Fed data reveals impact of pandemic on lower-paid US workers

Nick Beams

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has again pledged to maintain an ultra-loose monetary policy while reporting central bank data revealing the extent of the hit delivered by the COVID-19 pandemic to lower-paid US workers.

In a speech to the Economic Club of New York on Wednesday, Powell reiterated his view that a “patiently accommodative” monetary policy was needed well into the future. He said that even if there were a rise in inflation to the Fed’s target of two percent it would not bring an immediate tightening of interest rates or alter the central bank’s policy of purchasing assets at the rate of $120 billion per month.

Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

What stood out in his speech, however, was not the reassertion of these commitments to Wall Street, but rather the information he provided on the state of the US labour market. The focus on this area served two purposes: to underline the significant worsening of the state of the US economy and to provide a justification for the Fed’s continuation of monetary stimulus.

Powell began his remarks on the state of the labour market by noting that it could “hardly be more different” from the situation that prevailed 12 months ago.

“Employment in January of this year,” he said, “was nearly 10 million below its February 2020 level, a greater shortfall than the worst of the Great Recession’s aftermath.”

After reaching 14.8 percent in April, the unemployment rate has fallen to 6.3 percent as of last month.

“But the published unemployment rates during COVID has dramatically understated the deterioration in the labour market,” he said. The pandemic “has led to the largest twelve-month decline in labour force participation since at least 1948.”

This is a major reversal over the past five years. From 2008 to 2015, the participation rate had been steadily declining as a result of the effects of the financial crisis. But after 2015, the previous decline was reversed.

However, in the past year there had been a precipitous fall, as millions of working-age individuals dropped out of the workforce because there are simply no jobs available or because they are unable to work due to the pandemic.

“All told, nearly five million people say the pandemic prevented them from looking for work in January,” he said. “In addition, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that many unemployed individuals have been misclassified as employed. Correcting this miscalculation and counting those who have left the workforce since last February as unemployed would boost the unemployment rate close to 10 percent in January.”

He went on to note that “even those grim statistics” understate the decline in labour market conditions for the most vulnerable Americans. The reduction in aggregate employment since last February has been 6.5 percent. But this is not an even distribution. The decline in employment for workers in the top quartile of the wage distribution was four percent “while the decline for the bottom quartile has been a staggering 17 percent.”

According to Fed Governor Lael Brainard, the bottom 25 percent of workers are facing unemployment rates of 20 percent, equivalent to levels reached in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Powell said employment prospects for the lower-paid have changed little in the past few months and could be worsening.

In recent months, the improvement in labour market conditions had stalled, as the rate of COVID infections sharply increased. In the leisure and hospitality sector, the number of jobs fell by more than half a million in December and a further 61,000 in January.

At the start of the pandemic, the increase in unemployment was almost entirely due to temporary job losses, “but as some sectors of the economy have continued to struggle, permanent job loss has increased” along with long-term unemployment.

Powell said that it would “not be easy” for the economy to return to full employment, and America was still “very far from a strong labour market.” The situation was compounded by the fact that “we have seen that the longer-run potential growth rate of the economy appears to be lower than it once was,” and this circumstance “can lead to worse economic outcomes—particularly for the most economically vulnerable Americans.”

After detailing the effects of the pandemic on the labour market, Powell made clear that the support to financial markets, which has resulted in record highs on Wall Street and an orgy of speculation, would continue even if there were a rise in inflation and a tightening of the labour market. The Fed would “not tighten monetary policy in response to a strong labour market.” It was explicitly seeking to achieve inflation that averages two percent over time, he said.

“This means that following periods when inflation has been running persistently below two percent [the present situation], appropriate monetary policy will likely aim to achieve inflation moderately above two percent for some time in the service of keeping inflation expectations well anchored at our two percent long-run goal.”

This is an assurance to Wall Street that a sudden spike in the inflation rate will not result in the Fed immediately moving to lift its base interest rate from the present level of virtually zero.

Powell did not immediately comment on the controversy that has erupted following the publication last week of an op-ed piece by former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warning that the Biden administration’s proposed $1.9 trillion stimulus package could spark inflation and lead to financial instability.

But he indicated his broad support for the stimulus measures, having been calling for such action for some time.

He said discussions on the fiscal package were “appropriate,” without commenting on the specifics of the Biden plan. Given the number of people who had lost their jobs and “the likelihood that some will struggle to find work in the post-pandemic recovery,” he added, achieving maximum employment would require support from government.

Without specifically addressing Summers’ argument, he indicated his expectation that inflation would remain subdued even in the face of increased government spending.

“You could see strong spending growth, and there could be some overt pressure on prices,” he said. “My expectation would be that will be neither large nor sustained. Inflation dynamics will evolve but it’s hard to make the case why they would evolve very suddenly in this current situation.”

General Motors reports sharp increase in 2020 profits amid mass deaths from pandemic

Tom Hall & Tim Rivers

In spite of a global pandemic that killed 350,000 people in the United States last year, General Motors announced Wednesday that its profits in 2020 were up sharply over 2019.

GM made a pretax profit of $9.7 billion last year, up from $8.4 billion in 2019. This is in spite of a fall in sales in the United States, its most profitable market, from 2.9 to 2.5 million vehicles.

GM Renaissance Center (Source: GM Media)

The billion-dollar windfall is the direct result of a policy of mass death pursued by the entire ruling class, forcing most sections of the economy to remain open so that workers can continue pumping out profits to bolster endlessly rising share values on Wall Street.

With the disastrous rollout of vaccinations in the United States and throughout the world, and with the expectation that more virulent and lethal strains of the virus will become dominant later in the year, there is no end in sight yet for a pandemic that has killed over 2.3 million people worldwide and nearly half a million in the US.

Even though leading experts such as Dr. Michael Osterholm have warned of a massive surge of the virus in the spring, the Biden administration is moving rapidly to reopen schools and eliminate whatever remains of restrictions on businesses aimed at limiting the spread of the virus.

However, while storm clouds are gathering for the world’s population, General Motors expects to do even better this year. In a call with investors Wednesday morning, GM CEO Marry Barra predicted that the firm would post profits of between $10 and $11 billion for 2021.

