France summons Chinese ambassador after embassy criticizes “herd immunity” policy

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/16/pari-a16.html






By Alex Lantier
16 April 2020

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called in Chinese Ambassador to France Lu Shaye Monday to criticize his embassy’s statements defending China’s record in the COVID-19 pandemic.

This diplomatic incident centered on the contrast between China, where the pandemic is in check for now, with the few dozen daily new cases mostly imported from abroad, and Europe. COVID-19 is killing thousands each day in France and in Europe, where governments are calling for an end to shelter-at-home policies, pushing a frightened population back to work. At the same time, an anticommunist campaign is spreading in the French media to blame China, the original epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, for the disaster unfolding in Europe.

On Sunday, an anonymous Chinese diplomat posted a long note in French on the embassy web site, criticizing the European ruling elites. “China’s victory over the epidemic makes them bitter. With their concocted arguments, claiming that China ‘delayed its reaction’ and ‘hid the truth,’ they present China as principally responsible for the pandemic. … At the same time, in the West, we saw politicians tearing each other apart for votes, calling for herd immunity, which meant abandoning their citizens to face the viral onslaught alone, and stealing shipments of medicine from each other.”
France’s Foreign Ministry reacted with a communiqué stating, “Certain public positions taken by representatives of the Chinese embassy in France do not conform to the quality of the bilateral relations between our two countries.” It also said Le Drian would communicate to the ambassador his “disapproval” of “certain recent comments” of the Chinese embassy on COVID-19.

If the note upset Paris, this is because it explodes lies the European powers tell workers at home about COVID-19. Vast death tolls in Europe were not inevitable. Nor is “herd immunity”—that is, making a majority of the population get COVID-19 and, if it survives, perhaps become immune to the virus—the only strategy to fight the illness. These were lies to justify keeping workers at work in unsafe jobs, pumping out profits for the banks but also spreading the virus.

Responsibility for COVID-19’s spread in America and Europe lies not with China, but with capitalism. Of course, China’s Stalinist dictatorship itself oversees a capitalist society: it restored capitalism in 1989 as it opened China to the world economy, massacring workers and students protesting on Tiananmen Square against the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) policies. However, surviving elements of rudimentary state economic planning, mass quarantines and the mobilization of industry allowed for a far more effective response to COVID-19 in China than in Europe.

The coherent, democratic adoption of such policies internationally, which is key to fight COVID-19, requires a world revolution by the working class, including in China, to transition to socialism. Reading the French capitalist media’s frenzied attacks on China, in which anticommunism is intertwined with appeals to anti-Chinese racism, it is obvious that the main force motivating this campaign is precisely the bourgeoisie’s fear of socialism and revolution.

Commentator and former army officer Renaud Girard—who began his journalistic career reporting from Rwanda in 1994 for Le Figaro, as France backed the Rwandan Hutu regime’s bloody genocide of the Tutsis—proclaims that COVID-19 is proof of the failure of Marxism and communism. The pandemic, he wrote, “has unveiled the bankruptcy of three ideologies: communism, Europism and globalism. The Chinese Communist Party bears the heaviest responsibility for the birth and the initial dissemination of this highly contagious disease.”

“China bears heavy responsibility for this epidemic transmitted by a wild animal in which trading is banned,” Le Monde wrote, in a column blaming the global pandemic on Chinese who ate pangolin, an animal through which coronavirus may have migrated from bats to humans. In a post bearing a large communist hammer-and-sickle emblem, the newspaper hypocritically observed: “The Chinese dictatorship censors the media, the public does not know how many people are ill.”

Isabelle Lasserre, a reporter for the right-wing Le Figaro who apes Donald Trump with claims that “China pulls the strings of the World Health Organization (WHO),” insisted that COVID-19 proves Western capitalist democracy to be superior to the Chinese dictatorship: “While dictatorships were destabilized by the unexpected, democracies reacted calmly, transparently, rationally. They could anticipate and explain. Their open and coordinated health systems reacted rapidly... The democracies have proven that their system is the most effective.”

