The Pandemic Reveals a Europe More United Than the United States

John Feffer

During the Trump era, America increasingly seems like a motley collection of states brought together for reasons of territorial contiguity and little else.

The conservative South is ravaged by a pandemic. The liberal Northeast waits patiently for elections in November to oust a tyrant. A rebellious Pacific Northwest faces off against federal troops sent to “restore order.” The Farm Belt, the Rust Belt, and the Sun Belt are like three nations divided by a common language.

The European Union, on the other hand, really does consist of separate countries: 27 of them. The economic gap between Luxembourg and Latvia is huge, the difference in median household income even larger than that between America’s richest and poorest states (Maryland and West Virginia).

European countries have gone to war with each other more recently than the American states (a mere 25 years ago in the case of former Yugoslavia). All EU members are democracies, but the practice of politics varies wildly from perpetually fragmented Italy to stolid Germany to ever-more illiberal Hungary.

Despite these economic and political differences, the EU managed last week to perform a miracle of consensus. After 90 hours of discussion, EU leaders hammered out a unified approach to rebuilding the region’s post-pandemic economy.

The EU is looking at an 8.7 percent economic contraction for 2020. But the pandemic clearly hit some parts of the EU worse than others, with Italy and Spain suffering disproportionately. Greece remains heavily indebted from the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Most of Eastern Europe has yet to catch up to the rest of the EU. If left to themselves, EU members would recover from the current pandemic at very different rates, and several might not recover at all.

That’s why last week’s deal is so important. The EU could have helped out its struggling members by extending more loans, which was basically the approach after 2009. This time around, however, the EU is providing almost half of the money in the new Recovery Fund — $446 billion — in grants, not loans. The $1.3 trillion budget that European leaders negotiated for the next seven years will keep all critical EU programs afloat (like the European Structural and Investment funds that help bridge the gap between the wealthier and the less wealthy members).

Sure, there were plenty of disagreements. The “frugal four” of the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, and Sweden argued down the amount of money allocated to the grant program and the budget numbers overall. Germany has often sided with the frugal faction in the past, but this time Chancellor Angela Merkel played a key role in negotiating the compromise. She also managed to bribe Hungary and Poland to support the deal by taking “rule of law” conditionality off the table. Both countries have run afoul of the EU by violating various rule-of-law norms with respect to media, judiciary, and immigration. Yet both countries will still be able to access billions of dollars from the Recovery Fund and the overall budget.

Until recently, the EU seemed to be on the brink of dissolution. The UK had bailed, Eastern Europe was increasingly authoritarian, the southern tier remained heavily in debt, and the pandemic was accelerating these centrifugal forces.

But now it looks as the EU will spin together, not spin apart.

The United States, on the other hand, looks ever more in disarray. As Lucrezia Reichlin, professor of economics at London Business School, put it, “Despite being one country, the U.S. is coming out much more fragmented than Europe.’’

The Coming Storm

The Trump administration has been all about restarting the U.S. economy. Trump was reluctant to encourage states to lock down in the first place. He supported governors and even armed protestors demanding that states reopen prematurely.

And now that the pandemic has returned even more dramatically than the first time around, the president is pretending as though the country isn’t registering over 60,000 new infections and over a thousand deaths every day. Trump was willing to cancel the Florida portion of the Republican Party convention for fear of infection, but he has no problem insisting that children hold the equivalent of thousands of mini-conventions when they return to school.

Europe, which was much more stringent about prioritizing health over economy, is now pretty much open for business.

The challenge has been summer tourism. Vacationers hanging out on beaches and in bars are at heightened risk of catching the disease and bringing it home with them. There have been some new outbreaks of the disease in Catalonia, an uptick in cases in Belgium and Netherlands, and a significant increase in infections in Romania. Belgium is already re-instituting restrictions on social contacts. Sensibly, a number of European governments are setting up testing sites for returning tourists.

The EU is determined not to repeat what’s going on in Florida, Texas, and California. It is responding in a more deliberate and unified way to outbreaks leading to an average of 81 deaths a day than the United States is responding as a whole to a very nearly out-of-control situation producing more than 900 deaths a day.

The United States isn’t just facing a deadly resurgence of the pandemic. Various economic signals indicate that the so-called “V-shaped recovery” — much hyped by the Trump administration — is just not happening. More people are again filing for unemployment benefits. People are reluctant to go back to restaurants and hang out in hotels. The business sector in general is faring poorly.

“The sugar rush from re-openings has now faded and a resurgence of domestic coronavirus cases, alongside very weak demand, supply chain disruptions, historically low oil prices, and high levels of uncertainty will weigh heavily on business investment,” according to Oren Klachkin, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics in New York.

The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report earlier this month that offered two potential scenarios for the U.S. economy through the end of the year. Neither looks good. The “optimistic scenario” puts the unemployment rate at the end of 2020 at 11.3 percent (more or less what it is right now) and an overall economic contraction of 7.3 percent. According to the pessimistic scenario, the unemployment rate would be nearer to 13 percent and the economic contraction at 8.5 percent.

Much depends on what Congress does. The package that Senate Republicans unveiled this week is $2 trillion less than what the Democrats have proposed. It offers more individual stimulus checks, but nothing for states and municipalities and no hazard pay for essential workers.

Unemployment benefits expired last week, and Republicans would only extend them at a much-decreased level. Although Congress will likely renew the eviction moratorium that expires at the end of this month, some landlords are already trying to kick out renters during the gap. The student loan moratorium affecting 40 million Americans runs out at the end of September.

The only sign of economic resurgence is the stock market, which seems to be running entirely on hope (of a vaccine, or a tech-led economic revival). At some point this irrational exuberance will meet its evil twin, grim reality.

The Europeans are preparing the foundation for precisely the V-shaped recovery that the United States, at the moment, can only dream about.

The Transatlantic Future

What does a world with a stronger Europe and a weaker America look like?

