Capitalists Gonna

 

Red Herring via Black Label Logic.

But he's a philanthropist! https://t.co/ANU9c5sjoA

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) April 26, 2021

This is pretty disquieting, as reported by Jon Queally for Common Dreams (via Salon):

Asked to explain why not, Gates — whose massive fortune as founder of Microsoft relies largely on intellectual property laws that turned his software innovations into tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth — said: "Well, there's only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done — moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India — it's novel — it's only because of our grants and expertise that that can happen at all."

More Economic Opportunities

Mainland Chinese rapper VaVa registers her disapproval of Hong Kong demonstrators on her Instagram account (which is of course illegal in mainland China except for those with the money to maintain a VPN). This in no way makes her look as if she is cravenly currying favor with the Beijing government, except—well, yeah, it does.

How nuts is the entire world right now?

Well, India's only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, has had its constitution somehow revoked by the Hindu-nationalist government and now the entire state is under something like house arrest, under curfew and phone lines and Internet down for the past 12 days (these are supposedly being restored), politicians arrested, insulin and baby food running out, because that's how Prime Minister Modi thinks he can get the people "more economic opportunities".

That line is another one of the lines that enrages me, with its more than a hint of bribery: "Surely you can put up with a little oppression if we pay you enough." And its buried presupposition that the politician delivering the line is the only one who can deliver the cash, not so buried in the case of Trump:

"The bottom line is, I know you like me, this is a love fest, but you have no choice but to vote for me because your 401(k)'s down the tubes. Everything is going to be down the tubes," Mr Trump said. "So whether you love me or hate me, you've got to vote for me."

(The day after [checks notes] an 800-point drop in the DJI.)

Modi's economic policies, the thing that was going to make up for his party's overt "Aryan" chauvinism (not going to win him friends in the country's southern states) and Islamophobia, haven't actually been that great for the masses, in spite of continued high growth rates, because the growth isn't shared, but benefits only the top 10%, with persistent caste divisions (Modi and the BJP castigate "caste politics" the way Republicans talk about "identity politics", as a way of shutting down discussion of the issue) sharpening the inequality, which seems to be getting worse:

Annabel Bligh: The Modi government has been accused of withholding jobs data in the run up to the election because of how bad the official figures are. But the latest employment survey, which was approved by India’s national statistics commission, was leaked to the Indian newspaper the Business Standard in late January and showed unemployment was at a record high of 6.1%.

Indrajit Roy: By a lot of standards 6.1% is not a bad unemployment rate. But for India it’s very significant, according to Jens Lerche, because there isn’t strong welfare provision in the country. And the unemployment rate was just 2.2% in the 2011-2012 financial year.

Jens Lerche: Now unemployment is uncommon in a country such as India because poor people have to work. So, people being without jobs to some extent is people that can afford not to work – educated people that have a family background that they can live off for a while. But, what we have seen here is jobs that have disappeared also within the agricultural sector and low end of manufacturing sector. So it does appear as if poor people are also losing their jobs here.

And since his reelection in May things have started looking pretty gloomy for the business community as well:

Despite an uptick in August, Mumbai’s Sensex stock index is about as close to October’s lows as it is to June’s highs. In July foreigners pulled more money out of Indian equities than they put in. India’s cautious business press has begun to criticise the government. So too, even more gingerly, have its cowed business leaders. “There is no demand and no private investment,” groused Rahul Bajaj, chairman of Bajaj Auto, a motorcycle-maker, at its annual meeting in late July. “So where will growth come from?” The remark, widely interpreted as a swipe at Mr Modi, encapsulates Indian business’s disenchantment with the man they once regarded as their champion.

The immediate cause of the mood swing was the budget, presented on July 5th by Nirmala Sitharaman, the newly appointed finance minister. Business folk tuned in to the two-hour presentation expecting less red tape, fewer tariffs, more incentives for investment and lower taxes. They got the opposite....

So it seems likely that the timing of the Kashmir action could be related to the general sourness people are feeling about the government. For more, see this interview with the Kashmiri (but London-resident) novelist Mirza Waheed in The New Yorker.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Anti-Fascist Roundup

Austrian foreign minister Karin Kneissl, not a member of the Freedom Party, dances at her wedding last year with—ooh, that's Vladimir Vladimirovich! Photo by Alexei Druzhinin/AFP via the Financial Times coverage of this week's events.

