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Influence Has Become Democracy’s Influenza
Two months after the departure of Donald Trump, the world is seeking to understand the contours of the new administration’s still hesitating foreign policy. US President Joe Biden made a bold step forward this week when he vowed to pursue the fantasy of Russiagate, the Democratic equivalent of QAnon. He may fear that without the Russian bugbear, MSNBC, the news channel that contributed so effectively to his election, will see its audience plummet even further than in the weeks since the inauguration. Russiagate alone kept MSNBC’s audience hooked through four years of Donald Trump.
CNBC delves into the private thoughts of a president who now apparently feels empowered to judge the moral status of other leaders: “President Joe Biden says he believes Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a killer with no soul.” Biden intends to make the Russian president “pay a price” for interfering in the 2020 US election.
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Biden’s remarks followed a report issued by US intelligence that included the following observation: “A key element of Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to launder influence narratives including — misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden — through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration.”
One may forgive the incoherence of the author’s punctuation, but no reasonable reader can fail to deplore the confusion of the charges, highlighted by the use of phrases such as “people linked to” and “some of whom.” And then there is the semantic enormity of the phrase, “launder influence narratives.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Influence narrative:
Anything any politician or diplomat of any nation happens to utter in speech or writing. The basis of all political discourse.
Contextual Note
In his book, “The Ultimate Goal,” former Indian spy chief Vikram Sood explores the way governments and their intelligence arms build and promote their self-interested narratives. Like a modern Machiavelli, Sood offers today’s princes the basic recipe: “Manage narratives to manage your destiny … tell your story first, any other story thereafter will only be a reaction.” That sums up the business of the CIA. The fact that US intelligence operatives want people to feel shocked that Russia might be using “influence narratives” reveals more about the CIA and its belief in the naivety of the US public than it does about Russia. The report itself is a perfect example of an “influence narrative.”
Covering the same topic for The Washington Post, Ellen Nakashima confusingly repeats the CIA’s metaphor of laundering when she cites the report’s claim that Russians used “Ukrainians linked to Russian intelligence to ‘launder’ unsubstantiated allegations against Biden through U.S. media, lawmakers and prominent individuals.” “Launder,” in this context, is clearly a metaphor in spy language borrowed from the idea of “money laundering,” the act of pushing dirty money through indirect channels to return to the economy with a clean appearance.
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It may seem odd to apply a metaphor borrowed from the banking world and apply it to the hyperreal field of political narrative. But given the intelligence community’s well-documented predilection for dirty information — otherwise known as lies — it should hardly surprise us that the masters of plots and subplots see the public narrative as something that needs to be laundered. Sood, after all, tells us that the political language in any official narrative “is designed to make lies sound truthful and to give an appearance of solidity to the pure wind.”
Since the idea of “laundered narrative” belongs specifically to spy vocabulary, it may seem disconcerting that Washington Post journalists have uncritically adopted the term and feel no need to explain what it means. Could it be that they are corrupted by their incestuous relations with the spymasters in Langley, Virginia, who feed them much of their most valuable content and which they reprint uncritically? In contrast with The Post, Al Jazeera took the liberty of substituting a different verb, writing: “Moscow sought to ‘push influence narratives’ that included misleading or unsubstantiated claims.”
“Launder” has become part of The Post’s standard vocabulary. In September 2020, during the presidential election campaign, Post columnist Josh Rogin had used the term concerning the same claims about Moscow’s interference. According to Rogin, Democratic leaders demanded “a briefing based on concerns that members of Congress were being used to launder information as part of a foreign interference operation.”
This pushes the accusation a little further by supposing that the members of Congress referred to were actively involved in making the dirty information look clean. But that’s exactly how the fabricated Russiagate narrative is designed to play out: Putin’s accomplices and useful idiots can be found under every table. Just like in the good ol’ days of Joe McCarthy. After all, if the narrative tells us there’s a threat, we really do need to feel threatened. That’s the CIA and the media doing their job. Who doesn’t remember all the al-Qaeda sleeper cells that populated every American city following 9/11?
Historical Note
The website Strategic Culture offers a succinct explanation of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird that permitted it to infiltrate domestic media in the US. The journalist, Wayne Madsen, writes: “A major focus of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency from its very inception was the penetration of the news media, including the assignment of CIA agents to the newsrooms and editorial offices of America’s largest media operations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Hearst Newspaper, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and other major newspapers and broadcast networks.” That has been ever since one of the harder components of US soft power.
