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We Are Not Worthless: Resentment, Misrecognition and Populist Mobilization
by Philippa Kaur 12 July 2021, 17:06
We live in resentful times. Dare we even utter these words? They sound as trite and cliché as that time-honored opening sentence that has introduced so many articles on populism in recent years, “A specter is haunting Europe.” It can easily apply to Latin America, or the United States or, why not, India, Turkey or the Philippines. But, to abuse a well-known adage, only because something is trite does not necessarily mean that it isn’t true.
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The fact is that we do live in an age of resentment, and populism has been among its main political beneficiaries. Resentment has been credited for propelling Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, contributing to the narrow success of the Brexit vote, playing a major role in Jair Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, and fueling the most recent upsurge in support for radical right-wing populist parties in Europe. Those who vote for them are said to be “fearful, angry and resentful of what their societies have done for them over the years.” Those of us who have been studying these developments for the past several decades could not agree more.
Unsocial Passion
Populism derives much of its impetus from the force of the emotions it evokes. The arguably most potent of these emotions is resentment. Unfortunately, more often than not, the link between resentment and populism is merely asserted, as if it were self-evident. As a result, resentment is either trivialized or comes to stand for about any emotion considered objectionable.
The reality is, however, that resentment is a highly complex, equivocal and ambiguous emotion. Etymologically, resentment derives from the French verb ressentir, which carries the connotation of feeling something over and over again, of obsessively revisiting a past injury (from the outdated se ressentir). It is for this reason that Adam Smith, in his 1759 treatise on moral sentiments ranks resentment among the “unsocial passions.” This is not to say that resentment is an entirely odious and noxious passion. On the contrary, Smith makes a strong argument that resentment is “one of the glues that can hold society together.” For, as Michelle Schwarze and John Scott have pointed out, “we need the perturbing passion of resentment to motivate our concern for injustice.”
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On this view, resentment represents what Sjoerd van Tuinen has called “a mechanism of retributive justice” that “prevents and remedies injuries.” It is from this sense that Smith’s notion of resentment as the glue that holds society together derives its logic and justification. If resentment is an unsocial passion, it is, as Jerry Evensky has argued, that resentment, if “unregulated … can be the most socially destructive of all passions.” Here, resentment is nothing but vindictiveness and rancor, the urge to find malicious pleasure in revenge. This is the dark side of resentment.
The other, positive side to resentment is what Smith calls the “safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.” In this iteration, resentment serves as a mechanism that “prompts us to beat off the mischief which is attempted to be done to us, and to retaliate that which is already done; that the offender may be made to repent of his injustice, and that others, through fear of like punishment, may be terrified from being guilty of the like offence.” This type of resentment is, as Jonathan Jacobs has put it, “vitally important to maintaining the proper regard for the status of persons as equal participants in a common moral world.”
As a moral emotion, Elisabetta Brighi has stated, “resentment is not only an appropriate individual response to failures of justice, but it is also an indispensable attitude to cultivate if an overall degree of fairness is to be maintained in society.”
An excerpt from a speech by Frederick Douglass, the prominent 19th-century African American abolitionist, orator and preacher illustrates the point. Speaking before the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, Douglass noted that it was “perhaps creditable to the American people” if European immigrants from Ireland, Italy or Hungary “all find in this goodly land a home.” For them, he continued, “the Americans have principles of justice, maxims of mercy, sentiments of religion and feelings of brotherhood in abundance.” When it came to “my poor people (alas, how poor!) enslaved, scourged, blasted, overwhelmed, and ruined,” however, “it would appear that America had neither justice, mercy, nor religion.” As a result, he charged, African Americans were aliens “in our native land.”
Strangers in Their Own Land
The irony should not be lost on anyone who has followed the course of American politics in recent years. In 2016, Donald Trump not only secured the Republican nomination, but he was also elected president of the United States. He did so on a platform that catered to the disenchantment of large swaths of the country’s white population with a political class that appeared to care little about their concerns. Trump scored particularly big among the millions of white Americans who thought of themselves as having become, in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s words, strangers in their own land.
Similar sentiments have been reported from the eastern part of Germany. A study from 2019 by one of Germany’s leading public opinion firms came to the conclusion that 30 years after unification, “many eastern Germans still feel like aliens in their own home.” The political fallout has been dramatic: The “feeling of alienness” has informed party preferences more than have differences between political agendas.
Other studies have shown that a significant number of eastern Germans see themselves as second-class citizens. Talia Marin, who teaches international economics at the technical university in Munich, traces these sentiments to the fact that after unification, many eastern Germans were being told in not particularly subtle ways that their skills and experience acquired during the communist period “had no value in a market economy.” Confronted with this “feeling of worthlessness,” they “lost their dignity.” A representative survey from 2019 provides evidence of the extent to which eastern Germans continue to feel slighted. In the survey, 80% of respondents agreed with the statement that their achievements in the decades following unification have not received the recognition they deserve.
Dignity, studies have shown, is central to contemporary politics of recognition. It is at this point that resentment and populism meet. For, as Grayson Hunt has argued, resentment represents “an interpersonal dynamic which desires the restoration of respect.” Recognition, Charles Taylor has noted, constitutes a “vital human need.” Recognition entails, in Avishai Margalit’s words, “acknowledging and honouring the status of others.”
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The opposite is misrecognition. Misrecognition, in turn, is a major source of resentment. Pierre Rosanvallon, in a recent essay on populism, ranks resentment among what he calls the “emotions of position.” These are emotions that express “rage over not being recognized, of being abandoned, despised, counting for nothing in the eyes of the powerful.” In his view, what provokes these emotions is the huge gap that often exists between objective reality, such as the fact that, in terms of GDP, France is ranked fifth among industrialized economies. Subjectively, however, the daily lived experience of a substantial number of French people is quite different who face difficulties making ends meet.
France is hardly unique. As early as 2008, one of the BBC’s top executives, Richard Klein, noted that “the people most affected by the upheaval” that had characterized Britain during the past decade, both economic and cultural, “have been all but ignored.” Klein’s comments were made at the occasion of a BBC documentary series on Britain’s white working class. The documentary revealed a profound sense of “victimhood, rage, abandonment and resentment” among these strata. Not even the Labour Party, once the protector of working-class interests, seemed to consider them important. As a result, they felt completely abandoned, no longer worthy of dignity and recognition.
This is what also seems to have happened in post-unification eastern Germans, or at least not in the perceptions of eastern Germans. Otherwise, they would hardly consider themselves second-class citizens, not on an equal footing compared to westerners. The result has been widespread resentment, surfacing, for instance, during the refugee crisis of 2015-16. At the time, the priority was to integrate the hundreds of thousands of newcomers Angela Merkel’s government had allowed to enter the country. For good reasons, in the east, the mood was one of irritation, if not outright hostility.
The predominant notion was that the government should first integrate what was once communist East Germany. Eastern Germans complained that in the years following unification they had been asked to fend for themselves. Yet a few decades later, the state was lavishing benefits and support on refugees. For them, eastern Germans grumbled, the state did have money, for “us,” not.
Misrecognition
The eastern German case is a classic example of misrecognition, defined as the denial of equal worth, which prevents its victims from interacting on par with the rest of society. It denies its victims mutual recognition and, in the most extreme case, excludes them from equitable and just (re)distribution. Objectively, this might sound like a thoroughly unfair assessment. After all, for decades, the German government transferred a massive amount of funds to former East Germany (GDR). German taxpayers were forced to pay a “solidarity surcharge” designed to finance Aufbau Ost, a program of reconstruction designed to allow the eastern part of the country to catch up with the west.
Yet none of these measures appear to have substantially reduced the lingering sense of resentment prevalent among large parts of the eastern German population. In 2019, around 60% of respondents in the state of Brandenburg considered themselves second-class citizens, while some 70% resented the economic and political dominance of westerners. Two years later, a few days prior to the regional election in Sachsen-Anhalt in June 2021, 75% of respondents there agreed with the statement that “in many areas eastern Germans continue to be second-class citizens.”
