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Author: Ian Welsh Page 157 of 437
I was impressed how fast the UK and the US were vaccinating their population. How were they doing it, after they had been so incompetent during the rest of the pandemic?
Simple enough. Restrictions on vaccine exports.
India delays big exports of AstraZeneca shot, including to COVAX, as infections surge
And then there’s this:
The map of countries which blocked the proposal of right to manufacture and import affordable versions of the Covid-19 vaccines. The proposal was led by India and South Africa. https://t.co/sl5grZsPiQ #maps pic.twitter.com/0c3cnzJwfG
— Wondering Maps (@wonderingmaps) March 13, 2021
(Spare me the self-serving arguments that breaking the patents wouldn’t have helped because it takes too much time to ramp up production. However long it takes, the sooner your open up the IP, the faster it happens.)
And we could make it happen faster:
But the global capacity for producing vaccines is about a third of what is needed, says Ellen t’Hoen, an expert in medicines policy and intellectual property law.
….
To make a vaccine you not only need to have the right to produce the actual substance they are composed of (which is protected by patents), you also need to have the knowledge about how to make them because the technology can be complex.
The WHO does not have the authority to sidestep patents – but it is trying to bring countries together to find a way to bolster vaccine supplies.
The discussions include using provisions in international law to get around patents and helping countries to have the technical ability to make them.
Rich countries use IP law to keep poor countries poor, and to kill and impoverish their citizens to make even larger profits.
And, of course, if you’re stupid enough to believe neoliberal bullshit about how your countries will be OK and don’t take steps even though you have manufacturing capacity, (Europe), well, your citizens die. The EU is now restricting imports to the UK. I wonder how many Europeans will die because of not having those 10 million doses?
“I mention specifically the U.K.,” said EU Commission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis. Since the end of January, “some 10 million doses have been exported from the EU to the U.K. and zero doses have been exported from U.K. to the EU.”
OK. I have said this for years and years but I’m going to say it again now that it is being illustrated brutally: if you can’t make it yourself, you can’t be sure you’ll have it when you need it, since countries that can make it will tend to prioritize themselves.
You must make and grow everything essential to your country domestically if you can. Any international laws that forbid you from doing so are illegitimate. They may exist; they are not Just. This doesn’t mean completely breaking patent law (though it needs to be much less draconian and a lot less long), it does mean, at the least, writing in mandatory licensing provisions at reasonable prices.
A lot of people are going to die who didn’t need to because neoliberal “free trade” orthodoxy said you didn’t need to be able to both design and make vaccines in your own country: the “market” would supply you.
Eventually.
This isn’t just about behaviour now. It is about behaviour that has been encoded into law and trade practice over decades.
Don’t offshore anything that matters. If your citizens have to pay 5% or 10% more, slap on tariffs.
To not do so, if you think the welfare of your citizens is your duty, is treason.
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Note that when Covid ends there’s going to be a boom. Biden is actually putting out decent stimulus (3 trillion package incoming), and it seems that elites may, as Policy Tensor suggests, be getting the idea that fiscal stimulus is necessary and that the Fed shouldn’t strangle any good economy in its cradle. If Tensor is right, and I see some evidence he is, they also have decided to do something (not enough, but something) about climate change, in terms of industrial policy for clean energy and so on.
Since so many small businesses closed, many of those that survived, especially local ones like restaurants and bars and gyms and so on are going to see a huge surge and overcrowding or excess demand. (This is also your best chance to meet a member of your preferred gender and sexual orientation in your lifetime, odds are, if you’re still in the game.)
In Britain the Tories even are raising corporate taxes very slightly (Labour was reluctant to agree.)
So I think Tensor may be right that a chunk of neoliberal orthodoxy is falling away. Fiscal is back, central banks won’t squash it, and the world moves towards large, opposed, trade blocs. Industrial policy is coming back, as well, though it’s not yet clear to what extent.
(America and Britain putting restrictions on exporting vaccines has really taught everyone a lesson that needed to be taught about what happens when you don’t design and make necessary items in your own country.)
What hasn’t changed, yet, is the serious commitment to keep the rich really rich. Two percent is nice, but what is required is 50s style progressive taxes, an end to favoring capital gains over earned income, strict estate taxes and wealth and (in the future) windfall profits taxes. Breakups of monopolies and oligopolies are also required, but there’s some indication that Biden’s team is serious about that.
Biden’s a disaster on foreign affairs, and he’s unwilling to make permanent structural changes like increasing the minimum wage or medicare-for-all, but if he can squeeze his spending thru the Senate, he’s going to flood the system with a lot of money and a fair bit of it in forms that won’t all rush to billionaires before you get to touch it for two or three seconds on its way to someone else.
So be ready for what’s coming. All booms end and I don’t think that the core issues with neoliberalism are repudiated, but it seems likely the US may have a few good years coming.
