Coronavirus

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      How the 'great reset' of capitalism became an anti-lockdown conspiracy | Quinn Slobodian

      by

      At a recent anti-lockdown protest in London, thousands of people gathered to oppose what they saw as a clandestine power grab taking place under the cover of a pandemic. Some protesters carried cardboard signs bearing the name of the alleged takeover: “The great reset”. “They thought they could easily get their great reset,” one man shouted. “Little did they know! The pandemic’s a hoax!”The great reset, both the title of an airport book by the creative economy guru Richard Florida and a slogan favoured by corporate do-gooders, is also the term for a web of ideas that has become increasingly popular among the anti-lockdown right. In its most implausible version, this conspiracy imagines that a global elite is using Covid-19 as an opportunity to roll out radical policies such as forced vaccinations, digital ID cards and the renunciation of private property.Though a poor diagnosis of the causes of global events, the great reset offers a grim insight into the public mood. An unlikely source provided its initial spark. On 3 June, as the UK’s Covid death toll reached 50,000, the royal family’s YouTube account posted a video about a new sustainability drive headed by the Prince of Wales’s Sustainable Markets Initiative, in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF). Titled #TheGreatReset, the initiative called for “fairer outcomes” and the redirection of investment towards a more “sustainable future”. It had all the slick branding one has come to expect from the WEF, with a cinematic video of ice floes and beached whales, and a sonorous monologue by Prince Charles.The initiative joined a line of similar proclamations riffing on Karl Polanyi’s 1944 urtext, The Great Transformation. In the past decade, authors and politicians have talked of the “great financialization”, the “great regression”, the “great reversal”, the “great acceleration”, the “great unraveling” and the “great uncoupling”, to name just a few. The WEF’s great reset went largely unnoticed at first, arriving at the same time as George Floyd’s death spurred Black Lives Matter protests across the world. But the idea later caught on – in a way that organisers most likely didn’t expect.Weeks after the WEF’s announcement, Justin Haskins, the editorial director of the libertarian thinktank, the Heartland Institute, sounded klaxons about the great reset on Fox Business, Fox News and Glenn Beck’s network, TheBlaze. “The rough outline of the plan is clear,” he said. “Completely destroy the global capitalist economy and reform the western world.” Yet, apart from a few isolated yelps in the rightwing echo chamber, the great reset failed to catch on as a fully fledged conspiracy theory until Joe Biden’s victory in early November, when Google Trends shows that searches for the term surged online.The most obvious spark for this growing interest was a segment on Laura Ingraham’s television show on Fox News, which averaged 3.5 million viewers in 2020. “You know the idea, ‘never let a crisis go to waste’,” said Ingraham on 13 November. “Well, with the coronavirus, that idea went global. And since last spring, powerful people began to use this pandemic as a way to force radical social and economic change across the continents.”Years after the journalist Naomi Klein first identified the “shock doctrine” of radical policies that conservatives rolled out during disasters, the right was now appropriating this narrative for its own ends.A few days later, Ingraham returned to the theme. In a clip viewed some 2.4m times, she said Biden’s “handlers” believe in “the great reset of capitalism. It’s a plan to force a more equitable distribution of global resources.” The same day, another conservative commentator, Candace Owens, tweeted: “They are using Covid to crash western economies and implement communist policies. That’s what’s going on.” And in Australia, the Spectator columnist James Delingpole was interviewed on Sky News Australia (which, like Fox News, is owned by Rupert Murdoch). “Anyone who doesn’t realise that the great reset is the biggest threat to our form of life right now hasn’t been paying attention,” he said.The great reset theory is nonsense, and will probably become a prime target for the many new research centres and initiatives studying “disinformation” that have mushroomed on university campuses since 2016. But although we may scorn the ideas of anti-lockdown protesters, we ignore the unequal reality of the pandemic at our peril. Many of the world’s tech companies and CEOs have done well from this crisis. Indeed, in the same week that many Americans lost their jobs, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, added $13bn to his fortune in just a day. With surreal realities like these, where prominent members of the 1% really do appear to have gained from the pandemic, how much of a leap is it to persuade someone that the crisis has been orchestrated deliberately so that elites can amass power?The genius of Murdoch’s hosts was giving people a place to direct their anger. With his thick German accent and outpost in the Swiss Alps, the WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab, labelled a “charismatic German” and “dangerous Marxist leader” by Sky News Australia, was the perfect villain for this conspiracy. For rightwing pundits, the great reset was also a welcome distraction from their own complicity with power and wealth, having spent four years cheerleading a president whose major legislative achievement was a mammoth tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich.That the WEF has inspired a conspiracy about elites is unsurprising; the organisation is best known for its annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, when top corporate executives arrive in fleets of private jets to pay lip service to climate change. While Schwab has pronounced that “neoliberalism has had its day”, it is left to his critics to remind the WEF of its record, such as its publication of an annual “global competitiveness index” that has, since the 1970s, flogged national governments into a race to the bottom to adopt lower taxes and slash regulations.If the great reset tells us anything about political reality, it’s that corporate elites can’t win legitimacy through vacuous initiatives. People recoil, it turns out, at being treated like buggy hard drives that can be reset from above. Changing the conditions of people’s lives and the causes of political alienation will take far more than the WEF’s tone-deaf video about the opportunities of a pandemic, fronted by the royal family. It’s social movements such as Black Lives Matter and the climate strikers, not boardroom initiatives, that offer a better lesson in how to gather popular support for the transformations we need.• Quinn Slobodian is an associate professor of history at Wellesley College, Massachusetts• This article was amended on 4 December 2020 to reflect the fact that Candace Owens is not a Fox News host More

