https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F9h3zp8ru8
Thursday, June 30, 2022
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Holiday (1938, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn)
https://www.d-archive.org/holiday-1938/
A young man falls in love with a girl from a rich family. His unorthodox plan to go on holiday for the early years of his life is met with skepticism by everyone except for his fiance’s sister.
The Mexico Option
https://popularresistance.org/the-mexico-option/
Mexico is fighting to regain sovereignty over its energy future.
And African Leftists would do well to look to it for some answers.
In the 2018 Mexican general election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as “AMLO”) swept to victory. His presidential victory coincided with the historic collapse of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Barring losses in 2000 and 2006, the PRI had ruled Mexico uninterrupted since 1929 (under three different titles). In 2012, PRI’s Enrique Peña Nieto won the presidency with 39.17%; but by 2018, the PRI received just 16.4% of the vote compared with the 54.71% (the largest margin since 1982) received by AMLO’s Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (MORENA). The issue of corruption was front and center in this election, and AMLO explicitly framed it as a systemic byproduct of neoliberalism. While markets were initially rattled, capital was not in an outright panic; AMLO had broadly promised that “his government will not spend beyond its means.” In 2018, The Economist cited “uncertainty,” but three years later AMLO’s face was plastered on their print edition as “Mexico’s false messiah.”
The Economist alluded to various ruinous policies, but it is AMLO’s actions in the energy sector that justified the typical association of a leftist leader with proto-fascist figures such as Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi, and Jair Bolsonaro. AMLO’s energy reforms are geared toward reasserting energy sovereignty over an (increasingly foreign) private sector that owns most of Mexico’s renewable energy. The subsequent contestation has sparked national referendums, attempted constitutional amendments, and cases in the country’s supreme court. The market-led transition creates such contestations wherever it leads. It generally wins. Thus, the battle for Mexico’s energy sector offers an essential example for the left—and for South Africa’s especially.
The PRI And The Revolution In Development
Mexico offers a rich history of class struggle, from its independence to its 10-year revolution that ended in 1920. The postrevolutionary years saw a series of inter-elite violent contestations. In Origins of the Mass Party, Edwin Ackerman explains that the constitution of the PRI (then the Partido Nacional Revolucionario) was to “‘institutionalize the revolution’ by offering a vehicle for the circulation of the elite and [to] discipline ‘the revolutionary family.’” Irrespective of the needs of the elites, under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), the PRI—then the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana—followed the postwar Keynesian pathway of state-led development. The nationalization of Mexico’s oil in 1938 was, and remains, a source of great national pride after the unfettered foreign pillaging of its resources during the 31 years of the Porfirio DÃaz regime (1877-1911). Then, Mexico was beginning what Christy Thornton calls its “revolution in development,” which sought “to devise new rules and institutions for managing the global economic systems.” Indeed, the World Bank was irked by this state ownership and refused to loan capital in the 1950s to the state-owned oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), although it did offer capital to partially state-owned power utility the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE). The “revolution in development” even saw Mexico use foreign investment to nationalize the electricity sector and the CFE.
Eventually, the neoliberal turn set in, and Mexico’s foreign debt would supply ammunition to its spate of liberalizations under the PRI. Thornton reflects that the “revolution in development” had inadvertently been “used to dismantle the country’s state-led developmental project.” But the energy sector remained largely off the table, and capital would have to bide its time until the PRI returned to power in 2012 under Nieto. This return saw it continue on a path of liberalization, now explicitly targeting the energy sector through the Energy Transition Law of 2013. PEMEX was cleared to do business with private companies on exploration, which came with various modalities of privatizing reserves that were discovered. But it was the spate of reforms privatizing the power sector that drove the mass confrontation today.
To Liberalization And Back Again
The opening salvo in the war for Mexico’s power sector came in 1992 under former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, when gas companies were afforded power-purchase agreements (PPAs), locking the government into purchasing their power at agreed-upon prices for decades. Two decades later, former CFE officials are in court over awarding contracts to a US gas company “which had no previous experience in the energy industry.” Despite their lawyer’s connection to the Salinas family, these contracts were under Nieto, whom Sean Sweeney of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy calls the “poster child for ‘the standard model’ … power sector privatization.” Nieto’s reforma energética (energy reform), as is standard, empowered the market over the public sector. Private companies were allowed to produce and sell power for the first time, while PEMEX and CFE were demoted from state-owned enterprises to “productive state enterprises” with corporate structures. The CFE was to be “unbundled” and mandated to ensure “value creation” by “ensuring the country’s energy security.”
Unbundling is a preliminary step towards liberalizing a power sector. Traditional power utilities’ generation, transmission, and distribution divisions are “unbundled” into separate companies. In the case of CFE, its generation was further separated into six entities to compete alongside private generators. These generators were granted PPAs for as long as 20 years with CFE’s transmission and distribution division. But they could also simply bypass the CFE by forming direct contracts with qualified private end users. In Mexico, these PPAs and other contracts were awarded via auction. The first round saw 18 proposals accepted from 11 companies (three from three Mexican companies), while the second round saw 36 proposals accepted from 23 companies spanning 11 countries.
