Minouche Shafik – Samen – Een nieuw sociaal contract voor de 21e eeuw

• door: Linda Bouws

Minouche Shafik – Ills.: Joseph Sassoon Semah

‘Wij hebben een nieuw sociaal contract nodig dat beter in elkaar zit, dat zekerheid en kansen biedt voor iedereen. Een sociaal contract dat minder gaat over ‘mij’ en meer over ‘wij’, dat onze onderlinge afhankelijkheid onderkent en daar tot ons wederzijds profijt gebruik van maakt.’

Het huidige sociale contract staat onder druk. Het is het moment om tot een eerlijker sociaal contract te komen, het lijkt alsof we het huidige neoliberalisme in bepaalde mate achter ons willen laten, aldus Minouche Shafik. Ons sociaal contract is bezweken onder de druk van technologische en demografische veranderingen. Ze hebben onze wereld ingrijpend getransformeerd, met gevolgen voor inkomensverschillen, gendergelijkheid, onderwijs, gezondheidszorg en werk. We leven steeds vaker in een je-staat-er-alleen voor samenleving, hetgeen niet alleen onrechtvaardig is, maar ook veel minder efficiënt en productief dan wanneer de risico’s worden gespreid over de hele samenleving.

Minouche Shafik neemt ons mee door de stadia van het leven- opvoeden van kinderen, volgen van onderwijs, ziek worden, oud worden- en maakt duidelijk hoe we onze samenleving in elk stadium en op elk niveau kunnen herordenen.
Ze pleit voor zekerheid voor iedereen middels een gegarandeerd minimuminkomen, recht op onderwijs, basisgezondheidszorg en bescherming tegen armoede tijdens de ouderdom.
Ze pleit voor een maximaal investeren in capaciteiten zodat de productiviteit wordt verhoogd, onder andere met hulp van digitale techniek in bijvoorbeeld de gezondheidszorg.
Er is ook veel ongebruikt talent van opgeleide vrouwen, minderheden en kinderen uit arme gezinnen. En ze pleit voor een eerlijke en efficiënte spreiding van risico’s. In het toekomstige sociaal contract zal toenemende flexibiliteit in arbeidskrachten gecombineerd moeten worden met meer zekerheid. Jonge mensen moeten worden erkend in een sociaal contract tussen de generaties, zij die nu leven moeten iets doen aan de erfenis van milieuschade (we hebben een veel te grote aanslag op het milieu gepleegd) en staatsschulden.
Iedereen moet zo lang mogelijk een bijdrage leveren aan de samenleving en burgers zullen ook meer verantwoordelijkheid moeten nemen voor hun gezondheid.

Ze stelt zichzelf de vraag hoe we nieuw sociaal contract moeten financieren in een richting die haalbaar is. Betekent een nieuw sociaal contract een enorme toename van de overheidsuitgaven en een sterke verhoging van de belastingen om een gesubsidieerde kinderopvang, voorschoolse educatie en permanente scholing, toegankelijke gezondheidszorg en een staatspensioen mogelijk te maken? Shafik ziet een deel van deze uitgaven als investering, die in de toekomst hogere belastinginkomsten zullen genereren, maar ook het milieu zullen verbeteren. Dat biedt de mogelijkheid kapitaal te lenen. Een aantal posten keren echter steeds terug, zoals pensioenen en een deel van de gezondheidszorg. Deze kosten moeten daarom worden gefinancierd uit belastingheffing, tenminste in de hoogontwikkelde landen.
Om de klimaatverandering af te remmen moeten we Co2-belasting heffen.

Een nieuw sociaal contract vraagt ook een andere rol van overheid en bedrijfsleven. Het bedrijfsleven zou zich moeten richten op meer winnaars door te investeren in onderwijs en vaardigheden, door achtergebleven regio’s te voorzien van een betere infrastructuur en door innovatie en productiviteit te bevorderen. De overheid zal verantwoordelijk moeten zijn voor een minimaal stelsel van voorzieningen, die iedereen beschermen tegen grote tegenslagen en die worden betaald uit de belastingen, aldus Shafik. De belastingdruk moet verschuiven zodat een gelijker speelveld ontstaat tussen kapitaal en arbeid. Er moet worden opgetreden tegen het ontwijken van vennootschapsbelasting.