Across the board, the Detroit-based automakers have posted a rapid return to profitability after wildcat strikes last March, which were organized by rank-and-file workers against the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, forced a two-month shutdown during the initial surge of the pandemic. The third quarter of last year, the first after plants reopened in May, saw a sharp rise in year-on-year profits for all three automakers.

The basis of this has not been so much a recovery in sales as from a tremendous growth in exploitation of autoworkers. A report from last October by Reuters found that, during last summer, overtime levels surged past pre-pandemic levels. Automakers have also flooded the plants with low-paid temporary part-time workers to fill in for workers who are concerned over COVID-19 or caring for children at home from school. This has put the automakers in direct competition with ultra-exploitive firms like Amazon for cheap labor.

Far from defending autoworkers against the spread of the virus and speedup, the UAW has done everything to conceal the number of infections and deaths in the plants and to keep production running. In December, there were more than 21 cases at the Ft. Wayne, Indiana plant, but GM and the UAW kept the factory open because it produces the company’s most profitable vehicles, the Silverado and Sierra full-size pickup trucks.

In fact, far more factories have been idled for lack of parts, than for COVID-19 outbreaks. The

breakneck pace of production is such that the automakers have overextended their own supply base, producing parts shortages that are now forcing GM, Ford and Stellantis to slow down or halt production at many of their plants worldwide. “The bounce back caught GM and its rivals off guard, and they’re paying the price,” writes CNN Business. “Automakers cut back computer chip orders early last year, and electronics manufacturers, which had strong sales during the pandemic, happily snapped up the excess supply. But when car sales bounced back, it left the industry struggling with a chip shortage.”

While Barra’s predictions for 2021 already factored in the impact of the parts shortage, it is still expected to last for months and cost GM alone between $1.5 and $2 billion, according to the Detroit Free Press. Share prices in GM fell $1.19 yesterday in response to the news.

Ford announces profit sharing checks cut in half for 2020

Ford Motor Company announced last week that, because of declines in revenue associated with the coronavirus pandemic, profit-sharing checks for last year would be reduced by almost half compared to payments of a year ago.

This year’s payments of $3,625 or less for eligible hourly UAW members represents a 45 percent reduction from last year. In 2019, Ford paid up to $6,600 to 53,000 eligible employees, the smallest such payday for the Detroit Three automakers.

Because the checks are calculated against North American pre-tax profits of $3.625 billion, the total that workers will receive, a combined $192 million, represents a mere five percent of profit from the region. So-called “profit-sharing” has long been pushed by the UAW to falsely claim that workers and the corporations have the same interest. It has been used as a lever to increase productivity and replace concessions handed over by the UAW, including traditional annual wage increases, cost of living raises, personal days off and significant amounts from retirement and medical benefits.

Although Ford posted its first full-year global net loss since 2008, new Ford CEO Jim Farley referred to the current year as “a strategic inflection point,” a phrase coined by Intel founder Andy Grove to identify a decisive, make-or-break moment in the trajectory of the company.

Even before the pandemic, Ford had initiated a global “restructuring” program to lay off tens of thousands and close plants throughout the world. The aim of this program, in addition to delivering the immediate profit margins demanded by Wall Street, is to free up cash needed to invest into new technologies such as into electric and autonomous vehicles. “2021 is our year of action,” he told a reporter at CNBC. “We’re executing our plan and we’ll continue to do that so every business in our portfolio has a sustainable future. If not, we will restructure it.”

The Ford restructuring that Farley helped design in 2018 has so far wiped out 14,000 jobs worldwide. The company just announced closures of all three plants operating in Brazil at a cost of 5,000 Ford jobs and thousands more in supplier plants.

Credit Suisse analyst Dan Levy criticized the company’s car-heavy lineup and slammed Ford for lagging behind GM when it comes to investments in electric vehicles and job cuts and plant closures, which GM carried out with a vengeance in 2018-19.

“We see GM as better positioned in a transition to EV, while for Ford conversely we see more challenges ahead in the transition to EV,” Levy wrote to investors last Tuesday. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas added that GM has greater potential than Ford to be successful in profitably shifting from internal combustion engine vehicles to EVs. Automotive News noted: “GM CEO Mary Barra has been steadily pulling the automaker out of unprofitable markets since taking over the company in 2014. GM exited markets such as Australia, Russia and Europe. In 2018, GM restructured its North American operations, including job cuts and plant shutdowns, to refocus the 112-year-old automaker on emerging technologies, such as electric and autonomous vehicles.”

The investment plan at GM for electric and autonomous vehicles through 2025 totals $27 billion. Until two weeks ago, Ford had promised only half as much in the same time frame. But as the first month of 2021 came to a close, Ford upped the ante, promising $29 billion through 2025, including $22 billion on electric vehicles and $7 billion for autonomous technology.

The all-electric Mustang Mach-E is in production and an E-Transit van will be available by late 2021 while the all-electric F-150 pickup has been promised for the middle of 2022.

At the same time, Farley entered into a six-year agreement with Google for the development of connected vehicles and an ongoing engagement with the internet giant for the use of its expertise and cloud capacity to “better streamline Ford’s operations.”

A close look at Amazon fulfillment centers will expose what Google has in store for Ford employees. Tens of thousands have been infected with coronavirus, dozens have died and thousands more have suffered debilitating injuries as the logistics behemoth employs hand-held computers and the internet to track workers’ every movement through relentless forced overtime.

Ford’s announcement with Google was well-received on Wall Street. The company’s stock price rose as much as 8.6 percent in a single day. Morgan Stanley estimated the deal could create an annual revenue stream of $9 billion and generate $5 billion in profit for the automaker.

In a similar vein, Ford’s stock, which had flatlined for years, has shot up by more than 70 percent in the four months since Farley became CEO at the beginning of October.

Facebook moves forward with “depoliticization” of News Feed

Kevin Reed

On Wednesday, Facebook published a short statement on its Newsroom blog entitled, “Reducing Political Content in News Feed,” that says the company is moving forward with testing the “depoliticization” of its platform.

Written by Aastha Gupta, Product Management Director, the statement reveals specific measures that will be taken in “the next few months” to restrict political content on Facebook as mentioned by company CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a conference call with investors on January 27.

This Oct. 23, 2019, file photo shows Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington.