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Federico Tarragoni, a leading French expert on populism, provides another illustration of misrecognition, this time not from Western Europe but Latin America or, more precisely, from Venezuela. Tarragoni is primarily interested in explaining the widespread support Hugo Chavez garnered among large parts of Venezuela’s population. On the basis of discussions with ordinary Venezuelans living in the outskirts of Caracas, he reports the profound sense of injury and injustice experienced on a daily basis by the inhabitants of these barrios, who have a strong sense that nobody has any interest in them. They are cut off from the rest of Caracas. As one resident puts it, these are places where taxis don’t go. For Venezuela’s high society, these barrio dwellers are nothing but “savages” for whom they have nothing but disdain and contempt.
It should come as no surprise that contempt on the part of one side breeds resentment on the part of the other. Resentment, in turn, evokes a panoply of related emotions, such as anger, rage, even hatred, and particularly a wish for vengeance. When unfulfilled, however, when justified grievances are met with smug indifference on the part of those in charge, the wish for vengeance is likely to turn into resignation. In the sphere of politics, resignation is reflected in a drop in electoral participation, at least as long as there is no credible alternative. This is where populism comes in.
Feeding on Resentment
Populism feeds on resentment. Populist discourses of resentment “encode reactions to a sense of loss, powerlessness, and disenfranchisement; they consolidate feelings of fear, anger, bitterness, and shame.” The targets of populist discourses are, however, rarely the institutions and policies responsible for socio-economic problems, such as neoliberalism, international financial markets or transnational corporations. Rather, they are found in groups that appear to have gained in visibility and recognition, such as ethnic and sexual minorities, while others have been losing out. Populists channel the resulting wish for vengeance to the one place where everybody, independent of their social status, has a voice — at the polls.
Election time is payback time. This is how two prominent Austrian political scientists commented on the fulminant upsurge of support for the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) under its new leader, Jörg Haider, in the late 1980s. In the years that followed, the Austrian experience was replicated in a number of Western European countries, most notably Italy, Switzerland and across Scandinavia. The arguably most egregious case in point, of course, was Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 — an act of vengeance, at least in part, against a political establishment that more often than not appeared to show little more than thinly veiled contempt for ordinary people and their increasingly dim life chances (viz Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”).
The vote for Trump was an instance of what Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, from the London School of Economics, has characterized as “the revenge of the places that don’t matter.” These are once-prosperous regions that have fallen on hard times, walloped by the decline of mining, by deindustrialization and offshoring: the Rust Belt in the United States, northern England in the UK, Wallonia in Belgium, the Haut-de-France region in the north of France. These areas have been left behind in the race to remain competitive — or regain lost competitiveness — in the brave new world informed by financialization and globalization.
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To be sure, these developments have been going on for some time. More than a decade ago already, the French political geographer Christoph Guilluy drew attention to the emergence of what he called “la France périphérique” — peripheral France. These are areas increasingly cut off from the dynamic urban centers. These are the areas, Guilluy noted, where the large majority of the “new popular classes” live, far away from the “most active job markets.” Thus, Guilluy charged, “for the first time in history, the popular classes no longer reside ‘where the wealth is created’ but in a peripheral France, far from the areas that ‘matter.’”
The demographer and historian Hervé le Bras has extended the territorial analysis to include France’s educated middle class. He finds that “territorial segregation” increasingly also affects these social strata, segregation largely dictated by educational level. The higher the level of education, the closer a person lives to the urban center. The opposite is true for those disposing of lower levels of schooling who, as a result, see their upward mobility effectively blocked. The situation of qualified workers is hardly any better. Their qualifications progressively devalorized, they too find themselves relegated to the periphery, far away from the most advanced urban centers, more often than not forced to do work below their qualifications.
Brave New World
In this brave new world, it seems, a growing number of people are left with the impression that they have become structurally irrelevant, both as producers, given their lack of sought-after skills, and as consumers, given their limited purchasing power. Unfortunately for the established parties, as Rodriguez-Pose readily acknowledges, the structurally irrelevant don’t take their fate lying down. Telling people that where they live, where they have grown up and where they belong doesn’t matter, or that they should move to greener shores where opportunities abound more often than not has provoked a backlash, which has found its most striking expression in growing support for populist movements and parties, both on the left and on the right.
The eastern part of Germany is a paradigmatic case in point. British studies suggest that there is a link between geographical mobility — and the lack thereof — and support for populism. To be sure, there are plenty of people who insist on staying in their familiar surroundings for various perfectly sensible reasons, such as family, friends and proximity to nature. At the same time, however, there are also plenty of people who stay because they have no options, which, in turn, breeds resentment.
As Rodríguez-Pose has observed, “the lack of capacity and/of opportunities for mobility implies that a considerable part of the local population is effectively stuck in areas considered to have no future. Hence, the seed for revenge is planted.” This is what has happened in parts of eastern Germany. One of the most striking demographic characteristics of eastern Germany is its skewed age distribution, disproportionately dominated by the elderly. And for good reason: After unification, many of those who could get away left in search of better life chances in the west.
The German ethnologist Wolfgang Kaschuba has characterized the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the east as “the revenge of the villages.” In fact, a number of studies have shown that the AfD did best in structurally weak areas, characterized by demographic decline and lack of perspectives for the future. The most prominent example is Lusatia, a region in eastern Brandenburg and Saxony, bordering on Poland. In the regional elections in 2019, the AfD reached some of its best results in Lusatian villages, in some cases almost 50% of the vote.
The region is known for lignite mining, which during the GDR period represented a major industrial sector, attracting a number of industries and providing employment for the whole region. After unification, however, most of these industries closed down, resulting in mass unemployment and a large-scale exodus of anyone who could. The recent reversal of Germany’s energy policy, which entails a drastic reduction of coal in the energy mix, means that the days of lignite mining are counted — another blow to the region, rendering it even more economically marginal — if not entirely irrelevant. Under the circumstances, resentment is likely to remain relatively high in the region and with it continued support for the AfD.
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Resentment, the Presbyterian bishop, theologian and moral philosopher Joseph Butler insisted in a sermon from 1726, is “one of the common bonds, by which society holds itself” — a notion later adopted by Adam Smith. Today, the opposite appears to be the case. Today, more often than not, resentment is the main driver behind the rise of identity-based particularism (also known as tribalism) and affective polarization, both in the United States and a growing number of other advanced liberal democracies.
Diversity in its different forms, with ever-more groups seeking recognition, breeds resentment among the hitherto privileged who perceive their status as being assaulted, lowered and diminished. The current stage of liberal democracy, or so it seems, generates myriad injuries and grievances and multiple perceptions of victimization, each one of them prone to fuel resentment, providing a basis for new waves of populist mobilization.
Populist mobilization, in order to have a chance to succeed at the polls, has to offer a positive motivation to those who experienced disrespect, contempt, slight or a general lack of recognition or appreciation. This is, to a certain extent at least, what is meant when we talk about the “populist valorization” of the experiences of ordinary people. Valorization means in this context taking ordinary people, their concerns and grievances seriously. Populist valorization, however, falls far short of the norms of recognition, which are based on mutual respect and esteem.
It represents nothing more than what Onni Hirvonen and Joonas Pennanen characterize as a “pathological form of politics of recognition” centered upon “the in-group recognition between the members of the populist camp” and the denigration of anyone outside. As such, it cannot but “contribute to the feelings of alienation and social marginalization” that were the source of resentment in the first place. It is unlikely to assuage the profound political disaffection permeating contemporary advanced liberal democracies. In the final analysis, the only ones who truly benefit from the politics of resentment are populist entrepreneurs.
*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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in World Politics
Can an Inflatable Economy Survive?
by Philippa Kaur 9 July 2021, 11:49
US President Joe Biden’s approval ratings have remained consistently positive since his inauguration in January, inspiring hope among his supporters and the liberal media that he can fulfill at least some of his campaign promises. With extremely thin majorities in both houses of Congress, Biden has to be sure that the “moderates” in his party follow his lead. The term “moderate Democrat” designates the type of elected official who wins office in a Democratic district but possesses a mindset in line with conservative Republican ideology. In particular, such people tend to reject anything that reeks of excessive spending or may create pressure to increase taxes.
But that is not all. One of Biden’s most intimate advisers during last year’s election campaign, economist and former director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, Larry Summers, has been leading a vociferous campaign opposing Biden’s policies on the grounds of a lurking danger of inflation. He fears that the combined effect of COVID-19 relief and an ambitious infrastructure project accompanied by diverse social reforms will stretch the economy to the point of triggering uncontrollable inflation, the bugbear of traditional politicians. Biden may want to be remembered as the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Summers appears to be inspired by the thinking of FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover.
