Will Trump Survive November U.S. Election?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

 

Is it possible that Donald Trump is riding a wave of anti-globalist feeling that will keep him in the White House for another term?

Despite the criticisms levelled against him daily by his opponents, can the COVID-19 crisis benefit him in the November election?

The coronavirus pandemic is largely a class-based crisis. In its wake, Americans may confront increased inequality and resentment. 

The disaster has become so dire, in part, due to the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis. Minimum wage, in real terms, is more than thirty per cent lower than it was fifty years ago. Meanwhile, housing costs have more than doubled since 2000.

While well-educated white-collar professionals work remotely from home, their incomes secure, poorly paid workers in sectors of the economy requiring their physical presence face the hazards of infection, as they ride crowded buses and subways to their jobs. They risk exposure to the virus out of economic necessity.

A genetic analysis of the coronavirus by researchers at the Yale University School of Public Health revealed that 60 to 65 per cent of the nation’s infections and deaths can be traced to New York – the American epicentre of global finance and travel.

Yet the groups that have profited the most from the globalization and deregulation that made the rapid spread of the pandemic possible have had the easiest time protecting themselves from its effects.

Outrage has grown towards the privileged living in large houses removed from neighbours by leafy yards, while the working classes remain confined in small apartments located in densely populated inner-city streets. 

Trump’s opposition to immigration is in tune with this new world. As globalisation has advanced, so has the risk of infectious diseases spreading. Prior to the pandemic, centrist Democrats proposed decriminalizing illegal immigration while some further left even suggested such people should have free health care. 

It will not be as easy now to dismiss as racism or nativism demands that the legal status of all workers be verified by employers. Even Trump’s plan to build a wall along the southern border may find a new lease on life.

 A Washington Post-University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement poll found that 65 per cent of respondents want a temporary freeze on all legal immigration during the coronavirus outbreak -- a position more populist than anything Trump has implemented. 

(The survey was conducted April 21-26 among a random national sample of 1,008 adults with 70 per cent reached on cell phones and 30 per cent on landlines, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.)

As Michael Lind, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, contended in an April 16 article in Tablet magazine, “It is safe to assume that abolishing border controls and immigration enforcement in an age of global contagion will not be a winning message in the foreseeable future.”

Trump’s calls for bringing manufacturing back to America have been under constant attack by the left. He was labelled a xenophobe for saying that China was taking advantage of the trade relationship with the U.S.

 

However, Nadia Schadlow, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, in an April 5 article in the Atlantic magazine, observed that “the current emergency has proved Trump right in fundamental ways -- about China specifically and foreign policy more generally.”

Trump’s quasi-isolationist impulses will also resonate. Will Americans really care whether Iranian-backed Shiites dominate Iraq or Saudi-backed Sunnis prevail in Yemen?

When the economy restarts, it will be in a world where governments act to curb the global market. They will rebuild a national economy instead of a global one, and their priority will be domestic industry. A situation in which so many of the world’s essential supplies originate in China – or any other single country – will not be tolerated.

Trump’s emphasis on protecting U.S. sovereignty is no longer so easily dismissed as being “on the wrong side of history.”

As Americans re-evaluate their positions on globalization, immigration, and the economy during this crisis, a populist like Trump, rather than a machine politician like Joe Biden, is more likely to benefit in November.

Indonesia "Working with Nature" in Moving Capital

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Moving a country’s capital is not an easy decision. But it has been done.

Brazil relocated its capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia in 1960. Rio was crowded, government buildings were far apart and traffic was heavy. So the government decided to create a new city specifically developed to be the capital.  

Pakistan, too, built a new capital, and began moving from Karachi on the Arabian Sea inland to Islamabad in 1960. It was declared the capital three years later.

Lagos, on the Atlantic coast, was the capital city of Nigeria before Abuja, centrally located, was made the capital of the country in 1991.

In 1983, President Felix Houphouet-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire decided that Abidjan wasn’t the best choice and moved the capital to Yamoussoukro.

Almaty was the capital of Kazakhstan when the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The government moved the capital 1,200 kilometres north to Astana in 1997. It was also renamed Nur-Sultan.

In Myanmar, Rangoon, the capital city, was replaced by Naypyida, almost 200 miles to the north, in 2005.

Now it’s Indonesia’s turn. Last August, Indonesian President Joko Widodo provided details on the location and cost of a new capital on the large island of Borneo. The current capital, Jakarta, on Java, is overcrowded and sinking.

