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      Will Big Pharma Continue to Own the World’s Health?

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      The news from India concerning the ravages of COVID-19 is now beyond alarming. New York Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman describes a nation stricken by “the fear of living amid a disease spreading at such scale and speed.” In what sounds like the screenplay of a sci-fi catastrophe film, scientists are talking about an invasion by a “double mutant.” Doctors say the peak is still weeks away as hospitals, filled to capacity, lack the means to keep patients alive.

      The Biden administration has exceptionally called into question the US policy of hoarding vaccines for domestic use. It has agreed to share with India millions of doses of AstraZeneca vaccine that was stockpiled while awaiting authorization for use on the US market. This became possible because it turns out the stock of authorized vaccines will be sufficient for domestic needs.

      Following a telephone conversation with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Biden explained, somewhat cryptically, that the US would be sending “the actual mechanical parts that are needed for the machinery they have to build a vaccine.” Does this mean India will be able to manufacture vaccines whose patents are held by Western pharmaceutical companies? The Indian Express notes that Biden’s initiative “comes after criticism of Washington over its delay in responding and its earlier cold shoulder to a request for lifting the freeze on export of raw materials linked to vaccine manufacturing.”

      Bill Gates and the Zero-Sum Vaccination Game

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      Everyone should know by now that the ice pack for America’s cold shoulder was provided a year ago by philanthropist Bill Gates, who continues to oppose the sharing of know-how and industrial secrets with those who need it most on the grounds that it undermines his logic of industrial production. Even when the taxpayer foots the bill, Gates believes private companies should retain the right not only to skim off all future profits but to manage the scarcity that ensures the vaccine’s long-term profitability.

      Criticism of Gates has been rife in recent weeks, but nothing has been done to rectify an increasingly dangerous situation. The progressive populist website Public Citizen gives the details of a news conference in Washington, DC, led by Senator Bernie Sanders and several other lawmakers, accompanied by “leaders of labor, public health, faith and other civil society groups.” They urged the Biden administration to “join 100 other nations in supporting a temporary waiver of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules that now give a few corporations monopoly control over where and how much COVID-19 vaccines and treatments are made.”

      Bernie Sanders stated the basic case: “Poor people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and throughout the world have as much a right to be protected from the virus, to live, as people in wealthier nations. To me, this is not a huge debate, this is common human morality.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Common human morality:

      An idea inherited from the past but clearly superseded in the present by the laws of free market capitalism that place economic interest above human need as the principal criterion governing public morality.  

      Contextual Note

      The above quote by Bernie Sanders also featured in an article on another popular progressive website, Common Dreams. Jake Johnson covered it for Salon. Though it was a DC news conference headed by a prominent political figure, none of the major corporate outlets apparently considered it worthy of attaining The New York Times’ vaunted standard of “all the news that’s fit to print.” No one would deny Sanders’s exceptional weight of moral authority, acknowledged even by those who don’t share his “democratic socialist” agenda. So why wasn’t this news?

      Embed from Getty Images

      The simple answer to that question is that in today’s hypercompetitive world, where everything is about power and profit, the corporate media apparently have no idea what to do with the idea of morality. The institutions known as the liberal corporate media – The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and even much of broadcast news — stopped showing an interest in common morality the moment they began placing their trust in the likes of the CIA, the NSA and the countless lobbies as their most reliable source of political truth and practical wisdom. To the degree that the various conservative media have always believed in the merits of a dog-eat-dog world where all must fend for themselves in a struggle for personal advantage, they tend to treat the very idea of common human morality as an unfortunate attribute of “snowflakes,” the sign of a weak character.

      Bernie Sanders grew up in a moment of history when the notion of a common human morality still had some impact on human behavior. Over the past half-century, it has been replaced by the kind of realism that focuses on personal ambition, private profit and the acquisition of power. Today’s media can only see Sanders’ invocation of common morality as a quaint vestige of former times.

      Historical Note

      In October 2020, the World Trade Organization published an optimistic take on how the current intellectual property rules could effectively meet the needs of a human race confronted with a global health problem. Subsequent events have revealed how disingenuous their claims were. “Collaboration and cooperation among health technology developers, governments and other stakeholders,” it suggested, “can be positively supported by the IP system as well as by guidance on lawful cooperation among competitors under a country’s domestic competition policy regime.”

      In a Politico article with the title “Why waiving patents might not boost global access to coronavirus vaccines,” the authors, Ashleigh Furlong and Sarah Anne Aarup, sum up the current state of the debate concerning the campaign to institute a temporary waiver of the reigning intellectual property rules to permit the production of vaccines in the countries where they are most needed: “By some accounts, the IP waiver is the answer to producing more desperately needed jabs, but it’s being blocked by Big Pharma and wealthy nations guarding their bottom line. Others attest that the waiver makes no sense for vaccines and is being backed by people who are seizing the issue as their chance to make more sweeping changes to the current IP system.”

      The “others” in the last sentence would undoubtedly include Bill Gates. This confrontation could potentially become a significant moment in history. Sadly, it will have required the death of millions of people to provoke the “sweeping changes” that are clearly needed to reform a deeply perverse system.

      The first indications of a historical shift may appear as soon as next week. On May 5, in response to an initiative of India and South Africa, the WTO’s General Council will meet to consider a patent waiver permitting nations in need to manufacture the vaccines whose IP is now jealously guarded by for-profit pharmaceuticals. According to the National Herald, the “United States so far has remained non-committal on the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) move of India and South Africa over this.” On Monday, the White House informed reporters “that no decision has been made yet” in response to the legislators’ demand for the US to back the proposal.

      The suspense will grow in the coming days. Will Biden dare to defy Bill Gates? Does the president of the United States hold more power than the pharmaceutical industry? Before proving himself to be the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt — a claim his supporters have made — can Biden show even a slight aptitude to emulate the other, earlier Roosevelt, the trust-busting Teddy?

      Theodore Roosevelt was not just a “rough rider” but also a rough and tough opinionated character. Yet he reflected something that still existed in his day, the idea of a common human morality. He expressed it through his trust-busting but also in various pronouncements. “This country,” he intoned, “will not permanently be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.” He could even demonstrate political analysis: “This crooked control of both the old parties by the beneficiaries of political and business privilege renders it hopeless to expect any far-reaching and fundamental service from either.”

      No establishment Democrat or Republican, not even Bernie Sanders, would dare to pronounce such an obvious truth today, when the corruption that fuels the political system has been sealed into the economic ideology that governs it.

      *[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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      in World Politics

      Bill Gates and the Zero-Sum Vaccination Game

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      The debate is raging once again about the true origin of COVID-19. Was it zoonotic, originating in a bat cave and then infecting exotic meat in Wuhan’s wet market as the majority of scientists claimed throughout 2020? At the approach of the November election, US President Donald Trump preferred to believe the pandemic was a plot to destroy his presidency conducted by a man he previously called an intimate “friend,” China’s President Xi Jinping. The virus was already spreading when Trump explained to World Economic Forum in Davos the nature of his relationship with Xi: “He’s for China, I’m for the US, but other than that, we love each other.”

      Four months later, Trump began contradicting scientists and blaming Xi’s China by claiming “that the virus originated in a laboratory and was accidentally released.” In September, he preferred to suggest to his voters that COVID-19 was the result of an Asian conspiracy designed to undermine his presidency. This sparked a wave of anti-Asian attacks in the US that have continued to this day.

      Prominent scientists today recognize that Trump’s initial assessment may have been right. Their colleagues who dismissed the idea of an accidental release of the virus from a Wuhan laboratory were either misled or disingenuously defensive of an equally unproven thesis. The scientists may have been impelled to reject the suspicion of a laboratory accident not only out of a lack of direct evidence, but also out of fear of the political blame game the president was beginning to exploit to distract attention from his own failure to respond appropriately to the crisis.

      Trump obviously preferred to see the war against a virus as a PR opportunity to bolster his image as a fearless leader. Allowing politicians to place blame on China, even for an accident, might have become as dangerous for the world as the virus itself, adding to the reigning misery rather than resolving the mystery of the origin of the disease.