These years won’t last if real structural changes aren’t made, (I’ll keep an eye on that and write what I see), and maybe not even then (climate change/ecological collapse) but the oncoming boom be your last chance to make some hay. Do it while you can.
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I’m not going to give my answers to these questions, they are for you to answer. I will, gently, suggest that you try and imagine yourself in the appropriate person’s shoes while answering them.
If the world’s sole superpower is hostile to your country and sanctioning it, causing great harm, is it your duty to interfere in the superpower’s elections if you judge that might get it to kill less of your citizens?
Alternatively, fearing the superpower’s great might, seeing the terrible things it has done to various countries, should you cower in fear and do nothing, hoping that your clear fear convinces them to not hurt you too much?
Ethically speaking (not pragmatically), would it be OK for a country whose weddings and funerals regularly get droned by America to attack an American wedding or funeral which senior White House or military officials are attending? It not, would it it be more or less unethical than US dronings?
If you were a country the US was setting up to attack and destroy next and you had the ability to set off some suitcase nukes and thought that might stop the attack, would it be right to do so, or should you let the US destroy your country without hurting American civilians?
In a strange world where the US would not retaliate by destroying Iraq, would it be justified for Iraq to “rendition” George W. Bush and Cheney to their country, give them a trial, then execute them for mass murder and aggressive warmaking (like the US did Nazis and Japanese?)
If you were Yemeni, and you had an opportunity to kill the majority of the Saudi Royal family, though some unrelated civilians would also die, would it be right, or at least justified to do so? Why or why not?
If you were Palestinian and you discovered some super secret magic or tech that would make you able to force Israelis into a small amount of land, and seize their homes and lands for Palestine, would it be your duty to do so? What about natives in the Americas?
And when do those who were conquered/settled, morally, have to say “well, it’s been so long now that I guess it’s no big deal.” If I were a native in the Americans, I don’t know if I’d say the time has passed. The Irish didn’t with the English, and the Scots are getting uppity.
Is running an autocracy domestically worse than supporting coups to take away other countries democracy? If so, why?
If Indian Dalits could overthrow the Indian state and abolish the caste system by force, at the cost of all the deaths a war and revolution would entail, would they be justified in doing so?
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Biden made the comment in an ABC News interview broadcast on Wednesday. When asked if he thought the Russian leader, who has been accused of ordering the poisoning of Alexey Navalny and other rivals, is a “killer”, Biden replied: “I do.”
Biden also described Putin as having no soul, and said he would pay a price for alleged Russian meddling in the November 2020 US presidential election, something the Kremlin denies.
Putin on Thursday retorted: “I remember, in my childhood, when we argued in the courtyard, we used to say: ‘It takes one to know one.’ And that’s not a coincidence, not just a children’s saying or joke.
“We always see our own traits in other people and think they are like how we really are. And, as a result, we assess [a person’s] activities and give assessments.
Pretty much.
Now, obviously Putin is a killer. But Biden voted for Iraq and was VP to Obama, who was hardly a pacifist. He’s been a hawk all his career and has a ton of blood on his hands. He isn’t withdrawing from Afghanistan, he bombed in Syria, blah, blah, blah. He’s a red-handed mass murderer who apparently doesn’t even have the self-awareness to know that’s what he is.
Every American President, pretty much, is a mass murdering piece of human garbage. America has certainly destroyed more countries over the past 30 years than Russia, China, or both combined. This isn’t to whitewash those country’s crimes: the Chechen wars, in particular, were very nasty and Russia has targeted hospitals in Syria, among many other war crimes.
Putin’s a stone killer, sure, but the idea that Biden, or Obama, or Clinton or Trump aren’t is laughable.
I think that judging people in power by what they do is important. It is also important to be clear eyed and un-biased by our own tribal loyalties when doing so.
There has been a constant under-estimation of Putin and massive wishful thinking. Navalny is not popular, and Putin’s approval rating is at the low end of his normal range, but still good.
When Putin took over Russia, it was a shambles, after American lead “shock therapy” under the American proxy leader Boris Yeltsin.
(This is why I will always and forever laugh about Americans who whine about foreign election interference.)
Putin’s, overall, done a decent job for Russians. His major mistake was not diversifying the economy, but America’s forced him to change his mind on that with repeated sanctions. His approval ratings, over time, are better than most American Presidents ratings.
Russia continues to be a nuclear super-power, is the largest country in the world geographically, has a potent non nuclear military. They are now a solid Chinese ally, which is one of the biggest geopolitical errors in history from the US point of view (Russia didn’t want to be. They wanted to be Europeans.)
So Biden’s going to slap on more sanctions, and China and Russia are going to continue creating their own financial and trade bloc, which will include much of Africa and Asia, and Cold War 2.0 is going to continue forming.
