1) In the Battle Against Coronavirus, Humanity Lacks Leadership
What does this history teach us for the current Coronavirus epidemic? First, it implies that you cannot protect yourself by permanently closing your borders. Remember that epidemics spread rapidly even in the Middle Ages, long before the age of globalization. So even if you reduce your global connections to the level of England in 1348 – that still would not be enough. To really protect yourself through isolation, going medieval won’t do. You would have to go full Stone Age. Can you do that? Secondly, history indicates that real protection comes from the sharing of reliable scientific information, and from global solidarity. When one country is struck by an epidemic, it should be willing to honestly share information about the outbreak without fear of economic catastrophe – while other countries should be able to trust that information, and should be willing to extend a helping hand rather than ostracize the victim. Today, China can teach countries all over the world many important lessons about coronavirus, but this demands a high level of international trust and cooperation. [...] Perhaps the most important thing people should realize about such epidemics, is that the spread of the epidemic in any country endangers the entire human species. (Yuval Noah Hararari, Time)
3) Austerität ist tödlichPushing fake news online in English, Spanish, Italian, German and French, the Russian campaign uses contradictory, confusing and malicious reports to make it harder for the EU to communicate its response to the pandemic, the report said. [...] A specialist EU database has recorded almost 80 cases of disinformation about coronavirus since January 22, it said. [...] It said a fake letter purporting to be from the Ukrainian health ministry falsely stated here were five coronavirus cases in the country. Ukrainian authorities say the letter was created outside Ukraine, the EU report said. “Pro-Kremlin disinformation messages advance a narrative that coronavirus is a human creation, weaponised by the West,” said the report, first cited by the Financial Times. The EEAS has also shared information with Slovakia over the spread of fake news accusing the country’s prime minister, Peter Pellegrini, of being infected with the virus and saying he may have passed on the infection to others at recent summits. EU leaders have been conferring by videoconferences since early March. It quoted fake news created by Russia in Italy, the second-most heavily affected country in the world, that health systems would be unable to cope and doctors would choose who lived or died because of a lack of beds. (Robin Emmot, Reuters)
Das traf nicht nur Italien; auch die spanische Regierung sah sich gezwungen, ein Kürzungsprogramm zu unterzeichnen. Daraufhin wurden die Ausgaben für das Gesundheitssystem allein im Jahr 2012 um 5,7 Prozent gedrückt. Aber am härtesten traf es bekanntlich Griechenland: Die staatlichen Mittel wurden zwischen 2009 und 2016 von 16,2 Milliarden auf 8,6 Milliarden fast halbiert. Mehr als 13.000 Ärzte und über 26.000 sonstige im Gesundheitswesen angestellte wurden entlassen. 54 der 137 Krankenhäuser wurden geschlossen und das Budget der übriggebliebenen um 40 Prozent gesenkt. Insgesamt fielen zwischen 2011 und 2016 bei etwa elf Millionen Einwohnerinnen und Einwohnern mehr als drei Millionen Menschen völlig aus dem Schutz einer Krankenversicherung. Das griechische Gesundheitsministerium erklärte die gesunkenen Kosten „als eine Folge von Effizienzsteigerungen im Finanzmanagement“. [...] Der von der Großen Koalition in Berlin mit durchgesetzte Kahlschlag sozialer Infrastruktur in der Eurozone während der letzen Dekade ist ein Faktor, der die Bekämpfung der Corona-Pandemie schwieriger macht und Leben kosten wird. „Austerity kills!“ war in Südeuropa der Slogan im Widerstand gegen die Kürzungspolitik der Troika, noch immer ist er an einer Hauswand im Athener Stadtzentrum zu lesen. Derzeit wird mehr als deutlich, was damit gemeint ist. (Alexis Passadakis, Freitag)4) We Were Warned
The systemic failure stems in part from the fact that in recent decades successive administrations have not treated pandemic preparedness with the degree of seriousness they reserved for addressing other top security threats—from, say, terrorists or adversarial nations. The pattern repeats itself: Presidents rush to prioritize health security and lavish money on it after crisis strikes, then scale back resources and succumb to complacency once it subsides. Pandemics don’t occur with the frequency of other national-security incidents such as terrorist attacks and therefore often seem “like a remote possibility,” Toner said, especially for elected officials thinking in the time horizon of their term in office. [...] Funding for pandemic preparedness has long lagged behind other homeland-security priorities. The U.S. government, for example, spends at least $100 billion a year on counterterrorism efforts versus $1 billion on pandemic and emerging-infectious-disease programs, according to one calculation in 2016. This despite the fact that the new coronavirus threatens to kill vastly more Americans than terrorism ever has. And the Trump administration has gone further—not only underfunding these efforts but also proposing steep spending cuts year after year to institutions, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that are tasked with handling outbreaks. [...] The Trump administration has also downplayed global health threats through structural changes within the White House’s national-security architecture. [...] The irony is that this is all occurring in a country, the United States, that for decades “has been a leader in pandemic preparedness,” Toner said. “We were better prepared than others,” he acknowledged, “but no one, no country, is prepared for what we’re seeing now.” Just as the spread of the coronavirus is a function of human nature, so too is humanity’s capacity to be caught unprepared for it—despite warning after warning after warning that we would live to regret it. (Uri Fleischer, The Atlantic)5) A Glimpse of the Coronavirus’s Possible Legacy