De ontwikkeling van het sociaal contract is in de meeste landen afhankelijk van de structuur van het politieke bestel, de effectiviteit van de controlerende mechanismen, de opkomst van politieke coalities en de kansen die voortkomen uit crises, zoals nu de coronacrisis, waarbij vooral de meest kwetsbaren lijden onder de pandemie en het heeft laten zien wat de zwakke plekken zijn van de gezondheidszorg en ouderenzorg. Landen met een presidentieel en meerderheidsstelsel en autoritaire regimes kennen meestal een kleiner overheidsapparaat en een minder genereus sociaal contract. Er zijn minder prikkels om rekening te houden met minderheden. Landen met een stelsel van evenredige vertegenwoordiging en die inclusiever zijn bieden de beste kansen voor een goed functionerend sociaal contract.

De coalitie voor een nieuw sociaal contract is in potentie groot en divers. Jonge mensen zijn gemobiliseerd door middel van acties voor een beter milieu en de mogelijkheden van een levenslang onderwijstegoed, als compensatie voor wat ze zijn kwijtgeraakt. Mensen zonder vast contract zullen vaker om zekerheid, opleidingen en omscholingsmogelijkheden gaan vragen. Het belang van een toegankelijke gezondheidszorg, het aanmoedigen van preventiemaatregelen zijn aangetoond in de pandemie.

In Samen draagt Minouche Shafik de bouwstenen aan voor een nieuw sociaal contract, waarin meer onze onderlinge afhankelijkheden wordt onderkend, meer in mensen wordt geïnvesteerd, maar ook meer van individuen wordt verwacht.

Minouche Shafik – Samen. Een nieuw sociaal contract voor de 21 e eeuw. Uitgeverij Nieuw Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 2021. ISBN: 9789046826799

Minouche Shafik is directeur van de London School of Econimics and Political Science. Ze was vicepresident van de Wereldbank en bekleedde hoge posities bij het IMF en de Bank of England.

Zie ook:

Professor Amartya Sen, Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard, deliver a Distinguished Public Lecture on 18 January 2017 in the Sheldonian Theatre: Democracy and Social Decisions
www.ophi.org.uk

Linda Bouws – St. Metropool Internationale Kunstprojecten

The World Trade Organization Is Threatening Vaccine Equity And Climate Goals

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Jayati Ghosh – Photo: en.wikipedia.org

The huge COVID-19 vaccine supply gap between rich and poor countries exposes the deadly problem of intellectual property (IP) rights and the dangerous monopoly power of Big Pharma. It also exposes in glaring terms the failures of the entire system of global trading rules regulated by the World Trade Organization (WTO). In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Jayati Ghosh, one of the world’s leading development economists, dissects the question of intellectual property rights relating to vaccines and argues that the WTO is a vehicle for international imperialism. Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, for nearly 35 years, and has been professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst since 2021. This year, the United Nations named her to be on the High-Level Advisory Board on Economics and Social Affairs.

C.J. Polychroniou: The COVID-19 health disaster brought to the surface a multitude of issues, problems and faults associated with the workings of a capitalist world, not least of which are the rules of the WTO overintellectual property rights relating to vaccines. What are the facts and the myths behind WTO’s intellectual property rules?

Jayati Ghosh: Intellectual property is governed at the global level by a World Trade Organization treaty called the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement. This agreement was itself the result of active corporate lobbying: Susan Sell has provided a detailed and devastating account of how 12 powerful men from pharma, software and entertainment effectively lobbied to make the U.S. government insist on inclusion of this agreement in the set of agreements negotiated at the Uruguay Round of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), which was signed in 1994. The TRIPS agreement intervened in legal systems of all member countries, by putting the burden of proof on the accused rather than the accuser, adopting a much looser definition of “invention” that allowed much more private control of knowledge, and then by making all the rules much stricter and more stringent so that it became much easier to claim infringement. This effectively grants a monopoly over knowledge that companies can use to limit production and increase their own market power. Over the past decades, this has become a major limitation on the dissemination of knowledge and technology for the common good, and essentially benefited large companies who now hold most of the IP rights in the world.

Patents and other intellectual property rules are usually seen as providing a necessary financial reward for invention/innovation, without which technological change would either not occur or be more limited. The pharma industry argues that costs of developing new drugs are very high and there are high risks involved, because the drugs may not succeed even after years of effort, and so they must be granted property rights over this knowledge and be allowed to charge high prices thereafter.

But actually, pharma companies typically only do the “last mile” research for most drugs, vaccines and therapeutics: the bulk of the research — not just the basic science, but also more advanced discoveries that enable breakthroughs — is publicly funded. Big companies increasingly just acquire promising compounds and other knowledge from labs and smaller companies that benefit from public investments. Pharma companies in the U.S., for example, have spent relatively little on R&D — much less than they spend on advertising and marketing, and a small fraction of what they pay out to shareholders or spend in share buybacks designed to increase stock prices.

