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Ed Webb

Why Factories Leaving China Aren't Going to India - Bloomberg - 0 views

  • Vietnam seems to be the consensus pick for winner of the U.S.-China trade war, as Chinese and other manufacturers shift production to the cheaper Southeast Asian nation. If there’s a loser, at least in terms of missed opportunities, it may be the countries of South Asia.
  • African countries, too, are making manufacturing a top priority. Ethiopia alone has opened nearly a dozen industrial parks in recent years and set up a world-class government agency to attract foreign investment. The World Bank has lauded sub-Saharan Africa as the region with the highest number of reforms each year since 2012.
  • The only proven pathway to long-lasting, broad-based prosperity has been to build a manufacturing sector linked to global value chains, which raises productivity levels and creates knock-on jobs across the whole economy
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  • Faced with rising costs, Chinese manufacturers must decide whether to invest in labor-saving automation technologies or to relocate. Those choosing the latter present an enormous opportunity for less-developed countries, as Chinese companies can help spark industrialization and much-needed economic transformation in their new homes. 
  • In the last five years, the American Enterprise Institute’s China Global Investment Tracker has recorded 13 large Chinese investment deals in Africa and only nine in South Asia.
  • In the past few years, Bangladesh has fallen to 176 out of 190 countries in the global Ease of Doing Business country rankings. DBL Group, a Bangladeshi company, is investing in a new apparel manufacturing facility that will generate 4,000 jobs -- in Ethiopia.
Ed Webb

Indonesia mass strikes loom over cuts to environmental safeguards and workers' rights |... - 0 views

  • Indonesia has passed a wide-ranging bill that will weaken environmental protections and workers’ rights in an attempt to boost investment, a move condemned as a “tragic miscalculation” that could lead to “uncontrolled deforestation”.Groups representing millions of workers said they would strike on Tuesday in response to protest against the bill, which will amend about 1,200 provisions in 79 existing laws after it was pushed through parliament with unprecedented speed
  • The bill has also been criticised by both environmental experts and some of the world’s biggest investors, who expressed concern over its impact on the country’s tropical forests.
  • The government argues that the bill will make the country more attractive to investors at a time when the economy is reeling from the impact of Covid-19. Millions of people have lost their jobs as a result of the virus, which has infected more than 300,000 people and claimed 11,253 lives.
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  • According to a draft version of the bill, mandatory paid leave for childbirth, weddings, baptism and bereavement will be scrapped, as will menstrual leave for women. Work overtime will be increased to four hours a day, and mandatory severance benefits paid by employers will be reduced, from 32 times monthly wages, to 19 times monthly wages.
  • Phelim Kine, senior campaigns director with the environmental group Mighty Earth, said the Indonesian parliament had made “a ruinous false choice between environmental sustainability and economic growth”
  • Restrictions placed on foreign participation in some sectors will be eased, and the government will set up a land bank and manage this to acquire land for public interest and redistribute the land
  • only high-risk investments required to obtain a permit or carry out an environmental impact assessment
  • would legitimise “uncontrolled deforestation as an engine for a so-called pro-investment job creation policy.”
Ed Webb

The Crisis of Government: Representation Vs. Mobilization - The WorldPost - Berggruen I... - 0 views

  • for numerous reasons, mobilizational authority is currently undermining and challenging representational authority in new ways
  • Liberal modernity takes potentially controversial questions of truth and justice and hands them over to a small group of specialists to deal with so that the rest of us can live in peace. From the time of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes onwards, the basic compact is that liberal citizens trade shared meaning for security, including prosperity. But for the same reason, there is always a potential vulnerability here that surfaces periodically, as we’re witnessing today.
  • Nothing fuels populism as effectively as the sense of public corruption: the notion that this suspension of private interests is a sham. Today, especially in the age of leaks, social media, systematic scandals and tabloid intrusion, it seems intuitively obvious to many people that public life is a game being played by insiders.
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  • The central feature of contemporary populism is that it is anti-representational, both in a constitutional and an epistemological sense. It opposes representative democracy (favoring plebiscitary alternatives) and professional media (favoring social media or simple propaganda). In place of representation, it favors presentation. This is well-exhibited by a phenomenon such as the Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests), the French mass movement against economic injustice, in which a political entity comes into being with very little representational consensus on aims, objectives or policies but is primarily constituted by its presence on the streets and on social media.
  • mobilizational authorities. Rather than a grammar of “believe me, this is true,” they work via a grammar of “follow me.”
  • the transformation of our media ecology over the past 20 years that has undermined the status of facts in public life — not so much through replacing them with lies or propaganda (although we see instances of this) but with streams of real-time content and data that are so relentless and voluminous that individuals are increasingly dependent on curatorial practices to orient them
  • Modern populist movements offer what liberalism often cannot: common purpose, meaning and physical congregation for a mass of individuals.
  • Those whose power rests on a capacity to move people (emotionally and physically) make no claim to being honest or trustworthy; the fact that Trump or the Brexit leader Nigel Farage are liars is irrelevant to a person who is committed to following them
  • By their nature, facts are static entities that fit with modern techniques of the printing press, bureaucracy and critical review. But our contemporary media environment is attuned to speed rather than public credibility.
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      A critical point for understanding our current crisis.
  • even more moderate political controversies now routinely include questions regarding the politics of knowledge and challenges to elite consensus
  • Tighter media regulation, public investment in science for its own sake and support for public-interest journalism and education are all obvious ways in which a shared social reality can be bolstered. People don’t need to be trained in citizenship or national service; they need investment in the conditions of a shared world.
  • Fifty percent of Americans have experienced no increase in real income since the late 1970s. So in what sense is the story of national progress or growth true for these people?
  • Political alienation and disillusionment appear to relate to mortality and morbidity in curious ways. Psychologists have found that awareness of our own finitude can trigger a heightened demand for authoritarianism. The physical experience of pain makes us unusually receptive to messages that make sense of the world, in terms of heroes and villains.
  • Democracy and authority in the age of the digital platform are qualitatively different, allowing outrage to move virally and unpredictably. Being mobilized offers forms of embodied, emotional experience that being represented never does.
Ed Webb

How Afghanistan's President Helped His Brother Secure Lucrative Mining Deals with a U.S... - 0 views

