Bhabani Shankar Nayak, Coventry University, UK

Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST)

Petaling Jaya.

In Solidarity

Countercurrents Collective

Harsh Khanchandani is a 1st Year law student  pursuing BBA LLB from Symbiosis Law School Pune. He has a strong interest in contract law and tort law and is an avid reader and a mooter. He has been involved with a number of organizations working towards betterment of the society. >

Innocent brothers and sisters it’s time to wake up, wake up, wake up

Brothers and sisters it’s time to say something, do something, make ’em

Mmm I wonder, how many Blacks lives, how many Black lives

How many heartbeats turned into flatlines

– “How Many” by Miguel

Just when the news about the way African-Americans were being disproportionately affected by the coronavirus could get no worse, just when you thought that the United States was consumed with battling the virus, came sickening, familiar news, one after another, of a kind that had not hit public notice for a while now.

First, we heard of the senseless shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man out for a run in Georgia. Then came the incident where a white woman in Central Park, New York, called the police on a black man who had asked her to leash her dog. Most recently, we had to bear witness to the horrific murder of George Floyd when a police officer pinned his neck down with his knee.

All three incidents involved the common figure of the black person perceived as a threat.

The scenarios above are familiar ones too – white folk suspicious of black folk in their vicinity and either taking action themselves (Arbery) or immediately calling the police for intervention (Cooper); a law-enforcement officer using excessive force to restrain and punish a black man suspected of some wrongdoing (Floyd).

The second scenario is commonly labeled as “police brutality.” It describes situations in which police officers, often white, bring to bear excessive force on black suspects. This could be in the form of either employing a physical restraining force as with George Floyd in Minneapolis most recently and with Eric Garner in New York in 2014, or shooting at them if sensing even the slightest threat, as in the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014 – and hundreds of others over the years!

The August 2014 Michael Brown incident, close on the heels of the July 2014 killing of Eric Garner, set off massive protests in Ferguson (Missouri), which later spread throughout the United States. The state of Missouri had to employ heavily militarized additional forces, to bring the violence under control.

Though a lot of soul-searching and analysis resulted from the manifestation of public anger in Ferguson, from trying to understand the socio-economic divides to thinking of the issues with police biases and training,  that did not do much to put the brakes in racist police behavior throughout the US, even in the same year.

In November 2014, police in Cleveland Ohio, shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing in a public park. He was reported by someone in a call to the police as carrying a weapon, “probably fake.” Indeed, it turned out that Rice had a toy gun in his hands. Rice was, however, shot within seconds of the police arriving on the scene.

The list of unarmed black victims of police violence for 2014, just as an example, as maintained by the website Mapping Police Violence is depressingly long, as it is for years before or after. That not much has changed in the years following Ferguson is evident as also detailed in this recent piece from The Guardian titled, ‘Police violence in America: six years after Ferguson, George Floyd’s killing shows little has changed’.

As former President Obama, quoted in the article, put it recently, “We have to remember that for millions of Americans…being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal’ – whether it’s while dealing with the healthcare system, or interacting with the criminal justice system, or jogging down the street, or just watching birds in the park.” Obama should know – Ferguson erupted during his presidency.

Earlier, in 2013, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American boy was shot by a local security officer on suspicion of being an interloper in the neighborhood he was in. When the security officer was later acquitted by the courts, the Black Lives Matters movement was conceived of as a platform to rally around. The movement gained strength following the 2014 incidents of police killings.

Protests by the African-American community over police action, such as in Ferguson or in Minneapolis currently, have a long history in the US. These have included the Watts rebellion in Los Angeles in 1965, the Newark riots of 1967 and the protests following Rodney King’s murder in Los Angeles in 1992. Other more recent protests were triggered by Tim Thomas’ murder in Cincinnati Ohio in 2001, Oscar Grant’s shooting in Oakland in 2009 and the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015 in Baltimore.

The much celebrated and emulated Black Panther Movement in the late 60s and early 70s also took off after constant run-ins with the local police in Oakland, California. It was the Hunter’s Point riots that followed the killing of an unarmed black man, Matthew Johnson, that saw the emergence of the Black Panthers who took it upon themselves to monitor the police while openly carrying arms themselves.

There have been constant struggles and investigations in different areas to address the issues of the socio-economic disadvantages of African-Americans, from biases in allocation of state resources for basic social goods to the mass incarceration of black people to instill fear in the community and remove its working adults to prison.

But alongside all this, the confrontation with law-enforcement has been a constant. Terms like “Driving While Black (DWB),” which point to the high incidences of black folk being pulled over while driving without adequate reason, have long been in mainstream parlance.

In many cases, a simple instance of being pulled over can turn fatal, as in the case of Sandra Bland in Texas in 2015. She protested for being stopped for what seemed like a minor infraction and the exchange with the police officer quickly escalated such that he had her arrested and sent to prison. Three days later she was found hanging in the jail.

While the black community has had a fraught and fatal relationship with the police over the years, the white community has generally trusted the police implicitly. According to a Pew Center report, “A survey conducted in mid-2017 asked Americans to rate police officers and other groups of people on a “feeling thermometer” from 0 to 100, where 0 represents the coldest, most negative rating and 100 represents the warmest and most positive. Black adults gave police officers a mean rating of 47; whites gave officers a mean rating of 72.”

Whites and blacks have very different experiences when dealing with the police. Blacks, in fact, often end up being victimized when they seek the police’s intervention. But the experience the white folks have is markedly different.

As an article explains, “Whites calling the police…do not endure long response times, treatment that negates their victimization, or the slide from victim to suspect in the eyes of the police…even when whites have involuntary contact with police, they overwhelmingly experience the police as helpful, benevolent, fair, and efficient problem solvers.”

As the article goes on to say: “This mismatch in experience equates to powerful incentives for people of one racial group to call the police on others who could be seen as breaching ‘white space.’”

Many people have tried to understand the history behind the recent cases of police targeting of black folk. In the US South, a lot of the early policing was linked to maintaining the system of slavery, as an article explains. In the US North, even if the police started out as a municipal force, they were expected to control “a “dangerous underclass” that included African Americans, immigrants and the poor.”

According to the same piece, “controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers and slave patrol origins – are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans.”

A discriminatory regime of laws promulgated after the conclusion of the American Civil War (1865), called the Jim Crow laws, put into practice leagalized racial segregation in the US. It was the police who were often called in to enforce the specifics of the laws, further entrenching the biases against the black population.

The police are not separate from the larger beliefs and attitudes in a society. A historical stance of African-Americans as second class citizens, as dictated by the politics of  disposability, dominates the common attitudes and public policy: “It is a politics in which the unproductive (the poor, weak and racially marginalized) are considered useless and therefore expendable…in which entire populations are considered disposable, unnecessary burdens on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves.”

Consider the Washington DC mayor’s recent comment on how the federal government looks at the risk of reopening the economy after the Covid-19 lockdown, while considering the possible fatalities, especially among blacks: “There is this kind of a callous calculation happening that surprises me…It’s kind of like, ‘Well, this COVID is killing old people and, Oh, well. It’s killing black people, and poor people and essential workers. Oh, well.’”

To such deeper and older accounts of systematic neglect and marginalization of African-Americans, and their targeting by law enforcement, is joined the more recent story of America’s notorious “war on drugs.”

As Michelle Alexander, legal scholar and author of the book, The New Jim Crow, explained in an interview, “So, you know, after the drug war was declared…crack hit the streets and really began to ravage inner-city communities, and…a wave of punitiveness really washed over the United States…The drug war was a literal war. It has been, it continues to be, a literal war waged in poor communities of color complete with SWAT teams and military-style equipment and tactics…”

This greater police presence in black communities increased the chances of violent encounters and in many cases, resulted in black folk being swept up into the mass incarceration system, as Alexander explains above.

Other historians push the increased policing and surveillance even further back to the mid-60s into the early 70s. This was the time of the black unrest in places like Newark and Watts and the rise of the Black Panthers.

President Lyndon Johnson, who formulated a “War on Poverty” program to address the disaffection in the black community also sanctioned a “War on Crime,” as historian Elizabeth Hinton has shown. “By 1965, Johnson had formulated a new initiative, what he called a ‘War on Crime.’ He sent to Congress a sweeping new bill that would bulk up police forces with federal money and intensify patrols in urban areas…His initiatives provided money for police to arm themselves with military equipment — ‘military-grade rifles, tanks, riot gear, walkie-talkies, helicopters, and bulletproof vests.’”

What is abundantly clear is that the police have always been the frontline of an apathetic and skittish administration, which has deliberately under-invested in the upliftment of African-Americans. The police, especially the white officers, do their superior’s bidding besides imbibing all the common prejudices against the African-Americans.

Such is the threat that an oppressed, marginalized, brutalized community poses to them that their immediate reaction, despite whatever their training manual says, despite a child or an adult in front of them who is unarmed, is to pull their gun and deal with the supposed threat first.

But the story of the economic disadvantages that the African-Americans suffer from  cannot be ignored. Though, as several incidents including the one with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates have demonstrated, more well-placed blacks are not necessarily exempt from being stereotyped and viewed with suspicion, the likelihood of poorer blacks being the target of police violence is greater.

The sharp economic divides between blacks and whites are evident in most places in the US. Minneapolis, in the white-majority state of Minnesota, has parts that are poor and economically depressed. As an African-American city official from Minneapolis wrote recently, “Minneapolis hosts some of the worst disparities between black and white success in America.” Similar glaring gaps were found in the areas surrounding the town of Ferguson where protests had broken out in 2014.

While police brutality is certainly a real, existential issue for black Americans, the calamity of the coronavirus has laid bare their vulnerabilities in a stark and undeniable manner. Police brutality and the threat posed by the black body seems embedded deep in America’s history and psyche. So is the socio-economic marginalization of African-Americans.

The protests and reform movements, of course, rightfully seek changes to police operating procedures,  greater conversation on issues of race and solutions like community-control over police. Many organizations seek a minimum of accountability to prosecute the guilty police officers and reopening of old cases to bring a sense of justice.

The tactics and beliefs of the Black Panther Party in struggling against the structures of racism and inequality can be instructive. While advocating for neighborhood self-defence groups to address issues of police brutality, they also campaigned for socio-economic rights, managing their own free breakfast and liberation school programs.

While the current anger and outrage is understandable and protesting the institutionalized racism that pervades the police force is the need of the hour, longer term goals of pressing for socio-economic changes cannot be left by the wayside. Otherwise, it is possible, little substantial difference will accrue to the lives of African-Americans.

Umang Kumar is a writer currently based in Delhi NCR.

Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/vbrawat https://www.facebook.com/vbrawat

In recent weeks, the bankruptcy of global capitalism has been exposed to millions as the system has gone into deep crisis and its representatives have failed to take the measures needed to stem COVID-19’s spread.

This has been no accident. As scientists and health care professionals shouted themselves hoarse over the need for an urgent response, Trump and the political establishment were slow to act out of a desire to defend business-as-usual and Wall Street profits.

As of April 1, more than 45,000 have died globally, with 912,000 confirmed cases of infection, as the horrifying count continues to rapidly rise. In reality this figure is only the tip of the iceberg. There is little doubt that many millions are now infected around the world. And while this has been concentrated in countries with developed economies, the biggest human toll is likely to come in less developed economies with weaker health infrastructures like Latin America, Africa, parts of the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent.

In areas that have taken more proactive steps, such as with South Korea’s mass testing program of 10,000 people daily, or in Seattle, Washington, which saw the U.S.’s first recorded case of novel coronavirus and where social distancing and other measures were adopted sooner, the curve of contagion has been somewhat flattened.

In Seattle, these measures, while still limited, were driven by pressure from social movements. Seattle’s socialist City Councilmember, Kshama Sawant, urged immediate action at the beginning of the outbreak and organized working people to make a series of demands on the political establishment, including free testing and treatment, guaranteed paid sick leave, ability to work from home, suspended rent and mortgage payments, while emphasizing the crucial need for mass testing. Though the measures taken were very far from enough, they show that when we fight, we can win gains, even in the conditions of a pandemic.

U.S. the New Epicenter

At the same time, Trump has been the world’s poster child for recklessness in his absolutely criminal approach to the crisis.

Trump’s initial response was to dismiss the threat of the virus (“This is a flu,” he said. “This is like a flu.”) and a month was lost in establishing widespread testing for COVID-19 or other urgent measures. He then failed to take the steps needed to step up the supply of protective gear or tests for frontline workers, including the nurses and doctors in increasingly crisis-wracked hospitals. A recent survey of American mayors showed just how steep the shortfall is: 28.5 million face masks, 24.4 million other items of personal protection equipment, 7.9 million test kits, and 139,000 ventilators.

The U.S. is the new global epicenter of the pandemic, and as of today over 205,000 are confirmed infected, 4,516 dead, with projected deaths of between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans. Currently, New York State and especially New York City is the national epicenter but there will soon be other epicenters, likely including Louisiana where the outbreak has rapidly developed. New York State has over 83,000 confirmed cases, 40% of the national total and more than in Hubei province in China, and 1,941 deaths. Hospitals and morgues in parts of New York City are now completely overwhelmed.

In spite of the horrific human costs, Trump and the U.S. ruling class are itching to reopen the economy, in an attempt to restore profits and stock prices.

Calls to Reopen the Economy

On March 24, Trump vowed to lift coronavirus restrictions by Easter, saying “You’ll have packed churches all over our country … I think it’ll be a beautiful time.” Under intense pressure to back down, he adjusted his message, calling instead for April 30 for a general return to work.

But Trump is far from alone in the demands to return to business as usual at any cost to workers’ health and lives.

Well before Trump’s Easter proclamation, the Wall Street Journal editorial board declared, “This won’t be popular to read in some quarters, but federal and state officials need to start adjusting their anti-virus strategy now to avoid an economic recession.”

Most brutal have been the right wing pundits like Glenn Beck who have called for “economic patriotism,” particularly by older Americans, to immediately go back to work and die as needed, to get the economy back on track.

The difference between the “economic patriotism” of right-wing pundits and the wider elite is mainly in the degree of directness, not intent.

The mainstream view of the ruling class was summed up bluntly by former Wells Fargo CEO, Dick Kovacevich, now an executive at Cisco and Cargill: “We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don’t know … Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose.”

It is of course absolutely true that an economic catastrophe is underway alongside the pandemic. There are projections that 30% of American workers may be unemployed within the next month, rivaling the Great Depression. But while Coronavirus has had a huge impact it was the tipping point for a global capitalist crisis with deep roots and which already had the potential to be more serious than the Great Recession of 2008-9 even before the pandemic.

We should not conclude that putting working people’s lives second to the needs of capitalism is just a feature of the right wing or corporate interests. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio incredibly floated the idea last week of reopening the city’s schools by April 20 before universal opposition forced him to drop it. Also for over a week after the city was locked down, construction sites building luxury apartments for the super rich continued work. This only stopped because construction workers and their unions demanded an end to a situation where workers were going up and down in elevators 20 at a time and at serious risk of infection.

New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo recently said on CNN, “We’re talking about protecting lives. There also has to be a parallel track that talks about economic viability … You can’t stop the economy forever, so we have to start to think about does everybody stay out of work?”

Of course economic activity needs to reopen at some point, but under what conditions, in whose interests, and how are these decisions made? Representatives of workers in key sectors from manufacturing to education need to have a direct say and veto in this process. Reopening the economy is not just about “flattening the curve” of the virus. It must be linked to a clear strategy, putting the lives and health of workers first, and with real resources to deal with new outbreaks which are inevitable.

Left to their own devices the bosses and the corporate politicians will move to reopen sectors of the economy heedless of workers’ safety. And if they ask us to put our lives on the line for their profits, we will need to organize in our unions and with our co-workers to fight back.

We should also be clear that the ruling class and Trump may use the opportunity of the pandemic to move to restrict basic democratic rights which we should also resolutely oppose. This has already happened in country after country, from Chile to Hungary, as the New York Times reported on March 31. They describe how Trump’s Justice Department “asked Congress for sweeping new powers, including a plan to eliminate legal protections for asylum seekers and detain people indefinitely without trial.” While Congressional leaders balked, this is a serious warning of what may be coming.

A Bailout for the Billionaires

The ruling class’s priorities were clearly reflected in the March 27 stimulus package. The bill included a whopping $425 billion in corporate bailouts which is being used to capitalize an incredible $4 trillion in loans for big business compared to a far smaller amount for ordinary people. Even the inclusion of limited measures for workers is not due to the growth of a conscience, but rather the recognition that without putting some money directly into people’s pockets the economy could collapse completely.

Bernie Sanders successfully defended a substantial expansion of unemployment and other protections, while AOC raised sharp criticisms of the bill. But we should be clear it was a mistake for them to vote for the bailout package. Working-class representatives should not give left cover for a rotten political establishment in exchange for limited reforms.

At the root of the U.S.’s vulnerability to coronavirus has been not only Trump’s breathtaking failures but also the lack of a Medicare for All style health care system. Both parties have long fought fiercely against public health care – their determination to put profit before human lives didn’t begin with the current crisis. In reality we need to go further than Medicare for All, toward a socialized medical system in which the hospitals, health care, and pharmaceutical industries are taken into democratic public ownership, and run by the workers on the basis of human health and not profit.

In the past month, the Democratic establishment has pulled out all the stops to carry out a coup on behalf of Joe Biden – who has made it clear he would veto Medicare for All – in order to block Bernie Sanders and his political revolution. Yet Biden has been so utterly inept at responding to the pandemic that there has even been speculation about an intervention at the Democratic Convention to replace him with a more capable representative of the ruling class like Andrew Cuomo. But while we completely understand the desire of many to get rid of Trump at all costs, working people can’t support Biden or Cuomo. We need to fight back against the entire corporate establishment.

