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    Biden Washes His Hands of the Israel-Palestine Affair

    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

    READ MORE

    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.

    Embed from Getty Images

    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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    White America’s Burden in the Holy Land

    Earlier this week, an Israeli military official evoked “a worst-case scenario” conducted by three Israeli infantry brigades that would amount to crushing Gaza on the ground rather than just bombarding it. Some observers have noticed that the current worse-than-ever-before-but-not-as-bad-as-what’s-to-come scenario has miraculously permitted Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to hang on to power after the March 23 election deprived him of the hope of heading a new coalition.

    The Future of Jerusalem Matters to Us All

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    Washington Post reporter Steve Hendrix notes that “the escalation of fighting brought a last-minute reprieve from what could have been the end of [Netanyahu’s] record run at the top of Israeli politics.” Hendrix quotes Gayil Talshir, a professor at Hebrew University: “The riot came just in time to prevent the change of government in Israel.” Despite this “coincidence,” Hendrix avoids suggesting what some suspect: that Netanyahu’s policies and recent actions may have been designed to provoke the current crisis.

    Rather than delve into history, reflect on the meaning or explore possible hidden motives, Hendrix prefers the approach that Western media have long preferred: presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a combined violent chess game and political popularity contest between two obdurate parties whose leaders are unwilling to compromise. Hendrix reduces an enduring historical drama of vast geopolitical dimensions to a petty game of leaders seeking electoral advantage by appealing to their base, à la Donald Trump. He calls the new wave of violence “a boon to the leaders of both camps — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas militants — who have been struggling and scraping to salvage their political standing.” That’s the kind of narrative that appeals to The Post’s readers living in their bubble within the Beltway. History be damned; this is electoral politics.

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    The New York Times came closer to signaling Netanyahu’s implication in the current troubles. Isabel Kershner cites centrist opposition leader Yair Lapid, who “blamed the prime minister for the spiraling sense of chaos.” Kershner focuses on the likelihood that Israel will at some point in the near future have a coalition government including Mansour Abbas’ Islamic Raam party, which would mark a monumental change in Israeli politics. In the end, however, Kershner appears to believe that it’s still Netanyahu who will emerge from the rubble as the leader of whatever unstable political coalition he can cobble together.

    As the violence escalates, the world wonders what US President Joe Biden intends to do. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was the first to express the administration’s take, which for the moment sounds like an endorsement of the status quo: “There is, first, a very clear and absolute distinction between a terrorist organization, Hamas, that is indiscriminately raining down rockets, in fact, targeting civilians, and Israel’s response, defending itself.” The idea that Biden’s administration might try, for once, to play the role of honest broker would seem dead in the coastal waters of Gaza.

    Blinken’s recognition of Palestinian suffering only appeared when he claimed that Israel has “an extra burden.” This, of course, implies that its main burden consists of “targeting terrorists” in response to indiscriminately launched rockets. The “extra burden” consists of trying “to prevent civilian deaths, noting that Palestinian children have been killed in Israeli strikes.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Extra burden:

    A responsibility supplementing the one Rudyard Kipling famously identified as “the white man’s burden,” which consisted of dominating “sullen peoples, Half devil and half child,” the kind of people who for their amusement launch rockets indiscriminately at white people.

    Contextual Note

    Thanks to the growing realization that Israel is firmly set on maintaining an apartheid state, for the first time in decades, US politicians have begun to wonder whether it makes any sense to continue the nation’s unconditional support of every Israeli government. Israel has continued expanding its illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in direct violation of UN resolutions and the Geneva Convention. The current troubles began with Israel’s brazen attempt to evict Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem and replace them with Jewish settlers, followed by the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

    For Blinken, the social and historical context of these events simply doesn’t exist. He wants people to believe it all started with the launching of rockets by the Palestinians. Nor do context and historical reality interest Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, who insisted that details are irrelevant when the US has vowed “‘ironclad support’ for Israel’s right to defend itself.” This is totally consistent with Biden’s promise, in a phone call this week to Netanyahu, of “unwavering support” for Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

    Blinken showed less concern for the possible war crimes now taking place than for the bad PR they might generate. “[W]henever we see civilian casualties, and particularly when we see children caught in the crossfire losing their lives, that has a powerful impact,” he said. Blinken worries about what “we see” and its  “impact” in the media. This implies that if we didn’t see it and if the impact was reduced, all would be well. Ignorance is bliss.