Hoover was the president on whose watch the 1929 stock market crash occurred. Historians have identified excessive leveraging and the inflation of asset prices as the main contributing factor to the 1929 crash that marked the end of the Roaring ‘20s. That sobriquet for a decade that followed World War I and left in its wake the Great Depression reflects the wild optimism that reigned at the time. The US had survived a “war to end all wars” and now embraced what President Warren G. Harding called “the return to normalcy.”
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Proud of their role in ending Europe’s war, Americans — though deprived of alcohol that had been banned in 1919 by a constitutional amendment — interpreted normalcy as an open invitation to self-indulgence. Throughout that roaring decade, the stock market reached for the ceiling before crumbling to the floor in 1929.
To avoid the mistakes that led to depression, politicians have since crafted their preferred ways of fending off imminent disaster. They called the latest trick, perfected after 2008, quantitative easing (QE), a fancy name for the printing of money gifted to banks and corporations skilled at keeping it out of the reach of ordinary people. Quantitative easing magically inflated asset prices with little effect on the consumer index, a phenomenon all politicians gloried in for two reasons. First, it avoided consumer blowback against price-tag inflation. That always puts voters in a bad mood, threatening prospects of reelection. Second, QE meant that there would be unlimited cash available to corporate donors to finance their political campaigns.
The COVID-19 crisis arrived at a point where interest rates had fallen to close to 0% and in some cases had gone negative. The encouraging news concerning effective vaccines at the end of 2020 gave hope of a rapid return to Hardingesque normalcy. But today, things have become more complicated. The new Delta variant of the coronavirus threatens the optimists’ vision of a prosperous post-pandemic world. Add to that the raging debate about spending trillions to implement the long-delayed response to a crumbling infrastructure in the US and it becomes clear that many now doubt the likelihood of a smooth transition to a new normalcy, in which the market’s productive forces, guided by an invisible hand, will solve problems on their own while government spending is reined in.
The question arises: Is it reasonable to print money to solve otherwise unsolvable problems? Larry Summers says it will provoke inflation. Janet Yellen, Biden’s treasury secretary, disagrees: “Is there a risk of inflation? I think there’s a small risk. And I think it’s manageable.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Inflation:
1. The characteristic expansion of all types of bubbles during their formation and preceding the moment at which they burst
2. A general characteristic of any system that seeks to build an elaborate superstructure of hyperreality to replace traditional human activities, institutions, economic relations and social behavior, whose elements range from methods of governing and ideological frameworks to acceptable forms of public rhetoric
Contextual Note
Nobel Prize-winning economist, New York Times columnist and loyal Democrat Paul Krugman confessed this week that “while I’m in the camp that sees the current inflation as a transitory problem, we could be wrong.” He thus acknowledges that the threat of inflation is real while reiterating an optimism similar to Yellen’s. Consistent with The Times’ editorial line, he aligns with the president’s political agenda of Biden in his quest to be remembered as a second FDR.
Some have asserted that Summers’ bitterness about not having been handed the job of treasury secretary explains his loud complaining about the danger of inflation. But Summers may have missed the real threat facing the economy, just as he misjudged not only the situation in 2007 but even the Asian crisis in the 1990s. “In terms of judgment, in forecasting his record has been atrocious,” according to Joseph Stiglitz. But does that mean Yellen and Krugman are correct?
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Theron Mohamed, writing for Business Insider, cites a number of experts who beg to differ, including Michael Burry, who famously predicted the 2008 crash and became the hero of the book and film, “The Big Short.” These market analysts see something far worse than inflation in the offing. According to Mohamed, “Michael Burry and Jeremy Grantham are bracing for a devastating crash across financial markets. They’re far from the only experts to warn that rampant speculation fueled by government stimulus programs can’t shore up asset prices forever.”
Whereas Summers and Krugman are debating possible effects on the consumer index, Burry and Grantham are talking about a market meltdown, possibly a new depression. And they dare to designate the true villain: the obsession with shoring up asset prices.
Historical Note
A recent study documented by Yale Insights points to a historical constant that exists despite radically changing market and regulatory conditions. “Downward leverage spirals are believed to be one of the main triggers of the 1929 U.S. stock market crash,” professor Kelly Shue points out. “Leverage-induced fire sales were also a contributing factor to the 2007-2008 financial crisis in the U.S.” She adds that the same phenomenon underlay the Chinese stock market crash in 2015.
Measures taken with the intent of avoiding a depression have paradoxically aggravated the conditions that may result in a monumentally devastating depression. The intention of the Treasury and the Fed to employ quantitative easing to “shore up asset prices forever” contains one significant error: the belief in “forever.” It parallels the belief of every administration since George W. Bush — now for the first time called into question by Biden — that American wars can also be carried on forever.
The link between the two may be more direct than most people recognize. Military investment and activity have become the core of the US economy. Bloated defense budgets are today’s “pump priming.” Wars keep a cycle of investment alive that nourishes not only industries that directly benefit from defense procurement but more broadly the entire technology sector, which has become the locomotive of the civil economy.
The problem may even sink deeper into the structure of the US economy. Robert Kuttner recently unveiled a “dirty little secret of the recent era of very low inflation.” He believes that “the prime source of well-behaved prices has been shabby wages.” Citing “outsourced manufacturing, gig work, weakened unions, and a low-wage service sector,” he notes that the economy’s very real gains from productivity growth have all “gone to the top.”
When nearly all incremental wealth is tied up in assets that may come tumbling down at any moment, nobody is secure. After the crash, the rich will lament their losses and their inability to rebuild. Millions will lose their gig work and below-survival wages in real jobs with no hope for a rebound. And with COVID-19 still creating havoc and climate change more and more visibly aggravating its effects, the problem of inflation we should be most worried about is the verbal inflation of experts who believe their discourse is capable of shoring up a failing system.
*[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
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America, the Stumbling Giant
by Philippa Kaur 8 July 2021, 15:03
The United States has been the most powerful country in the world for 130 years and has actively led the international community for 75. With only 4.25% of the world’s population, the US still accounts for a little more than 24% of the world’s GNP. Its military is by far the world’s most powerful, with a budget larger than the next 12 biggest militaries combined. The US has the highest per capita income of any major country and the most diverse and creative economy the world has ever seen. It leads in virtually every technology critical for economic and military predominance, from artificial intelligence to materials science. Its democracy has set a standard the world has looked up to for 240 years.
But the American giant is stumbling. Today, Americans fear that the US is in decline. Its economy is progressively skewed to the ultra-rich. Its national government is almost paralyzed. China is challenging Washington’s international power and leadership. American society is more divided than at any time since the Civil War, with up to 40% of Americans believing that a “strong man” leader — a fascist — is preferable to democracy.
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Almost all Americans worry that for the first time in history, their children will be poorer than they are. Many of America’s political moderates and progressives fear that America’s democracy will be replaced by fascistic autocracy and consider former president Donald Trump and the current Republican Party fascist. Yet on the other side of America’s political divide, an NPR/Ipsos poll in December 2020 found that 39% of Americans believe that the country is controlled by a sinister “deep state,” and this enrages them.
Social Stresses
My family and I are literally what made America. Since my ancestors arrived in 1620 on the Mayflower off the shore of Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, America was created by “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” popularly known as WASPs. The culture that shaped the United States for 350 years was overwhelmingly English, then Western European, with a dominant Puritanical, Protestant ethos.
For 15 generations, America was also culturally and legally a society for whites. Even for my generation growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, many Americans still changed their surnames to sound more “Anglo” — dropping the last vowel, say, from the Italian (and Catholic) “Lombardi” to “Lombard,” to appear more WASP-like and less “ethnic” or un-American. Fully 10% of the population was black, but they were excluded from power and lived on the cultural periphery. Half the nation still lived in an apartheid “whites only” regime, the legacy of centuries of white domination and black slavery. In the media, one saw only white faces like mine, except in subordinate or, rarely, in “exotic” roles. And, of course, America, like the rest of the world since time immemorial, was only a man’s world.
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But with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, America began a stupendous social change, with blacks and women gaining unprecedented rights. Furthermore, non-WASP immigrants have arrived in the US by the tens of millions. When I was born, America was over 88% white. By the year 2045, under 50% will be white. The trend has already been clear for decades. In the past dozen years, the US has elected a black president twice, a black-Indian female vice president, and its second Catholic president.