Getting Organized in the Crisis

In order to win Medicare for All, affordable housing, or other real gains in the context of the global meltdown of capitalism, we need to get organized.

In the last days and weeks, working people have initiated heroic struggles against their bosses. From Instacart workers to sanitation workers in Pittsburgh to health care workers in NYC, there is a growing fightback taking place. Meanwhile, corporations like Amazon are profiting from the pandemic while providing little to no protections for their most at-risk workers, alongside a growing number of confirmed infections at Amazon warehouses.

We need to link working-class struggles to broader demands. All workers have the right to a safe workplace, and no one should have to choose between income and safety. Workers have the right to strike and refuse work, and we should get organized against efforts to demand we return to workplaces until safety policies are in place. The bosses will continue to put profit first, so we need to fight for the creation of elected worker committees to protect the needs of workers on the job. Workers and our unions must reject any suspension of collective bargaining or the right to form a union. We must fight all attacks on union rights! We must also demand “hazard pay” to all essential workers, who should be paid at least “time and a half” during the pandemic. Companies that refuse to operate under these rules should be taken into public ownership with democratic workers control and management. Sign Socialist Alternative’s petition for a bailout for working people, not big business.

Around the country, people are out of work and the rent is about to come due. An organization called Rent Strike 2020 is working with Socialist Alternative and others to build for rent strikes in the coming weeks with a demand for suspension of all rents and mortgage payments during the pandemic. If these demands are not met, they may call for a mass rent strike on May 1. A successful rent strike on this scale will require a high degree of organizing in buildings, in neighborhoods, on a citywide and a national level. But there is an absolutely urgent need, as millions of working people could face eviction during the pandemic or fall yet deeper into debt. Key to winning is renters being well organized with the backing of the wider working class including the unions.

This pandemic has laid bare how rotten and brutal capitalism is. It doesn’t have to be like this. We need to fight not only for emergency measures during the pandemic but also for an alternative to this sick system – for a socialist world in which the resources of society and big corporations are democratically owned and planned in a sane and sustainable way, for our needs instead of their profits.

Let’s show the billionaires that we won’t die for Wall Street.

Originally published in Socialist Alternative

Capitalism is facing at least three major crises. A pandemic-induced health crisis has rapidly ignited an economic crisis with yet unknown consequences for financial stability, and all of this is playing out against the backdrop of a climate crisis that cannot be addressed by “business as usual.” Until just two months ago, the news media were full of frightening images of overwhelmed firefighters, not overwhelmed health-care providers.

This triple crisis has revealed several problems with how we do capitalism, all of which must be solved at the same time that we address the immediate health emergency. Otherwise, we will simply be solving problems in one place while creating new ones elsewhere. That is what happened with the 2008 financial crisis. Policymakers flooded the world with liquidity without directing it toward good investment opportunities. As a result, the money ended up back in a financial sector that was (and remains) unfit for purpose.

The COVID-19 crisis is exposing still more flaws in our economic structures, not least the increasing precarity of work, owing to the rise of the gig economy and a decades-long deterioration of workers’ bargaining power. Telecommuting simply is not an option for most workers, and although governments are extending some assistance to workers with regular contracts, the self-employed may find themselves left high and dry.

Worse, governments are now extending loans to businesses at a time when private debt is already historically high. In the United States, total household debt just before the current crisis was $14.15 trillion, which is $1.5 trillion higher than it was in 2008 (in nominal terms). And lest we forget, it was high private debt that caused the global financial crisis.

Unfortunately, over the past decade, many countries have pursued austerity, as if public debt were the problem. The result has been to erode the very public-sector institutions that we need to overcome crises like the coronavirus pandemic. Since 2015, the United Kingdom has cut public-health budgets by £1 billion ($1.2 billion), increasing the burden on doctors in training (many of whom have left the National Health Service altogether), and reducing the long-term investments needed to ensure that patients are treated in safe, up-to-date, fully staffed facilities. And in the US – which has never had a properly funded public-health system – the Trump administration has been persistently trying to cut funding and capacity for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other critical institutions.

On top of these self-inflicted wounds, an overly “financialized” business sector has been siphoning value out of the economy by rewarding shareholders through stock-buyback schemes, rather than shoring up long-run growth by investing in research and development, wages, and worker training. As a result, households have been depleted of financial cushions, making it harder to afford basic goods like housing and education.

The bad news is that the COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating all these problems. The good news is that we can use the current state of emergency to start building a more inclusive and sustainable economy. The point is not to delay or block government support, but to structure it properly. We must avoid the mistakes of the post-2008 era, when bailouts allowed corporations to reap even higher profits once the crisis was over, but failed to lay the foundation for a robust and inclusive recovery.

This time, rescue measures absolutely must come with conditions attached. Now that the state is back to playing a leading role, it must be cast as the hero rather than as a naive patsy. That means delivering immediate solutions, but designing them in such a way as to serve the public interest over the long term.

For example, conditionalities can be put in place for government support to businesses. Firms receiving bailouts should be asked to retain workers, and ensure that once the crisis is over they will invest in worker training and improved working conditions. Better still, as in Denmark, government should be supporting businesses to continue paying wages even when workers are not working – simultaneously helping households to retain their incomes, preventing the virus from spreading, and making it easier for businesses to resume production once the crisis is over.

Moreover, bailouts should be designed to steer larger companies to reward value creation instead of value extraction, preventing share buybacks and encouraging investment in sustainable growth and a reduced carbon footprint. Having declared last year that it will embrace a stakeholder value model, this is the Business Roundtable’s chance to back its words with action. If corporate America is still dragging its feet now, we should call its bluff.

When it comes to households, governments should look beyond loans to the possibility of debt relief, especially given current high levels of private debt. At a minimum, creditor payments should be frozen until the immediate economic crisis is resolved, and direct cash injections used for those households that are in direst need.

And the US should offer government guarantees to pay 80-100% of distressed companies’ wage bills, as the UK and many European Union and Asian countries have done.

It is also time to rethink public-private partnerships. Too often, these arrangements are less symbiotic than parasitic. The effort to develop a COVID-19 vaccine could become yet another one-way relationship in which corporations reap massive profits by selling back to the public a product that was born of taxpayer-funded research. Indeed, despite US taxpayers’ significant public investment in vaccine development, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, recently conceded that newly developed COVID-19 treatments or vaccines might not be affordable to all Americans.

We desperately need entrepreneurial states that will invest more in innovation – from artificial intelligence to public health to renewables. But as this crisis reminds us, we also need states that know how to negotiate, so that the benefits of public investment return to the public.

A killer virus has exposed major weaknesses within Western capitalist economies. Now that governments are on a war footing, we have an opportunity to fix the system. If we don’t, we will stand no chance against the third major crisis – an increasingly uninhabitable planet – and all the smaller crises that will come with it in the years and decades ahead.

Mariana Mazzucato is Professor of Economics of Innovation and Public Value and Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). She is the author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, which was shortlisted for the Financial Times-McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.

Originally published in Project Syndicate

As the coronavirus sweeps across the planet, leaving death and mayhem in its wake, many theories are being expounded to explain its ferocity. One, widely circulated within right-wing conspiracy circles, is that it originated as a biological weapon developed at a secret Chinese military lab in the city of Wuhan that somehow (perhaps intentionally?) escaped into the civilian population. Although that “theory” has been thoroughly debunked, President Trump and his acolytes continue to call Covid-19 the China Virus, the Wuhan Virus, or even the “Kung Flu,” claiming its global spread was the result of an inept and secretive Chinese government response. Scientists, by and large, believe the virus originated in bats and was transmitted to humans by wildlife sold at a Wuhan seafood market. But perhaps there’s another far more ominous possibility to consider: that this is one of Mother Nature’s ways of resisting humanity’s assault on her essential life systems.

Let’s be clear: this pandemic is a world-shattering phenomenon of massive proportions. Not only has it infected hundreds of thousands of people across the planet, killing more than 40,000 of them, but it’s brought the global economy to a virtual stand-still, potentially crushing millions of businesses, large and small, while putting tens of millions, or possibly hundreds of millions, of people out of work. In the past, disasters of this magnitude have toppled empires, triggered mass rebellions, and caused widespread famine and starvation. This upheaval, too, will produce widespread misery and imperil the survival of numerous governments.

Understandably, our forebears came to view such calamities as manifestations of the fury of gods incensed by human disrespect for and mistreatment of their universe, the natural world. Today, educated people generally dismiss such notions, but scientists have recently been discovering that human impacts on the environment, especially the burning of fossil fuels, are producing feedback loops causing increasingly severe harm to communities across the globe, in the form of extreme storms, persistent droughts, massive wildfires, and recurring heat waves of an ever deadlier sort.

Climate scientists also speak of “singularities,” “non-linear events,” and “tipping points” — the sudden and irreversible collapse of vital ecological systems with far-ranging, highly destructive consequences for humanity. Evidence for such tipping points is growing — for example in the unexpectedly rapid melting of the Arctic icecap. In that context, a question naturally arises: Is the coronavirus a stand-alone event, independent of any other mega-trends, or does it represent some sort of catastrophic tipping point?

It will be some time before scientists can answer that question with any certainty. There are, however, good reasons to believe that this might be the case and, if so, perhaps it’s high time humanity reconsiders its relationship with nature.

Humans vs. Nature

It’s common to think of human history as an evolutionary process in which broad, long-studied trends like colonialism and post-colonialism have largely shaped human affairs. When sudden disruptions have occurred, they are usually attributed to, say, the collapse of a long-lasting dynasty or the rise of an ambitious new ruler. But the course of human affairs has also been altered — often in even more dramatic ways — by natural occurrences, ranging from prolonged droughts to catastrophic volcanic activity to (yes, of course) plagues and pandemics. The ancient Minoan civilization of the eastern Mediterranean, for example, is widely believed to have disintegrated following a powerful volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (now known as Santorini) in the 17th century BCE. Archaeological evidence further suggests that other once-thriving cultures were similarly undermined or even extinguished by natural disasters.

It’s hardly surprising that the survivors of such catastrophes often attributed their misfortunes to the anger of various gods over human excesses and depredations. In the ancient world, sacrifices — even human ones — were considered a necessity to appease such angry spirits. At the onset of the Trojan War, for example, the Greek goddess Artemis, protectress of wild animals, the wilderness, and the moon, stilled the winds needed to propel the Greek fleet to Troy because Agamemnon, its commander, had killed a sacred deer. To appease her and restore the essential winds, Agamemnon felt obliged — or so the poet Homer tells us — to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigenia (the plot line for many a Greek and modern tragedy).

In more recent times, educated people have generally seen coronavirus-style calamities as either inexplicable acts of God or as explicable, if surprising, natural events. With the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution in Europe, moreover, many influential thinkers came to believe that humans could use science and technology to overpower nature and so harness it to the will of humanity. The seventeenth-century French mathematician René Descartes, for example, wrote of employing science and human knowledge so that “we can… render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.”

This outlook undergirded the view, common in the last three centuries, that the Earth was “virgin” territory (especially when it came to the colonial possessions of the major powers) and so fully open to exploitation by human entrepreneurs. This led to the deforestation of vast areas, as well as the extinction or near-extinction of many animals, and in more recent times, to the plunder of underground mineral and energy deposits.

As it happened, though, this planet proved anything but an impotent victim of colonization and exploitation. Human mistreatment of the natural environment has turned out to have distinctly painful boomerang effects. The ongoing destruction of the Amazon rain forest, for example, is altering Brazil’s climate, raising temperatures and reducing rainfall in significant ways, with painful consequences for local farmers and even more distant urban dwellers. (And the release of vast quantities of carbon dioxide, thanks to increasingly massive forest fires, will only increase the pace of climate change globally.) Similarly, the technique of hydraulic fracking, used to extract oil and natural gas trapped in underground shale deposits, can trigger earthquakes that damage aboveground structures and endanger human life. In so many ways like these, Mother Nature strikes back when her vital organs suffer harm.

This interplay between human activity and planetary behavior has led some analysts to rethink our relationship with the natural world. They have reconceptualized the Earth as a complex matrix of living and inorganic systems, all (under normal conditions) interacting to maintain a stable balance. When one component of the larger matrix is damaged or destroyed, the others respond in their unique ways in attempting to restore the natural order of things. Originally propounded by the environmental scientist James Lovelock in the 1960s, this notion has often been described as “the Gaia Hypothesis,” after the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, the ancestral mother of all life.

Climate Tipping Points

Posing the ultimate threat to planetary health, climate change — a direct consequence of the human impulse to dump ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, potentially heating the planet to the breaking point — is guaranteed to generate the most brutal of all such feedback loops. By emitting ever more carbon dioxide and other gases, humans are fundamentally altering planetary chemistry and posing an almost unimaginable threat to natural ecosystems. Climate-change deniers in the Trumpian mode continue to insist that we can keep doing this with no cost to our way of life. It is, however, becoming increasingly apparent that the more we alter the climate, the more the planet will respond in ways guaranteed to endanger human life and prosperity.

The main engine of climate change is the greenhouse effect, as all those greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere entrap ever more radiated solar heat from the Earth’s surface, raising temperatures worldwide and so altering global climate patterns. Until now, much of this added heat and carbon dioxide has been absorbed by the planet’s oceans, resulting in rising water temperatures and the increased acidification of their waters. This, in turn, has already led to, among other deleterious effects, the mass die-off of coral reefs — the preferred habitat of many of the fish species on which large numbers of humans rely for their sustenance and livelihoods. Just as consequential, higher ocean temperatures have provided the excess energy that has fueled many of the most destructive hurricanes of recent times, including Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Maria, Florence, and Dorian.

A warmer atmosphere can also sustain greater accumulations of moisture, making possible the prolonged downpours and catastrophic flooding being experienced in many parts of the world, including the upper Midwest in the United States. In other areas, rainfall is decreasing and heat waves are becoming more frequent and prolonged, resulting in devastating wildfires of the sort witnessed in the American West in recent years and in Australia this year.

In all such ways, Mother Nature, you might say, is striking back. It is, however, the potential for “non-linear” events and “tipping points” that has some climate scientists especially concerned, fearing that we now live on what might be thought of as an avenging planet. While many climate effects, like prolonged heat waves, will become more pronounced over time, other effects, it is now believed, will occur suddenly, with little warning, and could result in large-scale disruptions in human life (as in this coronavirus moment). You might think of this as Mother Nature saying, “Stop! Do not go past this point or there will be dreadful consequences!”

Scientists are understandably cautious in discussing such possibilities, as they are harder to study than linear events like rising world temperatures. But the concern is there. “Large-scale singular events (also called ‘tipping points,’ or critical thresholds) are abrupt and drastic changes in physical, ecological, or social systems” brought about by the relentless rise in temperatures, noted the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its comprehensive 2014 assessment of anticipated impacts. Such events, the IPCC pointed out, “pose key risks because of the potential magnitude of the consequences; the rate at which they would occur; and, depending on this rate, the limited ability of society to cope with them.”

Six years later, that striking description sounds eerily like the present moment.

Until now, the tipping points of greatest concern to scientists have been the rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Those two massive reservoirs of ice contain the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of square miles of water. Should they melt ever more quickly with all that water flowing into neighboring oceans, a sea level rise of 20 feet or more can be expected, inundating many of the world’s most populous coastal cities and forcing billions of people to relocate. In its 2014 study, the IPCC predicted that this might occur over several centuries, at least offering plenty of time for humans to adapt, but more recent research indicates that those two ice sheets are melting far more rapidly than previously believed — and so a sharp increase in sea levels can be expected well before the end of this century with catastrophic consequences for coastal communities.

The IPCC also identified two other possible tipping points with potentially far-reaching consequences: the die-off of the Amazon rain forest and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Both are already under way, reducing the survival prospects of flora and fauna in their respective habitats. As these processes gain momentum, entire ecosystems are likely to be obliterated and many species killed off, with drastic consequences for the humans who rely on them in so many ways (from food to pollination chains) for their survival. But as is always the case in such transformations, other species — perhaps insects and microorganisms highly dangerous to humans — could occupy those spaces emptied by extinction.

Climate Change and Pandemics

Back in 2014, the IPCC did not identify human pandemics among potential climate-induced tipping points, but it did provide plenty of evidence that climate change would increase the risk of such catastrophes. This is true for several reasons. First, warmer temperatures and more moisture are conducive to the accelerated reproduction of mosquitoes, including those carrying malaria, the zika virus, and other highly infectious diseases. Such conditions were once largely confined to the tropics, but as a result of global warming, formerly temperate areas are now experiencing more tropical conditions, resulting in the territorial expansion of mosquito breeding grounds. Accordingly, malaria and zika are on the rise in areas that never previously experienced such diseases. Similarly, dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease that infects millions of people every year, is spreading especially quickly due to rising world temperatures.

Combined with mechanized agriculture and deforestation, climate change is also undermining subsistence farming and indigenous lifestyles in many parts of the world, driving millions of impoverished people to already crowded urban centers, where health facilities are often overburdened and the risk of contagion ever greater. “Virtually all the projected growth in populations will occur in urban agglomerations,” the IPCC noted then. Adequate sanitation is lacking in many of these cities, particularly in the densely populated shantytowns that often surround them. “About 150 million people currently live in cities affected by chronic water shortages, and by 2050, unless there are rapid improvements in urban environments, the number will rise to almost a billion.”

Such newly settled urban dwellers often retain strong ties to family members still in the countryside who, in turn, may come in contact with wild animals carrying deadly viruses. This appears to have been the origin of the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014-2016, which affected tens of thousands of people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Scientists believe that the Ebola virus (like the coronavirus) originated in bats and was then transmitted to gorillas and other wild animals that coexist with people living on the fringes of tropical forests. Somehow, a human or humans contracted the disease from exposure to such creatures and then transmitted it to visitors from the city who, upon their return, infected many others.