    Biden reinforced everyone’s expectation that there would be nothing new under the shining sun of US diplomacy when he offered this comment: “My hope is that we will see this coming to a conclusion sooner than later.” What conclusion is he thinking of? And why is an American president just hoping that something good will happen? Why isn’t he intervening to facilitate not a “conclusion” but a resolution? Some will point out that every US president’s hands are tied by a status quo that holds as its first commandment, thou shalt never criticize Israel, its leaders or its policies.

    Historical Note

    Following World War II, Western nations assumed the entire civilization’s shame at the crimes of Nazi Germany. The British used the newly created United Nations as the instrument by which the West could atone for Germany’s racist sins through the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. 

    Once that was done, the die was cast. The West, led by the British — who had assumed “responsibility” for the region of the former Ottoman Empire — decided how and at whose expense (not their own) the surviving European Jews might be rewarded. Giving them Palestine seemed like the easy way out for the Western world as a whole. The British wanted out anyway. It also had the advantage of establishing a state in the Middle East whose culture would be basically Western and European.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Neither the British, the Americans nor the French — all in various ways implicated in the new order to be established in the Middle East — imagined that Israel would evolve to become an aggressive nation increasingly focused on bullying its neighbors and claiming its own particular version of exceptionalism. French President Charles de Gaulle was the first to notice it, on the occasion of the Six-Day War in 1967. Western leaders may have naively believed that the same Arabs who allowed themselves to be bullied by the Turks for centuries would accept with docility the rule of their new masters, who claimed to be building a modern nation on socialist and egalitarian principles.

    In the first decade of Israel’s existence, the US refused to identify with the new nation’s interests, notably during the Suez Crisis in 1956 in which the Eisenhower administration countered the Franco-British alliance. It also viewed with hostility the presumed socialist ideology of Israel. At the time, the WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elite maintained a lingering anti-Semitic bias. But as the Cold War evolved and the importance of the oil economy grew, leading to increasing tensions between the West and the Muslim world, by the 1980s, the US was on track formulating its current “unconditional,” “iron-clad” alliance with Israel.

    This gradual evolution toward a position of increasingly blind support of Israel has had a profound influence on Western media in its reporting on the enduring, increasingly unresolvable conflict between the Jewish state and its Arab inhabitants. Western news media have largely accepted the role of encouraging their audience to sympathize with white, essentially European and American Israelis who feel threatened in an alien, hostile Orient.

    Greg Philo in The Guardian shows that an analysis of Western media in its reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has, for decades, reflected “a strong emphasis on Israeli perspectives.” What better illustration than yesterday’s Washington Post: “Israeli jets strike Gaza; Hamas launches rockets as Israeli ground troops stand by”?

    *[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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    Why the US Will Not Achieve Herd Immunity

    The problem with the COVID-19 pandemic is that we don’t know if we’re coming or going. It’s as if we’re swimming far from shore, overwhelmed by one wave after another, and we’re unsure if we’re heading toward land or away from it.

    China was the early face of COVID-19, but it hasn’t faced many infections since spring 2020. Europe, like the United States, has experienced successive outbreaks. Brazil continues to be hit hard, while Turkey is seeing a reduction of cases from a mid-April surge. Thailand and Cambodia are only now dealing with their first major upticks in the disease.

    Where India Went Wrong

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    But the real surprise has been India. Early on in the pandemic, journalists and scientists were trying to figure out why the coronavirus had made so little mark on the subcontinent and left so few deaths in its wake. Now, after a collective sigh of relief following a modest surge in late summer and fall last year, India is now overwhelmed by over 400,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths a day, which are both likely to be undercounts.

    There are several reasons for India’s current catastrophe. A more infectious variant started to appear in the population, which the World Health Organization this week labeled a global health risk. The Indian government was not only unprepared for the crisis, but it was dangerously cavalier in its approach to the disease. After last year’s surge, it grew lax on testing and contact tracing. Nor did it put resources into the country’s inadequate medical system or in stockpiling key supplies like oxygen.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Then there are the errors of commission. The government did nothing, for instance, to prevent Kumbh Mela, a Hindu religious event last month that drew millions of pilgrims to a holy location on the Ganges, from turning into the largest super-spreader event on the planet. Prime Minister Narendra Modi even continued to hold mass political rallies as the COVID numbers began to rise.

