnam. The United States would have been hit by under 5,000 infections and a little over 100 deaths. Not fair, you say, because Vietnam is a communist country that can impose draconian restrictions without fear of backlash? Okay, if we use Taiwan as the yardstick for comparison, the United States would have 15,000 infections and a little over 100 deaths. Not fair, you say, because Taiwan is an island? Okay, if we use South Korea as the baseline, the United States would have had 450,000 infections and about 8,000 deaths.

Any way you look at it, the United States did worse than every single country in Asia. If America had just managed to handle the crisis as effectively as the worst-performing Asian country, close to 400,000 more Americans would be alive today.

It’s easy to blame Trump for this woeful discrepancy between America and Asia. After all, according to the first Global Health Security Index released in 2019, the United States came out on top in terms of its readiness to deal with a pandemic. US hospitals routinely receive high marks in global lists. A failure of governance would seem to be the key distinguishing factor, particularly in light of all the mistakes the Trump administration made from day one, errors that the president compounded through ignorance, incompetence and sheer foolishness.

But many of the governments in Asia made similar mistakes. Duterte has been widely criticized for delays and missteps. South Korean leader Moon Jae-in faced calls for impeachment early in the crisis because of the government’s failure to prevent the first outbreaks. So, perhaps at least some of the fault lies elsewhere: not in our political stars, but in ourselves.

East vs. West

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the West indulged in more than a little triumphalism. Pundits fell over each other in their eagerness to declare that the individual had prevailed over the collective, capitalism had vanquished communism, and the West was the best (so forget about the rest).

Many people in Asia, however, begged to differ.  Maybe you remember the debate in the 1990s around “Eastern” vs. “Western” values. Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, along with their house intellectuals, claimed that Asian countries had superior value systems than those of the West.

Rather than unstable democracies, disruptive human rights movements and the overwhelming cult of the individual, the East valued harmony, order and the common good. These values, it argued, made possible the continuous economic success of the Asian Tigers — Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan — not to mention the earlier accomplishments of Japan, the leapfrogging rise of mainland China and the copycat efforts of the Tiger Cubs — Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. The proof was in the productivity.

The counterarguments came quickly from such august figures as Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, and Amartya Sen of India. They pointed out that there’s nothing inherently Western about human rights and democracy. Both South Korea and Taiwan, after all, democratized without putting a dent in their economic growth. Human rights movements had mass appeal in Burma, the Philippines and elsewhere in the region. After the Asian financial crisis of 1997, which devastated countries in the region, it became increasingly difficult to argue that the East was immune from the same economic problems that plagued capitalism in the West.

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As a result, the “Eastern values” camp gradually faded from view. Good riddance to bad theory. The dividing line between East and West was spurious in so many ways, reminiscent of older stereotypes of the East as “unchanging” or “inscrutable.”

And yet, today, COVID-19 has drawn a clear line between Asia and the rest of the world. What’s particularly striking about this latest divergence is the lack of significance in types of governance. The countries that have been successful in Asia have very different forms of government, from communist (Vietnam) to democratic (Taiwan) to military dictatorship (Thailand). Moreover, they have different histories, religious backgrounds, and relationships with the countries of the West. The only thing they share, it would seem, is what realtors are always going on about: location, location, location. So, should we be resurrecting “Eastern values” to explain such a startling difference in outcomes during this pandemic era?

Three Reasons

The most important reason that Asia reacted to COVID-19 with greater seriousness and better results has to do not with ancient history but with more recent experience. In 2003, the region was blindsided by the SARS epidemic. The first cases emerged in southern China in late 2002. By March, the new coronavirus was showing up in Hong Kong and Vietnam as well. Eventually, it would appear in 29 countries and result in over 700 deaths. By July, after unprecedented international cooperation, the World Health Organization declared the epidemic contained.

Think of SARS as a virus that stimulated Asia’s immunological system. That system went into hyperdrive to fight off the infection. Once Asia successfully beat off the new disease, a certain immunity remained. That immunity was not biological, in the sense that the populations of the region had any resistance to novel coronaviruses. Rather, the immunity consisted of a heightened awareness of the problem, a new set of institutions and practices developed to fight future attacks, and a historical memory among a certain generation of political leadership. The rest of the world, which avoided the brunt of SARS, didn’t develop that kind of immunity.

A second advantage that Asian countries have enjoyed is a coordinated central government response. After its initial denial of COVID-19, Beijing soon switched into high gear to contain the spread of the disease by locking down Wuhan and other hot spots and severely restricting internal travel. South Korea moved rapidly to institute a nationwide test-and-trace system. Taiwan quickly made masks available, imposed an immediate quarantine system and monitored citizens digitally. Countries in the region with less tightly federated structures — Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia — weren’t able to react as quickly or as consistently. But even they were models of central authority compared to the kind of policy clash between the center and the periphery that so complicated the pandemic response in countries like Brazil and the United States.