The new capital will be located in Borneo’s East Kalimantan province, about 2,000 kilometres from Jakarta. The island of Borneo is split among three countries: Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia.

 “It is a strategic location at the center of Indonesia, close to a growing urban area,” Widodo has stated.

He said one reason for picking East Kalimantan is that it does not have a history of natural disasters. The relocation will cost $33 billion and start in 2024.

Proposals to move the capital to Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, had been considered for years. Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, was unable to move the new nation’s capital to Kalimantan, though he initiated the construction of the city of Palangkaraya in 1957 for that purpose.

Widodo, who was governor of Jakarta before winning the presidency in 2014, won re-election in 2019 in part because of his record of building major infrastructure projects.

Jakarta has a population of 10 million and three times that number if including nearby areas. It is located on Java, the island that accounts for 58 per cent of Indonesia’s gross domestic product and is home to about half of nation’s 260 million people.

Jakarta, polluted and crowded, has few parks or cultural monuments. The city’s traffic jams are horrendous, and it is prone to floods, volcanos and tsunamis.

Parts of Jakarta have been sinking more than five centimetres a year due to the overuse of groundwater, and 40 per cent of Jakarta is below sea level. 

Sea walls have had limited success in holding back the Java Sea and parts of the city are likely to be lost in coming decades. It is one of the world’s most vulnerable cities to rising sea levels caused by climate change.

Severe flooding in January saw at least 66 people die from heavy rain that began last New Year’s Eve.

However, environmental groups have criticized plans to move the capital out of concern for Borneo’s vast forests and endangered wildlife.

The architectural team which won the government-run competition to design the capital – Urban Plus architects-- insists its aim is to work with nature, not against it. 

Sofian Sibarani, the head of the firm, indicated that 70 per cent of the 2500 square kilometres will be green space, and will include an institute which will specialise in reforestation.

Indigenous people worry it could destroy their unique cultures.  “We know their ‘forest city’ plans but we don’t want them to plant trees -- we want them to protect the forest that is left here,” declared Syukran Amin, from the Paser tribe.

Planning specialist Rita Padawangi also worries about who the new capital is really being built for.  

“Why can’t the indigenous people be the advisors? They are the ones who are going to be most affected by this. Is it just going to be a gated community of elite civil servants coming from Jakarta?”

Taiwan Deserves Support After Coronavirus Crisis

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph Journal

 

It seems that no good deed goes unpunished. While China prevaricated and covered up the truth about COVID-19, little Taiwan, kept out of the World Health Organization (WHO) by Beijing, began warning the world about the novel coronavirus early, and quickly took steps to combat it.

But has this helped Taiwan in the struggle to keep out of China’s orbit, or being allowed to join the WHO, whose director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, believed China’s initial lies? No -- but it did prevent the virus from ravaging its own people.

China has relentlessly pursued its objective of absorbing Taiwan, which it insists is part of the country. Since 1971, when China joined the United Nations and Taiwan was tossed out, China has worked tirelessly to isolate Taiwan diplomatically.

In recent decades the two have grown further apart. Taiwan has become a thriving democracy while China has increased its intolerance of free speech, thought, religion, and association. No wonder China has ratcheted up its political warfare and military threats against Taiwan.

China sends around 2,000 bomber patrols a year into the Taiwan Strait, which separates the two countries. In 2016, when Tsai Ing-wen, an opponent of reunification with China, was first elected Taiwan’s president, China began sending bombers to circumnavigate the island as a show of force. 

Last year it deliberately sent fighters across the mid-point of the Strait for the first time in two decades. In December China’s first domestically built aircraft carrier, the Shandon, was sent through the Strait two weeks before Taiwan’s Jan. 21 presidential election, won by President Tsai.

That’s nothing new. China took military action against some of the Taiwanese outer islands in 1955, forcing U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower to send the Sixth Fleet to quell the shelling.

In 1996, China launched missiles near Taiwan to intimidate and discourage its first direct presidential elections and American ships were sent to the area.

The WHO has ignored Taiwan out of diplomatic obsequiousness to Beijing and has denied the unrecognized state information and resources. WHO officials even refused to answer questions about Taiwan’s success at limiting the coronavirus.

On March 28, Bruce Aylward, a Canadian who is Senior Advisor on Organizational Change to the director-general, seemed to disconnect a video interview with journalist Yvonne Tong of Hong Kong broadcaster RTHK, who asked him whether the WHO would reconsider Taiwan’s membership. 

Yet not being allowed into the WHO hasn’t been an insurmountable problem. Taiwan moved early against the virus under the assumption that this would become a major pandemic.