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      Science itself and its public image have taken a hit from this ongoing catastrophe. The honored, if not revered Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted to prioritizing the distribution of masks among the medical community above the general public at a time when little was still known about how contagious COVID-19 was and how it spread. Political leaders across the globe, including Trump, all found themselves in a thankless position as they were required to demonstrate their leadership with insufficient knowledge of the nature of the challenge and a penury of material means to confront it.

      Many deserve to share the blame for a situation that, despite progress with vaccines, is still in many ways worsening. But, as Alexander Zaitchik exposes in an important article in The New Republic, the person perhaps most to blame for our global failure to respond effectively is neither a scientist nor a politician. His name is Bill Gates.

      Most rational people would reason that a global crisis requires a global response. Most realists recognize that in a civilization dominated by sovereign nation-states, summoning a unified response to any global crisis will never be easy. Humanity’s quasi-universal awareness of the problem of global warming over the decades demonstrates the difficulty of mobilizing humankind to implement even a minimalist response.

      In his article, “How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines,” Zaitchik narrates a depressing story that began in February 2020, when the nature of the COVID-19 threat had become clear. In conformity with its mission, the World Health Organization (WHO) coordinated a “research and innovation forum to mobilize international action” aimed at combating the spreading epidemic. It sought to “maintain broad and open channels of communication, since collaboration and information-sharing minimize duplication and accelerate discovery.”

      Collaboration and sharing of science would be critical to any effective response. With most research publicly funded — a point Mariana Mazzucato made this week — it specifically recommended patent pooling. Zaitchik notes that optimism was still possible: “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.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Proprietary science:

      An oxymoron to the extent that “science” simply means human knowledge and cannot be owned or commodified.

      Contextual Note

      The WHO was thus prepared to play the role assigned to its mission as stated in its constitution: “The health of all peoples is fundamental to the attainment of peace and security and is dependent upon the fullest co-operation of individuals and States.” Aware of the challenge lying ahead of them, the team began to prepare its campaign. Alas, it hadn’t counted on the intervention of the globe’s self-appointed Mr. World Health, Bill Gates, whose title derives from his contributing billions of dollars to the causes he believes in (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested $1.75 billion in the development and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine). Among them is the most sacred of all causes: intellectual property. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Zaitchik describes in detail how Gates — a man with no skills in science, security or politics — has positioned himself to dictate to the world how contemporary science will affect every human being’s security. The key, following the logic of all capitalistic projects, is the management of scarcity. Without scarcity, industry cannot survive and prosper. Little does it matter that because of scarcity many humans simply will not survive.

      Before Gates’s intervention, the group sought “to create a voluntary intellectual property pool inside the WHO.” In so doing, they demonstrated their naivety: “That pharmaceutical companies and their allied governments would allow intellectual property concerns to slow things down — from research and development to manufacturing scale-up — does not seem to have occurred to them.” But that is exactly what happened, thanks to Gates’s overpowering voice (measured by billions of dollars rather than decibels) and his “reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic leader.” When the dust cleared, what emerged was “a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.”

      Zaitchik documents the ensuing catastrophe due largely to “Gates’s dedication to monopoly medicine” and his “unwavering commitment to drug companies’ right to exclusive control over medical science and the markets for its products.” No one other than powerful governments can hope to compete with Gates’s cash reserves. But Gates’s own government, in Washington, DC, — whether under a Democrat or a Republican president — would never compete as a matter of principle. Competition is a private game. No other government in the world has the power to compete. The US government, like Gates himself, appears addicted to “politically constructed and politically imposed monopolies.”

      Historical Note

      The egregious oxymoron “proprietary science” would have seemed strange to the ears of anyone living before the industrial revolution. Were he alive today and imbued with modern economic culture, the 15th-century German printer, Johannes Gutenberg, would be claiming a percentage of every book, journal or magazine produced thanks to his invention of the printing press. Instead, Adolph II of Nassau, Archbishop of Maintz rewarded Gutenburg — the Bill Gates or Elon Musk of his day — for his innovation “with the title of ‘Gentleman of the Court’.” He also received “a court outfit, a stipend and two tonnes of grain and wine, tax-free.” The wine can be explained by the fact that Gutenberg’s inspiration for the printing press came from observing a wine press.

      Gates deserves to be similarly honored for his invention of MS-DOS. Rather than the billions extracted from the Earth’s entire population thanks to his skill at monopoly creation and predatory business practices, he should have received from the governor of the state of Washington an appropriate title (“Gentleman of the coding room”), a flashy suit of clothes with a matching raincoat (for Seattle weather), a generous stipend (a million of two per year would be appropriate) and maybe an unlimited supply of canned foods, since he is a believer in and expert practitioner of canned economic and scientific wisdom.

      As many of the rest of us queue up for one of the competing vaccines that promise to bail us all out — despite their disparities in performance adding to the confusion created by the incompetence of competitive governments — we should reflect on what all this tells us about an economic system whose vaunted efficiency Gates believes in and practices while using his money and clout to impose it on an unwilling world.

      *[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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      in World Politics

      White Trash, White Privilege

      by

      I grew up in southern Bavaria in the 1960s. I started formal education at the age of six at the local Volksschule — the people’s school. Quite frankly, I don’t remember much about this time. Among the few things I do remember is the warning my parents gave me on my way to school to keep away from the Rs. The Rs were a couple of kids from the same family, one of whom happened to be in my class. They came from the “bad” side of town, the Glasscherbenviertel. In my hometown, this was an area located behind a horse and motorcycle race track, a place where respectable citizens wouldn’t want to be caught dead. Those who lived there were dismissed as Grattler — uncouth, unsavory characters better avoided. And avoid them we did, if only not to run the danger of getting beaten up.

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      In our little town, the Rs were the epitome of what across the Atlantic is referred to as “white trash.” At the time in Germany, there was hardly anyone who looked “different,” so “white trash” would have made no sense whatsoever. They were German trash, and everybody knew it. In my immediate neighborhood, there was a woman who had three “illegitimate” children, all of them girls, all of them with a reputation of being tomboys. My parents, of course, told me I better keep my distance. I did, if only to avoid being bombarded with stones — the weapon, at the time, of the weaker sex — and, of course, out of fear of being associated with German trash.

      America’s Outcasts

      These are some of the reminiscences, images and thoughts that recently crossed my mind while reading parts of Nancy Isenberg’s “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.” Released in 2016, a few months before the presidential election, the book is as pertinent — if not more so — today as it was at the time it was published. This is the story of the outcasts of American society, the vagrants and “crackers,” the rednecks and the “deplorables” who “have remained vilified, shunned, targeted and kept apart, both physically — in poorhouses and trailer parks, through eugenic science and discriminatory public policy — and in the nation’s cultural imagination, where they have inspired mockery, kitsch and unceasing grimaces.”  

      For anyone who has ever watched an episode of “The Jerry Springer Show” knows what I’m talking about. With 28 seasons and around 4,000 episodes, it was not only one of America’s most successful TV series but also an export hit that exposed the rest of the world to the other side of America in the crudest way. The show was so successful because it systematically brought out some of the worst in human nature while at the same time fulfilling the “audience’s need to feel superior.” It reinforced age-old stereotypes that dismissed a part of America’s white population as “incestuous and sexually promiscuous, violent, alcoholic, lazy and stupid” — stereotypes, as Isenberg put it, that “remain with us until today.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      A case in point is the methamphetamine epidemic that the American Drug Enforcement Administration in 2003 characterized as “the most dangerous drug problem of small-town America.” In fact, what distinguished meth was that the drug was most prevalent in rural areas in the country’s heartland, where it was “burning a hole,” as Rolling Stone magazine put it, “through rural America.” What also distinguished it was that, unlike, for instance, crack cocaine, which is predominantly associated with inner cities and people of color, meth was largely characterized as a white-trash addiction. As Frank Keating, the former governor of Oklahoma, put it in 1999, meth was “a white trash drug — methamphetamines largely are consumed by the lower socio-economic element of white people. And I think we need to shame it, just like crack cocaine was a black-trash drug and is a black trash drug.”