The third advantage, and this comes the closest to a revival of the “Eastern values” argument, is the issue of compliance. The American anti-mask mentality, for instance, has no real counterpart in Asia. Sure, plenty of people in the region have issues with their governments and with state regulations. A number of the countries in the region, like South Korea, are notoriously low-trust. But throughout the region, citizens have greater respect for scientific authority and greater respect for community standards. And those who for whatever reason choose to flout this authority and these standards are quickly shamed into compliance.

As Lawrence Wright points out in his thorough piece on COVID-19 in The New Yorker, consistent mask use stands out as a determinant of success in containing the spread of the virus. “Hong Kong was one of the world’s densest cities, but there was no community spread of the virus there, because nearly everyone wore masks,” he writes. “Taiwan, which was manufacturing ten million masks per day for a population of twenty-three million, was almost untouched. Both places neighbored China, the epicenter.”

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Anti-vaccine sentiment is also quite low in Asia. According to a 2018 survey, 85% of people in Asia believe vaccines are safe — the highest of any region in the world. Although anti-vaxxers have managed to spread their messages in Asia, it’s notably been in the two countries with the worst records on COVID-19: the Philippines and Indonesia. Elsewhere, vaccination levels have remained high.

It’s not just deference to science or fear of public shaming. Compliance may also derive from a stronger sense of the common good. It’s not as if harmony prevails over Asia like a benevolent weather front. Look at the political polarization in Thailand that has led to multiple mass demonstrations and military coups. Or the rapid alternation in power of different political parties in Taiwan and South Korea. But underneath the great divisions in these societies is a persistent belief in pulling together during a crisis rather than pulling apart.

It is impossible to imagine a scenario in any Asian country like what transpired in the United States during the January 6 insurrection. Lawmakers evacuated from the congressional floor found themselves packed into a small, windowless lockdown room. If ever there were a time for bipartisanship, it was during this attack on American democracy. Yet some Republican legislators, although they quite obviously couldn’t maintain social distance in this crowded space, refused to wear the masks offered to them. They couldn’t even pretend to care about the health and safety of others, and several lawmakers indeed tested positive for COVID-19 after this experience. This is the American response to the pandemic writ small: astonishing selfishness and ideological rigidity.

In Asia, it’s very possible that the successful efforts by governments to contain COVID-19 will lead to a virtuous circle of trust, if not in the governments, then at least in social institutions like medical authorities, as this recent study from South Korea suggests. The West, meanwhile, is descending into a vicious circle of mistrust that vaccinations, herd immunity that the exile of Trump to Florida will not be enough to forestall. Forget about so-called Eastern values for a moment. The West needs to look more carefully at its own values since they are clearly not fit for purpose at a time of crisis.

*[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

A recent The Economist cover pictured the 46th US President Joe Biden in front of the White House with a cleaning mop. The lead, “Morning after in America,” projects that “The outlook for America looks grim, but that could quickly change.” The venerable publication proclaimed from its powerful pulpit that Biden “should stick to his folksy brand of dogged centrism which is so well suited to the moment.” That gives him the “best chance of success.”

The Economist sees good reasons for Biden to succeed. With interest rates so low, the government can virtually borrow for free. This means the Biden administration could roll out a $1.9-trillion stimulus. This could fund a polio-style vaccination program, extend unemployment insurance and expand child tax benefits. An infrastructure bill and investment in clean energy to combat change could create new jobs for the 21st century.

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The Economist’s ebullient optimism might come from the fact that it has been on the winning side of history since its inception in 1843. For more than 178 years of its existence, it stood for Pax Britannica. For the last few decades, this blue-blooded British publication has pivoted to be a trumpeter of Pax Americana. This has led to errors in judgment such as its infamous support for the 2003 Iraq War. 

In January this year, The Economist may be making a similar misjudgment. It is prematurely heralding America’s journey to what Winston Churchill memorably termed “broad, sunlit uplands” by using shoddy facts and specious reasoning just as it did in 2003. Its assertion that the US banking system looks sound is not backed by evidence. Its claim that “the economic pain is not widespread” is ridiculously untrue.

On Capitol Hill

On Wednesday, January 6, I read about a mob besieging Capitol Hill as I sat at my desk less than four miles away. Against the advice of my American friends, I left to see firsthand what was going on. They told me the white supremacist mob would beat me to a pulp. I ignored their advice because I was curious. I got off at the Archives metro stop and mingled with Donald Trump’s supporters. Some were heading to the Capitol, while others were walking away from it. Prima facie, the people walking around were not much different than at other Trump demonstrations.

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Although I lost count after 23, I am sure that I spoke to more than 50 people. They were all friendly, sociable and deeply distressed. They told me repeatedly that I was the first journalist who had cared to speak with them. They said that mainstream media was filming them but did not want to listen to them. They asked me whether elections were rigged in India. When I responded that India solved the problem of rigging by creating an independent election commission, some piped in that the US should have one too. That is certainly not what I expected to hear.

To be sure, I met the saner members of the crowd, a mix of what Douglas Murray has called “the strange, the sincere, the silly and the sinister.” I stayed on Capitol Hill grounds talking to one person after another. At some point, tear gas bombs started going off on the terrace and the curfew hour started drawing nigh. I finally beat a retreat and started walking down to the L’Enfant Plaza metro station. Someone stopped me, exchanged words and offered me food. I took a sandwich, granola bars and water while declining the chips. Instead of getting beaten, I had been welcomed and even fed. Even as I sat in the metro and later worked at home, the images and the words of the day stayed with me. Needless to say, I did not sleep well. In fact, I was so troubled that I hit writer’s block and was unable to put down my thoughts on paper coherently for days.