    When it comes to vaccines, the government has been slow to order doses, distribute them to the population and secure the raw materials to scale up manufacturing. Although India is the world’s largest producer of COVID vaccines, less than 3% of Indians are fully inoculated against the disease.

    Well, that’s India, you might be saying to yourself. They have a Trump-like fanatic for a leader. Their medical system has long been inadequate. It’s an obvious place for COVID to have a final encore.

    In the United States, meanwhile, the number of cases has fallen dramatically since January. Hospitals no longer face overcrowding. More than a third of the population is fully vaccinated. The Biden administration is expecting that the country will return to some semblance of normality this July. But wasn’t it a similar complacency that proved India’s undoing? So, is India the ghost of America’s past or a taste of things to come.

    Our Herd Problem

    In early 2020, the scientific community went into hyperdrive to develop not one but several vaccines against COVID-19. In the US, the government and the medical community worked overtime to set up the infrastructure to get doses into arms around the country. Clinics and volunteers have jumped into action at a community level to make sure, as of this week, that 58% of adults have gotten at least one shot and over 70% of those older than 65 are fully vaccinated.

    But all this effort is now hitting up against resistance. Or hesitancy. Or barriers to access. States are cutting back on their vaccine orders from the federal authorities. Daily vaccination rates have dropped nearly 20% from last week. Employers are basically bribing people to get their shots. Millions of people aren’t even bothering to show up for their second doses.

    Barriers to access is perhaps the easiest problem to address. According to a recent survey, 72% of African-Americans and Latinos want to get vaccinated, but 63% reported that they didn’t have enough information about where to get a shot.

    While lack of information may well be the reason why some Americans have yet to sign up for their vaccinations, a hard-core resistance has developed to vaccines in this country — and COVID vaccines in particular. According to polling in April, around 45% of Republicans report that they’ll never get the vaccine. In all, as much as 37% of Americans are now saying that they’re going to opt-out. That means that tens of millions of doses are now chasing the remaining 5% of Americans who want to be vaccinated and haven’t yet gotten their first shot.

    Embed from Getty Images

    This resistance has nothing to do with a lack of information about how to sign up for a shot. It’s all about misinformation: that the vaccine is unnecessary, that it’s dangerous, that it comes with a microchip that will track you forever.

    Recently, Republican pollster Frank Luntz set up a focus group of vaccination-hesitant, Donald Trump voters to see what it would take to convince them to get shots. It was not an easy crowd. The husband of one of the participants had gotten seriously ill from COVID — and she stilldidn’t want to get vaccinated. In over two hours of discussion, Luntz brought in such vaccine-boosters as a former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Senator Bill Cassidy, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — and still, the participants barely budged.

    Only after several emotional stories from former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and a final round of facts from the CDC official did they start to change their minds. “I would say I was probably 80% against when this started today,” one man said. “Now I’m probably 50-50-ish.”

    Luntz considered that a success. But in this age of Twitter, it’s not a workable model to expect skeptics to sit still for more than two hours while Republican Party grandees and noted doctors barrage one small group after another with stories and facts.

    A more representative reaction to such attempts by Republican Party influencers is what happened when Ivanka Trump posted selfies of her own vaccination. Twitter responses included: “‘Love your family but this is a huge NO for me & my family. Will be praying you do not get any of the horrible [side-effects].’ Others replied, ‘Please stop promoting this nonsense,’ ‘HARD PASS,’ and ‘Sorry, don’t trust it.’”

    Even more concerning, some anti-vaxxers are already planning to use fake vaccination cards to get into public events. Hundreds of sellers have appeared on eBay, Facebook and Twitter to hawk such cards. In this way, “live free or die” is quickly becoming “live free and kill.”

    In a nutshell, the US won’t achieve herd immunity because a significant portion of the herd is suffering from mad cow disease. Whatever the reasons for this obstinacy — anti-government, anti-science, anti-liberal — it will ensure that large pockets of this country will continue to play host to a very infectious disease.