Claims that the European regimes are most effective at fighting the virus expose only the European bourgeoisie’s contempt for human life. China, COVID-19’s original epicenter, has seen 82,295 cases and 3,342 deaths. Europe, however, has at least 935,338 cases and 74,662 deaths. Moreover, while the WHO independently confirmed China’s COVID-19 statistics, thousands are dying unreported at home or in retirement homes in Europe, and European officials admit that the number of COVID-19 cases in Europe may be two to ten times higher than the stated figure.

The anti-China campaign’s enthusiasm for the mass deaths in Europe reflects the class brutality of the financial aristocracy’s “herd immunity” policy. For them, the working class is a herd to be culled. The early death of tens or hundreds of thousands mean that billions of euros that, from their standpoint, would have been wasted on health and pension spending on these individuals can be redirected to stock markets and the wealth of super-rich parasites.

Attempts to foist responsibility for the resulting COVID-19 deaths on the CCP are political lies. They were refuted by the note posted Sunday by Chinese embassy officials in Paris, which made clear that China gave ample warning to let Europe prepare for COVID-19.

The note observes, “As early as December 30 of last year, we were publicly reporting cases of unknown pneumonia. Starting on January 3, we regularly informed the WHO and the entire world on the progression of the disease and, in record time, we succeeded in identifying the disease agent. On January 11, we shared with the WHO the entire sequencing of the genome of the virus. On January 23, as Wuhan went into lockdown, over 800 people were contaminated, and only 9 of them were abroad. And it was over a month later that the epidemic began in Europe and the United States.”

No one has tried to refute these claims, which are borne out by publicly available reports in global media. It is also a matter of public record that European governments reacted by downplaying the seriousness of COVID-19, comparing it to seasonal flu, opposing social distancing measures, and demanding that workers stay at work.

The note unfavorably contrasts European and Chinese policy: “China did not hold back from cutting trillions of yuans from its Gross Domestic Product, injecting hundreds of billions of yuans into health resources, and mobilizing over 40,000 health care workers from all across the country to go support Wuhan and Hubei province, finally defeating the epidemic in only two months.”

With vast financial resources and developed economies, however, the European ruling class rejected these policies, instead demanding massive bank bailouts. Referring caustically to “certain Western political and cultural elites,” the note adds: “[T]he fact that Western countries underestimated the seriousness of the virus and were late in taking ad hoc measures, making the epidemic uncontrollable, does not trouble their conscience or keep them awake at nights.”

The fatal contradiction in the CCP’s Stalinist strategy is that its export-led integration into the world economy requires cutting commercial and political deals with US and European capital, whose barbarism the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed, to furnish them with Chinese workers as cheap labor.



The growing anger, protests and strikes among workers in Europe and internationally go in another political direction: a unified struggle of the working class internationally to expropriate the fortunes of the super-rich and use these resources to halt the global pandemic.

CEO Assures Employees He Doing Everything In His Power To Lay People Off

https://www.theonion.com/ceo-assures-employees-he-doing-everything-in-his-power-1842904330




SAN FRANCISCO—Promising from the bottom of his heart that everyone’s jobs are in jeopardy, WhooshSnaps.biz CEO Brian Kleppen assured employees Thursday that he’s doing everything in his power to lay people off. 

“I’ve heard some concerns going around, and I want to impress upon each and every one of you that I’m taking every possible step to ensure that you are all out of a job with no income or health insurance,” said Kleppen in a company-wide email to employees, explaining that he was exploring all avenues to over leverage investments, misappropriate funds, and implement new approaches to hemorrhage money with the goal of firing as many staffers as possible. 

“Believe me when I say if it were up to me, I would terminate every single one of you. It gives me no pleasure to keep you around. The absolute last thing we want to do is retain all of our staff during this crisis.” 

At press time, Kleppen was working around the clock to free up funds tied up in employee paychecks to secure his year-end bonus.