A stronger Europe will no longer have to kowtow to America’s mercurial foreign policy. Take the example of the Iran nuclear deal, which the Obama administration took the lead in negotiating. Trump not only cancelled U.S. participation, he threatened to sanction any actors that continued to do business with Iran. Europe protested and even set up its own mechanisms to maintain economic ties with Tehran. But it wasn’t enough. Soon enough, however, the United States won’t have the economic muscle to blackmail its allies.

The EU has certainly taken a tougher stance toward China over the last couple years, particularly on economic issues. But in its negotiations with Beijing, the EU has also put far greater emphasis on cooperation around common interests. As such, expect the EU to take full advantage of U.S. decline to solidify its position in an East Asian regional economy that recovers far more quickly from the pandemic than pretty much anywhere in the world.

Europe is also well-positioned to take the lead on climate change issues, which the United States has forfeited in its four years of catastrophic backsliding under Trump. As part of its new climate pact, the EU has pledged to become carbon-neutral by 2050. The European Commission is also considering a radical new idea: a carbon tax on imports. In the future, if you want to be competitive in selling your products in the European market, you’ll have to consider the carbon footprint of your operation.

Of course, the EU could do better. But compared to the United States or Russia or China, it’s way out in front.

The European Union is not a demilitarized space. It has a very mixed record on human rights conditionality. And its attitudes toward immigration range from half-welcoming to downright xenophobic.

But let’s say that Europe emerges from this pandemic with greater global authority, much as the United States did after World War II. A lot of Americans, and most American politicians, will bemoan this loss of status. But a world led by a unified Europe would be a significantly better place than one mismanaged by a fragmented United States.

Globalization and the End of the American Dream

David Rosen

Immanuel Wallerstein provocatively begins one of his essays with the following cautionary note: “Globalization is a misleading concept, since what is described as globalization has been happening for 500 years.”

Nevertheless, in a 2000 article, “Globalization or the Age of Transition?,” Wallerstein notes that after WW-II the U.S. was “the only major industrial power whose industries were intact, and whose territories had not been badly damaged by wartime destruction.”  He lays out a critical perspective:

This long-term economic development combined with the literal collapse of the economic structures of the other major loci of world production gave the USA a productivity edge that was enormous, at least for a time, and made it easy for US products to dominate the world market.

He then outlines the social consequences of this development: “It made possible, furthermore, the largest expansion of both value and real production in the history of the capitalist world economy, creating simultaneously great wealth and great social strain in the world social system.”

U.S. hegemony during the postwar era was marked by the establishment of a host of organizations to coordinate global order, both political and economic.  These entities include the United Nations as well as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.  U.S. global imperialism came to be known as the “Free World.”  The postwar policy of “détente” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union established the “cold war” that froze global economic zones and, while facilitating innumerable local military skirmishes, contained a third — atomic — world war.

Wallerstein states simply: “… the period of true hegemony was quite short. I date it as going from 1945 to circa 1970.”  He distinguishes the period by three critical factors:

(i) “that the U.S. is the land par excellence of liberty, and therefore is more ‘democratic’ than any other country”;
(ii) “that the U.S. is more modern, more technologically advanced, and therefore wealthier than any other country”; and
(iii) “that the U.S. has the strongest military in the world.”

This was the era of postwar economic prosperity, of the American Dream.  Its marked by

(i) Pres. Richard Nixon ending the gold standard,
(ii) OPEC raising the price of oil and
(iii) Nixon visiting China in 1972.

These developments occurred as the U.S. military was defeated in Vietnam and the nation was wracked by a social uprising involving not only opposition to the Vietnam war but race relations, gender equality and sexual practice.

One consequence of the end of the postwar era was that manufacturing steadily declined as a share of total employment.  Paul Krugman assesses the decline in manufacturing during the 1997-2005 period:

Does the surge in the trade deficit explain the fall in employment? Yes, to a significant extent. A trade deficit doesn’t produce a one-for-one decline in manufacturing value added, since a significant share of both exports and imports of goods include embodied services. But a reasonable estimate is that the deficit surge reduced the share of manufacturing in GDP by around 1.5 percentage points, or more than 10 percent, which means that it explains more than half of the roughly 20 percent decline in manufacturing employment between 1997 and 2005.

The St. Louis Federal Reserve notes that “gains from globalization have been quite large and have taken many different forms, specifically, lower prices, higher profits, and increased product variety.”  It then adds, one outcome had significant consequences: “The decline in manufacturing jobs had a rippling effect throughout society.  It led to what as a “decline in workers’ bargaining power leading to slower wage growth and rising income inequality.”  In goes further, noting “the direct impact of declining wages (real and relative) and increasing healthcare costs will likely outweigh the more indirect benefits.”

However, as globalization led to a decline in wages for manufacturing and other hourly workers, it led to an enormous increase in executive compensation.  A study of the executive compensation at thousands of U.S. companies between 1993 and 2013 by researchers from the University of Colorado–Boulder and Williams College in Massachusetts concluded that “recent globalization trends have increased U.S. inequality by disproportionately raising top incomes.”

This finding is corroborated by a series of other studies.  For example, a 2015 study by the Economic Policy Institute found executive pay had grown by 997 percent between 1978 and 2014, while the average compensation for a private-sector production and non-supervisory worker increased by just 10.9 percent.  Also in 2015, the Pew Center 2015 calculated that upper-income households saw their pay rise 47 percent between 1970 and 2014. Middle-income households enjoyed a median gain of only 34 percent over that window, while lower-income households posted a softer 28 percent gain.

Wallerstein warned, in his 2000 article, “The future, far from being inevitable and one to which there is no alternative, is being determined in this transition that has an extremely uncertain outcome.”

We Need an Economic Survival Package Not Another Stimulus

Dean Baker

There continues to be enormous confusion about what we should be trying to accomplish in the next pandemic relief package. This is best demonstrated by Republicans’ obsession with getting people back to work, with a mixture of cuts to unemployment benefits and return to work bonuses.

Ignoring the questionable economic logic (there is zero evidence of large numbers of jobs going unfilled), this approach also ignores the reality of the pandemic. At the start of April, both houses voted nearly unanimously to support measures that were designed to make it possible for people to stay at home rather than work. At that time, we had roughly 35,000 new infections a day. Currently, we are seeing well over 60,000 new infections a day, with the count crossing 70,000 in many recent days.

