We're Witnessing an American Tragedy

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB]  Times & Transcript

The Coronavirus pandemic has created a massive economic contraction around the world, and its effects have been particularly devastating in the United States, which has suffered by far the highest death total, now inching upwards towards 200,000 people.

COVID-19 saw 40 million Americans lose their jobs, and 3.3 million businesses shut down. Many analysts predict that the U.S. unemployment rate will remain in double digits through the middle of 2021, which will surely doom President Donald Trump’s chances of re-election.

Thousands of enterprises will never re-open, eliminating millions of jobs – almost half of all Americans work for small companies, mainly in the low-wage service sector, and such businesses are more vulnerable to bankruptcy. Younger people entering the work force may not get a good job in the first place for years to come and their overall lifetime incomes may never catch up.

These economic dislocations fall disproportionately on those with lower incomes and savings. Temporary government programs to help those in dire straits will only mitigate the problem. The road to recovery will be long.

This crisis has illuminated the deficiencies of the American economy, its ruling elites, and its Social Darwinist political culture, which places value on individual freedom and getting ahead at all costs, at the expense of community and family.

This has led to an ever-widening chasm between Americans who are beyond rich and those who have little or nothing. In the 1950s, the salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that of their mid-management employees. Strong unions saw to that.

But during the 1980s politicians began to dismantle social protections, undermine labour rights and slash taxes on the rich.

Today, those at the top levels of corporations earn 400 times that of their salaried staff. One per cent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while those at the bottom have more debt than assets. They live on the edge of bankruptcy and if they lose their jobs, there is little of a safety net. They are on their own.

Entire segments of the economy, especially in manufacturing, have been outsourced overseas, and much of industrial America is a hollowed-out economic wasteland. In the 1960s, manufacturing made up 25 per cent of U.S. gross domestic product.  It is barely 11per cent today. More than five million American manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000.

Uncontrolled immigration and the corporate hunger for ever-cheaper labour has frayed the social fabric. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.

Fully 37 percent of African American families have zero or negative net worth. The median wealth of Black households is a tenth that of whites. And 41 percent of all Black-owned enterprises have closed since March. This is the backdrop to the rage that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis this past May.

America, like many a hegemonic power before it, also suffers from imperial overreach. Policing the international system does not come cheap. After World War Two, the U.S. became a military behemoth abroad. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries.

Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in domestic infrastructure, including education and health care.

Deindustrialisation, deregulation, low-wage work, underemployment, and a dysfunctional health system have long been evident but, as in a war, they now point to the nation’s underlying weakness. The reliance on unfettered markets with minimal government intervention has proved inadequate to repair the damage.

Americans today find themselves members of a failing state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government. The bonds of community and trust have almost vanished, replaced by anger and resentment that has led to levels of political polarization not seen since the Civil War 160 years ago. This will remain the case long after Trump is a memory.

Yet, in the midst of a pandemic and what is clearly an economic depression, Americans are about to elect as their president a run-of-the-mill machine politician born just a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

 

Can New York Recover From Covid-19?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The predominant urban center in North America, New York City is the primary American locale for the arts, culture, finance, the media, and intellectual life. I first visited New York in 1958, many, many times thereafter, and last time in December 2018. Who could not love it?

Yet today, New York faces a looming existential crisis brought on by the coronavirus. The city is a shadow of its pre-pandemic normal. In the most populated, most dense, most diverse American metropolis, more than 23,000 have died.

In the heart of Manhattan, national chains including Kate Spade, Subway and Le Pain Quotidien have shuttered branches for good. J.C. Penney and Neiman Marcus, the anchor tenants at two of the largest malls in Manhattan, recently filed for bankruptcy and announced that they would close those locations.

From SoHo to Fifth Avenue to Madison Avenue, once packed sidewalks are now nearly empty. There are virtually no tourists, a fraction of the usual army of office workers goes into work every day, many residents stay at home, worried for their health, and many of the wealthy have left the city for second homes.

New York City accounts for a very large share of the country’s transit ridership. Many people don’t own cars and use buses and subways – which are now seen as incubators for the virus. Crowded public transportation facilitates the spread of a highly contagious, airborne disease.