This week, Matt Taibbi interviewed the famous whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who, in 1971, leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, exposing the embarrassing truth about the war in Vietnam that had been carefully hidden from the media. Taibbi recounts how “Ellsberg described a vicious cycle, in which leaders lie pervasively, then learn to have so much contempt for the public that swallows those lies, that they feel justified in lying more.”
In its own dissemination of the content of the intel report released this week, The New York Times admits that the “report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election.” The report itself explains: “The Intelligence Community rarely can publicly reveal the full extent of its knowledge or the specific information on which it bases its analytic conclusions, as doing so could endanger sensitive sources and methods.” In other words, don’t ask for evidence, you won’t get it. Glenn Greenwald reminds his readers that when, last October, the story broke concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop that intel attributed to Moscow’s meddling, the FBI had already “acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop.”
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.custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}When the same discredited story reappeared months later with no significant changes and still with zero evidence, instead of casting doubt on the entire story, the obedient media interpreted it as confirmation of the original narrative. What better illustration of Vikram Sood’s principle, “tell your story first, any other story thereafter will only be a reaction”?
Perhaps the most neglected dimension of this debate concerns the official role of intelligence. A month after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, former President Harry Truman complained in an op-ed for The Washington Post that the CIA — an agency he had created — had betrayed its straightforward mission of gathering information to clarify the president in his decision-making. Truman insisted that “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.” When Operation Mockingbird under the direction of Cord Meyer was launched during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, the CIA had not only begun focusing on influencing the president, it realized that the best way of influencing executive decisions was to control the narrative that the media would share with the public.
The result is visible today, though no public figure will admit it. Democracy itself is engulfed within an elaborate system coordinated between the intelligence community, vested interests and the commercial media that generates and disseminates an endless stream of influence narratives.
*[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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Joe Biden stumbles on steps of Air Force One – video
The US president stumbled while boarding Air Force One on his way to visit to Atlanta, Georgia, to meet with Asian American community leaders. Biden tripped on the steps up to the plane, before recovering and carrying on unaided, turning to salute at the top. The 78-year-old fractured his right foot in November 2020 while playing with his dog Major
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China and the Perils of Bipartisanship
Not a single congressional Republican voted for the recent $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Not even the so-called moderate Republicans, the handful who backed the second impeachment of former US President Donald Trump, deigned to support an economic package that helps Americans hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The entire Republican caucus didn’t just snub the Democrats. They ignored the Republican mayors, as well as 41% of Republican voters, who approved of the legislation.
Naturally, the unified Republican caucus complained that President Joe Biden was not displaying his promised bipartisanship. It didn’t seem to occur to them that bipartisanship is a two-way street. How soon they’ve forgotten that nearly every Democrat in both houses voted for the Trump administration’s initial bailout package in March 2020.
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Nevertheless, the Biden administration remains eager to find common ground with Republican legislators. The president has high hopes that he can attract Republican support for an infrastructure bill this summer, given that rebuilding American bridges, highways and the like was a priority for the previous administration.
But here’s a truly troubling scenario. Casting around for another unifying topic, the Biden team has seized upon China. Democrats and Republicans alike are concerned about what China is doing these days. There is bipartisan disgust over what’s happening in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Hawks in both parties have long warned about Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea. Despite wildly different economic ideologies, Democrats and Republicans have joined hands in their opposition to Chinese trade and currency policies, cavalier approach to intellectual property rights and efforts to dominate markets in the Global South.
On the face of it, however, the bill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is starting to pull together is just another infrastructure initiative. It is meant “to shore up U.S. supply chains, expand American production of semiconductors, create 5G networks nationwide and pour billions into investments into U.S. manufacturing companies and hubs, among other proposals,” according to The Washington Post.
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But it’s not just infrastructure. The measure is specifically designed to bolster the full-spectrum US fight against China. “Hating China is a big bipartisan thing, and Schumer has the opportunity to take ownership of being against China,” points out Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-wing American Action Forum.