The comparison looks even worse if we pull out New York and New Jersey, both of which were overwhelmed by the pandemic at the start of April. Between them, they had roughly 15,000 new infections a day, which means the rest of the country was seeing close to 20,000. By contrast, at present both states have the virus relatively under control, which means that the new infection count in the country would still be over 60,000 a day, excluding New York and New Jersey.

This raises the obvious point: if Congress thought it made sense to allow, encourage, and possibly even require people to stay home rather than work at the start of April, how could it possibly make sense to push people to work at a time when the rate of new infections is more than three times as high, in areas outside of New York and New Jersey?

This is really a question of life and death. Tens of millions of workers have serious health conditions that mean they would be at considerable danger if they became infected. Tens of millions more workers would be putting into danger family members, with serious health conditions, if they became infected. As a result, a high percentage of the work force has very good reasons for not wanting to return to work just now.

If we face the reality of the pandemic, we should not be designing a package to get people back to work, we need to design a package to keep them whole through a period in which tens of millions of people will still not be able to work because of the pandemic. This means that we want people to have the money to pay their rent or mortgage and to buy food and other necessary items. We don’t want them to be going out to restaurants and bars, to see movies or baseball games, or to fly away on vacations or go on a cruise ship.

There was considerable confusion on this point even back in March and April where many were referring to the bills passed by Congress as stimulus. Some were even pushing types of spending that could boost the economy. There was little reason to want to boost the economy back in April, nor should there be now. We want to make it so that people endure as little hardship as possible for now, and the economy to be prepared to start up as quickly as possible, once the pandemic is under control.

Of course, we should not be in this situation. Most of the economy was shut down from the middle of March to the middle of May, with major restrictions staying in place in the hardest-hit areas well into June. These restrictions did largely bring the pandemic under control in places like New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington (both state and DC).

Unfortunately, many states did not take the need for restricting business seriously and began to open at the start of May. This is the reason that states like Arizona, Georgia, Florida, and Texas now have major outbreaks. California also now has a major outbreak, as a lack of financial support from the federal government, coupled with political pressure orchestrated by Donald Trump in the form of “liberate California” protests, led the state to relax restrictions sooner than it should have.

It would be possible to talk about an economic reopening now, if we had been successful in bringing the pandemic under control, as is the case in Europe and East Asia, in addition to the Northeast in the United States. But we can’t make plans based on a reality that does not exist. The pandemic is more out of control than ever in most of the country. This means that we again have to plan for another period in which the economy will not be operating normally by design. We need to focus on keeping people whole.

The Shape of this Rescue Package

The centerpiece of a keeping people whole strategy should be the continuation of the $600 weekly supplements to unemployment checks.  We can debate whether $600 is the right sum, but unemployment benefits have fallen far below the levels that would allow millions of workers to sustain anything close to their normal living standards through a period of prolonged unemployment. In order for millions of workers who are unemployed due to the pandemic to be able to pay their mortgage or rent and cover other unavoidable expenses, it will be necessary to have a substantial supplement to normal benefits.

There have been numerous complaints from Republicans, and some economists, that these supplements will discourage people from working. This is undoubtedly true in some cases, but this is the point. When we have a pandemic that is out of control, we don’t want to force people to work and threaten their own health and/or the health of family members.

Some have raised the issue that it is not fair that some people who are working at low-paying jobs are getting less from their paychecks than other workers are getting from being unemployed. This isn’t fair, but there is much that is going on in this pandemic that is not fair.

For example, the government is paying the pharmaceutical company, Moderna, $955 million to develop and test a vaccine. Then, after covering the research and testing costs, Trump will also give Moderna a patent monopoly that will allow it to charge prices that are more than 2000 percent above the cost of manufacturing and delivering the vaccine. The company is getting the patents in spite of the fact that the taxpayers paid for the research and took all the risk. Several top executives of the company have already made tens of millions on stock options as a result of the government contracts. There are similar stories at other pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies.

So, the fact that some workers may be getting less money at low-paying jobs than other workers are getting from unemployment insurance is unfair. But if this is someone’s biggest concern over unfairness, they are not paying attention to the world around them.

Others have also expressed concerns that these unemployment insurance supplements are making it hard for employers to find workers. There is zero evidence that this is a problem. There are millions of unemployed workers anxious to find jobs. If employers were having difficulty getting workers we should be seeing an increase in the number of job openings for unfilled positions. In fact, openings are very low. We should also be seeing rapidly rising wages as employers compete for available workers. The most recent data on compensation, that controls for changes in the mix of the workforce, found that compensation growth slowed sharply in the second quarter.

There will be workers who fall through the cracks and don’t get unemployment insurance. To try to help as many of these workers as possible, we should expand both the size and eligibility criteria for SNAP. We also must ensure that the moratoriums on evictions and moratoriums on foreclosures remain in place throughout the rest of the year.

Some of the other items that should be in the rescue package are funding for state and local governments. The Postal Service will also need substantial additional funding to prevent large-scale layoffs. State and local governments have already laid off 1.6 million workers, additional funding will allow them to hire back many of these workers and prevent the lay off of millions of additional workers. These governments also have an essential role to play in bringing the pandemic under control, doing things like testing and tracing, providing health care to coronavirus patients, and ensuring that workplaces and businesses are safe.

In the same vein, money is needed to allow schools to reopen safely. It is very important for both children and parents that the schools be open, but plans have to be put in place to allow for safe re-openings. Unfortunately, there was no national leadership or money for this effort over the summer and now most schools are not prepared to reopen. The next rescue package must have the money to allow for schools to make the necessary arrangements so that they can have safe re-openings as soon as possible.

We also need to try to lay the groundwork for a quick recovery when the pandemic is brought under control. The Paycheck Protection Program was useful for this purpose, keeping many businesses intact through a period in which they were operating well below capacity or shutdown completely. It would be good to extend this through the next three months.

We also need to ensure that our child care facilities are up and running. Lack of affordable child care has long been a problem, but it has become much worse in the pandemic as many child care centers have closed. We will need adequate child care arrangements if we want to ensure that parents are able to go back to work when the pandemic is brought under control.