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Biden plans to urge all Americans to wear masks for 100 days after inauguration

      by

      President-elect and vice-president-elect Kamala Harris pledge to receive Covid vaccines as soon as possibleJoe Biden intends to call for all Americans to wear masks for 100 days after he becomes president in an attempt to bring down infection rates, as the coronavirus crisis continues to rage out of control in the US.The president-elect and vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, have also committed to receiving coronavirus vaccinations as soon as possible when, as expected, the first vaccines are approved by US regulators. Continue reading… More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Donald Trump stays silent as US sees record 2,804 coronavirus deaths in a day

      by

      President fails to address national crisis, instead remaining focused on false voter fraud claimsA day after 2,804 Americans died in a single day from the coronavirus pandemic – almost as many as in the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks – Donald Trump said nothing about the harrowing national crisis.The US president’s silence broke from the tradition of predecessors who have sought to play the role of “consoler-in-chief” to the American public after deadly bombings, school shootings and other tragedies. Continue reading… More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      US logs a record 3,157 coronavirus deaths in one day

      by

      The US recorded its highest daily number of coronavirus deaths on Wednesday, as the number of people admitted to hospital with Covid exceeded 100,000 for the first time since the pandemic began.
      According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, 3,157 new deaths were recorded on Wednesday, more than the number of people killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The previous high was the 2,607 deaths recorded on 15 April, at the beginning of the pandemic.