The public experience and knowledge of SARS, Fukuda explained, make it easier to enact these types of measures because people need little prodding to undertake them. This creates a “major advantage for the officials dealing with the outbreak because you can expend less effort convincing people to help, and the strategies can be more effective,” he said. [...] Supplies have now largely returned to stores. Authorities have cracked down on counterfeit medical goods. Press briefings and detailed updates on new patients are delivered daily. Lam has mostly stuck to goodwill visits, allowing health officials and respected experts to explain the situation. A second batch of government-funded evacuation flights are being planned for Hong Kong residents in Hubei province, the coronavirus’s epicenter in China. The city is now testing about 1,000 people a day, though Yuen has said this number should be increased. The government’s interventions and individuals’ change of behavior have been significant. The results of two surveys carried out by researchers in Hong Kong in January and February, published Monday, estimated that the large majority of the adult population wore masks when going out, while most avoided going to crowded places, and reported washing or sanitizing their hands more frequently. Not only have measures been effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19 but the transmission of influenza has also “declined substantially” as a result, the researchers found. Researchers added that if their findings were borne out elsewhere, “they support the perspective that COVID-19 can be meaningfully controlled, or at least mitigated, by familiar social distancing and population behavioral changes short of the draconian measures introduced in mainland Chinese cities.” (Timothy McLaughlin, The Atlantic)6) How Hillary Clinton Became a Postmodern Menace
The vitriol is revealing. Bill Clinton has been part of the national conversation for precisely as long as his wife has, but Americans have not spent years publicly expressing their desire for him to disappear. Nor have cottage industrialists spent years producing “Go Away Bill” merch (T-shirts, hoodies, coffee mugs) to monetize the ire. It is Hillary, uniquely—a little bit Rorschach, a little bit Rashomon—who rankles people. It is Hillary who is imagined, by many in the American public, as a conspiracy theory incarnate. And it is Hillary, in that sense, whose treatment as a living fiction is timely yet again, during a Democratic primary that found a large group of capable and electorally viable female candidates steadily eliminated from contention. (#DropOutWarren may have its own electoral particularities; it is also spiritually similar to #GoAwayHillary.) Presidential politics will always involve some strains of magical thinking. Women candidates, though, often inspire something more akin to paranoia. They are often treated as interlopers, their presence regarded, in ways both subtle and astoundingly obvious, as an encroachment. American culture talks a big game when it comes to women’s equality, but it has not, traditionally, been terribly good at following through on the slogans. And Hillary Clinton—who won in 2016 but also very much didn’t—is a reminder of the depth of the lie. That might help to explain why so many people would prefer that she stop doing the reminding. (Megan Garber, The Atlantic)7) Sexism Is Other People
“Maybe Next Time, Ladies,” the headline of a New York Times opinion piece put itthis week, after it became clear that the 2020 Democratic primary would likely end with two straight, white, septuagenarian men vying to wrest the presidency from another straight, white, septuagenarian man. Is this outcome due to sexism and racism? Yes. Is it also due to other factors? Yes. The fact that both can be true at once—elections have a way of mingling prejudice with legitimate matters of policy and performance—lends galling currency to self-laundering lines like “I’d vote for a woman, just not that woman,” and “I’d vote for a person of color, just not that particular person.” These explanations carry their own camouflage. And they are adjacent to another idea that has been wielded in the 2020 primaries: “electability.” “Electability” claims to be a benign and objective concern. It is neither. It merely outsources biases, rationalizing them by appealing to the moral failings of imagined others. It talks about neighbors, and “other people,” and “what the country is ready for.” It throws up its hands and washes them at the same time. And it suggests an especially insidious strain of sexism. The sexism of the political past has often been blunt and unashamed in its expression (“Lock! Her! Up!”/ “Iron! My! Shirt!” / “She-devil”). The sexism of the political present, however, is slightly different: It knows better, even if it fails to be better. It is a little bit cannier. It has lawyered up. It is figuring out, day by day, how to maintain plausible deniability. (Megan Garber, The Atlantic)