One item that is completely unnecessary is the pandemic checks that gave every adult $1,200 in the first round and seem destined to be included in the last round as well.  While these checks give Donald Trump something to put his name on, they did little to keep people whole in the shutdown and are not likely to provide much of a demand boost when we reopen.

The vast majority of these checks were saved, with the saving rate out of disposable income soaring to 25.0 percent in the second quarter. (The saving rate was hovering near 8.0 percent before the pandemic.) The overwhelming majority of people who received these checks did not suffer any substantial fall in income as a result of the pandemic, they are either still getting full pay at their job or were retired. It is difficult to understand what the purpose of these checks is supposed to be.

To be clear, at a time when the economy is operating well below its capacity there is no particular harm in adding $1,200 to everyone’s bank account. This is not about causing an inflationary spiral, in large part because people are not spending the money. But if there are political limits on the size of the pandemic package, knocking out a $300 billion item that serves no real purpose, is a very good place to start.

Escalating State Repression and Covid-19: Their Impact on the Poor in Kenya

Kenneth Good

Soon after Kenya experienced its first Covid-19 case on 13 March 2020, President Uhuru Kenyatta invoked the Public Order Act to activate a series of tough measures, including wearing face masks at all times, the closure of schools and all ‘non-essential’ businesses, and a dusk till dawn curfew. Reports of police brutalities quickly followed. Even before the start of the curfew on 27 March, police in downtown Nairobi reportedly whipped and kicked people on the street, and in Embakasi, forced people walking home from work to kneel before them.

In the port city of Mombasa, police teargassed crowds trying to board a ferry home from work, beating them with batons and gun butts, kicking and slapping them, forcing them to huddle together and to lie on top of each other. In Kakamega county, around 1 April, Idris Mukolwe, a tomato seller, was hit by a teargas-cannister police threw at him. It exploded in his face and as he started suffocating, they laughed at him before he died. In the first 10 days, police killed at least six people in Kenya, according to Human Rights Watch (22 April 2020).

Various voices attested to the scale of the killings over the first weeks of the Covid crackdown. The Independent Police Oversight Authority (IPOA), an underfunded civilian organisation, had received more than 95 complaints of police brutality and had confirmed 30 deaths. Missing Voices KE, a consortium of rights groups, had recorded 17 people killed. The Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) had documented the deaths of 10 people in Mathare alone, a poor district of Nairobi: this number involved both extrajudicial executions, and the fate of Christine Aoko who, trying to evade the police curfew, had slipped down a cliff into the Mathare River and drowned. For “Stoneface”, an artist born and raised in Mathare, her death was in no sense accidental. ‘The topography of Mathare is defined [in part] by four police stations—one in each cardinal direction, connected by barracks no more than three kilometres apart’. For residents ‘these stations are familiar, feared portals from which armed officers emerge and into which young men often disappear.’ Purposeful and long enduring killings were taking place. MSJC’s report of 2017 (‘Who Is Next?’) tallied ‘systematic extra judicial killings’ of 804 people in Nairobi’s informal settlements 2013-2015. The victims were mostly young men, abducted or detained by police, shot at close range, sometimes in front of family members or neighbours. These findings were similar to those of Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur in 2009 on flagrant, institutionalised state killings, reported on by the present writer in these pages 3 January 2018, and by April Zhu, ‘Turning a Covid-19 Crisis Into a Human Rights Emergency’, New York Review (22 July 2020).

Rachel Wanjiku, 25, told reporters that she “knew about the police”: her boyfriend, Alex, age 19, was shot by them on the same night when she was in hospital giving birth to their child. Wanjiku was now with 200 others in Mathare in June protesting against police brutality. In Mathare, this was “a poor people’s struggle. Poor people are [being treated as] criminals”. Sobukwe Nonkwe, 30, a filmmaker, said “the police have killed us more than Corona”. At the start of June, IPOA announced that at least 15 people had been killed by police and 31 injured in the two months since the curfew was imposed. For writer, Patrick Gathara, “the brutality is just a function of how the state sees and deals with its subjects…not as citizens with rights but rather subjects with obligations.” Mathare’s marchers stopped at places where people had been killed, and finished at the apartment block of 13-year-old Yasin Moyo, shot when playing on his balcony after curfew in March. Police used teargas to disperse the marchers (reported by Amanda Sperber, Guardian Online, 9 June 2020).

Enhancing State Repression

Through settler colonialism, the Mau Mau poor-peasant rebellion of the 1950s, and successive independent governments since 1963, wealthy landed classes have used force to gain and maintain power. In the Kisumu Massacre in 1965, police fired into the crowd protesting against the visit of President Jomo Kenyatta, killing some eleven people and injuring hundreds. His successor, Daniel arap Moi, went further, using police as the tool of repression and assassination, and the detention and torture of opponents and dissidents. The police and paramilitaries are known today as one of Kenya’s most corrupt institutions: at all levels of its organisation, it is reviled for nepotism, tribalism and abuse. People who refuse to pay bribes may be brutalised, maimed or killed. The IPOA is overwhelmed by the number of complaints flooding into it: reportedly some 9, 200, on which it has secured convictions for ‘fewer than 10 cases’ (Douglas Lucas Kivoi, The Conversation (Johannesburg) 5 June 2020.

And the poor still protest. On 7 July, hundreds of demonstrators, mostly from such poor districts as Mathare, Dandora and Kiamike, voiced their anger against police brutality and the lack of basic public services. They also commemorated Saba Saba, seven seven, the 7 July 1990 protests, when ‘hundreds of others were arrested and dozens killed’ in nation-wide opposition to dictatorship (Rael Ombuor, Voice of America, 8 July 2020).

The continuities with the past are both close and complex. At independence, according to Tom Tebesi Anyamba, professor of architecture at the University of Nairobi, segregation in the capital was not dismantled, but rather “enhanced” along class lines instead of racial lines. From the 1970s and through the 1990s, “informalisation”, or the development of urban slums, ‘actually increased’, reinforcing the ‘exclusion of the city’s poor majority’. As the city expanded and refashioned itself into an outward-looking international hub, its “anti-city” followed. Nairobi always grows ‘in two directions at once’: every affluent district has ‘an equal and opposite slum’.