Last Dec. 31 Taiwan queried the WHO about this possibility but did not even receive a reply; however, on the same day Taiwanese health officials started screening passengers coming from Wuhan, China, centre of the outbreak.

It suspended Taiwanese visits to Hubei province on Jan. 25 and barred all Chinese arrivals on Feb. 6th.

By Jan. 20, Taiwan had activated its Central Epidemic Command Center, and on Jan. 30, President Tsai, who had been re-elected for a second term nine days earlier, gave a speech emphasizing that on Taiwan, medical personnel “working around the clock, through their concerted efforts,” had already brought the coronavirus outbreak “under control.”

With an enviable health system and a high technology base, Taiwan’s success in managing the coronavirus outbreak, despite being only 177 kilometres from the Chinese mainland, came down to banning international travels early, rigorous contact tracing, a lot of testing, and familiarity with earlier virus outbreaks originating in China, such as SARS in 2003. 

Using data from health, immigration, and customs agencies, Taiwan was able to track the whereabouts of quarantined individuals and therefore limited community transmission of COVID-19. It also helped to have an educated and disciplined population.

There have been only 440 confirmed cases and six deaths in a nation of 23.7 million people. Schools remain open, the economy is functioning, and citizens are living largely normal lives.

Taiwan is now even helping the rest of the world by churning out millions of face masks and sending them all over the globe, including 500,000 to Canada. The Canadian Red Cross will distribute them to hospitals, front-line workers and Indigenous communities.

Tedros, beholden to China for his job, on April 8 accused Taiwan’s government of being behind a campaign of racist insults against him. (He is Ethiopian).

Responded President Tsai, “We know how it feels to be discriminated against and isolated more than anyone else as we have been excluded from global organizations for years.”

Despite all this, Taiwan refuses to be bullied by Beijing. Last year, in response to a message from Chinese President Xi Jinping proposing further exploration of a “one country, two systems” scenario for Taiwan, Tsai reiterated that China must face the reality of the existence of the democratic system that the people of Taiwan have established.

China needs to respect the commitment of Taiwan, she added, “to freedom and democracy, and not foster divisions and offer inducements to interfere with the choices made by the people of Taiwan.”

When we observe how differently the People’s Republic and Taiwan have responded to COVID-19 – one engaged in coverups and obfuscation, the other dealing with it quickly and forthrightly – there should be no doubt among the people of Canada as to which one to support, despite China’s massive global footprint.

Many Languages Are Under Threat

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

Language is the essence of culture, so people tend to feel passionately about their mother tongue, especially when they have reason to believe that it is threatened in some way.

In Canada, French Canadians have been worried about their language ever since the conquest of Quebec. After all, in North America, they live in a “sea” of English – and, increasingly, Spanish.

Meanwhile, indigenous people have seen many of their languages near extinction and fight hard to preserve those that remain viable. Endangered tongues pass from the scene when elders still speaking them die.

Linguists estimate that tens of thousands of languages have been born and lost, leaving no trace, throughout human history. Today, about 7,000 languages remain, half of them classified by linguists as endangered.

Because of imperialism in earlier centuries, and globalization today, the prevalence of a few major cultures has allowed for a large degree of linguistic homogenization.

Why does so much of the world speak English? Because of a “settler revolution,” which launched vast numbers of emigrants from the British Isles to North America, Australia and New Zealand, and parts of South America and Africa.

Also, when modern states emerged and “national” languages became part of the identity of nations, minority languages not only withered but became targets for suppression. Those who spoke them often became marginalized and politically at odds with the majority population.

Oppressed people made the revival of their languages a priority – hence the revival of Gaelic in Ireland and Hebrew in Israel.

Speaking and writing in a relatively smaller language like Danish or Kazakh encloses you in a metaphorical prison – an author whose works are not translated into a global language remains relatively unknown, no matter their talent.

Still, not everyone thinks the loss of languages is a bad thing. Converging language use would undoubtedly have a positive effect on economic interaction.

As well, a modern lingua franca such as English, already spoken throughout the world, usually as a second language, may be helpful. If a Filipino and a Moroccan meet in Romania, it’s highly unlikely either will know the other’s native language, or Romanian – but both may be able to converse in English.

Although versions of Chinese are spoken as a mother tongue by about 1.2 billion people, about three times as many as English, it is English that is spoken around the world. Chinese remains essentially confined within the borders of the state.