  • In 2019 SOS International (SOSi), a Virginia company with links to the U.S. military, won exclusive access to mines across Afghanistan. President Ashraf Ghani’s brother is a major shareholder of a SOSi subsidiary. President Ghani granted this SOSi subsidiary, Southern Development, rights to buy artisanally mined ore. Southern Development operates a mineral processing plant on the outskirts of Kabul. The inroads made by SOSi and Southern Development into Afghanistan’s mining sector have roots in a 2011 initiative by U.S. special forces to work illegally with members of a pro-government Afghan militia on mining in Kunar province. Although shut down after an inquiry, these Kunar projects have since been quietly restarted as a private venture, and are benefitting those closest to the president.
  • The Taliban and other armed groups have battled both the central government and each other for control of the mines, using them to fund their insurgencies. Even former U.S. President Donald Trump coveted Afghanistan’s gold, lithium, uranium, and other mineral riches. In 2017, Trump was persuaded to keep troops in the country by its president, Ashraf Ghani, who dangled the prospect of mining contracts for American companies.
  • In 2011, American Special Forces operators introduced an eastern Kunar paramilitary commander, Noor Mohammed, and his deputy, known as Farhad, to a small Pentagon business development office called the Task Force for Stability and Business Operations. The Task Force, which operated in Iraq and Afghanistan, aimed to create jobs for locals in key industries like mining as part of a broader counterinsurgency strategy. In theory, good jobs would stop Afghans from joining the militants. “Their mission, to create small-scale, sustainable mining operations for the Afghans, was a solid fit to our FID [Foreign Internal Defense] mission,” said Heinz Dinter, a former Special Forces officer. The commandos asked the Task Force to help the two local warlords, who were illegally dealing in chromite, a valuable anti-corrosion additive used in stainless steel and aircraft paint. Afghan chromite is prized for its exceptional purity. With a crusher provided by the Pentagon, Mohammed and Farhad began to process their ore at Combat Outpost Penich, a small NATO base in eastern Kunar.
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  • public officials and leaders of government-aligned militias such as Mohammed and Farhad are forbidden by law to hold mineral rights.
  • “There’s no conceivable way extraction or export could be done without the collusion of insurgent groups,”
  • Beyond its powerful American connections, SOSi was well positioned for growth because it wasn’t afraid to get dirty. In his thesis, Hartwig recommended offering the Afghan government “some type of benefit” to win support from “key leaders” for future mineral projects. Through its subsidiary, that is exactly what SOSi did, apparently cutting the president’s brother in on the deal.
  • SOSi’s transition to a military contracting powerhouse came through its connections to the office of retired Army General David Petraeus
  • Bush administration Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq invasion, and other U.S. defense officials also joined the SOSi board
  • “The U.S. government cannot directly do business with Afghan companies, so it goes through SOSi, a private entity, to secure deals with all the major Afghan media networks to broadcast Resolute Support and NATO communication material,”
  • Task Force officials remained bullish on strategic mining long after the project was closed down; some even saw it as a possible form of Taliban rehabilitation. “The only way to realistically economically reintegrate the Taliban back into Afghanistan’s economy is with mining,” Emily Scott King, the former director of the Task Force’s natural resource group, said in 2019 at a special operations policy forum in Washington, D.C. “It can work within the hierarchy that the Taliban is used to, with commanders running small processing facilities or becoming the brokers for small miners.”
  • A Southern Development document on file in the Ras al-Khaimah Offshore Free Zone, the secretive United Arab Emirates jurisdiction where its full ownership records are held, confirms that on June 17, 2014 — three days after Ashraf Ghani was elected president — SOSi owned 80 percent of the company, with Hashmat Ghani owning the remainder
  • Hashmat Ghani’s son, Sultan Ghani, listed a short SOSi internship in 2013 on his resume. Sultan Ghani now runs The Ghani Group, the family’s privately owned conglomerate with interests that include mining and military contracting. He apparently keeps in touch with old friends at SOSi. A photo uploaded to LinkedIn during the summer of 2019 shows him meeting with SOSi Vice President Helmick, and the account features praise for his interpersonal skills posted by another SOSi executive
  • Buying chromite from unlicensed local mines remains illegal in Afghanistan, but Ashraf Ghani’s election opened a rich new vein of opportunity. While the American Task Force and his own son once urged legalization of artisanal mining, the president has instead redistributed bureaucratic power, enabling extralegal activities.
  • A document leaked to OCCRP reveals that on December 26, 2019, the High Economic Council, in a process overseen by the president, authorized Southern Development to take on a project far larger than the original task force project in Kunar. The company received a mineral processing permit and permission to purchase artisanal chromite in six Afghan provinces: Khost, Paktia, Paktika, Kunar, Ghazni and Maidan Wardak.
  • In the spring of 2018, more than a year before Afghanistan’s High Economic Council signed over the rights to the chromite, Southern Development’s Kabul office had imported new crushing equipment from South Africa for its Afghan operation. In fact, Global Venture and its consultants, according to Scott King, had since 2013 been “advising private sector investors” with mining interests in Afghanistan about how to “quietly” restart initiatives like the Kunar chromite project. At the same 2019 Special Operations forum, she highlighted a mysterious $10 million investment into what she claimed were “legal” Afghan chromite mines.
  • Until late 2019, the company falsely claimed to have won chromite exploration rights in Kabul province from Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum. The claim disappeared from the website after reporters asked about it.
  • Mining takes time to generate profits and it’s unclear if SOSi has started to see a return on its investments yet, but the price of chromite ore hovers around $200 per ton and with a worldwide market for stainless steel, Southern Development could become highly profitable. Meanwhile, its success is already spawning copycats.
  • Another American military contractor, DGCI, which is under federal investigation for its work in Iraq and Afghanistan, hired another former Task Force staffer in 2019, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to mine lithium in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province. Since then, DGCI has also tried to cultivate a relationship with the Ghani family, holding public charity events with Sultan Ghani.
Ed Webb

The Conflict in Ethiopia Calls Into Question Authoritarian Aid - Carnegie Europe - Carn... - 0 views

  • In recent years, the impressive economic performances of Ethiopia and Rwanda have meant that international donors have become increasingly willing to fund authoritarian regimes in Africa on the basis that they deliver on development. Beyond the obvious concern that donors become complicit in human rights violations, the main question facing authoritarian development in Africa has always been whether the economic gains achieved under repressive rule are sustainable.
  • if Ethiopia is no longer seen as a success story, then the case for authoritarian development in Africa falls apart. Already, the EU has suspended nearly €90 million ($110 million) in budgetary aid to the country because of concerns over the government’s handling of the conflict in Tigray. Growing evidence that authoritarian politics can have devastating developmental consequences will also give a shot in the arm to organizations like the Westminster Foundation for Democracy that argue that the international community should be doing development democratically.
  • it has become more common for international donors and aid practitioners to question the value of democracy for development—and to suggest that authoritarian governments that can force through necessary reforms might be more effective in some cases.
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  • some of the continent’s more democratic states have failed to end corruption or deliver high levels of economic growth. On the other hand, Ethiopia and Rwanda achieved impressive successes, attracting international praise for reducing poverty and unemployment while consistently securing high economic growth
  • Ethiopia received almost $5 billion in foreign aid in 2018, while Rwanda received just over $1 billion. The figure for Rwanda is particularly striking when one considers that democratic Malawi, which saw a peaceful transfer of power to the opposition in June 2020, receives considerably less aid per person: $70 for each Malawian in 2018, compared with almost $91 for every Rwandan
  • recent trends in academic and policy research have played an important role in the rise of authoritarian development. These trends provided donors with an intellectual foundation for investing in countries that, on the basis of their human rights records, the EU and the UK might have been expected to avoid.
  • researchers suggested that when patrimonial systems are tightly controlled, waste can be minimized and resources channeled toward productive investments to support developmental outcomes
  • official figures are part of a broader propaganda campaign designed to sell the regime both at home and abroad
  • there is some evidence that the empirical data used to identify Ethiopia and Rwanda as success stories may not be as impressive as it was first thought
  • The combination of the rise of China, democratic malaise in the West, and the economic struggles of many African democracies has led citizens and political elites to increasingly question the value of democracy for development
  • The Tiger economies of East Asia, such as South Korea and Taiwan, entrenched the economic progress they achieved in the 1970s and 1980s by undergoing relatively smooth transitions to more open and inclusive—and hence legitimate and stable—political systems in the 1990s. The prospects for such transitions have always seemed less likely in Ethiopia and Rwanda, where opposition parties are not allowed to operate effectively and limited social and political cohesion remains a cause for concern.
  • While the jury is still out on Rwanda, the political foundations of economic development in Ethiopia appear to be crumbling. When the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) came to power in 1991, it initially appeared to have broken out of Ethiopia’s damaging cycle of repression and rebellion. Rather than seeking to enforce one ethnic identity over the others, the EPRDF committed to giving the country’s different communities the freedom and self-respect they had always desired. The government enshrined a right to self-determination in the Ethiopian constitution. However, the reality was very different
  • the ruling party kept itself in power by rigging elections and repressing opponents. As a result, many ethnoregional groups felt that in addition to being politically marginalized, they were denied the opportunity to press their concerns through democratic channels.
  • although he quickly won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for moving to end a long-running dispute with Eritrea and promising a raft of democratic reforms, Abiy was unable to return Ethiopia to political stability. Most notably, the growing political marginalization of the TPLF left the former dominant clique increasingly frustrated. Tigrayan leaders ultimately quit the government, while Abiy disbanded the EPRDF and replaced it with his own political vehicle, the Prosperity Party. From that moment on, civil conflict between the federal government and the TPLF, whose role was now limited to control over the Tigrayan regional government, became increasingly likely.
  • Since civil conflict began in November 2020, Ethiopia has had a new set of developmental challenges. Hundreds of thousands of citizens have been displaced, major infrastructure has been destroyed, and Abiy’s reputation as a reformer has been undermined. Moreover, there is a serious risk that even though federal government troops have regained overall control of Tigray, the TPLF will be able to wage guerrilla attacks that will continue to weaken political stability and investor confidence.
  • Abiy, like his predecessors, will use coercion to maintain political control, building up more problems for the future. Although negotiated and smooth political transitions are not impossible, they are less likely in heavily divided societies and have been rare in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Although Ethiopia and Rwanda are often mentioned in the same sentence, Ethiopia is the more important example for the argument that authoritarian government models would serve Africa better than democratic ones. With a small population, a distinctive history, and an intensely authoritarian government, Rwanda is not a promising case from which to generalize. By contrast, Ethiopia, with a large and extremely ethnically diverse population, provides a more compelling example.
  • The empirical evidence in favor of authoritarian development models in Africa has always been remarkably thin. The vast majority of African states were authoritarian in the 1970s and 1980s, and almost all had poor economic growth. Fast-forward to today, and there are very few authoritarian regimes with the potential to join Ethiopia and Rwanda as notable success stories. Instead, most studies have found that democratic governments perform better when it comes to providing public services or economic growth.
  • On its own, Rwanda’s small and aid-dependent economy cannot sustain the narrative that authoritarian regimes perform better on development—and if it does not, there is no justification at all for supporting repressive regimes.
Ed Webb

