Sunday, July 5, 2020
Could U.S. Capitalism Turn Nationalist?
Richard Wolff July 2, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/could-u-s-capitalism-turn-nationalist/
The Trump administration has turned sharply toward economic nationalism. It attacks and undermines the World Trade Organization, NATO, and the UN. Trump and other top officials explicitly insult many world leaders. He imposes high tariffs. Official statements renew and sustain Cold War-type attacks on China, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. Trump flirts openly with nationalists who also stress white supremacy and anti-Muslim activity.
The Trump regime defines its nationalism largely negatively by focusing on three components: Obama, Obamacare, and globalization. These are what it blames most for what ails U.S. society, for the “un-Americanism” that it most opposes. The Trumpian opposition wraps itself in thin “philosophical” rationales. One of those is racism expressed through an obsessive rejection of Obama and all things Obamian. The racism must simultaneously be explicitly denied the better to cover its implicit, repetitive operation. The second is a primitive libertarianism. It rejects Obamacare as government intrusion upon individual liberty. The third (derived in part from ideologues like Steve Bannon) is a rejection of globalization. This emerges from Trump’s hostility toward immigrants and China and also his many invocations of “America first.”
Trump’s nationalism is clear, but is U.S. capitalism turning nationalist too?
Broadly, U.S. employers neither think nor care much about racism. Some use it to divide employees, keep them from unifying around workplace issues, labor unions, unwanted political initiatives, etc. Most ignore it unless and until gross racism brings victims and anti-racists into the street in ways that threaten their commerce or the economic status quo. Then lip service against racism flows. Corporations make mostly cosmetic adjustments hyped by major public relations efforts. At best, a few genuine, usually marginal improvements are achieved in racial integration and the excruciatingly slow decline of institutional racism.
U.S. employers care less about Obamacare. They know and appreciate that it was a compromise endorsed by the medical-industrial complex. On the one hand, they worry a bit, as usual, about enhancing the government’s position in private health care markets. But also as usual, when government intervention profits private capitalists, they are very interested and supportive. If Obamacare can help shift health care costs from employers onto the general public and onto employees, most employers will support it. Once again, fickle corporate support for laissez-faire, conservative, libertarian ideals can and will irritate the advocates of those ideologies.
Employers are much more concerned and agitated about the Trump regime’s turn toward economic nationalism. It threatens the profitability of the already huge U.S. corporate investments in the production of goods and services overseas and in global supply lines. It risks advantaging foreign competitors in overseas markets over U.S. multinationals active or interested there. Globalization meant profit-making capitalism practiced internationally (with limited government intervention) by private capitalist corporations, state capitalist enterprises, and partnerships between and among them. The beneficiaries of globalization lament when nationalist economic policies disrupt global supply lines, provoke trade and tariff “wars,” and rationalize government attacks on individual corporations. U.S. multinationals may allocate donations to Trump vs. Biden, GOP vs. Dems—and likewise their vast media spending—according to what best supports the globalization they favor.
So far, the Trump regime has wobbled ambivalently between base-pleasing nationalist rhetoric and a necessary subservience to globalized U.S. capitalism. The regime hoped that a massive profit-oriented corporate tax cut in late 2017 would buy global corporations’ acquiescence in a nationalist turn. That hope has not been realized. Instead, we have herky-jerky Trump policy. First it promises global compromise and resurgent world trade and investment, then it rails against untrustworthy, evil trade and investment partners. It raises and lowers both tariffs and threats to impose tariffs, often in dizzying sequence.
Only parts of the U.S. business community are focused exclusively on the domestic market or do not depend on imported inputs. Those parts remain too small by themselves to sustain a Trump turn to nationalism. Consider one statistic: tariffs as a share of the value of U.S. imports fell from almost 50 percent right after the Civil War to 1.2 percent in 2008. The protectionism so central to economic nationalism was largely abandoned across recent U.S. history. Therefore, the political project of shifting the United States toward economic nationalism poses a heavy lift for any government. The key question becomes whether enough U.S. corporations might change their many-layered investments in globalization and become backers of a nationalist turn.
The answer hinges on capitalist competition. U.S. corporations’ competitive growth opportunities since the 1970s focused heavily on technical change and foreign investments in the context of increasing free trade globalization. Telecommunications, the internet, social media, robots, and artificial intelligence continue to drive very profitable industries. Relocating formerly U.S.-based production abroad and producing for fast-growing foreign markets have been and are very profitable. Globalization has been the reality and the consequent policy imperative especially over the last half-century.
But the U.S. global capitalist leadership of the last 50 years is now ebbing. A recent Foreign Affairs article flatly declares that U.S. hegemony is now ending and “isn’t coming back.” China is the chief competitor, but other countries too are fielding or threatening soon to field effective competitors. If a U.S. multinational is losing its competitive edge in a global market, it might support nationalist measures giving it privileged, discriminatory access to a still large U.S. market. U.S. multinationals might be willing to leave to others the competition to capture a fast-growing Chinese market if those U.S. firms got privileged access, via nationalism, to a slower-growing U.S. market and/or if U.S.-China hostilities sharpen. If a nationalist turn in U.S. policy were combined with massive new U.S. government subsidies and further tax cuts for U.S. multinationals, the latter might support that nationalist policy turn. If they did, it would signal a high degree of U.S. corporate desperation.
A nationalist turn in the United States would provoke more or less matching and retaliatory nationalist turns elsewhere. In that case, all participating countries would likely lose economically. The world’s other major economies—their business communities and their leading politicians—are watching closely as Trump’s foreign trade and investment policies evolve. They hesitate to incur the large costs of possible nationalist turns inside their countries. They are waiting to see if what Trump has so far done ambiguously will harden into the dominant U.S. policy over the coming years, with or without Trump. A Biden victory might abandon the nationalist turn and renew the largely pro-globalization consensus before Trump. Then again, if confronted with corporate pressures the other way, centrist Democrats would likely bend.