Coronavirus toll reaches two million worldwide, nearly 30,000 US dead

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/16/coro-a16.html






By Benjamin Mateus and Patrick Martin
16 April 2020

The number of people on the planet infected with COVID-19 passed the two million mark on Wednesday, with the pandemic killing nearly 8,000 people in a single day. Half of those were in Europe, still the hardest-hit continent, while the largest single-country death toll was in the United States, some 2,482 people.

Nearly 5,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus in the last two days, but neither the American government nor the corporate media seem to care. At the White House coronavirus press briefing Wednesday, Trump vented his grievances against his political rivals and threatened to shut down Congress, while offering nothing to halt the spread of the infection or save the lives of tens of thousands now under threat.

American network television broadcasts barely even took note of the record death toll on Tuesday, and they said even less when this figure in turn was exceeded on Wednesday. Instead, they reported on the mounting demands (from big business and the ultra-right) to reopen the economy and force workers back to their jobs regardless of the dangers to their health and lives. Meanwhile, the military continues to build field hospitals—not for today’s patients, but to house the far greater numbers still to come.
COVID-19 is a global crisis, and the death tolls on a per capita basis are even higher in Italy, Spain, France and Britain than they are in the United States.

On Wednesday the pandemic killed 1,438 people in France, 761 in Britain, 578 in Italy and 557 in Spain, bringing the cumulative death toll in these four countries to 70,492, according to figures posted on WorldoMeter. Britain will reach 100,000 coronavirus cases today, joining France, Italy, Spain and Germany.

One of the hardest-hit countries, in terms of deaths per million people, is Belgium, which has suffered 4,440 deaths, far more than China, which has 100 times as many people. Germany too, portrayed as a comparative “success” in Europe, has lost more of its citizens than China, where the coronavirus first made its appearance last December.

While presently the US accounts for 30 percent of coronavirus cases and Europe for about 50 percent, there is a surge in cases in Brazil, India, Egypt, Indonesia and other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These figures only give a glimpse of the potential impact of this 21st century plague when it reaches the poorest countries, with the weakest public health and sanitation systems. The response of the Trump administration, however, is to turn its back on the majority of humanity by halting its funding contribution to the World Health Organization.

Contrary to the predictions of a decline at White House press briefings and official models, the number of new cases continues to rise, and the number of deaths per day in the United States has doubled in only nine days.

At this terrible milestone of two million human beings infected, it is worth reviewing the speed with which the pandemic has spread, and the complete incapacity of capitalist governments in both Europe and the United States, the richest and most technologically advanced societies on the planet, to do anything effective to halt it.

On January 22, WorldoMeter began keeping count of the numbers of cases in the outbreak that had its epicenter in Wuhan. On that day, 580 people harbored the coronavirus virus. Initially dubbed 2019-nCoV, the virus was officially given the name SARS-CoV-2 and the disease associated with it became COVID-19 (Corona Virus 2019).

On January 24, the day Chinese authorities implemented a massive lockdown of Wuhan city and Hubei province, an unprecedented quarantine of a massive geographic area impacting nearly 60 million people, the official count stood at just over one thousand. By this time, the genetic code for the virus had been shared with the world, and a test that could detect the virus had been provided to all countries by the WHO. Six days later, the WHO issued an official notice of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

At the end of January, the number of cases had jumped to over 10,000 with several nations having confirmed imported cases, including South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, France, Australia, Germany, Italy, United Arab Emirates, India, Russia, Spain and the United States.

At an international level, scientists, epidemiologists and virologists were engaged in elucidating the nature of this SARS-like coronavirus. Several publications describing clinical experiences with the infection were made available free in online journals.

In practice, there was initially a wide range of national experiences with the virus. The massive lockdown in China, combined with the mobilization of the country’s health care personnel and economic resources—two hospitals to treat patients with COVID-19 were constructed in a matter of days—ultimately seemed to have an impact. The number of cases in Wuhan and Hubei province stabilized, and other parts of China were not greatly affected.