As reported here on the World Socialist Web Site on Wednesday, it is clear from everything that Zuckerberg said in his earnings call, along with statements by US government officials and the capitalist press on the subject, that the primary target of the “depoliticization” of Facebook is progressive, left-wing and socialist political content on the platform.

The Newsroom post further reinforces this analysis. Gupta writes, “As a first step, we’ll temporarily reduce the distribution of political content in News Feed for a small percentage of people in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia this week, and the US in the coming weeks,” and that the testing is necessary to “explore a variety of ways to rank political content in people’s feeds using different signals, and then decide on the approaches we’ll use going forward.”

Gupta goes on to say that Facebook will “determine how effective these new approaches are” by surveying “people about their experience during these tests.” Both Gupta—and Zuckerberg previously—claim unconvincingly that “Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting each person’s appetite for it at the top of their News Feed.”

The reference to the “appetite” is tied in with the claims made by Facebook that moderation of the flow of political posts on Facebook is necessary because “one common piece of feedback we hear is that people don’t want political content to take over their News Feed.”

However, Gupta reports that Facebook made an analysis in the US, and “political content makes up about 6% of what people see” on the platform and that “even a small percentage of political content can impact someone’s overall experience.”

The News Feed is the primary stream of content seen by users each day on their Facebook accounts. It can include a variety of content posted by friends of users, such as profile changes, photos, birthdays and comments on any number of topics. The News Feed also includes corporate advertisements and other types of promoted content, including posts from political parties and organizations, government officials and news publishers commenting on contemporary events, along with shares of this content by individual users who can make their own comments about it.

Gupta did not disclose the actual number of the “small percentage of people” in the four countries that would have their political content throttled in News Feed. Since there are more than 500 million Facebook users in these countries (137 million in Brazil, 140 million in Indonesia and 244 million users in the US and Canada), even 1 percent would mean that more than 5 million users who would have their political content manipulated.

A report in the Washington Post included the comments of Facebook spokesperson Lauren Svensson, who said the countries were selected because they had “the most complaints about seeing too much political content.” Svensson also told the Post that “using a machine learning model that is trained to look for signals of political content and predict whether a post is related to politics. We’ll be refining this model during the test period to better identify political content and may or may not end up using this method longer-term.”

Neither Svensson nor Gupta explained precisely what the term “signal” means in connection with the artificial intelligence algorithms used by Facebook and the political content posted by users.

That the purpose of the new Facebook policy is to be directed against left and socialist political content is revealed by the fact that neither Gupta nor Zuckerberg referred to the use of the platform by the far-right and fascist political organizations and individuals who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6—on behalf of Donald Trump and the majority of the Republican Party—to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential elections.

While there is ample evidence that the fascists used Facebook and other social media platforms to both organize and livestream their January 6 insurrection—including the promotion of advertisements for weapons accessories and body armor next to false information about the “stolen election” and posts by “patriot” and militia groups—this is not the focus of Facebook’s new initiative.

Instead, Gupta spotlighted the need for controlling content about the deadly pandemic, writing, “COVID-19 information from authoritative health organizations like the CDC and WHO, as well as national and regional health agencies and services from affected countries, will be exempt from these tests. Content from official government agencies and services will also be exempt.”

The emphasis on reducing political content about the pandemic—with no mention of the conspiracy theories of the extreme right—reveals that the primary concern of Facebook and its advisors from within the ruling establishment is the growing mass political opposition to the placing of the profit interests of the capitalist class above the health and lives of the working class.

African Peacebuilding Network (APN) Individual Research Grants 2021

Application Deadline: 12^th February 2021

Eligible Countries: African countries

To be taken at (country): Research can be done about one or several African countries. Grant may support travel outside of Africa for research and conferences related to the specific project.

About the Award: A core component of the APN, the Individual Research Fellowships (IRF) program is a vehicle for enhancing the quality and visibility of independent African peacebuilding research both regionally and globally, while making peacebuilding knowledge accessible to key policymakers and research centers of excellence in Africa and around the world. Fellowship recipients produce research-based knowledge that is relevant to, and has a significant impact on, peacebuilding scholarship, policy, and practice on the continent. For its part, the APN works toward inserting the evidence-based knowledge that fellowship award recipients produce into regional and global debates and policies focusing on peacebuilding. The program also strives to build a highly visible and active network of African scholars and practitioners capable of projecting African perspectives and voices onto global discourses and practices of peacebuilding.

Field of Study: The fellowships support dissertations and research on peace, security and development topics.

Support is available for research and analysis on the following issues:

• Root causes of, and emerging trajectories of violent conflict;
• Natural Resource Conflict;
• Geopolitics and histories of conflict and peace;
• Minorities, under-represented groups, and the social dynamics of conflict and peace;
• Theory and practice of conflict mediation;
• Resilience, conflict prevention and transformation;
• State and non-state armed actors, transnational crime, extremism, displacement and migration;
• Post-conflict elections, democratization, governance and economic reconstruction;
• Statebuilding, including state-society relations and state reconstruction;
• Transitional justice, reconciliation, and peace;
• The economic and financial dimensions of conflict, peacekeeping, and peace support operations;
• Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and peacebuilding;
• UN-AU-REC Partnerships and Peace Support Operations;
• Digital media, technology, and peace;
• Cultures, media, and art(s) of peace;
• Gender, youth and peacebuilding;
• Water conflict and peace;
• Public health, post-conflict development, peace, and security;
• Prevention of mass atrocities; and
• Covid-19, conflict, peace and development

Type: Research Grants

Eligibility: 

• All applicants must be African citizens currently residing in an African country.
• This competition is open to African academics, as well as policy analysts and practitioners.
• Applicants applying as academics must hold a faculty or research position at an African university or research organization, and have a PhD obtained no earlier than January 2011.
• Applicants who are policy analysts or practitioners must be based in Africa at a regional or sub-regional institution; a government agency; or a nongovernmental, media, or civil society organization, and have at least a master’s degree obtained before January 2016, with at least five years of proven research and work experience in peacebuilding-related activities on the continent.

Women are strongly encouraged to apply.

Number of Awardees: Up to seventeen (17) individual fellowships of a maximum of $15,000 each will be awarded.