According to the most benign reading of this bipartisanship, the Biden administration will be manufacturing an anti-Chinese version of the Sputnik moment when, in 1957, the Soviet launch of the first artificial satellite prompted a frenzy of US government spending on science and technology to catch up to the Russians. “The danger China poses could fundamentally reorder U.S. attitudes toward government’s role in domestic economic growth, research and development in ways that leave the United States stronger,” writes liberal columnist E.J. Dionne.
A robust industrial policy is indeed preferable to, say, the tariffs that the Trump administration levied against Chinese products. If fear of China overcomes the conservative distaste for government interventions in the economy, should progressives really be looking this particular gift horse in the mouth?
Full Court Press
The Quad is the latest multilateral mechanism through which the United States is putting pressure on China. The four countries — the United States, India, Japan and Australia — all have their separate beefs with Beijing. But last week was the first time that the heads of these four states met as part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which was set up in 2007.
The statement the four leaders recently published in The Washington Post makes no mention of China. It’s all about cooperating on climate, the pandemic and strengthening democracy. But that’s just being diplomatic. As Alex Ward writes in Vox, China has “gotten into a deadly fight over a disputed border with India, started a trade war with Australia, hacked the US government, and for years used its might to push Japan around on economic and military matters.” Trump tried to rally the four countries behind his own anti-China agenda. But his efforts were compromised by a suspicion in many quarters that he’d just as soon negotiate a deal with China behind the Quad’s back as coordinate a united front.
The current president, by contrast, has moved steadily away from a preference to engage China. “Biden had to be reprogrammed on China” during the presidential campaign, one of his advisers said. This reprogramming explains Biden’s harsher tone during the election, such as calling Chinese leader Xi Jinping “a thug.”
As president, Biden has been careful to sound notes of both amicability and threat. Cooperation to deal with the climate crisis is certainly a possibility. But promoting deals with China is not going to win the new president support in Congress or, for that matter, with the American public. China’s unfavorability rating rose to 79% in a recent Gallup poll, its worst showing in more than four decades. A shift has taken place in just the last couple of years. According to a Pew Research Center poll, 67% of Americans now have “cold” feelings toward China, compared to only 46% in 2018.
The appointment of Kurt Campbell as the Indo-Pacific coordinator at the National Security Council (NSC) indicates the direction of the administration’s new take on Asia. Campbell was a key architect of the “Pacific pivot” under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration. He’s not going to play quite the anti-China role that Matt Pottinger did on Trump’s NSC, but he’s a firm believer in strengthening bilateral alliances and multilateral coordination to contain China.
In a January 2021 piece in Foreign Affairs, Campbell channeled Henry Kissinger in asserting the need for the US to restore a “balance of power” in the region. What that really means is that the US, with the help of its friends, must push back against China to reassert its own Pacific authority, both militarily and economically. Practically, Campbell explains, this means that:
“Although Washington should maintain its forward presence, it also needs to work with other states to disperse U.S. forces across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. This would reduce American reliance on a small number of vulnerable facilities in East Asia. Finally, the United States should encourage new military and intelligence partnerships between regional states, while still deepening those relationships in which the United States plays a major role—placing a ‘tire’ on the familiar regional alliance system with a U.S. hub and allied spokes.”
Over the years, China has steadily eroded US power not only in Asia but internationally. It used the anti-globalism of the Trump years to expand its influence in international institutions such as the United Nations and its associated bodies like the World Health Organization. Where It has encountered difficulties in expanding its influence, such as with international financial institutions, it has simply created its own. Shortly after Biden’s election, China joined the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which includes the countries of Southeast Asia, plus Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan). This move, plus Beijing’s recent investment agreement with the European Union and President Xi’s announcement that China would also consider joining a modified Trans-Pacific Partnership, suggests an economic counteroffensive to the US ramping up of multilateral security arrangements.
These moves have not gone unnoticed. On the eve of their first visit to Asia this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin III wrote in The Washington Post, “If we don’t act decisively and lead, Beijing will.”
The Biden administration’s decision to focus on beefing up US economic competitiveness, particularly in the tech sector, is in some ways an admission of defeat. China has outmaneuvered the United States in the global economy. The only way Washington can compete at the moment is by throwing its weight around militarily and trying to play catch-up on the home front.
Is China a Useful Threat?
It’s hard to argue with the importance of investing in critical US industries. Republicans and laissez-faire economists generally oppose such a policy of picking winners and losers in the marketplace, except when it comes to the military-industrial complex. Only a large external threat can move such ideologues to accept the obvious: governments can and should shape markets.