Advertisements for professionals at all levels tend to stipulate language ability in English, and business schools from Sweden to Singapore conduct all or most of their courses in English.

Travel to any country outside the anglosphere, and you quickly notice the ubiquities signs for English language schools.

However, even dominant languages may eventually disappear. Thanks to the might of the Roman Empire, Latin once predominated in much of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

But the empire gave way to new nationalities, and Latin was superseded by Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Spanish and Portuguese eventually became global languages themselves.

Now, thanks to the expansion of the British Empire in modern times, and therefore the use of English, especially in today’s most powerful culture, that of the United States, that language reigns supreme.

But the lessons of history are that nothing lasts. Already, differing accents and local words are widening the gap between the English spoken in, say, Hong Kong and Jamaica.

Their users may eventually become mutually unintelligible.

A Region Prone to Political Extremism

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Following the U.S. killing of Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, in January, might Iran retaliate by striking at targets in South America? Despite COVID-19, which has forced a reduction in funding terror, Tehran continues to make mischief around the world.

Local Arab communities living in the remote border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay known as the Triple Frontier have helped Hamas and Hezbollah carry out terrorist operations, particularly in Argentina, in the past.

The Suleimani strike is reminiscent of Israel’s targeted assassination of Hezbollah co-founder, and then-secretary-general, Abbas Musawi, in February 1992.

Iran responded by targeting Israeli and local Jewish institutions in Buenos Aires, with its Hezbollah proxy involved in the bombings of the Israeli Embassy in March 1992 and the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) in July 1994.

These strikes were massive and devastating, killing over 100 civilians and wounding several hundred more.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the Triple Frontier region, already associated with money-laundering and drug trafficking, has been seen as a sanctuary for Islamist terrorists, who are said to thrive in the anarchic atmosphere created by porous borders and the constant interchange of people, goods, and capital.

Substantial Arab communities in Foz de Iguaçu on the Brazilian side and Ciudad del Este in Paraguay have been the targets of police investigations, harassment, and deportation.

The FBI, CIA, Treasury Department, and Pentagon, and possibly Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, have been involved with local intelligence gathering and aided anti-terror task forces.

Hezbollah has taken advantage of the frustrations of many Arab residents whose families immigrated mainly from Lebanon in two waves, after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and after the 1975 Lebanese civil war.

Argentine security forces identified Sheik Mounir Fadel, spiritual leader of Ciudad del Este's main mosque, as a senior Hezbollah member.

In April 2002, Washington named the Triple Frontier region, with its thriving Arab community of 25,000, as an area where there is “terrorist activity,” and declared that at least two groups, Hezbollah and Hamas, operated there.

A counter-terrorism expert with the Pentagon’s National Security Study Group described the border area in 2007 as “the most important base for Hezbollah outside Lebanon itself.”

Since mid-2019, a number of Latin American countries have branded Hezbollah a terrorist organization. In July 2019, Argentina was the first to do so, followed by Paraguay the following month. Brazil may soon follow.

“At present, Hezbollah continues to represent a current threat to security and the integrity of the economic and financial order of the Argentine Republic,” stated Buenos Aires.

The Paraguayan government, which also branded Palestinian militant group Hamas a terror organization, explained that the designations highlighted their commitment to “preventing and combating violent extremism.”

One of the odder geographic quirks to be found in South America is Argentina’s province of Misiones, the country’s northerly protrusion between Brazil and Paraguay in the Triple Frontier.

In the Misiones town of Puerto Iguazu, you can see three different countries at the same time. The place where the Iguazu River joins the Parana River serves to separate Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina.

Originally home to the Guarani people, the area was dramatically altered by the initial arrival of Jesuit missionaries and later migrants from Europe as well as by contested territorial claims.

Although Argentinean sovereignty was eventually secured, a unique Misiones identity developed, shaped by the region’s remoteness, its tropical landscapes, and the constant circulation of people across the adjacent borders.

Given its history, geography, and exposure to two other nations, Misiones’s vulnerability, which derives from the province’s geographic situation and unusual shape, has given its inhabitants their own particular identity. 

Jesuit priests ruled the territory from 1609 to 1767, but after the Jesuits were expelled, the area returned to wilderness.

In the late nineteenth century, Argentina would restore social order, and European colonial settlers would repopulate the area. Argentina consolidated its sovereignty over Misiones with the conclusion of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), in which Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina defeated Paraguay.

Misiones assumed the role of a frontier region, which it remains to this day. It is a perfect place for terrorism, sleeper cells, organized crime, and illicit activities to flourish.