These private generators could count on significant support from the state. Fixed transmission charges were scrapped, and the extensive transmission infrastructure required to connect renewable energy projects was also covered by the public. Companies were also afforded depreciation-based tax breaks. This was justified on the basis of climate commitments, since solar and wind projects dominated the auctions. As is so often the case, Mexico adopted the “privatize to decarbonize” mantra. It was therefore able to further justify these projects as they expropriated the lands of local communities and deepened their inequality. But such matters are apparently not worth considering. AMLO’s battle with private generators is simply reversing “positive trends in Mexico’s energy industry” in favor of its “dangerous addiction to fossil fuels.”
Portrayals of AMLO as anti-climate and pro-fossil fuels (in his support of PEMEX) have gone beyond the business press to garner condemnation from Bill Gates and Mexico’s North American trade partners. Seemingly, all his critics have chosen to ignore the dire state of the energy sector he inherited. The Mexican government could do little when the Texas blackouts of last year came their way. Northern Mexico receives up to 80% of its power from private generators that answer to nothing but their bottom line. While the national electricity demand never exceeded 47 gigawatt-hours (GWh), Nieto’s auctions had granted enough projects to take the supply to 84 GWh. Another reality of renewable energy that is consistently ignored is the impact of its intermittency. The existing Mexican grid could not handle the surges and drops in supply that accompany changes in the weather, and private generators refused to support the upgrades necessary to ameliorate them.
In a landmark memorandum to energy officials, AMLO described the CFE as “almost in ruins: indebted, with its productive capacities reduced [and] subject to regulation that privileges individuals in the implementation of the energy reform. The deep-rooted vices of inefficiency, corruption and waste were preserved.” He further laid out his own plan “to implement the new policy to rescue Pemex and CFE it may be necessary to propose a new energy reform, we do not rule out that possibility; that is to say, the option to present an initiative for constitutional reform.”
In 2021, AMLO’s reformed Electric Industry Act (EIA) was signed into law, outraging international investors. Since its passage, AMLO’s energy ministry has canceled various transmission expansion contracts, demanding that private generators cover these substantial costs that are perennially excluded from total production costs in favor of just marginal costs. The piggybacking of large businesses’ “self-supply” on the grid, described as a mercado negro (black market), was also canceled. Given the dire state of the CFE under Nieto, AMLO’s reforms, pilloried by some as “(counter)reforms,” are better characterized by Sweeney’s description of a “wall of resistance.”
Nieto’s reforms locked the CFE into a subservient position to private generators, whose power got priority. This leaves the CFE in the position of having to back up the intermittency of these generators at a loss. Last year, the CFE reported that its dealings with private producers had cost some 20 billion US dollars through subsidies, exchange rate and inflation risks, irregular supply of power, and rising rates. Instead of leaving the CFE to continue to waste away, AMLO’s law guarantees its central position in supplying the nation’s power. And contrary to critiques of fossil addiction, it is the CFE’s emission-free hydroelectric plants that get first priority, and whose underutilization had previously caused floods.
But the private sector has fought back and taken the government to court. After various losses in local courts, the EIA survived the country’s supreme court, despite a majority of justices voting against key sections such as the prioritization of CFE. AMLO has also attempted to write the law into the constitution through congress. He held a referendum on his presidency in the buildup, and while he won with 93% of the vote, only 18% of eligible voters turned up. It all made little difference during the vote on constitutionalizing the reforms to the EIA, where ALMO’s bid fell well short of the two-thirds majority required in the lower house. Seemingly undeterred, AMLO simply nationalized Mexico’s lithium reserves (a critical mineral for clean energy) with a simple majority two days later.
Mexico is taking back its energy sovereignty, and it has tasked CFE with the job. In doing so, it is laying the groundwork for a potential public pathway towards decarbonization. Irrespective of its much trumped low cost, renewable energy is still not profitable enough. The market-led transition is failing us. We need public investment divorced from the necessity of profitability. We need what Matt Huber and Fred Stafford call “Big Public Power.” AMLO is fighting for big public power, but it is not clear whether decarbonization is a pillar of his agenda. He did recently assert that “Mexico is going to show how it is one of the biggest producers of clean energy,” but did so in the face of a report by his own energy ministry that they are falling short of their targets as private renewables are curtailed. This has been enough for green and climate organizations such as Greenpeace to sue the government over the EIA. It is a far too common occurrence that in its desperation for decarbonization, the climate movement lines up behind renewable capital against relatively fossilized public utilities.
Lessons For South Africa
The similarity between the Mexican and South African situations is uncanny. Mexico can be viewed as perhaps a few years ahead of where South Africa is now. South Africa is set to embark upon its own self-supply “Wild West” pathway which will no doubt bring about the same problems as it did in Mexico. The combination of the land requirements of renewables, the track records of private generators, and South Africa’s land question creates a ticking time bomb. Eskom (South Africa’s national power utility) has been unbundled just like the CFE was, although the process is not entirely complete. The South African government’s renewable energy plans are almost entirely reliant on private capital through auctions producing long-term PPAs. The priority of the power supply from Eskom’s generation division will almost certainly be downgraded by its future “Independent Transmission System and Market Operator” in favor of clean private generators, but it will have to keep its plants running to fulfill its ultimate purpose to back up the grid.