    This resistance potentially puts the US in the same category as the Seychelles. An island nation in the Indian Ocean, the Seychelles has the highest rate of vaccination in the world. More than 60% of the population is fully vaccinated. But that still hasn’t been enough to ward off COVID. The Seychelles is now experiencing its largest outbreak, which, on a per capita basis, is even larger than what has overtaken India.

    The same thing might happen again in America, for instance in states with very low vaccination rates, like Mississippi and Idaho. When it comes to COVID-19, the US is only as strong as its weakest links.

    Perennial Pandemic

    When I lived in New York City, I used to wonder why my apartment was so overheated in the winter. It turns out that the heating systems in old buildings had been designed (or redesigned) to accommodate open windows in winter. During the flu pandemic in 1918-19, open windows and greater circulation of air were supposed to guard against infection.

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    Modern societies were once structured to handle periodic outbreaks of infectious diseases, from the steam heating in buildings to the TB sanatoriums that dotted the landscape. Americans braced for outbreaks with greater frequency than the cyclical reappearance of the cicadas. Three major waves of cholera struck the United States between 1832 and 1866. Typhoid killed 25,000 people in New York in 1906-07. The flu in 1918, diphtheria in the 1920s, polio in the first half of the 20th century: Americans became accustomed to infectious diseases as a way of life.

    COVID-19 isn’t going to disappear completely. It will return, again and again, just like variants of the flu or that other coronavirus, the common cold. If we’re lucky, it will come back in a less virulent form or the antibodies in our systems — those of us who received vaccinations — will render it so. If we’re not lucky, COVID-19 will generate ever more infectious strains that overwhelm us on a periodic basis.

    In the best-case scenario, what’s happening in India today is COVID-19’s last gasp. With the worst-case scenario, India is our future. So, don’t delete your Zoom app or give up your home office. Don’t throw away those masks. When it comes to infectious disease, we are all dependent on the herd.

    That’s great if you’re living in South Korea or New Zealand where compliance is second nature. But in America, the home of the free, the brave and the stupid, the herd may prove to be our collective undoing.

    *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

    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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    How Reasonable Are Suspicions Promoted by the Media?

    The New York Times editorial board cannot be accused of a failure of will, a lack of consistency or the cardinal political sin of flip-flopping. Many of The Times critics supposed that, over the past five years, the newspaper’s obsession with any random complaint against Russia — cast in the role of America’s archenemy — could simply be explained by the editorial board’s visceral hatred of President Donald Trump. Knowing their readers were 91% Democrat, they willingly fed their audience’s wish to view Trump as Vladimir Putin’s closest collaborator.

    With Trump gone, things should have changed. His election victory in 2016 now appears to have been merely the catalyst rather than the cause of an obsession that has had the effect of renewing the Cold War animus formerly directed toward what was then a much more powerful adversary, the Soviet Union. A week doesn’t go by without one or more The Times articles either reminding readers of Russia’s multiple attempts at skulduggery. These include cyberterrorism, industrial espionage and even the tendentious use of American social media. 

    Anyone vaguely familiar with what we call “the modern world” should understand that every government of a self-respecting nation-state has by now learned to emulate the institutions, methods and techniques elaborated in the West for the purpose of “gathering intelligence.” But just as departments of “defense” (considered good and moral) are configured to wage aggressive war (considered bad and potentially immoral), intelligence agencies are also hard at work producing and disseminating bad information. Some of these institutions have even been known to engage in “covert activities.”

    The New York Times Has Feelings for China

    READ MORE

    This permanent competition poses a slight problem for many Americans with a keen sense of morality, who don’t know how to deal with the idea of US skulduggery. Rather than denying it, they consider that even its obviously immoral actions — assassination, the overthrow of democratically elected governments, etc. — it is only employed as “a force for good.” Russian skulduggery, on the other, is a force for evil. It’s a lesson every baby boomer learned at school. The baby boomers appear to have passed on the information to the next generation. Curiously, Chinese skulduggery has now begun to worry Americans, but they tend to consider it annoying rather than evil (unless it includes creating and deliberately spreading a global pandemic).