The coronavirus appears to have had somewhat similar origins. In recent years, hundreds of millions of once impoverished rural families moved to burgeoning industrial cities in central and coastal China, including places like Wuhan. Although modern in so many respects, with its subways, skyscrapers, and superhighways, Wuhan also retained vestiges of the countryside, including markets selling wild animals still considered by some inhabitants to be normal parts of their diet. Many of those animals were trucked in from semi-rural areas hosting large numbers of bats, the apparent source of both the coronavirus and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, outbreak of 2013, which also arose in China. Scientific research suggests that breeding grounds for bats, like mosquitoes, are expanding significantly as a result of rising world temperatures.

The global coronavirus pandemic is the product of a staggering multitude of factors, including the air links connecting every corner of the planet so intimately and the failure of government officials to move swiftly enough to sever those links. But underlying all of that is the virus itself. Are we, in fact, facilitating the emergence and spread of deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus, SARS, and the coronavirus through deforestation, haphazard urbanization, and the ongoing warming of the planet? It may be too early to answer such a question unequivocally, but the evidence is growing that this is the case. If so, we had better take heed.

Heeding Mother Nature’s Warning

Suppose this interpretation of the Covid-19 pandemic is correct. Suppose that the coronavirus is nature’s warning, its way of telling us that we’ve gone too far and must alter our behavior lest we risk further contamination. What then?

To adapt a phrase from the Cold War era, what humanity may need to do is institute a new policy of “peaceful coexistence” with Mother Nature. This approach would legitimize the continued presence of large numbers of humans on the planet but require that they respect certain limits in their interactions with its ecosphere. We humans could use our talents and technologies to improve life in areas we’ve long occupied, but infringement elsewhere would be heavily restricted. Natural disasters — floods, volcanoes, earthquakes, and the like — would, of course, still occur, but not at a rate exceeding what we experienced in the pre-industrial past.

Implementation of such a strategy would, at the very least, require putting the brakes on climate change as swiftly as possible through the rapid and thorough elimination of human-induced carbon emissions — something that has, in fact, happened in at least a modest way, and however briefly, thanks to this Covid-19 moment. Deforestation would also have to be halted and the world’s remaining wilderness areas preserved as is forever. Any further despoliation of the oceans would have to be stopped, including the dumping of wastes, plastics, engine fuel, and runoff pesticides.

The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up. The only way to avert such a catastrophe and assure ourselves that Earth will not become an avenger planet is to heed Mother Nature’s warning and cease the further desecration of essential ecosystems.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, including the just-published All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (Metropolitan Books).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Originally published by TomDispatch.com

If the warfare against each other and Planet earth continues, the Cosmic experiment with human life, which in principle could support its  harmonious and joyous flourishing existence far into the future, could soon come to a premature end. This would be one of the supreme tragedies of the universe.

Our Biological Vulnerability

The Pandemic Covid-19 as it builds in intensity is turning our attention to our biological vulnerability on this planet. It is also turning our attention to the inadequacy of our understanding of that vulnerability.

It is showing us that we are living in contradiction to biosphere planetary Gaia equilibrium. (Gaia Theory: the earth and all life on it as an interdependent organism)

We were given ideal ecological conditions for our evolutionary development when our journey began some eight million years ago; then when standing upright four to three million years ago and then when beginning to develop a large brain cage 400 to 300 thousand years ago. But now with over seven billion in population, (more than double since 1950) mostly packed together like sardines in a can and in a planetary “free-for-all” potpourri of ecologically destructive social, political, economic religious systems for the first time in our evolutionary history we find ourselves in violation of the divinely grounded Gaia laws of nature; laws that are rooted in the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.

As for the virus, in the long run there will be a vaccine. It will then be far more manageable. Nevertheless, the question before us will remain:

Will Covid-19 teach us the underlying Gaia lesson or will the self-destructive demonic within us continue to be a force leading to Homo sapiens extinction?

Go to my Blog 55 and read my essay:  “Our Biosphere Problem”

https://countercurrents.org/2018/06/17/our-biosphere-problem/

Essay Summary

Over the next 50/150 years our Biosphere will undergo drastic temperature change. That change may bring about our extinction. Unlike past extinctions, this one will not be brought on by a random meteorite/asteroid or natural planetary happening. It will be self-inflicted by Homo sapiens.

A WAY TO A GLOBAL SOLUTION

Understanding of the “Demonic” by way of

A world dialogical imperitive leading to religion/science pluralism

Religion

Religious belief as it exists in its varied permutations throughout the world is a powerful force.

Because our planetary survival problem is a global problem, leaders of the world religious belief systems need to come together and reach consensus as to commonality in thought and how that can be energized so as to find a way for continued human existence on Planet earth.

They will find that many seemingly different religious assertions that at first appear contradictory underneath express complementary truths.

This is not a call for debilitating religious relativistic debate. It is a call for definition of commonality of religious objectives. People can strongly affirm the primary doctrines of their faith while determining universalities.

Physical Sciences

As for the physical scientists, they too need to come together and acknowledge a Modern Age fact: There are cosmic truths within which a deeper understanding of the confluence between religion and science can be found. That understanding must center on the need for an understanding of the continuance of Homo sapiens on Planet earth from a scientific, philosophic and religious viewpoint. (Yes and that includes atheists)

Social Sciences

And as for the in the Social Sciences it is time for it to be concentrating attention on the eukaryotic/neurotic/psychotic thinking imperfection (religion called the demonic) that we brought with us into this New Age.

A New Social Political Economic – and Religious – Order

Such a form of world-wide exploration and reconciliation could establish a framework for a new social political economic – and religious – order based on divine values replacing the present world order; which is now without question under demonic control.

A few quotes from one of our great American thinkers can give insight. In my view he and his publishers wrongly presented its title. It should have been: (See Sources NY Times Below)

Religion in America Gone Wrong

The Christian Gospel for Americans  A Systematic Theology

David Ray Griffin

God’s Experiment

“If the warfare against each other and the rest of the earth continues, the creator’s hope for this planet, which in principle could support the harmonious and joyous flourishing of human beings and other forms of life far into the future – God’s experiment with human beings – could come to a grossly premature end. This would be, we can only suppose, one of the supreme tragedies of the universe.”

The Demonic

“Jesus clearly believed, in line with widespread beliefs of the time that the world was under demonic rule.”

“Demonic power is now even more complete than in New Testament Times in effective control of the trajectory of human civilization. This control is now so complete that, although we are on the verge of destroying human civilization and much of the rest of the planet’s advanced forms of life, our leaders are, rather than changing course, actively fanning the flames of conflict.”

“The present world order is demonic because it is based on principles that are diametrically opposed to divine purposes and powerful enough to defeat them, and because it is idolatrous giving primary devotion to wealth and power.”

The Need for Religious Pluralism

“Promotion of religious pluralism in our world today is vitally important.”

“The conclusion that Christianity, like every other religion, is limited, said Knitter, leads to the dialogical imperative, because it is through dialogue with members of other religious traditions that we can expand or correct the truth that we have, therefore overcoming the limitations of our own viewpoint.”

“A theological impetus for dialogue is that once we see that our own religion is not the one and only true religion, we realize that other traditions may have truths and values that are not provided, at least as clearly, in our own religion.”

“If civilization is to have much hope of surviving even the present century, we must find solutions to our global problems of war, imperialism, nuclear weapons and global warming, plus ocean acidification.”

“The world’s religions, with their ability to motivate people could provide a powerful force for the kind of civilizational transformation we need if they cooperate toward that end in the name of their common values. But thus far the religions have been the source of discord as much as sources of solidarity. The growth of religious pluralism in the various traditions could encourage a mutual respect and appreciation that would facilitate cooperation.”

“Growth of religious pluralism is now especially important among Christians. This is because the tendency of religious absolutism has been very strong because Christians have in recent centuries had far more power – militarily, economically and culturally – than adherents to other religions, making for the Christian tendency to accept religious absolutism.”

Abrahamic Recognition of the Demonic

“Many systematic thoughts have no discussion of the prophets; they go directly from Scripture, God and Humanity to Jesus. But to understand Jesus, it is essential to know something about the prophets.”

A Few Judaic Christian Quotes

Amos 750 BCE  2:6-7

“The elite deserve punishment because they sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals – they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and push the afflicted out of the way.”

Isaiah 740-55 BCE  (685 year period)  24:5-6

“The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants. For they have transgressed laws, violated statues broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth. And its inhabitants suffer from the guilt.”

Matthew 70 AD  19:24

“Jesus said: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.”

Ephesians 20 AD  6:10-12

“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly.”

SOURCES:

The Christian Gospel for Americans  A Systematic Theology

David Ray Griffin

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Watch listen Jane Goodall’s brief beautiful message

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOkBBMFlTpM&feature=youtu.be

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To understand all that we will be losing listen to Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky The Rite of Spring Leonard Bernstein

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From The New York Times: In God We Divide The political dimensions of worship have never been greater.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/religion-democrats-republicans.html?smid=em-share

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David Anderson brings together a wide range of interests in his writings, namely; theology, history, evolutionary anthropology, philosophy, geopolitics, and economics. He has written four books. The fourth is about a necessary geo political, social, religious, economic paradigm shift for human survival. Go to: http://inquiryabraham.com/new-book.html

ABSTRACT

The novel corona virus or COVID 19 has finally triggered the collapse of the industrial/capitalist economy. In the first part of this article we outline this collapse and the solution that has been proposed for the last decade and a half by a variety of green initiatives all over the world. However the COVID 19 has also posed an unforeseen challenge. About the best method of facing the challenge of COVID 19 is to maintain social distance in coming 6 months or so. But then how do we implement these ‘solutions’ keeping the social distance that is necessitated by this very COVID 19 that has triggered the present collapse. Can we wait for 6 months for the storm to be over? In Part II we will consider this.

Part I: The Collapse

1) Ever since 2008 financial melt down, the world economy has been on a slow recession. It has been said that it has been the longest drawn recession in the history of capitalism. People expected a repeat of the phenomenon in about 10 years based on earlier cycles in the past 50 years. Through out last year a bigger recession has been setting all over the world. Many have been expecting a ‘Black Swan’ (The black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise and has a major effect.) event to trigger this. Only a couple of months ago people were talking of Australian bush fires or locust attack could be such a trigger. As it turned out, COVID 19 proved to be the black swan event.

2) This event is once in a century event and has been compared to Spanish Flu of 1918 when 50 million people died. In India18 million died, so much so that there was no population increase between 1911 and 1921 census. Other such event in India have been Bengal famine of 1943 and partition riots of 1947 where the death toll has been in hundreds of thousands, approaching a million.

3) This time it is different from any of those events mentioned above. We do not know what the number of deaths would be. Probably we would never know in India because of under reporting. However this crisis is an end of era event – end of the era of industrial society/capitalism era.

4) The reason is that, it is bringing a host of other crises together and the whole crisis is bigger than the parts. The parts are: 1. Global Warming 2. Resource depletion 3. Ecological degradation 4. Growing Inequality and Social Unrest.

5) The results of this mega crisis are: i. Collapse of the present economy ii. End of globalisation iii. A big reduction of many sectors of economy e.g. air travels, auto industry, tourism, petro- chemical industry, iron and steel, coal and many many more.

6) The alternative will consist of: 1. Equality 2. Scaling down of the use of resources-particularly energy 3. Local self-sufficient economy 4. Ecological restoration of the present degraded ecology 5. A value system or ethical base which is more cooperative and less competitive than the present society.

7) At a political level it will be federation of states based on ecology. For example present day India can be a federation of 65 states based on ecological regions. The borders – both internal and international borders will be ecological soft borders – a border across which there is no tension.

8) How the local will be organised depends on local ecology. I have elaborate this in the booklet: A call for local action in the wake of global emergency.

9) Essentially there will be about 10 areas around in which the local economy will reorganised. Some existing examples are the transition town movement cities around the world.

10) These 10 areas are: 1. Air 2. Water 3. Waste Management 4. Food Production 5. Energy 6. Health 7. Education 8. Housing 9. Commons and Heritage 10. Employment Generation and Entrepreneurship.

For details see the booklet ‘Kabira khada bazar mein: A call for local action in the wake of local emergency’.

Part II: Rebuilding the economy keeping the social distance

1) On the face of it it seems an insoluble problem. We have the theoretical option of waiting fort six months – let the storm blow over and then we start rebuilding. But we don’t know what happen in these 6 months and whether we can delay it by these 6 months. So we have to start thinking how to start rebuilding the economy through facing COVID 19 – through following the discipline of social distance.

2) One possible answer is to study the rise and decline of this pandemic. We notice that it started in China in may be December 2019 and while it spread quickly all over the world, in China itself it has been brought under control. In many parts of the world its spread is minimal and they may escape relatively unhurt. These parts of the world are ‘undeveloped’ in the modern sense, that is penetration of capitalist society is minimal. So the new initiative should start simultaneously in both the areas: Areas which have recovered and areas which are not likely to be affected seriously.

3) We see at once that there are advantages in both the areas. In the areas where recovery has occurred-they are very developed and with high level of education, health care and environmental consciousness. Some thing like the conditions that were obtained in Cuba in 1991 when they faced this kind of crisis. Can we expect that these areas – China, South Korea, Japan etc. may respond like Cuba did?

4) The backward/undeveloped areas. Many of these areas are tribal/indigenous people’s area. As it is they don’t face any problem on their own. Many of them have healthy traditions of the kind of things that we desire. They don’t need to rebuild so much. The main problem is to remove the capitalist penetration and influences of the market economy – influences of the glitter of urban life – clothes, films, English medium schools, smart phones, motorcycles and so on. It has been a tough problem so far, but with the economic collapse it may become relatively easier to face these problems.

6) In India it started with Kerala on January 30 and Kerala will probably recover first. There has been a talk of Transition Kerala. Such a group should immediately get active through social medial/whatssap etc. Also within Kerala, particularly in Northern Kerala there are indigenous areas and work may start there first.

5) What we do in areas which are in the middle of the pandemic? The first thing to do is to organise relief within the paradigm of social distance. Solutions are emerging daily all over the world. Basically home delivery of food and medicines to all the people and keep the health services going. Meanwhile through electronic/social media local green groups should start planning concrete plans of recovery and rebuilding step by step. Many ngos have good experience in disaster management. Some good initiatives will come from them.

March 21, 2020

P. S. I wrote the above on March 21. Within 7 days the collapse, at least in India is staring at us. (See Jayati Ghosh’s interview by Karan Thapar, The Wire.) Even that is old before the lock down. In the last two days alarming reports are coming. So I decide to circulate widely for what it is worth. Who knows if we will access to internet.

T. Vijayendra (1943- ) was born in Mysore, grew in Indore and went to IIT Kharagpur to get a B. Tech. in Electronics (1966). After a year’s stint at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, he got drawn into the whirlwind times of the late 60s. Since then, he has always been some kind of political-social activist. His brief for himself is the education of Left wing cadres and so he almost exclusively publishes in the Left wing journal Frontier, published from Kolkata. For the last nine years, he has been active in the field of ‘Peak Oil’ and is a founder member of Peak Oil India and Ecologise. Since 2015 he has been involved in Ecologise! Camps and in 2016 he initiated Ecologise Hyderabad. He divides his time between an organic farm at the foothills of Western Ghats, watching birds, writing fiction and Hyderabad. He has published a book dealing with resource depletions, three books of essays, two collections of short stories, a novella and an autobiography. Vijayendra has been a ‘dedicated’ cyclist all his life, meaning, he neither took a driving licence nor did he ever drive a fossil fuel based vehicle.

Email: t.vijayendra@gmail.com

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.  When history is compressed enough and people bend their minds to new problems, consciousness can change with lightning speed.  Because of the emotional rollercoaster that is accompanying the Covid-19 pandemic, the world’s collective weltanschauung is shifting noticeably to the left.

Fear and panic are poor advisers, of course. Absurd, visceral predictions are floating on the internet and from the lips of people everywhere. I have heard conspiracy theories and divinations of impending social and economic collapse that run the gamut from rising nationalism, military dictatorship, world war and zombie apocalypse to mass de-urbanization, a return to the countryside and a hybrid form of postmodern feudalism.

Such views are not on all fours.  Take the last one, for instance.  It is ridiculous to speak of any large-scale return to the countryside.  If the failed attempts to create communism in Russia and China achieved anything (something capitalism also achieved) it was the elimination of the individual peasant household as a major factor in production.

But what if Covid-19 kills a lot more people than the algorithms project?  What if it becomes a new Great Plague, or something akin to the merciless onslaught of smallpox and measles that ravaged the New World after 1492?  These disasters claimed so many lives that the price of labor soared and the value of land and other capital plummeted.  With such a shortage of labor, workers ate and dressed better, and landlords complained that the humble turned up their nose at employment.  Clearly, this sort of situation cannot benefit the planet’s movers and shakers.

Not to mention that the Grim Reaper cannot wreak such extreme havoc on the world’s population.  Modern medicine, the great expansion of the state (a result of WWI), the digital revolution and speed with which information now travels, will most likely restrict the danse macabre to a quick twist rather than a long waltz.  This is reflected in the statistics, which pale in comparison with the Great Plague or even the Spanish “lady,” the deadly 1918-20 influenza epidemic.

Covid-19 is much more Darwinian and less indiscriminate or “democratic” than past pandemics.  It tends to spare the young.  Even in the worst case scenario, it will make the world a younger place than it is already (especially in developing areas).

