SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) --
“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
(Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
Democratic President Bill Clinton opened the door wide for this police militarization in the 1990s with the National Defense Authorization Act which created a program, the 1033 program, through which police departments are given surplus military equipment. As recently explained by Michael Shank in an article in The New York Review of Books, entitled “How Police Became Paramilitaries,” pursuant to this program, “local law enforcement began to adopt the type of military equipment more frequently used in a war zone: everything from armored personnel carriers and tanks, with 360-degree rotating machine gun turrets, to grenade launchers, drones, assault weapons, and more. Today, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment—most used, some new—has been transferred to civilian police departments.”
And, once the police receive this equipment, they must use it.
As Shank explains, the 1033 program “requires that law enforcement agencies make use of such equipment within a year of acquisition, effectively mandating that police put it into practice in the public space.” In other words, the police are actually required to turn the military’s high-tech guns against their own people.
The militarization of the police, moreover, can be seen as a
by-product of the US’s over-reliance on the use of military force and
war to solve all of its problems, to the near exclusion of all other
alternatives. Indeed, the US has given up on trying to lead the world
through economic and technological prowess, or through moral suasion.
Instead, our leaders have decided that brute military force alone will
allow the US to dominate the planet, and our nation’s coffers are being
looted to the tune of over $1 trillion a year to do so. The result is
the starving of our educational system, our social safety net and our
nation’s vital infrastructure. This, of course, then leads to mass
deprivation and despair which then leads to mass unrest. And, just as it
deals with the rest of the world, our rulers have decided to deal with
the unrest at home, not by solving the social ills plaguing this nation,
or by fixing a few bridges or dams, but by beating us down with
military-style violence.
Military force, indeed, has become the only instrument in our
government’s toolbox, as quite starkly illustrated recently by the White
House’s decision to give our valuable medical workers military flyovers
costing $60,000 an hour instead of providing these workers with the
protective equipment they have been desperately demanding. As with all
things, our government has money and resources for instruments of
violence, but none for human needs. This is literally killing us, just
as surely as it is killing hundreds of thousands of people – nearly all
people of color, not coincidentally – in foreign lands. The fight
against police brutality and racism must therefore be linked to the
fight to de-fund our military and to the broader fight to de-militarize
our very society and culture.
On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to legendary Black Panther, communist politician and activist Angela Davis. She cites the strength of the Palestinian struggle and their solidarity with her and U.S. resisters.
By signing on to this document, you are endorsing the following statement:
Police
reform efforts—from Minneapolis to Seattle—have failed. To stop police
violence, the police must be reduced in size, in budget, and in scope.
The police have never served as an adequate response to social problems.
They are rooted in violence against Black people. In order to protect
Black lives, this moment calls for investing and expanding our safety
and well-being beyond policing. To that end, we demand:
1-
Seattle's Mayor and City Council must immediately defund Seattle Police
Department (SPD). The city faces a $300 million budget shortfall due to
COVID-19. Seattle City Council should propose and vote for a 50% cut
from the $363 million already budgeted for SPD.
2- Seattle's
Mayor and City Council must protect and expand investments to make our
communities safe, prioritizing community-led health and safety
strategies. Full access to affordable housing, community-based
anti-violence programs, trauma services and treatment, universal
childcare, and free public transit are just a few of the non-police
solutions to social problems.
3- The Seattle City Attorney must
not prosecute protesters, including those arrested violating curfew, and
those living in encampments. Protesters took to the streets to call for
the end of the murders of Black people by police, and SPD unnecessarily
escalated tensions and violence.
Our schools, workplaces, and
government offices frequently collaborate with police. The police are an
occupying force in Black communities. Their brutality towards Black
people is condoned and accepted as business as usual. We urge all local
governmental and non-governmental entities to cut ties with the SPD.
When they put on their badges, police officers cease to be members of
the working class. In fact their primary role is to surveil, control,
and silence all forms of dissent to support the continuity of a racist,
harmful, murderous status quo.
--- *These demands are
prepared by COVID-19 Mutual Aid Seattle, a network of organizations and
individuals who came together in response to COVID-19 to demand an
abolitionist, anti-racist public health response to the COVID-19 crisis.
You can reach us at covid19mutualaidsea@gmail.com.
You can follow us on Instagram at @covid19mutualaid, on Facebook at
@covid19mutualaid, and on Twitter at @covid_mutualaid. Thank you for
supporting this important effort.