Though New York’s subway system has stepped up its disinfecting of trains and buses and has launched an app that tells riders on some lines how crowded rail cars are, many people remain reluctant to use them. 

The pandemic sparked an exodus of frantic wealthier residents fleeing the city for the suburbs or countryside, an estimated 420,000 of them since March, gutting upscale neighborhoods now facing up to 40 per cent vacancy rates.

Many are looking to buy houses in small towns along the Hudson River in upstate New York, or nearby Connecticut. Real estate agents say these are selling hours after they go on the market, with buyers sometimes paying full price in cash after seeing the houses only on video tours.

After all, suburban, exurban, and small-town residents don’t live in dense urban neighbourhoods. They get around in their private cars and have far more room inside their houses; as well, they have back yards. Today’s technologies make it increasingly easy for employees to work far from dense megacities.

New York City’s left-wing mayor and New York State’s governor, though both Democrats, are at odds over what to do to stem the tide.

Mayor Bill de Blasio took a shot at Gov. Andrew Cuomo Aug. 6 for trying to lure the wealthy back to New York with the promise of tax breaks. The mayor stated he would like to raise taxes on the rich if federal coronavirus aid doesn’t come through.

“If our federal government fails us and doesn’t provide a stimulus we should immediately return in Albany to the discussion of a tax on wealthy New Yorkers,” de Blasio said. “Wealthy New Yorkers can afford to pay a little bit more so that everyone else can make it through this crisis.”

Cuomo has been pleading with rich city dwellers who left the city for second to come back, and dismissed calls for boosting taxes on the rich to stave off a potential 20 per cent cut to major programs, like school funding.

“We do not make decisions based on the wealthy few,” de Blasio declared. “I was troubled to hear this concept that because wealthy people have a set of concerns about the city that we should accommodate them,” he added. “That’s not how it works around here anymore.”

It’s a very divided city. Today the top one per cent in New York take in over 40 per cent of the city’s income while much of the city’s population find themselves left behind. This is due in large part because of a precipitous fall in middle income jobs.

The pandemic will only exacerbate the problems of a great, yet troubled, metropolis.

 

Belarus Strongman Is Returned to Power -- For Now

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, N.B.] Times & Transcript

Let’s hope no one was foolish enough to take the Aug. 9 presidential election in the former Soviet republic of Belarus seriously, because it was as fixed as an old-time wrestling match.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Aleksandr Lukashenko was re-elected president, for the sixth time, defeating four challengers.

Lukashenko garnered over 80 per cent support, with political novice Svetlana Tikhanovskaya far behind with undert 10 per cent. She refused to accept the results, while large protests erupted in some 20 cities and were met with police attacks.

 Lukashenko has ruled the country since it passed its current constitution in 1994. Term limits were abolished in 2004, and he is Europe’s longest-serving ruler.

This is the land where the old Soviet Union has somehow managed to survive ideologically. So it’s no surprise to learn that Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm manager, was the only deputy in the old Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic’s Supreme Soviet to vote against the 1991 dissolution of the USSR.

Lukashenko’s authoritarian style involves controlling the main media channels, harassing and jailing political opponents, and marginalising and incarcerating independent voices.

The powerful secret police, still called the KGB, closely monitors dissidents. There have been more than 100 cases of prosecution of journalists across the country since January.

Still, this time around Lukashenko faced the biggest opposition protests for a decade. There have been hundreds of arrests in a wave of demonstrations since May.

On July 30 tens of thousands rallied in the capital, Minsk, in support of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. She stepped in to challenge Lukashenko after her husband Sergei Tikhanovsky, a popular blogger, was arrested and barred from running. Two other leading contenders, Valery Tsepkalo and Viktor Babaryko, were also prevented from contesting the election.

Tikhanovskaya joined forces with Veronika Tsepkalo, the wife of Valery Tsepkalo, and Maria Kolesnikova, campaign manager for Babaryko. He had been charged for embezzlement and fraud. The three women became the main symbol of the opposition.