That Eskom intends to dramatically increase its gas-power capacity seemingly confirms this. The case of the CFE under Nieto demonstrates that this arrangement will not be economically feasible without significant tariff hikes and continued bailouts. But the plan has always been for Eskom to be sidelined. Like with the CFE and PEMEX, Eskom has also been steadily corporatized, its procurement and provision of services outsourced. Cheap renewables and climate change have made the final blow of unbundling appealing beyond capital. But these play second fiddle to perceptions that Eskom is beyond saving. With South Africans constantly in the dark, such perceptions are hardly unwarranted. This is where the Mexican and South African situations diverge. There is no AMLO, no MORENA, in South Africa.
I have argued elsewhere that given the choice between capital and the vanguard of state capture, the former is preferred. But it should not be accepted. To reject this binary, the left needs to go beyond putting credible options on the table (many already have) to building a political entity capable of delivering it—and taking back the defense of Eskom from those who would continue to loot it. MORENA has centered its politics and much of its policies on tackling corruption—this is an absolute necessity for any prospective South African formation. Of course, AMLO did not magically appear in 2018; he had received over 30% of the votes in the previous two elections. But making the South African public pathway credible does not necessarily require taking the reins of government. AMLO and MORENA have demonstrated an alternative, and the South African left would do well to look to Mexico for some answers.
Union Demands Respect And Dignity For Disciplined Workers
https://popularresistance.org/union-demands-respect-and-dignity-for-disciplined-workers/
Minneapolis, Minnesota – On June 22 union leaders from AFSCME Local 2822, representing 1300 clerical workers at Hennepin County, crashed the State of the County Address demanding, “Stop retaliation against union activists now! End racism, sexism, ageism at work!”
While managers patted each other on the back and reconnected after two years of hiding at home, union leaders confronted public officials with signs and informational flyers. Workers are demanding the bosses stop targeting union stewards and activists.
Bosses began targeting three union leaders in January 2022.
The first was Irish Gauna, a single African American mother of five who was fired in late January for allegedly violating the county’s COVID testing policy. Irish, a rank-and-file leader, became active in the union after organizing Black women and others in a successful campaign to get paid leave for parents and caregivers during the COVID pandemic. Irish spoke publicly throughout the union’s recent contract negotiations, including at a press conference in early January about why workers voted to strike.
The second was Sue Olson, a 31-year employee at Hennepin County who had no issues at work until she became the only union steward for support staff in the probation department. In the past two months Olson received a three-week suspension without pay for petty issues, including reporting a broken door to facilities instead of her supervisor. The disciplines came shortly after Olson informed human relations that her supervisor was over three months late in issuing raises. Most of the retaliation stems from manager Jen Belde.
The third was DJ Hooker, an executive boardmember of AFSCME 2822, and an associate librarian at North Regional Library. DJ Hooker is a beloved community activist as well. Hooker was issued a written reprimand and one day suspension without pay after a white manager accused them of “reverse racism.” The accusation was related to a conversation with manager Michael Boe where Hooker asserted the need to hire more Black and Latino workers at their library. North Regional serves a predominately African American community on the North Side of Minneapolis. Boss Boe asserted that Hooker’s advocacy for a diverse workforce created a hostile work environment for their white co-workers. None of Hookers co-workers filed any complaints about the incident.
The union members declared that these acts of harassment, intimidation and retaliation must end. They called on Hennepin County commissioners to “Stop the retaliation against union activists now! End racism, sexism, ageism at work!”
Meet The Appalachian Women Facing Down The Mountain Valley Pipeline
https://popularresistance.org/meet-the-appalachian-women-facing-down-the-mountain-valley-pipeline/
Across Years And Several Southern States, These Organizers Have Helped Drive The Massive Gas Pipeline To The Brink Of Defeat.
I have met so many people through this fight,” says Nancy Bouldin of Monroe County, West Virginia. “If you look at any benefits of all this, it’s the people and the connections that have been made.”
When Bouldin says, “all this,” she refers to the years-long battle communities across West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina have waged against the Mountain Valley Pipeline and its proposed Southgate extension.
When Bouldin and fellow organizers Lynda Majors and Donna Pitt met for a discussion via Zoom in March of 2022, the MVP’s prospects seemed dim.
Originally priced at $3.7 billion, the MVP’s costs have ballooned to over $6.2 billion, the project is over three years behind schedule and has faced millions of dollars in fines for violations of clean water protections. A number of recent legal setbacks
have set the pipeline back further, but years of experience have made these organizers cautious.
“Victory is when they cancel the pipeline,” Majors says. “Until that happens, in my mind, there is no victory. We stay vigilant. And then [after the pipeline’s defeat,] our attention turns to restoration.”
As the women explain their history with the effort to defeat the MVP, the camaraderie among the three is apparent: They finish each other’s sentences, laugh at shared experiences, and collectively recall memories from nearly a decade of organizing around this issue.
And their stories also gesture to a robust network of others — friends, neighbors, leaders, family, landowners, and diverse networks of people who might otherwise have remained strangers.
“There are so many people who have been and are involved in this effort,” Bouldin says. “It seems somehow not quite right to be one of only three interviewed for this piece.”
Majors adds, “I am so grateful for whatever involvement people have — every single one of them is important. It takes a coalition.”
Pitt agrees, “This experience brought the community together, neighbors who didn’t know each other now do.”
Bouldin, Majors and Pitt may not see themselves as exceptional in the MVP fight, but each is extraordinary in her persistence, contributions and commitment to this resistance movement.