Even though I have long been a critic of Donald Trump, I have been cognizant of the power of his appeal. While explaining Trump’s victory in 2016, I gave facts and figures about increasing income and wealth inequality in America. I also pointed out how social mobility has been falling. For most Americans, life is tough, and prospects for their children increasingly bleak. In 2017, CNN reported that 6 in 10 Americans had savings of less than $500. The great American dream has become a terrible American nightmare for far too many families.

Every Trump supporter I met on January 6 spoke about being left behind. One supporter claimed to be a Catholic bishop from Kentucky. He proudly posed for a photo at my request and blessed me when we parted. The bishop had done missionary work in India and had been to my ancestral hometown of Varanasi. He waxed lyrical about how the political system was broken. The man in holy robes said those on Capitol Hill have long stopped caring about the American people. Instead, they now represent special interests with money. 

The Pain

When I think about what the bishop said, I find it hard to disagree. As per CNBC, the 2020 election spending was nearly $14 billion, more than double the 2016 sum. It is an open secret that members of Congress spend more time raising money than legislating. There are numerous studies about declining congressional oversight and surging presidential power. Such has been the divide in Congress that it has been impossible to pass meaningful legislation for a while. Too often, legislation is bloated, poorly drafted and caters to those who can lobby hardest for their interests. Like many other democracies, the US has turned disastrously dysfunctional.

Although most people I met were white and working class, I ran into members of minority communities as well. A preacher of South African origin was singing paeans to Jesus and to America. I ran into two ladies who had immigrated from Vietnam and the Philippines. They believed that Trump was the only leader who could stand up to China and bring back law and order. When I asked if I could photograph them, the Vietnamese lady bolted, taking her friend along.

Later that evening, my friends were referring to the crowd as a “bunch of pigs.” They were appalled by the scenes they had seen on television and what they had read on their smartphones. In their eyes, those in the crowd were not protesters. They were rioters, seditionists, insurrectionists, terrorists and perpetrators of a coup. They were guilty of breaking down democratic institutions, if not treason. They deserved arrest, trial and punishment. Given that the day’s attack on the Capitol was the first in the nation’s history — bar the British invasion of 1814 — their indignation at this assault on their democracy was understandable.

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But they were not on Capitol Hill that day. What I saw is that President Trump, his son, Donald Jr., and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, played pied pipers. They riled up the crowd that turned into a mob and overwhelmed Capitol Police. Most people in the mob were misguided instead of malevolent. When I spoke to them, it was clear they had no plan of action unlike those who actually plan a coup. As historian Timothy Snyder observed in his tour de force for The New York Times, “The American Abyss”: “It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around.” At the end of the evening, the mob inevitably melted away. I met families on their way back to Alabama, truck drivers returning to Texas, old ladies headed back to Georgia and even plumbers returning to Democrat-run New York. They had come to Washington, DC, to be heard, stormed what they saw as a modern-day Bastille and were going back to their daily lives.

What struck me most was that everyone I spoke to was convinced that they did not matter to the system and their votes did not count. Since that fateful day, a question has played repeatedly in my mind: When people genuinely believe their votes do not count, what stops them from taking up arms?

A Strange New World

After January 6, I have followed my father’s advice and gone back to the past to peer into the future. A 1987 edition of The Republic with crinkling yellow pages and my brother’s fading notes has made me think. In the words of the late classicist Sir Desmond Lee, Plato was living in “an age which had abandoned its traditional moral code but found it impossibly difficult to create a new one.” Athenian democracy had forced his tutor Socrates to drink hemlock. It had degenerated into chaos and dissension. Needless to say, it did not survive.

A few centuries later, the Roman Republic perished too. At some point, oligarchs took charge. They controlled almost all the land. Form triumphed over substance, and democratic institutions decayed. Populists emerge to lead the mob. One of the better known was Tiberius Gracchus, who attempted agrarian reform, assembled a mob on the Capitol but was clubbed to death in the Senate.

Unlike that long-forgotten Roman revolutionary, Trump did not bring in any radical reform for the people but, like the ancient populist, he has overreached. After years of profiting from Trump’s mass following, Twitter not only silenced him but terminated his account. A political leader who had just got over 74 million votes was obliterated from his favorite public platform by a private company in a jiffy. For all its faults, The New York Times is considered the “newspaper of record.” Its support for the CIA-led 1953 coup in Iran or the case the newspaper made for the 2003 Iraq War is in the public domain. By deleting Trump’s profile, Twitter has demonstrated that a corporation now arbitrates over what constitutes the public domain.

It is not only the question of what constitutes the public domain but also the issue of freedom of speech that is problematic. America’s fabled First Amendment “protects freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” For years, internet giants have claimed to be platforms with no editorial responsibility. The First Amendment has been their first defense against allegations that they were letting falsehood, hate and toxic propaganda run amok. Unlike traditional newspapers, these social media platforms did not restrict what people could say. Suddenly, they have changed tack.