Despite being one of the city’s oldest settlements, from its time as a quarry, Mathare does not receive public water and lacks a systematic water grid. Water must be purchased by the poor at prices perhaps twenty times higher than the rate for city water. Across the bisecting highway from Mathare is the rich neighbourhood of Muthaiga, with its lush diplomatic residences, a long-established country club and golf course.

For Mathare and for “Stoneface” specifically this bifurcation constitutes a dense web of “ecological injustice”: cholera, the absence of schooling and sanitation, joblessness, housefires, teargas, the creation of hopelessness. This is also part of what defines Mathare.

And because the state has not invested in infrastructure for Mathare, the governance strategy of “neglect and force” exists, in the words of urban ethnographer, Wangui Kimari. The continuities appear clear. Kenya’s police force ‘can trace a direct lineage’ back to its colonial forerunner, the paramilitary Administration Police established in 1958, the final year of the State of Emergency out of which President Jomo Kenyatta emerged victorious. (Mau Mau’s Nairobi headquarters was in Mathare, Zhu says).

The Public Order Act is a pillar of colonialism and repression. Created in 1958, it criminalised vague infractions like ‘loitering and vagrancy’, and licensed police to widen the net of their roundups. The Act empowered the first two authoritarian presidents, Jomo Kenyatta and arap Moi, and it remained intact through reform attempts in the 1990s.

This is what Uhuru Kenyatta invoked on 13 March 2020, to combat the Covid-19 emergency. Brutality existed, but the Act facilitated and enhanced “policing by terror” (April Zhu, 22 July 2020).

Hiroshima 75: The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence!

Francis A. Boyle

The human race stands on the verge of nuclear self-extinction as a species, and with it will die most, if not all, forms of intelligent life on the planet earth. Any attempt to dispel the ideology of nuclearism and its attendant myth propounding the legality of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence must directly come to grips with the fact that the nuclear age was conceived in the original sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined by the Nuremberg Charter of August 8, 1945, and violated several basic provisions of the Regulations annexed to Hague Convention No. 4 Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907), the rules of customary international law set forth in the Draft Hague Rules of Air Warfare (1923), and the United States War Department Field Manual 27-10, Rules of Land Warfare (1940). According to this Field Manual and the Nuremberg Principles, all civilian government officials and military officers who ordered or knowingly participated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been lawfully punished as war criminals. The start of any progress toward resolving humankind’s nuclear predicament must come from the realization that nuclear weapons have never been legitimate instruments of state policy, but rather have always constituted illegitimate instrumentalities of internationally lawless and criminal behavior.

THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS

The use of nuclear weapons in combat was, and still is, absolutely prohibited under all circumstances by both conventional and customary international law: e.g., the Nuremberg Principles, the Hague Regulations of 1907, the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocol I of 1977, etc. In addition, the use of nuclear weapons would also specifically violate several fundamental resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly that have repeatedly condemned the use of nuclear weapons as an international crime.

Consequently, according to the Nuremberg Judgment, soldiers would be obliged to disobey egregiously illegal orders with respect to launching and waging a nuclear war. Second, all government officials and military officers who might nevertheless launch or wage a nuclear war would be personally responsible for the commission of Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and Protocol 1, and genocide, among other international crimes. Third, such individuals would not be entitled to the defenses of superior orders, act of state, tu quoque, self-defense, presidential authority, etc. Fourth, such individuals could thus be quite legitimately and most severely punished as war criminals, up to and including the imposition of the death penalty, without limitation of time.

THE THREAT TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter of 1945 prohibits both the threat and the use of force except in cases of legitimate self-defense as recognized by article 51 thereof. But although the requirement of legitimate self-defense is a necessary precondition for the legality of any threat or use of force, it is certainly not sufficient. For the legality of any threat or use of force must also take into account the customary and conventional international laws of humanitarian armed conflict.

Thereunder, the threat to use nuclear weapons (i.e., nuclear deterrence/terrorism) constitutes ongoing international criminal activity: namely, planning, preparation, solicitation and conspiracy to commit Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, as well as grave breaches of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, Additional Protocol I of 1977, the Hague Regulations of 1907, and the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, inter alia. These are the so-called inchoate crimes that under the Nuremberg Principles constitute international crimes in their own right.

The conclusion is inexorable that the design, research, testing, production, manufacture, fabrication, transportation, deployment, installation, maintenance, storing, stockpiling, sale, and purchase as well as the threat to use nuclear weapons together with all their essential accouterments are criminal under well-recognized principles of international law. Thus, those government decision-makers in all the nuclear weapons states with command responsibility for their nuclear weapons establishments are today subject to personal criminal responsibility under the Nuremberg Principles for this criminal practice of nuclear deterrence/terrorism that they have daily inflicted upon all states and peoples of the international community.. Here I wish to single out four components of the threat to use nuclear weapons that are especially reprehensible from an international law perspective: counter-ethnic targeting; counter-city targeting; first-strike weapons and contingency plans; and the first-use of nuclear weapons even to repel a conventional attack.

THE CRIMINALITY OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE

As can be determined in part from the preceding analysis, today’s nuclear weapons establishments as well as the entire system of nuclear deterrence/terrorism currently practiced by all the nuclear weapon states are criminal — not simply illegal, not simply immoral, but criminal under well established principles of international law. This simple idea of the criminality of nuclear weapons can be utilized to pierce through the ideology of nuclearism to which many citizens in the nuclear weapons states have succumbed. It is with this simple idea of the criminality of nuclear weapons that concerned citizens can proceed to comprehend the inherent illegitimacy and fundamental lawlessness of the policies that their governments pursue in their names with respect to the maintenance and further development of nuclear weapons systems.

THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE/TERRORISM

Humankind must abolish nuclear weapons before nuclear weapons abolish humankind. Nonetheless, a small number of governments in the world community continue to maintain nuclear weapons systems despite the rules of international criminal law to the contrary. This has led some international lawyers to argue quite tautologically and disingenuously that since there exist a few nuclear weapons states in the world community, therefore nuclear weapons must somehow not be criminal because otherwise these few states would not possess nuclear weapons systems. In other words, to use lawyers’ parlance, this minority state practice of nuclear deterrence/terrorism practiced by the great powers somehow negates the existence of a world opinio juris (i.e., sense of legal obligation) as to the criminality of nuclear weapons.

There is a very simple response to that specious argument: Since when has a small gang of criminals — in this case, the nuclear weapons states — been able to determine what is legal or illegal for the rest of the community by means of their own criminal behavior? What right do these nuclear weapons states have to argue that by means of their own criminal behavior they have ipso facto made criminal acts legitimate? No civilized nation state would permit a small gang of criminal conspirators to pervert its domestic legal order in this manner. Moreover, both the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo Tribunal made it quite clear that a conspiratorial band of criminal states likewise has no right to opt out of the international legal order by means of invoking their own criminal behavior as the least common denominator of international deportment. Ex iniuria ius non oritur is a peremptory norm of customary international law. Right cannot grow out of injustice!

To the contrary, the entire human race has been victimized by an international conspiracy of ongoing criminal activity carried out by the nuclear weapons states under the doctrine known as “nuclear deterrence,” which is really a euphemism for “nuclear terrorism.” This international criminal conspiracy of nuclear deterrence/terrorism currently practiced by the nuclear weapons states is no different from any other conspiracy by a criminal gang or band. They are the outlaws. So it is up to the rest of the international community to repress and dissolve this international criminal conspiracy as soon as possible.

THE HUMAN RIGHT TO ANTI-NUCLEAR CIVIL RESISTANCE

In light of the fact that nuclear weapons systems are prohibited, illegal, and criminal under all circumstances and for any reason, every person around the world possesses a basic human right to be free from this criminal practice of nuclear deterrence/terrorism and its concomitant specter of nuclear extinction. Thus, all human beings possess the basic right under international law to engage in non-violent civil resistance activities for the purpose of preventing, impeding, or terminating the ongoing commission of these international crimes. Every citizen of the world community has both the right and the duty to oppose the existence of nuclear weapons systems by whatever non-violent means are at his or her disposal. Otherwise, the human race will suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs, and the planet earth will become a radioactive wasteland. The time for preventive action is now!

COVID-19 takes hold in Papua New Guinea

John Braddock

After appearing to hold the COVID-19 pandemic at bay for the past several months, the Papua New Guinea (PNG) government last week confirmed dozens of new cases in the capital, Port Moresby. PNG’s Pandemic Response Controller David Manning, also announced a new case in Lae, the capital of Morobe province, some 300kms from Port Moresby.

Health worker performs CPR during simulation (Photo: UN Papua New Guinea)

As of August 3, the total number of cases was 110, including three victims hospitalised in critical condition and two deaths. In mid-July, the country had recorded just 11 cases of COVID-19, before then surging to over 30 within a week. Now, 90 percent of cases have been recorded in the past 14 days.

Government modelling suggests more than 5,000 people may have the virus. Only around 10,000 have been tested in a population of nine million and Manning declared the virus is now “widespread” in the capital. His deputy, Acting Health Secretary Dr Paison Dakulala admitted last Thursday that authorities were playing “catch-up” with contact tracing.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has just stepped up its response, deploying more emergency medical staff to strengthen testing capacity and medical supply delivery. Following a request from PNG, Australia dispatched a token eight-member crisis response team.

Many of the recent cases are health workers at the Port Moresby General Hospital, where all non-essential services were suspended. Hospital workers had repeatedly raised concerns about their own safety, the lack of adequate personal protective equipment and staff shortages sparked by the need to quarantine some health workers. The hospital’s CEO Paki Molumi said patient care had been affected by the shortages.

Dakulala also warned that the main isolation facility in the capital, the Rita Flynn Centre, can only hold up to 72 patients and is expected to reach capacity. COVID-19 positive patients may be forced to isolate at home.

Authorities had earlier announced a cluster outbreak at the Central Public Health Laboratory, situated on the hospital grounds, where coronavirus testing is conducted. This followed a previous outbreak at Port Moresby’s central military barracks.

With community transmission rapidly taking hold, Prime Minister James Marape announced a two-week lockdown of Port Moresby on July 27, including a curfew under the Pandemic Act. Only essential businesses can open and the curfew runs between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. Schools are closed for 14 days, and no motor vehicles are allowed to operate except taxi services. There is also a ban on all domestic flights from Port Moresby for 14 days.

A PNG academic told Radio New Zealand that without the enforcement of strict health measures it will be “difficult” to contain COVID-19. Henry Ivarature from the Australian National University said the PNG government had “erred” as the recent surge in cases developed. He said it had invested more in a “security approach” than one based on public health policy, and “I think that’s coming back to hurt the government now.” Manning, who leads the pandemic response unit is, significantly, also the Police Commissioner.

COVID-19 is set to overwhelm the country’s fragile and ill-equipped healthcare system. Port Moresby governor Powes Parkop told Australia’s ABC that the capital faced “a situation that we dreaded,” declaring: “We simply don’t have the capacity, we don’t have enough space in isolation facilities, in the hospital, we don’t have enough medical officers and we don’t have enough equipment.”

The Guardian reported in April that the looming arrival of coronavirus “has terrified the public.” The health system, which has just 500 doctors and 5,000 hospital beds, cannot deal with even routine illnesses. The General Hospital has appealed for donations of face masks, gloves, protective face shields, and hand sanitiser, as well as pillowcases, blankets, mattresses and laundry detergent.

The prospect of the virus spreading in the former Australian colony threatens a catastrophic social crisis. According to Oxfam, 37 percent of the population lives on less than $US1.25 a day. In Port Moresby tens of thousands live in crowded, unofficial settlements. Malaria, HIV/AIDS, dengue fever, drug-resistant tuberculosis and polio are all rife. More than 60 percent of the population has no access to safe drinking water.