Today, the US has a vibrant black middle class. Its Asian population is growing rapidly. Asian and Indian Americans hold many prominent positions in the country’s economic and scientific establishments. Women now hold countless key positions in all sectors of the US economy, including boardrooms. This demographic and social revolution has diversified America but also engendered a nativist, racist reaction and the rise of a fascist: Donald Trump.
Socially conservative whites — especially the least educated — have literally taken to the streets to “save” their country from these changes. Donald Trump voices their anger and their demands. Having lost the presidential election of 2020 yet having refused to accept verified results, the Republican Party has taken dozens of measures to restrict voting access for non-whites. There has been talk of civil war, and there has been an insurrection.
Economic Stresses
Real incomes have largely stagnated for about 40 years. Globalization has destroyed entire sectors of America’s middle-class economy. Much of US manufacturing has moved abroad to lower-wage economies. In the 1960s, the single male income earner could provide a middle-class life for most families. Today, 60% of families require two full-time incomes to maintain a middle-class life. According to a Brookings paper, women account for “91% of the total income gain for their families.”
In 2019, a Federal Reserve study found that almost 40% of Americans “wouldn’t be able to cover a $400 emergency with cash, savings or a credit-card charge that they could quickly pay off.” With $41.52 trillion in assets, the top 1% of households control more than 32% of the country’s wealth. With just $2.62 trillion in assets, the bottom 50% own a mere 2%. This concentration of wealth is creating social and political strains.
America Is No Longer One Nation
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The Republican Party has based its appeal on these grievances for decades, and Trump, the classic demagogue, exploited them all the way to the presidency. Blaming stagnation and increasing economic insecurity of ordinary Americans — and their loss of white social status — on globalization has been a ploy of Republicans since the mid-1960s. The party has progressively based its appeal on such tropes and fears since.
Today, Republicans systematically oppose any action by the federal government as a threat to “freedom.” They seek to reduce taxes, gut economic regulations, lower investments in infrastructure and slash expenditure on education, which they deem to be a means of dangerous social engineering.
Political Stresses
As McKay Coppins has pointed out in The Atlantic, after emerging as the leader of the Republican Party in 1994, “Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise.” As speaker of the House of Representatives, Gingrich sought to demonize and destroy the Democratic Party. He refused to cooperate, let alone compromise with the Democrats at any level either in the White House or Congress.
When Barack Obama was elected president, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acted ruthlessly to oppose everything the Obama administration proposed. Before the 2010 midterm elections, McConnell declared: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Today, McConnell has stated that “100% of his focus is on blocking” President Biden’s agenda.
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Since the mid-1990s, American politics has turned increasingly polarized, its federal government almost paralyzed. There are two principal reasons the US suffers from political rigor mortis. First, the Republican Party has become increasingly intransigent and partisan. The Democratic Party remains more moderate and open to compromise but has gotten little in return from the Republicans. Second, America’s electoral structures accord a disproportionate weight to rural districts, which is where the anxious, angry and reactionary WASPs and other whites live. The more ethnically diverse, urban and educated citizens tend to live in the major cities, heavily concentrated on the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
On July 1, 2019, Wyoming’s population was 578,759 while California’s numbered 39,512,223. In the presidential elections, Wyoming receives three electoral college votes; California receives 55. This means a vote for president in Wyoming is worth more than 3.72 times a vote in California. However, it is in voting for the US Senate where Wyoming really has an edge. Every state in the US elects two senators, regardless of its population. This makes a vote in Wyoming 68.27 times more valuable than a vote in California.
This structural bias toward less populous rural states gives Republicans a tremendous political advantage. It has enabled them to triumph in two of the last six presidential elections despite winning a minority of the popular vote and to frequently hold a majority in Congress and Senate, despite receiving lower overall votes. America is so evenly divided politically that one party often controls the White House while the other dominates Congress, or at least one of its two chambers. Given the partisan gridlock in the US, this virtually brings legislation to a halt.
The consequences of this electoral and institutional schizophrenia are everywhere to see and experience: American roads, bridges, water mains, harbor facilities and education now lag far behind most developed countries and even many emerging economies. Some foreign visitors to the US have commented that American infrastructure reminds them of the 1950s — which is precisely when much of it was built. The Shinkansen, Japan’s bullet train network, awes Americans, including myself, and it is 50 years old. America has always been a “third-world country” for the ethnically excluded. Now, the strains and failures of America’s social, economic and political paralysis extend more broadly through society. Even the WASPs are not spared.
Global Stresses
Two global issues in particular shape American public life and self-doubts. First, the US is no longer the only great power. China’s rise has been breathtaking. Beijing challenges American preeminence in trade, technology, diplomacy and military strength, posing the greatest challenge to the US since World War II. Many Americans fear that China’s rise is a sign of American decline.
Second, global warming threatens the American way of life and shapes much of the political debate about the environment, the economy and the role of government. Signs of a literal cataclysm are already upon us. The West Coast has experienced the worst forest fires in recorded history and is living through the worst drought in 500 years. In 2012, the US Geological Survey estimated that sea levels would rise on the East Coast by nearly 50 centimeters by 2050. In 2021, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association projects the same level of sea rise in Boston and Massachusetts. By 2050, the spot where my Mayflower ancestors began the American experiment 400 years ago will be swallowed by the sea.
Yet even global warming divides America. Most of the Republican Party believes that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the “deep state” so that scientists can have jobs. Some even assert that the California wildfires are linked to “Jewish space lasers.” These Republican beliefs are an amalgam of lunacy and old fascist tropes. That one of the country’s two major political parties believes such dangerous lies and delusions bodes ill for America’s future.
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During his campaign and since becoming president, Joe Biden has declared that the next four years will be a “battle for the soul of the nation.” He and his party have to end the paralysis of America’s public institutions and democracy, heal social divisions, and reduce growing economic inequality. They must rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure and rise to the challenge of China as a fast-emerging peer competitor in international and economic affairs.
The Republican Party and nearly 40% of the American population will oppose every step Biden attempts. The rural bias in the country’s political structures consistently grants this 40% control of about half the House of Representatives and Senate. Biden must win majorities to implement his transformative economic, social, political and diplomatic policies with only the slimmest majority possible in the legislature.
Furthermore, this majority is fragile. Of the 100 seats in the Senate, Republicans have 50, Democrats 48 and independents two, both of whom caucus with the Democrats. The vice president presides over the Senate and supports the president but may only vote in the event of a 50-50 split. Historically, most presidents have struggled to enact their agenda even with strong electoral majorities.
No president since Abraham Lincoln in 1861 has had to deal with such an array of grave social, political and economic crises. Throughout history, many states have proven unable to address structural, systemic problems with legislation and policies that do not profoundly alter these structures or systems. In most instances, however, this requires major social and political upheaval, sometimes even revolution. This has happened before in America — in 1776, when there was revolution, in 1861, when there was civil war, and in 1929, when there was economic collapse.
Within the current framework of American democracy, Biden can probably only succeed in radically addressing America’s daunting democratic, diplomatic, social, political and economic challenges if his party wins a more solid majority in both chambers of Congress. Thus, all eyes, hopes and fears turn to America’s congressional elections of 2022, now only 16 months away. This historic vote may well decide who wins the “battle for the soul of the nation.”
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Biden Washes His Hands of the Israel-Palestine Affair
by Philippa Kaur 17 May 2021, 15:01
Faced with a serious clash in Jerusalem between two communities divided on the subject of religion, the Roman Empire’s man of the hour, its colonial governor Pontius Pilate made the bold decision to suppress his own opinion and not to intervene in the debate. As a patriotic polytheist, he had no time to waste on disputes concerning monotheistic truth. Instead, he washed his hands before the raging mob. He let those who held local power and who shouted the loudest have their way. His action, dating from two thousand years ago, eventually spawned the proverbial expression, “To wash your hands of the affair.”
When a far more violent crisis broke out in Jerusalem last week, US President Joe Biden demonstrated his own firm resolution to steer clear of an escalating conflict that had begun in East Jerusalem and has now reached beyond Israel’s borders into Lebanon and Jordan. Biden has taken up his post at the washbasin to avoid having to speculate about the truth.