After Trump evaporated from Twitter, more was to follow. Amazon Web Services abruptly kicked out conservative social media platform Parler from its servers. Google and Apple also banned the app. They argued Parler incited violence, breaching their terms and conditions. Like Trump, Parler was effectively shut down in minutes. The companies might have had good reasons to do so. However, the action raises uncomfortable questions. Who decides what is free speech? Is it the legislature, the executive, the judiciary or a billionaire-controlled Silicon Valley company?

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The First Amendment “guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely.” Nothing restricts companies from curbing freedom of expression. When the constitution was drafted, big companies did not exist. Today, the situation is dramatically different, and no equivalent of the First Amendment protects Americans from censorship by big companies.

It is now transparent that the balance of power in the US lies with the big corporations. Its CEOs wield far greater power than governors, members of congress, senators and, at times, presidents. In 2008, Barack Obama won a historic election by getting nearly 69.5 million votes. In American history, only Joe Biden, with more than 81 million votes, has gained greater support in absolute numbers than Trump. Still, Twitter has summarily deleted his profile. Not only Trump supporters but also many of his opponents are uneasy with this decision.

The Left-Behind

Despite his crass, erratic and boorish behavior, Trump improved his voting numbers in 2020. He won 36% of the Latino vote, an increase of 4% compared to 2016. Despite Biden’s Catholic faith, Trump won 50% of the Catholic vote, with 57% of the white Catholics casting their ballots for him. The easy explanation is Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, the anti-abortion Catholic who studied at Notre Dame, to the US Supreme Court. However, something more might be going on. Trump increased his support among other minorities such as black men and Asians as well.

Why did so many Americans vote for Trump? I got the best answer from some militia members in West Virginia. In an article in November 2020, I mentioned how they conceded that Trump was an unsavory character who lies incessantly, but they credited him for telling one big truth: Things had turned much too ugly for far too many people like them. Far too many Americans have been suffering for much too long, and politicians from both parties have been pretending things are hunky-dory, denying grim realities.

When Trump speaks about making America great again, he is appealing to nostalgia by using one of Ronald Reagan’s lines. He is also acknowledging that things are not so great for many Americans. He is feeding off the anger many Americans feel for what his recently pardoned adviser Steve Bannon has called “the permanent political class.” Bannon is an Irish Catholic from a working-class family who voted Democrat. This Navy veteran graduated from Harvard Business School and worked at Goldman Sachs. Then he went rogue.

Bannon is the ideologue who threw his lot with Trump to smash the status quo. He entered politics by launching the right-wing news site Breitbart. Instead of targeting Obama and the Democrats, he went after the Republican establishment because he saw them as traitors to the American working class. Bannon masterminded Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party, something Bernie Sanders tried but failed to achieve with the Democrats.

Bannon consistently makes the case that trade and immigration are two sides of the same coin. Both suppress workers’ wages. Companies can move factories from Michigan to Mexico for cheaper labor to improve their profits and share prices. When foreigners flood in, whether it is Latinos who mow lawns or Indians who write software on H-1B visas, companies do not have to hire Americans for the same jobs. They can and do pay foreigners less than their American counterparts. Companies do well and so do their shareholders. Executives do better: CEO compensation has soared 940% since 1978. American workers do not. Like Native Americans and African slaves in times past, they are now the left-behind.

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Many economists and politicians ridicule this argument. They stress that immigrants bring in skills that are in short supply. They point to the likes of me who turn entrepreneurs, raise capital, create jobs and boost the American economy. It is true that immigrants give the nation a unique strength. Like Rome, America can draw in the best and brightest of foreigners to give it an edge. Yet not all immigrants are necessarily terribly talented. Many of them are cheap cannon fodder for the unremitting American economic system, where people’s health care is tied to their job, holidays are rare, and 13 million work more than one job. These immigrants increase labor supply and decrease the wages of ordinary Americans.

To add insult to injury, it is these beleaguered workers who have bailed out banks after the financial crash of 2007-08. Both Republicans and Democrats sang from the same hymn book to prevent a recession from turning into a depression but did nothing to curtail or curb the financial class from behaving badly. Only one top banker went to jail. More importantly, taxpayer money ended up as bonus payments for some of the executives who had caused the crash. It was a classic example of capitalism on the upside and socialism on the downside. As a hedge fund manager told me off the record, the bailout was, Heads I win, tails you lose — with “you” being the American taxpayer.

Both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements opposed these bailouts. They had different philosophies and belonged to two ends of the political spectrum, but they opposed what was a fundamentally unjust government policy. The bailouts were accompanied by quantitative easing, which in simple terms means the central banks cutting interest rates to virtually zero and then flooding the economy with money by buying bonds on the market. The rich have gotten richer. The poor find themselves priced out of the market. Many on both the right and the left have lost faith in the system.