And stone killer Biden will say nasty things about stone killer Putin and use the supposed Navalny assassination attempt as an excuse for sanctions, while not sanctioning Saudi Arabia over the murder of Kashoggi.
All of this is ridiculous. Even assuming Putin did try to have Navalny killed (why bother, he’s never been a threat), it pales compared to, oh massive Chechen (or Iraq) war crimes or bombing hospitals.
America is an evil empire. So is Russia.
Meanwhile, I leave you with this, from Navalny, the champion of the West.
Hero of western liberals Alexei Navalny comparing Muslim migrants to cockroaches (with English subtitles) pic.twitter.com/TyE6zVF7uw
— sameera khan (@SameeraKhan) February 1, 2021
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The United States punished 24 Chinese officials on Wednesday for undermining Hong Kong’s democratic freedoms, acting days before the first scheduled meeting of senior Chinese and American diplomats since President Biden took office.
Imagine sanctioning all the politicians involved in undermining freedom in Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Ukraine and Bolivia, among many others?
Meanwhile, the BBC helpfully explains the strategy:
The idea is to counter the Chinese perception that the United States is on the decline, says Michael Green, the senior vice-president for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Chinese commentators like to say that the “winds are blowing to the East.” The financial crisis of 2008, the Capitol Hill riot of 2021 and the years of Trump’s unilateralism in between have reinforced a view in China that the US has been weakened inside and out.
“This meeting in Alaska is geared to show the Chinese are wrong on all three counts,” says Green. “The schoolyard version of this is to say: “You’re not so great…yeah you’re big, but we like hanging out with our allies, democracies, because they’re cool.”
That third paragraph. Wow.
Now, is China a good actor in all ways? Of course not. In many ways it’s a terrible actor. Then again, it hasn’t destroyed multiple foreign countries over the last 20 years in wars of aggression.
The Chinese POV is simple: the “rules based international order” was created by America and its allies when China was at its weakest point in centuries. Expecting China to simply say “what a great order” is deranged. Nor is China acting worse than America did during its rise to power: it is seeking the same sort of influence that America did with things like the Monroe doctrine, but has overthrown fewer governments along the way and launched fewer wars. Far fewer.
America, to the Chinese, wants to freeze international relations at the point of American maximum power and Chinese greatest weakness.
From the American POV, China is terrible. They haven’t obeyed a lot of the rules. They’ve screwed over a lot of American companies in China. They’re aggressively bullying their neighbours (India being the latest, and successfully, I’d say), and contesting with America for control over waters near China that has essentially been an American lake since World War II by building islands in the South China Sea.
But the real problem is simple economics. By various metrics China already has the largest economy in the world. If they continue to grow that will become unambiguously the case: they will be much larger than the American economy.
America has been able to use the current “rules based order” to slow China recently, as when it kneecapped Huawei, China’s leading smartphone manufacturer by forbidding use of US technology, and by convincing allies to not invest in Huawei 5G (where China is ahead), but that technological lead is fading. When the US passed Britain in manufacturing, it took about 3 decades for them to then surpass Britain technologically (though it didn’t matter much, the Brits invented things, the Americans made them.)
The Chinese aren’t stupid, having had a weakness used against them, they move hard to end it.
One irony of the situation is that both countries are terribly led. Xi Jingping is a genius at internal politics, but not competent at actually running the country and terrible at foreign affairs. His first instinct is always to bully, and so instead of other countries falling into China’s arms, as they should given how bad a hegemon the US is, he’s driven countries in America’s arms.
That takes special talent, and while his genius for internal politics has put him firmly in control of the country, it operated better when the oligarchy replaces the supreme leader regularly, not when there was one “great” leader whose talent is mostly to shove people around.
China likewise has a demographic bomb: their population will turn “old” in about 15 years, a consequence of the one child policy. The policy was probably necessary at the time, but the consequence will be a serious slowdown as they have to spend much more of their economy, as a percentage, caring for old folks who no longer work. This same style of demographic bomb is one of the factors that cut the legs out from under Japan’s economic miracle.
In a personal sense, however, none of this is all that important. What I want to emphasize for you is to keep in mind that the world is moving towards a cold war, where it is divided into two mutually hostile blocs. They will have different payment systems (Russia and China and Iran and many others are very tired of the US ability to hurt both individuals and countries, often disastrously, thru financial sanctions). They will have different trade areas and trade rules, and there’s a decent chance they’ll stop even pretending to obey each others IP laws (a major US complaint is that China already often doesn’t.)
It’s going to be very hard to stay “between” these two blocs unless Europe decides to be the third bloc. Being within one set of rules will put you at odds with the other set. Money won’t transfer easily. Trade will be hobbled. Favors will be done for nations inside each bloc, as they were in Cold War 1.0.
So keep this in mind: the unipolar moment is ending. There is unlikely to be “one world”, odds are it’ll be two or three worlds.
And sitting on a fence between them will be frowned on and often very dangerous.
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