White America’s Burden in the Holy Land
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In a phone call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Wednesday, Biden reaffirmed the position traditionally taken by all recent US presidents that consists of deferring to Israel’s every wish. Netanyahu appreciated Biden’s compliance. He reiterated to the media the logic the Biden administration endorsed: “They have upheld our natural and self-evident right to defend ourselves, to act in self-defense against these terrorists who both attack civilians and hide behind civilians.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Self-evident:
Unquestionably true, especially when the assertion corresponds to one’s self-interest
Contextual Note
When a modern politician bandies about the adjective “self-evident,” it inevitably evokes Thomas Jefferson’s famous words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
As a child of the European Enlightenment, Jefferson built his reasoning on philosophical grounds that appear beyond the scope of Bibi Netanyahu’s commitment to self-interested expediency. What Jefferson described as self-evident were “truths.” In contrast, Netanyahu evokes “rights” he considers self-evident, specifically the right to violate international law when Israel feels threatened. Jefferson’s “truths” are the equivalent of axioms in mathematics. They stand as true without being derived logically from any other truth. Netanyahu’s “rights” are self-declared rather than self-evident.
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Jefferson modeled his thought on the political philosophy of the English philosopher John Locke, a proponent of government by consent of the governed. Locke insisted on the government’s requirement to respect its citizens’ “life, liberty and property.” Jefferson extended the meaning of “property” by calling it “the pursuit of happiness.” Even non-property owners in a democracy could thus be deemed citizens. (That of course excluded slaves, including Jefferson’s own slaves, who existed as the property of property owners).
Most modern politicians have lost all interest in philosophy. They prefer to evoke half-remembered philosophical concepts and use them as meaningless rhetorical placeholders. In his attempt to sound Jeffersonian, Netanyahu expediently skips an important step in Locke’s and Jefferson’s political reasoning: the philosopher’s insistence that a government’s legitimacy is derived from the consent of the governed. That ultimately means that political rights exist not as self-evident principles but as an effect of the law, which is the expression of a social and political consensus serving to limit rather than expand the government’s capacity for aggression.
Netanyahu takes the Jeffersonian idea of a self-evident truth about political systems, turns it on its head and transforms it into the inalienable right of the government to violate the rights of the people under its jurisdiction. Concerning self-evident truths, Locke wrote: “I may warn men not to make an ill use of them, for the confirming themselves in errors.”
Some justly accuse Jefferson of cheating, having glossed over the paradox of slavery while asserting that all men are created equal. Netanyahu’s insistence on Israel’s “self-evident right” to self-defense places him closer to Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher of passive obedience to governmental authority, than to Locke. Hobbes’ emphasized the idea of “sovereignty by institution.” It supposes citizens voluntarily yield their rights to the institution and cannot contest its sovereignty.
Bibi naturally assumes the Jews have transferred their rights to his government. He also expects the Israeli Arabs — citizens who theoretically, but not in practice, have equal rights with the Jews — to do the same, but they now may be revolting. As for the Palestinians in the occupied territories, the only rights they can claim are derived from international law, which the Israeli government routinely flouts.
The current strife in Jerusalem began with the cynical, supposedly legally justified expulsion of Palestinians, who had been living in their homes in East Jerusalem for decades after the forced reassignment of residency that followed the Palestinian exodus in 1948. This demonstrates how far from the self-evident truths of Jefferson and Locke the supposedly democratic Israeli government has veered. Property even for Arab citizens of Israel is a purely relative concept. As for life and liberty, the Gazans, in their open-air prison, have no hope of enjoying such rights.
Historical Note
When the Israelis destroyed the building housing the offices of AP and Al Jazeera in Gaza City on Saturday, they demonstrated their disdain for the liberty of the press. Americans and the US government should be appalled at this violation of what they deem to be sacred “constitutional” values. But it has become evident — if not self-evident — that the Biden administration has no interest in promoting a moral reading of the events in Israel. Calling for a voluntary ceasefire is admirable but will have no effect. When he expressed his “hope … that we will see this coming to a conclusion sooner than later,” he appeared hopeful but helpless.
In his victory speech in November, Biden insisted that the nation’s vocation was to “lead by the force of its example and not the example of force.” Faced with the current crisis, he is neither showing an example nor leading, but rather following Israel’s example of leading by force. Many are wondering whether the very idea of leadership by the United States hasn’t lost its former meaning.
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In February, clownish UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson effusively announced that “Joe Biden has put the United States back as leader of the free world in a fantastic move that has helped the West to unite.” Johnson was reacting to the speech in which Biden promised to return to the Paris Climate Agreement and move forward with the Iran nuclear deal. The return to the climate accord took place effortlessly but appears to be of little consequence. As for the Iran deal, negotiations have been engaged but possibly too late to expect any enduring success.
The Biden administration’s anemic reaction to the growing crisis in the Middle East demonstrates that, rather than confirming the nation’s status as “leader of the free world,” it would be more apt to call it “the follower of an apartheid state.” A 2017 article in The Atlantic pointed to the persistent but absurd habit reigning in the media of referring to the US president as the “leader of the free world.” The idea of dividing the globe into the free and the unfree worlds theoretically disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union. This time around, what has disappeared is the very idea of American leadership. Fewer and fewer countries believe in it. Biden’s hesitations and inaction on various important issues illustrate why.
Martin Indyck, writing for Foreign Affairs, offers a realistic analysis of the stakes and tactics underlying the superficial game the various concerned parties have been playing in the current crisis. He concludes that “the most basic instincts of the Biden administration are correct.” This is reassuring for the administration, but Indyck may not have noticed the long-term deterioration of the world’s perception of US leadership. He may be mistaken when he sees little risk in simply throwing up one’s hands at yet another Middle East crisis and hoping for a return to “normal.”
Pontius Pilate’s disinfected hands played a role in launching the religion that would eventually dominate Europe. Still, Pilate’s Roman Empire thrived for another three centuries before one of its emperors, Constantine, decided to turn it over to the Christians. How long does Biden expect his empire to last?
*[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
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The Future of Jerusalem Matters to Us All
by Philippa Kaur 13 May 2021, 09:47
No city in the world has seized the imagination or captivated the soul in the way that Jerusalem has. Revered by more than half the world’s population, Jerusalem is the beating heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is a city widely held to have been inhabited by the Jebusites, long before the coming of Abraham to whose descendants the land of Canaan is believed by some to have been divinely promised. However, such a claim, irrespective of its authenticity, does not and cannot be used to justify occupation, injustice and the undermining of the fundamental rights of peoples to live in their homelands in both peace and security.
The suffering of Arab Jerusalemites — Christian and Muslim — has gone on for far too long. In 1967, the Arab residents of the Moroccan Quarter were forcefully evicted from their homes before Israeli forces razed the neighborhood entirely, and the same story seems to have repeated itself ever since, with the recent events at Bab al-Amoud, Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah being its latest iterations.
Israel Must Accept ICC Jurisdiction Over Palestine
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When on the June, 27, 1967, Israel extended the remit of its laws and administration to include the Old City and other areas, it acted in direct contravention of Article 43 of the Hague Regulations that requires an occupying power to “respect, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.” Any impartial examination of Israeli measures, both administrative and other, taken in relation to Jerusalem, would make patently clear that Article 43 has been violated, and so have Articles 56 and 46.
Ample Evidence
There is ample evidence of the demolition of privately-owned Arab property in Jerusalem to make way for the construction of large apartment complexes in the environs of a city now enlarged. There is ample evidence too of the expropriation of private land and property, which is not, in point of fact, necessarily justifiable on national security grounds. Dispossession, the purpose of which can only be to reconfigure the demographic balance and to prevent the Palestinians from exercising their right to self-determination, does, however, meet Israel’s demand for housing.
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When expropriation amounts to confiscation, it is likely to be in breach of Article 46, which states that “private property must be respected” and “cannot be confiscated.” Demolitions clearly violate Article 53, which prohibits the destruction of property situated in occupied territory. In addition, when enacted as punitive measures, demolition and/or confiscation clearly amount to collective punishment, a crime under international law and a violation of the provisions of international humanitarian law and the principles of customary international law.
Turning a blind eye to flagrant violations of human rights law and international law does have grave repercussions. In our rules-based international order, world peace and security depend ultimately on UN member states upholding Security Council resolutions that in relation to the question of Palestine criminalize the acquisition of territory by force, the building of settlements in occupied territory and the misrepresentation and falsification of facts on the ground. Not only are confiscation, demolition and annexation serious breaches of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, but they also violate Security Council and General Assembly resolutions that hold “inadmissible” the taking of land or territory by war or by force.