Why the Pandemic Is So Bad in America - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable
  • Tests were in such short supply, and the criteria for getting them were so laughably stringent, that by the end of February, tens of thousands of Americans had likely been infected but only hundreds had been tested.
  • Chronic underfunding of public health
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  • bloated, inefficient health-care system
  • Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable
  • decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net
  • same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories
  • the COVID‑19 debacle has also touched—and implicated—nearly every other facet of American society: its shortsighted leadership, its disregard for expertise, its racial inequities, its social-media culture, and its fealty to a dangerous strain of individualism.
  • SARS‑CoV‑2 is neither as lethal as some other coronaviruses, such as SARS and MERS, nor as contagious as measles. Deadlier pathogens almost certainly exist. Wild animals harbor an estimated 40,000 unknown viruses, a quarter of which could potentially jump into humans. How will the U.S. fare when “we can’t even deal with a starter pandemic?,”
  • The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal failed us
  • Many conservationists jump on epidemics as opportunities to ban the wildlife trade or the eating of “bush meat,” an exoticized term for “game,” but few diseases have emerged through either route. Carlson said the biggest factors behind spillovers are land-use change and climate change, both of which are hard to control. Our species has relentlessly expanded into previously wild spaces. Through intensive agriculture, habitat destruction, and rising temperatures, we have uprooted the planet’s animals, forcing them into new and narrower ranges that are on our own doorsteps. Humanity has squeezed the world’s wildlife in a crushing grip—and viruses have come bursting out.
  • This year, the world’s coronavirus experts—and there still aren’t many—had to postpone their triennial conference in the Netherlands because SARS‑CoV‑2 made flying too risky.
  • In 2003, China covered up the early spread of SARS, allowing the new disease to gain a foothold, and in 2020, history repeated itself. The Chinese government downplayed the possibility that SARS‑CoV‑2 was spreading among humans, and only confirmed as much on January 20, after millions had traveled around the country for the lunar new year. Doctors who tried to raise the alarm were censured and threatened. One, Li Wenliang, later died of COVID‑19. The World Health Organization initially parroted China’s line and did not declare a public-health emergency of international concern until January 30. By then, an estimated 10,000 people in 20 countries had been infected, and the virus was spreading fast.
  • Even after warnings reached the U.S., they fell on the wrong ears. Since before his election, Trump has cavalierly dismissed expertise and evidence. He filled his administration with inexperienced newcomers, while depicting career civil servants as part of a “deep state.” In 2018, he dismantled an office that had been assembled specifically to prepare for nascent pandemics. American intelligence agencies warned about the coronavirus threat in January, but Trump habitually disregards intelligence briefings. The secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, offered similar counsel, and was twice ignored.
  • “By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken.”
  • Travel bans make intuitive sense, because travel obviously enables the spread of a virus. But in practice, travel bans are woefully inefficient at restricting either travel or viruses. They prompt people to seek indirect routes via third-party countries, or to deliberately hide their symptoms. They are often porous: Trump’s included numerous exceptions, and allowed tens of thousands of people to enter from China. Ironically, they create travel: When Trump later announced a ban on flights from continental Europe, a surge of travelers packed America’s airports in a rush to beat the incoming restrictions. Travel bans may sometimes work for remote island nations, but in general they can only delay the spread of an epidemic—not stop it.
  • countries “rely on bans to the exclusion of the things they actually need to do—testing, tracing, building up the health system,”
  • genetic evidence shows that the specific viruses that triggered the first big outbreaks, in Washington State, didn’t land until mid-February. The country could have used that time to prepare. Instead, Trump, who had spent his entire presidency learning that he could say whatever he wanted without consequence, assured Americans that “the coronavirus is very much under control,” and “like a miracle, it will disappear.” With impunity, Trump lied. With impunity, the virus spread.
  • it found a nation through which it could spread easily, without being detected
  • sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise
  • In response to the global energy crisis of the 1970s, architects made structures more energy-efficient by sealing them off from outdoor air, reducing ventilation rates. Pollutants and pathogens built up indoors, “ushering in the era of ‘sick buildings,’ ” says Joseph Allen, who studies environmental health at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Energy efficiency is a pillar of modern climate policy, but there are ways to achieve it without sacrificing well-being. “We lost our way over the years and stopped designing buildings for people,”
  • As of early July, one in every 1,450 Black Americans had died from COVID‑19—a rate more than twice that of white Americans. That figure is both tragic and wholly expected given the mountain of medical disadvantages that Black people face
  • The indoor spaces in which Americans spend 87 percent of their time became staging grounds for super-spreading events. One study showed that the odds of catching the virus from an infected person are roughly 19 times higher indoors than in open air. Shielded from the elements and among crowds clustered in prolonged proximity, the coronavirus ran rampant in the conference rooms of a Boston hotel, the cabins of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and a church hall in Washington State where a choir practiced for just a few hours.
  • Between harsher punishments doled out in the War on Drugs and a tough-on-crime mindset that prizes retribution over rehabilitation, America’s incarcerated population has swelled sevenfold since the 1970s, to about 2.3 million. The U.S. imprisons five to 18 times more people per capita than other Western democracies. Many American prisons are packed beyond capacity, making social distancing impossible. Soap is often scarce. Inevitably, the coronavirus ran amok. By June, two American prisons each accounted for more cases than all of New Zealand. One, Marion Correctional Institution, in Ohio, had more than 2,000 cases among inmates despite having a capacity of 1,500.
  • America’s nursing homes and long-term-care facilities house less than 1 percent of its people, but as of mid-June, they accounted for 40 percent of its coronavirus deaths. More than 50,000 residents and staff have died. At least 250,000 more have been infected. These grim figures are a reflection not just of the greater harms that COVID‑19 inflicts upon elderly physiology, but also of the care the elderly receive. Before the pandemic, three in four nursing homes were understaffed, and four in five had recently been cited for failures in infection control. The Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated the problem by reducing the influx of immigrants, who make up a quarter of long-term caregivers.
  • the Department of Health and Human Services paused nursing-home inspections in March, passing the buck to the states. Some nursing homes avoided the virus because their owners immediately stopped visitations, or paid caregivers to live on-site. But in others, staff stopped working, scared about infecting their charges or becoming infected themselves. In some cases, residents had to be evacuated because no one showed up to care for them.
  • its problematic attitude toward health: “Get hospitals ready and wait for sick people to show,” as Sheila Davis, the CEO of the nonprofit Partners in Health, puts it. “Especially in the beginning, we catered our entire [COVID‑19] response to the 20 percent of people who required hospitalization, rather than preventing transmission in the community.” The latter is the job of the public-health system, which prevents sickness in populations instead of merely treating it in individuals. That system pairs uneasily with a national temperament that views health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good.
  • “As public health did its job, it became a target” of budget cuts,
  • Today, the U.S. spends just 2.5 percent of its gigantic health-care budget on public health. Underfunded health departments were already struggling to deal with opioid addiction, climbing obesity rates, contaminated water, and easily preventable diseases. Last year saw the most measles cases since 1992. In 2018, the U.S. had 115,000 cases of syphilis and 580,000 cases of gonorrhea—numbers not seen in almost three decades. It has 1.7 million cases of chlamydia, the highest number ever recorded.
  • In May, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan asserted that his state would soon have enough people to trace 10,000 contacts every day. Last year, as Ebola tore through the Democratic Republic of Congo—a country with a quarter of Maryland’s wealth and an active war zone—local health workers and the WHO traced twice as many people.
  • Compared with the average wealthy nation, America spends nearly twice as much of its national wealth on health care, about a quarter of which is wasted on inefficient care, unnecessary treatments, and administrative chicanery. The U.S. gets little bang for its exorbitant buck. It has the lowest life-expectancy rate of comparable countries, the highest rates of chronic disease, and the fewest doctors per person. This profit-driven system has scant incentive to invest in spare beds, stockpiled supplies, peacetime drills, and layered contingency plans—the essence of pandemic preparedness. America’s hospitals have been pruned and stretched by market forces to run close to full capacity, with little ability to adapt in a crisis.
  • Sabeti’s lab developed a diagnostic test in mid-January and sent it to colleagues in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. “We had working diagnostics in those countries well before we did in any U.S. states,”
  • American hospitals operate on a just-in-time economy. They acquire the goods they need in the moment through labyrinthine supply chains that wrap around the world in tangled lines, from countries with cheap labor to richer nations like the U.S. The lines are invisible until they snap. About half of the world’s face masks, for example, are made in China, some of them in Hubei province. When that region became the pandemic epicenter, the mask supply shriveled just as global demand spiked. The Trump administration turned to a larder of medical supplies called the Strategic National Stockpile, only to find that the 100 million respirators and masks that had been dispersed during the 2009 flu pandemic were never replaced. Just 13 million respirators were left.