A Very Modern Feudalism

During the COVID-19 pandemic, things have gotten worse. The central bank may be printing money, but it is only ending up in the hands of big boys. After the 2007-08 financial crisis, banks prefer to lend to large businesses or those with guaranteed incomes to reduce credit risk and avoid another meltdown. This means that cash flows into a few big rivers instead of many small streams. Even as small businesses are closing down, the stock market is touching the stratosphere. As William Shakespeare memorably penned in “Hamlet,” “The time is out of joint.”

Such is the state of affairs that even the Financial Times, a paper of choice for the financial elite, is sounding the alarm. On January 3, its Washington correspondent Edward Luce argued that easy money and fiscal gridlock were leading to populism. Today, the top 10% of Americans own 84% of all shares in the US, with the top 1% owning half. About 50% of Americans own almost no stocks at all. As pointed out earlier, they do not have $500 in savings. It is many of these Americans who form the support base of Trump and Sanders.

America today is in a similar situation as Rome during the era of Tiberius Gracchus. The rich were grabbing land from poor farmers and using slaves from Carthage to work their estates. The republic where all Romans were citizens with a say in the affairs of the state was fraying. Rome was creating an imperial economy where the elite grew richer through plunder of conquered territories like Spain and Carthage as well as cheap labor from newly enslaved populations. This made the Roman farmer and worker largely redundant. The Roman plebeian was so exploited and powerless, that he slipped to subsistence or below-subsistence levels of income. On the other hand, the elite grew wealthier and wealthier.  

Tiberius Gracchus and his brother Gaius Gracchus attempted reforms, but both were murdered. The Populares rose up to champion their reforms to redistribute a bit of land, ameliorate the plight of the urban poor and reform the political system. The Optimates emerged to fight for the status quo, which preserved the supremacy of the Senate over the popular assemblies and the tribunes of the plebeians. This bitter discord was similar to the Athenian republic Plato found himself in. Roman divisions eventually led to the rise of Julius Caesar.

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This ambitious general believed the dysfunctional system to be leading to ruin. Taking sides with the Populares, he sought to reform the system and redistribute wealth to the plebeians. The Optimates did not budge, a civil war resulted, and the collapse of the Roman Republic ensued.

Both in Athens and Rome, rising inequality and deepening discord obliterated the common bonds that made democracy possible. In America, inequality has reached feudal dimensions. Technology is destroying thousands of working-class jobs while creating far fewer highly paid ones. The “frightful five” — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google — control the internet and large swathes of the economy. They are strangling the small and medium-sized businesses. 

Furthermore, Big Tech’s algorithms, filter bubbles and echo chambers have led to a post-truth world of fake news, conspiracy theories and more. People cannot even agree on basic facts. The constant deluge of data has put their minds in Brownian motion, and they have lost the ability to focus or sift fact from fiction. The irony of the current situation is that the leaders of these companies are self-proclaimed liberals, avowed philanthropists and cheerleaders for progress. Yet they have unleashed Frankensteins that have wrecked journalism, destroyed discourse and damaged democracy.

What Lies Next?

On Monday, January 18, I ventured into the city once again, again against the advice of my friends. I got off at L’Enfant Plaza metro station yet again to walk north and found the streets deserted and the National Mall sealed. I walked for an hour from one checkpoint to another. Eventually, a police officer told me that instructions were changing all the time and I was better off taking the metro. When I did take the metro, it stopped far away from the heart of town. Clearly, 25,000 troops and all the police were not enough to guarantee security in the capital. Authorities took the view that shutting down access to the heart of town was necessary too. The security arrangements seemed a bit of an overreaction but understandable given the events of January 6.

On January 20, I watched the inauguration with some American friends. Some were delighted to see the back of Trump and were celebrating with mimosas already in the morning. With Trump gone, many hoped that the populist genie could be put back in its bottle. I wish I had the same sense of American optimism. I simply cannot forget that despite a raging pandemic and thousands of deaths, over 74 million Americans voted for Trump. They are not going away.

As ancient republics demonstrate, populism flourishes when inequality increases. In tough times, people are also more likely to turn against those they see as threats or competition. In 1873, the US suffered its deepest depression to date. Cotton prices crashed and unemployment rose. A disputed election of 1876 led to the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction and the reintroduction of racial segregation through Jim Crow laws. A campaign of intimidation and violence kept black voters away from the polls for decades to come. Only in the 1960s did the historic civil rights movement end segregation, but black people remain poorer and die earlier than their white counterparts.

In addition to black people, another group suffered after 1873. The 1860s had been the time of the California Gold Rush and the First Continental Railroad. The Irish alone were unable to supply enough labor. Therefore, the 1868 Burlingame-Seward Treaty “ensured a steady flow of low-cost Chinese immigrant labor,” toiling primarily in goldmines and on railroads. The emerging trade unions saw Chinese workers as competitors who lowered everyone’s wages, and so opposed immigration. The Chinese worked for less money and worked harder. They also worked in areas where whites refused to work. White society at that time did not want people of color around. The labor movement was able to crystallize that latent racism.