      The same applies to a certain extent to what Joshua Wilkey, in his blog This Appalachia Life, has called the “white-trashification of the opioid crisis.” Wilkey’s charges the political establishment in Washington with not giving “two shits” about the crisis, at least as long as it affects primarily the rural poor in depressed areas such as the Appalachians. At least two reasons account for this: first, the notion that addiction “is simply the result of stupid people making poor choices” and, second, that since the crisis “largely targets poor and rural areas, there’s less urgency on the part of urban elites to advocate for solutions.” To put it more brutally, white trash just doesn’t matter, if only because it does not conform to the dominant narrative — in which whiteness represents the “default racial norm” — that serves as the justification for white socioeconomic dominance.

      White Privilege

      At the same time, the trope poses a challenge to the notion of white privilege, for white trash is a term that racializes whiteness by denigrating those dismissed as such “in race specific terms.” One way to get out of this quandary is to relabel a clearly derogatory racialized epithet as “pseudo-racialization.” For the guardians of this type of wokeness — largely derived from critical race theory prevalent today in American academia and the chattering classes — this might sound reassuring. It shouldn’t, at least if wokeness is taken seriously. It should not be forgotten that wokeness is defined as “a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.”

      The derogation, denigration and disparagement of, if not outright contempt for, America’s white underclass, mocked and dismissed as white trash, certainly counts for an egregious example of inequality alongside a range of dimensions — economic, social and cultural. White trash is the Lumpenproletariat of our globalized world, structurally irrelevant and, therefore, largely ignored — at least as long as it doesn’t become a threat to society as it did during the meth epidemic.

      Worse still, as the notion of pseudo-racialization implies, the distress and despair of the white underclass are easily dismissed since its problems fall through the dominant grievances grid that today is almost exclusively informed by and defined in racial terms. What Ernesto Laclau has once called the “internal antagonistic frontier” that informs today’s hegemonic wokeness discourse runs between whites and everybody else. In this discourse, whiteness is automatically associated with privilege and entitlement. The white maligned underclass might be underprivileged or worse, but, being white, it is automatically subsumed under notions of privilege and entitlement for no other reason than that one so happens to be white.

      The case of Oumou Kanoute, a black student at Smith College, which was recently featured in The New York Times, illustrates the point. Here even Michelle Goldberg, in her recent defense of critical race theory, had to acknowledge that something went horribly wrong, that this was a case of “woke overreach.” Smith College is one of the most prestigious — and expensive — liberal arts colleges in the US. Students attending the college are the epitome of entitlement, given the prohibitive cost of tuition and board that easily amounts to nearly $80,000 a year. An article in The Guardian from 2016 hit the nail on the head when it pointed out that “at the best colleges there are very few low-income students, except for a few lucky enough to grow up in New York City, Los Angeles or Boston.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      As The New York Times account rightly put it, the Smith College incident is a story of the clash between race and class. Once again, class came out at the short end of the stick, resulting in the destruction of the reputations of a number of employees, all of them white, all of them part of today’s easily dispensable service class — janitors, security guards — who were labeled as racists and as carriers of white privilege. Yet, as a subsequent commentary piece in The New York Times put it, “the narrative of racist harassment of a minority student at an elitist white institution turned out to be comprehensively false.” Does it matter? Apparently not, for as the initial report by The Times put it, the whole story “highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.” In short, something must be true because you think it is true. This might explain why even after an investigation exonerated the employees of racial bias, they received, unlike the student, no apology from the administration. The white underclass apparently is not worthy of recognition.

      Dispensable Service Class

      The incident happened in 2018. In the meantime, Oumou Kanoute has moved on to Columbia University, another elite university. The fate of the targets of her accusations is largely unknown. But then, who cares about janitors and security guards? This is hardly a rhetorical question. According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019, the white poverty rate was 9%. This amounts to more than 17 million Americans. Poverty rates were disproportionately high (around 15%) in West Virginia and Kentucky, two Appalachian states, which were also among the top states when it comes to opioid prescription rates.

      The impact was devastating. In 2017, the opioid-related death rate in Appalachian counties was more than 70% higher than in the rest of the country: 24 versus 14 deaths per 100,000 residents. At the same time, the rate of Kentucky’s neonatal abstinence syndrome was more than three times higher than the national rate, West Virginia’s more than eight times.

      The testimony, recently published in a medical journal, of a physician who grew up in eastern Kentucky provides a first-hand account of the misery and despair the epidemic has wrought. Eastern Kentucky, a coal-mining area at the foot of the Appalachian hills, is among the poorest in the United States. Isolated and on the margins “both geographically and culturally,” the region and its opioid crisis were long ignored by the national media.

      It was not until “it had spread to more affluent and valued parts of the country, almost 15 years later” that it would gain national attention. This is despite the fact that the region is overwhelmingly white. Magoffin County, for instance, which is the focus of the physician’s account, in 2000 was roughly 99% white. But then, who gives two shits about poor white trash — except, perhaps, to make money. Otherwise, why would Amazon sell a “Funny Kentucky White Trash Tee Shirt”?

      In late 2016, an expose in The Atlantic on America’s poor white underclass noted the “barely suppressed contempt” that “has characterized much of the commentary about white woe, on both the left and the right.” In support of their observation, the authors cite a philippic that appeared in the National Review, the flagship of the traditional conservative right, heaping scorn on low-income white voters for supporting Donald Trump in the primaries. Among other things, the author sneered:

      “If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. … The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. … The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.”

      In 2016, Trump won an overwhelming majority in eastern Kentucky. In Magoffin County, for instance, he won roughly 75% of the vote. Four years later, Trump once again carried Kentucky by a wide margin; the same was true for Magoffin County. And yet, in his four years in office, he had done little to nothing to improve the lives of America’s poor white underclass. To be sure, at one point, Trump had claimed he would revive the coal industry so dear to states like West Virginia and Kentucky. He didn’t, and, like any good populist, once in power, he largely ignored the plight of those whose pain he had earlier purported to hear. As studies have shown, America’s poor, independent of race, by and large don’t vote and, therefore, can be dismissed. They don’t count, in more than one sense of the word.

      Farewell to the Proletariat

      Unfortunately, the left on both sides of the Atlantic has, to a large extent, bought into this trope. Instead of fighting for every vote, the left has written off significant segments of a potential electorate which, at one point, was part of its natural constituency. Yet in the late 1970s, at least in Western Europe, the left abandoned the concerns of blue-collar workers in favor of new “postmaterialist” priorities, promoted by the “new middle classes.” A paradigmatic text was André Gorz’s manifesto from 1980, “Adieux au proletariat” (“Farewell to the Proletariat”). In the decades that followed, the left increasingly adopted what has come to be known as identity politics, centering upon questions of gender, ethnicity and race.

      There is nothing wrong with identity politics — as long as it is inclusive. Following Chantal Mouffe, the potential of progressive politics crucially depends on the establishment of an alternative “powerbloc” that not only unifies different claims and struggles, such as the #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and Fridays for Future movements, but is also able to effectively challenge the dominant power structure and the hegemonic narratives, such as neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. Identity politics on the left these days focuses on minorities, such as LGBTQ and particularly race, in the process sidelining, excluding, if not outright dismissing questions of class. As one reader who identified himself as a “white man living paycheck to paycheck” put it in The Atlantic, “I think that most of us would acknowledge that minorities have it rough, but at least someone seems to care about them.”

      In the end, a strategy that focuses almost exclusively on an anything-but-white identity politics — if it is at all a strategy — is only going to weaken any genuine hope for a more equitable politics. At the same time, it is likely to provide fertile ground for the exploitation of resentment and anger by cynical populists such as Donald Trump well versed in the deceptive appeal of symbolic politics, like feeding into delusions of white superiority, while doing nothing concrete, like raising marginal tax rates on the rich to pay for universal health care, for the “ordinary people” they purport to represent.  