The Big Picture
As we discuss the origins of their activism against the MVP, each woman pinpoints the moment she became engaged.
“It was the fall of 2014,” Bouldin says, and they all agree. “It’s really depressing to do the math on that,” she adds. “It’s been an all-consuming piece of our lives for all that time.”
“It was the shock of a lifetime,” Pitt says. “When we looked at where the pipeline was going — it was right through the middle of our farm, which we had spent the last 40 years building, preserving, stewarding. Coming within 50 feet of the house. And when we talked to neighbors to the right and the left of us who are on the same route, it was like, ‘We’ve got to get together and fight this!’”
Beginning in the fall of 2014, Majors, Pitt and Bouldin began working in their respective communities to build awareness among landowners and concerned residents about the proposed MVP. But soon, they recognized the power-building potential in forming broader coalitions.
“We first met as the POWHR coalition was forming,” Pitt says. Today the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights coalition describes itself as “an interstate coalition representing individuals and groups from Virginia and West Virginia dedicated to protecting water, land, and communities from harms caused by the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, including the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP).”
“The group that would become POWHR started coming together when Mountain Valley Pipeline and [the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] held some open house hearings along the pipeline route in 2015,” says Bouldin. “There were people from our county [Monroe County, West Virginia] who traveled down to Virginia because they wanted to hear what was going on in these open houses and in so doing, they started meeting people from Virginia and there was a core group who were saying, ‘We need to be connecting!’”
“There were birth pains with what eventually became POWHR as there are birth pains in many organizations,” Bouldin adds. “Within every county there were organizing challenges — but over time, these connections made a difference.”
“POWHR brought the big picture to everybody,” Majors says.
Part of Your Heart
When considering the paths that brought each of them to anti-pipeline activism, Pitt, Majors and Bouldin all articulated a deeply rooted connection to environmental stewardship.
“I grew up on a farm in northern Virginia with a mother who was a New Englander and an activist. My dad was an engineer and believed strongly in stewardship of the land,” Pitt says. “We farmed and I grew up with livestock. That’s where I got my relationship with the land.”
Pitt lived in North Carolina and Canada before moving to the Blacksburg, Virginia, area when her husband, Joe, began teaching at Virginia Tech.
“We thought we’d move on, as academics often do,” says Pitt, “but when we got here, well, my husband had an officemate with experience building houses.” Pitt laughs. “So we built this house with our own hands.”
Virginia was not an academic pitstop. Donna Pitt made a career at Virginia Tech where she was a galvanizing force in the creation of the school’s Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine. She retired after three decades working as an executive assistant for four different deans of the veterinary school. The house that she and her husband built is her home. “We’re still here and we’re not going anywhere,” she says.
“I grew up in southern New York near the Pennsylvania border where I ran free with the dogs and a gun,” Lynda Majors says, laughing. “Dogs and being outside have always been important to me and still are!”
“I always knew I wanted an outside job,” she says. “I went to Cornell University and had various jobs over the years. I met my husband in Arkansas, then we went to the University of Wisconsin where he did a veterinary ophthalmology residency and then we moved to Virginia where we’ve been for 34 years.”
“I feel very centered here in my community,” Majors says. “I want to stay because this is my fight. This is my land.”
Nancy Bouldin agrees. “People will fight for what they love deeply. For most people around here, their land is not a real estate investment. It’s their home, their history, their heritage. To watch that land taken by eminent domain and turned over for someone else’s permanent use and control — that’s a wound that can’t be healed by any amount of money.”
“I grew up in New Jersey, but my husband, Wood, was born and raised in West Virginia,” Bouldin says. “We both did graduate degrees at WVU. But then we moved up near Philadelphia in the late 1970s and didn’t move back to West Virginia until ‘retiring’ here in 2008.”
“I really don’t think I would have become as committed to the pipeline fight if it hadn’t been so clear how deeply attached people here are to their homes and farms and to special landmarks like Peters Mountain — and to a way of life not dominated by industrial development,” says Bouldin. “There’s a strong sense of stewardship, of taking care of the land and passing it on to future generations. You can’t put a cash value on that attachment. It’s like telling someone ‘I’ll pay you $20,000 to take away part of your heart.’”
Take Action
Despite the significant obstacles facing the MVP at the time of our conversation, Pitt, Majors and Bouldin were concerned about statements from West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin championing the pipeline as a domestic energy resource in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I think we are at a very critical point right now with the Ukraine situation because we have people like Sen. Manchin saying that the Mountain Valley Pipeline must be completed,” says Bouldin.
Majors interjects: “It’s so ubiquitous in the press — ‘the MVP is 95% complete, let’s just finish this one last little bit up.’ And that’s just not true. It’s nowhere near complete.”
All three women are concerned that legislators who favor expanding natural gas will use the geopolitical crisis in Ukraine to advance MVP construction, even though analyses have found that the natural gas industry can boost natural gas exports this year and beyond without any new infrastructure and accelerated European investment in energy efficiency and renewables may mean increased gas exports are unnecessary.
“Our elected representatives have presented us as ‘they’re just cranks,’” says Pitt. “So we have been betrayed by those who are supposed to represent us all the way along the line from county, state to federal. But that’s why we keep at this: because it’s wrong.”
When asked how they have sustained themselves and their advocacy without getting discouraged, Majors gets fired up, “Discouraged? No! Don’t say that word! I don’t get discouraged. I get angry and motivated!”