Pundits have been taking it upon themselves to tell the Black Lives Matter movement that the demand to abolish the police is the wrong one. Sarah Jaffe argues abolitionism has been making gains for decades - and now it’s breaking through.
Alarmed by the unfettered power accumulated by the military and its affiliates, President Eisenhower, himself a participant at the highest levels, warned of the attendant dangers:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.
Similarly, the “misplaced power” of the police threatens the lives and well-being of African Americans, the poor, and working people. Like the military and the security agencies, the role of the police cannot be separated from its central function of protecting wealth and privilege. It cannot be detached from the capitalist system.
The insurrections that are rising throughout the US are a remarkable sign of both the breadth and depth of anti-racist sentiment. They are inclusive in the best possible way. And they have frightened the Trumps, Cuomos, DeBlasios and the others charged with maintaining compliance with the system. The capitalist media is doing its best to shatter the hard-won unity against racism and against the police.
Insofar as the police are central to maintaining the legitimacy of capital, the rebellion is a rebellion against capitalism, whether its participants recognize it or not.
We must do everything to safeguard that unity and expose the source of racism and police violence: capitalism.
Nearly 30 years before a bystander with a cellphone caught a Minneapolis Police Department officer restraining George Floyd with his knee on Floyd's neck, police in Los Angeles were covertly taped beating a criminal suspect. And Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, proposed legislation siding with police.
Historically in the United States, police aggression has come before
any unrest. In 1967, unrest in Detroit spurred the US government to study the causes, which they assumed
would be communist instigators and an inflammatory press. The riots,
the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner
Commission) said, “were not caused by, nor were they the consequences of, any organized plan or ‘conspiracy.’”
Instead, the Kerner Commission said the cause of the unrest was structural racism. “What white Americans have never fully understood,” the report noted, “is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
By “ghetto” the report’s authors meant the atrocious class inequalities in the United States that had – because of the history of enslavement – been marked by race.
Rather than address the deep inequalities in society, the US government chose to arm police officers heavily and send them to discipline populations in distress with their dangerous weapons. The commission proposed instead “a policy which combines ghetto enrichment with programs designed to encourage integration … into the society outside the ghetto.”
Nothing came of that report, as nothing has come of any of the reports that stretch back 150 years. Rather than genuinely invest in the well-being of people, the US government – whether run by Republicans or Democrats – cut back on social programs and cut back on welfare spending; it allowed firms to erode wages and it allowed them to diminish working conditions. What
The ruling elites no longer have legitimacy. They have destroyed our
capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state. What the Roman
philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a
“public thing” or the “property of a people,” has been transformed into
an instrument of naked pillage and repression on behalf of a global
corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by obscenely rich, omnipotent
masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have
perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of
government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to
commit financial fraud and theft.
The loss of control over our system of rulership, the misuse of all
democratic institutions, the electoral process and laws to funnel money
upwards into to a handful of oligarchs while stripping us of power,
ominously means that the ruling elites can no longer claim the right to
have a monopoly on violence. Violence employed by police and security
agencies such as the FBI, which have devolved into occupying forces, to
protect the exclusive interests of a tiny, ruling criminal class exposes
the fiction of the rule of law and the treason of the ruling elites.
“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a
conscience,” Stokely Carmichael warned. And if your opponent is bereft
of a conscience, then state violence is inevitably met with
counter-violence. Tyranny takes the place of reform. The danger of
widespread sectarian violence in America is now very real.
There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the
American body politic, is impossible; revolution; or tyranny. The more
things deteriorate, the more the elites feel threatened, the more brutal
the police, the National Guard and the organs of state security will
become. The longer the serfs defy their masters the more the populations
in the jails and prisons, which are already the largest in the world,
will swell.
If the mafia state is not overthrown, then America will become a
naked police state where any opposition, however tepid, will be met with
draconian censorship or force. Police in cities around the country have
already thwarted the reporting by dozens of journalists covering the
protests through physical force, arrests, tear gas, rubber bullets and
pepper spray. The huge social divides, largely built around race, will
be used by the neo-fascists in power to divert a legitimate rage by a
betrayed working class to set neighbor against neighbor. Neo-fascist
“patriots” will be unleashed like attack dogs against people of color,
Muslims, feminists, intellectuals, artists, the media and liberals.
Dissent, even nonviolent dissent, will become treason.