      There were 200,070 new cases on Wednesday, only the second time that new cases had exceeded 200,000. With the total caseload now standing at 13,911,728, the US is expected to record its 14-millionth case on Thursday, and experts predict the death toll could reach nearly 450,000 by the end of February.
      The deaths, cases and hospitalizations showed a country slipping deeper into crisis, with perhaps the worst yet to come, in part because of the delayed effects from Thanksgiving last week, when millions of Americans disregarded warnings to stay home and celebrate only with members of their household.
      Across the US, the surge has swamped hospitals and left nurses and other healthcare workers shorthanded and burned out.
      “The reality is December and January and February are going to be rough times. I actually believe they are going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation,” Dr Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Wednesday.
      Redfield said that about 90% of hospitals in the country were at stretched capacity.
      “We are at a very critical time right now about being able to maintain the resilience of our healthcare system,” he said.
      The grave total came as Joe Biden, the president-elect, threw his weight behind a bipartisan $908bn coronavirus relief effort in Congress which would provide $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits and direct $160bn to states and cities.
      Chart
      Hospital admissions grew over the course of November, setting new records nearly every day. The American Ambulance Association referred to a 911 emergency call system “at a breaking point”.
      Governor Laura Kelly of Kansas said there were no staffed ICU beds in the south-west of the state, while in New Mexico, coronavirus patients were using 27% of hospital beds, which has left the state with just 16 intensive care beds left to spare.
      In California alone, more than 8,000 people were being treated for coronavirus on Wednesday, after the state saw a record number of hospitalizations for the fourth day in a row.
      Health authorities had warned that the numbers could fluctuate strongly before and after Thanksgiving, as they often do around holidays and weekends, when because of reporting delays, figures often drop, then rise sharply a few days later as state and local agencies catch up with the backlog.
      The White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator, Dr Deborah Birx, urged Americans who had travelled over the recent holiday weekend to behave as though they had the virus.
      “If you are under 40, you need to assume you became infected during the Thanksgiving period if you gathered beyond your immediate household. Most likely, you will not have symptoms; however, you are dangerous to others.”
      April’s peak of cases and deaths was concentrated mostly in New York and New England, but the current spread of the virus is across the whole country, and shows no sign of slowing down. Over 1.1m new cases have been recorded in the last seven days alone, and 273,621 people have died in total.
      Donald Trump’s few public appearances recently have been dedicated to efforts to overturn the results of the election rather than deal with coronavirus. Before the election, Trump said that the country was rounding the corner, and the media would no longer talk about Covid after the election.
      Chart
      The mayor of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the US, with a population of 3.9 million, warned it was nearing a “devastating tipping point” this week, as officials introduced new guidance prohibiting mingling of households.
      “It’s time to hunker down,” Eric Garcetti said. “It’s time to cancel everything. And if it isn’t essential, don’t do it.”
      Los Angeles’s restrictions are far from a blanket ban on activity, however, with retail businesses allowed to remain open if they implement a set of protocols, and golf courses, tennis courts and outdoor gyms allowed to remain open. Film and TV production are also allowed to continue.
      Los Angeles county, which includes Los Angeles and surrounding areas, is home to 10 million people and has recorded 414,185 infections so far. So far 7,740 people have died.
      Some coronavirus relief programs passed by Congress are due to expire at the end of the year. Twelve million people are due to lose unemployment benefits as Democrats and Republicans remain at an impasse over the size of a new relief package.
      The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a stimulus bill worth $3tn in May and has pushed for a more than $2tn measure in recent weeks, but have dropped their demands to a $908bn bill, which Biden said on Wednesday he would support.
      Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, supported a $1tn bill in the summer but abandoned that after criticism from conservatives. McConnell has since been fixed on a $550bn bill, which has twice failed in the Senate.
      The vice-president, Mike Pence, who has been leading the Trump administration response to the pandemic, will participate in a coronavirus response roundtable in Memphis on Thursday. More

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Obama, Clinton and Bush pledge to take Covid vaccine on TV to show its safety