The first lesson is that, unlike the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the coronavirus will force the return of big government. [...] The second lesson is that the coronavirus provides one more demonstration of the mystique of borders, and will help reassert the role of the nation state within the European Union. [...] The third lesson of the coronavirus relates to trust in expertise. [...] The fourth lesson is open to interpretation but very important nonetheless. Unfortunately, the coronavirus could increase the appeal of the big data authoritarianism employed by the Chinese government. [...] The fifth lesson concerns crisis management. What governments learned in dealing with economic crises, the refugee crisis, and terrorist attacks was that panic was their worst enemy. [...] The sixth lesson is that the Covid-19 crisis will have a strong impact on intergenerational dynamics. [...] The seventh lesson is that, at a certain point, governments will be forced to choose between containing the spread of the pandemic at the cost of destroying the economy or tolerating a higher human cost to save the economy. (Ivan Krastev, European Council on Foreign Relations)
Intriguingly, Italians’ faith in sovereigntist parties appears to be crumbling along with their belief in the EU: Covid-19 is weakening Italy’s brand of populism. According to a poll taken on 10 March, support for the League is at 27 percent, down by 7.3 percentage points since the May 2019 European Parliament election. During this period, the Democratic Party has remained stable in the polls, moving from 22.7 percent to 22.5 percent; the Five Star Movement has dropped from 17.1 percent to 15.6 percent; and Forza Italia has fallen from 8.8 percent to 6.1 percent. Nonetheless – and somewhat confusingly, given the fate of the League – support for the nativist Brothers of Italy has risen from 6.5 percent to 13.4 percent. [...] This is a very dangerous time for both Italy and Europe as a whole. After the financial crisis and the migration crisis, the emergency is a turning point for European politics. With European borders closing and EU member states protecting their national interests, the Italian experience holds important lessons for the rest of the continent. Italy has not only been dealing with Covid-19 for longer – at an estimated 10-12 days ahead of other EU countries in infection rates and emergency measures – but is deeper into the political effects of the crisis. Although it might seem strange in the context of its politics of recent years, Italy is on the right track in re-establishing political solidarity and putting aside domestic confrontation. (Teresa Coratella, European Council on Foreign Relations)10) The deglobalisation virus
The Covid-19 crisis has become the third great shock of the century, after the 9/11 attacks and the process unleashed by the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which triggered economic and financial contagion. This is simultaneously a human shock, a supply-side shock (involving production), and a demand-side shock (involving consumption), with the added danger of unleashing a new financial crisis. It may be, as Holman Jenkins suggests, that recession is an inevitable part of the eminently sensible method used to combat the virus – in other words, the suppression of demand that comes with keeping people in their homes. But it comes when the world’s governments have fewer tools for fighting against its effects, and will exact an enormous toll. Increasing numbers of supply chains, much more complex than they were in 2008, are seizing up or stalling. Many factories making machinery, cars, toys, and other products have had to cut or cease production for lack of vital components originating in, for example, China, where manufacturing has been halted. Air and other forms of travel are in abeyance; the same goes for the movement of shipping containers – that analogical invention so crucial to globalisation. Global tourism has taken a massive hit, from which it will take time to recover. The pandemic has laid bare our mutual dependence, the degree of interdependence on which we rely. And there is no shortage of people advocating retreat. (Andrés Ortega, European Council on Foreign Relations)11) Germany, Wilsonianism and the return of Realpolitik
In the coming years, Germany will embrace realpolitik in practice, not just in rhetoric. With a fading American commitment and increased interest in Europe, Germany will have to invest more in its defensive capabilities, perhaps embedded in a European institution. While some are skeptical that Germany can implement a more robust defense policy, the country will soon have no choice. Simultaneously, the country will become more assertive and consciously increase its power — probably arguing that it will be for the sake of Europe. Such a move would be a long overdue and necessary consequence of the end of the Cold War, and the new world order defined by Sino-American competition. German pacifism and Wilsonianism could thrive while German foreign policymaking was shaped by Washington. With America’s attention elsewhere, Berlin has become less relevant for the United States. Consequently, current American interests coincide less, and clash more, with German interests. The time is over when Germans could simply agree or disagree with whatever came out of Washington and then be done with their foreign policymaking. Nothing can change the two governing forces of American strategy — the United States wants to remain the most powerful state in the world, and its primary challenge is China. So long as this is true, Asia will remain the priority theater for U.S. foreign policy, not Europe. This leaves a void — a void that Germans have to fill with own concepts and visions if they do not wish to be steamrolled by the United States as America acts on new interests lying elsewhere. The increasingly realist rhetoric by German leaders indicates that this idea is settling in. (Dominik Wullers, War on the Rocks)12) Why rich people use so much more energy