Equally inadmissible is annexation. Among the disastrous consequences of further annexation would be the resulting demographic imbalance in the occupied West Bank. Many Palestinians will neither leave their land or their home voluntarily nor relinquish them without resistance. Annexation is a clear breach of international law, which precludes, indeed considers a crime, any form of discrimination against or oppression of one people or racial group over another. This, as regards the situation in the West Bank, has been described by the United Nations, B’Tselem and others as constituting apartheid.
Unless creeping annexation is halted, the viability of a Palestinian state will be further jeopardized, with any such state effectively reduced to a number of Bantustans: disconnected, walled-off islands of land, isolated, incoherent and with no territorial connection to the outside world. Such a result would render the two-state solution inviable, with obvious consequences for international efforts to resolve the conflict.
Near-Perpetual Injustice
Mediated by anger, frustration and hopelessness, decades of systematic humiliation and discrimination can lead to acts of violence, but violence cannot and must never be the response to the violence of others even when that violence is enacted with glaring impunity. Palestine is a woeful tale of an increasingly lonely people beset by near-perpetual injustice, whose moments of hope are oft-shattered by belligerent and reckless politicking. The toll of recent days — the lives indiscriminately taken, the trauma-mangled psyches, the futures broken — does drown out non-violent opportunities for change.
International pressure is vital if violence on both sides is to be halted; a halt in hostilities in and of itself cannot win the peace. There is both the urgent need for new channels of communication and the desperate need for a vision that offers on-the-ground evidence, powerful and immediate, of what the dividends of peace would look like. The security-for-peace formula should be embraced and its goals achieved. Historical obscurantism is not a solution, and despite the legal and ethical obligation to respect human rights, it is crystal clear that neither law nor ethics can ensure either respect or compliance.
Mutual respect and peaceful co-existence are requisites for a just, lasting and, comprehensive peace, which we can wage through the development of a greater receptivity: “I become myself by what I am given by the other.”
We must remember why we care so much about Jerusalem so that once again it can be celebrated as the City of Peace. Jerusalem is a shared gift, not the exclusive property of one government or one people. Because the future of the Holy City matters to us all, we need to ensure the equal treatment of and prosperity for all its residents. Whatever happens in Jerusalem is testament to the strength or weakness of the relationship between the Abrahamic faiths and the relationship between our societies and cultures.
The deadlock must be broken. The status quo is untenable.
*[This article was originally published by Arab Digest. HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal will appear on its podcast on Friday, May 14.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Big Pharma’s Big Free Lunch
by Philippa Kaur 10 May 2021, 10:18
A vast majority of the planet’s population had every reason to welcome the Biden administration’s belated backing of a proposed patent waiver for COVID-19 vaccines. To anyone not invested in the pharmaceutical industry or not named Bill Gates, it was a no-brainer. Economist David Adler and Dr. Mamka Anyona, writing for The Guardian, convincingly argue that “the system of pharmaceutical patents is a killing machine.”
The good news coming from the White House predictably triggered bad news on Wall Street. CNBC reported that within hours, share prices of major vaccine producing pharmaceutical companies “including Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer, dropped sharply.” The alarm may have been exaggerated. “Johnson & Johnson shed a modest 0.4%,” and closed higher at the end of the week. Pfizer and the others had also gained ground by Friday.
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The brief Wall Street plummet was enough to provoke the ire of Stephen J. Ubi, president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, ready to demonstrate the bad faith everyone might expect from a powerful industrial lobbyist. “In the midst of a deadly pandemic,” he explained indignantly, “the Biden Administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety. This decision will sow confusion between public and private partners, further weaken already strained supply chains and foster the proliferation of counterfeit vaccines.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Public and private partners:
A euphemism invented to hide the practice of getting taxpayers (the public) to pay for research that will guarantee future profits for commercial firms (private partners) by gifting them a monopoly permitting exorbitant margins on sales to the public, whose tax dollars funded the research
Contextual Note
The pharmaceutical industry will tend to judge any political decision made in the name of human health and the prosperity of all as an act of “sowing confusion.” In our ultra-rationalist economy, profit has become the sole measure of value. Compromising profit is evil, and, as Milton Friedman endlessly repeated, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Calling into question the pricing strategies of private companies in the supposed free market is considered a dangerous heresy.
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When a government puts up money and resources to stimulate research, guarantees massive purchase orders and transfers the intellectual property to private companies, the companies that benefit don’t consider it “a free lunch.” There’s a reason for this: A lunch at an expensive restaurant in New York may set you back $100 or more. A Coney Island hot dog costs less than $5. But the kind of transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector is routinely measured in billions, if not tens of billions.
The current system of research funding and pharmaceutical production has admittedly produced a certain form of consumer abundance. But the driver of the system even in ordinary times is the management of scarcity and human misery. There seems to be an iron-clad rule that many take to be a law of nature: The misery of the many serves the prosperity of the few. The enduring good fortune of the wealthy enterprises ensures their capacity to partially respond to the needs of the many — but only partially, thanks to the sacrosanct scarcity principle.
Ubi begins his complaint by reminding us that we are “In the midst of a deadly pandemic.” He doesn’t bother to mention that the pandemic might have been controlled months ago if, from the start, we had followed the advice of those who preached in favor of coordinated research and “patent pools.” As Alexander Zaitchik explained in his New Republic article on the crucial role Bill Gates played in defending patents, there was a brief moment when the World Health Organization and health professionals were ready to coordinate global research by suspending considerations of private interest and monopolistic profit in response to an impending global threat. That, alas, was seen as stealing Big Pharma’s lunch and violating the consecrated principle of public-private partnerships.
When the pandemic began to spin out of anyone’s control, US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron proudly declared war against the virus. In a veritable world war against a truly evil enemy, with the well-being of every nation’s citizens at stake, reasonable people might expect private interests to give way to the public good. Not in today’s economy. The public sector has accepted its structural dependence on the private sector’s greed to accomplish even its most modest goals. Instead of pooling their efforts, the world’s nations acted as if every other nation was a rival, if not an enemy. Call it the triumph of the spirit of competition.
Historical Note
Ubi complains that the Biden administration took “an unprecedented step.” That is simply untrue. The Defense Production Act (DPA), passed in 1950 during the Korean War, authorized “the federal government to shape the domestic industrial base so that, when called upon, it is capable of providing essential materials and goods needed for the national defense.” According to The New York Times, the DPA “has been invoked hundreds of thousands of times” in recent years to ensure the procurement needs of the military. Is global health a less deserving cause than equipping an aircraft carrier?
Waiving the patents, according to Ubi “will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety.” Some might see this as a threat. That actually makes sense, since threats are an item in every effective manager’s toolbox. But it becomes the equivalent of blackmail. In all likelihood, the Big Pharma behemoths would refuse to cooperate with the transfer of technology and know-how at a time when all processes need to be accelerated to achieve a lasting effect. They are the ones who possess the clout required to “undermine our global response” and “compromise safety.”
Most astonishing is Ubi’s claim that the “decision will sow confusion between public and private partners.” Although President Biden’s initiative is only a modest step forward, the waiver would be a welcome occasion to begin to clarify what a presumed “partnership” means. For the public, it could signal the breakthrough some believe they see in Biden’s stance. For the first time in at least two decades, the idea of putting a valuation on the public contribution and translating it into intellectual property rights becomes conceivable.
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In the recent past, public investment in all kinds of innovation has been quietly transferred at a fixed price to private interests. In most cases, the price takes little account of actual cost and even less of commercial value. This is as true of Silicon Valley as it is of Big Pharma. The richest billionaires have benefitted from more than a few free lunches.
Ubi fears that the waiver will “further weaken already strained supply chains.” A year ago, the question of supply chains emerged as a major issue as the wealthy nations discovered they no longer had easy access to the masks, PPE and medical supplies needed to respond to the pandemic. In a competitive globalized world, nearly every nation suddenly found itself at a disadvantage. Ubi is right to signal “strained supply chains.” But the whole point of the waiver is to reduce supply chain bottlenecks at a moment of crisis.
Ubi’s final point concerns his fear of “counterfeit vaccines.” But liberating intellectual property reduces the attraction of counterfeits, an effect associated with the protected monopoly of exclusive brands. Illicit imitations of every type of commodity will continue to be an issue for local or national law enforcement. The medical profession is far more capable than retail stores to combat counterfeiting.