      by

      Former US presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton have pledged to get vaccinated for coronavirus on television to promote the safety of the vaccine.The trio’s effort comes as the Food and Drug Administration prepares to meet next week to decide whether to authorize a Covid-19 vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech.More than 3,100 people died from the coronavirus in America on Wednesday, a record single-day high and more than the number of people killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.Obama, Bush and Clinton’s willingness to address the seriousness of the pandemic is markedly different from the attitude of Donald Trump, who remained silent as the US passed 250,000 coronavirus deaths in November.In an interview with SiriusXM host Joe Madison, Obama said that he would trust Anthony Fauci if the infectious disease expert declares a coronavirus vaccine to be safe.“People like Anthony Fauci, who I know, and I’ve worked with, I trust completely,” Obama said. “So, if Anthony Fauci tells me this vaccine is safe, and can vaccinate, you know, immunize you from getting Covid, absolutely, I’m going to take it.”Many Americans say they will not agree to be vaccinated against Covid-19. A poll by Gallup, released in mid-November, showed that 42% of the country would not take the vaccine even if it was “available right now at no cost”.Obama said he would take the vaccine once it was available for people “who are less at risk”. The 44th president is 59 and is not known to suffer from any serious health problems.“I may end up taking it on TV or having it filmed, just so that people know that I trust this science, and what I don’t trust is getting Covid,” he added.Freddy Ford, Bush’s chief of staff, told CNN the former president is also willing to receive the vaccine on camera.“A few weeks ago, President Bush asked me to let Dr Fauci and Dr Birx know that, when the time is right, he wants to do what he can to help encourage his fellow citizens to get vaccinated,” Ford told CNN.“First, the vaccines need to be deemed safe and administered to the priority populations. Then, President Bush will get in line for his, and will gladly do so on camera.”Clinton’s press secretary told CNN that he too is prepared to be filmed as he takes the vaccine.“President Clinton will definitely take a vaccine as soon as available to him, based on the priorities determined by public health officials,” Angel Urena said. “And he will do it in a public setting if it will help urge all Americans to do the same.”The three presidents, along with Jimmy Carter and George H Bush, who died in 2018, previously teamed up to raise money for relief efforts for Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      Agriculture Is India’s Ray of Hope in Time of Crisis

      by

      As India completes 73 years of independence, agriculture has emerged as a mainstay of the economy. Despite the COVID-19 crisis, Indian agriculture is poised to grow by an estimated 3% in 2020-21. Shaktikanta Das, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), has acknowledged that agriculture remains a “beacon of hope” at a time the economy is shrinking.

      The government has announced a new agricultural policy that has drawn both supporters and detractors. Farmer protests have broken out in parts of the country. About 50,000 have marched to New Delhi from the agrarian state of Punjab, objecting to the loosening of price, storage and sales regulations that have traditionally shielded India’s farmers from the free market forces.

      Land Reform Can Transform India’s Economy

      READ MORE in this 360˚ Series

      As of August 25, the International Monetary Fund projected India’s real GDP growth to be 4.5% in 2020. This shrinking of the economy in a country with a growing population could lead to a major crisis. Already, jobs are scarce, industrial production has declined, services have suffered and demand has plummeted. Even after decades of independence, agriculture remains “the largest source of livelihoods in India.” As India gears up to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s 151st birthday, there is no better time than now to achieve the Gandhian vision of rural self-reliance.

      Blessing in Disguise

      COVID-19 has made rural areas more important than ever. On March 25, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown. It took the country by surprise. Millions of urban migrant workers were left with little choice but to walk home to their villages. Carrying their meager household possessions and with their small children in tow, many walked hundreds of kilometers, suffering thirst, hunger and pain. Some died en route.

      Embed from Getty Images

      India’s Economic Survey 2016-17 estimated the “annual inter-state migration [to be] about 5-6.5 million between 2001 and 2011.” In 2020, this migration has been reversed. People who fled rural areas for urban jobs have returned home. Chinmay Tumbe, a professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and an expert on migration, estimates that 30 million migrants might have returned to their villages since the lockdown began. The number could be as high as 70-80 million if reverse intrastate migration is accounted for.

      The reverse migration from urban to rural areas might be a blessing in disguise. Over the last few decades, urban migration has led to overcrowding of cities, the proliferation of slums and much misery for poor migrants. In cities, they have lacked community, cultural moorings and social safety nets. The massive migration to India’s cities was a result of failed economic policies that focused on megacities while neglecting villages. Several studies have found that at least 60% to 70% of the migrant workers who returned to their native places are unlikely to return back to the cities, at least not in the near future. The millions of migrant workers, whom I refer to as agricultural refugees, flocked to cities because the government’s economic policies kept them impoverished.