The Belarusian authorities’ handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been met by severe criticism. In terms of preventive measures, Belarus remains the least active of all the countries in the region in trying to control the spread of the virus, and Lukashenko has insisted that Belarus’s economy continue to operate as normal.

Belarus has had nearly 70,000 confirmed cases and some 600 deaths. The president recommended vodka and sauna visits as protective measures. At the end of July, though, he himself contracted COVID-19.

Fearing the sudden upsurge in opposition to his reign might even result in a possible loss, Lukashenko on July 29 used one of the oldest tricks in the authoritarian playbook: He claimed to have uncovered a foreign plot to “destabilise” the country.

He claimed that 33 mercenaries with the private Russian military group Wagner had been arrested outside the capital, Minsk. Russia denied the charges against them and it cooled relations between the two countries, though Belarus has been Moscow’s closest ally since the breakup of the USSR.

Belarus was never an independent state before 1991 and its Slavic population of almost ten million is ethnically very close to that of Russia. The Russian language is used by 70 per cent of the population, and more than four-fifths are members of the Russian Orthodox faith.

Since December 2018, Russia and Belarus had been pursuing negotiations on closer integration. They have held joint military exercises and the struggling Belarus economy relies on trade with its neighbour.

Belarus exports some 40 per cent of its goods to Russia. And Moscow is also Minsk’s largest creditor: Almost 38 per cent of its debt is with Moscow.

About one-quarter of Belarus’ GDP is driven by cheap Russian gas and oil. But Moscow early this year stopped its deliveries when the two countries failed to renegotiate oil prices. On March 5, Belarusian Foreign Minister Uladzimir Makei declared that further  talks would make no sense before an agreement was resolved. The deliveries were resumed in April.

The arrest of the mercenaries was also aimed at Tikhanovskaya, as investigators tried to link her husband to the detainees. She has fled to Lithuania. Meanwhile, some 6,700 people have been detained since protests erupted after the vote results.

 

Panicked Provinces Succumbed to Fear

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Lord Acton warned that it is human nature for people given power over others to wield that power ever-more broadly.

This impulse has been particularly evident with restrictions that violate Canadians’ mobility rights as enshrined in section 6 (2) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

It states that every Canadian has the right to live and work in any province. No legislature can overrule it with Section 33, the Charter’s notwithstanding clause.

True, the government can attempt to justify its actions limiting a right by using Section 1 of the Charter, which stipulates that it remains subject “to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” But this has not been tested in court. Nor has the federal Emergencies Act been invoked.

Prince Edward Island was all but cut off from the rest of Canada for months on end – this was even reported in a Washington Post article of July 6. Other Maritime provinces also shut their borders, while in British Columbia officials were telling Albertans not to cross the provincial border to cottages they owned in that province.

Since mid-April, 375 individuals have been denied entry to PEI. A Montreal woman with a 91-year-old mother on the island has been unable to visit. A Manitoba man who managed to get in after his application was denied was sentenced for violating the Public Health Act.

There were internal travel restrictions in various provinces and territories. Security checkpoints were implemented in several regions in Quebec, including along the Ontario border.

The Newfoundland and Labrador government gave sweeping new powers to the police, authorizing officers to stop vehicles, detain people and take them to the border if they were not complying with public health measures.

How quickly xenophobia rears its ugly head. On PEI cars with out-of-province licence plates had profane notes left on their windshields. British Columbia Premier John Horgan suggested drivers of such vehicles should consider taking public transit or riding a bicycle if they’re feeling harassed. Some have been victims of sabotage.

These border bans have fuelled criticism from civil rights advocates. Canada “should know better than to allow provinces and territories to claim lands as their own, to the exclusion of others,” wrote Michael Bryant, executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), in the National Post May 21.

The border restrictions are not based on population density and the need for social distancing, he noted. Instead, they’re based on residency. “It’s not their border to patrol,” he insisted.

The CCLA in May sent letters to each of the provinces and territories contending that if a province or territory limits those rights, its reasons must be justified. 