      *[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

      Violence Against Women in Mexico Rises

      by

      Home is not a safe space for many women around the world and coronavirus-era quarantines and lockdowns have increased the risk of gender-based violence. In Mexico, statistics reflect this reality and women additionally face the rising risk of becoming targets amid violent drug crime and the militarization of the state security forces.

      According to the Secretariat of Citizen Security (SSPC) last year, 3,752 women were violently killed. Of these were 969 classified as femicides — defined as the violent death of a woman because of her gender — a slight increase on the previous year’s figure. According to data compiled by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Mexico has the second-highest total number of femicides in the region — after Brazil — whilst nearby El Salvador and Honduras have the highest rates per capita. The prevalence of violent crime, a culture of machismo and weak implementation of measures designed to protect women mean Latin America is home to 14 of the 25 countries with the highest rates of femicide in the world.

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      The first months of the coronavirus pandemic were particularly dangerous for Mexican women, according to Maissa Hubert, the executive sub-director of Equis Justicia Para Las Mujeres, a Mexico City-based NGO. “During the first months of the pandemic, we saw a rise in various forms of gender-based violence,” she says. “In total, 11 women killed each day, compared to 10 per day at the start of 2020.”

      In March 2020, the emergency call centers received 26,000 reports of violence against women, the highest ever in Mexico. The number of women leaving their homes to take shelter in the National Refuge Network quadrupled.

      Outside the home, however, the continued growth of Mexico’s transnational criminal organizations and the militarized response of state security forces have further increased risks to women. While crime dropped in the first months of the pandemic, the security vacuum has increased clashes between 198 active armed groups in the country’s “hyper-fragmented criminal landscape,” according to International Crisis Group.

      Gangs and Militarized State Security

      “Organized crime has aggravated the situation with regards to the murder of women,” says Maria Salguero, a researcher who created the National Femicide Map. “The crime gangs use the dead bodies of women to send messages to their rivals. In states where there is a lot of organized crime, such as Juarez, Chihuahua, Guerrero and Naucalpan, we see high incidences of femicide, disappearances and rape.”

      The situation is exacerbated by the further militarization of state security. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index’s (BTI) country report on Mexico notes that “the army has been called upon to perform internal security tasks and is receiving large amounts of resources in the context of the war against drug trafficking.” It adds that the widening of the military’s mandate to include civilian tasks could have worrisome implications for consensus building in the country. As noted in the BTI report, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador‘s government risks losing public support if it cannot solve the challenges of corruption and violence in the country. It points out that “the fact that the army, which has so far not signified a threat to democracy, is required to undertake ever more tasks may be a threat in the future.” Such a breakdown in trust for institutions and the security forces could have knock-on effects for all violent crime.

      Embed from Getty Images

      On May 11, 2020, the Mexican armed forces and National Guard were given new authority to play a far greater role in policing violent crime in the country — giving them free rein to assume many of the police force’s duties — without any effective audit mechanism.

      The effect of this process on gender-based violence is only now coming to be understood. “The attitude of this government and its predecessors has been that a military response to the security situation will protect all of us and women in particular,” says Hubert. “But the reality is that the increased circulation of firearms has had a tremendous impact on women.”  

      Firearms were the weapon used in 60% of the total 1,844 murders committed against women in 2020. From 1998 to 2019, the number of women killed by firearms in Mexico rose by 375%. Over 2.5 million firearms have entered Mexico from the US over the last decade, and firearms accounted for the overwhelming majority of the total of 34,515 murders registered in Mexico in 2020, the highest number since 2015.

      An Overlooked Issue

      The continued emphasis on militarized security is sapping state funds at a time when resources for programs addressing violence against women in Mexico are being cut. In recent years, Mexican public policy has had a mixed record with respect to gender-based violence. It took until December last year for President Lopez Obrador to talk about gender-based violence, having previously avoided using the word femicide or acknowledge that women faced specific security concerns. In May 2020, he said that 90% of domestic violence-related 911 calls were false. His team failed to provide evidence to support this claim when requested to by NGOs.

      Despite this intransigence at the executive level, in recent years, there has been greater recognition of the problem at the federal and ministerial level, according to Hubert, with many long-lasting public policies proposed by the National Institute of Women, founded in 2001. However, many of the preventative and reactive policies introduced to tackle gender-based violence have been subject to cuts in government spending as a result of the pandemic.

      “We analyzed the activity of the courts at the start of the pandemic, and we found gender-based violence was not being prioritized,” says Hubert. “Issues such as divorce and alimony are crucial for a woman looking to free herself from a violent situation, but they weren’t being attended to by the courts.” 

      For Saguero, the priority is to keep recording the names and identities of the victims of Mexico’s “shadow pandemic” of gender-based violence. “Only by making the victims visible can we really make the scale of the problem visible,” she says, “but we have a lot of work to do because the numbers remain high.”

      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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      Divide and Rule: What Drives Anti-Asian Resentment in America?

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      Donald Trump might have left the White House. His nefarious legacy, however, lingers on. A prominent case in point is the dramatic rise in the number of attacks on Asian Americans, ranging from verbal insults and harassment to physical assault to deadly acts of violence that has gone hand in hand with the pandemic.

      Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. It stands to reason, however, that Trump’s repeated characterization of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” significantly contributed to the mobilization of anti-Asian resentment, particularly among his most ardent supporters. Trump had started to blame China as early as mid-March last year, when the pandemic was starting to spread in the United States. The results of an Ipsos survey from April 2020 suggests that it had a considerable impact on public opinion. Among other things, the survey found that 60% of Republican respondents believed that “people or organizations” were responsible for the virus, most prominently the Chinese government and the Chinese people in general. In short, large numbers of Americans blamed China and the Chinese for spreading the virus — with sometimes fatal consequences.

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      In mid-March, a man attacked the members of an Asian American family with a knife at a retail store in Midland, Texas. Only the intervention of a courageous bystander prevented a bloodbath. Nevertheless, several persons suffered serious injuries, among them two children aged 2 and 6. When interrogated, the perpetrator stated that he had thought “the family was Chinese and infecting people with the coronavirus.” They were actually Burmese.

      A report published in early April recorded over 1,000 incidents of anti-Asian cases of various types of aggression and discrimination associated with COVID-19 in the last week of March alone. Among them were individuals reporting having been verbally assaulted, spat on and shunned in grocery stores, supermarkets and pharmacies. Most of the incidences occurred in California, New York and Texas.

      Divide and Rule

      In the meantime, a year has passed, information available about the virus has dramatically increased, yet Asian Americans continue to be scapegoated and victimized. The dramatic increase in conspiracy thinking over the past several months, promoted by right-wing media and politicians alike, has done its part to fuel the flames of anti-Asian prejudice and hatred. The most recent cases that have caught widespread attention have been deadly assaults on elderly Asian Americans in California. One victim, an 84-year-old man, was knocked to the ground in a San Francisco street by a young man. The victim died two days later of his injuries, with the perpetrator now facing murder and elder abuse charges. The other victim was a 91-year-old man, pushed to the ground by a young man wearing a mask and a hoodie in Oakland’s Chinatown. The victim survived the attack.

      On the surface, the recent wave of anti-Asian hostility might easily be explained as being directly related to COVID-19. On second thought, however, things are significantly more complex and intricate. What might appear to be spontaneous outbursts of violence, verbal or physical — as, for instance against refugees in Germany and other Western European countries — are, in reality, the result of deep-seated diffuse resentments. What COVID-19 has done is to provide something like an excuse allowing these resentments to get out into the open.

      Embed from Getty Images

      To a large extent, as has been frequently pointed out these days, anti-Asian resentment is intimately tied to the myth of Asian Americans as the “model minority.” In this narrative, what accounts for the success of Asian Americans is intact family structures and a high priority accorded to education and traditional values such as thriftiness and discipline. This explains why, on average, Asian American household incomes have been higher than those of white households. As has also been noted, this narrative has been primarily used not to celebrate the achievements of Asian Americans but to blunt charges of racism and privilege. As Bill O’Reilly, the disgraced former Fox News star, asked rhetorically during a debate on the “truth of white privilege,” “Do we have Asian privilege in America?”