    In the rubric Good Reasons to Hate Russia and Maybe Even Envision Going to War With It, The Times offers two major pieces this week. A new article on directed-energy attacks evokes suspicion of Russia before admitting that “the intelligence agencies have not concluded any cause or whether a foreign power is involved.” Another article with the title “Russian Spy Team Left Traces That Bolstered C.I.A.’s Bounty Judgment” revives the recently discredited story that the Russians offered a bounty for the killing of American military personnel in Afghanistan. The three journalists do their damnedest to persuade readers that this potential pretext for a new cold (or hot) war confirms Ronald Reagan’s famous identification of Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) as the “evil empire.”

    The authors inform us that the evil action of offering bounty is the work of “Russian operatives, known as Unit 29155 of the G.R.U.,” Russia’s military intelligence service. To bolster their case, the authors cite Czechia’s prime minister’s claim that there is “’clear evidence,’” assembled by intelligence and security services there, establishing ‘reasonable suspicion’ that Unit 29155 was involved in two explosions at ammunition depots that killed two Czechs in 2014.” The same people must be involved in the bounty story.

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Reasonable suspicion:

    Either a purely rational hypothesis emitted by an objective observer with no interest in particular outcomes or a self-interested innuendo corresponding to a hidden agenda

    Contextual Note

    “Clear evidence” to support a “reasonable suspicion” is all Times journalists need to justify publishing an article designed to create certainty where none exists. Who needs facts on the ground when you have suspicions to excite your readers? 

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    The journalists laboriously develop a tendentious explanation of the notion of “confidence levels,” at one point even suggesting that “low” really means “high.” Discerning readers might have their own reasonable suspicion of this attempt to conflate supposition with the truth. What emerges from this and many of the Russia-based narratives promoted by The Times and other media, is an earnest effort to persuade the public to take at face value the stories intelligence sources share with their journalists. Behind it lies the idea that intelligence agencies know more than they’re willing to release to the public. 

    The authors actually propose an explanation of why the public should have high confidence in information the agencies have branded as worthy of low to moderate confidence: “When analysts assess something with low confidence … that does not mean they think the conclusion is wrong. Rather, they are expressing greater concerns about the sourcing limitations, while still judging that the assessment is the best explanation of the available facts.”

    Anyone who has studied the human brain knows that thought is a powerful tool. The Times authors see a direct correlation between thinking and truth. “The National Security Council statement,” they write, “identified other ‘nefarious operations’ around the world that the government thought the squad had carried out.” They see as solid evidence the fact that “some military officials based in Afghanistan, as well as some other senior Pentagon and State Department officials, thought the C.I.A. was right.”

    Historical Note

    Playing with our sense of both logic and justice, the authors offer a new line of reasoning when they write that “the intelligence community also had ‘high confidence’ — meaning the judgment is based on high-quality information from multiple sources — in the key circumstantial evidence.” With no real evidence, circumstantial evidence must suffice. 

    In the legal tradition of the United States, circumstantial evidence alone may lead to conviction, but only after testimony and full contradictory debate before a judge and jury. Attribution of guilt requires the unqualified respect of due process, including the accused’s right to a formal defense. As one legal argument puts it, “In order to sustain a conviction based solely on circumstantial evidence, the circumstances must be consistent with his innocence, and incapable of explanation on any other reasonable hypothesis than that of guilt.”

    Intelligence assessments, conducted in secrecy, cannot be compared to a fair trial. But the policy outcomes they provoke may be as extreme as invasion and war. This happened in 2003 when the George W. Bush administration used circumstantial — and in some cases fabricated or manipulated — evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

    In this highly controversial question, the intelligence agencies are given the role of the prosecutor, called upon to align circumstantial evidence to convince the jury that the accused is guilty. The public is the jury. What then should the role of the press be? If intelligence agencies can be compared to prosecutors and the nation’s executive compared to that of the judge, in the absence of the accused, who is left to play the role of defense? Without professional counsel there cannot be a fair trial.

    US Media Still Has Russia on Its Mind

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    Political theorists have traditionally attributed that role, which consists of raising possible objections to foregone conclusions proposed by the government, to the fourth estate — in other words, the press and the media. They alone make it possible to present and weigh the evidence on either side. The contradictory light they throw on a subject makes it possible for the public to understand what is behind the government’s decisions and policies.