Yet aren’t the rich and powerful benefiting from the crisis?  Not really.  Although the pandemic is a great opportunity to cut wages, any advantage gained from reducing salaries is offset by the tremendous decline in world trade.  Despite their policies of austerity, quantitative easing, buying securities and keeping interest rates near zero, the volume of world trade was falling long before the Covid-19 crisis unleashed itself on the world.

The crisis has revealed the incompatibility of the existing system with the health of billions of human beings. Decades of austerity decimated the healthcare system in many countries. This was done to cut “unnecessary” spending and compel people to seek private alternatives, opening a very lucrative field of investment for private healthcare companies. Many doctors jumped on the bandwagon, exchanging the Hippocratic Oath for a hypocritical one as they milked money from broken bones, internal pathologies and the like.

The free-market system is facing an existential threat.  It cannot survive it the way it has in the past—through world war, which ensured the destruction of so much capital that profits could be had in the process of rebuilding.

The growth of post-War production around the world glutted the international market and profit margins tanked.  Beginning in the 1980s, investors began to seek miraculous profits in non-essential spheres. First among these was the financial sector, which swelled far beyond the extent justified by the value created in the productive economy.  Neoliberal, “financialized” capitalists also invested surplus capital in a range of other speculative gambles.  These included real estate bubbles, commodity and shares markets, and unicorns that rode the wave of smart technology and the proliferation of app-based services.  You know them well: Uber, AirBnB, Instacart, Snapchat, Pinterest and Dropbox, among others.

Surf the net and you cannot fail to notice a lot of people are still calling the pandemic a hoax.  This is obviously wrong, but such comments express the fears people have that they are being duped again and that the rich and powerful will use the crisis against them.

Still and all, the big grab is over.  And it is unreasonable to expect that neoliberal “casino” capitalists will take advantage of the falling cost of labor to reinvent themselves as new Henry Fords, John Rockefellers and Andrew Carnegies.

The Great Depression shrank the world’s economy and destroyed international trade and travel.  The Covid-19 pandemic is doing the same, only with a colossal difference.  It appears we are lucky in our misfortune.  This time a tremendous blow to the world economy cannot lead to global war because the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in the summer of 1945 made total war impossible.

Epidemics are a mirror for humanity, reflecting existing moral relationships that governments and institutions have toward people, as well as those that people have towards one another.  There is a marked difference between the way the former and the latter have reacted to the Covid-19 crisis. When the pandemic first began, a number of governments peddled vanilla statements that played down the danger. Their main concern was not the health of their citizens, but saving the profits of the banks and monopolies. The contrast with how simple people around the world are reacting to the crisis is sharp.

The Covid-19 pandemic is much worse than a natural calamity.  Greta Thunberg’s strident words about climate change seem almost irrelevant now.  As during a war, people’s lives are abruptly interrupted and families are torn apart and separated.  Unlike war, however, the crisis is uniting people across all manner of boundaries and borders.  The effect it is having on a grassroots level is akin to that one might expect from an attack on our planet by extraterrestrials.

Governments are worried that people will begin taking matters into their own hands. In a number of countries, including Italy, Spain but also the United States, employees have intervened directly and imposed the closure of some plants.  It is important to note that strikes were on the rise before the pandemic erupted.  In September and October of 2019, for example, the United States witnessed the first national strike by auto workers in more than forty years.

People are demanding the abolition of the profit motive in medicine and publicly owned health services. Some are even calling for the immediate requisitioning of hotels, empty luxury apartment blocks and mansions in order to turn them into hostels for sick people.

If this crisis leads to a return to production, this can only be a good thing.  It will force millions of people, especially in economically advanced countries, off their posteriors. Sedentary social behavior is symptomatic of societal decay.  During major crises, social institutions that support hyper-specialization are removed and people tend to become more generalized in their work and daily habits.

For decades the catchword of the ruling elites has been privatization. Large state-owned corporations were chopped up and sold off for a song to the wealthy.  The very concept of nationalization was ridiculed as something belonging to the spectral past. Now all of a sudden, the tune has changed. Take, for instance, the recent words of Bruno Le Maire, France’s Minister of Finance: “I won’t hesitate to use all means available to protect big French companies…I can even use the term nationalization if necessary.”  In the same spirit, President Donald Trump, of all people, has compelled General Motors to make ventilators.

Neoliberal analysts are coming to the painful realization that the free-market system is in serious trouble.  The prestigious Australian stock broking magazine Macquarie Wealth Management has warned that “conventional capitalism is dying” and that the world is headed for “something that will be closer to a version of communism.”  To paraphrase a lyric by the Charlie Daniels Band, all hell is breaking loose and the devil is dealing the cards!

One thing is certain: the Rubicon has been crossed. In a matter of a few weeks, so much has changed that it is quite impossible now for the leaders of the world’s big players—the United States, China, Russia and the European Union—to return to the status quo ante. Who, for instance, will acquiesce to the kind of money spent thus far on military might and technology?  Covid-19 represents not only a powerful blow to the world’s military-industrial complexes but also to the very urge to conduct politics by “other” means.

Our postmodern world is sick with something much worse than Corona virus, and people know this.  Once we manage to contain the invisible enemy, we will turn to confront a far more visible one.  And we will finally make our farewell with an expectorating system that has outlived its usefulness.

Evel Economakis teachs IB history at Ionios Lyceum in Athens, Greece

 People thought Covid-19 has united the whole world, erasing borders and frictions. Indeed people – medical personnel, scientists, journalists and administrators across countries joined hands in educating and mobilizing people to face the calamity. But US acted erratically, promoted anti-China tirade and calumny, called it Chinese virus or Wuhan virus, despite WHO’s explicit appeal not call it that way.

China has gone out of the way to supply millions of masks, thousands of ventilators etc to US and Europe, despite the bad blood caused by US and the West. 

But alas, the leopard did not change its spots : Going against the people’s aspirations for peace and good health, the US State led by Trump came out with its hegemonism, racism, and all its ugly features, even as its own people faced one of the worst calamities, lakhs of deaths, many of them avoidable, awaiting them.

White House experts, and Trump, are anticipating 1 to 2.4 lakh deaths, next week being a nightmare. 

More than three (3.36) lakh people tested positive in US, and deaths are reaching 10000 as on April 5. New York alone had 1.23 lakh cases and 4100 deaths.    

US hijacking mask shipments in rush for coronavirus protection  is the title of a report in UK magazine, theguardian , Fri 3 Apr 2020.

US buyers waving wads of cash managed to wrest control of a consignment of masks as it was about to be dispatched from China to one of the worst-hit coronavirus areas of France, according to two French officials. The masks were on a plane at Shanghai airport that was ready to take off when the US buyers turned up and offered three times what their French counterparts were paying.

Another French official also involved in procuring masks from China said the group were acting for the US government.

“Today the US sent 23 of their biggest cargo planes to China to pick up the material they had acquired. Many of our purchases, which we had hoped to confirm in order to supply [our health system], fell through,” he said.

Jean Rottner, a doctor and president of the GrandEst regional council, said part of the order of several million masks heading for the region, where intensive care units are inundated with Covid-19 patients, had been lost to the buyers.

“On the tarmac, they arrive, get the cash out … so we really have to fight,” he told RTL radio.

Rottner would not identify the buyers, who they were working for or which US state the cargo was flown to, but another French official also involved in procuring masks from China said the group were acting for the US government.

 “Today the US sent 23 of their biggest cargo planes to China to pick up the material they had acquired. Many of our purchases, which we had hoped to confirm in order to supply [our health system], fell through,” he said. “The whole world wants [these things] too. There is a problem of hyper-demand.”

As the pandemic worsens, panicked governments have been accused of using questionable methods to acquire supplies in the battle against the coronavirus. Tactics have ranged from blocking exports of medical supplies to sending spies on clandestine missions to find tests.

Fearing shortages and a strain on their health systems, a number of states, including France, Germany and Russia, have taken measures such as stockpiling masks and hazardous materials, or hazmat suits. This has meant limiting exports of protective medical equipment.

China has, however, since been one of the few countries to go the other way, selling or donating millions of masks to Europe. One such shipment bound for Italy went through the Czech Republic, where it was seized by authorities under disputed circumstances.

Fears of shortages are driving many countries to take increasingly devious measures to secure masks and tests, the report said.

“Modern-day piracy” by US, says Germany

The US diverted a delivery of Chinese-made face masks bound for Germany at a Bangkok airport, (freemalaysiatoday.com reported)

a Berlin city official said Friday, accusing Washington of “modern-day piracy” as competition for protective gear against the coronavirus heats up.

In a statement Berlin’s state minister of the interior, Andreas Geisel, said 200,000 highly sought-after FFP2 masks, made by an American firm in China and destined for use by Berlin police, were “confiscated” in Bangkok.

President Trump, after a late start in procuring urgently needed protective gear, has in recent days invoked the Defense Production Act to get US firms to divert their resources to the battle against the pandemic.

According to German newspaper Bild, the hijacked shipment contained masks made in China by US firm 3M, one of the leading brands in the sector, that were then diverted to the US. Local official Geisel was more blunt, blasting the US for resorting to “methods from the Wild West”.

He urged the German government to remind Washington to “comply with international rules”.

French officials have also complained this week that Americans had swooped on Chinese masks ordered by France, after apparently outbidding them on a shipment that had already been lined up.

washingtonpost, April 5, 2020 reported with this title : 

White House scrambles to scoop up medical supplies worldwide, angering Canada, Germany.

It said : The Trump administration’s global scramble to secure more protective masks for U.S. health-care workers has sparked tensions with allies including Canada and Germany, which fear they could face shortages as they battle their own coronavirus outbreaks.

The White House late Thursday ordered Minnesota mask manufacturer 3M (producing in its China factory) to prioritize U.S. orders over foreign demand, using its authority under the Defense Production Act, or DPA, to try to ease critical shortages of N95 masks at U.S. hospitals.

The Trump administration has asked 3M to stop exporting the masks to Canada and Latin America, and to import more from 3M’s factories in China, the company said Friday.

CNN reported it with the title :

Coronavirus sparks a ‘war for masks’ as accusations fly

(CNN) As the coronavirus pandemic spreads across Europe and the United States, a global scramble for protective equipment such as masks and gloves is underway. In France they are calling it the “guerre des masques” — the war of the masks.

Some French officials have even alleged that their consignments from China have been hijacked by Americans.

The presidents of two regions in France have claimed that American customers — without specifying who — have tried to pay Chinese suppliers three or four times the agreed price to get critical supplies diverted.

Renaud Muselier, president of the Sud region, alleged in several interviews that an order from one French region had been bought by the Americans for cash — and the plane that was due to fly to France had instead gone to the US.

Muselier was asked by CNN affiliate BFM-TV whether masks had been taken by Americans at Chinese airports. He replied: “Exactly,” before adding, “There is a foreign country that paid three times the price of the cargo on the tarmac. So the masks are gone and the region that ordered them has been destitute.”

Muselier later tweeted that masks for his own region were on their way and had “not been bought by a foreign power.”

Contacted by CNN, Muselier referred further questions to the French Foreign Ministry, which said Thursday it was looking into the reports.

Jean Rottner, the president of another French region — Grand Est — echoed Muselier’s remarks, telling French radio network RTL that it was a daily battle to secure orders.

“It’s true,” he claimed, “that on the tarmac the Americans arrive, take out cash and pay three or four times more for the orders we have made, so it’s necessary to fight.”

Rottner tweeted that 2 million masks had arrived on April 1 from Shanghai, posting video of the cargo being shipped on his Twitter account. Two more shipments are due to arrive at the weekend, he said.

Contacted by CNN, Rottner’s office would not elaborate on his claims, but a third regional president, Valérie Pécresse of Île-de-France, said the quest for masks was a global treasure hunt.

“We had made an order but were unable to complete it because others were ready to pay three times the market price,” Pecresse told radio network Franceinfo. She did not identify the “others.”

It’s unclear which US entity — federal, state or commercial — might have tried to secure orders destined for France.

CNN reached out to the US Department of Health and Social Services Thursday but has not heard back.

The US Embassy in France, which only speaks for the federal government, said the US “has not purchased any masks intended for delivery from China to France.”

In an interview with French television Thursday, French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said securing deliveries was “not always easy.”

The problem, he said, was “not logistical difficulties related to missing aircraft but difficulties sometimes in accessing the products from orders that are not always delivered. This is for a variety of reasons, including the huge demand that comes to China from the United States, from Europe, and indeed from the whole world.”

CNN has submitted several questions to the Prime Minister’s office about problems with deliveries.

On Friday, the German Health Minister Jens Spahn responded to media reports that a PPE consignment bought by the state of Berlin had been diverted to meet an American order. “Reports of this kind — I don’t know if it is true in this specific case — but it is not the only report of this kind,” Spahn said.

“This is not a good development in general, but at the same time it is due to a very strong demand that is there.”

Spanish and French officials say that logistical bottlenecks in China have compounded the problem of shipping personal protective equipment (PPE.)

Spanish Health Minister Salvador Illa told a parliamentary committee in Madrid last week that everyone was trying to buy from China — but could not confirm when Spanish orders would be met “because the market is crazy and the logistics are hard.”

One French region, Centre Val de Loire, told CNN its order had been diverted to Zhengzhou airport due to congestion at Shanghai airport.

Prices spiral

In the meantime, several governments are requisitioning what they can. Last month the French government said it was seizing all masks being made in the country.

One French company, Valmy SAS, was obliged to divert an order for PPE from the UK’s National Health Service, a regular customer. A representative of the company in the UK told CNN that the order had been blocked by customs officials at the French coast.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned for several weeks that hoarding and shortages of protective equipment is leaving doctors and nurses “dangerously ill equipped” to look after Covid-19 patients.

A month ago, its director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “prices of surgical masks have increased six-fold, N95 respirators have more than tripled, and gowns cost twice as much.”

“Supplies can take months to deliver, market manipulation is widespread, and stocks are often sold to the highest bidder,” he said.

And demand has only multiplied since.

Several European governments have sounded the alarm about the difficulty of obtaining protective equipment for health workers. In Germany, the Bavarian state premier Markus Söder said Thursday that Germany would need “billions of masks” to fight coronavirus.

Spahn has said he wants Germany to become less dependent on masks made elsewhere. “We must become more independent of the world market, for the security of our citizens. That is one of the lessons of these weeks,” he said on Twitter.

In Spain, labor unions have complained about a lack of protective equipment for health workers.

Last week Fernando Simon, director of the Center for Coordination of Emergencies and Health Alerts, said that “Although access to personal protective equipment is proving sufficient, it is true that at some points there may be critical moments.” PPE, he said, was a scarce global commodity and there was no easy availability.

Spanish Health Minister Salvador Illa said last week: “Not enough masks for the global market are being produced; not enough ventilators are being produced.” Illa said. He was also critical of delays in a joint European Union program to buy PPE.

Several French regions told CNN that they’d had problems securing supplies. Bourgogne Franche Comté has ordered 4 million masks but are using two different suppliers in case one fails to deliver.

In the United States, a congressional source told CNN on Wednesday they’d been informed that the coronavirus task force — led by Vice President Mike Pence — was stopping overseas shipments of the medical equipment and instead asking that the supplies be distributed within the United States.

France, Spain, Germany and the UK are all trying to accelerate domestic production of PPE as scarcities bite. But that’s not something that can happen overnight in the volumes now needed as coronavirus stretches hospital resources across the world.

(Mia Alberti in Lisbon, and CNN’s Nadine Schmidt in Berlin and Max Ramsay in London contributed to this report.)

A question was raised on this sordid episode:

After all, the manufacturer, US firm 3M, one of the leading brands in the sector, was a US company. US has no right to take its production?  

The MNC was producing not in USA but in China, and are obliged to fulfill orders placed by customers on a first-come-first basis…they are bound by rules and conditions, often framed by US and West as part of globalization…

US probably can order, under its Defense Production Act , that the US MNC must give priority to US.

But that can be only prospectively. It would not be legal for US to hijack stocks, booked and paid for by others, and being dispatched to others…US action , seizing the goods on the tarmac of a foreign soil, is part of its hegemony, and wont be acceptable….

Given globalization and agreements and conventions, among G-8, the MNC operating in a foreign land need not necessarily oblige. 

US imports most its requirements from around the world, also presently to tackle Covid-19. If this logic is applied, the others can obstruct even consignments already booked, and divert them as they wished.

China goes out of the way to supply crucial materials.

China was hard pressed with Covid-19. New cases reappeared, and another bout is feared. In spite of that China had exported in recent weeks lakhs of masks, and other medical supplies to many countries in the West, and to USA. China and its companies also made donations to some, despite their own problems, and fears of corona re-appearing after a gap.

US in desperate need of supplies from China changed tune. On April fools Day, Wednesday, Mr. Trump was effusive in describing his relationship with President Xi Jinping of China, whom he spoke with last week.

See this report from nytimes.com April 2, 2020 :  

In Sudden Shift, U.S. and China Seek to Cooperate

Several of President Trump’s top aides are advising him to work with China on the coronavirus pandemic, but national security officials are skeptical the truce will hold.

WASHINGTON — For weeks, President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo forcefully used the controversial terms“Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus” in public and said they intended to hold Beijing responsible for the crippling coronavirus pandemic.

Now, they have avoided using those phrases, and the administration is welcoming planeloads of medical equipment from China.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump was effusive in describing his relationship with President Xi Jinping of China, whom he spoke with last week.

“The relationship with China is a good one, and my relationship with him is really good,” Mr. Trump told reporters. The president added that he “will always assume the best” of China’s leaders. Asked whether American intelligence agencies have assessed that China falsified case and fatality numbers over the virus, Mr. Trump said, “I’m not an accountant from China.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-china.html

Photo By AP 2 Apr 20200

The New England Patriots’ private team plane is returning to Boston from China carrying more than one million masks critical to health care providers fighting to control the spread of the coronavirus.