Pitt acknowledges that it can feel grinding at times. “People burn out doing this work for their communities — some people for health reasons, depression — it does have a dragging effect,” she says. “You have to have something to keep you going: It’s either fury or eternal optimism. I personally feel that if I don’t keep going, how do I expect that anybody else will?”
Bouldin agrees. “It may sound trite, but I have grandchildren — I feel we don’t have a lot of time left to make changes and there’s something that needs to be done. I get tired, but it’s the coalition: it provides enormous energy. The coalition has kept everyone going.”
The women acknowledge that bringing more young people into the coalition is both challenging and necessary for the future of the fight.
“I understand that younger generations feel like they don’t have political power — that sense of a lack of security and disenfranchisement not felt by older generations,” Majors says. “But this is important. You have a responsibility to something bigger!”
Bouldin describes the importance accountability among fellow activists has played in her work. “All of my work has been done in super close collaboration with Judy Azulay, a founding member of the Indian Creek Watershed Association,” she says. Just like our coalition of groups across West Virginia and Virginia has helped build and sustain each other over time, I would never have stayed in the fight or tried to do as much without Judy. I don’t know how many times we stuck it out for ‘one more thing’ just because we don’t want to let down each other.”
For Pitt, motivation is in plain sight. “What motivates me is that I look out my window and I can see the damn thing,” she says. “If you can’t fight for your property and your water, then you don’t deserve it. At some point, you just have to take action.”
China And The US Response To Covid-19
https://popularresistance.org/china-and-the-us-response-to-covid-19/
Covid deaths in the US (over 1 million) and China (about 5000).
“History Should Judge Us” – and it will.
In May and June of 2022 two milestones were passed in the world’s battle with Covid and were widely noted in the press, one in the US and one in China. They invite a comparison between the two countries and their approach to combatting Covid-19.
The first milestone was passed on May 12 when the United States registered over 1 million total deaths (1,008,377 as of June 19, 2022, when this is written) due to Covid, the highest of any country in the world. Web MD expressed its sentiment in a piece headlined: “US Covid Deaths Hit 1 Million: ‘History Should Judge Us.’”
Second, on June 1, China emerged from its 60-day lockdown in Shanghai in response to an outbreak there, the most serious since the Wuhan outbreak at the onset of the pandemic. The total number of deaths in Mainland China since the beginning of the epidemic in January 2020 now stands at a total of 5226 as of June 19,2022.
To put that in perspective, that is 3042 deaths per million population in the US versus 3.7 deaths in China due to Covid. 3042 vs. 3.7! Had China followed the same course as the US, it would have experienced at least 4 million deaths. Had the US followed China’s course it would have had only 1306 deaths total!
The EU did not fare not much better than the US with 2434 deaths per million as of June 19.
When confronted with these numbers, the response of the Western media has all too often been denial that China’s numbers were valid. But China’s data have been backed by counts of excess deaths during the period of the pandemic as the New York Times illustrated in a recent article. Actually this is old news. The validity of China’s numbers, as shown by counts of excess deaths, was validated long ago in a February 2021 study by a by a group at Oxford University and the Chinese CDC. This was published in the prestigious BMJ (British Medical Journal) and discussed in detail here.
What about the economy?
Clearly China put the saving of lives above the advance of the economy with its “dynamic zero Covid policy.” But contrary to what was believed in the West at the time, saving lives also turned out to be better for the economy, as shown in the following data from the World Bank:
During the first year of the pandemic, 2020, China’s economy continued to grow albeit at a slower rate. In contrast the US economy contracted dramatically, dropping all the way back, not simply to 2019 levels, but to pre-2018 levels!
Interestingly the plot also shows the year that the Chinese PPP-GDP surpassed that of the United States, 2017, heralding a new era for the Global South.
The World Bank has not yet released data for 2021, but the IMF has PPP-GDP data for 2021 shown here. The U.S. economy grew at 5.97 percent and China’s at 8.02 percent. Unlike the World Bank data shown in the graph above for the years up to 2020, these data for 2021 are not corrected for inflation which for 2021 ran at 4.7% in the U.S. whereas China’s was 0.85%. So China’s growth would be even greater in comparison to the US, were inflation taken into account.
The bottom line is that for the first two years of the pandemic through 2021, China’s growth was always positive and greater than that of the US. China’s policy not only saved lives but protected the economy. Win-win, one might say.
Is China’s dynamic zero Covid policy “sustainable”in the face of the Omicron variant? The Shanghai Lockdown.
The period of the recent Shanghai lockdown which we can date from April 1, 2022, ended on June 1, and was the second largest outbreak in China since the original outbreak in January, 2020, in Wuhan. Each resulted in major lockdowns, the first in Wuhan lasted about 76 days and the second in Shanghai about 60 days. The first in Wuhan was due to the original variant and the second was due to the much more infectious Omicron.
During the recent lockdown in Shanghai, the Western press was awash with proclamations, all too many laced with an unseemly Schadenfreude, that China’s dynamic Zero Covid policy was not sustainable. This is all too reminiscent of decades of predictions that China’s extraordinary success in developing its economy to number one in the world in terms of PPP-GDP was a passing phase, a Ponzi Scheme that was – what else – “not sustainable. Recently the same press has gone silent, always a sign that China has met with success. So what are the results?