    That effort of the fourth estate should be focused on challenging power, casting light on murky issues, reducing their ambiguity and tempering the abuses of the powerful. That was formerly advertised as the badge of honor of a free press. The New York Times is not alone not just in echoing the messages of the national security state, but in actively promoting them as unqualified truth. The corporate media have become the obedient stenographers of the most secret and aggressive governmental initiatives. Some see this as a betrayal of their mission in a democracy.

    Russia is certainly up to all sorts of dirty tricks aimed at the US, just as the US is up to tricks against most other nations, including allies. But obsessively blaming Russia alone for both verified and unverified crimes should not be the business of a serious newspaper.

    *[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

    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.

    Embed from Getty Images

    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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    What the State Department and the Media Get Wrong About the JCPOA

    Just as President Joe Biden’s administration waited till the very last minute to define its position of vaccine patent waivers, imperiling the effective impact on a pandemic of whatever agreement is finally reached, it has played for time with the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This may prove costly because of Iran’s tight electoral calendar. The failure to act quickly with the current negotiation-minded regime in Tehran, which insists on returning to the accord from which Donald Trump withdrew, risks reinforcing the Iranian hardliners in the country’s June 18 election.

    The quandary the Biden administration is dealing with may now have more to do with saving face than achieving an accord. In a New York Times article on the state of negotiations, reporters Steven Erlanger and David Sanger claim that American and Iranian leaders “share a common goal: They both want to re-enter the nuclear deal that President Donald J. Trump scrapped three years ago.” The easy path for a president who presumably represents everything Trump opposed would be simply to rescind the withdrawal. But Biden’s advisers appear to believe that returning to the old deal would make the president appear weak and unmanly after the virile performance by his predecessor who pleased his audience by taking a roundhouse punch at the hornet’s nest.

    Can the US and Iran Compromise in Vienna?

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    The Times reporters describe the situation in these terms. If Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken can’t come home with what he termed in January a “’longer and stronger accord’ — one that stops Iran from amassing nuclear material for generations, halts its missile tests and ends support of terrorist groups,” the US appears poised to accept Trump’s fait accompli. Republicans routinely accuse Democratic presidents of being weaklings. They believe that US presidents must perform with brio and show their muscles. Like George W. Bush in Iraq, to avoid appearing weak, Biden needs a pretext for a photo-op declaring the mission accomplished.

    According to Erlanger and Sanger, Biden “knows he cannot simply replicate what the Obama administration negotiated six years ago, after marathon sessions in Vienna and elsewhere, while offering vague promises that something far bigger and better might follow.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Bigger and better:

    The magic formula required to justify any proposed project in the consumer society

    Contextual Note

    The Times reporters insist that more than a month of “marathon sessions” must be justified by a cry of victory. In the US, time is money. Even if the public has paid little attention to the negotiations, the journalists clearly believe that the time invested must be accounted for. Erlanger and Sanger see a high political cost if the administration fails to show a return on investment. After all, Biden is already facing the shame — coming from both Republicans and Democrats (including Hillary Clinton) — of canceling 20 years of blood and treasure in Afghanistan with nothing to show for it.

    The journalists dismissively call the negotiations “five weeks of shadow boxing.” They deem the respective positions irreconcilable. The Iranians want to “be allowed to keep the advanced nuclear-fuel production equipment they installed after Mr. Trump abandoned the pact, and integration with the world financial system beyond what they achieved under the 2015 agreement.” The Biden administration, in contrast, insists on “an agreement on limiting missiles and support of terrorism.”

    Colm Quinn, the author of Foreign Policy’s newsletter, offers a clearer picture, pointing out that both sides are playing coy for the moment, as is usual in serious negotiations, especially in this case, when Americans and Iranians are communicating exclusively through European intermediaries. Quinn leaves a strong hint that the two sides may be close to a return to the original deal. This contradicts the impression given by The Times journalists. Is this their way of building suspense by treating it like a diplomatic Super Bowl?

    Embed from Getty Images

    If a deal is reached, The Times will be in a position to celebrate Biden’s “unexpected” accomplishment against such formidable odds. The Times, after all, has been going overboard to promote Biden as the new Roosevelt. To make their point, the authors cite American officials who “say it is not yet clear that Iran really wants to restore the old deal, which is derided by powerful hard-liners at home.” 

    With a single verb, Erlanger and Sanger unwittingly reveal their incapacity or unwillingness to take some perspective and distance themselves from the US State Department’s point of view. “With Iran’s presidential elections six weeks away,” they write, “the relatively moderate, lame-duck team of President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif are spinning that an agreement is just around the corner.”