BOSTON (AP) — Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker found himself in need of an assist to help the state fight the coronavirus pandemic. He called on the New England Patriots.

The team’s private plane was on schedule to return to Boston from China on Thursday evening carrying more than one million masks critical to health care providers fighting to control the spread of the virus..

Baker secured the N95 masks from Chinese manufacturers but had no way of getting them to the U.S. He reached out to Patriots team owner Robert Kraft, who loaned the Boeing 767 painted in the team’s colors and logo that is usually used to carry the team to and from NFL games.

Baker confirmed the joint venture in a news conference Thursday.

Chinese technology company Tencent was a huge help in the process, Nolan said. It agreed to gather the masks, got them through the inspection process, stayed with them to ensure their security and eventually their movement on to the Patriots’ plane.

“This isn’t in their wheelhouse, but they thought it was the right thing to do,” Nolan said.

There were hurdles that included legal logistics that were only cleared thanks to cooperation involving multiple state, U.S. and international entities.

There was little margin for error once the airplane arrived in China, which granted the Patriots three hours to fill the plane with the masks. They were on the ground for 2 hours, 57 minutes according to flight tracker data Nolan monitored.

Tencent looked after approximately 1.7 million masks. The Patriots’ plane took on 1.2 million, Nolan said.

They are working with Tencent to bring additional equipment back from China via a cargo plane

The masks will be going into Massachusetts’ stockpile for distribution to medical personnel.

Nolan said 300,000 of the masks will also be going to New York to help medical personnel there. Baker said Rhode Island will also receive some of the masks.

At several points in the history of our planet, increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have caused extreme global warming, prompting the majority of species on Earth to die out.

In the past, these events were triggered by a huge volcanic eruption or asteroid impact. Now, Earth is heading for another mass extinction – and human activity is to blame.

I am an Earth and Paleo-climate scientist and have researched the relationships between asteroid impacts, volcanism, climate changes and mass extinctions of species.

My research suggests the current growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions is faster than those which triggered two previous mass extinctions, including the event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The world’s gaze may be focused on COVID-19 right now. But the risks to nature from human-made global warming – and the imperative to act – remain clear.

The current rate of CO2 emissions is a major event in the recorded history of Earth. EPA

Past mass extinctions

Many species can adapt to slow, or even moderate, environmental changes. But Earth’s history shows that extreme shifts in the climate can cause many species to become extinct.

For example, about 66 million years ago an asteroid hit Earth. The subsequent smashed rocks and widespread fires released massive amounts of carbon dioxide over about 10,000 years. Global temperatures soared, sea levels rose and oceans became acidic. About 80% of species, including the dinosaurs, were wiped out.

And about 55 million years ago, global temperatures spiked again, over 100,000 years or so. The cause of this event, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, is not entirely clear. One theory, known as the “methane burp” hypothesis, posits that a massive volcanic eruption triggered the sudden release of methane from ocean sediments, making oceans more acidic and killing off many species.

So is life on Earth now headed for the same fate?

Comparing greenhouse gas levels

Before industrial times began at the end of the 18th century, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere sat at around 300 parts per million. This means that for every one million molecules of gas in the atmosphere, 300 were carbon dioxide.

In February this year, atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 414.1 parts per million. Total greenhouse gas level – carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide combined – reached almost 500 parts per million of carbon dioxide-equivalent

CC BY-ND

Carbon dioxide is now pouring into the atmosphere at a rate of two to three parts per million each year.

Using carbon records stored in fossils and organic matter, I have determined that current carbon emissions constitute an extreme event in the recorded history of Earth.

My research has demonstrated that annual carbon dioxide emissions are now faster than after both the asteroid impact that eradicated the dinosaurs (about 0.18 parts per million CO2 per year), and the thermal maximum 55 million years ago (about 0.11 parts per million CO2 per year).

An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Shutterstock

The next mass extinction has begun

Current atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are not yet at the levels seen 55 million and 65 million years ago. But the massive influx of carbon dioxide means the climate is changing faster than many plant and animal species can adapt.

A major United Nations report released last year warned around one million animal and plant species were threatened with extinction. Climate change was listed as one of five key drivers.

The report said the distributions of 47% of land-based flightless mammals, and almost 25% of threatened birds, may already have been negatively affected by climate change.

Many researchers fear the climate system is approaching a tipping point – a threshold beyond which rapid and irreversible changes will occur. This will create a cascade of devastating effects.

There are already signs tipping points have been reached. For example, rising Arctic temperatures have led to major ice melt, and weakened the Arctic jet stream – a powerful band of westerly winds.

A diagram showing the weakening Arctic jet stream, and subsequent movements of warm and cold air. NASA

This allows north-moving warm air to cross the polar boundary, and cold fronts emanating from the poles to intrude south into Siberia, Europe and Canada.

A shift in climate zones is also causing the tropics to expand and migrate toward the poles, at a rate of about 56 to 111 kilometres per decade. The tracks of tropical and extra-tropical cyclones are likewise shifting toward the poles. Australia is highly vulnerable to this shift.

Uncharted future climate territory

Research released in 2016 showed just what a massive impact humans are having on the planet. It said while the Earth might naturally have entered the next ice age in about 20,000 years’ time, the heating produced by carbon dioxide would result in a period of super-tropical conditions, delaying the next ice age to about 50,000 years from now.

During this period, chaotic high-energy stormy conditions would prevail over much of the Earth. My research suggests humans are likely to survive best in sub-polar regions and sheltered mountain valleys, where cooler conditions would allow flora and fauna to persist.

Earth’s next mass extinction is avoidable – if carbon dioxide emissions are dramatically curbed and we develop and deploy technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But on the current trajectory, human activity threatens to make large parts of the Earth uninhabitable – a planetary tragedy of our own making.

Abstract of paper

published in Global Change Biology in May 2016

Cenozoic greenhouse gases (GHG) variations and warming periods underscore the extreme rates of current climate change, with major implications for the adaptability and survivability of terrestrial and marine habitats. Current rise rate of greenhouse gases, reaching 3.3 ppm CO2 per year during March 2015–2016, is the fastest recorded since the Paleocene‐Eocene Thermal Event (PETM) when carbon release to the atmosphere was about an order of magnitude less than at present. The ice core evidence of concentration of (GHG) and temperatures in the atmosphere/ocean/cryosphere system over the last 740 kyr suggests that the rate of rise in GHG over the last ~260 years, CO2 rates rising from 0.94 ppm yr−1 in 1959 (315.97 ppm) to 1.62 ppm yr−1 in 2000 (369.52 ppm) to 3.05 ppm yr−1 in 2015 (400.83 ppm), constitutes a unique spike in the history of the atmosphere. The reliance of pre‐740 kyr paleoclimate estimates on multiple proxies, including benthic and plankton fossils, fossil plants, residual organic matter, major and trace elements in fossils, sediments and soils, place limits on the resolution of pre‐upper Pleistocene paleoclimate estimates, rendering it likely recorded mean Cenozoic paleoclimate trends may conceal abrupt short‐term climate fluctuations. However, as exemplified by the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) and earlier GHG and temperature spikes associated with major volcanic and asteroid impact events, the long‐term residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere extends the signatures of abrupt warming events to within detection limits of multiple paleoproxies. The mean post‐1750 temperature rise rate (approximately ~0.0034 °C per yr, or ~0.008 °C per yr where temperature is not masked by sulfur aerosols) exceeds those of the PETM (approximately ~0.0008–0.0015 °C per yr) by an order of magnitude and mean glacial termination warming rates (last glacial termination [LGT] ~ 0.00039; Eemian ~0.0004 °C per yr) by near to an order of magnitude. Consistent with previous interglacial peaks an increasing likelihood of collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation is threatening a severe stadial event.

Andrew Glikson  is an Earth and paleo-climate scientist, Australian National University

Originally published in The Conversation

Capitalism will slowly evolve into a Democratic Socialist system that will be able to provide the structures for maintaining democratic substance and resolving the challenges of a difficult future. 

Theory and logic indicate Socialism’s possible superiority. If centralized planners, especially in the technological age of data mining and artificial intelligence, responsibly control the processes, allocate resources, create an agreeable work ethic, and capably enter into the international trading system, Socialism might succeed. Apparently, except for China, which is more of an authoritarian mixed or semi-fascist economy (government and industry working together), this has not occurred. The public views Socialism as a totally failed concept.

Despite numerous failures of theoretical inferiority, Capitalism sustains, going through crises of fall, revival, and survival. “Can Socialism’s failures be ameliorated, can Capitalism contue to revive and survive, and can Socialism replace Capitalism?” are questions arising from the debate between Socialist and Capitalist competition. Answering the questions allows changes in qualifications for reception. Enhancing quality of life, increasing material wants, and augmenting Gross National product are becoming lesser qualifications. The future portends more importance to meeting challenges posed by climate change, pandemics, greenhouse gases, and other potential crises. The future portends more importance to survival, to having sufficient means to meet the next day in a gracious and inviting manner.

In a capitalist system, the capitalist owns means of production, invests profits to regenerate more profits, and increases capital from this constant reinvestment. An outgrowth of the industrial revolution, Capitalism promoted industrial progress and greatly increased the material wants of much of the world. Stagnating through recessions, depressions and panics, Capitalism periodically breaks down, retreats, and petitions government rescue. From another perspective, pure Capitalism had a short life, needed to be constantly resuscitated, and finally evolved into neoliberalism Capitalism, a sub-system to a mixed economy that uses capitalist structures. Severity of forecasted global problems indicates that neoliberal Capitalism cannot meet the challenges, and a new socioeconomic system is demanded.

Pure Socialism is an economic and political system, where the government owns much of production and controls most prices. Considered, from historical attempts, to be a liability, Socialism has two primary built-in failures ─ inability to properly allocate resources and to motivate workers. The former occurs from industries hoarding to meet quotas, which creates waste, and from other industries being unable to meet commitments, which creates production bottlenecks. The latter is a product of workers having lifetime employment and not requiring motivation to maintain security. Although they occur in the capitalist system, Socialism also allows a more sinecure and corrupt system, where close associates are favored.

Democratic socialism has many definitions. For this conversation, Democratic Socialism defines an economy and society that is politically democratic, allows private enterprise to generate surpluses and uses government controls to assure profits are optimally reassigned for both business (profit reinvestment) and public needs (taxation). Government policies, such as subsidizing, regulating, and distributing, help shape the economy. Social ownership of businesses is encouraged. These include worker-owned cooperatives, publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives, and workplace democracy, where workers sit on corporation boards. Some inefficient and vital industries necessitate some form of state ownership, but most industries are best run as private enterprises.

Democratic Socialists consider central planning for major  public industries — mass transit, housing, and energy — and permit market mechanisms to determine the demand for consumer goods. Mainly, Democratic Socialism attempts to combine the positives of Capitalism and Socialism and eschew the faults of both systems.

Failures of Capitalism and its neoliberal doppelganger ─ free enterprise

Behind the appearance of Capitalism’s (free enterprise) success in providing material wants to vast population, lie failures — economic depressions, world wars, civil strife, and inability of the private sector to respond quickly to catastrophes, as shown by western response to the corona virus.

Periodic economic recessions, depressions, and panics gripped the United States since its beginnings. Government actions to repair the defects and readjust the failures proceeded from recognition that Capitalism becomes comatose every few years and must be constantly revived. A plethora of laws, regulations, agencies, government deficits, and other ameliorations have provided stitches, transplants, band-aids, and surgical operations to patch up and rescue a constantly ailing patient, reviving the collapsed after each fall. The history of Capitalism reveals a system that ignored the nation and a nation that did its utmost to maintain free enterprise.

From 1867 to 1929, the U.S. economy exhibited a shock every several years. Seven severe depressions or financial panics occurred during that 62-year period. One of these started in 1873, and is considered to be the Long Depression ─ a period of bursts of prosperity and contractions from 1873-1896.

Constant economic disturbances and sputtered growth prompted lawmakers to socialize capitalism, and  correct the excesses of “rugged individualism capitalism,” in which a few financiers exercised control of the economic system and used it for their private gain ─ essentially robbing banks by owning them. Establishment of the Interstate Commercial Commission in 1887 for regulating the railroads, passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which “declared illegal all combinations in restraint of trade,” creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1912 to regulate the money supply, stabilize the financial system and subdue inflation, passage of the Clayton Act in 1914 in order to further restrict anti-competitive practices and enforce the earlier Sherman Antitrust act, establishment of the Federal Trade Commission in 1914, an agency with powers to “prevent business practices that are anti-competitive or deceptive or unfair to consumers,” and formation of The Federal Communications Commission , by the Communications Act of 1934, to “maintain jurisdiction over the areas of broadband access, fair competition, radio frequency use, media responsibility, public safety, and homeland security,” are a few examples of government attempts to rectify Capitalism’s problems. They did not halt the calamities ─ “boom” and bust” persisted; speculation remained rampant; mergers tending to monopolies continued; banks went bankrupt.

The call for regulatory legislation proved that the capitalist system, which had its moments of genuine success, was, as constituted, insufficiently effective or efficient ─ it could not exist without government intervention. Legislators, in their ardor to preserve the system, neglected to realize that the capitalist system had survived with special advantages. How far would the capitalist system in the United States have advanced without a century of slave labor, land and resource appropriation from the Native Americans, constant wars to seize territory in North America and command global markets, and tens of millions of immigrants working at subsistence wages? Government attempts to stabilize the erratic free enterprise system with regulatory capitalism served as a temporary palliative, which eventually became co-opted and could not prevent the Great Depression.

Hunger and unemployment in the land of plenty drove the New Deal toward the rescue plan of welfare capitalism ─ government sponsored programs and legislation that fostered institutions to re-distribute wealth and enable all citizens to escape poverty and gain equal opportunity. Soon more rescue was needed, such as government construction of transportation, communication and power infrastructure ─ interstate highways, airports, hydroelectric and nuclear power plants, and ARPANET (the first wide-area packet switching network). Equal opportunity laws, subsidized mortgage loans, and direct coordination in research and development between the defense department and private industry drove free enterprise toward a mixed economy. Extensive cessions of public lands made to states and to railroad companies, between 1850 and 1872, promoted railroad construction; government defense contracts developed the electronics and aviation industries; Eisenhower administration’s interstate road system magnified the automobile and steel industries.

The role of the defense department in providing sustenance to the free enterprise system is insufficiently considered. Entire industries — defense, armaments, electronics, shipbuilding, aviation, space exploration — and parts of some industries — airlines, plastics, chemical, metallurgical, Internet — owe their existence and prosperity to defense department developments, funds and contracts. Airplane designs and manufacture are direct outgrowths from defense industry warplanes. Airline growth relied upon government subsidies, mail and freight deliveries, and airport constructions. Despite the assistance, the airline industry, until recently, consistently showed bottom line losses and most of the many airlines have gone bankrupt. Without government assistance, the free enterprise economy would have permanently collapsed decades ago.

OPEC’s  higher oil prices challenged a troubled Capitalism with inflation, ultra-high interest rates and a 1981 recession, which invoked the final rescue plan ─ pump the economy with government deficits and easy credit ─ the final attempt to rescue the system.

Since the Reagan administration, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has closely followed an almost continually increasing sum of public and private debt. Growth in the Capitalism system became allied to and dependent upon growth in debt.

Excessive debt enabled the Reagan administration to emerge from its incipient recession. Escalated private debt offset budget surpluses during the Clinton administration. A combined whammy of private and public debt during the Bush term soon hit a wall and caused the huge 2008 recession. Wisely, Obama pursued slow growth policies that needed slow accumulation of debt and prevented any downfall during his entire administration.

Almost all money is conventional debt, issued by banks in their lending process, and by Federal Reserve open market operations. Capitalism runs on this debt. As debt plus interest is retired, new and more expensive debt must replace it or the monetary base will decrease and money available for purchase of goods and services will decline. Aligned with this decline is the rapid disappearance of profit.

Capitalism needs profit in order to grow and generate its periods of prosperity. Because profit is the lifeblood of the capitalist system, understanding the modern concept of profit ─ how profit is made, its functions, problems, benefits, and failures ─ provides an improved understanding of the contemporary Capitalism system.

The price of goods Pr = C+ P, where C is cost, and P is profit. In the production process, excepting for some subsidies, no funds are supplied to the economy for purchase of the goods represented by profit, or as Karl Marx defined it, the surplus value, the value of goods that worker wages are insufficient to purchase. From where comes the added purchasing power to obtain the mysterious profit?

Increasing the Purchasing Power

(1) Private debt supplies a major increase in purchasing power. (2) Distribution of profits by dividends, share buybacks, and bonuses to management and employees recirculate profits for purchase of goods. (3) Government deficit spending supplies the knockout punch to clear the shelves, growing when private debt shrinks. (4) A positive trade balance brings purchasing power into the system, reclaiming dollars circulating throughout the world. A negative balance, which has occurred during the last decades, removes purchasing power from the system. (5) Some liquid funds from savings and investments re-enter the system.

The first three components have operated strongly and actively to restore purchasing power. Regardless of approaches to stabilize the capitalist system, the profit motive has built-in failures and must eventually collapse.

Ultimate failure

The ultimate failure of the profit system is apparent. To increase purchasing of goods, the money supply must increase. Trade imbalances (subsidized by government debt), and retirement of private debt and its interest decrease the money supply. When, securing debt becomes saturated, which means the money supply cannot increase, wants from all sectors are fulfilled, or workers become unavailable for increased production, the economy must stagnate and soon must decline. Proper actions can slow the failures but not forever. Bust is inevitable.