The uprisings in the streets of American cities are not only about
the wanton murder by police of yet another person of color, but a
frantic fight to wrest back power over our own lives. They go far behind
police brutality, a daily reality for those trapped in our internal
colonies where 1,100 citizens are murdered by police every year, almost
all unarmed. The uprisings are fueled as well by the seizure of the
institutional and structural mechanisms that once made some form of
equality, always imperfect and always colored by an animus towards the
poor and people of color, possible.
Half the country lives in poverty or a category called near poverty.
The working class and the working poor are priced out of the health care
system. The schools do not educate their children, wholive without
adequate food and often clean water, are repeatedly evicted from their
homes, have their utilities shut off, cannot find jobs, are crippled by
punishing debt peonage and with the pandemic are dying at
disproportionally higher rates. They get the message the oligarchs are
sending. They, and their children, are expendable. They don’t count.
Their lives are of no consequence, unless they are locked in a cage
where their bodies can generate as much as $60,000 a year for the
multitude of corporations, including the for-profit medical services,
food services, money transfer services, commissary services, phone
services, private prisons and prison contractors, not to mention the
large corporations and state governments that exploit the cheap and
bonded labor of 1 million of our 2.3 million prisoners.
The prison system is a multi-billion dollar a year industry with
lobbyists in state capitals and Washington making sure these bodies
remain in cages or are put back into cages soon after they are released.
The neo-slavery in our prisons is the corporate model envisioned for
all of America.
The two ruling parties are equally complicit in this assault. The
Democratic Party, in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the
Great Depression, is trying to sell us a presidential nominee, Joe
Biden, who was one of the principal architects of de-industrialization
and responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of good, union
jobs. Biden and Bill Clinton also destroyed our welfare program, where
70 percent of the recipients were children, and orchestrated the
doubling of our prison population and the tripling and quadrupling of
sentences.
Biden, as Naomi Murakawa points out
in “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,” () was a
driving force behind the notoriously harsh penalties in the Anti-Drug
Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, and the three-strikes legislation in the
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which also
provided funding for 100,000 new police officers and the aggressive
prosecution of 60 new capital crimes. He sponsored legislation to
dramatically curtail the ability of those in prison to appeal and led
the passage of the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 and The
Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. He oversaw the
militarization of the police and the massive expansion of death-eligible
crimes, which he has repeatedly bragged about.
Biden was also at the forefront of the re-segregation of our public
school system and has repeatedly called for cuts to Social Security. He
was instrumental in the disastrous trade deals such as the North
American free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)and austerity programs as well as
establishing the most pervasive system of mass government surveillance
in human history. Watching Stacey Abrams, who certainly knows better,
twist herself into contortions to lavish praise on Biden, even tossing
the #MeToo movement overboard, is another sad example of the corrosive
disease of careerism. Biden, one of the most important architects behind
the wars in the Middle East, where we have squandered upwards of $7
trillion and destroyed or extinguished the lives of millions of people,
is personally responsible for far more suffering and death at home and
abroad than Donald Trump.
If we had a functioning judicial and legislative system, Biden, along
with the other architects of our disastrous imperial wars, plundering
of the country and betrayal of the American working class, would be put
on trial, not offered up as a solution to our political and economic
debacle. The myopia of the ruling elites is that they think they can
foist Biden on us because he is not Trump. But the game is up. The
façade of democracy no longer works.
It is only the dwindling and largely white middle and professional
classes who still believe the fiction that this election offers a choice
or that we live in a democracy. The working class and the working poor
know better. Their lives were, as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, one long
emergency before the pandemic. Now they face the prospect of bankruptcy
this summer when unemployment and stimulus checks run out, the
moratorium is lifted on evictions to double or triple the unhoused
population of 11 million people and unemployment skyrockets to 25
percent. Forty-eight percent of front line workers remain ineligible for
sick pay, and some 43 million Americans have just lost their
employee-sponsored health insurance. Food banks are already overrun with
tens of thousands of desperate families.
And in the midst of this crisis, what did our kleptocratic rulers do?
They looted $4 trillion on a scale unseen since the 2008 bailout
overseen by Barack Obama and Biden. They gorged and enriched themselves
at our expense, while tossing crumbs out of the windows of their private
jets, yachts and palatial homes to the suffering and despised masses.