Explosive social struggles will undoubtedly erupt. Repeated strikes by doctors and nurses over the decrepit conditions in the health system have occurred since 2016. Following a sit-in on March 26 by nearly 600 Port Moresby nurses protesting inadequate personal protective equipment, over 4,000 nurses were ready to strike over the lack of preparation for a coronavirus outbreak. The strike was averted by the PNG Nurses Association which, not for the first time, called it off at the last minute.

The deepening crisis in PNG has major implications for the wider region. According to WHO statistics, there are currently some 500 cases scattered across the Pacific. Fiji, the Pacific’s second largest country, on Friday confirmed its first COVID related death, among eight active cases. The same day, the number of cases in the Northern Marianas rose by two to 42.

If the virus spreads more widely it could devastate the Pacific Island communities, which have populations with high rates of co-morbidities and public health systems that are fragile and at full capacity, even before the pandemic. Last year 83 people, mainly children, died in Samoa in a measles outbreak that originated in New Zealand.

According to a study published in the Lancet in July, COVID-19 has the potential to cause “substantial disruptions to health services,” due to cases overburdening the health systems and response measures limiting usual programs. Particularly in poor countries, disruptions to services for HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria could lead to substantial loss of life over the next five years, the report warned.

The regional imperialist powers, Australia and New Zealand, are showing cynical indifference to the social disaster unfolding in their former colonial possessions. The Australian government recently announced a paltry $US500,000 aid package for PNG to respond to COVID-19, following a donation of personal protective equipment for health workers.

New Zealand’s Foreign Affairs Ministry declared in June that the Pacific will need “significant investment” to recover from the economic devastation of COVID-19, even if the virus itself is kept at bay. The ministry concluded, however, that its priority is to reinforce the Labour government’s “Pacific reset” strategy—i.e. to upgrade NZ’s diplomatic and military presence in lockstep with Washington’s and Canberra’s escalating confrontation with China.

California’s Apple Fire burns 20,000 acres, forces thousands from their homes

Peter Ross

A massive fire broke out Friday afternoon in a rural area 75 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Three potential arson fires rapidly merged and spread through more than 1,900 acres Friday night, forcing hundreds of residents of Cherry Valley, Banning Bluff, and other nearby communities to evacuate. Extreme temperatures, low humidity and high winds drove the fire deep into the San Bernardino National Forest and up the southern face of the San Gorgonio Mountains over the weekend.

Firefighters struggled to slow the aggressive spread of the fire over the rugged and inaccessible terrain, and by Monday morning the fire had burned more than 26,000 acres (about 41 square miles) and was only 5 percent contained. More than 1,300 firefighters have been assigned to the fire, along with hundreds of fire engines, nine helicopters and two air tankers. “It is steep terrain, rugged terrain,” Captain Fernando Herrera of Cal Fire told the Palm Springs Desert Sun. “We rely a lot on the aircraft to do the work during the day.”

The eastern flank of the fire has already moved into the western section of the Morongo Reservation, home to over 3,500 Mission Indians. In the west, the fire has spread into San Bernardino County, threatening the Forest Falls community in the national forest, and forcing mandatory evacuations for the town of Oak Glen.

Strong westerly winds and high temperatures prevailed on Monday, amid an extended heat wave across the region. “Given the fuel, given the weather, given the topography and where this is going, this fire is not going to stop tonight, it's going to keep going,” Lisa Cox, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service told reporters.

The fire has produced massive smoke columns visible throughout much of Southern California, which have formed pyrocumulus clouds that have generated their own strong winds. Plumes of smoke have been swept as far as Las Vegas and central Arizona. The South Coast Air Quality Management District has issued air quality advisories for much of the Inland Empire and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. Unsafe smoke levels are of special concern for the sick and elderly, and are known to increase the severity of COVID-19, of which there are almost 40,000 active cases in Los Angeles County alone.

No deaths or injuries have been reported from Apple Fire, but evacuation orders have so far affected over 8,000 people from more than 2,600 residences. Among those who had to evacuate was Cherry Valley resident Rick Stewart, 67, who evacuated with his wife and three grandchildren as the fire approached his house. “I was terrified. You have no idea the amount of heat that came off that. Literally burning your face,” Stewart told the Desert Sun.

An evacuation shelter has been set up at a high school in the town of Beaumont, but only a small number of evacuees have reportedly come to the shelter. Only 32 evacuees stayed in Red Cross-provided hotel lodging Saturday night. “Folks not taking advantage of it over concerns about COVID-19, we have measures in place. We planned for this months ahead,” Cal Fire’s Captain Fernando Herrera explained to CBS News.

The low turnout at the evacuation shelter is doubtlessly due to a pervasive sentiment of distrust for the way state and federal authorities have handled the pandemic: the policies of the political establishment are correctly perceived as criminally indifferent to the safety of the broad population and many fear that staying in emergency shelters will increase their risk of contracting the deadly coronavirus.

A string of record-breaking wildfires has torn across California since 2017, including the Ranch Fire, the largest in the state’s history, and the Camp Fire, which completely destroyed the town of Paradise. Despite the growing danger of wildfires, the state has systematically cut funding for social infrastructure, including firefighting and wildfire prevention, and has increasingly relied on thousands of low-paid prison inmates to work as firefighting “hand crews.”

Due to COVID-19—which has hit California’s prisons particularly hard—less than half of these crews will be available during the 2020 fire season. To compensate, California lawmakers have set aside $85.6 million to hire additional firefighters, even as they have cut firefighters’ salaries by 10 percent, and slashed $680 million from the state budget for environmental protection.

Even as thousands of people were forced from their homes in yet another catastrophic fire under conditions of a historic pandemic, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom made a television appearance Monday afternoon to congratulate his administration for “encouraging signs” in the fight against COVID-19. Meanwhile, the state is posting death rates which are 25 percent higher than in April.

Currently, there are more than 150,000 homeless people in California, and tens of thousands more are out of work and at risk of eviction as extended federal unemployment benefits were allowed by Congress to expire at the end of last month. To this number must be added the tens of thousands whose homes and lives are endangered by the constant threat of wildfires, while an indifferent ruling elite looks on.