  • The supply of nasopharyngeal swabs that are used in every diagnostic test also ran low, because one of the largest manufacturers is based in Lombardy, Italy—initially the COVID‑19 capital of Europe. About 40 percent of critical-care drugs, including antibiotics and painkillers, became scarce because they depend on manufacturing lines that begin in China and India. Once a vaccine is ready, there might not be enough vials to put it in, because of the long-running global shortage of medical-grade glass—literally, a bottle-neck bottleneck.
  • As usual, health care was a matter of capitalism and connections. In New York, rich hospitals bought their way out of their protective-equipment shortfall, while neighbors in poorer, more diverse parts of the city rationed their supplies.
  • A study showed that the U.S. could have averted 36,000 COVID‑19 deaths if leaders had enacted social-distancing measures just a week earlier. But better late than never: By collectively reducing the spread of the virus, America flattened the curve. Ventilators didn’t run out, as they had in parts of Italy. Hospitals had time to add extra beds.
  • the indiscriminate lockdown was necessary only because America’s leaders wasted months of prep time. Deploying this blunt policy instrument came at enormous cost. Unemployment rose to 14.7 percent, the highest level since record-keeping began, in 1948. More than 26 million people lost their jobs, a catastrophe in a country that—uniquely and absurdly—ties health care to employment
  • In the middle of the greatest health and economic crises in generations, millions of Americans have found themselves disconnected from medical care and impoverished. They join the millions who have always lived that way.
  • Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shouldered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. Thousands of people endured months of COVID‑19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a “great equalizer,” the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nation’s history.
  • Of the 3.1 million Americans who still cannot afford health insurance in states where Medicaid has not been expanded, more than half are people of color, and 30 percent are Black.* This is no accident. In the decades after the Civil War, the white leaders of former slave states deliberately withheld health care from Black Americans, apportioning medicine more according to the logic of Jim Crow than Hippocrates. They built hospitals away from Black communities, segregated Black patients into separate wings, and blocked Black students from medical school. In the 20th century, they helped construct America’s system of private, employer-based insurance, which has kept many Black people from receiving adequate medical treatment. They fought every attempt to improve Black people’s access to health care, from the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the ’60s to the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
  • A number of former slave states also have among the lowest investments in public health, the lowest quality of medical care, the highest proportions of Black citizens, and the greatest racial divides in health outcomes
  • “We’re designed for discrete disasters” like mass shootings, traffic pileups, and hurricanes, says Esther Choo, an emergency physician at Oregon Health and Science University. The COVID‑19 pandemic is not a discrete disaster. It is a 50-state catastrophe that will likely continue at least until a vaccine is ready.
  • Native Americans were similarly vulnerable. A third of the people in the Navajo Nation can’t easily wash their hands, because they’ve been embroiled in long-running negotiations over the rights to the water on their own lands. Those with water must contend with runoff from uranium mines. Most live in cramped multigenerational homes, far from the few hospitals that service a 17-million-acre reservation. As of mid-May, the Navajo Nation had higher rates of COVID‑19 infections than any U.S. state.
  • Americans often misperceive historical inequities as personal failures
  • the largely unregulated, social-media-based communications infrastructure of the 21st century almost ensures that misinformation will proliferate fast. “In every outbreak throughout the existence of social media, from Zika to Ebola, conspiratorial communities immediately spread their content about how it’s all caused by some government or pharmaceutical company or Bill Gates,”
  • Rumors coursed through online platforms that are designed to keep users engaged, even if that means feeding them content that is polarizing or untrue. In a national crisis, when people need to act in concert, this is calamitous. “The social internet as a system is broken,” DiResta told me, and its faults are readily abused.
  • Like pandemics, infodemics quickly become uncontrollable unless caught early.
  • In 2016, when DiResta spoke with a CDC team about the threat of misinformation, “their response was: ‘ That’s interesting, but that’s just stuff that happens on the internet.’ ”
  • The WHO, the CDC, and the U.S. surgeon general urged people not to wear masks, hoping to preserve the limited stocks for health-care workers. These messages were offered without nuance or acknowledgement of uncertainty, so when they were reversed—the virus is worse than the flu; wear masks—the changes seemed like befuddling flip-flops.
  • Drawn to novelty, journalists gave oxygen to fringe anti-lockdown protests while most Americans quietly stayed home. They wrote up every incremental scientific claim, even those that hadn’t been verified or peer-reviewed.
  • By tying career advancement to the publishing of papers, academia already creates incentives for scientists to do attention-grabbing but irreproducible work. The pandemic strengthened those incentives by prompting a rush of panicked research and promising ambitious scientists global attention.
  • In March, a small and severely flawed French study suggested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID‑19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The hydroxychloroquine story was muddied even further by a study published in a top medical journal, The Lancet, that claimed the drug was not effective and was potentially harmful. The paper relied on suspect data from a small analytics company called Surgisphere, and was retracted in June.**
  • Science famously self-corrects. But during the pandemic, the same urgent pace that has produced valuable knowledge at record speed has also sent sloppy claims around the world before anyone could even raise a skeptical eyebrow.
  • No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.”
  • Trump is a comorbidity of the COVID‑19 pandemic. He isn’t solely responsible for America’s fiasco, but he is central to it. A pandemic demands the coordinated efforts of dozens of agencies. “In the best circumstances, it’s hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly,” Ron Klain said. “It moves if the president stands on a table and says, ‘Move quickly.’ But it really doesn’t move if he’s sitting at his desk saying it’s not a big deal.”
  • everyday Americans did more than the White House. By voluntarily agreeing to months of social distancing, they bought the country time, at substantial cost to their financial and mental well-being. Their sacrifice came with an implicit social contract—that the government would use the valuable time to mobilize an extraordinary, energetic effort to suppress the virus, as did the likes of Germany and Singapore. But the government did not, to the bafflement of health experts. “There are instances in history where humanity has really moved mountains to defeat infectious diseases,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “It’s appalling that we in the U.S. have not summoned that energy around COVID‑19.”
  • People suffered all the debilitating effects of a lockdown with few of the benefits. Most states felt compelled to reopen without accruing enough tests or contact tracers. In April and May, the nation was stuck on a terrible plateau, averaging 20,000 to 30,000 new cases every day. In June, the plateau again became an upward slope, soaring to record-breaking heights.
  • It is no coincidence that other powerful nations that elected populist leaders—Brazil, Russia, India, and the United Kingdom—also fumbled their response to COVID‑19. “When you have people elected based on undermining trust in the government, what happens when trust is what you need the most?”
  • the United States underperformed across the board, and its errors compounded. The dearth of tests allowed unconfirmed cases to create still more cases, which flooded the hospitals, which ran out of masks, which are necessary to limit the virus’s spread. Twitter amplified Trump’s misleading messages, which raised fear and anxiety among people, which led them to spend more time scouring for information on Twitter.
  • The virus was never beaten in the spring, but many people, including Trump, pretended that it was. Every state reopened to varying degrees, and many subsequently saw record numbers of cases. After Arizona’s cases started climbing sharply at the end of May, Cara Christ, the director of the state’s health-services department, said, “We are not going to be able to stop the spread. And so we can’t stop living as well.” The virus may beg to differ.
  • The long wait for a vaccine will likely culminate in a predictable way: Many Americans will refuse to get it, and among those who want it, the most vulnerable will be last in line.
  • It is almost unheard-of for a public-health measure to go from zero to majority acceptance in less than half a year. But pandemics are rare situations when “people are desperate for guidelines and rules,” says Zoë McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. The closest analogy is pregnancy, she says, which is “a time when women’s lives are changing, and they can absorb a ton of information. A pandemic is similar: People are actually paying attention, and learning.”
  • As the economy nose-dived, the health-care system ailed, and the government fumbled, belief in American exceptionalism declined. “Times of big social disruption call into question things we thought were normal and standard,” Redbird told me. “If our institutions fail us here, in what ways are they failing elsewhere?” And whom are they failing the most?
  • It is hard to stare directly at the biggest problems of our age. Pandemics, climate change, the sixth extinction of wildlife, food and water shortages—their scope is planetary, and their stakes are overwhelming. We have no choice, though, but to grapple with them. It is now abundantly clear what happens when global disasters collide with historical negligence.
  • America would be wise to help reverse the ruination of the natural world, a process that continues to shunt animal diseases into human bodies. It should strive to prevent sickness instead of profiting from it. It should build a health-care system that prizes resilience over brittle efficiency, and an information system that favors light over heat. It should rebuild its international alliances, its social safety net, and its trust in empiricism. It should address the health inequities that flow from its history. Not least, it should elect leaders with sound judgment, high character, and respect for science, logic, and reason.
Ed Webb