The CNBC article concludes with warnings about “China’s ability to piggyback on U.S. innovation to further its vaccine diplomacy aims.” It mentions Russia as well. The idea of cooperation appears nowhere in its reasoning. That is what’s expected from a media whose sole focus is on what affects the stock market. It cites The Washington Post editorial board’s echo of Bill Gates’s self-interested reasoning. With such well-funded resistance in the financial and political world, the likelihood of a serious change of outlook seems limited. DC lobbyists, generously funded politicians and conformist media clearly have more power than the American people and far more than the seven billion people that populate nations not called the United States.
*[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
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After Long Wavering, a Waiver
by Philippa Kaur 7 May 2021, 13:22
During last year’s presidential election campaign, candidate Joe Biden promised “absolutely” and “positively” to support the waiver of US patents to permit the unencumbered manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines in the rest of the world. Once Biden was elected, the words “absolutely” and “positively” apparently lost some of their absoluteness and positivity, becoming synonyms of “possibly” and “hopefully.” The hesitation ended on Wednesday when the US committed to back the idea of a temporary patent waiver.
The New York Times legitimately called Biden’s unexpected agreement with a principle promoted by more than 100 countries “a breakthrough,” after noting that until Wednesday the US had been “a major holdout at the World Trade Organization over a proposal to suspend intellectual property protections in an effort to ramp up vaccine production.” Biden’s representative to the WTO, Katherine Tai, nevertheless emphasized that this dramatic reversal should be thought of as exceptional: “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for Covid-19 vaccines.”
For a Few Billion Dollars More
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Digging a little deeper into the perspective for change, Michael Safi at The Guardian offered the Biden administration “two cheers” rather than the three The Times appears to believe it deserves. This follows from Tai’s realistic assessment of how things are likely to play out: “Those negotiations will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Consensus-based:
Designed to protect vested interests, even in the face of a majority and the logic of history and health itself
Contextual Note
Times reporters Thomas Kaplan and Sheryl Gay Stolberg remain faithful to the patented meliorist approach the paper applies to nearly all policies conducted by a Democratic president. They emphasize the constructive process now underway at the WTO in a piece that echoes The Beatles song, “Getting Better All the Time.” The Biden administration seems to be telling the world: I’m changing my scene and doing the best that I can.
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In contrast, the coverage by The Washington Post (owned by Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos) spends most of its ink suggesting the proposed waiver probably is fundamentally a flawed idea, leaving the impression that not much if anything will come of it. According to its pessimistic take, “Tai cautioned that the discussions to proceed with negotiations over the waiver’s text would ‘take time.’ Current and former officials said that a final agreement could differ significantly from the proposed waiver, which India and South Africa first introduced in October, and that deliberations could fall apart entirely.”
CNN more prudently highlights the fact that the US proposal “is preliminary and will not guarantee the global patent rules are lifted right away. But the Biden administration’s signal of support amounts to a major step that aid groups and Democrats had been pressing for.” It nevertheless appears to offer Biden his third cheer when it explains that the president “ultimately decided to support the waiver in line with his campaign pledge.” It quotes US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s claim that Biden “put people over patents.”
But CNN points clearly to the true obstacle: “Members of the WTO must unanimously decide whether to loosen the restrictions. And while the US had been a hold out, other countries — including the European Union and Switzerland — have also resisted the step.” In other words, Biden may have killed two birds with one stone. By letting Europeans do the dirty work, he could save his standing with Big Pharma — surely the main reason for his hesitation — while appearing to stay true to the progressive principle of putting people over patents. Interestingly, France’s President Emmanuel Macron may be playing the same game.
Historical Note
The Guardian reminds its readers that the proposal is limited to “waiving patents on Covid vaccines — but not on treatments or other technology used to fight the disease.” Whereas the US media presented the question as one of moral duty versus economic interest, both The Guardian and Al Jazeera point to the practical question implied by the waiver: “If approved, the waiver would theoretically allow drugmakers around the world to produce coronavirus jabs without the risk of being sued for breaking IP rules.” For the developing world, feeling free from an imminent attack by corporate lawyers is indeed a kind of liberation.
In other words, the proposed waiver would leave the world a long way from the optimistic scenario originally evoked by health experts and scientists in early 2020 that Alexander Zaitchik described in his exposé of Bill Gates’ influence on the WTO: “Battle-scarred veterans of the medicines-access and open-science movements hoped the immensity of the pandemic would override a global drug system based on proprietary science and market monopolies.” The idea at the time was to mobilize everyone and maximize resources. This implied patent pooling.
The health professionals facing the outbreak of COVID-19 understood both the scope of its threat and the dangers of an insufficiently coordinated organization to counter it. They also knew what the consequences of patent protection might turn out to be. The adoption of the agreement Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in 1995 and TRIPS-plus in 1999 marked a landmark moment in the trend economists and politicians have celebrated with the term “globalization.” The specific rules applying to pharmaceuticals have been in place since 2005. In 2015, the website Infojustice highlighted the fact that the TRIPS agreement had established a regime in which “patents grant the patent holder a monopoly on the market that allows the blocking of price-lowering generic competition and the raising of prices which restricts affordable access to medicines.”
The history of the past two decades has demonstrated to the global south the risk existing patent laws represent for their health and welfare. In 2015, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights drew “attention to the potential detrimental impact these treaties and agreements … may have on the enjoyment of human rights as enshrined in legally binding instruments, whether civil, cultural, economic, political or social. Our concerns relate to the rights to life, food, water and sanitation, health, housing, education, science and culture, improved labour standards, an independent judiciary, a clean environment and the right not to be subjected to forced resettlement.”
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COVID-19 changed everyone’s perception. So long as the world was not faced by a politically toxic pandemic, the developed world was free to use its superior wealth and force to impose its rules on the rest of humanity. Any serious campaign to understand the fundamental asymmetry that was continually and silently aggravating the gap between the rich and poor nations was easily stifled. Thomas Piketty could write erudite books about the gap and what was driving it. But most people in the West had bought into the belief system promoted by New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas Friedman, conveying the message that thanks to globalization and American technology, the world was now flat.
In an ideal scenario, the Biden administration will now begin to put pressure on Europe and Switzerland to emulate America’s courage in backing the proposed waiver. It will also pressure US vaccine providers to share their technology and know-how with the rest of humanity by convincing them to show not just their leadership but also their commitment to human health above profit. With or without patent protection, there is no danger of their becoming unprofitable, not with the power they have and an ever-expanding marketplace for health. But what we are witnessing, as they resist even temporary waivers, is the rentier’s obsession with automatically induced maximum profit making the question of health benefits a secondary consideration.
In the months to come, the world will be attentively observing the political and economic games now being played out. At some point, COVID-19 will begin to fade away. The world will then face the fear of the next contagion and perhaps begin seriously to struggle with a strategy to counter the effects of climate change. Awareness of the stakes is already much higher than in the past. It is time for the political class to begin assessing the risk that represents for their own future.
*[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
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The Road to Yemen’s Starvation
by Philippa Kaur 4 May 2021, 13:55
Yemen’s food crisis is not different in its nature from other regions of the Arab world and the agrarian south more broadly. However, it is a severe case, hence the warning issued a year ago by the United Nations that Yemen, along with other countries, faces the imminent threat of famines of “biblical proportions.” The mass starvation that has engulfed the country is partly a consequence of the ongoing conflict, especially the economic blockade imposed in 2015. Yet the root causes predate the civil war, as devastating as it has been, and have only been revealed and exacerbated by it. At its core, Yemen’s food emergency is an agrarian and a rural social crisis that has been in the making since the formation of the two republics in the 1960s.
It is difficult to understand how a country of experienced farmers, extensively terraced areas and fertile agricultural valleys could fail to feed itself. In 1955, a mission of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to Yemen concluded that it was one of the best terraced countries in the world at the time. Indeed, Yemeni farmers are worthy of being described as masters of their particularly harsh environment. The main features of Yemen’s geography and climate are seasonal rains in limited parts of the country and almost no precipitation elsewhere; semidesert coastal plains; western and central steep, rugged highlands of a volcanic mountain massif; and eastern and northeastern arid plateaus and vast deserts, including al-Rub’ al-Khali, literally the “Empty Quarter” — “the largest area of continuous sand in the world.”