But here are some problems with hitching this industrial policy to the “China threat.” The global economy needs an overhaul to address the climate crisis, rampant economic inequality, automation and other developments. This is no time for the US to turn its economic relationship with China into a Cold War competition. Sure, let the two countries compete over who makes the best laptop computer, but cooperation is essential for developing new rules for the global economy. A robust industrial policy doesn’t preclude cooperation, unless it feeds into a rancor and a parochialism that makes cooperation near to impossible.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of global supply chains, with the collapse of international trade and countries initially competing for scarce medical equipment. This is not a new problem, however. Shelley Rigger writes in her 2013 book on Taiwan about a moment “in 1999 when a power transmission tower on a remote mountain in central Taiwan toppled, blacking out the island’s high-tech industry for a day. The interruption nearly doubled the world price of memory chips and the supply of TFT-LCD flat screens took six months to return to normal.” Natural (and unnatural) disasters can wreak havoc on the supply of essential components.
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.custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}Ensuring an indigenous supply of computer chips may well protect the US in the short term, but it does little to address the underlying problem of supply chains. A return to a time when every country produced all of its essentials or went without is not really an option, considering the importance of global trade routes going back to the Silk Road and even before. Reshoring and relocalization are both essential in this age of climate crisis. But a reordering of the global economy that accommodates such changes should be a matter for coordination, not Cold War competition.
In addition, an industrial policy that prioritizes gaining a competitive edge over China could overshadow the other major focus of the Biden administration, namely reducing the national and global carbon footprints. High-tech products often rely on key outputs of the extraction industry, like cobalt and lithium. An industrial policy built on minimizing carbon emissions and the use of rare minerals, rather than besting China, would pick very different economic winners and losers.
When it comes to foreign policy, bipartisanship is not necessarily a virtue. The two major US parties came together around waging the Vietnam War, confronting the Soviet Union during the Cold War and fighting “terrorism” in the wake of September 11. The first failed, the second was outrageously expensive and nearly ended in nuclear apocalypse, and the third led the country into the infamous “forever wars.”
Selectively challenging China over its human rights record, its overreach in the South China Sea or the conduct of its businesses around the world (like this fish meal operation in Gambia) is appropriate. Going all out in a military, economic and cultural competition with the Asian superpower — and forging a wafer-thin bipartisan consensus to do so — is the height of folly.
*[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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'Our community is bleeding': Asian American lawmakers say violence has reached 'crisis point'
Asian American lawmakers and leaders warned that violence and discrimination targeting their community have reached a “crisis point” following the shootings in Atlanta this week that killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent.The hearing, the first to examine anti-Asian discrimination in more than three decades, had been scheduled weeks ago amid a surge in violence against the Asian community since the pandemic began. But it took on heightened urgency after the mass shooting that left Asian Americans in Atlanta and across the country shaken and afraid.“What we know is that this day was coming,” Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, told a subcommittee of the House judiciary committee on Thursday. “The Asian American community has reached a crisis point that cannot be ignored.”Grace Meng, a Democrat of New York, said: “Our community is bleeding. We are in pain. And for the last year, we’ve been screaming out for help.”Meanwhile police in Atlanta revealed new details about the investigation. At a press conference, Charles Hampton, deputy chief of the Atlanta police, said “nothing was off the table”, including whether the killings were motivated, at least in part, by race or gender.“We are looking at everything to make sure that we discover and determine what the motive of our homicides were,” he said, adding that they were still determining whether the murders constituted a hate crime.The suspect, Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder. Long, who is white, told police that he had a sex addiction and targeted the spas to eliminate “temptation”, denying any racist motivations.Hampton said on Thursday that Long had “frequented” two of the spas where four women of Asian descent were killed. Four more people were killed at Youngs Asian Massage Parlor, on the outskirts of the city.The Cherokee county sheriff’s department announced on Thursday that Capt Jay Baker had been replaced as the spokesman on the investigation.Frank Reynolds, the sheriff, expressed regret amid widespread outrage over comments Baker had made a day earlier. Baker drew criticism for saying Long had had “a really bad day” and “this is what he did”. Reynolds released a statement on Thursday acknowledging that some of Baker’s comments stirred “much debate and anger” and said the agency regretted any “heartache” caused by his words.