The media played its part. William Randolph Hearst’s papers popularized the phrase “yellow peril,” and the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers. This was the first legislation in American history to place broad restrictions on immigration. And this was the Gilded Age. Rapid economic growth led to millions of European immigrants streaming onto American shores. This lowered the price of labor, and workers suffered. At the same time, the concentration of wealth continued apace, with robber barons and speculators making fabulous fortunes.

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The Gilded Age also led to the emergence of a left-wing agrarian movement called the People’s Party. They came to be known as the Populists, a word that has stuck with us to this day. Despite doing well in the 1896 election, the party eventually disbanded, but some elements of its program were adopted by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. It is important to note that this party drew support from white Protestant farmers who were losing out to industrialization, urbanization and mass immigration.

While they advocated many measures of public welfare, the Populists were anti-Semitic, conspiracy-minded and racist. They offer a good insight into what America’s near future might look like. As the predominantly white working-class suffers, some of its members are more likely to wave Confederate flags, blame blacks for sponging off welfare and oppose immigration from Mexico, India or elsewhere. This enrages many urban liberals who argue that the white working class is not the real oppressed. It is Latinos, blacks and Native Americans who have suffered much more. Instead of complaining, members of the white working class could just mow lawns, clean homes or serve coffee. Also, these liberals are furious that many members of the working class pick on poor Mexican immigrants, not rich Wall Street bankers.

This urban elite misses an important point. Many Trump supporters are acting in the same ways as Populists in the 1870s who focused as much on the Chinese as on the robber barons. Part of the reason is simple. Like the robber baron in the 19th century, the banker is not a tangible part of most American lives. He is a character from movies such as “Wall Street” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” The aggressive banker and the ruthless entrepreneur are archetypes that American culture apotheosizes. They represent the Nietzschean Übermensch, who deserves devotion, not just admiration, in a cult of success that is deep-rooted in America. That cult explains why Harvard has a school of government, not of politics. Success is non-negotiable, a Socrates-style failure unacceptable.

In contrast to the Übermensch who controls the commanding heights of the economy but is rarely seen in the flesh, Mexicans are ubiquitous. They work longer for lesser pay. Every office or apartment building I have visited across the country has had Mexicans or other immigrants from Central America doing the cleaning or taking out the rubbish. They look different, smell different and speak a different language. They excite insecurity. That insecurity rises when increasing numbers compete for fewer jobs.

American elites like immigration for both emotional and practical reasons. After all, America is a land of immigrants. They provide America with cheap labor, technological talent and entrepreneurial energy. Those with capital enjoy having access to all three. It boosts returns on capital. In contrast, the left-behind want less competition and higher wages. 

Biden has his task cut out for him as president. An increasingly unequal America with declining social mobility is seething with rage. The rich have turned rentiers, profiting off quantitative easing and rising asset prices. Those without capital or connections can no longer move up in society. The stock market is a bubble waiting to burst. America cannot ignore the last four years, and a significant proportion of the 74 million who voted for Trump have lost faith in the system. Many of them have guns. This is no time for dogged centrism. It is time for bold political and economic reform that decreases inequality and increases social mobility. If Biden fails, a modern-day Julius Caesar will inevitably emerge to bury yet another dysfunctional democracy.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

For the past year, many commentators have assumed that once the COVID-19 pandemic fades away, the world’s governments will understand that another global task awaits them: addressing the consequences of climate change. COVID-19 has already upset those calculations, at least in terms of timing. Even when things appeared to be improving during the summer of 2020, none of the governments, even the ones that seemed most successful in controlling the pandemic, showed an interest in thinking about future challenges. Instead, they focused on how the consumer economy might get back to its “normal” pattern of continuous growth and how the accumulated debt provoked by the crisis could be accounted for.

Initially, the realization that our societies can continue to function in non-optimal conditions, even after the shutdown of a significant proportion of economic activity, led to speculation about how we may no longer really need to spend hours in traffic jams, submit to choking air pollution and jump from one plane to another to get our pressing business done. A change of lifestyle seemed in the works. The idea emerged that we could to some degree adapt to something less frenetic than what had become the high-tension consumer society obsessively committed to exponential growth.

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The confusion wrought by an accelerating — and a more devious than anticipated — pandemic, now accompanied by the increasingly ambiguous hope that the arrival of vaccines will bring closure, has left all those hopes of lifestyle change in a state of suspended animation. 

While no one can now predict what the economy will look like at the end of 2021 and whether the businesses forced to press the pause button for the better part of a year will function, most people are aware that the clock is still ticking on the climate crisis. The Guardian now informs us that humanity is crying out for an answer: “The biggest ever opinion poll on climate change has found two-thirds of people think it is a “global emergency.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Global emergency:

1. For human beings, an existential threat.

2. For politicians, a minor annoyance that urgently needs to be sidelined.

Contextual Note

Most people will not be surprised by the results of this survey, for the simple reason that the numbers tell us what most people actually think. In contrast, if we polled the governments of the world to find out how many had begun acting to counter this global emergency, the answer would be zero or close to zero. Until January 20 of this year, the most powerful economy in the world had decided to not even think about the question.