How long can you expect people to watch their children go hungry? How
long can you expect people to watch their loved ones suffer and die
because they can’t get medical care? How long can you expect people to
be abused by lawless police and a court system designed to railroad the
poor into jails and prisons? How long can you watch the rich profit from
your misery?
I would prefer that our revolution eschew the poison of violence,
which I know too intimately from my two decades as a war correspondent.
But I also know that when everything around you conspires to crush you,
the only way left to affirm yourself is to destroy, not only the
structures and institutions that have oppressed you, but often yourself.
I saw this when I lived in the impoverished neighborhood of Roxbury in
Boston and when I worked as a reporter in Gaza. This understanding was
something Malcom X, who came out of poverty, always understood and
Martin Luther King, a product of the black bourgeoisie, learned later.
It is ultimately the ruling elites who will determine the mechanics
of resistance. When they close every escape route, when they speak
exclusively in the language of force, then the language of force becomes
the only form of communication. Trump’s demand that states use the
National Guard to crush the protests and threat to deploy the U.S.
military in the streets of American cities only heightens the anger and
frustration that led to the uprisings.
The ruling elites are, at the same time, desperately seeking
scapegoats. The idea that Antifa, which on the spectrum of terrorist
groups would rank alongside the Boy Scouts, is behind these clashes is
as ridiculous as the idea that Russia is responsible for the election of
Trump. This desperate search for explanations that absolve the ruling
elites saw Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national-security adviser, blame
the violence on “foreign actors,” adding that “this is right out of the
Russian playbook.” This trope is always trotted by despotic rulers to
discredit dissidents who are branded as the enemy of the people.
The longer the ruling elites refuse to address the root causes behind
these protests, the more they loot the treasury to enrich themselves
and their fellow oligarchs, the more they engage in futile and absurd
efforts to deflect blame, the more unrest will spread. The last
desperate resort by the oligarchs to save themselves will be to stoke
the fires of racialized violence between disenfranchised whites and
disenfranchised people of color. This, I fear, is the next chapter in
this saga. I saw this tactic used to deadly effect in the former
Yugoslavia. These are dark times. They are about to get darker.
EXCERPT (more good ideas here, but couldn't get the whole article to post -- read it at link above):
Here’s another idea: Imagine if the
money used to pay the salaries of police officers who endlessly patrol
public housing buildings and harass residents can be used to fund plans
that residents design to keep themselves safe. The money could also pay
the salaries of maintenance and custodial workers; fund community
programs, employment and a universal basic income; or pay for upgrades
to elevators and apartment units so residents are not stuck without gas during a pandemic, as some people in Brooklyn were. The Movement for Black Lives and other social movements call for this kind of redirection of funds.
We
need to reimagine public safety in ways that shrink and eventually
abolish police and prisons while prioritizing education, housing,
economic security, mental health and alternatives to conflict and
violence. People often question the practicality of any emergency
response that excludes the police. We live in a violent society, but the
police rarely guarantee safety. Now more than ever is the time to
divest not only from police resources, but also the idea that the police
keep us safe.
“The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation that any
other person in America. His discretion is tremendous. He can have
citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations. Or the prosecutor may choose a more subtle course and simply have a citizen’s friends interviewed. The prosecutor can order
arrests, present cases to the grand jury in secret session, and on the
basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen
to be indicted and held for trial. He may dismiss the case before
trial, in which case the defense never has a chance to be heard. Or he
may go on with a public trial. If he obtains a conviction, the
prosecutor can still make recommendations as to sentence, as to whether
the prisoner should get probation or a suspended sentence, and after he
is put away, as to whether he is a fit subject for parole. While the
prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our
society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of
Capitalism is an amazingly resilient system. This is not meant as praise, but as an observation that Marxists have made again and again since Marx and Engels first foresaw capitalism’s demise.
Its resilience lies not in its delivering the public goods, but in its ability to convince a critical mass of people that it does deliver and, when faced with an existential crisis, to stop at nothing to save the reign of capital.
Of course earlier socio-economic systems had long runs as well. But it is a fool’s errand and decidedly un-Marxist to call the date of the “final” crisis. Unfortunately, far too many have foolishly made that call-- I have the books on my bookshelves to prove it.
What Marxists can do is check the pulse of the capitalist system, take an x-ray, and make a cautious diagnosis. I think everyone-- Marxist and non-Marxist alike-- would agree that today the system is ill, indeed, critically ill. Global capitalism is breathing heavily, and struggling to get out of bed. Maybe it’s because of the coronavirus, maybe it’s also from some serious pre-existing conditions.