    The verb is “spinning.” For The Times journalists, it goes without saying that Iranians spin, while Americans tell it like it is. After citing the Iranians’ optimistic contention that negotiations are “underway for some details,” the journalists don’t just assume the State Department’s position but blurt out their own emotive reaction: “Not so fast, Mr. Blinken has responded, adding that ‘Iran has yet to make an equally detailed description of what nuclear limits would be restored.’”

    The rest of the article is remarkable for its uninformative incoherence, navigating around negotiating positions and areas of dispute that fail to differentiate between rhetoric and the description of the political reality on both sides. Lost in meaningless details, they make no attempt to clarify the underlying issues. They mix serious facts with anecdotal trivialities. To add to the confusion, they offer difficult-to-decipher statements in the passive voice, such as this one: “In two discussions in February, the Europeans urged American officials to start negotiating in earnest and lift some sanctions as a gesture of good faith toward Iran. Those suggestions were ignored.” Who ignored them and why?

    At one point, the journalists mention “Iran’s pressure tactics.” But even when citing Trump’s 1,500 sanctions against Iran, they never suggest that sanctions may be seen as pressure tactics. The authors apparently seek to leave the impression not only that the negotiations are going nowhere but that the journalists themselves — like for example, the Israeli government — may be hoping they fail. Compare this lengthy Times article with a brief video interview with Trita Parsi, executive vice president of The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where the viewer comes away with a solid idea both of what the stakes are on the two sides and a feeling for the historical logic underlying the current situation.

    Historical Note

    The rhetoric journalists use often reveals more about their unstated worldview than the content of what they write. Seizing on Blinken’s wish for something “longer and stronger,” the journalists echo it with their own “bigger and better.” This underlines the fact that Americans tend to see everything, even a supposedly delicate negotiation, in competitive terms. They multiply the comparatives, following the logic of marketers in the consumer society who always promise their product will provide “more and more.”

    The parties of any serious negotiation should have a principle on which they can agree, an overriding objective they both wish to achieve. In this case, it could be identified as a crucial historical goal: the denuclearization of the Middle East. It might even imply a broader goal, like the denuclearization of the world. Although they refused to make it explicit, the Obama administration’s JCPOA strategy did contain the idea of normalizing relations between the US and Iran in such a way as to remove the temptation of a Middle East nuclear arms race. By integrating Iran into the global economy, the competitive pressure to match Israel or dominate Saudi Arabia thanks to a nuclear arsenal would logically disappear.

    Instead of emphasizing that goal, Blinken publicly asserts, with The Times’ approval, that it’s all about getting an advantage and achieving more. There is a reason for that. Israel wants to maintain its own nuclear monopoly in the region, despite denying its existence. Because the US prioritizes Israel’s concerns, it effectively refrains not only from pursuing its own objectives but even articulating them in public. Reporting on the growing violence in Jerusalem and Gaza this week, The Times predictably notes that “neither side [is] prepared to make concessions the other would demand.” One more issue framed as a competition. Let the bigger and better man win.

    *[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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    Can Joe Biden Convince America?

    It has become so hard to be hopeful about America. Disappointment awaits around every corner and under every rock. Yet, there he is, Joe Biden, president of the United States of America, telling the nation that we can be so much better than we are and then having the guts to tell us what we need to do to get there. Other “leaders” have given it a try, but there was always one important thing missing. What makes Biden different than the others is having the political courage to tell the nation how we have failed to be what we have for so long told ourselves that we were and are.

    Biden Scores Key Wins in First 100 Days

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    I don’t know of anyone who predicted that this 78-year-old lifelong politician could seize the moment and grip the nation. But somehow, he has. It was to be expected that anything would be better than Trump, and Biden could have coasted on that alone. But that is not what is happening.

    President Biden has used quiet confidence, competence, compassion and a solid moral foundation to propose the most progressive agenda in decades to try to lead Americans to where they didn’t know they wanted to go. Senator Bernie Sanders, among others, understood and articulated the problems and offered a vision of fundamental reform. Now, somewhat out of the clear blue, Biden may prove to be a leader capable of actually delivering some of that reform.