Boris Johnson: The Brezhnev Years | British Politics and Policy at LSE - 0 views

  • What makes democracy resilient is its acceptance that we the people, and by extension our governments, are imperfect. The separation of powers between executive, legislature, and judiciary are there to keep the debate continuous, rights protected, and imperfect governments honest as they pursue their current mandate. In totalitarian systems, by contrast, the governing regime justifies itself by a supposedly ‘scientific’ blueprint. The law is reduced to an instrument for the fulfilment of that blueprint.
  • Since the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, successive governments of New Right and New Left have attempted to implement an asserted science of government based on the radical, free-market neoclassical economics of the Virginia and Chicago Schools: neoliberalism
  • Its dominant idea: that markets are always more efficient; the private is morally and functionally superior to the public
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  • The claims of neoliberalism are based on utopian assumptions; the supply-side revolution has failed accordingly, and we are living with the systemic consequences of that failure.
  • When you explore the neoclassical economics at the root of the UK’s neoliberal reforms, it has far more in common with Leninism than with the political economic doctrines of the post-war era. Anglo Keynesianism, German Ordoliberalism and the Swedish Rehn-Meidner models all accepted the realities of radical uncertainty and the incompleteness of human rationality. The affinities between the economic libertarianism of the last forty years and Leninism are rooted in their common dependence on a closed system, machine model of the political economy. Both depend on a hyper-rational conception of human motivation: a perfect utilitarian rationality versus a perfect social rationality.
  • For neoliberals, the state must be subordinated to market mechanisms
  • The more neoliberals embrace their materialist utopia as an infallible science, the higher the tide of unanticipated consequences and systemic failure
  • The Johnson Cabinet is only the most extreme version of successive Conservative cabinets unable or unwilling to believe the evidence of their own eyes: that neoliberalism does not work in the terms by which it is justified
  • What is problematic for this Cabinet however is that there is no majority social base for their actual project, which is the completion of the supply-side revolution, the creation of a free trade, deregulated, offshore (i.e. tax haven) Britain and the shrinking of the state towards the utopian night-watchman minimum
  • the UK economy has succumbed to a dominant business model in which financial extraction via the maximisation of shareholder value has completely undermined the culture of investment and with it the productive and innovative capacity of the private sector
  • The leaders of the real, productive economy in the UK oppose Brexit in principle and dread ‘No Deal’ as a wilful act of economic self sabotage. The leaders of the financially extractive economy and those who benefit from the really-existing-supply-side-revolution demand Brexit as an opportunity to escape EU regulations that have acted as a brake on their worst excesses.
  • That the extreme economic purpose of Brexit has been successfully conflated with an act of national liberation from tyranny is a product of a skilful charismatic politics, a polarised social media landscape nevertheless driven by conventional media skewed ever further to the right.
  • As the Soviets found, when the popular legitimacy of your actual project is lost, the culture of lies and populist scapegoating becomes your only option. Brexit has offered a cornucopia
  • As in Leninism, the promised withering away of the state under neoliberalism is ultimately a religious utopia: it promises to return us to an Edenic state of nature before the Fall. In the Brezhnev era, the Leninist doctrine became an alibi for the abuses of massively centralised power;  in the neoliberal version the state will likewise fail to wither anywhere. Instead, it will become more completely captured by business and financial interests, with unprecedented abuses of public policy and money to follow.
Ed Webb

Egypt: when the rivers run dry | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • A man that is deeply enmeshed in Egypt`s crony capitalist system, has revealed, through a series of online videos, what many Egyptians already felt and knew: Namely, the corruption of the military institution, and the regime’s deliberate economic and fiscal policy that is leading to the impoverishment of the mass of Egyptians, while enriching the military elites
  • His series of videos directly led to rare protests against President Abdel Fattah El Sissi, in-spite of the government’s draconian record of repression.
  • compared to 2015. Relative poverty rates rose from 27.8% to 32.5% in 2018, and the level of absolute poverty rose from 5.3% to 6.2% for the same period
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  • The growth of the GDP is primarily driven by government spending on mega infrastructure projects (spearheaded by the military), leading to a boom in the construction sector. Government spending is financed by a bloated public debt, the burden of which is disproportionality shouldered by the lower segments of society.
  • the regime did not invest in the development of the manufacturing sector, and it did not lay down the foundation for sustainable, long-term economic growth
  • The decline in the level of consumption was not counteracted by an increase in the level of exports in goods and services. This is reflected in the value of Egyptian exports, which reached 47.45 billion USD in 2018, a decrease of 1.66 billion USD compared to 2013. Other indicators also reflect a worsening international competitive position. For example, the trade deficit ballooned from -6.34% of the GDP in 2013 to -10.45% of the GDP in 2018
  • the military directly employs 19.2% of the labour force. This makes the military the second largest employer in the country, after the public sector that employs 5.6 million.
  • projects include much-publicised mega infrastructure projects, with dubious economic benefit, the most notable of which is the new administrative capital. The construction sector, which is closely connected to the military led projects, played an important role in generating economic growth. In 2018, it is estimated to have grown by 8.9%, making it the number one contributor to the GDP growth
  • growth of the GDP is not driven by a dynamic private sector, but mainly by a massive military led construction spree, and mega-infrastructure projects that have little positive impact on increasing the competitiveness of the Egyptian economy
  • the unemployment rate, which reached 8.1% by the first quarter of 2019, the lowest in 10 years. This drop in the level of unemployment, however, requires some additional qualification. The rate of utilization, which measures the number of workers employed for at least one hour per week as a percentage of the population, has dropped from 44.5% to 39%. This is also accompanied by a reduction in the level of workforce participation from 46.4% to 41.6%, indicating a reduction in the level of those seeking work, rather than an increase in the number of available jobs. Loss of hope should be credited with the drop in the level of unemployment, not improved economic conditions.
  • profits generated from business owned by the armed forces are exempt from taxation, under law 96 (2015). This means that the government is shifting the burden on the shoulders of the poor, as they finance the military construction spree, which in-turn is used to enrich the military elites and other regime insiders
  • as debt continues to pile up, the pressure on the poor will continue to rise, as the government continues to cut social spending. This will reduce the level of effective local demand, leading to greater pressure on the private sector. In addition, if the construction spree continues, the possibility of overcapacity and over-accumulation of capital in the construction sector becomes more prominent. In essence, a bubble that is bound to burst.
Ed Webb

U.S. Puts New Restrictions on Chinese Journalists in U.S. | Time - 0 views

  • the Trump administration is cutting the number of Chinese nationals allowed to work for Beijing’s state-run media outlets in the U.S. by nearly half, citing China’s expulsion of three U.S. correspondents last month and Beijing’s increasingly hostile actions toward foreign — and local — press
  • “a personnel cap” on five Chinese media outlets that the State Department reclassified as “foreign missions” last month — in other words, agents of foreign influence rather than genuine media outlets
  • “It could play into Beijing’s hands, which is looking for excuses to further restrict foreign media’s operations in China,” said Yaqiu Wang, China Researcher for Human Rights Watch.
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  • The state-run Chinese outlets impacted by the cap are Xinhua China Global Television, China Radio International, China Daily Distribution, and the Hai Tian Development. Collectively, they will now be allowed to employ a maximum 100 Chinese nationals as of March 13, down from around 160 now. And the administration may in future limit the time those Chinese nationals are allowed to stay in the country
  • “Crying foul about the ‘sick man of Asia’ op-ed allows Beijing to rally nationalist sentiment and redirect anger over the COVID-19 outbreak away from the government and toward foreigners,” Stokes said. In the longer term, he said the move is intended to convince Chinese people that Western news outlets are controlled by Washington, and therefore can’t be trusted.
  • During Monday’s press briefing, a Voice of America reporter asked officials if the White House expected Beijing to retaliate against journalists working in the country for foreign government-funded media like VOA or the BBC. One of the administration officials pointed to his earlier response, in which he said that further actions against any foreign journalists “would only end up hurting China,” because foreign businesses would balk at investing in a country that had gone “completely opaque.”
Ed Webb