In addition, in the specific case of COVID-19 vaccines, big pharma companies not only benefited from prior publicly funded research and reduced costs of clinical testing because of more unpaid volunteers for trials, they received massive subsidies from governments that have mostly covered their R&D costs. In the U.S. alone, the six major vaccine companies received over $12 billion in public subsidies; other rich-country governments also provided subsidies to these companies for developing these vaccines. Yet the companies were granted exclusive rights over this knowledge, which they are now using to limit supply and keep prices high even as the global pandemic rages on in the developing world.

Consider the AstraZeneca vaccine, developed by a publicly funded lab in Oxford University. The original distribution model was for an open-license platform, designed to make the vaccine freely available for any manufacturer. However, the Gates Foundation, which had donated $750 million to Oxford for health-related research, persuaded the university to sign an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights. The company promised not to make profits on the vaccine during the pandemic, but because of the competition for doses and opacity in contracts, the range of reported prices of vaccines is vast, from $2.19 to as much as $40 per dose. The major pharma companies producing COVID-19 vaccines are already estimating massive super-profits in 2021 because of the artificially created shortage [effected by the] control over knowledge.

In October 2020, South Africa and India proposed a waiver of IP rights for COVID-19 vaccines. In an unexpected but welcome move, the Biden administration also backed the waiver and encouraged other countries to do the same on account of some extraordinary circumstances at play. The move has now received support from over 120 countries, but it has been opposed by pharmaceutical companies. Should the waiver be temporary, or apply permanently to all private patents on technologies, knowledge and vaccines related to COVID-19 and vital medicines?

India and South Africa requested the WTO to allow all countries to choose to neither grant nor enforce patents and other IP related to COVID-19 drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, and other technologies for the duration of the pandemic, until global herd immunity is achieved. This waiver would apply only to COVID-19-related vaccines, drugs and treatments; it does not mean a waiver from all TRIPS obligations. They could also more easily collaborate in research and development, technology transfer, manufacturing, scaling up and supplying COVID-19 tools.

This is a very limited demand, which develops the argument already in the TRIPS agreement that intellectual property rules can be waived “in exceptional circumstances.” All it does is to protect countries from having trade-dispute mechanisms brought against them by rich country governments in the WTO — it does not ensure the transfer of the required knowledge, for which further measures are required: for example, by governments forcing the companies that benefited from public subsidies to share their technology with other producers.

Some argue that the TRIPS agreement already contains a clause on compulsory licensing by countries that do have production capacity that provides flexibility on patents. But this is too limited in scope and time-consuming, since it must be done item-by-item between companies, and could then be subject to disputes in the WTO.

Even this very limited demand is being fought tooth-and-nail by pharma companies (and consequently by some rich country governments). It is good news that President Biden has dropped U.S. opposition to this waiver, but several European governments with big pharma companies are still opposing it. This is surprising, because such suspension would also benefit their own populations if it made available more vaccines quickly, and larger supply would reduce costs of additional vaccines, making them cheaper for governments and taxpayers across the world, with hopes of finally bringing the pandemic under control.

This is a system that is broken and needs to be fixed urgently. The only beneficiaries are big pharma companies — people across the world suffer, and so do other businesses, as economic activity cannot recover as long as the virus continues to spread and destroy lives and livelihoods. The current demand for a waiver applies only to this pandemic, but it is clear that the entire system of health-related innovation, which is really subsidized and funded by the public, must be restructured to make sure that it operates for public benefit across the world. Otherwise, future health threats will also be hard to combat collectively. Even the recent report of the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines had recommended that governments increase their own investment in health-related innovations and ensure wider access to the outcomes by preventing privatization of the knowledge.

What about trade secrets as a class of protected right for intellectual property rights holders? Should they also be suspended?

The current proposal in the WTO correctly asks for a waiver on all intellectual property related to preventive, diagnostic and treatment tools, because many of the restrictions in supply come from other IP rights like those for industrial design and trade secrets.