By mid-February, however, reports from Iran suggested the outbreak there had grown out of control. US sanctions thwarted efforts to direct assistance by various governments and international aid groups. In the same period, a cluster of infections associated with a religious sect in South Korea saw a rapid escalation of community transmission leading to an essential lockdown of the city of Daegu. Massive testing and contact tracing were initiated that helped drastically curb the spread.

In March, however, the virus exploded across Europe and the United States. On March 6, the global count surpassed 100,000. On March 9, Italy’s lockdown was extended to the whole nation as the number of cases rapidly escalated, followed by a huge number of deaths of Italian physicians and health care workers. The videos of coffins by the truckload being transported in the dark hours of the night had a profound effect on the consciousness of the world.

The first few cases in the United States, on the west coast, led to the first death near Seattle, Washington, and a cluster of infections at a Seattle-area nursing home. The Trump administration established its coronavirus task force, with Vice President Mike Pence named its head and Dr. Deborah Birx the response coordinator. At this point, the CDC had only performed a few thousand tests, and the White House continued to exude complacency and indifference—Trump was only energized when reports on the epidemic led to a sharp fall in the financial markets.

On March 11, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom formally designated the coronavirus as a pandemic, declaring at a press conference, “In the past two weeks, the number of cases of COVID-19 outside China has increased 13-fold, and the number of affected countries has tripled. There are now more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries, and 4,291 people have lost their lives.”

On March 13, with total cases in the US at over 2,000, Trump declared a national emergency which granted access to $50 billion in funding for US states and territories. State after state began “shelter in place” policies, first closing schools, then most businesses. Though Trump promised testing capacity would increase, he told those without symptoms, “It’s totally unnecessary. This will pass.”

Only on March 17, during a news conference exactly one month ago today, did Trump finally ask “everyone to work at home, if possible, postpone unnecessary travel, and limit social gatherings to no more than 10 people.”

A week later, as the number of cases approached 100,000 in the US, with New York City at the epicenter of the pandemic, came Trump’s infamous statement complaining that the financial cost was more important than stemming the rising death toll. “The cure can’t be worse than the problem itself,” he tweeted.

On April 2, the world passed the threshold of one million cases. The number of deaths had exceeded 50,000 people. Two weeks further on into this global crisis, and both figures have more than doubled.



Throughout this process, while doctors, nurses and other health care workers have labored heroically, through great difficulties and at great risk to their own survival, to save lives, the capitalist governments of Europe and America have been preoccupied with a different problem: how to preserve and even increase the accumulated wealth of the capitalist ruling class, at the expense of the working class, no matter how high the death toll rises.

‘I Congratulate Joe Biden, A Very Decent Man,’ Says Bernie Sanders In Unprovoked Attack On Democratic Party Unity

The gloves are off. But is former presidential contender Bernie Sanders just a sore loser, or does he really want to see another four years of President Trump?




https://www.theonion.com/i-congratulate-joe-biden-a-very-decent-man-says-ber-1842900009







https://megaphone.link/SONY2725171652

Trump defunds the World Health Organization: A “crime against humanity”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/16/pers-a16.html






16 April 2020

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would suspend funding to the World Health Organization, the most important global institution in the fight against COVID-19 and other communicable diseases.

Trump’s action is a transparent effort to deflect attention from his own administration’s failures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic by blaming external enemies: China and the United Nations’ health care arm. The pandemic has now infected more than two million people and claimed more than 134,000 lives worldwide, including 644,000 cases and more than 28,500 deaths in the US alone.

While Trump’s decision is based on crude and backward political calculations, it will have a real and devastating impact. As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads throughout the world, Trump’s decision to defund the WHO will mean the deaths of countless people in developing countries whose health care systems are supported by the WHO’s equipment, personnel and expertise.
“President Trump's decision to defund WHO is simply this—a crime against humanity,” said Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal. “Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity.”