What is deadly dull and can save the world? (Hint: you probably hate it) - The Correspo... - 0 views

  • "If you could name one thing that would really change your life, what would it be?" I ask. I’m expecting him to say a better house, or more food, or a doctor, or education for his kids. I’m expecting him to mention one of the things relief money often provides for.But Lebrun grins broadly at me, revealing a missing tooth, and says, "What would help me most? A land registry."
  • What Lebrun needs is security – security he can build a future on. And he needs agencies to safeguard that security. What Lebrun needs is bureaucracy.
  • Bureaucracy is also the system that organises everything into procedures that are the same for everybody. It’s what holds societies together. It’s not excessive; it’s indispensable.
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  • Bureaucracy, in short, is all the fundamental building blocks of civilisation some people have the luxury of taking for granted.
  • These days, a westerner can hardly imagine how complicated the world would be without bureaucracy. But try to picture it: living without an address, without a social security number. Could you open a bank account? No. Start a business? No way. Register to vote? Never.And yet, about four billion people around the world have no address.
  • imagine having no proper tax authority. Without one, a government loses out on billions of dollars of potential revenue. There’s no money for social services or infrastructure. People living in poverty stay living in poverty.
  • people living in poverty own much more than they’re able to prove on paper. In Cairo, for example, they have $241.4bn worth of unregistered property, according to De Soto. In his book The Mystery of Capital (2000), he puts this figure into perspective: it’s six times all the money held in Egyptian savings accounts, 30 times the market value of every publicly listed company in Cairo, and 116 times the value of all Egypt’s privatised former state companies.
  • Without papers proving ownership, you can’t record the sale of your property or use it as collateral to secure a loan.The evidence is ample: bureaucracy – and the security that comes with it – is what people living in poverty need to climb out of poverty.
  • one agency after the other has started donating paperwork, Excel sheets and bookkeeping courses. They call it "capacity building".
  • Tax Inspectors Without Borders
  • British tax veteran Lee Corrick went to Kenya in 2011 to train local inspectors. For years, the Kenyan tax office had had problems with a big multinational company – something to do with tea auction licence rights and letters of credit. It sounds overly complicated, and the Kenyans thought so too. But after two workshops with Corrick and a stern talk with the multinational, the Kenyan tax office managed to collect $23m. In fact, revenues from Kenyan tax inspections doubled after Corrick came to town. And in Colombia, the take increased tenfold after training.
  • In one area, farmers’ land was officially added to a land registry; in another, it wasn’t. The researchers then looked at how the farmers used their land.Here’s what they found: farmers who owned their land on paper invested more. For example, they more often planted trees, such as oil palms, that would continue to provide income all their lives. And since they no longer feared their land would be snatched out from under them, they spent less time guarding it. That left them more time to do other things – like earn money.
  • If development economists and people living in poverty like Lebrun are calling for bureaucracy outright, why doesn’t everyone – aid organisations, governments, companies – get behind it 100%?The answer is simple. Bureaucracy is boring.
  • A TV ad showing a sweetly smiling Haitian girl who’s just got her first school uniform works better than one with a blah bureaucrat in a fluorescent-lit office drawing lines on paper with a ruler
  • capacity building remains the neglected stepchild
  • the truth is, real progress is a gradual, thoroughly bureaucratic, deadly dull process. Saving the world isn’t sexy.
Ed Webb

After the Capitol Insurrection, the United States Must Understand the Psychological Und... - 0 views

  • Rather than tangible economic grievance, decades of cross-national empirical research show that feelings and perceptions of sociocultural threat are the principal drivers of surging authoritarian sentiment among the electorate and the demagoguery that rises up to service it.
  • In a modern, multicultural society, certain citizens simply become overwhelmed by growing complexity and rapid change. These individuals fear a loss of their social order, status, and familiar way of life. Whether rational or not, this trepidation provokes intolerance of threats to the collective order, in which they are unusually invested.
  • About a third of the population in Western countries is predisposed to authoritarianism, which is about 50 percent heritable. Authoritarians have an inherent preference for oneness and sameness; they favor obedience and conformity and value strong leaders and social homogeneity over freedom and diversity
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  • Comparative data suggests that the United States may be somewhat overstocked with authoritarians, though they may simply be more easily identifiable in the country’s high-arousal political environment.
  • Whether in Washington or Warsaw, Western liberal democracy’s ongoing struggle with populism is united by fear.
  • Authoritarianism is not the same as conservatism, although they are modestly correlated. Authoritarians’ fundamental aversion to diversity—complexity and variety—is distinct from traditional conservatives’ aversion to change—which is more about novelty and uncertainty
  • the rapid demographic transformation of the United States likely provokes both authoritarians opposed to diversity and traditional conservatives averse to change
  • All people have an innate bias toward those like themselves; studies confirm that humans are wired to be tribal. For authoritarians, this bias is greatly magnified
  • Significant proportions of both Democrats and Republicans appear willing to endorse violence or violate democratic procedure to defend their values
  • the strongest predictor of anti-democratic attitudes among Republicans was not partisanship or political expediency; it was ethnic and racial antagonism
  • the strongest predictor of a Brexit “leave” vote—ostensibly rooted in racial and ethnic intolerance—was support for the death penalty and for the public whipping of sex criminals
  • those who are predisposed to favor freedom and diversity over authority and conformity must recognize that the authoritarian preference for oneness and sameness is largely innate and unlikely to change
  • even creating the mere feeling or appearance of oneness and sameness can be reassuring to authoritarians
  • authoritarian predispositions are not a problem that can just be educated away: In fact, liberal democracy’s loud and showy celebration of freedom and diversity drives authoritarians not to the limits of their tolerance but to their intolerant extremes
Ed Webb

Vaccine refusal and the bargain of modernity | The Week - 0 views

  • the mistrust of expertise is not just caused by Trumpian disinformation and the occasional scientific misstep or accident. In the U.S., it is also the consequence of a society-wide failure to hold morally bankrupt elites who preside over massive expert systems like banking, investment, health care and yes, governance, accountable for their crimes and abuses
  • we must combine careful messaging with efforts to make the United States a more trustworthy society, in which the lords of our expert realms are not able to evade all responsibility for their misdeeds by throwing money at the right people
Ed Webb

Algerian regime steps up repression against the protests - 0 views

  • “We are victims of a campaign of arrests because we are an organization that has invested and contributed a lot to Hirak,” a member of RAJ’s executive board told Al-Monitor, speaking on the condition of anonymity following Fersaoui’s arrest. “Yet, RAJ is not the only target of these arbitrary arrests, but rather the civil society as a whole.”
  • an upsurge of repression against prominent leaders and other activists with Hirak, including large-scale arbitrary arrests
  • escalation is taking place two months before presidential elections called for Dec. 12 by the interim president, Abdelkader Bensalah, and pushed for by the army.
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  • The lawyers highlighted arrests outside the legal framework, abuse of pre-trial detention, the disproportionate concentration of detentions in Algiers and denying detainees the right to contact their family or a lawyer
  • Kaci Tansaout, CNLD coordinator, remarked to Al-Monitor, “Since Friday, Sept. 13, it is no longer ‘arrests’ but rather kidnappings of known and identified persons, either before a march or at the end of a sit-in in support of detainees.” 
  • According to the National Committee for the Liberation of the Detainees (CNLD), Algerian authorities detained at least 91 prisoners of conscience between June 21 and Oct. 15 in Algiers alone
  • detainees have mainly been arrested on the grounds of allegedly violating Articles 75, 79 and 96 of the penal code, respectively, undermining the morale of the army, undermining the integrity of the national territory and publishing content undermining the national interest
  • Many detainees have been arrested for carrying the Amazigh flag during protests and later accused of undermining the integrity of the national territory, a violation that carries a prison term of one to 10 years and a fine between 3,000 and 70,000 Algerian dinars ($25 to $600).
  • “At RAJ, we are directly affected by the arrests because we already have nine activists behind bars…, but those in jail always ask us to remain mobilized, keep up the struggle and not to worry about them. This is what gives us the courage and resolve [to persevere].” 
  • “After 34 weeks of massive popular protests throughout the country, the government is deploying a [broad] strategy to counteract the peaceful revolution, including intimidation and prevention of free movement, but also, and mainly, by the exploitation of the judiciary as a tool of repression,”
  • “Another manoeuver of the government to try to weaken or stop the popular movement is to exert pressure on the editorial offices of the public and private media, including over coverage of popular demonstrations.”
Ed Webb