Value of Award: up to $15,000

Duration of Programme: Fellowships are awarded on a competitive, peer-reviewed basis and are intended to support six months of field-based research, from June 2021 to December 2021.

How to Apply: All applications must be uploaded through our online portal. 

Requirements

• Completed Application Form
• Research Proposal & Bibliography
• Expected Publication(s)
• Current CV
• Proposed Research Timeline
• Proposed Research Budget
• Two Reference Letters
• Language Evaluation(s) (if required)

Frequently Asked Questions.

Visit Research Webpage for details

Advancing Women’s Empowerment Fund 2021

Application Deadline: 5th March 2021

About the Award: In this round, ANDE seeks to fund projects that will pilot, test, or expand scalable solutions to the financing gap for women-led SGBs in eastern, western, and southern Africa to create learnings and insights for uptake by the broader SGB sector. ANDE intends to support a minimum of three applications for this round, from a total funding pool of USD $450,000. Submissions should be for activities of up to 12 months with a total request of between $50,000- $150,000.

Type: Grants

Eligibility: ANDE seeks concept notes to pilot, test, or expand scalable solutions that tackle the financing gap for women-led SGBs in eastern, western, and southern Africa to generate knowledge and proven solutions
that can be replicated and scaled by the broader SGB sector. ANDE is specifically focused on submissions catalyzing early-stage, growth-oriented capital.

We encourage submissions employing creative solutions to both supply and demand components of the gender financing gap and that fit any of the following categories:

• Gender transformative approaches to delivering acceleration services including recruitment, selection, cohort and program design, or other elements seen as constraints to the success of women entrepreneurs.
• Supplemental services delivered independently or in coordination with traditional accelerator programs, including tailored consulting services, bespoke matchmaking, investment facilitation, mentorship, or other approaches to address gender deficits in traditional acceleration.
• Novel approaches to catalyzing investment into the hands of women fund managers to address the systemic finance constraints that women entrepreneurs encounter.
• Innovative methods for sensitizing and influencing SGB support providers around the fundamental challenges (family life, social norms, talent opportunities) that women entrepreneurs face.

SGB service providers with proposed projects in only the following eligible countries will be considered:

• Western Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte D’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo.
• Eastern Africa: Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda
• Southern Africa: Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia,
  South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe

ANDE will award a minimum of one project per region with a total funding pool of $150,000 per region.

Selection Criteria:

Clarity: Is there a clear understanding of the problem this fund seeks to address? Are solution objectives, as well as justification of the proposed solution, clearly articulated?

Feasibility and Internal Capacity: How is feasibility articulated for the objectives outlined?
Has the organization demonstrated its ability to achieve the milestones laid
out in the concept note?

Impact: Does the proposed model clearly address a barrier to the financing gap for women-led SGBs in eastern Africa, western Africa, or southern Africa?
Does the concept note present a credible rationale for why this model is
likely to be successful?

Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning: Is the key learning question(s) clearly articulated?
Are prospective plans for learning dissemination articulated?
To what extent will lessons on what works well from this project inform the
work of SGB service providers and investors?

Eligible Countries: countries in eastern, western, and southern Africa

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value& Duration of Award: Submissions should be for activities of up to 12 months with a total request of between $50,000- $150,000.

How to Apply: Prospective applications must submit a concept note by March 5, 2021. Shortlisted applicants will be invited to submit a full application. Applicants may send questions to ande.membership@aspeninstitute.org with reference “AWEF 2021”.

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

HFG Foundation Young African Scholars Program 2021

Application Deadline: 1st March 2021

Eligible Countries: African countries

Eligible Fields: Applicants’ projects are expected to highlight the issues of violence and aggression.

About the Award: Harry Guggenheim established this foundation to support research on violence, aggression, and dominance because he was convinced that solid, thoughtful, scholarly and scientific research, experimentation, and analysis would in the end accomplish more than the usual solutions impelled by urgency rather than understanding. We do not yet hold the solution to violence, but better analyses, more acute predictions, constructive criticisms, and new, effective ideas will come in time from investigations such as those supported by our grants.

The foundation places a priority on the study of urgent problems of violence and aggression in the modern world and also encourages related research projects in neuroscience, genetics, animal behavior, the social sciences, history, criminology, and the humanities which illuminate modern human problems. Grants have been made to study aspects of violence related to youth, family relationships, media effects, crime, biological factors, intergroup conflict related to religion, ethnicity, and nationalism, and political violence deployed in war and sub-state terrorism, as well as processes of peace and the control of aggression.

Type: Grants

Eligibility: Applicants must be aged 40 or younger, currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program at an African higher education institution, and living on the continent.

Number of Awardees: 10

Value of Programme: The program includes:

• a methods workshop
• fieldwork research grants of $10,000 USD each,
• editorial and publication assistance,
• and sponsorship at an international conference to present research findings.

How to Apply: Eligible applicants may apply here.

Visit Programme Webpage for details

Brexit, One Month After

Kenneth Surin

 

“This [Brexit] is an amazing moment for this country.”

–Boris Johnson (New Year’s Day, 2021)

“Only a quarter of Brits believe Brexit has ‘gone well’ so far”

– YouGov poll

The UK’s official departure from the EU took place on January 1, 2021. The Brexit roll-out, not unexpectedly, has been awash with problems.

The government describes these as “teething problems”, but it is clear that some of them are inbuilt into the Brexit deal, and will be there for the duration.

As expected, the Northern Irish border is one of them. Northern Ireland is part of the UK, but remains in the EU’s economic orbit because it shares a border with the EU-member Republic of Ireland.

The Prime Minister, Boris “BoJo” Johnson, insisted, implausibly, that there would be “frictionless” trade despite this border arrangement, but this has not turned out to be the case.

UK companies shipping goods to Northern Ireland face new customs rules and health checks that have the same impact as shipping goods to the EU per se, rendering Northern Ireland a “foreign” country, economically, even though it is a part of the UK.

The post-Brexit UK-EU trade deal allows goods to move without tariffs or quotas, but businesses still face extra costs, paperwork, inspections, and other barriers.

Businesses anticipated these hurdles when trading with the EU, but were relatively unprepared to face the same obstacles when shipping goods to Northern Ireland.

These measures regarding shipments to Northern Ireland were put in place to retain an open border between Northern Ireland and the EU-member Irish Republic to its south.