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To demonstrate that at least thinking was now possible, on January 27, newly elected US President Joe Biden reaffirmed his commitment to return to the Paris Climate Agreement and “signed a sweeping series of executive actions — ranging from pausing new federal oil leases to electrifying the government’s vast fleet of vehicles — while casting the moves as much about job creation as the climate crisis.”

For the moment, Biden’s plan is modest, to say the least. He has put more emphasis on purchasing emission-free vehicles (presumably made in the USA) with a view to creating jobs than on the work of transforming an economy built to deplete resources and deregulate the climate. One of his initiatives seeks to “identify new opportunities to spur innovation,” which is also more about economic growth and the creation of jobs than it is about economic paradigm shift.

The Times offers this realistic reminder: “Mr. Biden called on the campaign trail for overhauling tax breaks to oil companies — worth billions of dollars to the oil, coal and gas industries — to help pay for his $2 trillion climate change plan, although that plan is expected to face strong opposition in Congress.” Recent history tells us that Congress is extremely accomplished at engineering bailouts and tax cuts for oil companies, but singularly lacks experience in actually taxing them. In contrast to the predicted inaction of the new administration, The Guardian notes the eagerness and sense of self-sacrifice of the ordinary people polled: “Even when climate action required significant changes in their own country, majorities still backed the measures.”

Historical note

For five hundred years, the world has been organized around two concepts: the nation-state and a globalized economy. The development of a global economy required the existence of nation-states with effective central governments. The emerging nation-states rapidly evolved to become mature managers of their own increasingly industrialized economy. They did so precisely because of their ability to mobilize the resources of a global economy. That implied setting the rules permitting them to exploit, effectively and efficiently, other people and their resources. The model of the nation-state could not have taken its modern form without pursuing a policy of deliberate colonialism tending toward economic empire.

Along the way, modern nation-states, most of which began as monarchies, evolved into either democracies or people’s republics. This essentially meant offering a stake in the gains to the nation’s population to ensure its acceptance of a system that was built on exploiting other populations and resources. If many of the citizens of these democracies did not directly profit from the colonial system that defined the global economy, they at least had indirect access to some of the gains thanks to manufacturing and the gradual development of a consumer society. They could also feel privileged and culturally superior to those who were exploited overseas. This became a major psychological contributor to the stability of modern nation-states.

It has also led to a state of severe, endemic instability for the entire planet. All political power lies in the individual nation-states who compete for their maximum share of global resources. No state is willing to give ground to another or even to a well-organized group of nations. No effective global conscience, let alone global government, is possible. At the same time, the people of the earth, and especially the young whose lives will extend decades into the future, are beginning to understand that something must be done while realizing that their own nation-state is not likely to make it happen.

The United States has consistently preferred to defend the status quo of an economy. After all, it sets the economy’s rules — thanks to the dollar, its omnipresent military and its successful engineering of a global consumer economy. Republicans have built climate denial into their civic credo. Democrats have done what is necessary to appear more open than Republicans. But the party stalwarts, with Biden as the archetype, have shown no commitment to going further than seeming marginally more committed than the Republicans.

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This poll demonstrates how the current global system based on the idea of competing democratic nation-states has betrayed the fundamental principle of democracy. When the ideology of democracy began to prevail in the late 18th century, its stated intention was to ensure that the interests of the people would prevail. Because all political logic was confined within the boundaries of individual states, the shared interests of the people of the earth could be forgotten or dismissed as irrelevant.

That is what we are seeing today. Distancing himself from Donald Trump, Joe Biden promises to marginally reduce the massively disproportionate contribution of the US to global warming. To do so, he must emphasize job creation rather than seek a response to a global emergency. This solution implies more manufacturing, not less damage to the environment. With its global hegemonic position, the US is the only nation that can lead and set the tone for the rest of the world. The sad reality is that Biden and the Democrats cannot even lead at home. In all likelihood, the timid measures Biden is proposing will be blocked or watered down by the Republican opposition.

Two-thirds of humanity are crying out for a solution to two obvious crises. The nation-states have demonstrated their ineptness at addressing the pandemic. Populations, even in peaceful countries like the Netherlands, are already revolting. What the nation-states have failed to do for their own populations reveals how unlikely it is that they can respond to the needs of all of humanity. It may be time to rethink all of our institutions. Or rather, it may be too late.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

On January 18, in an interview with Bloomberg, Qatari Foreign Affairs Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, speaking in the wake of the settlement of the Gulf feud, took the opportunity to argue that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) should sit down with Tehran. “The time should come,” he said “when the GCC sits at the table with Iran and reaches a common understanding that we have to live with each other. Sheikh Mohammed expressed optimism that with the Biden administration in place, Iran and the US will “reach a solution with what will happen with JCPOA” and that, in turn, will “help (relations) between the GCC and Iran. Everything is interconnected at the end of the day.”

How Will Joe Biden Approach Iran?

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The fact that Joe Biden is bringing many of Barack Obama’s staff back to the White House, in particular Wendy Sherman as deputy secretary of state, is what may have buoyed the Qatari foreign minister’s optimism about a renewed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Sherman was the lead US negotiator for the initial nuclear deal with Iran. Her new boss at the State Department will be Antony Blinken, a harsh critic of President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement. Biden’s designated national security adviser is Jake Sullivan. Both men are on record as wanting to bring America back into a JCPOA 2.0.