“So far, what we’ve seen from these governments hasn’t convinced us that there is good evidence that these limits are reasonable,” Cara Zwibel, director of CCLA’s Fundamental Freedoms Program, told the CBC in May. A challenge of the Newfoundland and Labrador ban is now before its supreme court.

On July 3, the four east coast provinces did ease inter-provincial travel restrictions within the region, creating an “Atlantic bubble.” However, the rest of Canada remains shut off.

Long before this pandemic upended our lives, the French philosopher Michel Foucault, in a series of lectures he delivered in 1976 titled “Society Must be Defended,” laid out the basis of a new concept of power in the modern world, which he called “biopower,” or power over life.

Foucault became convinced that human freedom was deeply imperiled by alliances of opinion-makers, experts, and politicians. Against them, liberal democracy, with its guarantees to certain basic liberties and to participation in a process of collective self-determination, appears powerless.

A politics centered on life, promising safety and well-being to a populace that must forgo its rights, can become a murderous totalitarianism, Foucault argued.

During the French Revolution, for instance, Jacobin extremist Maximilien Robespierre’s regime, which inaugurated the infamous Reign of Terror, was named the Committee of Public Safety.

In the twentieth century, too, dictatorial regimes contended they were saving their people from enemies, often portrayed as carriers of disease. Of course COVID-19 is real, but we must nonetheless always be wary of losing our liberties.

 

Politics and the Pandemic in Pakistan

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Pakistan has been struggling to develop an all‑encompassing identity since the founding of the state in 1947. The nation was created as a homeland for Muslims, a place where they would no longer be a minority community in the Hindu‑majority state of India.

Expectations were high that Pakistan would flourish and that its citizens would be unified by their sense of religious identity.

It hasn’t worked out that way. This vision of promise and unity soon encountered the realities of state building. Islamists and secularists disputed the centrality of Islam in the government. Pashtun and Baloch tribes resisted relinquishing their autonomy to the new centralized state.

And now the country deals with COVID-19. Pakistan has so far registered nearly 280,000 cases and over 5,900 deaths. The province of Sindh has seen the most cases, with some 119,000, while Punjab has suffered the most deaths, at more than 2,100.

Pakistan was slow in trying to control the spread of the virus. In late March, President Arif Alvi and provincial governors held a meeting with Sunni and Shia clerics to convince them to close mosques for congregational prayers across the country amid rapidly increasing COVID-19 cases in the country. The clerics, however, rejected the request.

Their refusal to shun collective prayers raised doubts about the country’s resolve to fight the pandemic.

Earlier in March, the federal government had allowed Shia pilgrims from Iran to return to the country through Baluchistan province. The pilgrims were not properly quarantined, which resulted in a spike of infections.

By the end of March, with cases surging, various provincial governments had imposed complete lockdowns, but these were lifted in stages in May, ahead of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, though the disease is not under control. In July, the government imposed a “smart lockdown” in 30 cities in a in a bid to control the virus while minimising the economic impact.

Pakistan’s public health system was overstretched long before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The country has one doctor for every 963 people and one hospital bed for every 1,608 people. It faces a shortage of 200,000 doctors and 1.4 million nurses to cope with the crisis.

When Prime Minister Imran Khan took power in 2018, GDP growth was around 5.8 per cent; now it is 0.98 per cent and is likely to decline further.

One third of Pakistan’s population already lives below the poverty line while 66 per cent -- 145 million people -- require immediate relief. Khan launched the Ehsaas Emergency Cash financial relief program on April 1 to help the most vulnerable part of the population.

None of this makes national unity any easier. Especially difficult has been trying to integrate the people of the old Northwest Frontier Province, renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in 2010, whose 36 million residents are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims, and four fifths speak Pashto.

Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa has now seen than 33,000 cases of COVID-19, with almost 1,200 deaths. On March 29, Chief Minister Mahmood Khan approved a $255.68 million stimulus economic package to provide relief to almost three million families and the business community. The provincial government has doubled the testing capacity of Covid-19 patients in hospitals across the province.

The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Provincial Assembly has 124 elected members: 99 regular seats, 22 seats reserved for women and three seats for Non-Muslims. In the 2018 provincial election, Pakistan’s ruling Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party of Imran Khan, won a landslide victory, taking 63 seats of the 99 regular seats.