“Inasmuch as his words were taken or construed as insensitive or inappropriate, they were not intended to disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect,” Reynolds said in a statement, adding that Baker “had a difficult task before him, and this was one of the hardest in his 28 years in law enforcement”.In response to the shootings, the White House announced that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were canceling a political event in Atlanta on Friday as part of their Help is Here tour to promote the administration’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief package. Instead, they will spend their visit meeting with local leaders and elected officials from the city’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community.Biden on Thursday ordered flags at the White House and all federal buildings to be flown at half-staff through sunset on Monday to honor the eight victims of the Atlanta spa shootings.At the hearing on Capitol Hill, Meng was joined by experts and advocates who told the panel that the rising tide of anti-Asian bigotry was fueled in part by rhetoric from Donald Trump and his allies, who referred to Covid-19 as the “China virus” the “China plague” and the “kung flu”.Nearly 3,800 hate incidents, spanning the spectrum of verbal harassment to physical assault, have been reported against Asian Americans nationwide since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, according to Stop AAPI Hate. Asian American women reported nearly twice as many incidents as men, at nearly 70%.During the hearing, the subcommittee chairman, Steve Cohen, recounted a number of brutal incidents that included a Filipino man being slashed across the face with a box cutter and an 89-year-old Asian American woman being lit on fire.“All the pandemic did was exacerbate latent anti-Asian prejudices that have a long, long and ugly history in America,” he said.In a particularly impassioned exchange, Meng confronted one of the panel’s Republican members, the Texas congressman Chip Roy, who said, after a lengthy exhortation of China’s handling of the coronavirus, that he was concerned the hearing amounted to a “policing” of free speech.“Your president and your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other country that you want,” Meng said through tears. “But you don’t have to do it by putting a bullseye on the back of Asian Americans across this country, on our grandparents, on our kids.”“This hearing was to address the hurt and pain of our community, to find solutions – and we will not let you take our voice away from us,” she said.The Associated Press contributed to this report More
Why the US Return to the WHO Matters
In compliance with major statements made repeatedly during his electoral campaign, US President Joe Biden, on his first day in office on January 20, signed two important executive orders — among 15 others, a record number — signaling the United States’ return to the international arena, to global cooperation and multilateralism. One of these orders was for the United States to rejoin the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, and the other was to reestablish the country’s full membership and support to the World Health Organization (WHO).
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Both acts were hugely symbolic, especially since they occurred within hours of Biden’s inauguration, as they set a fundamentally new tone in US foreign policy and sent a strong signal to the world, paraphrased as: We are back, count on us. But other than being symbolic, these acts constitute a material and substantial backing of global efforts to address two of the 21st century’s most severe world crises — the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change — under the aegis of the United Nations.
When the Trump administration announced in July 2020, in the middle of the most devastating pandemic in at least a century, that the US would withdraw from the WHO — having already frozen payments of mandatory membership dues and thereby violating international law months earlier — that move was widely regarded as not only hugely counterproductive but as outright insane.
The World Needs the US as Well
Clearly, the country hit hardest by the pandemic — both in terms of total infections and deaths — is better off as a member of the very global community that ensures the fast sharing of research, data and best practices, coordinates responses, and comes together to devise evidence-based solutions to the world’s most pressing public health issues, be it malaria, tuberculosis, HIV or COVID-19. But the international community needs the US as well.
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In fact, the US has been the single most important independent variable in international relations and global affairs since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of the Declaration of the United Nations on January 1, 1942. Hence, a WHO without the active participation and support of the US government is unthinkable. This engagement extends well beyond funding. Since its inception in 1948, the US has been the single largest contributor to the WHO — which budgeted $4.84 billion for the biennium 2020-21, not including COVID-19-related expenses — with a steady share of 22% of the organization’s assessed core budget and significant additional voluntary contributions made every single year.