      For O’Reilly and other prominent figures on the American right, the success of Asian Americans was a convenient occasion to bolster a rhetoric that blames blacks, Hispanics as well as the poor (independent of color) for their plight. If only they followed the example of Asian Americans, worked hard, kept their families together, and lived within their means — or so the charge goes — they too would be able to achieve the American dream. In short, individual flaws, rather than racism and discrimination, are to blame if some Americans fail “to make it.”

      In order to bolster their case even further, right-wing “thought leaders” such as Charles Murray, the author, together with Richard Hernstein, of the 1994 bestseller “The Bell Curve,” had no qualms to note that with regard to IQs, Asian Americans came out on top, ahead of whites. More recently, Murray wrote a short blog entry on the state of American education, charging that high schools were “going to hell” — unless “you’re Asian.” Analyzing SAT test scores over the past decade or so, Murry pointed out that the scores had declined for all major ethnic groups, except for Asians. Their scores had actually increased, and this not only in math, but also in verbal skills, where Asians had trailed whites in the past.

      It should not entirely come as a surprise if comments like these and similar remarks provoke resentment, particularly on the part of minorities that are constantly subjected to this kind of comparison. One might suspect that this was exactly what was intended. By suggesting that Asian Americans might be “privileged” or pointing out, as Murray does, that Asian Americans constitute “the unprotected minority” they drove a wedge between minorities that share a common, if differentiated, history of oppression, discrimination and structural violence directed against them. In Roman times, they used to call this strategy of safeguarding one’s hegemonic position divide et impera — divide and rule.

      A History of Migration

      The history of Asian migration to the West Coast in the 19th and early 20th century is replete with episodes of anti-Asian mobilization. The arguably best-known case was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers — but only after they helped build the nation’s railway system. It came at the heel of intense anti-Chinese agitation, both “on the ground” in California and Oregon and in the US Congress. The rhetoric was highly charged, inflammatory — and meant to be so. In a speech on Chinese immigration, Senator Mitchell from Oregon, for instance, in 1876 characterized Chinese immigrants as a “festering sore which, like a plague-spot, has fastened itself upon the very vitals of our western civilization and which to day threatens to destroy it.” 

      Two years later, Representative Davis from California, in a speech in the House, warned that Chinese immigrants posed a fundamental threat to the institutions of the republic.  The Chinese of California, Davis charged, clung to their nationality and separated themselves from other men; they were incapable “to change their ways and adapt themselves to their surroundings.” This alone rendered them “most undesirable immigrants.” Arrested in their development as a result of “ages of uniformity” that had “fixed the type,” they had “nothing in sympathy with the social and political thoughts of a free people.” Instead, their “political aspirations” were limited to a “paternal despotism, with no conceptions of a popular government.” 

      Embed from Getty Images

      This meant that the Chinese were unfit for life in the United States. Exclusion was the logical consequence, as were various measures adopted in the decades that followed targeting Asians. In the decades that followed, western states and territories passed various pieces of legislation that prevented aliens from acquiring land. Although general in nature, they were primarily directed against Chinese and particularly Japanese aliens.

      One of the more ludicrous exclusionary measures was San Francisco’s Cubic Air Ordinance of 1870. Disguised as a sanitary measure, it was designed to expel Chinese workers from their crowded tenement quarters in the city’s Chinatown and thus “persuade” them to return to China. The ordinance led to the incarceration of thousands of Chinese from 1873 to 1886 “under a public health law driven by anti-Chinese sentiment.”

      Even the populists, arguably the most progressive political force at the end of the 19th century, adopted nativist rhetoric directed against the Chinese. In the early 1890s, several state populist platforms included a passage calling for the exclusion of Chinese and/or Asian immigration. The passage appealed particularly to women who felt threatened by competition from Chinese men for domestic services and laundry jobs. Anti‐Chinese agitators seized the opportunity and charged Chinese workers with threatening the job opportunities of working women. Anti-Asian exclusion and discrimination were also reflected in anti-miscegenation and naturalization laws. The first anti-miscegenation law, which derived its justification from views on racial distinctions and barred marriages between whites and Asians, was passed in 1861 by Nevada. In the decades that followed, 14 more states passed similar laws. It was not until the middle of the 20th century to miscegenation laws were abolished.

      This was also the case when it came to naturalization, the right to which was established in the Naturalization Act of 1875 that restricted American citizenship to whites and blacks. Whenever Asian immigrants in subsequent decades petitioned for naturalization, American courts ruled that Asians belonged to the “Mongolian race.” Ergo, they were not white and, therefore, not eligible for citizenship. In response to these court cases, Congress passed a law in 1917 banning immigration from most parts of Asia. Seven years later, Congress passed a further measure, excluding foreign-born Asians from citizenship “because they no longer were able to enter the country, and they could no longer enter the country because they were ineligible for citizenship.” It was not until 1952 that race-based naturalization was formally abolished.

      A Privileged Minority?

      Given this background, the suggestion that Asian Americans somehow constitute a privileged minority so dear to right-wing apologists of white privilege rings more than hollow — as does the myth of the model minority. The reality is quite different. The narrative of Asian American success obscures, for instance, the fact that over the past decade or so, inequality has risen most dramatically among Asian Americans. According to Pew Research, between 1970 to 2016, the gap between Asians near the top and the bottom of the income ladder “nearly doubled, and the distribution of income among Asians transformed from being one of the most equal to being the most unequal among America’s major racial and ethnic groups.”

      Poverty rates among Asian Americans have been slightly higher than among whites, with some groups, such as Hmong and Burmese, far above the national average. This underscores the fact that Asian Americans constitute a community that is ethnically, socioeconomically and, in particular, culturally highly diverse.

      The dominant narrative of the model minority, largely promulgated by the white right, largely ignores these subtleties. Instead, it creates the image of the privileged minority — singled out by the white majority compared over other minorities — and, in the process, sows discord among America’s subordinate communities. The resulting resentment goes a long way to explain the recent wave of anti-Asian hatred. It is hardly a coincidence that both recent hate crimes against Asian Americans in northern California were committed by blacks.

      It is also hardly a coincidence that the two attacks put Asian American activists into a quandary. As one of them noted, “If addressing violence against Asian Americans entails furthering stereotypes about Black criminality and the policies associated with those stereotypes … we’ve misdiagnosed the problem.” The problem, of course, is the widespread disgruntlement toward Asian Americans, wrongfully seen as constituting an “honorable white” minority bent on defending its privileges.

      A case in point is the lawsuit launched against Harvard University in 2014 charging it with discriminating against Asian American applicants in favor of less-qualified black and Hispanic students. Hardly surprising, the Trump administration, ever eager to stir the resentment pot, sided with the plaintiffs. The administration’s brief argued that the evidence showed that “Harvard’s process has repeatedly penalized one particular racial group: Asian Americans. Indeed, Harvard concedes that eliminating consideration of race would increase Asian-American admissions while decreasing those of Harvard’s favored racial groups.”

      For those in the know, the language echoed Murray’s notion of “protected groups.” Once again, divide et impera was in action. Courts finally rejected the plaintiffs’ case. But ill feelings are likely to linger on, feeding into extant resentments that appear to have poisoned the Asian American community’s relations with other visible minorities in the United States. Under the circumstances, anti-Asian hostility, hatred and violence are unlikely to fade out in the near future.  

      *[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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      What Has Amazon Been Withholding?

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      Everyone knows that Amazon is a successful, profitable, world-conquering and, therefore, obscenely rich company. It has made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world. He keeps getting richer by the day. With his fortune, Bezos doesn’t need to be as careful with his cash, in contrast with normal human beings, who know how important is to save up for a rainy day. That may help to explain why Bezos has just stepped away from his post as CEO. Still, the culture Bezos created at Amazon during his reign insists on being extremely careful with its money. We now learn that this is true even when it’s cash that belongs to other people.