The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, an alliance of religious groupings including the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl, won 10 seats; the Awami National Party nine, the centre-right Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz six, and the centre-left Pakistan Peoples’ Party Parliamentarians, four. Independents took five seats.

To add to the province’s complexity, in May 2018 the seven tribal agencies and the six regions on the border with Afghanistan, formerly called the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), were merged into Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

The first-ever democratic election there took place a year ago. Of the 16 seats up for election, independents won six seats. Pakistan’s ruling Tehreek-e-Insaf won five, the far-right clerical Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl gained three, and the Jamat-e-Islami and Awami National Party won one seat each.

America Is Not Living Through the Sixties

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Many writers are inclined to view the current unrest in the United States through the lens of “the Sixties.” That decade actually spanned 1963 to 1973, beginning with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy through to America’s ignominious exit from Vietnam.

It gave us the so-called counterculture -- hippies, communes, the increasing use of drugs, anti-Vietnam War protests, and the American umbrella organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

But these authors are wrong. This is a very different political moment.

The Sixties activists challenged the structures of the state, including bureaucracy, the military, big business, and university administrators. All those sectors in turn resisted the activists. Also, though the New Left opposed racism, that wasn’t the very core of its critiques.

Today, many of these same, now older, radicals are themselves part of the political establishment. They control the Democratic Party and much of academia, the courts, the media, and the cultural industries, including films, publishing and television. Many became tenured university professors and brought the revolution into the classroom, Corporations are no longer seen as evil, the military is no longer smeared.

Also different is the situation of today’s protestors. Though iconoclasm now reigns, and protestors topple statues and eliminate the names of streets, sports teams, buildings, and even towns, with wild abandon, this is met with little resistance, something unimaginable 50 years ago.

While the main protests are carried out under the Black Lives Matter banner, the Antifa (for anti-fascist) far-leftists are mostly white.

The extremists in SDS, who spawned white militant groups like the Weathermen that bombed buildings and killed cops, were hunted down and destroyed by the police and FBI. Yet today’s radical Antifa rioters, whose core belief includes the embrace of political violence, are, by comparison, treated with kid gloves; they know the police won’t intentionally kill them.

Particularly different is the African American experience then and now. Urban insurrections were met by National Guard troops firing real, not rubber, bullets. Hundreds were killed in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Newark. Groups like the Black Panthers were suppressed, their leaders jailed, murdered, or driven into exile.

Black Lives Matter, on the other hand, has the backing of virtually the entire Democratic Party, including members of Congress, state governors and big-city mayors. One mayor, Ted Wheeler of Portland, Oregon, himself joined a Black Lives Matter-Antifa protest in his volatile city July 23.

Multinational corporations are in support of its aims. Major league sports teams have “taken the knee,” and American media outlets like the Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, the Nation, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post are in favour. And don’t forget Facebook, Google, YouTube and the rest of the Silicon Valley billionaires.

Indeed, anyone who questions the left’s program and tactics is branded a racist by most Americans and becomes a pariah, often losing their job. Such is the power of ideological hegemony.

So if all those sixties radicals are now part of what sociologist C. Wright Mills 60 years ago called the “power elite” in his seminal book by that name, who are the new protestors?

For the most part, the members of groups like Antifa have always been the pampered children of the white professional class.

But they are also angry, because in today's high-priced American cities, especially on the globalized coasts, it is increasingly difficult for college graduates to find a job that will allow for upward mobility.

The protestors realize that they have little hope of attaining the usual milestones of entry into the middle class, such as gaining a useful and marketable skill, starting a small business, or buying a home. They now suffer consistently lower wages than their counterparts from previous generations.

They are not rebelling against their elders, as was the case on the New Left, but rather because they cannot attain what those sixties radicals, now in power, managed to acquire. And those guilt-ridden “boomers,” their grandparents, are reluctant to admonish them.

For these reasons, today’s revolution is not a second iteration of “The Sixties.” One thing, though, is certain: a society whose history and founders are hated by millions of its members will not survive.