The potential pitfalls regarding this border arrangement became apparent a couple of weeks ago, when the EU proposed a ban on shipments of the Covid vaccine to Northern Ireland in order to bolster the bloc’s vaccine stocks.

This step would have created a hard border, for however short a term, between the two parts of Ireland, and in so doing breach the terms of the Brexit deal.

Irish leaders were quick to object to the EU’s plan, and Brussels dropped it in a couple of hours—the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen (a medical doctor by training) apologizing for her “mistake”.

The transport of medicines is clearly an issue for Brexit cross-border provisions. An official of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) told a parliamentary committee that an unnamed drugs manufacturer had been forced to move its production from Wales to Ireland in order to overcome delays at the UK-EU border.

Friction at the border held-up the manufacturer’s exports of time-sensitive cancer drugs to the EU, which had to be destroyed as a result, the committee’s MPs were informed.

The BBC surveyed 3 exporters in the North East, and reported as follows:

A brewery in Newcastle has been hamstrung by the new shipping rules, which have caused its beers to be held-up in ports or returned to it, severing it from its EU markets– which account for a quarter of its business– in the process. Wylam Brewery has already lost half its business because of the pandemic lockdowns.

Another firm operates clothing banks for charities. It sorts, repairs, and packs donated items into containers that are sent for sale to the EU and elsewhere.

The new “rules of origin” require all products not originally made in the UK to be subjected to a 5.3% import duty before they can enter the EU. Many clothing items have “Made in China” labels attached to them, and these are now subjected to the EU’s China import tax. As a result, ECS Textiles has 20 tonne/20,000kg containers languishing at a port in Latvia (to which it sends 5 containers per week), and is incurring extra storage costs while they are there. The charities involved are receiving less money as a result.

Another firm manufactures metal fasteners for chemical drums, which it ships to Germany and other countries, and is facing increased haulage costs since Brexit. The price of a single container has increased by £650/$891, and Berger Group Europe has had to suspend several of its exports to the EU.

More complex paperwork can be streamlined in time, but the extra haulage costs and import duties are here to stay.

The Tory government is putting a positive spin on events.

UK supermarkets are not facing food shortages, but this is due in large part to businesses stockpiling ahead of Brexit and in anticipation of any chaos caused by the Covid pandemic.

Large-scale traffic jams have not occurred at English Channel ports, and the expected monster 7,000-vehicle tailbacks have not materialized.

Traffic is flowing efficiently across the Channel, with fewer than 5% of trucks being denied entry because drivers lack the requisite documentation.

Business organizations say this is not necessarily to the government’s credit–companies have opted to scale-down their cross-Channel transactions as they wait for things to improve, and The Observer reports that the volume of exports going through British ports to the EU fell by 68% last month compared with January 2020, primarily as a result of problems caused by Brexit.

These organizations say businesses need more support to overcome post-Brexit obstacles, and are pleading with the British government and the EU to streamline customs paperwork and to reduce “rules of origin” bureaucracy that has requires businesses to prove their goods are British (as opposed to being manufactured in some other country and having a “Made in Britain” label slapped on them) and thus entitled to tariff-free trade.

The British government says it is spending millions to help companies with these problems.

Having done their best to deceive the electorate in the run-up to Brexit over the problems potentially afflicting cross-border trade, the Tory Brexiters are now admitting that frictionless trade was a mirage.

The International Trade Secretary Liz Truss said recently:

“We’ve always been clear that trading as a third-party country would involve processes, the similar processes that you have for trading with the United States or Japan or any other countries”.

Contrast this with the breezy statement made in 2016 made by Michael Gove, the current minister in charge of Brexit: “The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want”.

Hand in and with the deception that Brexit would be almost completely free of obstacles to trade, Brexit supporters maintained that leaving the EU would enable the UK to develop its own economic programmes and set-up trade deals with this or that country of choice.

Last week the UK applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade bloc of 11 countries (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam). Unlike the UK, all these countries have proximity to the Pacific, which does not bode well for the success of the UK’s application.

In any event, sceptics point out that the UK’s £111bn/$152bn in annual trade with the Pacific bloc is a fraction of the £670bn/$920bn a year in trade between the UK and the EU.

It is becoming increasingly clear that no such trade deals can match the trade advantages the UK had as a member of the EU, and that the Tory government was being less than candid about this with the UK electorate.

Things are due to get more complicated. The Guardian reports:

In the coming months further checks are due to be phased in at the UK border, controlling everything from the import of sausages and live mussels to horses and trees, as well as the locations these checks can take place.

One logistics firm warned the situation had “disaster written all over it”, saying businesses need more time to prepare, while accountancy firm KPMG said some of the “biggest headaches” facing traders are yet to come. Importers fear UK customs are not ready for the new controls, and that logjams at points of entry could cause fruit and vegetable shortages in the spring.

The “teething problems” excuse used by BoJo Johnson and his pals looks increasingly to be no such thing.

Brits are starting to face the beginnings of a permanent economic shift, involving long-term economic adjustments for which they are ill-prepared.

India’s Growing Disease Burden… Will Healthcare Budget Suffice?

Harleen  Shergill

The global health emergency that jolted the world from its slumber made us realize the value and importance of health, probably the only positive outcome of the pandemic. Baring few nations, others struggled hard to cope with their crumbling health infrastructure. In India too, Health sector which had long been overshadowed and ignored in both priority and fund’s in the race of development came under pressure and scrutiny. Our healthcare spending of GDP has been measly in the last seven decades of independence. The Modi government aims to increase the public health spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2025, which is way too low for a country of 1.3 billion. Whereas, countries with much smaller populations like US are spending 16.9% of GDP (2018), Switzerland 12.2% (2018), France and Germany spending11.2% respectively.

The disease situation in India has been in a consistent state of deterioration with little improvement over the decades. The ailing health of our population has hardly ever been a priority with state authorities or a cause of concern for health experts. Till the time pandemic decided to hit us -Health ministers were neither heard nor seemed worried for the persistent health issues gripping our people and eroding the human capital of our country.