Yet the active support of medical research data, analysis, know-how, logistics, supplies and people power to the WHO’s multifold programs and emergency operations by the US, such as during the West African Ebola crisis of 2013-15, is priceless and virtually irreplaceable. Indeed, a great sense of relief was voiced in unison by scientists, senior government officials and UN leaders alike when the Biden administration applied common sense and restored the United States’ bond with the WHO on the day of its inception. This step will have an immediately relevant and measurable impact on the global response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
With the unfreezing of previously withheld payments and the allocation of additional, fresh sums of money targeted at global health emergency relief efforts, research and development, and the provision of supplies and teams, the global fight against COVID-19 will experience an important boost. This will be particularly important in the context of WHO’s COVAX initiative, which is a historic, unprecedented fundraising effort to make effective and safe vaccines available to all countries, especially developing ones. Moreover, COVAX entails a proprietary vaccine development program, including the building of manufacturing capabilities, and provides technical and logistical support to countries in need.
COVAX Initiative
The new US administration has quickly become COVAX’s largest funder and pledged to donate surplus vaccine stocks in addition to its financial contributions. Also, efforts to assist developing countries by deploying on-the-ground technical assistance where needed are underway.
However, COVAX still has a long way to go to meet its goal of buying supply so that 2 billion doses can be fairly and equitably distributed by the end of 2021. To date, financial support by OECD countries to the facility has been lukewarm at best, although the US and Germany stand out. The apparent lack of solidarity and tangible support by wealthy nations is disappointing and recently prompted UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to call global vaccine distribution “wildly uneven and unfair,” describing the goal of providing vaccines to all as “the biggest moral test before the global community.”
In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic with its rapidly-emerging mutations and variants, quick, unequivocal and substantial support — both financial and technical — to developing countries and those behind in getting access to effective vaccines is not only a moral obligation for developed countries, but also a mere matter of rationality and self-interest.
As long as over 100 countries globally have not even received a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, even the most ambitious and aggressive vaccine rollout campaigns in wealthy countries may be in vain as new variants of SARS-CoV-2 can emerge and cause new viral strains at any time. The Biden administration, along with other governments, is well advised to massively support multilateral solutions and collective action. It is the only reasonable, promising approach to tackling the world’s biggest crises in the 21st century.
*[This article was submitted on behalf of the author by the Hamad bin Khalifa University Communications Directorate. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the university’s official stance.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
- in US Politics
'Inhumane and flawed': global business leaders urge governments to end death penalty
Global business leaders launched a campaign on Thursday declaring their opposition to the death penalty, urging governments everywhere to end the practice and asking their peers to join them.Speaking to the virtual South by Southwest festival, Sir Richard Branson, one of the campaign’s leaders, said: “The death penalty is broken beyond repair and plainly fails to deliver justice by every reasonable measure. It is marred by cruelty, waste, ineffectiveness, discrimination and an unacceptable risk of error.“By speaking out at this crucial moment, business leaders have an opportunity to help end this inhumane and flawed practice.”Initial signatories of Business Against Death Penalty include billionaires fashion mogul François-Henri Pinault and telecoms tycoon Mo Ibrahim, Ben & Jerry founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Martha Lane Fox, tech entrepreneur and Twitter board member and Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post.The campaign is being coordinated by the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice, a nonprofit human rights group led by Celia Ouellette, a former death row lawyer. “This campaign is an opportunity for business leaders to embrace their responsibility to speak out authentically on issues of racial and social justice in a way that delivers real impact.”Ouellette said in the light of the business communities support for Black Lives Matter and racial justice there was a growing awareness of the “long history of race and the death penalty among business leaders” and many were now prepared to stand against it.In a statement, Ben & Jerry founders Cohen and Greenfield said: “Business leaders need to do more than just say Black Lives Matter. They need to walk the talk and be instrumental in tearing down all the symbols of structural racism in our society. The death penalty has a long history with oppression, and it needs to end. Now.”Joe Biden is the first US president to openly oppose executions and is under pressure to end the federal death penalty. Ouellette said she was hopeful that the business community could help lobby for change in the same way it helped press for marriage equality in the US and elsewhere.“Bringing powerful voices to the table is highly impactful,” she said.The group plans to build support and increase pressure for change ahead of the World Day Against the Death Penalty on 10 October.More than 170 United Nations member states have now abolished the death penalty in law or practice.Ouellette said the practice was at a “tipping point” and that Biden’s appointment could pave the way for the US to join the countries that have effectively ended it. “I am hopeful,” she said. But she warned that the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, when the government for the first time executed more American civilians than all the states combined, shows what is at stake.“Movements can tip backwards too,” she said. More