The majority of the WHO’s resources go to Africa and the Middle East. These areas have so far suffered 910 and 6,815 deaths from COVID-19, respectively, numbers that are accelerating.

These are also some of the most vulnerable regions of the world, which have been impoverished and exploited by the imperialist powers for over a century. Countries such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, Palestine and Yemen have had their hospitals and medical infrastructure bombed into oblivion over the past 30 years by the US and its allies. There have been repeated warnings that even small increases in the infection rate will overwhelm their largely nonexistent health care systems and cause a rapid surge in cases and deaths.

The World Health Organization is not just their front line against the coronavirus, but also against pathogens largely absent in the United States and Western Europe, including “polio, measles, malaria, Ebola, HIV, tuberculosis… and many other diseases and conditions,” as WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted in his press conference yesterday. The organization has provided millions of vaccines to fight these epidemics for decades, programs that now face a collapse of funding.

The WHO has sharply criticized the policies of Western governments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and has called for urgent measures to contain it. On March 11, Dr. Tedros warned of “alarming levels of inaction” on the part of governments in responding to COVID-19.

Responding to the stated policy of the British government, and the unstated policy of other Western governments, to allow the virus to infect substantial parts of the population to generate “herd immunity,” Dr. Tedros warned of a “moral decay.”

“Not taking the deaths of elderly and senior citizens as a serious issue is one of the moral decays. Any individual, whatever their age, any human being, matters,” he said.

Trump’s strategy in response to the pandemic, in contrast, has largely been one of denial. Despite warnings from China in January, or the more urgent declarations on February 24 from the WHO’s mission to China, that infected countries needed to “prioritize active, exhaustive case finding and immediate testing and isolation, painstaking contact tracing and rigorous quarantine of close contacts,” the administration did not implement mass testing until mid-March. By that time, the virus had been spreading essentially unchecked for two months.

As a result, the United States has seven times as many cases as China and nearly nine times as many deaths. Trump again claimed yesterday, “It is clear that our aggressive strategy is working,” making no mention of the record number of deaths, 2,407 and 2,482, on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively.

In place of any serious measures to contain the disease, Trump has tried to paint the virus as a foreign invader, repeatedly calling the novel coronavirus the “Chinese Virus” or the “foreign virus,” and defended a White House official who referred to the outbreak as the “Kung flu.”

In announcing the funding cuts, Trump claimed that “the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet and share information in a timely and transparent fashion.” He added, “WHO’s reliance on China’s disclosures likely caused a twenty-fold increase in cases worldwide” and that “so much death has been caused by their mistakes.”

Any review of initial news reports of the outbreak—before they began to be colored by anti-Chinese propaganda—exposes these claims as lies.

On January 6, the Chinese government alerted the WHO and the rest of the world about a new pneumonia-like illness. By January 11, the WHO had published warnings about dealing with a new type of respiratory infection, and the genetic sequence was shared by China the day after. During this time, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raised its alert level in case the infection was detected elsewhere.

The WHO rapidly sent an international team to China, including American delegates, all of whom made clear that there were no restrictions placed upon their movements.

Even as Trump is withholding half a billion dollars to fight against the most dangerous pandemic in a century, he has already handed over at least $5 trillion in bailouts to Wall Street and major corporations, with promises of more to come. Included in this is a tax break that will provide the millionaires in the US with $73.8 billion, more than 100 times what WHO has asked for to fight the coronavirus.

The WHO’s constitution, referenced Wednesday by Dr. Tedros, states that “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being, without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.”

These are high ideals, which embody the principles of science, rationality and solidarity that have been espoused by doctors, epidemiologists and scientists all over the world in their struggle against COVID-19. But working people must be clear that there can be no appeal for these ideals to the ruling class and its various representatives, including Trump and his counterparts in Britain, France, Germany and the rest.