Even though the Healthcare allocation in the budget has surged by 137% from Rs 94,452 crore to 223,846 crores in 2021 (Economic Times), But is this budget enough for a perpetually ailing population marred by burden of disease. What needs to be understood is that mere pumping of money in the under resourced and up till now ignored sector will only marginally help at a superficial level in regaining the lost health of our population. We have been quick to applaud ourselves over the unearned victory in tackling the COVID-19 crisis and conveniently ignoring the real pandemic looming large.

India ranked 94th on the Global Hunger Index (2020) among 107 countries. The score based on four indicators of undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting and child mortality makes it all the more crucial to recognize the grim reality. The ‘Serious Category’ tag exposes the irreparable damage being done to our young population.  As per the National Health Survey (2015-16) conducted by Ministry of Health and Family Welfare-35.7% children under 5 years of age are under weight, 38.4% are stunted and 21% are wasted. What is even more alarming is the prevalence of hunger in our country over the decades, with 8,82000 reported malnutrition deaths in 2018, of children below 5 years of age as reported by UNICEF. Though, these staggering figures are slowly declining but they still continue to impact the lives of our young population. Malnutrition impairs cognitive ability and reduces work performance in school. The burden of the disease in childhood also leads to detrimental effects that persist throughout the course of life. Surprisingly, India is not only a self sufficient but a surplus food grain country, the hunger pangs of the deprived population failing to find a voice.

Rabies, a completely preventable disease has shown no obvious decline for almost a decade, the reported incidents are probably only an understatement of actual incidence of the disease, since Rabies is still not a notified disease in our country. According to World Health Organisation (WHO) Bulletin released in 2014, the annual reported deaths due to the disease were as high as 18,000 to 20,000 and India accounts for 36% of the total deaths across the world.

Most of the infected people are from lower socio-economic background. Thus, these depressing statistics fail to find any mention in government Health Schemes or awareness programs.

Communicable disease remains a major threat for crippling India’s population, with Tuberculosis (TB) being the biggest challenge. The elimination of TB by 2025 as proclaimed by the National TB Elimination Program seems unrealistic with its extremely high prevalence across the country. WHO has categorized India as a ‘High Burden’ country as it accounts for 27% of total worldwide deaths. The absolute figures for total infected and notified cases is even more shocking with a total 24 lakh positive cases and 79,000 reported deaths in 2019, TB being a bigger killer than covid.

Moreover, most of the TB cases in India are also drug resistant posing major hurdles to its elimination. Worse, the TB infected population shows higher incidence of also being HIV positive making it a lethal combination.

The HIV positive status of our country is even more disconcerting as we are home to second largest population living with HIV infection in the world. In 2019, 23.49 lakh people were suffering from AIDS and 69,000 had died due to the unforgiving illness(Ministry of Health and Welfare). The extent of prevalence of the disease is equivalent to any scary epidemic.

The burden of Malaria has also not eased much in the last several years, with consistent break outs every year. India accounts for a whopping 77% of total Malaria cases in South Asia. There are glaring discrepancies in the reported cases and recorded deaths as far as statistics provided by Indian authorities and data reported by World Health Organisation is concerned. The estimated figures for the disease as reported by WHO in 2019 were as high as 6,737,000 confirmed cases and 9620 recorded deaths. The impact for Malaria is more profound in case of pregnant women causing severe anemia, abortions, still birth, and maternal mortality. Unfortunately, data for these lost lives does not find any reference.

According to a report released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for 2020, India ranked 131 on Human Development Index among 189 countries. Health being one of the prime parameter’s in measuring Human Development Index. The life expectancy of Indian’s at birth is worse (69.7 years) than even developing countries like Bangladesh (72.6 years). This clearly substantiates the growing disease burden in India, making it pertinent to recognize several factors that accelerate the spread of diseases. The link between poverty and disease is obvious and indisputable. Hence, lack of clean drinking water, poor sanitation conditions, absence of adequate food, rising pollution levels are major risk factors, with air pollution being the biggest contributor in rampant spread of Pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses.

The prevalence of disease dampens and depresses human development and is detrimental to its progress. It is common knowledge that poor countries tend to be unhealthy and diseased nations tend to be poor. Human capital itself is a prime resource for economic development as ill health and disease reduce lifetime incomes.  Human-resource being the driving force behind nation building, makes investment in Health sector imperative and crucial.

The threat posed by disease burden in our country needs to be understood and addressed at the micro level by revisiting the numerous health schemes started by the government. There is an urgent need to make healthcare affordable and available for the poor and deprived population. Awareness drives need to broaden their spectrum. COVID-19 pandemic with less than 2 lakh deaths should not become the only top priority in allocation of funds. Therefore, to raise the health status of our population healthcare policies, need to be all inclusive and comprehensive, rather being inclined to a particular population group or a particular disease. Health of a nation should be a collective responsibility carried out in a cooperative manner towards a common goal.

Modi’s politics of tears

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

Mr Narendra Modi often cries as if tear drops can replace misgovernance and hide the failures of his government. The display of tear drops help to build a persona of human feelings. There is no scientific way to measure whether his tear drops reflect sincerity or master act of political strategy to hide Hindutva politics of hate. This is an old strategy of politicians to weep in order to manipulate public and manufacture their humane qualities. It is becoming a permanent feature of Modi’s politics to hide his broken promises to the people of India. Historically, fascists display their emotional side more often to decorate their rhetoric and hide their ruthless leadership under the tear drops. The sinking democracy, loss of public trust in Modi, awful economic crisis, social and economic conflicts are serious signs of a fractured republic in India under the BJP government.

The political journeying of Mr Narendra Modi from Gujarat to New Delhi is based on well-crafted propaganda full of deceptive image making and promises. His political success based on his ideological politics of Hindutva and policies of crony capitalism have accelerated deaths and destitutions of many Indian citizens. His tears did not fall neither during the death of Hindu karsevaks in Godhra nor for the Muslims died in 2002 Gujarat riots. The political dividends provoke Modi’s tear drops. He has used tear drops as a potent tool to accomplish his political objectives. Mr Narendra Modi’s tear drops are master classes in acting to revive his lost glory as a visionary strong man in politics.

Historically, Adolf Hitler, Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher have used tear as a tool of ruthless politics. The merchants of power have used wet eyes as a strategy to hide the failures of their political leadership and sinister politics. The tear shedding is a profound political expression and not an emotional human outburst for these reactionary, authoritarian and fascist leaders.