Obama 3

Though Oman played a key role in negotiations with the Iranians in the first deal, other Gulf states (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) were left out of the loop, which only added to their anxiety that the Americans were being played for suckers by Tehran. This time around, it is to be hoped (in what has been called by some analysts “Obama 3”) that lessons have been learned and there will be consultation with the GCC as new negotiations with Iran get underway.

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If that happens, the Bloomberg interviewer asked, would the Qataris be interested in playing a lead role as facilitators this time around? Sheikh Mohammed replied that “we want the accomplishment, we want to see the deal happening. … If Qatar will be asked by the stakeholders to play a role in this, we will be welcoming this idea.” He affirmed that Qatar will support anyone conducting the negotiations because Doha has good relations with both Washington and Tehran: “Iran is our neighbor … they stood with us during the crisis.”

That fact alone may give the Qataris the inside track should the Americans choose to use them as a bridge to the Iranians. And it would be a role that the Saudis, in their efforts to curry favor with the Biden administration while wanting to appear to stand up strongly to Iran, may find useful as well.

Saudi Foreign Affairs Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud has already staked out the kingdom’s position. In an interview he gave just ahead of the rapprochement with Qatar, he said Saudi Arabia was “in favor of dialogue with Iran” as well as “in favor of dialogue between the United States and Iran.” He went on to argue that the Trump administration had been open to dialogue but that it was “Iran that closed the doors to that dialogue.” That, it could be argued, is somewhat disingenuous, since Trump had adamantly refused, as a means of getting the Iranians to the table, to ease sanctions. Indeed, in the waning months of his presidency, he had ramped them even higher.

Prince Faisal, though he called for talks, was clear that there must be “real dialogue” that “addresses significant issues of concern — not just nuclear non-proliferation … but also ballistic missiles and, most importantly, the destabilizing activity … Without addressing Iran’s malign role and Iran’s funding of armed groups and terrorist organizations in the region and its attempts to impose its will by force on other states,” Prince Faisal said, “we are not going to have progress.” In a message intended for the incoming president’s ears, he concluded: “I sincerely hope that the Biden administration will take that into account when it formulates its policy in the region, and I believe they will.”

Time for War

Meanwhile, a conservative Israeli think tank, the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS), has just released a paper that says, forget about dialogue — it’s time for Israel to go to war with Iran. That sentiment is rooted in the author’s belief that the Iranians are hell-bent on securing nuclear weapons. Professor Efraim Inbar, the JISS president, writes that “Iran-Israel relations are essentially a zero-sum game, leaving Israel little choice but to act upon its existential instincts.” Noting numerous strikes by the Israel Defense Forces on Hezbollah in Syria and on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, he argues that Israel is already at war: “Indeed, Israel has decided to wage a low-profile limited war, ‘the campaign between wars,’ to obstruct Iranian attempts to transform Syria and Iraq into missile launching pads.”

Iran, Professor Inbar argues, will play a game of “talk and build” pretending to be serious about meaningful negotiations while building its nuclear capability — a point John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and others from the Trump administration have consistently made. “Essentially,” Inbar writes, “inconclusive talks preserve a status quo, a tense standoff in which Iran can go on uninhibited with its nuclear program. Indeed, bargaining, at which Iranians excel, and temporary concessions postpone diplomatic and economic pressures and, most importantly, preventive military strikes.” His solution is to suggest Israel “strike to pre-empt the return of Iran to the negotiating table.”

And, despite the Abraham Accords, he doesn’t put much stock in Israel’s new friendships in the Gulf. To the contrary, he worries that “as Iran becomes more powerful in the region and the US security umbrella becomes less reliable, reorienting their foreign policy towards Tehran might become more attractive.”

Granted, it is unlikely that Benjamin Netanyahu — preoccupied with keeping his political career alive as a way of avoiding prison — will seize on the professor’s bellicose strategy. That will be a relief, no doubt, to the Gulf states. The last thing they need is a war unleashed by their new Israeli friends right on the doorstep. Still, it points to the huge difficulties President Biden faces in attempting to revive the nuclear deal. His political foes and the right-wing media in America will move quickly to paint him as Tehran’s patsy. Regardless, the first step is to get the Iranians and the Americans around the table. Doha may be just about the best place to do that.

*[This article was originally published by Arab Digest.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

Dresden is one of Germany’s great cities, known worldwide for its meticulously rebuilt historic center, destroyed in one night at the end of World War II. Pre-Christmas shoppers have probably come across a Dresdner Christmas stollen, a bread full of nuts and candied fruit, coated in powdered sugar. Music lovers might have visited the city’s …
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The US has always proclaimed its dedication to freedom of expression as the founding virtue of its vaunted “exceptionalism.” Children learn in civics classes that the only brake on freedom of expression is the irresponsible, antisocial act of crying “fire” in a theater. In such a culture, the question of censorship should theoretically never arise, …
Continue Reading “Out of Many, Two: The American Art of Choosing Sides”
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