Metaphor aside for a moment, capitalism is, at this time, declining rapidly. The usual numbers-- unemployment, GDP, investment, manufacturing activity, trade, etc.-- are all trending in ways unseen at least since the Great Depression.
What is the prognosis?
The pollyannas of the capitalist class-- most capitalists, economists, politicians-- speak of a quick recovery. They see the crisis as beginning and ending with the rise and fall of Covid-19 infections. Once the coronavirus is conquered, they say, the global economy will pick itself up and, in time, continue briskly marching forward. This should, and does, sound like whistling past the graveyard.
Liberals and social democrats-- the social-work left-- understand that great human damage is occurring; their sympathy for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of the crisis’s victims is genuine and heartfelt; and they sense an opportunity to reform. However, for them, reform must accomplish two-- I would argue, contradictory-- tasks simultaneously: restore and repair the capitalist system and repair and restore the carnage inflicted upon people by this crisis.
Sure, the respectable left rails against capitalism-- crony capitalism, disaster capitalism, pandemic capitalism, gender capitalism, Trump capitalism, “cancerous form of capitalism” (Michael Moore) or neo-liberal capitalism. But they don’t really mean capitalism itself. Rather, they reject what they consider aberrant capitalism, bad capitalism, capitalism off its otherwise benign rails. Instead, they desire a good capitalism: “human-centered capitalism” (Brookings), “accountable capitalism” (Elizabeth Warren), “capitalism for everyone” (Center for American Progress), “post-capitalism” (the science-fiction capitalism imagined by many academic leftists), or a host of other capitalisms tailored to the supposed greater good.
The unstated truth is that the soft left, the reformist left does not connect the social ills of growing inequality, wealth concentration, increasing poverty, declining life expectancy, and social dysfunction directly to the intrinsic mechanism of capitalism. They believe that, with some tinkering, they can make the insatiable drive for profit, for accumulation, take a backseat to human needs.
It is an odd view; for centuries, through capitalism’s birth, growth, and maturation, this reformist program has not come close to any lasting success.
In the twenty-first century, with three devastating, life-crushing economic crises in twenty years, that prospect appears even dimmer.
Many in the US are entirely focused on the forthcoming Presidential election campaign. Do they think that the two-party electoral system-- finely honed over many decades to repel even moderate reformism-- will produce solutions equal to the tasks of this era? For young people, it is hopefully a learning experience; for older people, confidence in a favorable outcome is a disappointing measure of their cynicism, not their maturity. Could anyone believe that either Donald Trump or Joseph Biden (now joined with the execrable Laurence Summers) is able to tackle, for the good of the people, an economy now in free fall?
In the past, the reformist left relied upon the labor union hierarchies, the center-left political parties, and issue-oriented activist networks. But today, these groups are more and more compromised. The center-left parties are thoroughly “bourgeoisified”; corporate ownership-- once a dirty, little secret-- is now apparent to all.
The labor union leadership has exchanged class confrontation for partnership with capital; in some embarrassing cases, they have mounted a stiffer defense of capitalism than the corporations, notably when attacking “foreign” competitors.
And far too many issue-groups have drunk from the poisoned chalice of foundation money. Understandably, there are desperate needs for funding, especially for a resource-starved left, but foundation money is a stealth assault on independent action.
The way forward lies in unleashing the potential of working people, freeing them from the institutional fetters imposed by bankrupt political parties, an ossified labor leadership, and ineffective NGOs.
While it is a daunting task, organizing the millions of unemployed workers promises to break from the inadequate tactics of the recent past. It was the Communist-led unemployment councils that sparked the peoples’ movement in The Great Depression. The marches on state capitals and Washington DC, the confrontation with assistance agencies and evicting officials, and relentless agitation pressed the authorities to reluctantly consider remedies to widespread human misery. Contrary to the “great man” mythology ascribed to Franklin Roosevelt, it was the militant action of the unemployed and other workers that constructed the popular base for New Deal reforms. Without that base demanding more, Roosevelt would have retreated. This time, even greater victories are possible.