The acting skills and propaganda can help the actors in cinema, but politics of performance cannot stay away from everyday realities of people and their lives for long. The material crisis represented by the rise of mass poverty, hunger, homelessness and unemployment brings back leaders from their dream journeying of power to the pedestrian path of democratic accountability. The tear drops of Modi might be providing illusionary relief to the fraudulent politics of the BJP and RSS but no weeping can save Mr Narendra Modi led BJP government from its quick fall. The farmers movement in India reveals the working-class consciousness and exposes the hollowness of Modi’s politics of tear and his diversionary tactics.

In larger philosophical landscape, the political tear shedding emerges when democratic politics of representation based on people’s needs and desires no longer have a material foundation. Tear drops mark the end of politics of reason, debate and disagreements grounded in evidence. In the market driven cultural politics of Hindutva, the RSS and BJP is trying to create a long-lasting emotional space independent of material reality of people and their everyday sufferings in India. The mass media is accelerating such a transformation in which emotive issues take precedence over everyday necessities. The media manipulates public mind by creating scenes of external threat to national security, heritage, culture, religion, unity and sovereignty of the country. Such propaganda signals to people that we need a strong leader to overcome these crises. The same propaganda machines also offer Mr Narendra Modi as an alternative leader based on strong vision.

The times of tide reveals the cowards in politics and puts all strong men and their political propaganda in the dustbin of history. As time progresses, the people of India realised that Mr Narendra Modi is a political conman of capitalist forces in India. He has no feelings for the people and their country. He is only interested in false propaganda and capture power through electoral means to facilitate the deepening of capitalism which marginalises masses in India. The people of India learn from their everyday realities that BJP and RSS cannot govern and represent their interests. The regular weeping scene of Mr Narendra Modi is a product of such a situation in India.

Modi’s tear drops are political and lacks human emotion. His weeping is a strategy to overcome the crisis created by his ideological politics of Hindutva and economic policies.  It is time to expose Mr Narendra Modi and his politics without substance.

Switzerland’s contribution to the International Neoliberal Order

Franklin Frederick

The Russian Revolution in 1917 panicked Europe’s upper middle classes, already much discredited and weakened by the gigantic tragedy of the First World War, the result of their own greed, irresponsibility and incompetence. The crash of 1929, which almost ruined most of the industrialized capitalist countries but hardly affected the young Soviet Union, further strengthened the alternative posed by the Russian Revolution. This bourgeoisie subsequently faced two huge tasks: rebuild the international capitalist order and respond to the challenge posed by Marxist criticism and the Russian Revolution. A group of intellectuals hostile to communism, to the left in general, and even to New Deal capitalism in the U.S., sought to develop and impose a more authoritarian and profoundly anti-democratic reconstruction of capitalism: neoliberalism. As mentioned in a previous article, Switzerland was the first country to welcome and finance these intellectuals, playing a key role in shaping the neoliberal order.

Quinn Slobodian, author of Globalists, gave a name to Switzerland’s contribution to neoliberalism: the Geneva School.

For Slobodian:

“The Geneva School includes: thinkers who held academic positions in Geneva, among whom Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig von Mises, and Michael Heilperin; those who pursued or presented key research there, including Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Robbins, and Gottfried Haberler; and those who worked at the secretariat of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), such as Jan Tumlir and Frieder Roessler. Geneva School neoliberals transposed the ordoliberal idea of ‘the economic constitution’ – or the totality of rules governing economic life – to a scale beyond the nation.”

Still according to this author;

“Geneva – later the home of the WTO – became the spiritual capital of the group of thinkers who sought to solve the riddle of postimperial order “– the period following the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – that obviously included the challenge posed by the Russian Revolution. Slobodian added:

“What the neoliberals of the Geneva School sought was not a partial but a complete protection of the rights of private capital, and the ability of supranational judiciary bodies like the European Court of Justice and the WTO to override national legislation that might disrupt the global rights of capital”, in short, an economic constitution for the world.

For the Geneva School, always according to Slobodian:

“Commitments to national sovereignty and autonomy were dangerous if taken seriously. The Geneva School stalwarts thus believed that after empire, nations must remain embedded in an international institutional order that safeguarded capital and protected their right to move it freely throughout the world. The cardinal sin of the twentieth century was unfettered national independence, and the neoliberal world order required enforceable isonomy – or “same laws”, as Hayek would later call it – against the illusion of autonomy, or “own laws”.”

Put another way, for neoliberals in the Geneva School, laws defending the ‘rights’ of capital should overlap with national laws concerning workers’ rights or environmental protection, for example.

Many of the Geneva School’s participants were among the founders of the Mont Pélerin Society in Switzerland, an organization that played a key role in the intellectual construction of neoliberalism and the international dissemination of its proposals. The Mont Pélerin Society has served as an inspiration and model for other important organizations on the international right such as the Atlas Network and the Atlantic Council.

Faced with the challenge posed by the Russian Revolution, the Swiss bourgeoisie very early on sided with capital, embracing even the most authoritarian extremes of capitalism as represented by neoliberalism, all to stop the ever more threatening ‘danger’ of the left, always much more menacing, from the point of view of capital, than any totalitarian threat from the right. An important testimony of the Swiss bourgeoisie’s crusade against communism and the left in general is given by the writings of Harry Gmür, Swiss writer and communist. Born in Bern in 1908, Gmür witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe and the neo-liberal reaction in Switzerland, both reactions to the challenge posed by workers and the Russian Revolution. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Gmür embraced the left and its humanitarian values. In a text published in 1965 under the title Hitler’s War and Switzerland, Gmür wrote: “After the outbreak of war, the government in Bern, under German pressure, but certainly availing itself all too readily of the opportunity, had hastened to ban and subject to police surveillance all consistently anti-fascist parties, associations, newspapers, book distributors, and so on.”

And in another article published in 1975 – At that time in Switzerland – Gmür wrote:

“The Swiss Left was subjected to particular pressure during the war…After the outbreak of the war, the Federal Council, out of anti-Communism no less than out of servility to the Third Reich, had suppressed Freiheit, the organ of the Communist Party, and the two daily newspapers of the Left Socialists of Vaud and Geneva, which had split from Social Democracy. After the French surrender, the Communist Party, the left socialist parties of French-speaking Switzerland, the German-Swiss Socialist Party Opposition (a faction working against the right-wing course of the party leadership) and the Switzerland-Soviet Union Society were banned outright. Their property – printers, bookshops, even office inventory – was confiscated and never returned even later.