The Shanghai Lockdown ended on June 1 and from that day until today, June 19, there have been no deaths due to Covid on the Chinese Mainland. Cases nationwide are also way down to 183 per day from the peak of 26,000 on April 15. That was the largest number of cases in a single day for the entire period of the pandemic in China. For comparison, the peak in the US was 800,000 in a single day.
Both the Wuhan and Shanghai lockdowns demanded sacrifices and patience over the roughly two-month period for each. However, these difficulties are generally exaggerated In the West and based on anecdotes of the worst of the difficulties encountered. Such sordid journalism reached rock bottom in a NYT piece equating China’s hard working health care workers to Adolph Eichmann!
As an antidote to this kind of hit piece and to gain a feeling of life in the cities that were under lockdown during the Wuhan outbreak, Peter Hessler’s March, 2020, account in the New Yorker, “Life on Lockdown in China,” is enlightening and will dispel many misconceptions. Hessler was living and teaching in Chengdu, Sichuan, at the time.
For the moment China’s approach has succeeded although we cannot say what the future holds. But the public health measures that have worked so well in Mainland China should not be lightly dismissed let alone be the subject of mean-spirited attacks. Such measures may be a means of saving millions of lives when the next variant or the next pandemic strikes.
The US Needs a People’s Tribunal On the Handling of Covid-19.
Turning again to the US, what does it say when the US, one of the richest nations in the world, spending over $1 trillion a year on its “national security” budget, could not muster the means to deal with Covid-19 and ended up with more deaths than any other nation on earth? China’s handling of the pandemic certainly shows a completely different outcome is possible. The US death toll was not an inescapable act of nature.
That being so, should there not be a People’s Tribunal to investigate those in charge in the US government over the course of three administrations? That, and not an official white wash, is certainly needed? And should not punishment appropriate for a crime against humanity be meted out? The one million dead deserve no less.
The Pacific Northwest Has Defeated Dozens Of Fossil Fuel Projects
https://popularresistance.org/the-pacific-northwest-has-defeated-dozens-of-fossil-fuel-projects/
The fossil fuel industry, smarting from a string of defeats in Oregon and Washington, is hoping to continue to expand in the face of the climate crisis.
But without arousing opposition.
New large-scale fossil fuel projects have become mostly unworkable in the Pacific Northwest, with dozens canceled over the past decade due to fierce opposition from local communities. But the industry’s blitz is not yet over. Instead, rather than building new pipelines, it is seeking to expand existing infrastructure in a way that will provoke less pushback.
Since 2012, an estimated 55 coal, oil, and natural gas projects have been proposed for the Pacific Northwest — encompassing Oregon and Washington, as well as British Columbia. But more than 70 percent of them have been defeated, according to a recent study from the Seattle-based Sightline Institute.
“The fossil fuel industry really was trying to turn the Pacific Northwest into a coal, oil, and gas export hub,” Emily Moore, a senior researcher at Sightline Institute, told DeSmog. “We could be looking at a really different picture right now if all of those had gone through.”
The Pacific Northwest was targeted by the fossil fuel industry because it is situated between the massive reserves of coal, oil, and gas in interior North America and fast-growing Asian markets.
“We could be looking at a really different picture right now if all of those had gone through.”– Emily Moore
As Moore notes, the proposals came in waves, largely the result of whims in energy markets and changes in federal policy that allowed for more exports. First, developers proposed a series of coal train projects in the early 2010s, as domestic coal demand went into decline but was soaring overseas. Then, when the Obama administration lifted the ban on crude oil exports in 2015, new oil export projects were in vogue. Finally, the glut of natural gas led to a wave of proposals to export liquified natural gas (LNG), as well as for related gas products, such as propane and methanol.
But coalitions of environmental groups, landowners, and tribes fought back — and more often than not, they won. Forty of the 55 projects were canceled, six were completed, and nine more are either under construction or on the drawing board.
“It’s really hard to underestimate the climate devastation those projects would have had,” Moore said.
If all had gone forward, the Pacific Northwest would have added more than 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. That is roughly equivalent to 30 percent of the United States’s greenhouse gas emissions or nearly three times the emissions of Canada, the world’s tenth largest emitter.
A few high-profile defeats for the fossil fuel industry stand out. Longview, Washington, could have been home to Millennium Bulk Terminals, the largest coal export hub in the country, but that project was denied a permit in 2017. A little upstream on the Columbia River could have been the Tesoro Savage oil export terminal, which would have also been the nation’s largest at the time, in Vancouver, Washington. Then there was the saga of Jordan Cove LNG, a project that sought to take land from private landowners in southern Oregon in order to build a long-distance gas pipeline, transporting fracked gas from the Rocky Mountains and British Columbia to the Oregon Coast for export.
Those projects, along with dozens of others, fell by the wayside. On each occasion, grassroots activists, tribes, and local communities, faced long odds, and often had little help from elected officials. So “I think it’s important to celebrate these wins,” Moore said. “We do need to dismantle the dirty legacy of our existing fossil fuel infrastructure, but I think it’s a positive story that we didn’t become a major fossil fuel export hub.”
British Columbia remains more friendly turf for oil and gas companies. The massive Trans Mountain expansion and the Coastal GasLink pipelines, which are currently under construction, would pump oil and gas across Indigenous lands to the Pacific Coast. A handful of additional LNG projects are on the drawing board, and both the provincial and federal governments are supportive of a further expansion of oil and gas.