Encouraging signs are rising that workers are seeking a new militancy to combat the ravages of capitalism. There is a thirst-- expressed especially among younger workers-- for new ways to organize and direct the anger emerging from the failures of the system to protect and support workers faced with a deadly virus. The callousness of many capitalist leaders toward the safety of health care workers, the rush to return enterprises to profit making despite endangering workers, and the failures to promptly and efficiently provide the resources necessary to combat and treat the virus have exposed the inhumanity of capitalism. Amazon workers, gig workers, the precariat, and other unorganized workers, now more than ever, see the need for collective action. Danger and idleness are great teachers.
Those with the lowest paying jobs, women, Blacks, and Latinos have been hit the hardest by the layoffs and are the most neglected by the politicians and those pretending to represent labor. Like in the era of the Great Depression, a resurgent, militant, and independent labor movement must appeal to those left out. Whether the movement follows the pattern established by the 1930s industrial movement, the CIO, or takes another form, it must not be shackled with moderation and class pacification. The objective need is there, the conditions are ripe; all that is needed is the will.
As in the thirties, there is mass confusion, unfocused anger, nihilism. The divisions grow in number and grow deeper. The danger of the right coopting righteous indignation increases. Already, Trump and his international counterparts have exploited the frustration of the masses and the impotency of the center-left.
The antidote to the appeal of the right is not hand-wringing or fear-mongering, but countering with alternatives. Communists in the thirties countered Father Coughlin, the Black Legions, and the many crackpots and demagogues with the power of organization and the inspiration of militant ideas.
In the thirties, where a catalyst seized the initiative-- even a small catalyst like the US Communist Party-- working people were able to unite and force change on an obstinate ruling class. They were able to find their strength and a vision of a better world. Once recognized, the potential of working people knows no bounds. We must work to foster that recognition.
Our fight is not for unemployment insurance or social security. Those fights have been won, though the ruling class has chipped away at these gains from the day they were secured. Hopefully, our fight is for more, for everything, for socialism!
Not long ago, the government of Vietnam sent
450,000 units of personal protective equipment (PPEs) to the United
States in an act of solidarity. This is the same country which was
bombed beyond belief by the United States government, which used such
harsh chemical weapons that the people remain scarred by it; Vietnam’s
agriculture will not recover for generations.
The COVID-19
disease has caused more than 4.13 million infections and has taken
283,000 lives. Vietnam, which shares an 870-mile border with China, saw
its first case in late January when a man from Wuhan came to visit his
son in Vietnam. Thus far, however, there have only been 288 confirmed
infections and no deaths. This is not because of low testing or poor
record-keeping. It is because Vietnam took a science-based approach to
the virus and disease, something alien to the Trump administration.
Vietnam’s government, led by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, never minimized the threat of COVID-19. It immediately set up a national steering committee to coordinate action. Testing began
at border points and epidemic control teams began to test the
population and do contact tracing if they found anyone with the
infection. Rather than lockdown the entire population, the epidemic
teams studied the population, and isolated and treated those with
symptoms and who tested positive for COVID-19; if there was a region
with particularly high numbers, it was quarantined.
This multi-tier isolation system helped the authorities break the chain of infection. The Communist Party of Vietnam — very early — offered a motto, “fighting the epidemic is like fighting against the enemy.”
The Ministry of Health posed a music video
to explain the concept of physical distancing and hand washing; this
video went viral on TikTok, where young people created a dance to go
with it. The message was broadcast in days. Masks were mandated in public and alcohol-based hand sanitizers are found everywhere. Schools and religious sites were all immediately closed.
The government directed
public sector units to produce necessary equipment, including PPEs and
ventilators, as well as hand sanitizer and medicines. There was
sufficient industrial capacity that could be directed to produce these
goods without any worry about price gouging, since these are public
sector enterprises. The private sector followed suit, and so did
philanthropists who set up “Rice ATMs” to distribute food to those who had lost their incomes. The government set up food kitchens to feed the indigent.
Here’s
how the United States failed. Alex Azar is the Health and Human
Services Secretary in the Trump administration. He heard about the virus
in the first week of January but did not tell Trump for two weeks. Both
Trump and Azar behaved in an anti-science, hallucinatory way toward
COVID-19.
On Jan. 28, Azar said that Americans
would find that the virus “should not be an impact on their day-to-day
life.” By then, the Vietnamese had already begun major preparations to
contain the virus, including increasing capacity in medical institutions
and for the production of necessary protective equipment. On the day
that the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency —
Jan. 30 — Trump said, with no evidence, “we think we have it very well under control.”