In a nutshell, as people get wealthier, they spend more on transport (cars, boats, planes, vacations), which is one of the most energy intensive consumer categories. Because wealthier people turn to more energy intensive goods, the energy gap rises even faster than the income gap. [...] The most energy intensive thing that wealthier people do is move around more, in cars, ships, and planes. [...] The top 10 percent of the global income spectrum consumes 20 times as much final energy as the bottom 10 percent. The numbers are particularly striking for transport, where the top 10 percent consumes 187 times as much in vehicle fuel and operation as the bottom 10 percent. “In land transport, the bottom 50% receive a bit more than 10% of the energy used,” says the report, “and in air transport they make use of less than 5%.” Conversely, the top 10 percent uses around 45 percent of land transport energy and 75 percent of air transport energy. As Boeing’s CEO noted in 2017, celebrating his company’s endless growth potential, somewhere around 80 percent of people in the world have never flown. [...] But because heat and electricity represent a basic good, it is not appropriate to address them with pricing mechanisms like taxes, which tend to be regressive and hit the poor the hardest. Performance standards and large-scale public investments are better suited. Vehicle fuel, because it is a luxury good, is a better target for pricing. [...] This logic leads ineluctably to a third policy conclusion: The only way to decarbonize many of the most energy intensive goods and services fast enough is for wealthy people to change their behavior and consume less of them. (David Roberts, vox.com)13) Elon Musk’s coronavirus journey: A timeline
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is gonna Elon Musk, even during a global pandemic. Musk — and his problematic tweets — have prompted controversy for quite some time. His reaction to the coronavirus crisis is no different. Even as public officials around the world have warned of the potentially catastrophic implications of the virus, and as federal, state, and city leaders beg the public to combat the virus’s spread by socially distancing, the South African-born entrepreneur has suggested on Twitter than the whole thing is “dumb,” or at least that everybody should settle down about it. [...] This is noteworthy because what Musk says and does matters. People respect him and follow his advice. If he doesn’t take coronavirus seriously, others might not, either. What’s more, he’s in charge of factories employing thousands of people, and he has taken a contradictory approach compared to other tech and corporate leaders when it comes to letting employees work from home and shifting production to coronavirus-related necessities. [...] But beyond any real effort he makes to pitch in on the crisis, what Musk says about the coronavirus matters, in a similar way to what the president says or what some personality on Fox News says about the pandemic. He has 32 million Twitter followers, and there’s a sort of “cult of Elon Musk” around him, meaning people listen to him.Musk, like all of us, gets to do the coronavirus his way, but his choices matter more. He can do it irresponsibly, like the spring breakers who are still partying on the beach in Miami. Or he can do it responsibly. It’s up to him, and it’s not too late for him to change his tack and encourage his followers to do the same. (Emily Stewart, vox.com)14) How Do You Know If You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire?
The fall of an empire is supposed to be a dramatic thing. It’s right there in the name. “Fall” conjures up images of fluted temple columns toppling to the ground, pulled down by fur-clad barbarians straining to destroy something beautiful. Savage invasions, crushing battlefield defeats, sacked cities, unlucky rulers put to death: These are the kinds of stories that usually come to mind when we think of the end of an empire. They seem appropriate, the climaxes we expect from a narrative of rise, decline, and fall. We’re all creatures of narrative, whether we think explicitly in those terms or not, and stories are one of the fundamental ways in which we engage with and grasp the meaning of the world. It’s natural that we expect the end of a story—the end of an empire—to have some drama.The reality is far less exciting. Any political unit sound enough to project its power over a large geographic area for centuries has deep structural roots. Those roots can’t be pulled up in a day or even a year. If an empire seems to topple overnight, it’s certain that the conditions that produced the outcome had been present for a long time—suppurating wounds that finally turned septic enough for the patient to succumb to a sudden trauma. That’s why the banalities matter. When the real issues come up, healthy states, the ones capable of handling and minimizing everyday dysfunction, have a great deal more capacity to respond than those happily waltzing toward their end. But by the time the obvious, glaring crisis arrives and the true scale of the problem becomes clear, it’s far too late. The disaster—a major crisis of political legitimacy, a coronavirus pandemic, a climate catastrophe—doesn’t so much break the system as show just how broken the system already was. (Patrick Wyman, Mother Jones)15) Republicans like me built this moment. Then we looked the other way.
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