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      The New York Times features an article with this headline: “Amazon to Pay Fine for Withholding Tips From Delivery Drivers.” The first sentence gives the gist of the story: “Amazon agreed on Tuesday to pay $62 million to the Federal Trade Commission to settle charges that it withheld tips to delivery drivers over a two-and-a-half year period, in a case that highlights the federal government’s increased interest in gig-economy workers.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Withhold:

      1. When practiced by a government’s tax authorities: to retain the amount of money that is calculated as taxes that must be paid.
      2. When practiced by Amazon: to steal money owed to workers who have no idea what is going on.

      Contextual Note

      With any New York Times article, it is important to pay attention to the verbs. In this sentence, “withhold” appears alongside “agree,” “pay” and “highlight,” a word typically used to introduce the broad theme the article will develop. At no point in the article does the article use the verb that most people would use to describe Amazon’s deed — “steal.” Instead, it describes how the stealing took place: “Amazon had promised its Flex delivery drivers that they would receive 100 percent of all customers’ tips. But starting in 2016, the F.T.C. said, Amazon secretly lowered the hourly delivery wages, which were advertised at $18 to $25, and tried to mask the smaller wages by using customer tips to cover for the smaller hourly pay.” This time, the key verbs are “promised,” “receive,” “lowered,” “mask” and “cover.” Taken together, those verbs may suggest prolonged criminal acts.

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      Once Amazon realized the theft had been noticed, it did what any common thief would be inclined to do when hauled before a court. The company promised to reform and proposed a friendly settlement to compensate the victims and avoid scandal. As The New York Times tell us, “Amazon stopped the practice in 2019, after it became aware of the F.T.C.’s investigation.” Just like any burglar or pickpocket would then gladly do, Amazon “settled without admitting wrongdoing.” Why admit wrongdoing when the crime only took place over a period of two and a half years?

      The settlement demonstrated Amazon’s generosity. It amounted to “tens of millions of dollars,” which of course is small change for a company with a market cap of around $1.7 trillion. Such a small amount hardly deserves the qualification of theft. The misdemeanor merits the label The Times seems content with: “inadvertent withholding.”

      By the end of the article, the only reference to unlawful activity appears in a quote from Rohit Chopra, at the Federal Trade Commission: “Amazon is one of the largest and most feared corporate empires on the planet, and it is critical that global regulators carefully scrutinize whether the company is amassing and abusing its market power through unlawful practices.” Even this mention of “unlawful practices” falls far short of suggesting that Amazon may be guilty of an actual crime. It is now accepted wisdom, as determined by the Supreme Court and reaffirmed by Senator Mitt Romney, that “corporations are people.” But corporations are never punished in the way people are punished. Just ask Jean Valjean.

       Historical Note

      In 18th-century England, capitalism began to take form. Part of its job was to, write a new set of rules for human management. At about the same time, reformers began to call into question slavery, a standard feature of the brutal colonialism that had been fueling European prosperity for at least 200 years. The reason capitalists themselves began to find slavery and serfdom intolerable was the fact that those who controlled the means of production felt some vague sense of responsibility for the well-being of the slaves, who were a form of property that required maintenance. 

      At the beginning of the 19th century, economist David Ricardo described the new industrial approach to employment: the subsistence theory of wages. Market forces became the deciding factor, replacing the relationship of human dependency between employers and labor: “Ricardo wrote that the ‘natural price’ of labour was simply the price necessary to enable the labourers to subsist and to perpetuate the race.” This vision of economic production led to the abolition of slavery. But its real purpose was to liberate employers from any sense of vestigial responsibility for the livelihood of workers, who were merely anonymous, interchangeable suppliers of a new notion of “manpower” rather than humans who might, at odd moments, require the attention of the employer, if only because they tend to be more productive when healthy.

      An approach based exclusively on criteria of subsistence proved untenable for a simple reason: Humans are cultural beings rather than pure economic actors. Both individually and collectively, they can exercise intelligence. They may even succeed in analyzing power relationships and put pressure on the marketplace itself. 

      When capitalists found themselves confronted by the complexity of human psychology and cultural reality, they had to imagine sophisticated strategies to defend the law of subsistence wages. That could have led to the kind of theorizing that is now promoted as “social responsibility,” which many leaders like to praise while avoiding the practice. In most managers’ minds, the subsistence theory remains a foundational idea. Employers do what is necessary to keep wages as close to subsistence level as possible. Amazon is the perfect example.

      One solution is robotization. The subsistence requirements of robots are not only minimal, but devoid of psychology. Robots don’t complain of any form of abuse and they don’t talk to each other — two of the factors that led to the kind of pressure that led to reforms concerning employment itself and working conditions. Amazon has been robotizing as much as it can and will continue to do so in the future. Future generations of artificial intelligence will accelerate the trend.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The New York Times tends to admire rich people and successful companies, though it also allows itself to criticize them, especially when they give to Republican causes or promote Republican talking points. As the owner of The Washington Post, Bezos appears to be on the same side of the fence as The Times, squarely in the establishment Democrat camp. The Times tends to see Bezos as a hero to be admired for his skill and his wealth.

      In its role as an objective reporter of the facts in the news, The Times nevertheless makes a point of acknowledging the real world. In 2015, the paper of record did a thorough piece on Bezos’s management approach at Amazon. The article provided multiple examples of the deeply inhuman management culture Bezos created: “Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.” It mentions Bezos’ “eagerness to tell others how to behave; an instinct for bluntness bordering on confrontation; and an overarching confidence in the power of metrics.” It quotes an employee saying that “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot … a term that means you have become at one with the system” — an Amazon robot.

      The overall tone of the 2015 article is one of rapt admiration of the originality and assertiveness of a modern, pitiless meritocratic management style that seeks global conquest. The kind of management that can “withhold” tips from anonymous drivers to boost its own highly positive bank balance. This week’s article on the settlement with the FTC offers Amazon the final word, quoting Amazon’s statement that its pay for contract workers was among the “best in the industry,” and that, after the settlement with the drivers, the company is “pleased to put this matter behind us.” The wealthy are always pleased to put embarrassing matters behind them.

      *[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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      Tunisia: The Pending Goals of the Revolution

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      A decade after the Arab Spring, Tunisians have made significant progress in the field of democratization with respect to the constitution and the guarantee of public and private freedoms. However, economic performance remains modest, and many of the demands of the Tunisian Revolution are still pending.

      Tunisia commemorated the 10th anniversary of the revolution with violent youth protests alongside peaceful demonstrations in major cities like Tunis, Sousse and Nabeul, and inland cities of Siliana, Kasserine and Kairouan. The protesters demanded employment and comprehensive development. They expressed their discontent with high prices, monopolies and the deterioration of the purchasing power of citizens. There was also consternation about the increasing number of COVID-19 victims and the mishandling of the pandemic.

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      The reality is that the demands for employment are stagnating, ending the isolation of marginalized areas is still a distant dream, and achieving transitional justice is at a stalemate. While the population of Tunisia suffers, many members of the former regime who opposed the revolutionary struggle are still there at the forefront of the media, clinging to impunity.

      The Youth Unemployment Problem

      Tunisia has not yet succeeded in developing effective solutions to the unemployment problem that first sparked protests in December 2010. According to the National Institute of Statistics, the unemployment rate in the country during the third quarter of 2020 was 16.2% of the total active population, translating to approximately 6,766,000 people. This figure includes no fewer than 225,000 university graduates, with the rate rising to between 30% and 40% in several inland governorates.

      The youth population in Tunisia is the most vulnerable to joblessness. The latest field survey on employment by the National Institute of Statistics showed that around 70% of all those unemployed are below 30 years of age. Unemployment is effectively marginalizing youth in Tunisia and is among the main reasons behind both the 2010 revolution and the current protests. The continuing absence of employment opportunities for young people, the spread of favoritism among government and business elites, the rampant administrative and financial corruption and nepotism resulted in a perception of injustice that fueled discontent among many of those who have been unemployed for a long time.