The true meaning of profit

Profit is perceived with awe, glorified as the deserved result of risky and arduous effort. Household debt is viewed with sympathy, as an opportunity to purchase hard goods and participate in the material life of the nation for those who cannot immediately earn enough to buy the goods. Government debt has severe detractors who consider it a theft on future generations. The true meaning of profit is that they are all the same, the principal component of someone’s profit is debt accrued by others.

As described, a Capitalist system does not exist on its own merits; capital formations are only one part of a complex socioeconomic system, which includes credit control, welfare, government spending, taxes, subsidies, regulation, directives, and oversight, all which determine production, growth, and progress. The entrepreneur deserves remuneration, but he/she and the capitalist system maintain existence only due to government largesse.

Profit is not tied to Capitalism, and other economic systems can incorporate it for growth and material enrichment. A severely modified Capitalism can more efficiently and effectively employ profit, which has significant benefits.

A Democratic socialized system can issue credit to those willing to amortize expensive items that would ordinarily require years of savings. Instead of dividends to stockholders, profits from the credit purchases are recirculated as bonuses to laborers. The profit motive remains, and the rewards enrich a greater number of people.

Industry wide sharing of profits between investors and employees extends the years between economic cycles and allows stable and high profits ─ previous year distributed profit allows purchase of next year’s surplus. Less domestic and government credit are needed to keep the system alive.

The Economic Consequences of Wealth Concentration

An economy that has operated as “trickle down” has reached a peak, and it is time for an economy that pours itself out for all. Share the wealth and lessening inequality by distribution of income are not just idealistic expressions or populist proposals; they are sound economics. More equitably distributed wages and spending power lessen social grievances, reduce social problems, and increase domestic spending. More equal distribution of wealth has also been associated with improvements in national health. Fairness to all reflects as benefits to all, including a lower need for government spending on social programs.

Rationalizing ill-conceived wealth distributions by describing the American poor as wealthier than the lower middle class in many developed nations is deceiving. Poverty is defined as an absolute number, but its effects are relative. The lower wage earners in the United States are unaware of what they have in relation to foreigners; they are aware of what they do not have in relation to others living close to them. The wide disparity in wealth creates resentment and tension leading to psychological and emotional difficulties. Minimizing social problems means combining the giving of more to the lower classes with the taking of less by the upper classes.

The social problems and associated costs in developed nations that have wide distributions of income and wealth are well-documented — elevated mental illness, crime, infant mortality, and health problems. Every citizen suffers from and pays for the social problems derived from income inequality, an unfair condition in a democratic society. Several investigators have clarified the social determinants of health.

Kawachi, I. and B.P. Kennedy, 1997, in Socioeconomic Determinants of Health: Health and Social Cohesion: Why Care About Income Inequality? British Medical Journal.

Growing evidence suggests that the distribution of income, in addition to the absolute standard of living enjoyed by the poor, is a key determinant of population health. A large gap between rich people and poor people leads to higher mortality through the breakdown of social cohesion. The recent surge in income inequality in many countries has been accompanied by a marked increase in the residential concentration of poverty and affluence. Residential segregation diminishes the opportunities for social cohesion.

University of Chicago, Nov, 16-22, Sir Michael Marmot, The Social Determinants of Health and Disease Health

One of the dominant features affecting the health situation of all industrialized countries is the social gradient in health and disease. Analysts who approach this topic commonly think of it as a problem of poor health for the disadvantaged and good health for those who are not in the disadvantaged category. This is an inadequate way to pose the problem. The Whitehall Study of civil servants showed that, amongst people who are not poor, there is a social gradient in mortality that runs from the bottom to the top in each society. People in each socio-economic category have worse health than those above them in the hierarchy.

Impact of the Coronavirus on Health and Economics

Response to the Covid-19 pandemic has shown the inability of the private sector to adequately contain a pandemic and diminish its deleterious economic effects. Only a fully committed government can completely mobilize the public to subdue a serious epidemic and arrange the nation’s resources to assure its economic health. In a socialized system, an epidemic will not lead to economic uncertainty; the public will know that basic care will be provided. Nor will there be confusion of for whom, how, where, and when health services will be available. The Covid-19 epidemic revealed the capitalist system dropped the ball, slowed to a walk, and finally was temporarily replaced by a quasi-Democratic Socialist system that planned, controlled, and distributed resources to the citizens, a prelude to governing the future.

The Future

A future of growing challenges — climate change, pandemics, robotics and artificial intelligence replacing workers, greenhouse gas emissions heating the atmosphere, change from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, prevention of nuclear war, migration chaos, political polarization, and redistribution of the wealth — demand a realignment of the socioeconomic system.

Governments are needed that can assure the safety and security of all the worlds peoples, no matter their economic status, and no matter the hardships of the prevailing circumstances. Wealth will be immaterial, and escaping human extinction will be the motivation, requiring government action in many aspects of human existence. Capitalism will slowly evolve into a Democratic Socialist system that will be able to provide the structures for maintaining democratic substance and resolving the challenges of a difficult future.

Dan Lieberman edits Alternative Insight, a commentary on foreign policy, economics, and politics. He is author of the book A Third Party Can Succeed in America, a Kindle: The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name). Dan can be reached at alternativeinsight@earthlink.net 

Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD in interdisciplinary Social Science (Syracuse University, New York, USA), an academia and international scholar believes in One Global Humanity living peacefully on One Earth and shares new ideas and vision for change and critical thinking action to transform the obsolete global systems of thinking and governance into remaking of global peace, security and conflict resolution. While science and technology has advanced immensely the human thoughts, pleasure-seeking sports and entertainment, comforts and lifestyles, the mankind remains disconnected to the imperatives of its own origin, purpose of life and relationships to the Nature of Things within a splendid Universe.  The 21st century of knowledge and advanced artificial intellect, the Nation States, global institutions and large segments of the humanity live as if they do not belong to the Earth and continued to undermine the viability of peaceful co-existence in complete violations of the basic norms of understanding and living in harmony within the natural environment. The author reminds the global political elite and institutions of reasoned vulnerability to avoid indifference, ignorance and arrogance in the conduct of global affairs and to return to foment human relations based on human equality, justice, solidarity and freedom for all.

One Global Humanity – the concept articulates an enlightened vision of globalization of the people, by the people and for the people.  As a scholar in global affairs (global peace, security and conflict resolution), the author contributes to enhance the multidisciplinary international experiences and cross-cultural expertise to produce much needed academic publications for universities and colleges programs, foreign policy research and to serve the interests of informed global citizens. If history is an instrument of learning, the 20th century leaders failed to lead to safeguard the humankind from the horrible consequences of the Two World Wars.  Armed with political absolutism and nationalism, they had no sense of time, history and public accountability. But the 21st century global community is well informed, active and a forceful persuasive factor in global participation for change and future-building. The time horizon operating in global crises is very short and critical in nature. To avert the coming of a Third World War, the book envisions the transformational change of global politics and sustainable future for One Global Humanity and calls it ‘The Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Management.’

In a constantly changing and complex global culture of politics, the book exposes the treacherous illusion of global politics, presently unmanageable by conventional treatise, lack of leadership visions and integrity, failing system of nation states and institutions, and the impotence of the UNO, that cannot uphold its own Charter for peace and conflict resolution to end the dehumanizing systems of governance.

“Globalization of the People, by the People and for the People.” Success is power of visualization and affirmation by doing the best asserts the author. Rejecting cynicism and contemporary political quagmire, the author offers a new vision of One Global Humanity – the globalization of the people, by the people and for the people – a revulsion against the contemporary standardized norms of  global systems of thinking, institutions, peace and security and focusing on global capacity-rebuilding of human communication, systematic institutions and accountability with decent progressive normalization of global society; and transforming superpower’s indifference and political chaos into peaceful co-existence and security for all.

Destiny and future making are always timeless moving and young phenomena with inner evolutionary spirit seeking new and creative horizons beyond the obvious. The innovative inner human eye and spirit cannot be boxed-in to any imaginary blocks, no matter how powerful its encroachment could be on the march for new ideas and vision of future making. If the 20th century’s global systems of politics and governance had consisted on truth and facts of human life, the wars should not have happened or caused dreadful consequences to the human societies.

The contemporary world is fraught with man-made problems unfolding ignorance, exploitation of the Nature of Things, political indifference and wars against the humanity, wars on moral and socio-cultural and spiritual values and the larger universe in which we breathe and maintain our hopes for the future. But the earth is continuously an abject of destruction by wars and weapons of mass destruction, global warming, and greenhouse gases, rising temperature and depleting natural resources affecting the entire spectrum of human existence and survival on this planet. What is being destroyed was not created or built by the human beings, institutions or the world governments. We, the people of the globe must ponder at our own ways of thinking and human priorities, hegemonic control of the natural resources, exploitative policies and practices and to discover workable solutions to ensure the sustainability of our future on Earth.

Progressively evolving is a new information-age of plausible global culture of Thinking of One Global Humanity and a new proactive civilization of strong bonds and affinity of people to people cultural communications – global citizenry participation in social, economic and political thinking and globalization – man in one part of the world feels, thinks and acts-reacts to what happens to any man in another remote corners of the globe. Mankind is neither blind, nor inept, it defines its own purpose, meaning and identity for peace and harmony that the established institutions of governance – be it in America or Europe or elsewhere miserably failed to recognize or value their importance in global political affairs. Given the inherent systematic deficiencies and moral and intellectual corruption in worldwide political governance and policy formulation toward the international community, the global community is actively organized and morally and intellectually powerful to halt all the belligerent nightmares planned and orchestrated by the few war lords.

Will the morally and intellectually conscientious global community face the challenge of realism and strive for coherent manifestation of normalization of global peace, security and conflict resolution and making of a promising and progressively sustainable future? The requisites for the 21st century age of creative knowledge, information and technological advancements call for ‘change’ as a proactive phenomenon in thinking and actions to be a reality. Whether an individual or an organizational, ‘change’ is never easy as it may disturb the comfortable ones and detach us from the safe and certain. But it can also challenge our ingenuity and unfold best in us to open the new vistas of human, intellectual and global opportunities, unknown and unexplored to the human ‘self’ and the living present.

Despite the misleading title, I will not talk to you today about the coronavirus, but of that other, far more insidious crisis that we cannot hope to solve with a vaccine. The global ecological crisis: a crisis in which we are the virus. I would like to share with you some brief reflections on human agency, human nature and their relationship with the possibility of a sustainable society. I know, philosophical stuff – but with very practical implications.

The idea for this article came from a series of conversations I recently had with a reader of my book ‘A Future History of the 21st Century: How We Overcame the Crisis of Civilization’. The text debates the nature of the current socio-economic system, and analyses which of its structural elements constitute obstacles to our transition to a sustainable society. It then discusses how we could potentially overcome those obstacles, focusing on specific economic, institutional and political reforms. All of this while avoiding the well-known trap into which many Degrowth theorists still fall today, which can be summarized by the dead end idea that bottom-up change is the only way out of the crisis, and that to change the world we first need to change ourselves. In short, this is a dead end idea because it cannot be translated into concrete policies. Conversely, to be carried out successfully, a bottom-up change requires a top-down change that facilitates and supports it. In other words: institutional, political and economic reforms.

After this necessary introduction, let’s get to the core topic of the article. The reader I spoke of earlier agrees with the book’s analysis of our current situation and acknowledges that the solutions proposed could produce the desired transition to a sustainable steady-state economy. However, he argues that human nature will never allow us to implement those changes. In other words, not only can human beings not change themselves – they can’t even change the very institutions they created. And this is not an unlikely change either, he claims, but an absolutely impossible one. This is the same as saying that we are trapped in a car that is heading speedily towards a ravine, with a functioning brake in easy reach of our hands, but sadly we are programmed not to pull it.

To put it another way, the problem is not to be found in a defect of the hardware (our hands) or in the resilience of the system (the car), but rather in the software code (our head). The software, he argues, is programmed for accumulation, for a growth without limits and without purpose, for constant acceleration. These things are not cultural constructs, but rather inalienable characteristics of human nature.

He then proceeds to claim, based on fringe clyodynamic theories – which he of course accepts as undisputable scientific proofs – that history demonstrates this; that civilizations have always grown until they could, and when they stopped doing so, they without exception collapsed. The only solution, he concludes, is exactly that: collapse. A non-solution. Worse still: to embrace the very idea that a solution is not possible. That we cannot pull the brake. That we cannot change direction. That we need to give up and accept that we are going to fall into the ravine, and die along with the system. Not everybody, of course. Those of us that will survive will have the chance to start again, little by little, from down there, the slow climbing of the cliff. Only this time with fewer resources. And this ad infinitum, with our heads forever preventing us from learning from the mistakes of the past: until the final suicide.

Of course – I’m sure you’ve guessed it by now – I do not agree that this is the unavoidable destiny of our species. I do acknowledge, however, that we are indeed genetically programmed for accumulation and growth, and that we are not programmed to individually impose limits to ourselves. We get immediate pleasure from accumulation, while the most we get from limits is a kind of long-term serenity. To obtain the latter we need effort and perseverance, while to accumulate more and more, we just need to follow our instincts.

In other words, starting from a clean sheet and without culture, we tend to long for growth. To have more, to produce more, to do more. What I do not agree with is that our culture has to strengthen this inclination, and cannot instead compensate for it, for everyone’s sake.

Let me be clear: contemporary global culture intensifies these human tendencies more than any other culture that preceded it. The fact that we live inside this culture makes us see it as the most natural outcome of human nature, just as the ancient romans thought of their own culture as the peak of human civilization. Neither they nor we were right, of course. In the same way as we constrained our human tendencies to indulge in gratuitous violence, and no longer slaughter slaves in an arena, so people in the future can stop growing their production and consumption beyond the carrying capacity of the ecosystems. What allows us to do this is human agency: the ability to change our culture and our institutions based on what we think is right. In this case, what is right for most people (including the author of this article) is to increase the lifespan of the human race on this planet, and make sure that life is worth living for future generations.

In this sense, we should note that our current situation involves never before seen elements that work in our favour. Here are some of the most significant:

1. Today, for the first time in history, we know that our socio-economic model is environmentally unsustainable, and that a change is necessary (although there is currently no complete agreement on what type of change we need, or how to produce it).

1. Today, for the first time in history, the entire world is interconnected, and can potentially discuss shared solutions (although coming to an agreement is not as easy as we hoped).
2. Modern technologies make producing the goods and services essential to human survival more efficient. We produce and consume too much, but each unit we produce and consume has a lower impact on the environment compared to the past.
3. It is now a consolidated fact that beyond certain levels of consumption, further consumption does not equal more well-being for human beings.[1] We already passed those limits, which means that a reduction of our per-capita consumption would not produce a reduction in aggregate well-being.

There is also historical evidence that points towards the possibility of complex social models that are not based on the relentless accumulation of material goods.

There have been entire communities in Asia and Africa that for centuries lived in societies in which the individual accumulation of material goods was socially sanctioned. These are examples of instances in which culture compensated nature, producing ecologically sustainable social models as a result.

Thus, the real fundamental question is not whether it is possible to build a sustainable society, but rather whether it is possible to do so without sacrificing the fundamental values of the West and people’s well-being. If by ‘fundamental values of the West’ we mean things such as human rights and political and civil liberties, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ (you can find a demonstration of this in my book). If we instead mean unchecked capitalism and a lawless market, then the answer is ‘realistically, no’.

However, we do not need to ask history to know this, because history does not include the full range of possible futures. If there is a constant in human history, it is novelty. The creation of new things that constantly confute the idea that history is destined to repeat itself. History is not the full toolbox we have at our disposal to build our future. Many things that exist today did not exist before. These things are as varied as computing technologies and the internet, but also liberalism, the state of law, and human rights. We also, for the first time, live in a full world, without new frontiers to exploit. Human history has always been a history of exploitation because, among other things, there was an abundance of resources to exploit; now we are consuming (far) more than what nature produces. The situation has changed, and there is no reason to believe that we cannot change also. Before we did not need to change. Now we do. The very fact that we can see this as a problem is a relatively new thing, and a hint that we have the power to solve it.

My reader, however, appears to be blind to the very possibility of change, any change. This is because he draws his arguments not from history, but from an interpretation of history. A highly deterministic interpretation that excludes human agency. Doing so, he looks at the forest as an actor independent from the trees it is made up of. In this way, culture becomes an entity separated from people, which controls them as a puppet master. It has its own will, or moves as if it had one. There is no way we can control it. And even when it looks like we are in control, in reality we are just executing its directives. It is not the trees that make up the forest; it is the forest that makes up the trees.

Conversely, my position is one shared by most social scientists: the forest makes up the trees and at the same time, the trees make up the forest. The influence is mutual. Under certain historical conditions, it is mostly the forest that shapes the life of the trees. It decides where they lay roots, where they extend their branches, where they spread their seeds. In times of uncertainty and crisis, however, the trees can shape the life of the forest. They can shape which direction it expands. Whether it grows or retreats. If it provides sufficient nourishment for the living beings that inhabit it.

In a similar fashion, human beings are not slaves to their culture, although going against it, to change it, requires a considerable effort. An effort that the majority will not want to undertake unless they perceive it as absolutely necessary. Unless – and this is the main message I want to pass here – they believe that a change is possible.

Such a change is not likely to occur spontaneously, without direction. Most great changes in history have occurred when capable and innovative leaders (not only politicians, but also intellectuals) come together with a mass of people united by a common goal. A mass that starts small, but little by little grows until it reaches the critical threshold necessary to spark a change. This happened with women’s rights, with workers’ rights, with the liberal-democratic model, with communist revolutions, with Nazism. Change is not always positive. But it is almost always possible.

This does not mean it is probable. Often it is not. Today I think it is not probable. But it is possible. And this is really, really important. Another thing is important: change becomes more probable if we believe it possible. If the ideas of my aforementioned reader spread, change would become less probable: a self-fulfilled prophecy that could condemn our race (and others, too) to a dreadful future.