The only social force that can defend these principles is the working class. In the fight to save lives—massively expanding testing, increasing medical care, raising the production of personal protective equipment—workers must realize that any solution to the pandemic requires a level of planning and global cooperation of which capitalism is simply incapable. Lessons must be drawn, above all that the battle against the pandemic is inseparably bound up with the struggle for socialism.






Bryan Dyne

Why oil prices will never recover

By MICHAEL GRUBB


APRIL 16, 2020






https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/after-the-storm-why-oil-will-never-recover/







Reactions to the Covid-19 crisis have shared much in common with the stages of grief, but one key difference is the ability to believe that after the storm passes, we will return to “business as usual.”

In the energy world, reeling from the spectacular crash of global oil prices from about US$60 to $20 a barrel, the question is posed as to when something like a “normal” will price return.

I have news for you: It won’t. The oil price could again become spectacularly volatile, but will not rise above $30-40 a barrel for any sustained period again. Ever. Given the fundamental importance of oil to the global economy, government revenues, your pension funds, and much besides, that may be the most enduring shock of all from the crises.

Note the plural. If it were “just” Covid-19, oil would recover. But oil already faced two other challenges. Covid-19 has just prematurely thrown the world’s most valuable commodity over a cliff toward which it was anyway stumbling during this decade.




The first was oversupply. For the uninitiated, the oil price collapse started just before the Covid crisis broke, with the Saudi-led Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) unable to agree production cuts with Russia.

Prices close to $60 throughout 2019 were bringing in ever more US shale oil, threatening both. According to the textbooks, as the biggest and cheapest supplier, Saudi Arabia could win any price war as it has done before, thus stabilizing the game.

However, the Saudi regime depends on high oil prices to balance its books. Russia is much more diversified, and is equally concerned about US shale gas exports undermining its pipeline gas markets – which mostly involve oil-linked prices.

Global prices of liquefied natural gas (LNG) had already collapsed – first in the Atlantic basin and then more dramatically in Asia. One of the world’s leading gas research centers, the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies, projects the LNG glut will last a decade, at prices that can compete with coal for power generation and oil in key petrochemical uses.

The stage was already set for battle – for Russia, crashing the oil price is a strategic game with an upside. Covid-19 has, however, turned the battle into a rout. Logically, shale oil should crumble first in the new price war – and the crashing price has enabled US President Donald Trump to “offer” enough cutbacks to create a façade of a deal.

But we can also bet that under Trump, a significant chunk of the world’s largest-ever stimulus package will try to maintain US production, come what may. So Covid-19 could indirectly impede the market shakeout and amplify the strategic supply glut.

The Saudis cannot win a price war. Under pressure from the US administration, they had to sue for a temporary peace – while losing both power and a shrunken share of a cratered market. As the reality dawns, it appears that even this unprecedented deal among the US, Russia and Saudi Arabia could not stop the price sinking back toward $20.


So to the second, strategic challenge – also amplified by Covid-19 – of the multiple pressures on oil demand. In oil’s premier market of transport, growth in the West had largely stalled anyway over the past 10-15 years. The short-run impacts of Covid-19 are obvious. The game-changer is that the pandemic seems peculiarly targeted toward this assumed bastion of demand.

Of course people will resume travel. Yet by then we will all be more than familiar with remote working and videoconferencing. It will be routine for businesses to ask if the time, strain – and for international meetings, cost and jet lag – of a physical meeting is really justified compared with a videoconference.

Domestically, Covid-19 will have accelerated the capacity for, and pre-existing trend toward, greater home-working. Even personally, having experienced that Zoom celebration or a curry evening shared with friends on Skype, we may think twice before traveling so far.

We have learned other things. Like the proverbial boiling frog, the citizens of developing-country megacities had become partly anesthetized to appalling levels of pollution; they have experienced again what clean air is like.

One great paradox of Covid-19 is credible evidence that the reduced air pollution in China has saved more lives – perhaps far more – than the virus has killed.

People will still travel and consume, but also with a renewed awareness of the fragility of our complex societies, of global interconnectedness, and the benefits of taking heed of scientific warnings and prescriptions.