      Embed from Getty Images

      While some impacted by the unemployment crisis attend sit-ins or demonstrate, others risk death on the high seas in search of work that guarantees dignity. In 2020, nearly 10,000 Tunisians arrived in Europe illegally. According to Romdhane Ben Amor, spokesman for the Tunisian Economic and Social Rights Forum, between 150 and 200 families have left Tunisia to Europe clandestinely over the last year, evading the Tunisian coast guard.

      A report by the forum found that “most of the illegal immigrants, aged between 18 and 30, share a fundamental characteristic as they lived the ‘school failure experience’ through early drop-out. They refer such drop-out to several reasons ranging from economic difficulties, and reluctance to continue to study, because the school, in their view, is no longer useful in light of the high unemployment of high-ranking people.” In addition, many who give up hope either take the path of organized crime or get involved with international terrorist networks.

      There is an urgent need to develop inclusive strategies aimed at empowering youth in the labor market. This is possible through the development of educational programs, vocational services and training courses to enhance the social investment role of the state by creating new productive projects directed at the domestic or foreign consumer market that would create jobs for the young.

      Marginalized Regions Remain Isolated

      A decade after the revolution, the inland and remote governorates have not yet gotten their share of comprehensive development. Rather, they are still suffering from marginalization, the ravages of high rates of illiteracy, poverty, unemployment and school dropouts. They lack basic facilities such as infrastructure, health services and educational institutions even though the new constitution stipulates the necessity of implementing a policy of positive discrimination concerning these underprivileged areas. It is not known where the financial allocations and in-kind assistance that the successive governments, the European Union and the Gulf states have allocated to those governorates have gone.

      It is worth noting that, according to the European Commission, “Since 2011, EU assistance to Tunisia has amounted to almost €3 billion (over €2 billion in grants and €800 million in macro-financial assistance).” With an average of €300 million ($360 million) per year between 2017 and 2020, these funds go toward the “Promoting good governance and the rule of law,” “stimulating a sustainable economic growth generating employment” and “Reinforcing social cohesion between generations and regions.” It is likely that these marginalized areas suffer locally from financial corruption and administrative misbehavior and are dominated by bureaucratic lobbies. Such underprivileged areas are often exploited politically by party and trade union elements to serve as a reservoir of popular protest against government policies.

      Likewise, ruling parties only pay attention to these marginalized regions during election campaigns. This has made the residents suffer the brunt of inequality and injustice. It leaves them with a difficult choice: to continue staying in neglected regions despite dire conditions or to leave their lands for major cities or to board migration boats to Europe. There is a definite need to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants of these regions, to provide them with resources for a decent living, to encourage greater investment in these regions and to revive the spirit of citizenship that will help regain confidence in the state.

      No Truth or Dignity

      In another context, the demand for justice for the victims of tyranny that the revolutionaries called for back in 2010 has not yet been fulfilled in an atmosphere where the transitional justice process is still stumbling. This includes the many obstacles that the Truth and Dignity Commission, which carries the mandate of investigating human rights abuses by the state, has faced — a lack of cooperation from state agencies and executive institutions being one of them. Observers have noticed that the perpetrators of violations did not attend the hearings and did not respond to lawsuits by judicial departments.

      This failure reinforces the culture of impunity and intensifies the suffering of the victims of the dictatorial regimes of President Habib Bourguiba (1956-1987) and his successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011). The state must make use of its authority to bring to justice the perpetrators, apologize to the victims and authorize reparations for their material and mental suffering so that they can resume their lives as part of the Second Republic.

      It is true that the revolution has, to some extent, removed the fear of the government and led to a decline in repression and the power of the president, the censors and the police. Critics were also released, the culture of protest spread, politics became a public affair and governance an ordinary exercise in which competing parties maintained an atmosphere of peace and democracy, with no single party having a monopoly.

      However, it is evident that some of the revolution’s goals have not been implemented. What is required is to make those goals not just promises and slogans, but a reality. The need of the hour for Tunisia is to further reform the judicial and government systems, ensure decentralization and comprehensive development to win citizens’ trust in the state, the revolution and the project of democratization.

      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

      Tech Exodus: Is Silicon Valley in Trouble?

      by

      On January 7, the news media announced that Elon Musk had surpassed Jeff Bezos as “the richest person on Earth.” I have a personal interest in the story. Two of my neighbors just bought a Tesla, and this morning, on the highway between Geneva and Lausanne, an angry Tesla driver flashed me several times, demanding that I let him pass. His license plate was from Geneva. Apparently, these days, driving a Tesla automatically gives you privileges, including speeding, particularly if you sport a Geneva or Zurich license plate. In the old days, at least in Germany, bullying others on the highway was a privilege reserved for Mercedes and BMW drivers, who, as the saying went, had an “inbuilt right-of-way.” Oh my, how times have changed.

      Texas: The End of Authentic America?

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      Elon Musk is one of these success stories that only America can write. He is the postmodern equivalent of Howard Hughes, a visionary, if slightly unhinged, genius, who loved to flout conventions and later on in his life became a recluse. And yet, had you bought 100 shares of Tesla a year ago, your initial investment would be worth more than eight times as much today (from $98 to $850). Tough shit, as they like to say in Texas.

      The Lone Star

      Why Texas? At the end of last year, Elon Musk announced that he was going to leave Silicon Valley to find greener pastures in Texas. To be more precise, Austin, Texas. Austin is not only the capital of the Lone Star State. It also happens to be an oasis of liberalism in a predominantly red state. When I was a student at the University of Texas in the late 1970s, we would go to the Barton Springs pool, one of the few places where women could go topless. For a German, this was hardly noteworthy; for the average Texan, it probably bordered on revolutionary — and obscene.

      In the 2020 presidential election, in Travis County, which includes Austin and adjacent areas, Donald Trump garnered a mere 26% of the vote, compared to 52% for the whole state. Austin is also home to the University of Texas, one of America’s premier public universities, which “has spent decades investing in science and engineering programs.”

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      Musk is hardly alone in relocating to Texas. Recently, both Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle announced they would move operations there, the first one to Houston, the second to Austin, where it will join relatively long-time resident tech heavyweights such as recently reinvigorated Advanced Micro Devices and Dell. It is not clear, however, whether Oracle will feel more comfortable in Austin than Silicon Valley. After all, Oracle was very close to the Trump administration.

      Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the “tech exodus” from Silicon Valley. Michael Lind, the influential social analyst and pundit who also happens to teach at UT, has preferred to speak of a “Texodus,” as local patriotism obligates. Never short of hyperbole, Lind went so far as to boldly predict that the “flight of terrified techies from California to Texas marks the end of one era, and the beginning of a new one.” Up in Seattle and over in Miami, questions were raised whether or not and how they might benefit from the “Texit.”

      Lind’s argument is that over the past decade or so, Silicon Valley has gone off track. In the past, tech startups in the Bay Area succeeded because they produced something. As he puts it, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos “are building and testing rockets in rural Texas.” Musk produces cars and batteries. Against that, Silicon Valley’s new “tech” darlings come up with clever ideas, such as allowing “grandmothers to upload videos of their kittens for free, and then sell the advertising rights to the videos and pocket the cash.”

      The models are Uber and Lyft, which Lind dismisses as nothing more than hyped-up telephone companies. Apparently, Lind does not quite appreciate the significance of the gig economy and particularly the importance of big data, which is the real capital of these companies and makes them “tech.” This is hardly surprising, given Austin’s history of hostility to the sharing economy — at least as long as it associated with its industry giants. As early as 2016, Austin held a referendum on whether or not the local government should be allowed to regulate Uber and Lyft. The companies lost, and subsequently fired 10,000 drivers, leaving Austinites stranded.

      In the months that followed, underground ride-sharing schemes started to spring up, seeking to fill the void. In the meantime, Uber and Lyft lobbied the state legislature, which ultimately passed a ride-hailing law, which established licensing on the state level, circumventing local attempts at regulation, which allowed Uber and Lyft to resume operations.