For example, it has been estimated that there are around 64 different IP rights involved in the production of the mRNA vaccines, which have been licensed to Moderna and Pfizer — but new producers would then have to also apply for all of these licenses. A waiver would solve that problem. But, I repeat that the TRIPS waiver is only a first step. It does not ensure that the requisite knowledge will be shared — for that, further pressure needs to be applied by governments to the concerned companies. Read more

Lammert de Jong & Dirk Kruijt (eds). Extended Statehood in the Caribbean Paradoxes of quasi colonialism, local autonomy and extended statehood in the USA, French, Dutch and British Caribbean

Lammert de Jong & Dirk Kruijt (eds). – Extended Statehood in the Caribbean Paradoxes of quasi colonialism, local autonomy and extended statehood in the USA, French, Dutch and British Caribbean
Rozenberg Publishers 2005 – ISBN 90 5170 686 3

Het complete boek (PDF): 070211ExtendedStatehood

Zie voor RQ -online versie: https://rozenbergquarterly.com/extended-statehood-in-the-caribbean

Remke Kruk & Sjef Houppermans (red.) – Een vis in een fles raki – Literatuur en Drank in verschillende culturen

Download hier het complete boek (PDF): Een vis in een fles Raki

Zie voor RQ -online versie: https://rozenbergquarterly.com/een-vis-in-een-fles-raki-literatuur-en-drank-in-verschillende-culturen-inhoudsopgave/

Uit de Inleiding:

Misschien is de belangrijkste trek die alcohol met literatuur gemeen heeft wel zijn sublieme vluchtigheid. Vederlichte extases voor wie een ogenblik aan de verveling van het bestaan wil ontkomen of strategische vervoering om de grenzen van de zwaartekracht te verkennen. Zelfs de zwartste romans uit de naturalistische koker gaan op de tenen lopen als het alcoholpercentage stijgt, en de verschrikkingen van het delirium tremens gaan meestal toch gepaard met zotte spotlachjes of dromen van een overkant. Inspiratie lijkt als twee druppels wodka op een roes en dichterlijke verzen spreken vaak een nostalgie naar het bacchantenleven uit. Het boek en de fles zijn zo een onlosmakelijk duo in schertsende dialoog of in vinnig twistgesprek.
Natuurlijk kent de relatie tussen de letteren en de etherische genoegens van de drank vele varianten, zowel wanneer men langs de lijnen van de geschiedenis kijkt als ook wanneer verschillende culturen nader beschouwd worden. De voorliggende verzameling van rond alcohol gesitueerde essays tracht deze menigvoud steekproefsgewijs in beeld te brengen waarbij trouwens ook de betrokkenheid van de auteur bij de drank kan variëren: van de nuchtere dronkenschap die Sem Dresden Montaigne toedichtte tot de ultieme helderheid van het laatste glas bij Malcolm Lowry.
Wanneer we even de alcohol als decorvulling buiten beschouwing laten (ook al is dan inderdaad het decor vlug overvol gelijk in de western waar we voorvoelen dat het eerste uitgeschonken glas in de bar onherroepelijk leidt tot een vuurgevecht waarbij alle flessen door de spiegelwand worden geprojecteerd), kunnen we een viertal mise en scènes onderkennen die samen de horizon van behoefte, vraag en verlangen afbakenen.

Arij Ouweneel – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1927 – 2014. Terug naar Macondo – Het spook van Honderd jaar eenzaamheid en het inheemse innerlijk van de Mesties

Arij Ouweneel- Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1927 – 2014. Terug naar Macondo – Het spook van Honderd jaar eenzaamheid en het inheemse innerlijk van de Mesties
Rozenberg Publishers 2007
ISBN 978 90 5170 813 4

Download hier het complete boek (PDF): Ouweneel – Marquez

Zie voor RQ -online versie:: https://rozenbergquarterly.com/gabriel-garcia-marques/

Great Power Competition Is Escalating To Dangerous Levels: An Interview With Richard Falk

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Richard Falk

Great power competition has emerged as a key priority for U.S. foreign policy under the Biden administration. In fact, we may be already at the start of a new New Cold War, according to Richard Falk, one of the world’s leading scholars in the fields of global politics and international law, in the interview below.   Falk has also been a  leading activist since the Vietnam war, and has published more than fifty books and thousands of essays. His latest book is a political memoir titled Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim (Clarity Press, 2021). Falk is Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, where he taught for nearly half a century, and Chair of Global Law at Queen Mary University of London.

C. J. Polychroniou: Richard, US foreign policy under the Biden administration is geared toward escalating the strategic competition with both China and Russia. Indeed, the Interim National Strategic Guidance, released in March 2021, makes it abundantly clear that the US intends to deter its adversaries from “inhibiting access to global commons, or dominating key regions” and that, moreover, this work cannot be done alone, as was the case under Trump, but will require the reinvigoration and modernization of the alliance system across the world. Does this read to you like a call for the start of a new New Cold War?