The pandemic occurred against a backdrop of unprecedented concerns about climate change and accumulated impacts of extreme events. Anyone who thinks that Covid-19 has displaced this may be in for a shock: It could be precisely the opposite.

One huge psychological impact is discovering that many advanced societies are less resilient than we thought. Those societies that seem to have coped the best were those that had learned from the past – including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) – and invested, prepared and then heeded the scientific evidence as it emerged.

Not least, all this has happened just as cleaner alternatives have become attractive. In 2019, more than 2 million electric vehicles were sold – still modest, but a growing force. EVs are cleaner, more efficient, and – given their intrinsically greater simplicity – on the cusp of becoming cheaper to buy than conventional cars. The pace of innovation, and the demand for cleaner transport, may easily outpace the falling price of crude.

Moreover, with wind or solar electricity now cheaper than fossil fuels in many regions, EVs might also sell valuable balancing services back to the power grid. As Covid-19 icing on the cake, in Europe and many Asian countries at least, stimulus money could well – and should – accelerate the technology, and charging infrastructures.

In 2019, oil demand breached 100 million barrels a day for the first time: It may well be the last. Covid-19 has already ensured that 2020 demand will be much lower. Some inevitable post-Covid-19 bounce does not mean that oil demand will ever again reach triple figures.

A previously unthinkable US-convened semi-cartel with Russia and OPEC could probably cause price spikes, but seems scarcely stable in the long run.

The cost of the dramatic and strategically premature price collapse could still be high volatility, particularly if Middle East regimes fall or take to conflict in fiscal desperation. But we have already entered a new world, and there is no way back to the old.

Vietnam poised to be big post-pandemic winner

Vietnam's 'coronavirus diplomacy' has lent an emergency helping hand to the West that will likely be rewarded in kind after the plague

By DAVID HUTT
APRIL 16, 2020




https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/vietnam-poised-to-be-big-post-pandemic-winner/







Through early and efficient border closures, uncharacteristic official transparency and strategic Covid-19 diplomacy, communist-run Vietnam is fast emerging as a likely post-pandemic winner.

For a nation that has long-sought to secure it’s place as a reliable and responsible global actor, the coronavirus outbreak and its minimal impact on Vietnam has presented the nation an opportunity in crisis analysts say it is firmly grasping.

Carl Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia and a recognized Vietnam expert, says that Hanoi was “quick off the mark” in its version of “coronavirus diplomacy”, a gambit China, Taiwan and others have likewise deployed to strategic effect.

Vietnam has recently ramped up medical equipment production and made related donations to countries in Covid-19 need, including to the United States, Russia, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.



The latter five European nations, all grappling to cope with the pandemic, have negotiated strategic partner agreements with Vietnam in recent years, Thayer noted.

US President Donald Trump earlier this month thanked “our friends in Vietnam” in a Twitter post after America received 450,000 protective hazmat suits manufactured in Vietnamese factories owned and operated by US chemical company DuPont.

Vietnam has also donated face masks, hand sanitizers and other Covid-19 containing supplies to medical services in neighboring Cambodian and Laos, countries with which Vietnam shares special relations and where China has recently made inroads and gains.

“The coronavirus pandemic has been a great opportunity for Vietnam to enhance its soft power, as it helped to broadcast Vietnam’s generous behavior toward the international community,” said Alexander Vuving, professor at the Daniel K Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Indeed, international praise for Vietnam is soaring at a time when China faces considerable criticism for not only for covering up the initial outbreak of the virus in its Hubei province, but also for spreading disinformation and propaganda in its aftermath, including a bogus official accusation that the US planted the virus in China.

Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, a Washington-based think tank, says that Vietnam’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as its diplomacy amid crisis, will “enable it to demonstrate its value-added to the world.”

That was already becoming apparent to some before the pandemic. Vietnam was one of the few beneficiaries of the US-China trade war as multinational and other companies migrated their factories from China to Vietnam to avoid punitive new US tariffs on China-made goods.