      Unfortunately for Lind, he also has it in for Twitter and Facebook for their “regular and repeated censorship of Republicans and conservatives” — an unusual failure of foresight in light of recent events at the Capitol. Ironically enough, Facebook has a large presence in Austin. Business sources from the city reported that Facebook is in the market for an additional 1 million square feet of office space in Austin. So is Google, which in recent years has significantly expanded its presence in the city and elsewhere in Texas.

      Colonial Transplant

      Does that mean Austin is likely to be able to rival Silicon Valley as America’s top innovation center for the high-tech industry? Not necessarily. As Margaret O’Mara has pointed out in the pages of The New York Times, this is not the first time that Silicon Valley has faced this kind of losses. And yet, “Silicon Valley always roared back, each time greater than the last. One secret to its resilience: money. The wealth created by each boom — flowing chiefly to an elite circle of venture investors and lucky founders — outlasted each bust. No other tech region has generated such wealth and industry-specific expertise, which is why it has had such resilience.”

      Industry insiders concur. In their view, Austin is less a competitor than a “colony.” Or, to put it slightly differently, Austin is nothing more than an outpost for tech giants such as Google and Facebook, while their main operations stay in Silicon Valley. It is anyone’s guess whether this time, things will pan out the same or somewhat differently. This depends both on the push and pull factors that inform the most recent tech exodus — in other words, on what motivates Silicon Valley denizens to abandon the Bay Area for the hills surrounding Austin.

      A recent Berkeley IGS poll provides some answers. According to the poll, around half of Californians thought about leaving the state in 2019. Among the most important reasons were the high cost of housing, the state’s high taxes and, last but not least, the state’s “political culture.” More detailed analysis suggests that the latter is a very significant factor: Those identifying themselves as conservatives or Republicans were three times as likely than liberals and Democrats to say they were seriously considering leaving the state.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The fact that 85% of Republicans who thought about leaving did so for reasons of political culture is a strong indication of the impact of partisanship. Among Democrats, only around 10% mentioned political culture as a reason for thinking about leaving the state. Partisanship was also reflected in the response to the question of whether California is a “land of opportunity.” Among Democrats, 80% thought so; among Republicans, only about 40% did.

      Until recently, thinking about leaving hardly ever translated into actually going. COVID-19 has fundamentally changed the equation. The pandemic introduced the notion of working from home, of remote work via “old” technologies such as Skype and new ones like Zoom. In late February 2020, Zoom’s stock was at around $100; in mid-October, it was traded at more than $550. In the meantime, it has lost some $200, largely the result of the prospect of a “post-pandemic world” thanks to the availability of vaccines.

      At least for the moment, remote work has fundamentally changed the rationale behind being tied to a certain locality. Before COVID-19, as Katherine Bindley has noted in The Wall Street Journal, “leaving the area meant walking away from some of the best-paying and most prestigious jobs in America.” In the wake of the pandemic, this is no longer the case. In fact, major Silicon Valley tech companies, such as Google, Facebook and Lyft, have told their workforce that they won’t be returning to their offices until sometime late summer. Given that California has been one of the states most affected by the virus, and given its relatively large population heavily concentrated in two metropolitan areas, even these projections might be overly optimistic.

      Distributed Employment

      And it is not at all clear whether or not, once the pandemic has run its course, things will return to “normal.” Even before the pandemic, remote work was on the rise. In 2016, according to Gallup data, more than 40% of employees “worked remotely in some capacity, meaning they spent at least some of their time working away from their coworkers.” Tech firms have been particularly accommodating to employee wishes to work remotely, even on a permanent basis. In May, The Washington Post reported that Twitter had unveiled plans to offer their employees the option to work from home “forever.” In an internal survey in July, some 70% of Twitter employees said they wanted to continue working from home at least three days a week.

      Other tech companies are likely to follow suit, in line with the new buzzword in management thinking, “distributed employment,” itself a Silicon Valley product. Its most prominent promoter has been Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University. Bloom has shown that work from home tends to increase productivity, for at least two reasons. First, people working from home actually work their full shift. Second, they tend to concentrate better than in an office environment full of noise and distractions.

      Additional support for distributed employment has come from Gallup research. The results indicate that “remote workers are more productive than on-site workers.” Gallup claims that remote work boosts employee morale and their engagement with the company, which leads to the conclusion that “off-site workers offer leaders the greatest gains in business outcomes.”

      It is for these reasons that this time, Silicon Valley might be in real trouble. Distributed employment fundamentally challenges the rationale behind the Valley’s success. As The Washington Post expose put it, in the past, “great ideas at work were born out of daily in-person interactions.” Creativity came from “serendipitous run-ins with colleagues,” as Steve Jobs would put it, “’from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.’” Distributed employment is the antithesis of this kind of thinking. With the potential end of this model, Silicon Valley loses much of its raison d’être — unless it manages to reinvent itself, as it has done so many times in the past.

      A few years ago, Berkeley Professor AnnaLee Saxenian, who wrote a highly influential comparative study of how Silicon Valley outstripped Boston’s Route 128, has noted that Silicon Valley was “a set of human beings, and a set of institutions around them, that happen to be very well adapted to the world that we live in.” The question is whether or not this is still the case. After all, at one point, Route 128 was a hotspot of creativity and innovation, a serious rival of Silicon Valley. A couple of decades later, Route 128 was completely eclipsed by the Valley, a victim of an outdated industrial system, based on companies that kept largely to themselves.

      Against that, in the Valley, there emerged a new network-based system that promoted mutual learning, entrepreneurship and experimentation. The question is to what degree this kind of system will be capable to deal with the new challenges posed by the impact of COVID-19, which has fundamentally disrupted the fundamentals of the system.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In the meantime, locations such as Austin look particularly attractive. This is when the pull factors come in. Unlike California, Texas has no state income tax. In California, state income tax is more than 13%, the highest in the United States. To make things worse, late last year, California legislators considered raising taxes on the wealthy to bring in money to alleviate the plight of the homeless who have flocked in particular to San Francisco. Earlier on, state legislators had sought to raise the state income tax rate to almost 17%. It failed to pass.

      At the same time, they also came up with a piece of legislation “that would have created a first-in-the-nation wealth tax that included a feature to tax former residents for 10 years after they left the Golden State.” This one failed too, but it left a sour taste in the mouth of many a tech millionaire and certainly did little to counteract the flight from the state.

      No wonder Austin looks so much better, and not only because of Texas’s generally more business-friendly atmosphere. Austin offers California’s tech expats a lifestyle similar to that in the Bay Area, but at a considerably more reasonable cost. Add to that the absence of one of the most distressing assaults on hygiene: Between 2011 and 2018, the number of officially recorded incidences of human feces on the streets of San Francisco quintupled, from 5,500 cases to over 28,000 cases — largely the result of the city’s substantial homeless population. The fact is that California is one of the most unequal states in the nation. As Farhad Manjoo has recently put it in The New York Times, “the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by.”

      Homelessness is one result. And California’s wealthy liberals have done little to make things better. On the contrary, more often than not, they have used their considerable clout to block any attempt to change restrictive zoning laws and increase the supply of affordable housing, what Manjoo characterizes as “exclusionary urban restrictionism.”

      To be sure, restrictive zoning laws have a long history in San Francisco, going all the way back to the second half of the 19th century. At the time, San Francisco was home to a significant Chinese population, largely living in boarding houses. In the early 1870s, the city came up with new ordinances, designed “to criminalize Chinese renters and landlords so their jobs and living space could be reclaimed for San Francisco’s white residents.” Ever since, zoning laws have been informed by “efforts to appease the city’s wealthy, well-connected homeowners.” And this in a city that considers itself among the most progressive in the nation.

      None of these factors in isolation explains the current tech exodus from the Bay Area. Taken together, however, they make up a rather convincing case for why this time, Silicon Valley might be in real trouble. Unfortunately enough, the exodus might contribute to the “big sort” that has occurred in the US over the past few decades, meaning the “self-segregation of Americans into like-minded communities” that has been a major factor behind the dramatic polarization of the American political landscape. The signs are there, the consequences known — at least since the assault on the US Capitol.

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