What Caused Yemen’s Famine?
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But despite the fragility of the Arabian Peninsula’s environment, including its southwestern corner, the ingenuity of Yemeni farmers’ methods has successfully established innovative and truly sustainable systems of agriculture and food production since time immemorial. As it turns out, what has thrown Yemen into a downward spiral of rural marginalization and impoverishment is an insidious alliance between irresponsible, short-sighted governance and a reckless global food regime, one that is obsessed with the bottom line and market value. Together, as Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo write in “The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry,” they worked to “reinforce the incorporation of the peasantry into volatile world markets and extend land alienation, while increasing import dependence.”
Once Yemen was hooked on “speculative world markets dominated by monopoly finance capital,” the rest of the damage was automatic. In fact, that is how free markets work, if that is what you feed into them. Yemen is a good case in point for malintegration with the global economy and the imposition of unequal agricultural trade at the expense of both food security and sovereignty.
Of Donkeys and Farmers
There are two main drivers of Yemen’s persistent and severe food insecurity. Both of them were simultaneously brought about by developmental interventions in the country, particularly in what is commonly referred to as northern Yemen. This part of the country is home to a major water-shed infrastructure spanning two fundamental food-producing systems: the mountain highlands and the lowland Yemeni Tihamah, the Red Sea coastal plain.
The first and foremost driver of insecurity is the large loss of domestic production of native staple grains, including, above all, sorghum. Called dhurrah in Yemen, sorghum is an important traditional staple for humans and livestock. As pointed out by Daniel Varisco in his study of agriculture and water rights in Yemen, sorghum is boiled to make Yemeni porridge, aseed, a nutritious popular dish, and ground to make flour for baking traditional bread. Sorghum leaves and stalks are fed to cattle, the bottom part of the stalk is used as fuel for a traditional clay oven, tannur, and the surplus of sorghum fodder and grain is stored for the rest of the year (it is a summer crop, planted in late spring).
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This loss is the direct result of the agricultural trade liberalization of the country’s local markets that was indirectly dictated to Yemen. It was done in the name of development, of course, by luring the country into artificially low prices for basic commodities on global markets. In her review of Samir Amin’s writing and ideas, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven underscores that external dictates such as those imposed on Yemen have prioritized the demands of international capital over the long-term needs of the people. She adds that states, capitalists and non-capitalists alike, “need to invest not just in the goods that are the most immediately profitable on the world market or domestically, but in long-term projects that are the most likely to lead to improvements in living standards for people.”
As a consequence, Yemen became absurdly overdependent on basic foodstuff imports, including, notably, wheat and rice, from volatile world markets. In addition to leading to the country’s alarming state of hunger, the loss of domestic production has eventually resulted in a significant decrease in rural sustainability and livelihood. The domestic production figures speak for themselves. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (FAOSTAT), Yemen produced between 700,000 and 760,000 tons of sorghum during the early 1960s. In 1960, the country’s population was 5.3 million. In sharp contrast, by 2014, one year before the start of the war, the quantity dropped to less than half, 341,000 tons, and then to 222,000 and 162,000 tons in 2015 and 2016 respectively.
By that time, the population had grown to an estimated 27.2 million. Meanwhile, the country’s net domestic supply quantity of wheat, for instance, went from an average of 115,222 tons for the period 1961–69 to 3,104,625 tons between 2010 and 2017. Similarly, the average domestic supply quantity of rice went from 20,333 tons to 533,250 tons for the same periods. Given that Yemen does not grow rice and almost entirely imports wheat, these figures portray Yemen’s rapid and costly transformation from food self-sufficiency to striking food insecurity.
Capturing the essence of the collapse of Yemen’s agriculturally self-sufficient economy is the shrewd observation by a professor of political philosophy at the University of Sanaa that donkeys and smallholding agriculturalists in Yemen share the same fate. Originally published in 1988, Abu Bakr al-Saqqaf’s analysis noted that lost donkeys that had been wandering the streets of the cities of Taiz, al-Hodeidah and Sanaa were dying of hunger or being killed by vehicles. Despite being an important agricultural asset, the animals were abandoned because their owners could no longer afford fodder. To deal with this problem, the Yemeni government borrowed money from the United States to supply fodder to local farmers instead of addressing the root cause of the problem.
The fate of the donkeys’ owners was no different. Coerced by the forces of the free market to abandon their agricultural lands altogether, they ended up wandering off en masse all the way to the Gulf, not just to urban Yemen. Previously dignified and accomplished farmers, Yemen’s smallholders and other rural male labor spent the rest of their working lives confined to small rooms they shared with other estranged comrades. Those who were better off lived in pathetic housing conditions in overpopulated and very poor parts of town. As such, Yemen’s peasantry was uprooted from the land, neither by chance nor by circumstances of their own making.
Draining Yemen’s Groundwater
The second driver of Yemen’s destitution is the major shift from longstanding rainfed agriculture to groundwater-dependent irrigated agriculture. It resulted from the introduction of hydraulic pumps powered by diesel in the country’s coastal region and dry plateaus, in addition to building expensive, high-maintenance barrages in the coastal spate-irrigated wadis — Arabic for valleys, watercourses without a permanent flow of water — as documented by Martha Mundy and several others. These new irrigation methods and permanent diversion structures were perceived by international development agencies as technological improvements.
From their point of view, groundwater mining served to increase water supply for the production of crops that had a high international market value. Thus, in a capitalist economy, they were justified. However, by disregarding the country’s well-known water scarcity, those substantial investments served as a second blow to Yemen’s sustainable agriculture and rural productivity. Over-financed and unregulated, irrigated agriculture has overexploited and depleted Yemen’s deep fossil aquifers. It favored perishable yet lucrative crops destined for local urban and Gulf markets.
In so doing, it benefited the country’s large, wealthy and internationally connected landholders at the expense of its rural smallholders. In the short term, this market-oriented production policy impoverished the country’s rural population by freeing it from the land. In the long term, it starved the whole country, today home to an estimated 30 million people, by reinforcing its dependence on imported wheat and other staples. Reporting on the findings of his ecological field study of tribal farmers in al-Ahjur, a rich agricultural valley in the central highlands of Yemen, conducted in the late 1970s, Varisco concluded the following:
“The emphasis on new machinery, cash crops, and experimental farms represents a potential threat to viable traditional agricultural systems such as ghayl [Arabic for water flowing from springs] in al-Ahjur. The role of the small farmer, growing crops both for his own needs and for a regional market, is being challenged. Al-Ahjur represents all that is right with traditional agriculture in the Arab world. … Hopefully, the experience that has led to viable traditional agriculture in Yemen will not be ignored in the future development of the region and its resources.”
Many other informed experts have repeatedly cautioned that the injection of external agriculture technology and knowledge cripples Yemen’s development. In its report titled “Groundwater depletion clouds Yemen’s solar energy revolution” published in April, the Conflict and Environment Observatory issued yet another blunt warning. According to the report, solar power is “vital to break a crippling dependency on diesel for water supplies but it risks increasing unsustainable groundwater abstraction.” The report states that “urgent action is needed by all stakeholders to prevent groundwater levels falling to the point that they become inaccessible,” stressing that “the consequences of inaction may be dire.” They already are.
Regrettably, all alarms sounded over Yemen’s food insecurity and water insecurity have been deliberately ignored. The obvious dispossession, displacement and imprudent exploitation of agricultural assets, labor and resources under neoliberal conditionalities make it a foregone conclusion to state that Yemen’s famine is but a historic policy failure, as Patnaik and Moyo demonstrate in their book. In the words of Ali Kadri, “Yemeni labour and resources have to be continuously undermined and cheapened.” He explains: “The labouring classes in Yemen have to be denied control of their resources and readied to enter the global accumulation system as material of capital via its encroachment side.”
At any rate, agricultural policy in Yemen has commodified human life and dignity. Going forward, two things must change. First, Yemenis need to own their national development strategy. Second, the mainstream doctrines and attitudes toward the development of Yemen’s agriculture sector and the whole economy more broadly must change. In other words, postwar agricultural development policy must be both inward-looking and holistic. In agrarian societies, agriculture and rural production are integral to the whole economy. In the case of Yemen, a major change in agricultural policy that shifts away from ill-conceived neoliberal policies is inevitable, for they have not only silenced the interests of Yemen’s mostly rural population but famished the whole country.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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