Justifiable complaints by the Soviet press about the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war who had fled to Switzerland were rejected by the chief of justice and police.”

Gmür’s two articles were published in Weltbühne, a publication in the former Democratic Republic of Germany, under the pseudonym of Stefan Miller, certainly to avoid repression from the right wing in Switzerland.

However, the most compelling document about Switzerland’s bourgeoisie, its ceaseless war against the left and its uncompromising defence of capital above all else is the Bergier Report.

In December 1996, an independent commission was created by the Swiss Federal Council under the direction of the historian Jean François Bergier, with the mandate, according to Bergier himself:

“ to answer a series of specific questions: on “unclaimed” assets, i.e. assets deposited in Swiss banks before the (Second World) War by future victims (of Nazism) and never later recovered by them or their heirs; on the treatment of refugees; on all economic and financial relations between Switzerland and nazi Germany – trade, industrial production, credit and capital movements, insurance, arms trafficking, the market in art works and property looted or sold by force, rail transit, electricity, forced labour in the German subsidiaries of Swiss companies.”

The Bergier Report as a whole consists of 11,000 pages distributed over 28 volumes. It is an immense and invaluable piece of work.

For Pietro Boschetti, author of a book that summarizes the Bergier Report titled Les Suisses et les Nazis [The Swiss and the Nazis], from which Bergier’s previous quote comes,

“the report in general confirmed what historians already knew: yes, asylum policy was extremely harsh during the war; yes, the National Bank bought a lot of suspicious gold from Nazi Germany, thus providing it with a much-appreciated service.”

In his book, Boschetti mentions a few examples of the cooperation of big business in Switzerland with nazi Germany as revealed by the Bergier Report. From the examples given by Boschetti, I mention some below, to give an idea of the scope of the Bergier Report.

On business between Switzerland and nazi Germany, Boschetti wrote: “Relationships between businessmen were obviously very close and lasting. Thus, after the war, the president of the [Bank] SBS [Rudolf Speich] and the director of the [Bank] UBS [Alfred Schaefer] supported the only Nazi banker [Karl Rasche, member of the SS, of Dresdner Bank] before the International Tribunal in Nuremberg.”

On ‘aryanisation’: “Aryanity certificates to prove racial purity appear to have been a fairly common practice. For example, in order to obtain the right to land in Munich, Swissair accepted that its crews prove their aryanity. Nestlé did the same, as did insurance companies.”

And again, about Nestlé: “From Vevey, Nestlé remained in contact throughout the war with the Swiss Hans Riggenbach, who was in charge of the multinational’s German operations in Berlin. Nestlé sold its Nescafé to the Wehrmacht during the Russian campaign, despite the difficult of importing of coffee beans.”

On forced labour by prisoners of war: “‘Struck, like their competitors, by the lack of workers, Swiss firms resort to forced labour. …at the Lonza factories in Waldshut, where 150 Frenchmen landed between July 1940 and April 1942. From then until the end of the conflict, more than 400 Russian prisoners of war worked there. Georg Fischer, BBC, Maggi, Nestlé and many others did not hesitate to draw on this pool of labour.”

“Ill-treatment was commonplace, including in the Swiss subsidiaries… Until August 1944, Switzerland repatriated fleeing forced labourers, especially Russians and Poles, to Germany.”

For Bergier, the authorities and the people responsible for Swiss companies at the time, “did not fail to justify each of the measures they took, or their refusal to take them, or their hesitation. But their explanations rarely stand up to scrutiny”, as he wrote in the introduction to Boschetti’s book.

However, the public debate that should have taken place after the Report was published – the ultimate goal of all the effort employed – was thwarted. In the words of Pietro Boschetti:

Curious country all the same! While it has just completed a praiseworthy work of historical introspection recognised almost everywhere as exemplary, while it has invested considerable resources to enable historians to work seriously and independently, while it has gone through an ‘identity crisis’ caused by the scandal of unclaimed assets which gave rise to all sorts of exaggerations and excesses, this country, at a time when it has the historical material necessary to have a serene debate, refuses to hold it…. What a pity!

The suppression of this debate was a fundamental victory for the bourgeoisie and big business in their endeavour to protect their own image and maintain within Switzerland the space and credibility needed to continue the expansion of the neoliberal agenda. Were it not for this, institutions as different as the World Economic Forum and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), both based in Switzerland and both heirs and proponents of the neoliberal vision of the world, i.e., the market as the main instrument for organizing society and even the ‘saviour’ of the planet, might not have achieved such renown.

2022 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of the Bergier Report. It is an occasion to hold the suppressed but still necessary discussion about this document, not only for a deeper understanding of the role of the Swiss bourgeoisie and big business and their ideology at the time of the Second World War, but above all to understand current developments. After all, the neoliberal world view and its representatives still hold enormous political power in this country, hostility against the left remains as aggressive as it was during the Cold War, and Switzerland continues to be an important partner in the construction and dissemination of the fake U.S. narratives supporting anti-democratic campaigns against Cuba and Venezuela, to cite just these two examples. The political forces and economic interests that led to the collaboration of large Swiss companies with nazi Germany are the same as those behind the proposals to reorganize the state according to the interests of capital as advocated by the Mont Pélerin Society and the World Economic Forum; they are also the same forces that prevented public discussion of the Bergier Report.

Neoliberal capitalism continues to be advanced in Switzerland as the only possible solution to the various problems facing humanity today, from the ecological crisis to the health crisis represented by the pandemic. The role of neoliberal capitalism as the cause of these same problems is never even mentioned. When the climate movement dared to question neoliberalism in Switzerland, the reaction was brutal and repressive legislation. Despite the Mont Pélerin Society and the Geneva School, the World Economic Forum and the WWF, there is another tradition in Switzerland, one that was embodied in Harry Gmür, in the Bergier Commission and is now reappearing in the climate movement. It is now up to this tradition to reopen the necessary debate and challenge neoliberalism in one of its most important and influential centres, Switzerland.