It is true: human beings are, to a certain extent, programmed by genes and culture. But they can also reprogram culture. Often they can only do this indirectly, like when the standard working day was reduced to 8 hours (an institutional reform). This produced more free time for individuals, which in turn translated into a proliferation of new activities, giving birth, among other things, to the entertainment industry and sport (previously, sport had been something that only athletes and nobles engaged in).

In conclusion, between my reader and myself there is both agreement and disagreement. We agree that the world is hurrying towards a ravine. We disagree on the possibility of pulling the brake. I firmly believe that resignation is the worst enemy of change. It paralyzes us. And I believe that optimism is needed more, not less, on the brink of an apocalypse. If we want to produce a positive change in the world, we need to look at the ravine with a smile on our lips, but also – and especially – with rolled up sleeves and our brains at work. It may be highly unlikely that we will be able to pull the brake. Nonetheless, we have the moral obligation to try. Success might not be probable, but it is surely possible. And this possibility, being rooted in the present and not in the past, is something that no deterministic interpretation of history will ever be able to disprove.

[1] See, for example, D. G. Blanchflower, A. J. Oswald, Well-being over time in Britain and the USA, in “Journal of Public Economics”, 88 (2004), pp. 1359-1386; R. Layard, S. Nickell, G. Mayraz, The marginal utility of income, in “Journal of Public Economics”, 92:8/9 (2008), pp. 1846-1857; D. Kahneman, A. Deaton, High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being, in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America”, 107:38 (2010), pp. 16489-93; E. Proto, A. Rustichini, A Reassessment of the Relationship between GDP and Life Satisfaction, in “PLoS ONE”, 8 (2013).

Federico Tabellini is the author of “A Future History of the 21st Century”

Our admiration, interest, and respect spikes for countries where the spread of Covid-19 is flattened or limited with early measures. As we track global statistics on a daily basis, any country with less than 1000 cases makes us react with Wow and How. As we scroll further down the list, those with 500 or less than 100 cases make us feel positive and we conclude: This is the place to live. These may or may not be counted as fantasy lands or ideal destinations in normal times, but when it comes to survival, we salute them for keeping citizens safe in these dark times.

When I discussed this with some friends in an online chat, they are reluctant to bat for developed and advanced nations now. Countries more efficient in the management of crisis and saving human lives, countries more benevolent towards the poor, countries with more nature-friendly policies, countries where a citizen is considered much more than a statistic are weighed against the traditional heavyweights. When the pandemic subsides and people have lesser emotional stress, perhaps the same set of questions will have completely different answers. Or maybe, the magnitude of this crisis enables us to imagine grief more closely and we are compelled to revise our assessment of growth, development, and quality living.

While the recovery phase will take its time, the nations least affected will have having a clear advantage over the severely affected ones. Whether they will be able to leverage on their strengths and give the world the option of a better life with limited but sufficient resources remains to be seen.

Economists and artists will get busy mapping the COVID-19 impact on people once the pandemic is contained. GDP predictions, recession, relief packages and stimulus will form the key discussions. The wealthy of every nation will look for growing economies to park their funds and they will come together to create rich economies — lured by maximum plough back of profits. They will look for economies with double-digit annual growth or for high single-digit economies with enormous potential to double up in the short term itself.

Job losers and fresh job seekers will migrate in search of better and stable options anywhere in the world. The top ten nations for immigrants will be another interesting development. Many new countries will enter this list and many big names will be excluded from the list. Globalisation will become a word of caution for some nations while the rest of the world will begin to harness its potential.

Tragedies inspire artists. The political class that creates global tragedies will be defeated by nature this time. Man-made tragedies kindle the angst in artists far more than the natural ones, even if the extent of damage remains the same or even greater. Being lovers of nature, the community of artists will not be ruthless towards the eco systems. They will blame mankind for being unkind, for the excesses against nature, and treat every natural disaster as the planet’s brave attempt to heal or reclaim what it lost. Artists will remind people and countries to be friendlier towards the Earth as will environmentalists, who have always emphasised harmonious co-existence with nature. This enthusiastic drive will continue with full force.

As soon as the element of greed raises its ugly head and the countries become competitive to provide a ‘better life’ or restore the ‘better’ life, the return towards normal will start. Although we live under greater threat, we have greater confidence that we will survive every kind of threat. The resumption of the predictable cycle will make us return to our lives of consumerism, to flaunt fancy gadgets or something precious to suggest our material abundance. The lessons from COVID-19 will be forgotten and buried.

Rich countries fear the death of their privileged status more than the death of thousands and millions of people. Those who survive will need to live in the same country with pride in its strengths. A country with the highest casualties will continue to say it is far below the expected numbers. If a million die, they will boast of saving many millions more. They will boost the morale of the nation with solidarity drives and keep them upbeat about a quick bounce back. It is a humongous task that brings a battery of opinion makers, public relation strategists and pliant media to play a constructive role in helping governments build – or rebuild – their image.

However, as critical assessment will have lesser tolerance, masses will expect their governments to do what is required. In such times, elected leaders will get the opportunity to showcase their potential. State leaders will grow in stature through their performance. National leaders will find suitable roles other than criticising the government. Social service measures to benefit the poor will help them connect better. Instead of lampooning the governments, people should be seen aligned with the government. These images will linger in the public mind for long. And a new class of leaders will emerge as viable alternatives –some reaching the helm through sacrifice, some reaching it through service.

It will not matter whether democracies deliver the best care or totalitarian regimes perform better. Any kind of governance will find resonance if the citizens conclude their leaders prevented severe loss of human lives. At the end of the day, survival matters. The political class has understood it is not only important to do enough, but it is equally important to be seen you are doing enough. When one game seems lost, the other has to be won.

Global leaders are trying their best to tell their citizens they have a responsive and proactive government. When elected leaders get affected by the virus, they appear vulnerable as individuals. When they get cured faster, they prove their stronger ability to fight and survive. A subtle message that the nation is safe in their hands.

Devraj Singh Kalsi works as a senior copywriter in Kolkata. His short stories and essays have been published in Deccan Herald, Tehelka, Kitaab, Earthen Lamp Journal, Assam Tribune, and The Statesman. Pal Motors is first novel.  

A new study in Nature (April 2020) casts a disturbing light on the prospects of abrupt ecosystem collapse. The report analyzes the probabilities of collapsing ecosystems en masse, and not simply the loss of individual species. (Source: Trisos, C.H. et al, The Projected Timing of Abrupt Ecological Disruption From Climate Change, Nature, April 8, 2020)

The paper states that a high percentage of species will be exposed to harmful climate conditions at about the same time, potentially leading to sudden and catastrophic die-offs of biodiversity. If high greenhouse gas emissions remain in place, abrupt events are forecast to begin before 2030 in tropical oceans and spread to tropical forests and temperate regions over time.

Without doubt, no nation is prepared for the consequences of collapsing ecosystems nor are they doing anything to avert it. Yet, it is all about the quintessence of life on the planet.

There is a high probability that fossil fuel emissions will not be curtailed enough in enough time to prevent abrupt ecosystem collapse(s). Sufficient mitigation efforts to slowdown carbon emissions are not happening, not even close.

Regrettably the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects future usage of fossil fuels that look an awful lot like “the reverse” of rapid emission mitigation with plans afoot by the U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other major producers to increase fossil fuel production by 120% by 2030, and China and India have elaborate, surprisingly huge, plans to increase usage of coal. All of which portends big-big-big trouble down the pike. Of course, it’s a crushing blow to the Paris ‘15 climate accord. (Sources: Dangerous Levels of Warming Locked in by Planned Jump in fossil Fuels Output, National Geographic, Nov. 20, 2019 and BBC News d/d November 20, 2019: “Climate Change: China Coal Surge Threatens Paris Targets” and IEA)

Problematically, CO2 emissions, the primary catalyst for global warming, are on a 62-year semi-parabolic uptrend (Keeling Curve) year by year higher, never lower. The recent Mauna Loa Observatory (est. 1958) monthly average for CO2 emissions for March 2020 registered 414.50 ppm versus 411.97 ppm in March 2019.

For perspective, in 1963 it was 322.28 ppm. In 2000 it was 368.74 ppm. Notice: It took 37 years from 1963 to 2000 to increase by 45 ppm. Since 2000, it’s only taken 20 years to increase by that same amount, 45 ppm. Meaning, turbo-charged greenhouse gas emissions are compressing the timeline to ever-higher levels. Bad news.

More to the point, worldwide carbon emissions were 36.8 billion tons in 2019. By way of an historical context, when nature traversed its own course 55 million years ago similar levels of emissions, in the aggregate, cranked temperatures up by 5C, but it took centuries and centuries to achieve.  That level of temperature today would take civilization down to its knees.

Back in the day, 55 million years ago, the annualized rate of carbon emissions by nature on its own accord was 1.1 billion tons per year but spread out over a few thousand years. Today world economies emit more than 36 billion tons per year. That’s as much carbon in 1 year as 30 years of emissions generated by nature on its own 55 million years ago, when sea levels rose by 50 feet. Hmm.

More to the point, today’s rapid growth 30xs faster does not allow time for ecosystems to adapt, especially when compared to the drawn-out affair of a few thousand years 55 million years ago. Of significance, back then ecosystems had enough time to adjust to a hotter planet.

Nowadays ecosystems have no chance of adjusting because of hyper-speed emissions thirty times faster than the paleoclimate record of 55 million years ago. In turn, that prompts some level of contemplation about the bitter truth that the planet was not designed for 7 billion people in the first instance, but that’s a much longer story.

In fact, clarifying the point even further, the Human Footprint consumes 1.75 Earths. Therefore, and because the biosphere is overused and overly abused, at its margins the planet is ultra-sensitized to the repercussions of human activity. In turn, this gives rise to collapsing ecosystems that are crucial for life support throughout the planet. Oops! Without viable ecosystems, life ends.

Meantime, the initial stages, or early warning signals, of abrupt ecosystem collapse are already happening in real time. A prime example is the Great Barrier Reef suffering its worst coral bleaching on record because of too much planetary heat. February of 2020 saw the most extreme ocean temperatures at the Great Barrier Reef since records began in 1900.

Thus, the world’s largest living organism has experienced three devastating bleachings in only five years. Metaphorically, that’s kinda like a glittering red neon rapidly blinking light extending across the sky above the entire 2,300-kilometre (1400-mile) Great Barrier Reef flashing the words: Help! Save the planet!

Consider this, for the first time in recorded history severe bleaching, which kills coral outright caused by excessive levels of heat, hit all three major regions of the Great Barrier Reef, the northern, central, and southern portions. That’s unprecedented and should scare the daylights out of anybody and everybody. It’s a startling example of anthropogenic-generated global heat at work at the margins of the planet and likely marks the beginning of ecosystems collapsing en masse.

“A survey of 1,036 reefs in the Great Barrier Reef over the last two weeks of March revealed the most widespread bleaching event on record.” (Source: Theresa Machemer, The Great Barrier Reef Is now Facing Most Widespread Bleaching Event Yet, Smithsonian Magazine April 9, 2020)

There is no stronger signal of serious trouble for the planet than 3 consecutive massive bleachings of the Great Barrier Reef within only 5 years, as ocean temperatures hit all-time recorded highs. That’s a no-brainer.

The implications are downright scary. The fact that collapse is already underway in real time today should be enough evidence to bring world leadership together to take advantage of “coronavirus-forced downtime” to reorganize the world economy around planet-friendly eco economics and drop, like a hot potato, the neoliberal brand of capitalism of the past 40 years.

But still, getting real, what can be done?

Only a worldwide Marshall Plan can save civilization, as it is currently constituted, but maybe not, some say it’s too late. Still, there’s no competent leadership, with vision, in the world to take charge. After all, high-end capitalism forged a new brand of leadership, as it depends upon iron-fisted tyrannical leadership to survive its obvious foibles, and there are many!

However, even in a world of perfect leadership, or even imperfect leadership but smart and informed, and based upon real science, a sober-minded (studious and logical) leader would toss out neoliberalism in favor of eco economics in a NY minute as a rescue-line to the planet.

Meanwhile, according to the above-referenced Trisos ecosystem study: “Keeping global warming below 2°C effectively ‘flattens the curve’ of how this risk to biodiversity will accumulate over the century,” said co-author Dr Alex Pigot from UCL, “providing more time for species and ecosystems to adapt to the changing climate.” (Source: Climate Change Could Abruptly Alter Biodiversity, University of Cape Town News, April 8, 2020)

Since studying climate change/global warming for over a decade, it’s readily apparent that it is careening down a path of doomsday-type events. Its trajectory is clearly up, up, and away. Accordingly, horrific problems could ensue, unexpectedly, for example, abrupt loss of adequate food resources due to mid/lower latitude agriculture collapse under the stress of too much global heat.

Ecosystem collapse is already evident. The Fertile Crescent (Middle East) where Western Civilization started, is rapidly disappearing as a breadbasket because of: (1) severe droughts and (2) stupid human mismanagement of natural resources. Portions of eastern and southern Mediterranean landmass are drying up faster than anywhere else on the planet. Hence, eco migrants commit to arduous pathways to Europe, in time morphing into a retro Mad Max world.

A planet that transitions from a healthy source of natural resources to a bruised limp shell of its former self is potentially much more deadly than coronavirus, which is merely one more example of an abrupt happenstance (Black Swan) that nobody expected, as it happened all of a sudden, out of the blue.

Abrupt ecosystem collapse is similar to coronavirus in some aspects but dreadfully different and much more sinister in many others.

Postscript: “The main finding that surprised us was how much biodiversity is at risk in the first half of this century,” said Dr Christopher Trisos, senior researcher at the African Climate & Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town (UCT). “The risk doesn’t accumulate gradually, but can go from low risk to high risk within a decade. This abruptness of risk was really a shocking finding for us.”

Robert Hunziker, MA, economic history DePaul University, awarded membership in Pi Gamma Mu International Academic Honor Society in Social Sciences is a freelance writer and environmental journalist who has over 200 articles published, including several translated into foreign languages, appearing in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He has been interviewed on numerous FM radio programs, as well as television.

Last night, I got a call from my cousin sister. She is a Nurse in a big hospital in NY. She was calling me after a long time. In fact, I started getting many such phone calls from several other friends and relatives after the current pandemic driven global lockdown. Glad that people are finding more time to interact as relatives, friends and family members.

My cousin Jyoti who called me yesterday, told me that right at the time when she called me, three trucks full of dead bodies are lying outside her hospital. On an average 70 bodies are taken out daily from only her wing of the hospital. For the 10 minutes or so we have spoken, I could hear continuous sirens of ambulances coming into her hospital. She said people above 70 are not given any treatment or ventilators. There is only a 50 – 50 chance for death or life for even those who go into the ventilators. This is NY.

We do not know where we are headed to in India. I sit now in an apartment house in south Delhi which is inside a ‘red’ marked zone. Occasionally I go out for a short and quick visit to the nearby market to buy necessities such as vegetables and milk. I do attend zoom calls from the office and my children attend online classes. As a family, we spend our time cooking, cleaning and also investing some time on our favorite hobbies including music, social media and reading books. We do not know how long this will continue.

I called my servant yesterday. She used to come in the daytime to help us with cooking and cleaning. She sounded very fragile and weak. She wanted to get some money to buy food, but she does not have an account with a money transfer facility. Servants are not allowed to enter our apartment. She somehow managed to send me the account details of her brother through whom I was able to send her some money. But I feel helpless to the plight of hundreds of hungry people out there in the street. How long?

It is clearly an uncertain time. We are going through very difficult, stressful and shocking times. This is unprecedented and a very rare period of human history.

But if we look back into history, we see these kinds of epidemics were kept on happening in human history at periodic intervals.

There was a well-known scientist called Malthus. He said, when the rise in population is greater than that of the food supply, it creates a condition of disequilibrium. As a result, people will not get enough food even for survival. People will die due to a lack of food supply. But nature will have its own mechanisms of checks and balances. People will be subjected to wars, epidemics, famines, starvation, and other natural calamities. These are named as positive checks by Malthus.

There are many criticisms against the Malthusian theory of population checks. But one thing is certain. Whenever men lived against the rules of nature, beyond limits, there were always serious consequences.

Human beings are supposed to live within the sustainable limit that nature suggests. Unfortunately, we see people are exploiting the nature beyond measure. ‘Human need’ is being replaced by ‘human greed’.

Popular author Yuval Noah Harari says, “As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it – and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it.” As a result, we had several floods, famines, earthquakes, and pandemics.

Humans as a species have survived many disasters and pandemics. In the case of COVID we know that those who have better immunity are escaping from infection. Experts say nutritious food, adequate physical exercise, low-stress levels and enough sleep can boost our immunity.

In this time of confusion, fear and chaos, it is very difficult to maintain a low stress. Many people ask a lot of ‘IF’ questions. If I get the infection, what will happen to me, to my children, to my project and so on. Experts say it is better to stay away from such hypothetical questions and be always positive in our mindset.

My classmate Ajimol Mohan is a Psychologist in Toronto. She shared a method called ‘appreciation’ to reduce our stress levels. Whenever we experience high levels of stress, pick up a piece of paper and note our stress level on a scale of 1-10, say 6. Then we should sit quietly at a comfortable place and think about a pleasant memory or look at some pleasant object. It could be a thing or a person or a painting that is very pleasant and generating some positive vibes. We shouldn’t think about individuals, objects or events which can give us pain or unpleasant thoughts. After some time, we will notice that our stress levels have come down considerably. We may go back to the piece of paper and note down our stress levels which may be lesser than the earlier score. If needed, we can repeat the process.