      A recent study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in collaboration with ICRIER, a New Delhi-based think tank, concluded that Indian farmers suffered a cumulative loss of Rs. 45 lakh crore (over $600 billion) between 2000 and 2016-17 because of such policies. Subsequently, the NITI Aayog, a policy think tank of the government of India, admitted that, between 2011-12 and 2015-16, the growth in real farm incomes was less than 0.5% every year. It was 0.44% to be exact.

      Since then, the growth in real farm incomes has been near zero. With farm incomes growing painfully slowly and then stagnating, what else could be expected from the rural workforce but migration to cities where menial jobs as daily wage workers give many the only shot at survival?

      Despite the Hardships

      Despite these hardships, Indian farmers have toiled hard to produce a bumper harvest year after year. This has led to overflowing food stocks. Reports show that this abundance of food grains has come in handy. The government has been able to provide subsidized rations to over 720 million people during the four months of the post-COVID-19 lockdown. In addition, the government has been able to provide free rations to the needy.

      A buoyant agricultural output has hidden a severe agrarian crisis. Farmers get little money for their produce. With less money available in their hands, rural demand has dipped. This had led to a slowdown in the Indian economy even prior to the lockdown. In a country where the agricultural workforce accounts for nearly 50% of the population, the surest way to bolster the economy is to create more rural demand. This involves providing farmers with decent incomes.   

      The lockdown has increased downward pressure on farm incomes. It coincided with the rabi (winter crop) harvest season and resulted in a crash in demand for winter produce. Farmers suffered huge losses in the case of perishables such as vegetables, fruits, flowers, poultry, dairy and fish. Not all news is grim though. On May 15, the United States Department of Agriculture estimated that India is on course to produce “a record 295.7 million metric tons, with estimated record rice, wheat and corn production.”

      For the next kharif (monsoon crop) season, the sowing area coverage of summer crops has increased by 13.92% as compared to last year. With rains expected to be normal, and with a much higher area under cultivation, the kharif harvest will be bountiful just like the rabi one. It seems that in these times of crisis, agriculture alone provides a ray of hope in India.

      Aim for an Economic New Normal

      The coronavirus pandemic has come as a timely reminder of the limitations of dominant economic thinking. Its inherent bias and blind spots stand exposed. For the last two centuries and more, economics has sacrificed agriculture on the altar of industry. The dominant assumption is that industry drives productivity and growth.

      India has never quite managed to industrialize like, for example, the US or China. Still, it has kept farm incomes low and neglected public investment in agriculture for many decades. As per the RBI, this investment hovered around 0.4% of the GDP between 2011-12 and 2017-18. It is little surprise that agriculture has floundered in India.

      The time has come to change outdated economic thinking. Agriculture matters to India because it employs a majority of the country’s population. It provides food security to 1.3 billion people whose ancestors suffered repeated famines until a few decades ago. COVID-19 gives the country the opportunity to return not to normal, but to a new normal.

      The return of migrant labor to villages gives India the opportunity to reinvigorate its rural economy. The country must tap the socioeconomic wealth of rural enterprise, its diversity, and the traditional knowledge base. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat — a self-reliant India — can only be achieved through a focus on agriculture. A sharp focus, sensible policies and public investment can unleash growth not only in the sector but also in the country.

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

    • 175 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Joe Biden warns of 250,000 further Covid deaths 'between now and January' – video

      by

      President-elect Joe Biden has warned there may be 250,000 further deaths due to Covid-19 between ‘now and January’. The warning came in a virtual event on the economic impact of Covid-19, with Biden stressing the importance of remaining vigilant during the holidays. ‘We’re likely to lose another 250,000 people dead between now and January,’ Biden said. ‘You hear me? Because people aren’t paying attention’
      Covid deaths at highest level since April as Biden pledges to ‘fight like hell’ for US investment – live
      Coronavirus live news: former French president dies of Covid complications; global deaths near 1.5m More