Egypt's army controls much of the economy. Is this wise? | Middle East Eye - 1 views

  • the Egyptian military has been allowed to engage in economic activities as a way of reducing the official defence budget. The military economy also allows senior officers to be compensated for low pay and pensions, by giving them the opportunity to acquire extra income and fringe benefits. The overall volume of such economic activities was relatively modest until 2011, when former President Hosni Mubarak was forced out of power.
  • Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a former general who became president in 2014, has relied on the military to take over major management roles in the civilian economy
  • this approach overlooks the real structural problems in the Egyptian economy, including low productivity, low investment in all sectors except for energy and real estate, and low value-added, especially in technology-dependent sectors
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  • The military started by working on land reclamation - turning deserts into arable land. In the late 1970s, the army led the way in reconstructing cities and infrastructure along the Suez Canal that had been damaged severely during the war with Israel.
  • The military now manages approximately a quarter of total government spending in housing and public infrastructure
  • Until the 2013 takeover, the military’s economic activities functioned to keep the senior officer corps happy and loyal to the president, by allowing them perks. Sisi, however, has made a different calculation. He is looking to reinforce the political legitimacy of his regime domestically, and to show Western governments and foreign investors that Egypt means business. He wants to demonstrate credibility. He’s shown his contempt openly for the civilian agencies of his own state. He feels he can only trust the military to do the job on time, within budget.
  • He doesn’t understand how the economy works, how to get it going, how to generate jobs and growth, or how to increase revenue in a sustainable way. But the military is following orders. If he tells them to go build a new city in the sand somewhere, that is what happens.
  • The economic consequences are increasingly negative, because Egypt is borrowing heavily to fund these projects.
  • The military’s main advantage is political influence. It has officers placed throughout the state apparatus who help get contracts. These officers also dominate the government’s main audit agency, which is instructed to inspect civilians to prevent corruption.
  • the problem here is that the military’s powerful political position means it doesn’t really have to account for genuine cost-effectiveness; the real problems are being kicked down the road.
  • Egyptian military accounts are not shared with anyone either inside or outside Egypt. This includes the official budget, in addition to the financial books of the various military agencies involved in economic and commercial activities.
  • the military pays no taxes on any of its activities, and no customs duties on the goods it imports for these purposes
  • All officers who perform duties on behalf of military agencies undertaking economic activities get paid extra allowances and benefits for each task they undertake, and often get an extra salary if they run a military factory or a military farm. And then there’s a share of profits - or of incomes before profits are calculated, because there’s not always a profit; a certain share of these are distributed to senior officers as well. 
  •  
    This is interesting. I'm curious of the attitude of the Egyptian soldiers as they are doing work outside of their job description and their superiors are getting a paycheck for it. Can you imagine if public school teachers could do this with their students? That'd be interesting... Here's another article about how Egypt continues to crack down on media outlets: https://nyti.ms/2OgCNtN
Ed Webb

Nigeria's Buhari Resurrects Hard-Man Habits to Curb Dissent - Bloomberg - 0 views

  • Nigeria’s government is reviving old habits from its authoritarian past to stifle criticism.Evoking memories of Nigeria’s three decades of military rule, the repression risks undoing progress Africa’s top oil producer has made since the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1999. Governance and other reforms have helped more than double average annual foreign investment since then -- a pace President Muhammadu Buhari needs to sustain to help reduce the world’s largest number of people living in extreme poverty.
  • Buhari won a popular vote in 2015 claiming to be a “converted democrat,” and was reelected in February. That assertion has been eroded by crackdowns on civil-society organizations, increasing arrests of journalists and planned laws to regulate social media.
  • “Investors are less keen on venturing into regions that are considered to be within the grip of erratic strongmen.”
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  • The Lagos-based Punch newspaper declared on Dec. 11 it will no longer address Buhari as president, but by his military rank of major-general in recognition of the martial tendencies of his government.
  • Omoyele Sowore, a prominent critic of Buhari, was detained by intelligence agents, 24 hours after the secret police belatedly submitted to a court order to release him on bail. The publisher and former presidential candidate was first arrested in August, after calling for revolution, and charged with various crimes including treason.
  • at least 61 cases of attacks or harassment of journalists in Nigeria this year, more than any year since 1985, according to a report published by the Lagos-based Premium Times newspaper last month
  • The detention of Sowore, despite a bail order, “doesn’t send a favorable signal to investors concerned about contract risk,” said Adedayo Ademuwagun, an analyst at Lagos-based Songhai Advisory LLP. “The more the government demonstrates that it doesn’t respect its own laws and legal institutions, the less faith investors will have in the system.”
  • Two bills -- one designed to regulate “internet falsehoods,” the other to rein in “hate speech” -- are being scrutinized by the Senate. Under the former, individuals found guilty of creating or transmitting “false” information online face fines of up to 300,000 naira ($824) or three years in prison. An early version of the latter sought life imprisonment for anyone convicted of stirring up ethnic hatred and the death penalty if the offense causes loss of life.“If these bills become law, we will see the political class and the security services move rapidly to use them to stifle dissent,” said Cheta Nwanze, head of research at Lagos-based SBM Intelligence. Legislation already on the statute books has been used to justify a recent raid on a leading newspaper as well as the imprisonment of journalists.
Ed Webb

Somalia is Set to Be Ravaged by the Coronavirus, and Terrorists Will Profit - 0 views