“The projects that remain in BC – LNG projects in the Trans Mountain oil pipeline – would also be in place for about 30 or 40 years,” Moore said. Canada, like much of the world, is aiming to hit net-zero emissions by 2050, but these projects could conceivably operate well into the second half of the century. “We have very limited time to meet the 1.5-degree goal and even to meet the 2-degree goal, so we don’t have any wiggle room in the carbon budget to be locking in decades more of fossil fuel infrastructure,” she added.
Expanding Under the Radar
Even though many projects ran aground in the Pacific Northwest, the fossil fuel industry is not giving up yet. Recognizing that building new long-distance pipelines will face opposition, a new strategy could be afoot.
TC Energy is hoping to expand its Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) system, a large pipeline that carries gas from British Columbia to Washington, Oregon, and California. The expansion project, called GTN Xpress, would add 250 million cubic feet of gas per day to the system’s capacity, equivalent to around a quarter of Washington state’s entire annual gas consumption, according to a separate report from Sightline.
TC Energy says that its pipeline expansion would go to meeting new market demand. However, regional gas demand is set to shrink, not grow. In fact, the region is making deliberate moves to reduce gas consumption. Washington and Oregon both have 100 percent renewable energy targets, and the states also have emissions reductions targets specifically for gas utilities.
In addition, Washington State has banned gas hookups in new commercial buildings, and could follow that up later this year with a prohibition on gas connections for new residential construction. More broadly, a growing movement in much of the country to ban gas in new construction is gaining momentum. More than 50 cities, mostly in California, have banned gas, and the trend is gathering pace in the Pacific Northwest. Bans on new connections all aim to stop the growth of the gas system.
Utilities are pushing back with misleading advertising and propaganda, but the trend away from gas is clear.
TC Energy is likely aiming to push out other gas companies from the Northwest to gain more market share, according to Sightline. But the risk is that more infrastructure would lock the region into decades of gas use, despite the desire by policymakers and the public to break free of gas. Moore likened it to “someone opening a smoke shop in your house when you’ve just quit smoking.”
“While you might have every intention of never having another cigarette, having it at your fingertips makes achieving that goal all the more difficult,” she wrote.
“We are seeing a shift today where fossil fuel companies are more sneaky in how they frame new projects.”– Brett VandenHeuvel
TC Energy’s regulatory filings suggest it is pursuing a subtler strategy that could prove more successful than the long list of fossil fuel projects shelved over the past decade. Rather than apply for a big increase in capacity, it has filed for a series of small increases, which could arouse less regulatory scrutiny and public outrage if deemed to be separate projects. And because it is expanding along an existing pipeline route, the company will confront fewer landowners, or other opposition groups.
Two non-profits, Columbia Riverkeeper and Crag Law Center, are formally opposing the federal request.
“Our region has defeated some of the nation’s largest coal, oil, and fracked gas projects over the last two decades. We are seeing a shift today where fossil fuel companies are more sneaky in how they frame new projects,” Brett VandenHeuvel, outgoing executive director of Columbia Riverkeeper, told DeSmog. “They attempt to piecemeal projects to make them look smaller, focus on expanding existing infrastructure, and claim projects are needed for reliability but redact the data as classified.”
“For GTN Xpress, the scope of the project involves upgrades and modifications to existing compressor stations,” TC Energy said in a statement to DeSmog. “It is preferred to use existing rights-of-way for energy infrastructure projects, as possible, for many reasons, including the location of existing energy facilities and land rights.”
The company added that its work aims to “provide reliable service and meet customer demand,” adding that “[s]pecifically, for natural gas, our role is to move supply to existing and new markets for those who contract our service via energy infrastructure.”
But VandenHeuvel added that the industry is fighting hard to keep its grip on the region as Washington and Oregon are clearly trying to move away from gas.
“Unfortunately, fracked gas companies can pass on the costs of building unwanted and unneeded projects to their customers by increasing their rates,” VandenHeuvel said. “This is the behavior of a dying industry.”
British Army Chief Tells Troops Prepare For World War III With Russia
https://popularresistance.org/british-army-chief-tells-troops-prepare-for-world-war-iii-with-russia/
UK Army chief Patrick Sanders told his troops to prepare for World War III with Russia.
Benjamin Norton discusses how Western imperialists are threatening nuclear apocalypse to try to save their declining empires.
The chief of the United Kingdom’s army, Patrick Sanders, told his troops to prepare for World War III with Russia.
Mainstream British media outlet and radio station LBC published a report on June 19 titled “British soldiers must get ready to fight Russia in Third World War, army chief warns.”
General Sanders just took over as commander-in-chief, and he told his soldiers to prepare “to fight in Europe once again.”
According to LBC, the UK military chief said, “There is now a burning imperative to forge an Army capable of fighting alongside our allies and defeating Russia in battle.”
The British media outlet added that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had just visited Ukraine and warned his country, “I am afraid that we need to steel ourselves for a long war.”
In this video, Multipolarista editor Benjamin Norton discusses how Western imperialists are threatening nuclear apocalypse to try to save their declining empires.