    Biden Has More in Mind

    After the election in 2020, there was much talk about the Biden who most thought to be a transitional figure, at best. But while we were talking to each other, it seems that Biden was actually telling himself and maybe a few others that he had much more than that in mind. Progressives like me didn’t even know he was listening to us. Maybe we had become so often disappointed that we never quite understood how far compassion and empathy can take someone when they are empowered with the opportunity to try to make a real difference.

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    To be clear, it will take much more than compassionate leadership to move America even slowly toward fulfilling its promise. It will take steady and competent administration officials and public servants committed to progressive ideals and then willing and able to turn ideals into public policy. It will take a united Democratic Party at all levels of government to both support and actively promote the policy initiatives. And then it will take President Biden to remind the whole nation that good people not only can accomplish good things, but that there is a moral imperative to do so now.

    There will be no help whatsoever from Republican politicians at the national level, and the right-wing media apparatus will only ramp up its bile. Somewhere, around 70% of those who identify as Republicans still reject the reality that Biden is the legitimate president of the United States. With this in mind, Biden should ignore the national Republican Party and its acolytes until there is a clear and unequivocal affirmation of the results of the last presidential election from their political “leaders,” including the disgraced and seditious losing candidate.

    In the current political environment, the most basic tenet of democratic governance continues to require repetition, so here goes: No one can be entrusted with democratic governance without a commitment to the democratic process, the rule of law and the resulting government. So, for all of you Republicans who still are waiting for Trump’s “triumphant” return and those who try to diminish the institutional significance of the insurrection that shook the nation, you have earned the right to be ignored. No nation can succeed at governance if those who do not believe in government continue to have a seat at the table.

    I have some confidence that Biden knows this as well. And even more confidence that those counseling the president are exploring all of the realistic options to achieve their policy objectives. Further, they know that it will be imperative to negotiate with Democratic officials at all levels of government to increase broad public support for his progressive agenda.

    Republican Officials

    There may also be some state and local Republican officials willing to sign on. However, Biden and his supporters will have to work much harder than they should have to in order to convince state and local Republican officials of the painfully obvious value of federal support for education, health care, child care, roads and bridges, better wages, affordable housing and the like. After years of local community neglect, most Republican officials still seem willing to reflexively resist any federal mandates, no matter how much those mandates might benefit their constituencies.

    In this context, it will not be necessary to fix everything at once. However, it will be essential to initially restore a national faith in the capacity of government to meet collective societal challenges and to convince the nation that solutions to 21st-century problems require an actively engaged national government.

    Embed from Getty Images

    To succeed at this, Biden will have to directly address the most persistent element of resistance to collective national solutions — the perception that to implement policy changes beneficial to all requires that some give up a little individual “liberty” and a measure of individual “security.” There is only one cohesive response. It is that realizing a better America engenders a collective liberty that provides a more secure future for all of us.

    This is what transformation looks like. Over the 40 years since Ronald Regan first stained governance with his disdain for the very government he was chosen to lead, much has been lost. A certain atrophy has set in that has often resulted in government failure, not because government can’t work, but because political leaders never trusted the institutions that were essential to success. It was much easier to find failure than the courage to fix it. And it was even easier to allow delusional waves of national greatness to mask a shameful level of collective despair.

    Convincing Americans

    If President Biden is to be transformational, he will need to convince a cynical nation that government is worthy of the trust needed to meet the challenges ahead. Then, he will need to fight for the resources required to meet those challenges and to demonstrate that we are writing a better chapter this time because we finally realize the distortion of previous chapters.

    To write new and better chapters, the usual national distractions will have to be avoided. Two simple “truths” need to be emphasized. The first is that deficit spending is not a threat to needed reform, while resistance to paying taxes to meet public policy objectives is a threat. The second is that costly international adventures can only be avoided by accepting that “winning” is not a given. In both instances, simple cost/benefit analysis would serve America well and temper the hubris at the core of so much national angst.

    Joe Biden may well be suited to rise above the exaggerated pride and self-confidence that has driven many of his predecessors to achieve far less than they could have or should have achieved and that has shattered promise after promise. Maybe Joe is the guy. I sure hope so. It is nice for the moment to feel like some of us are no longer walking alone.

    *[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

    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

    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.

    Embed from Getty Images

    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