New COVID-19 infections take hold in first week of attempted cruise industry restart

Tom Casey

While the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) ban on cruise ship sailings, combined with the Cruise Line Industry Association’s (CLIA) voluntary industry suspension will remain in effect until the end of September, several European cruise and ferry enterprises have recently begun to resume scaled-down operations. These initiatives mark the beginning of a wave of attempts at a “phased” reopening since its shutdown in March due to the coronavirus.

MSC Grandiosa (Credit: Tom Rees, WikiMedia Commons)

The new sailing efforts come within the context of the ongoing failure of cruise companies and governments to repatriate thousands of ship workers since spring. As the WSWS has documented, thousands of stranded employees have remained stuck at sea for months, pushed off of company payroll, unable to meet their expenses at home, and having little information about when they will be reunited with their families. Since May, there have been nearly a dozen non-COVID-19-related deaths which are widely suspected to have been suicides.

A press release by the CDC calculates that as of July 10 there were 14,702 crew remaining on board 67 ships in US waters. The report also declares that there have been 99 disease outbreaks on 123 different cruise ships, with a total of 2,973 “COVID-19 or COVID-like illness cases” and 34 deaths. While the CDC release only refers to vessels under the US Coast Guard’s tally, there are likely thousands more stranded crew members on dozens of ships worldwide.

Among the first ship operators to resume sailings was Hurtigruten, a Norwegian-owned cruise and ferry company specializing in “scenic cruising,” or voyages which dock at fewer ports of call in favor of itineraries that do not require passengers to leave the ship. This weekend, Hurtigruten announced that it would suspend its recently resumed operation of the MS Fridtjof Nasen and the MS Roald Armundsen, after 36 passengers and five crew on board the latter tested positive for COVID-19.

AIDA cruises, a German brand operated by Costa Cruise Lines (Italy), a subsidiary of the Carnival Corporation/Carnival UK group (US/UK), also announced this weekend that it would be unable to continue its plans to restart passenger operations out of German ports for the first week of August.

On Wednesday, July 22, 750 Filipino and Indonesian crew members arrived in the port of Rostock, Mecklenberg-Western Pomerania in order to join the AIDAmar and AIDAblu ships for planned employee-only voyages. These sailings were scheduled in order for the company to implement its newly updated onboard health and safety procedures. Prior to boarding, however, 10 crew members tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

Following the isolation of the infected workers, the company issued the following statement: “None [of the confirmed cases] are related to the regular on-board operations. […] The entire arriving crew was tested in their home countries before their departure to Germany. Another PCR test was carried out directly prior to the boarding. [This] shows that the strict hygiene protocols AIDA Cruises has developed with the authorities are effective and that the company has taken the right preventive measures. [...]”

The company blamed the government of Italy, the flag state for all ships in its fleet, for its inability to carry out planned cruises. The Italian government neglected to give its final approval to the company’s voyages out of Rostock and Hamburg.

Last week, the Miami Herald reported on a memo leaked in social media groups by employees of MSC Cruises. The document presented updated protocol for all shipboard workers upon the resumption of the company’s sailings. A bullet point which banned all “non-emergency” shore leave for crew sparked widespread opposition, as the ability for employees to leave the ship during normal operation is a necessary component of a job in which long work hours and no days off are a prominent feature.

While MSC Cruises is the world’s fourth largest cruise company, it is the world’s largest cruise operator that is a privately-held company. While the Switzerland-registered enterprise has officially stated that it awaits the approval of local health agencies before it resumes its sailing, it has acknowledged that it has begun the process of bringing employees to locations where the ships are docked in preparation for reopening.

While the company recklessly moves ahead with its plans, dozens of its crew still remain imprisoned on its vessels around the world. A Mauritian worker on a stranded MSC ship who wished to remain anonymous confirmed with the WSWS that the company has been chartering flights to send Mauritian crew to Genoa, Italy, in preparation of its resumed sailings.

“This is outrageous. I’ve been waiting to go home since the end of March. It’s really hard to survive like this,” the crew member said, concluding, “it should be a fundamental right for any citizen to return home.”

The response to the coronavirus pandemic by the Mauritian government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth, has been a particularly naked expression of the self-serving calculations of the country’s national business elite, as the WSWS has reported. Weeks after it implemented a shakedown policy in the form of expensive travel restrictions on its citizens returning from abroad, the Mauritian ruling class has demonstrated that it will spare no account in meeting the needs of the tourism industry—it merely seeks to reap a better price for doing so.

On July 25, TUI cruises, owned by Royal Caribbean, Ltd., (US) through TUI AG, a German tourism company, became the first European ship operator to sail a large cruise vessel since the industry shutdown. “Mein Schiff 2,” a 2,900-passenger ship filled with only 60 percent of its operating capacity sailed on a scenic, 3-day voyage to Norwegian waters with no ports of call.

A telling report from New York Daily News last week painted a chilling picture of the cold calculations involved the resumption of the cruising industry. The reopening will inevitably be built on the prolonged misery of employees who are financially desperate from a prolonged period without work. The report states, “after months of shutdowns, the German cruise ship industry is betting on shorter trips to help reignite the business, which was badly affected by the ongoing coronavirus crisis. […] The Western European nation of 83 million has been widely seen as a success in the fight against COVID-19, with just over 206,000 cases and 9,201 fatalities, about one-fifth of the death toll in the U.K.”

Put in plain language, cruise corporations around the world see potential outbreaks of illness onboard, and whatever personal damages or deaths that may result, as a secondary factor to the resumption of business operations and the accumulation of their profits.

Cruise crew should categorically reject any return to work under the deadly conditions which are being pushed by the international cruise and ferry corporations. The right to safe repatriation must be demanded by ship workers as a basic prerequisite for any and all resumption of cruising operations.

Seafarers who are stranded on ships, those who are on active duty, and those who are at home with or without future assignments must form rank and file organizations to ensure that no restart of the industry is possible under the current conditions. These committees must be connected with similar organs of struggle in factories, schools, neighborhoods and workplaces around the world as part of the broader struggle by the working class to transform society on the basis of its own class interests—that is, of international socialism.