After the coming of COVID many people started saying that ‘religion is dead’, ‘science win’ etc. All these are meaningless assertions. In fact, science is only one form of religion and all these religions and spirituality will continue to co-exist till human beings exist. I have seen many scientist friends who gained strength through spirituality and faith. Faith, hope, and love are our bridges to the future. Science and spirituality offer tools and fuel to cross the river of human miseries!

COVID like shocks and uncertainties are part of a process of rejuvenating the earth. Such processes happen at the micro-level and macro-level too in individuals, communities, nations and even in planets.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written a beautiful book called ‘Antifragile’. In this book, Taleb says: “Modern society assumes that anything can be ‘fixed,’ but most of the time it is better to leave well alone. Socioeconomic life and the human body can actually be harmed by intervention, leaving the whole more fragile to shocks and uncertainty. Often, the best course of action is to ignore the noise from too much data, and let time take care of the problem.”

It is good and even essential to have such shocks for organizations also. According to Taleb, best systems (whether of organizations or of individuals) are the ones that overcame shocks, volatility and uncertainty! They gain a natural empathy for those who are suffering and the marginalized. We all need to face COVID like shocks. To him, “Suppressing volatility and randomness in our economy, our health, our education, or our political life makes systems more fragile. Without stressors, complex systems become weak and even die”. We can use this time as an opportunity to re-discover life and to live life in its fullness.

Those who are religious may subject themselves to the will of God while having full faith in God’s plans for them. Others may regain their strength through whatever processes which usually offer them peace and tranquillity and hope.

Haruki Murakami discussed a similar scenario to what we live in today in one of his stories. He writes: “Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. All you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

We are in a storm of confusion and chaos. This phase will definitely pass. We will overcome this sooner than later. When we overcome this, let us be resilient, changed and loving individuals and communities. Will we?

(Kandathil Sebastian is a researcher, novelist, and commentator on social issues)

“When I described the tumor in my esophagus as a “blind, emotionless, alien,” I suppose that even I couldn’t help awarding it some of the qualities of a living thing. That at least I know to be a mistake: an instance of the pathetic fallacy by which we ascribe animate qualities to inanimate phenomena.”

• • – Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

The world, needless to say, is currently battling with a similar kind of a ‘blind, emotionless, alien’ in the form of CoVid-19, which has efficiently rattled the 21st century’s ‘global village’, matching in its pace in bringing the fast paced life to a grinding halt, rupturing the grand apparatus of globalisation by reinforcing the borders of nation states along with creating new borders of quarantine from  cities, towns, streets to new segregations, even  within the space one calls ‘home’. Hitchens’s understanding of the cancer in his esophagus as an ‘alien’ is understandable to most and relatable to some, almost familiar in a sardonic way (in the limited confines of language) as a foreign invader of a host’s body. But cancer never managed to evoke the kind of global terror that CoVid-19 has managed to do in such a short time, primarily because of the scale of damage it has done and is still capable of until contained. What makes CoVid-19 more alien is the directly proportional relationship between its rapid global spread and the looming unfamiliarity of the virus without a potential cure.

Taking a break from the Covid-19 virus for a moment, if one should just look at the term ‘alien’ without getting into its historiography, one can still broadly club together the polysemic aspects of this term as primarily constituting the ‘other’, in a colonial, castetist, classist and racial sense, flowing from the notion of ‘self’ within the confines of the anthropocentric world view.  In other words, the term ‘alien’ has been used by some humans to categorize other humans in order to oppress, supress or separate the latter, in different contexts throughout history. Until the advancement of modern science in the last two centuries and the discovery of the microbial universe (of which CoVid-19 is very much a part of), the explanations for the occasional outbreaks of plague and disease (at best or worst) were angry acts of God, catering to the need to give form to the mysterious , thereby  restricting the definition of ‘alien’ to the social sphere.

The term ‘alien’ attained new meanings as science developed, while retaining the ones in the social sphere. One can argue that this addition of new definitions to the term ‘alien’ by modern science is gradually marring the ascribed social categories of ‘self’ and the ‘other’, as the human species understands more and more about the planet and the universe. On the other hand one can also argue (very convincingly) that the advancement of technology in this capitalist structure of the current ‘global village’ has only reinforced the notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’, of rich and poor, of haves and have nots, of the expendable and the unexpendable, where the old dictum ‘knowledge is power’ has evolved to ‘control of knowledge is power’. One can continue to argue that there is a looming gap between the advancement of technology and scientific/rational thinking in the ‘modern’ society. This holds especially true in the case of India, where the state is actively participating in endorsing and encouraging pseudo-scientific and superstitious practices among its citizens in the name of ‘warding off’ the CoVid-19. Most recent example is the active response to the Prime Minister of India’s call to chant, ring bells, bang empty utensils of steel and light candles. It would be redundant to interpret this as simply respecting the position one holds in the office or a mere matter of showing national solidarity or worse feeling patriotic. Rather, (if one should draw from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment) is an ostentatious display of power on the human body in modern society through the instruments of pseudo-science and the fear of the unknown, where the politics of subjugation derive legitimacy through a hazy mix of the scientific and the pseudo. The facilitation of the ‘known’ through science for an individual (thanks to technology) feeds into the fear of the unknown for the collective, becoming a breeding swamp for the pseudo and the superstitious to take control and subdue. In other words, the fear of the unknown (CoVid-19) is crucial in facilitating this mass performance to mitigate the social angst caused by the virus. But this mass act is not a spontaneous one. It needs a sutradhara, a director, a father figure, the dear leader to “administer” it. Theodor Adorno in Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda writes:

“When the leaders become conscious of mass psychology and take it into their own hands, it ceases to exist in a certain sense… just as little as people believe in the depth of their hearts that the Jews are the devil, do they completely believe in their leader. They do not really identify themselves with him but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader’s performance.”

Until the age of the Industrial Revolution, when the world was yet to be fully explored and colonised by the white man,  the notion of ‘other’ always had room for the mythic and the unknown. Animal motifs in art since antiquity are replete with examples (like the unicorn) giving a form to the fantastic and the mysterious. Fantasy played a significant role in trying to bridge the gaps between the known and the unknown, the rational and the irrational, the ‘self’ and the mysterious ‘other’. This fantasy has evolved with the evolution of the scientific discipline over the centuries, consistently finding room to accommodate the irrational. In the quote at the beginning, Hitchens’ conscious acknowledgement of ‘attributing qualities of a living thing’ to the cancer in his body is at best an affectation on the not-so-conscious attribution of the ‘bad spirit’ like stature given to CoVid-19 by the Indian mass psyche. Therefore, while labs across the world are trying to find effective ways to test and treat the spread of the virus, there seems to be no harm (as is endorsed by many popular figures in India from the film industry), to look at the astrological chart and pick a time to collectively generate ‘positive vibrations’ by ringing bells and banging utensils to fight the virus (a seeming Pascalian wager).

Also, the fear of the CoVid-19 virus has strengthened the fear and alienation towards the known ‘other’. For instance, the most recent development in the treatment of the minorities in India (Muslims and the North-East people included), is their perceived symptomatic relationship in the spread of CoVid-19 in the popular discourse. Another instance is the treatment meted out to the doctors and the nurses working tirelessly to treat the infected across the country in spite of the lack of proper protective gear. While on one hand this has resulted in vague praises by the state and the civil society, it has also catapulted them into the category of the ‘other’ in many parts of India. They are being ostracised and vilified by certain sections of the same civil society with the fear of them acting as agents for the spread of the virus.  It is interesting to note that, ideally this lockdown should have brought the plight of Kashmiris closer to the broader Indian psyche but it is not so. If anything, the fear of the virus has only segregated and monstrosised the ‘other’ from this ‘Pan-Indian’ majoritarian ‘self’.

Image: The Phantom (From Dreams: A Series) by Vasudeva Naidu

As the pandemic continues its work and the potential ‘modern’ host languishes in the confinement of the indeterminate quarantine (exempting the poorest of the poor), there are notes of hope that when this is all over, the virus will leave an indelible mark on the existing economic structure of the world for the better. One can already feel the pitch of optimism in a particular class of the society who for instance while reading Milan Kundera’s Slowness would periodically post Instagram stories, musing on how slowness facilitates remembering, helping in coming to terms with one’s ‘self’ as opposed to the fast paced life brought about by modernity and technology, that one is only too familiar with.  Maybe the virus will manage to do just that in an alchemic way, turning isolation into solitude for many, or maybe not. But, this renewed form of assertion and negotiation of the self with the ‘self’ as a consequence of the conditions imposed by the virus has left enough room for the possibility of a reassertion of the known ‘other’ as a more ‘alien’ and  dangerous entity, pushing the category closer and closer towards the fear of CoVid-19 and latching it altogether with the virus, leading to a phantasmagoria of the pandemic.

One cannot help but remember William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which the band of boys trapped on an island during wartime, organise themselves democratically to survive hoping to be rescued eventually. As the novel progresses, this order quickly deteriorates as the majority of the boys become idle giving room to paranoias, the chief of which is a supposed monster they call the “beast”. Acting on this paranoia results in the escalation of a series of tragic events leading to the death of Piggy who represented civility and rationality on the island.

Vasudeva Naidu K Was a research scholar in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Gandhinagar from 2014 to 2017. Currently teaching in Salesian College, Darjeeling.

Famous German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel was the first philosopher who linked social science and natural science by applying the principle of Thesis, Anti-Thesis and Synthesis. He effectively separated State and Religion while allowing them to function in their separate spheres and advanced the scientific thinking of modern world. In these times of coronavirus war on humanity we must understand his game changing statement that “State is the March of God on Earth”. Three major religions of the world–Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, are still struggling to accept State, Science and Medicine as the saviors of the humanity and religion should move into the private sphere. Religions must leave the public domain to the State in a situation when a pandemic like corona erupted and shaken the foundations of human life. State, according Hegel, is a rational institution as an agent of rational God. He transformed God from a superstitious element into a rational element and from subjective being to objective reality.

Modern state is much more developed than what it was during Hegel’s time in early nineteenth century. In India, for example, with the Bharatiya Janatha Party coming to power in 1999 and 2014, state is seen as an irrational faith based institution. Yogi Adityanath, who was supposed to be a non-political sanyasi, became the Chief Minister of biggest state in India and is handling it as if it is a Mutt like religious institution, risking the nation itself. A global Islamic body, Tablighi Jamaat, by organizing an international conference at Delhi at a time when corona was attacking the world put whole of India in great risk. In America a pastor of major church in Florida was arrested for refusing to lock down a church and still holding mass services 1

Hegel died of Cholera in 1831 at the age of 61. Religion in those days was very dominant and conflict between medical science and faith based religion was very intense. Cholera was not a pandemic like Corona which we are struggling with. But it was a major epidemic in Germany of his time. Large number of people were dying in Germany as they were dying world over in 2020. Hegel went out of Berlin for fear of cholera but after  his university was re-opened he came back and was said to have died having contracted cholera.

Hegel was an intense reader of Bible and a serious follower of Jesus Christ and wrote a book on Him– Life of Jesus. In fact Hegel was trained to be a pastor but he left that course and became a philosopher.

At that time also the religious masses perhaps were not caring the state controls to save themselves. In those trying times Hegel declared that ‘State Is the March of God on Earth’. He conjoined State with God which no religious person or preacher would accept. It was a blasphemic statement. But Hegel wanted them to understand the role of strong state in difficult situations. He thought that his German rulers were not strong enough hence he wanted Napoleon to take over Germany.

But we are living in times that democracy is a dominant political system where discussion, consultation and policy formulation even to tackle pandemic situations would play a better role than dictatorship. People must be sensitive enough to understand the importance of public health than that of individual pleasure or right in times of pandemics. Very organised religion is far more well spread now than in Hegel’s times. Hegel’s was post crusades and post Martin Luther period and the Islamic and the Hindu religions were not so well organised at that time. Buddhism always remained a different entity without pushing itself into fundamentalism at any time in its existential history. Its only fundamentalist tendency was maintaining all male Sangha system in the modern times. But by and large the states where Buddhism is dominant religion, there the religion functions under the guidance of state laws as religious congregations were never critical to that religion. Socialism and semi-socialism are the main socio-political structure in these Far Eastern Buddhist nations, except Japan. The notion of God in those countries is focused in the image of Buddha or on their ancestors.

At a time when Coronavirus is waging a war on global humanity, there are billions who still believe that God, Allah or Eswar will save people from coronavirus in Hindu, Muslims and Christian religious nations and they do not have to care for the state, doctors and medicine. Many of them do not want to practice Disease Distancing ( I am against using the phrase Social Distancing) in the markets and at home. Particularly some religious communities like Muslims believe in herded prayer life. They normally organize religious congregations with huge number of people at the religious spaces. Many Muslim countries have not adopted democracy where debate and expert opinion does not play any role in decision making on health issues. They use Quoranic injunctions to pass decrees. In many Muslim countries monarchies or dictatorships are handling power at the time of coronoa pandemic attack. Social science and medical science discourses have not acquired much place in those countries. India which was a secular democracy from 1947 began to change the course  after the Bharatiya Janatha Party/Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh came to power in 1999 and 2014. The social science, natural science and medical science developmental discourse in the country came under cloud. Investment in the sciences–social, natural and medical–got reduced drastically. The State is not seen as the ‘March of God on the Earth’but began to be seen ‘Mythology is the State’. The RSS/BJP forces have no understanding of European thought of materialism and science and religion negotiated with each other. They started treating the ancient texts as ready made answer books like the Quoran in the Muslim world even on medical issues.

Corona pandemic suddenly intervened into this process of change from democratic to theocratic state in India. Science, particularly medical science had to come to central stage as the corona pandemic threatened everybody’s life like a nuclear war on a particular zone. No nuclear war can shake the whole world at once like the coronavirus could do.

Globally the contemporary state–whether of democratic or of one party or of one man dictatorship–is far more powerful and organized than what it was in Hegel’s time. The virus has attacked the word in the thick of the right wing spiritual forces took control of many nation states. Hence there is a confused handling of virus.

The Muslim world has been depending more on Allah than on state, doctor and medicine even in times of corona attack. Many Muslim  countries have not focused on medical infrastructure at all. The Hindutva forces in India are spreading superstition and myth as source of state power and kept the morale of Indian scientists and doctors at low by the time the virus attacked in March 2020. Babas and yogis became Chief Ministers and most Hindutvawadis are more baba worshipers than God worshipers. The Indian secular State was transformed into baba state and the Prime Minister Narendra Modi is hanging between astrology and science. He declares at 9 AM on 3rd March that people should lit lamps on 5th March at 9 PM for 9 Minutes. Some astrologer must have told him that number 9 works like an anti-corona vaccine. The Indian PM while ruling 1.3 billion people believed in that kind of astrology. He is known as more sensible among the BJP/RSS leaders who are ruling the nation yet his regime never gave reason, science and medicine priority over belief and faith. An individual can rely on belief and faith and face the consequence as an individual but the state must be a an embodiment of Reason as Hegel wanted it to be.

Modi and his team have been attacking Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, who believed in reason and science as the foundation of modern Indian democratic secular state. If only that beginning was not made in the 1940s India would have been a hot bed of superstition and ignorance. Though BJP/RSS combine praises Dr..B.R.Ambedkar it does not believe in the rational state that he advocated for.

Even the Christian world where secularism and rationality gained ground over a period of time went back into more fundamentalist beliefs where Pentecostal spirits not Jesus started dominating by the time corona landed in the West from China. America had to arrest pastors who refused to lock down churches. The case of a Muslim Mullah international conference organized at Delhi from 13 January to 16, which spread the virus across India that was contracted by the native Muslims from the air traveled foreign Mullahs is case in point. At Ayodhya on Sriramnavami (marriage celebration Sriram with Sita) massive gathering on 2nd April was planned by Yogi Adityanath but that had to be forcefully stopped by Modi Government.

There is an international guiding body called the United Nations Organization and  its health wing, World Health Organization, to guide people on protection of health through modern medical science practices now. The guide lines are coming from there. But each state has to implement those guidelines with a scientific temper. Religious fundamentalists do not bother about the medical science and many of them are ready to die in the name of God, Allah or Eswar. But a virus like corona does not kill just one individual even s/he wants to die for the sake of their belief. It kills many people who want to live and depend on reason and medicine. The modern state has to ensure the life of those who want live more seriously than those who want to die without any concern for others. Death in a pandemic situation does not remain and individual affair. An individual death becomes a community or nation’s death.

Like the Chinese doctor Li Weliang who warned the Chinese state about the deadly virus and became victim of that virus but saved millions from the virus the modern state must save every life with the help of science, medicine and doctors . There are many science believers who would want to live long and preserve many lives would die if the state does not take timely steps. The solution to the problem of contradiction between science and faith lies in Hegelian formulation that ‘State is the March of God on Earth’.

India is a country of 1.3 billion people. If the pandemic is not handled by the Indian state based on science, medicine and doctor and para medical strength , the nation will stand to lose millions of people.

Hegelian state was an embodiment of Reason and God but not of  superstitious faith. In a crisis like this that state needs to operate on rational grounds. Any rational state deploys science as the driving force of disease cure. Doctor and nurse with the help of medicine and technology  play a key role in saving human beings but not superstition or astrology or prayer. Every religious institution has to surrender to modern rational state so that human life could be saved first. Hegel understood the relationship between God, State and Science. His famous statement that State is the March of God on Earth is more relevant now than any other time before. Let that God function with full powers but not as dictator but as democracy.

Hegel was not a socialist like Marx. But he laid the foundation for socialist thought, state and society. The socialist state emerged and has undergone ups and downs. But during coronacrisis of the world it seems to re-emerge as the best alternative for human survival. Hence Hegel becomes more relevant now than ever before.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is Political Theorist, Social Activist and Author