Japanese investment bank Nomura estimates that Vietnam’s economy enjoyed an 8% boost in 2019 as a beneficiary of the shift in supply chains.

Many analysts now expect Vietnam to receive the lion’s share of “second wave” factory relocations driven by the pandemic and growing anti-Chinese sentiment in the West fueled by perceptions China is chiefly responsible for the outbreak.

Politicians in Washington, Tokyo and certain European capitals now speak openly and provocatively about the need for “decoupling” from China’s economy, including to break dependence on a single foreign source for essential imports such as medical supplies.

“Vietnam is a major beneficiary of this diversification as it has proved to be friendly while still cost-effective to firms from the West,” said Vuving. “Vietnam will be, in many cases, their first choice when they look around to find a reliable alternative to the now unreliable Middle Kingdom.


The shift, if indeed on the horizon, couldn’t be better timed for Vietnam. The World Bank forecasts in a worst Covid-19 case scenario that Vietnam’s gross domestic product (GDP) will fall to 1.5% this year, down dramatically from around 7% in recent years.

While this would mark Vietnam’s lowest growth in decades, it will still be much higher than most of its Southeast Asian neighbors, including manufacturing rival Thailand, which is now officially projected to see -5.3% GDP growth in 2020.

Investors clearly see the difference as Vietnam’s bourse has emerged as the region’s best performer this year while several of the region’s other stock markets have tanked in anticipation of Covid-19’s economic damage.

Indeed, some pundits suggest that Vietnam’s economy could bounce back faster than other Southeast Asian states in 2021, especially if the likes of the US, Japan and EU states move en masse to relocate their post-pandemic supply chains out of China and into Vietnam.

The Covid-19 crisis also comes at an important diplomatic time for Vietnam. This year the nation holds the rotating chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and a non-permanent rotating position on the United Nations’ Security Council.

This week, Vietnam hosted a virtual summit with other Southeast Asian leaders to forge a collective regional Covid-19 response at a time new cases are surging in several of the ten-member bloc’s member states, including Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines.

“It is in these grim hours that the solidarity of the ASEAN community shines like a beacon in the dark,” Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, who chaired the meeting, said in his opening remarks.

Speculation is now swirling in diplomatic circles that Vietnam’s tenure as ASEAN chair could be unprecedentedly extended until 2021 due to disruptions caused by the coronavirus crisis.

If so, it would allow Hanoi more time to build regional consensus on two big China-related issues it was expected to emphasize as ASEAN’s chair, namely notching a long-sought code of conduct for the contested South China Sea and an agreement on water resource management on the Mekong River.

Both prickly and escalating issues have put various ASEAN member states at loggerheads with China. Vietnam-China tensions escalated this month after a Chinese surveillance ship sank a Vietnamese fishing boat in contested sea waters; the Philippines came to Vietnam’s diplomatic defense over the incident.

Meanwhile, a report compiled by American climatologists released this week used satellite images to show for the first time that water levels in China’s dammed upper reaches of the Mekong River were running high despite months of severe droughts and parched water flows in downstream Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.

If Vietnam is to have any success in making its case against China and to emerge as a regional spokesperson for resolving the issues, Hanoi will need to win the support of the wider international community, including in the West.

Vietnam’s diplomacy in the recent years has been geared towards winning friends and potential allies in case of a conflict with China. In that vein, many analysts now consider Vietnam to be America’s closest ally in Southeast Asia.

Last month, the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier became the second US naval vessel to dock in Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, following another major US naval visit in 2018.

The carrier has since been grounded due to a rash of Covid-19 infections among its personnel, raising speculation China may seize on the vaccuum to take a more assertive approach to the maritime area with the US at least temporarily out of the strategic picture.

Vuving argues that Vietnam is now “veering closer to the US and farther from China” faster than it would have without the Covid-19 pandemic and fast emerging related new security dynamics.