Richard Falk: Yes, I would say it is more than ‘the call’ for a New Cold War, but its start. The focus is presently much more China than Russia, because China is seen by Washington as posing the primary threat, and besides, it regards Russia as a traditional rival while China poses novel and more fundamental challenges. Russia, while behaving in an unsavory manner, dramatized by the crude handling of the opposition figure Alexei Navalny, is seen as manageable geopolitically. Euro-American strategy is to stiffen resistance to Russian pressure being exerted along some of its borders, and as in the Cold War can be handled by refurbished versions of ‘containment’ and ‘deterrence.’

China is another matter entirely. The most serious perceived threats  are mainly associated with non-military sectors of Western, and particularly, U.S., primacy, its dominance over a dynamic productive economy, especially with respect to frontier technologies. The remarkable developmental dynamism of the Chinese economy has far outstripped anything ever achieved in the West. The United States Government under Biden seems stubbornly blindsided, seemingly determined to address these Chinese threats as if they could be effectively addressed by a combination of ideological confrontation and as with Soviet Union, containment and deterrence. So far, the Biden response is fundamentally mistaken in its approach, which is to view China as a similar adversary than was the Soviet Union. This Chinese challenge cannot be successfully met frontally. It can only be met by a diagnosis of the relative decline of the West by way of self-scrutiny, selective emulation, and a surge of creative adaptive energies. Such a response needs to be accompanied by a reformist agenda of socio-economic equity, massive infrastructure investment, the adoption of fairer wealth and income tax structures, and a commitment to a style of global leadership that identified the national interest to a greater extent with global public goods. Instead of focusing on holding China in check, the United States would do much better by learning from its successes, and adapting them to the distinctiveness of its national circumstances.

It is to be regretted that the present mode of response to China is dangerous and anachronistic for four principal reasons. Firstly, the mischaracterization of the Chinese challenge betrays a lack of self-confidence and understanding by the American Biden/Blinken foreign policy leadership. Secondly, the chosen path of confrontation risks a fateful clash in South China Seas, an area that according to the precepts of traditional geopolitics falls within the Chinese sphere of influence, and a context within which Chinese firmness is perceived as ‘defensive’ by Beijing while the U.S. military presence is regarded as intrusive, if not ‘hegemonic.’ These perceptions are aggravated by the U.S. effort to augment its role as upholding alliance commitments in South Asia, recently reaffirmed by a clear anti-Chinese animus in the shape of the QUAD (Australia, Japan, India, and the U.S.), formally named Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which despite the euphemism intends to signify enhanced military cooperation and shared security concerns.

Thirdly, the longtime U.S. military superiority in the Pacific region may not reflect the current regional balance of forces in the East and South China Seas. Pentagon public assertions have been sounding the alarm, insisting that in the event of a military confrontation, China would likely come out on top unless the U.S. resorts to nuclear weapons. According to an article written by Admiral Charles Richard, who currently heads National Strategic Command, this assessment has been confirmed by recent Pentagon war games and conflict simulations.

Taking account of this view, Admiral Richard advises that U.S. preparations for such an armed encounter be changed from the possibility recourse to nuclear weaponry to its probability. The implicit assumption, which is scary, is that U.S. must do whatever it takes to avoid an unacceptable political outcome even if it requires crossing the nuclear threshold. It may be instructive to recall the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when Soviet moves to deploy defensive missile systems in Cuba in response to renewed U.S. intervention to impose regime change. It is instructive to recall that Cuba was accepted as independent sovereign state entitled under international law to uphold its national security as it sees fit, while Taiwan has been consistently falling within the historical limits of Chinese territorial sovereignty. The credibility of the Chinese claim was given diplomatic weight in the Shanghai point Communiqué that re-established U.S./China relations in 1972. Kissinger recalled that in the negotiations leading to a renewal of bilateral relations the greatly admired Chinese Foreign Minister, Chou En-Lai, was flexible on every issue except Taiwan. That is, China has a strong legal and historical basis for reclaiming Taiwan as an integral part of its sovereign territory considering its armed severance from China as a result of Japanese imperialism. China governed the area now known as Taiwan from 1683-1895. In 1895 it was conquered and ruled by Japan until 1945 when it was reabsorbed and became a part of the Republic of China. After 1949 when the Chinese Communists took over control of China, Taiwan was renamed Republic of China on Taiwan. From the Chinese perspective, this historical past upholds the basic contention that Taiwan is part of China and not entitled to be treated as a separate state.

Fourthly, and maybe decisively, the international claims on the energies and resources of the United States are quite different than they were during the Old Cold War. There was no impending catastrophe resulting from climate change to worry about or decaying infrastructure desperately needing expensive repair or under-investment in social protection by government in the area of health, housing, and education.

Read more