Last year there was an inspiring democratic revolution in Armenia, an extraordinary democratic election in Malaysia, a distressing fascist backslide in Italy (a fascistoid party, the "Lega", was able to attach itself in coalition to the unfortunate actual winner, the Movimento Cinque Stelle, one of those new-fangled Howard Beale parties of irritable but poorly informed comedian populists, unable to wield power itself so that the minority League is basically able to run the government), and who knows what else, and we didn't cover any of it here because at this point we're basically all Trump all the time and I didn't feel like doing the work to come up with some hot take on the subject.

But it occurs to me that I should at least try to keep up some kind of running tab on the advances and retreats of democracy around the world...

Austria:

Proponents of liberal democracy may be forgiven a measure of glee in the fall of Austria’s far-right vice chancellor, which has thrown the government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz into chaos and forced early elections. Heinz-Christian Strache, the vice chancellor and head of the far-right Freedom Party, had long projected himself as the scourge of dirty politics, and here he was on a secretly filmed video making all sorts of shady offers to a woman posing as the relative of a Russian oligarch.

Egypt: The next India or the next Israel?

Thomas P. Friedman, aka Thomas L. Friedman, the Erzschnurrbart of the Zeitgeist, has learned to his amazement and delight that India is a multiethnic and multireligious country in which members of non-majority groups frequently ascend to high political office, though only when the Congress Party is in power:

India’s prime minister and its army chief of staff today are both Sikhs, and India’s foreign minister and chief justice of the Supreme Court are both Muslims. It would be like Egypt appointing a Coptic Christian to be its army chief of staff.

“Preposterous,” you say.

I'd say it's more like Dublin having a Jewish mayor ("Only in America!" my dad liked to say), not all that preposterous, whereas Egypt having a Christian army chief would be pretty interesting. Still, why not? Iraq had a Christian deputy prime minister under the Baath party leadership, and my country, in which about 13% of the population is black, just re-elected its first black president.

Would it be preposterous for Egypt to have a Christian army chief?

Well, yes, that’s true today. But if it is still true in a decade or two, then we’ll know that democracy in Egypt failed. We will know that Egypt went the route of Pakistan and not India. That is, rather than becoming a democratic country where its citizens could realize their full potential, instead it became a Muslim country where the military and the Muslim Brotherhood fed off each other so both could remain in power indefinitely and “the people” were again spectators. Whether Egypt turns out more like Pakistan or India will impact the future of democracy in the whole Arab world.

I have no idea what makes Friedman bring up Pakistan in this context. No doubt it has become somewhat less comfortable for Christians than it was in the glory days of the 1960s, when A.R. Cornelius presided over the Supreme Court, but still. I expect it was a bizarre slip of the fingers when he meant Israel, where no Christian has ever served in the government, the little token minority positions in governments of the "left" being reserved for Muslims and Druze—and where Christians and Muslims alike are passed up for national service, under the assumption that they are naturally traitors.

Yes, of course that's it. Rather than becoming a democratic country where its citizens could realize their full potential, instead it became a Jewish state where the military and the Orthodox clergy fed off each other so both could remain in power indefinitely until somebody still more cynical came by and ate their lunch. And if Israel has a Christian foreign minister or a Druze running Mossad or maybe one Reconstructionist rabbi conducting weddings ten years from now, maybe democracy will be a success there too!

Theatrical release poster, 1928. From Wikipedia.

P.S. I should have taken a screen shot but now it's too late: the original version of Friedman's column referred to Amartya Sen as a "Noble Prize-winning economist".

Privateers

The Times coverage of the horrible hospital fire in Kolkata (olim Calcutta) suggests that one of its causes was the fact that the Advanced Medical Research Institute is a private hospital, which means apparently less heavily regulated than the public ones:

The blaze is sure to raise fresh questions about safety in India’s booming private hospital business, which, like much else in India, is poorly regulated.

The hospital had recently been named one of the city’s best by The Week, an Indian magazine that regularly ranks hospitals. Like many such hospitals in India, the Advanced Medical Research Institute offered expensive Western-style facilities to middle- and upper-middle-class Indians who have shunned government hospitals, which are crowded and less well equipped.

A great hospital in the aspects seen by its wealthy clientele, in other words, but not so much so in those seen by India's famously onerous, nitpicking regulators--like what are they storing in the basement (diesel fuel and motor oil), is the fire detection system regularly tested and the staff drilled,