Perhaps the plan (even if not yet explicit and conscious) is to rebuild U.S. hegemony. This time “multilateralism” would not be the mechanism that sustained it. That worked well over the last 75 years, but it may now be exhausted. A new U.S. nationalism might then aim to subordinate each other part of the world (country or region), bi-laterally, as a “partner.” Perhaps such a plan could obtain the loyalty of nationalists without compromising the basic interests of globalists.
In short, more than a viral pandemic, a global capitalist crash and climate change weigh on world trade and investment. So too does the question of whether globalized capitalism produced so many victims and critics that it cannot survive no matter how it might be reconfigured. If so, will the consequent transition hold on to capitalism but drop “globalization” to become instead a tense, dangerous world of contending nationalist capitalisms? Or, alternatively, will we see a transition to a post-capitalist global system of quite differently organized enterprises, political institutions (including nation-states), and movements of productive resources and products across its geography?
Revolutionary possibilities loom.
Saturday, July 4, 2020
Newer variant of COVID-19-causing virus dominates global infections
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200702144054.htm
Research out today in the journal Cell shows that a specific change in the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus virus genome, previously associated with increased viral transmission and the spread of COVID-19, is more infectious in cell culture. The variant in question, D614G, makes a small but effective change in the virus's 'Spike' protein, which the virus uses to enter human cells.
Bette Korber, a theoretical biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of the study, noted, "The D614G variant first came to our attention in early April, as we had observed a strikingly repetitive pattern. All over the world, even when local epidemics had many cases of the original form circulating, soon after the D614G variant was introduced into a region it became the prevalent form."
Geographic information from samples from the GISAID COVID-19 viral sequence database enabled tracking of this highly recurrent pattern, a shift in the viral population from the original form to the D614G variant. This occurred at every geographic level: country, subcountry, county, and city.
Two independent lines of experimental evidence that support these initial results are included in today's paper. These additional experiments, led by Professor Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D., at the La Jolla Institute, and by Professor David Montefiori, Ph.D., at Duke University, showed that the D614G change increases the virus's infectivity in the laboratory. These new experiments, as well as more extensive sequence and clinical data and improved statistical models, are presented in the Cell paper. More in vivo work remains to be done to determine the full implications of the change.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus has a low mutation rate overall (much lower than the viruses that cause influenza and HIV-AIDS). The D614G variant appears as part of a set of four linked mutations that appear to have arisen once and then moved together around the world as a consistent set of variations.
"It's remarkable to me," commented Will Fischer of Los Alamos, an author on the study, "both that this increase in infectivity was detected by careful observation of sequence data alone, and that our experimental colleagues could confirm it with live virus in such a short time."
Fortunately, "the clinical data in this paper from Sheffield showed that even though patients with the new G virus carried more copies of the virus than patients infected with D, there wasn't a corresponding increase in the severity of illness," said Saphire, who leads the Gates Foundation-supported Coronavirus Immunotherapy Consortium (CoVIC).
Korber noted, "These findings suggest that the newer form of the virus may be even more readily transmitted than the original form -- whether or not that conclusion is ultimately confirmed, it highlights the value of what were already good ideas: to wear masks and to maintain social distancing."
Research partners from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Duke University, and the University of Sheffield initially published work on this analysis on the bioRxiv site in an April 2020 preprint. That work also included observations of COVID-19 patients from Sheffield that suggested an association of the D614G variant with higher viral loads in the upper respiratory tract.
"It is possible to track SARS-CoV-2 evolution globally because researchers worldwide are rapidly making their viral sequence data available through the GISAID viral sequence database," Korber said. Currently tens of thousands of sequences are available through this project, and this enabled Korber and the research team to identify the emergence of the D614G variant.
GISAID was established to encourage collaboration among influenza researchers, but early in the epidemic the consortium established a SARS-CoV-2 database, which soon became the de facto standard for sharing outbreak sequences among researchers worldwide.
The study, "Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus" was supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC) part of UK Research & Innovation (UKRI the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR); Genome Research Limited, operating as the Wellcome Sanger Institute; CoVIC, INV-006133 of the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mastercard, Wellcome; private philanthropic support, as well as the Overton family; a FastGrant, from Emergent Ventures, in aid of COVID-19 research; and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Interagency Agreement No. AAI12007-001-00000, and the Los Alamos Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.
Additional study authors included S. Gnanakaran, H. Yoon, J. Theiler, W. Abfalterer, N. Hengartner, E.E. Giorgi, T. Bhattacharya, B. Foley, K.M. Hastie, M.D. Parker, D.G. Partridge, C.M. Evans, T.M. Freeman, T.I. de Silva, C. McDanal, L.G. Perez, H. Tang, A. Moon-Walker, S.P. Whelan, C.C. LaBranche.
Story Source:
Materials provided by DOE/Los Alamos National Laboratory. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
B. Korber, W.M. Fischer, S. Gnanakaran, H. Yoon, J. Theiler, W. Abfalterer, N. Hengartner, E.E. Giorgi, T. Bhattacharya, B. Foley, K.M. Hastie, M.D. Parker, D.G. Partridge, C.M. Evans, T.M. Freeman, T.I. de Silva, C. McDanal, L.G. Perez, H. Tang, A. Moon-Walker, S.P. Whelan, C.C. LaBranche, E.O. Saphire, D.C. Montefiori, on behalf of theSheffield COVID-19 Genomics Group. Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus. Cell, July 2, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.06.043
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