Right
through January, February and March, Trump minimized the threat. His
Twitter feed provides all the necessary evidence. On March 9, Trump
likened the virus to the common flu; “Think about that!,” he wrote. Two days later, the WHO declared a global pandemic. On March 13, Trump declared a national emergency;
this was months after Vietnam acted, six weeks after the WHO had
declared a public emergency. These six weeks were lost. In the United
States alone, 80,602 people have died thus far of the virus; remember,
in Vietnam there are no fatalities.
Vijay
Prashad, who lives in Northampton, was born and raised in Kolkata,
India. He is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research.
TweetEpisode 19: Remembering Kent State — Assange Countdown to Freedom: Laurel Krause On the 50th Anniversary of the massacre at Kent State, Laurel Krause, Director of the Kent State Truth Tribunal, talks about that fateful day when her sister Allison was among the four students murdered and the work that she has supervised over the last fifty years in search of truth
Biggest” or “fastest” declines in history are becoming routine
characterizations in business media of everything from stocks to
unemployment claims to U.S. Treasury yields and now to commodity prices.
You’d have to go back to the 1930s and the Great Depression to find as
many similar references.
And there was one other key characteristic that defined the early
1930s and now: unprecedented wealth inequality that had been
manufactured by Wall Street running an institutionalized wealth transfer
system that culminated in a stock market crash that erased 90 percent
of the stock market’s value from 1929 to 1932. The late MIT economist, Lester Thurow, explained some three decades
ago what happens when wealth is concentrated in too few hands:
“Depression is seen as a product of
systematic tendencies for the distribution of wealth to become
concentrated among a few. When this happens, demand eventually sags
relative to supply and long cyclical downturns commence…
“Essentially, the economic problem is
like that of the wolf and the caribou. If the wolves eat all the
caribou, the wolves also vanish. Conversely, if the wolves vanish, the
caribou for a time multiply but eventually their numbers become too
great and they die for lack of food. Producers need consumers, and if
producers deprive workers of their fair share of production income they
essentially deprive themselves of the affluent consumers they need to
make their facilities profitable….”
Yesterday, the price of the front futures contract for U.S. domestic
crude oil, known as West Texas Intermediate or WTI, closed in negative
territory for the first time in history. The reason was that no one
wanted to take physical possession of that crude oil because they could
not find any place to store it. There is now such a global oversupply of
crude that traditional storage places, like tankers and storage tanks,
are full for the most part. The May contract expires today and the price action in the new front
month June contract does not look promising. At 9:25 a.m. this morning,
the June contract was down by 29 percent with WTI trading at $14.50. While the price action in crude yesterday was historic, it is far from the only commodity experiencing dramatic price declines. On April 17, a devastating report was published in the Immokalee Bulletin titled “The Day South Florida Agriculture Died.”
The report came from Gene McAvoy, associate director for stakeholder
relations for the University of Florida IFAS Southwest Florida Research
and Education Center and president of the National Association of County
Agricultural Agents. McAvoy described the situation as follows:
“On Tuesday, March 24, a local broker
says, everything changed. From brokers, orders stopped and everything
got quiet. On Wednesday, March 25, it got super quiet.
“Since then, tomato volumes are down 85%, green beans are like 50% and cabbage is like 50%.
“R.C. Hatton has plowed under 100 acres of green beans, around 2 million pounds, and 60 acres of cabbage, or 5 million pounds.
“Florida’s tomato growers target 80% of
their production to restaurants and other food service companies, rather
than to supermarkets. In this sector, growers are walking away from big
portions of their crop.
“Tony DiMare estimates that by the end of the growing season, about 10 million pounds of his tomatoes will go unpicked.”
The demand destruction has also impacted cattle ranchers. The article
notes that “The cash market and futures prices are lower than anyone
can remember. One local rancher sold calves last week and averaged $250
per head at the Arcadia auction barn. A few weeks ago he would have
received $450 per head average, and that constitutes below break-even.”
That’s a 44 percent price decline. Hog farmers are also facing a crisis. The Associated Press reported yesterday that “…almost overnight millions of hogs stacking up on farms now have little value.” There is growing evidence that all of this demand destruction leading
to collapsing prices cannot be blamed on the coronavirus outbreak.