Tuesday, June 28, 2022
The Neocon’s Dream – Decolonize Russia, Re-Colonize China
https://popularresistance.org/the-neocons-dream-decolonize-russia-re-colonize-china/
On March 26 U.S. President Joe Biden called for regime change in Russia:
Speaking in Warsaw, Poland, on Saturday, President Biden said of Russian President Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
The White House immediately rushed to talk back that call for regime change and a day later Biden himself denied that he was calling for regime change:
President Joe Biden told reporters on Sunday he was not calling for a regime change in Russia when he said a day earlier that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” a surprising comment the White House quickly tried to walk back Saturday.
When a reporter asked if he was calling for Putin’s removal from office, Biden replied “no” as he walked out of church Sunday afternoon, according to Bloomberg pool reporter Courtney Rozen.
However, other parts of the U.S. government makes unmistakeably clear that its aims in Russia go even much than regime change. Tomorrow the US Government’s Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) will hold a briefing on the “Moral and Strategic Imperative” that makes it necessary to “Decolonize Russia”.
As Nicolo Saldo points out:
What is notable about this panel is the shift from “spreading freedom and democracy” to the need to “decolonize” Russia.
The neo-conservatives are back using a new narrative to push their old agenda.
Russian officials will love such talk:
Today’s panel is a further step forward in that it tells ordinary Russians that even regime change and democracy is not good enough for them. They require the partition of their country into smaller (more easily controlled) polities, so that they can be free. Needless to say, this is a propaganda coup for Putin and the Kremlin as it allows them to paint the conflict in Ukraine as an existential fight.
The Kremlin has no need to ‘paint’ the conflict as an existential fight. The Russians know that it is such a fight.
Biden’s haplessness continues to tank the Democrats chances to keep house majority.
In a meager attempt to tackle the high fuel price he will today call on Congress to suspend the tax on fuel for three month. It is just a gimmick which would have little effect at the pump and has no chance to pass Congress:
GOP lawmakers have been hammering Biden and Democrats on the campaign trail over inflation and fuel prices. They argue that such measures are political theater that will do little to make long-term dents in oil prices. The best way to reduce oil prices, they say, is to loosen regulations and increase U.S. oil production.
The real reason for high fuel prices is Biden’s misguided foreign policy. Three of the biggest oil producers on the globe, Venezuela, Iran and Russia, are under U.S. sanctions that limit their oil exports:
The sanctions have made it more difficult for Russia to sell its oil. Biden has also banned the import of Russian oil, and last month Europe announced it was imposing a partial embargo on it.
As of 2020, Russia was the world’s third-largest producer of petroleum, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
As the New York Times correctly headlines:
Western Move to Choke Russia’s Oil Exports Boomerangs, for Now
That move will continue to boomerang. Russia sells it oil to China and India where it gets refined. The resulting gasoline and diesel is then exported to the U.S.. That is good for India and China as they buy the oil with a rebate and sell the end products with a substantial margin. It is a ‘win’ ‘win’ ‘win’ for Russia, India and China with the sole loser being the ‘west’. Whatever NYT hope of sanction success is expressed in its ‘for now’ addition to the headline is not going to change that.
Meanwhile Russia is announcing the next target of its campaign to counter ‘western’ misbehavior – the reserve status of the U.S. dollar and the Euro:
MOSCOW, June 22. /TASS/. The issue of creating an international reserve currency based on currencies of BRICS member-states is under consideration, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday in the welcome address to BRICS Business Forum participants.
“The matter of creating the international reserve currency based on the basket of currencies of our countries is under review,” the Russian leader said.
BRICS currently consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Together those countries represent 3.2 billion people and a third of the world’s purchase power GDP. The new international reserve currency would therefore have a much larger backing than the U.S. dollar or the Euro.
The U.S. is moving too but in the wrong direction.
Some in the Biden administration are pushing to lower Trump era tariffs on Chinese goods. M.K.Bhadrakumar interprets that as an attempt of a new détente with China. I doubt that lowering the tariffs would have much effect on prices in the U.S. as a new law that became applicable yesterday will raise prices of goods from China even more. The U.S. is slowly waking up to the consequences of such stupidity:
The Biden administration has said it intends to fully enforce the law, which could lead the U.S. authorities to detain or turn away a significant number of imported products. Such a scenario is likely to cause headaches for companies and sow further supply chain disruptions. It could also fuel inflation, which is already running at a four-decade high, if companies are forced to seek out more expensive alternatives or consumers start to compete for scarce products.
Failure to fully enforce the law is likely to prompt an outcry from Congress, which is in charge of oversight.
“The public is not prepared for what’s going to happen,” said Alan Bersin, a former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection who is now the executive chairman at Altana AI. “The impact of this on the global economy, and on the U.S. economy, is measured in the many billions of dollars, not in the millions of dollars.”
As Bhadrakumar acidly comments:
When Russia attacked Ukraine and the West imposed sanctions against Moscow, Washington threatened China that any move on its part to help Russia circumvent the sanctions would trigger severe punishment. Now the wheel has come full circle and the US needs China’s helping hand to salvage its economy. This is Thucydides Trap turned upside down — an emerging power rescuing an entrenched great power, whose extravagance pauperised it.
I doubt that. Tariffs or no tariffs China will not help the U.S. in anything. It knows that the U.S-Russian proxy war is about much more than Ukraine.
The current U.S. aim may well be to decolonize Russia, but its real geopolitical aim is a re-colonization of China.
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