  • Somalia has been spinning on a crisis carousel: war, famine, terrorism, climate stress. Now, the coronavirus pandemic is set to steer the country towards another hemorrhaging of human life. Even with a youth population above 70 percent, the virus will likely compound Somalia’s chronic medley of miseries. With each passing day, an uneasy question looms large: If the pandemic has left such death and upheaval in its wake in the world’s most powerful countries, what impact will it have on one of the world’s most fragile?
  • a psychological readiness for catastrophe. Extreme violence has long been a fact of daily life in Mogadishu, under siege by one of the deadliest terrorist groups in Africa, al-Shabab, which, by conservative estimates, has killed more than 3,000 people in the past five years and wounded tens of thousands in the past decade. Somalis, often touted for their resilience amid unrelenting adversity, are no strangers to mass loss of life.
  • As of Monday, 1,054 infections—out of a miniscule testing pool—and 51 deaths have been confirmed. The true spread is doubtless far worse.
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  • Despite testing far less than its neighbors, Somalia has the highest death toll in East Africa. On April 17 and 18, 72 people were tested, out of which 55 were confirmed positive, a staggering 76 percent infection rate. Since this revelation, the Somali government has stopped sharing the numbers of people tested with the public.
  • Anecdotal accounts of COVID-19 symptoms and a spike in burials abound. “There is extraordinary community transmission. Infections and deaths are out of control,” explained a Mogadishu doctor on the condition of anonymity. “And why visit a hospital if they can’t treat you?” Somalia’s health infrastructure is mere scaffolding: scarce public hospitals struggling with a lack of equipment, unaccredited doctors in private facilities offering unaffordable services, and medication that is as low-grade as it is scarce.
  • Somalia’s best-equipped medical institution, Erdogan Hospital in Mogadishu, was shut down in April after 3 of its doctors were infected. Martini Hospital—kitted with 76 beds—is the only medical facility in the whole country designated to treat the infected
  • Answers to this acute health crisis lie in part with the government’s 2020 budget, which allocated $9.4 million for health spending, a mere 2 percent of the national budget. A whopping $146.8 million was reserved for security institutions—a telling indication of a cash-strapped state facing widespread security threats.
  • The group heralded the disease as divine punishment for the treatment of Muslims globally. Weaponizing the disease, al-Shabab ushered in Ramadan with an attempted vehicle-borne explosive attack at a military base on the first full day of the holy month.
  • Like the virus, al-Shabab transcends national borders and presents risks not only to Somalia but to its pandemic-weakened neighbors, particularly Kenya, which has weathered violent attacks from the group for years. Born out of a power vacuum itself, al-Shabab will capitalize on lapses in states’ security apparatus as governments redirect resources from preempting terror attacks to enforcing curfews
  • risks reversing critical security gains
  • Kenya’s northeastern towns lying on its border with Somalia have been particularly vulnerable to devastating al-Shabab attacks. In response to the illegal smuggling of people and goods from both Somalia and Ethiopia, Kenyan security authorities have recently ramped up aerial surveillance along its borders, in part, to curtail cross-border infection. Ethiopia’s health minister announced last week that 13 of its new cases were imported via illegal migration from Djibouti and Somalia
  • More than 80 percent of global trade passes through the Gulf of Aden
  • the resurgence of piracy can be expected
  • For more than a year now, the central government has been embroiled in a rancorous fight with two of its federal states. This being an election year, the fledgling Somali state finds itself at a critical juncture. It remains to be seen whether federal elections will be postponed, following in the footsteps of neighboring Ethiopia.
  • The disappearance of remittances—a lifeline for millions on the continent and estimated at $1.4 to $2 billion annually in Somalia alone—makes the situation all the more desperate. These critical cash flows have dried up as a global recession sets in and incomes of workers in the diaspora shrink.
  • harrowing statistics from across Europe show that Somali communities have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. In Sweden, Somalis are dying from the virus at “an astonishing high rate” according to the BMJ despite accounting for only 0.69 percent of the population. The World Bank is calling on governments to designate remittance companies as an essential service, a crucial step to easing restrictions on these financial flows.
  • The populations most at risk in Somalia are those living in the densely populated camps scattered across the country. More than 2.5 million internally displaced people live in these cramped conditions, already weakened by malnutrition and compromised immune systems, and with limited access to clean water, soap, or bathrooms.
  • According to the World Food Programme, the number of food-insecure people in East Africa is projected to reach up to 43 million in the next few months—more than double what it is now—sparking fears of conflict over scarce resources.
  • The specter of drought and famine, alongside the unforgiving plague of locusts that has ravaged crops in recent months
  • deadly flash floods
  • will force more people to move, compounding the internal displacement crisis and heightening intercommunal tensions  even as it spreads the disease further
  • Border closures across the region have throttled migration flows, making it ever harder for people to escape conflict or starvation. This will simply force migration into the shadows, opening up avenues for human trafficking and exploitation. Irregular movement of refugees has already been observed across the Horn of Africa’s highly porous borders.
  • During  Friday prayers at Mogadishu’s Marwazi mosque on April 10, armed forces tried to forcibly disperse a congregation of worshippers without notice. A massive demonstration broke out, and shoulder-to-shoulder prayers continue across the country today
  • Riots swept the streets of Mogadishu again on April 24 in response to the fatal shooting of two innocent civilians by police as they tried to enforce a curfew. Ramadan, replete with nightly rounds of public taraweeh prayers, is likely to catalyze disease spread in the absence of clear communication with communities and Islamic leaders.
  • The virus demands self-sufficiency. Countries are forced to make do with their own systems, however broken.
  • government’s restrictions on press freedom and access to information about the novel coronavirus to the detriment of its own people
  • As has often been the case in the disaster-prone country, it will be up to grassroots community groups, the private sector, and members of the diaspora to mobilize en masse to contain the crisis.
  • Two officials at the Ministry of Health have already been arrested on corruption allegations related to COVID-19 response donations, denting public confidence.
  • With domestic flights suspended, it is all the more critical to invest in hospital and testing capacity across the country. This cannot be achieved without genuine collaboration between the federal government and its constituent member states.
Ed Webb

Truss learns the hard way that Britain isn't America | Financial Times - 0 views

  • Britain is in trouble because its elite is so engrossed with the US as to confuse it for their own nation. The UK does not issue the world’s reserve currency. It does not have near-limitless demand for its sovereign debt. It can’t, as US Republicans sometimes do, cut taxes on the hunch that lawmakers of the future will trim public spending.
  • So much of what Britain has done and thought in recent years makes sense if you assume it is a country of 330mn people with $20tn annual output. The idea that it could ever look the EU in the eye as an adversarial negotiator, for instance. Or the decision to grow picky about Chinese inward investment at the same time as forfeiting the European market.
  • Because the UK’s governing class can follow US politics as easily as their own, they get lost in it. They elide the two countries. What doesn’t help is the freakish fact that Britain’s capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city, despite the national population being a fifth of America’s.
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  • Like all armchair free-marketeers (she has never set up a business) she believes her nation is a blast of deregulation away from American levels of entrepreneurial vim. It isn’t. The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people. (It did, once, but the present chancellor of the exchequer voted to leave it.) Someone who glides over that point is also liable to miss the contrasting appeal to investors of gilts and Treasuries.
  • the importation of identity politics from a republic with a wholly different racial history
  • You would think from British public discourse that Earth has two sovereign nations. If the NHS is fairer than the US healthcare model, it is the world’s best. If Elizabeth II was better than Donald Trump, monarchy beats republicanism tout court. People who can’t name a cabinet member in Paris or Berlin (where so much that affects Britain, from migrant flows to energy, is settled) will follow the US midterms in November. The EU is a, perhaps the, regulatory superpower in the world. UK politicos find Iowa more diverting.
  • It is a kind of patriotism, I suppose, to mistake your nation for a superpower.
Ed Webb

Murano glass factories forced to shut down furnaces during Europe's gas crisis - The Wa... - 0 views

  • In a typical year, the glass factories here power down only once, for maintenance in August. But with Europe in the midst of an energy crisis, facing a 400 percent increase in natural gas bills, the gas-fueled blazes needed to produce Murano’s richly colored, ornate creations have become a luxury the glassmakers can scarcely afford.
  • The gas crisis stems from a combination of factors — insufficient stockpiles within Europe, constrained supply from Russia and increased competition from Asia for access to liquid natural gas. And with the Kremlin threatening to cut off flows if it is hit with sanctions over Ukraine, the crisis could get worse.
  • For Murano’s glassmakers, who were already reeling from a pandemic lockdown in 2020 and massive flooding in 2019, support has come in the form of regional and national subsidies intended to help them get through the winter. But with gas prices continuing to rise, the subsidies aren’t expected to last them beyond next month, tops. That’s led companies like Effetre to keep their furnaces off — and some to consider closing up shop for good.
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  • In the eight centuries of Murano glassmaking, the use of natural gas is relatively new, adopted only in the 1950s.
  • But environmental regulations adopted in the interim prevent going back to wood. Local emissions would far exceed the legal threshold, explained Francesco Gonella, a physicist who specializes in artistic glass. “You may have a wood-powered stove up on a mountain, but you can’t have hundreds of wood-powered furnaces going at 1100 degrees Celsius,”
  • The glassmaking industry is responsible for only a tiny fraction of Italy’s emissions. But the work is energy-intensive. In a normal year, the Murano factories guzzle more than 13 million cubic meters of natural gas, according to a market insider speaking on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized by his company to talk. That’s as much as a town of 30,000 people would typically use in domestic heating. Yet Murano is an island of 5,000.
  • The range and depth of those colors, along with the level of artistry, help authentic Murano glass stand out from mass-produced versions from China.
  • “Murano’s is an unlucky sector,” said Gonella, the physicist. “It finds itself dealing with problems of different natures: commercial, because China rolls out counterfeit glass; environmental; and now the blow delivered by bills that are unsustainable for many.”
  • Electric furnaces can’t provide the kind of heat or artistic control they need. The sector has been looking into hydrogen as an alternative fuel. But that would require building a whole new network of pipes, designed to withstand corrosion from the hydrogen running through them.
  • “we’ll need a massive investment in local renewable technologies that won’t require the massive costs of importing power from the outside. Geothermic, absolutely, all around the island, and on it. Wind farms, off the lagoon, catching wind at dawn and dusk. And solar. All of these factories also need to be covered in solar panels.”
  • Mattia Rossi, 43, shuttered his family business this month because of financial problems made worse by skyrocketing bills.“If I’m shelling out 5,000 euros for the electric bill one month and 15 [thousand] the next, I won’t be able to raise the price by 30 to 40 percent. My goblet would no longer cost 80, but 150 euros. People just won’t buy it then. Because glass is a beautiful thing, but it’s not bread and milk. It’s unnecessary.”
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