Treasury yields were plunging in August and September of last year, long
before there was a coronavirus outbreak anywhere in the world. The
Federal Reserve had to step in on September 17, 2019 – four months
before the first coronavirus case in the U.S. – to shore up a liquidity
crisis on Wall Street. The crisis was so bad that the Fed had to pump
hundreds of billions of dollars weekly into the trading houses on Wall
Street for months on end. (See the more than six dozen articles we penned on that topic from September 17 onward.) U.S. manufacturing had already entered a recession in 2019 and the International Monetary Fund announced in October of 2019 that it was downgrading its global outlook and “predicted that growth in advanced economies would slow from 2.3% in 2018 to 1.7%” in 2019. The U.S. had a previous warning of what causes this type of demand
destruction. It is now known as the Great Financial Crisis of 2007 to
2010. The roots of that era of collapsing prices and today’s date back
to November 12, 1999 when President Bill Clinton signed the
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealing the Glass-Steagall Act. Clinton’s
signature on that legislation ended the 66-year long ban against Wall
Street trading houses owning federally-insured banks holding the
deposits of moms and pops across America. Clinton released a statement on the signing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley
Act which said that the legislation would stimulate “greater innovation
and competition in the financial services industry.”
Today, just five
Wall Street mega banks control the majority of assets of the more than
5,000 banks and savings associations that exist in the U.S. today. These
same Wall Street banks are allowed to charge upwards of 17 percent or
more on consumer credit cards while paying 1 percent or less to their
depositors. Simply put, Clinton launched a massive wealth transfer
system in America.
Clinton said this at the signing ceremony:
“The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act makes the
most important legislative changes to the structure of the U.S.
financial system since the 1930s. Financial services firms will be
authorized to conduct a wide range of financial activities, allowing
them freedom to innovate in the new economy. The Act repeals provisions
of the Glass-Steagall Act that, since the Great Depression, have
restricted affiliations between banks and securities firms. It also
amends the Bank Holding Company Act to remove restrictions on
affiliations between banks and insurance companies. It grants banks
significant new authority to conduct most newly authorized activities
through financial subsidiaries. Removal of barriers to competition will
enhance the stability of our financial services system.”
Nine years later, the U.S. financial system collapsed along with
iconic, century old names on Wall Street as the U.S. entered the worst
economic collapse since the Great Depression. This is round II.
I offer, as a working hypothesis, that the Asia triad of Confucius, Buddha and Lao Tzu has been absolutely essential in shaping the perception and serene response of hundreds of millions of people across various Asian nations to Covid-19. Compare this with the prevalent fear, panic and hysteria mostly fed by the corporate media across the West.
The Tao (“the way”) as configured by Lao Tzu is about how to live in harmony with the world. Being confined necessarily leads to delving into yin instead of yang, slowing down and embarking on a great deal of reflection.
Yes, it’s all about culture, but culture rooted in ancient philosophy, and practiced in everyday life. That’s how we can see wu wei – “action of non-action” – applied to how to deal with a quarantine. “Action of non-action” means action without intent. Rather than fighting against the vicissitudes of life, as in confronting a pandemic, we should allow things to take their natural course.
That’s much easier when we know this teaching of the Tao: “Health is
the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure.
Confidence is the greatest friend. Non-being is the greatest joy.”
It also helps to know that “life is a series of natural and
spontaneous choices. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let
reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way
they like.”
Buddhism runs in parallel to the Tao: “All conditioned things are
impermanent. When one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from
suffering.”
And to keep our vicissitudes in perspective, it helps to know:
“Better it is to live one day seeing the rise and fall of things than to
live a hundred years without ever seeing the rise and fall of things.”
As far as keeping much-needed perspective, nothing beats, “the root of suffering is attachment.”
And then, there’s the ultimate perspective: “Some do not understand
that we must die. But those who do realize this settle their quarrels.”
Confucius has been an overarching presence across the Covid-19
frontline, as an astonishing 700 million Chinese citizens were kept
for weeks under different forms of quarantine.
We can easily imagine them clinging to a few pearls of wisdom, such
as: “Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and
honors depend upon heaven.” Or “he who learns, but does not think, is
lost. He who thinks, but does not learn, is in great danger.”
Most of all, in an hour of extreme turbulence, it brings comfort to
know that, “the strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the
home.”
And in terms of fighting a dangerous and invisible enemy on the
ground, it helps to know this rule of thumb: “When it is obvious that
the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action
steps.”
So what would be the ultimate insight a serene East can offer to the
West in such hard times? It’s so simple, and it’s all in the Tao: “From
caring comes courage.”
