“É mais urgente que o impeachment” - Leandro Demori (The Intercept)

 É mais urgente que o impeachment

Leandro Demori

The Intercept, 21/07/2021

Olá, O texto abaixo pode soar alarmista ou revelador, a depender do interlocutor. Como meu objetivo não é causar polêmica, ele será enviado apenas para os assinantes da nossa newsletter e não irá para o site. Minha intenção é:    Partilhar algumas ideias que estão pairando por aqui a partir da grande quantidade de informação que temos apurado nas últimas semanas; Mostrar para onde vai o trabalho do Intercept no futuro próximo, justamente guiado por essas informações. Não vou enrolar para dizer o que motiva este texto, mais adiante explico com calma, mas já queria que partíssemos de uma ideia comum. Diante das condições estabelecidas hoje, no atual patamar de pressão e alta temperatura em Brasília, o impeachment de Jair Bolsonaro é insuficiente para tirar o Brasil da crise sanitária, econômica e política.  Mais do que isso: o impeachment, apenas ele, pode aprofundar essa crise.  Você me perguntará: "Leandro, você está dizendo que é contra o impeachment?". De maneira nenhuma. Também não estou fazendo exercício de futurologia, não pretendo "prever" para onde nos levaria o impeachment. Não é esse meu trabalho. O que eu quero e tenho condições de fazer é trazer informação e refletir a partir dela.  É possível que você seja uma das centenas de milhares de pessoas que conheceram o Intercept depois da Vaza Jato. Ou talvez você tenha passado a assinar nossa newsletter no último mês — tivemos um boom de assinaturas em junho e julho. Talvez você conheça bem o TIB ou seja uma das pessoas que apenas leu alguns dos nossos furos mais importantes. Eu não sei. Mas independentemente de como você chegou aqui, quero te lembrar que o Intercept existe pra fazer jornalismo de impacto. Isso não é muito comum no Brasil, então vou tomar a liberdade de explicar rapidamente. Toda e qualquer pauta que chega para a gente aqui é debatida coletivamente a partir de um princípio: essa apuração causa alguma mudança importante para a sociedade?Atenção: uma mudança pode acontecer de várias formas. Às vezes uma pauta não derruba um ministro, mas ela escancara pra sociedade negócios escusos e revira o tabuleiro enfraquecendo um nome poderoso. Em outras situações ela é mais efetiva: reverte uma injustiça, muda uma lei, liberta pessoas presas injustamente.  Tenho muito orgulho quando lembro que uma apuração da jornalista Amanda Audi resultou na proteção das terras dos Tupinambá de Olivença, no Sul da Bahia. A área é o lar de 4,6 mil indígenas, além de marisqueiros e pescadores artesanais. Esse pessoal ia perder tudo porque o governo Bolsonaro pretendia repassar as terras para uma rede hoteleira. Demos a matéria, a pressão em cima do governo aumentou e no fim os indígenas encontraram Amanda em Brasília para agradecer. Conto com orgulho também que, depois de uma reportagem da Nayara Felizardo, 30 casos de adoções irregulares no Amapá estão sendo investigados, porque provavelmente aquelas crianças foram tiradas de suas famílias pobres por conta do poder financeiro de outras famílias. Estampo um tremendo sorriso no rosto todas as vezes que lembro do que fizemos na Vaza Jato e olho para o que aconteceu com Sergio Moro. Há quanto tempo não ouvimos falar em Deltan Dallagnol, o procurador que vivia metendo o bedelho em todos os assuntos nacionais e articulando politicamente através do seu cargo e segundo seus interesses pessoais? O destino de Deltan era a PGR… Prometi explicar resumidamente, mas me empolguei. Peço desculpas. Antes de falar propriamente do impeachment e do atual cenário político, citei esses exemplos mais contundentes para explicar o trabalho do Intercept e te alertar que o que vamos abordar aqui é fruto desse trabalho.  Cheguei ao Intercept em 2018 e muito rapidamente vi essa redação se transformar em uma das mais relevantes do país. Somos uma equipe pequena para o tamanho do barulho que provocamos e isso não é casual. Isso acontece por três fatores: somos focados em impacto, temos os recursos para correr atrás dele e temos independência como nenhuma outra redação para enfrentar as consequências disso. É a partir desse lugar e com essa autonomia que trabalho. E tenho trabalhado cada vez mais nas últimas semanas.  Estamos em um momento singular da nossa história republicana. Somos comandados por um governo militar que chegou ao poder através do voto. Tinha tudo para ser a chance de ouro dos milicos. Eles não precisaram de golpe para chegar lá e tinham apoio de parcela expressiva da população. O Brasil estava atolado em uma crise profunda e, caso as coisas melhorassem, todos os méritos seriam deles, os militares, os brasileiros "mais preparados para enfrentar qualquer problema". Você sabe, para eles, nós, civis, somos um bando de idiotas e de ladrões.  Mas no meio do caminho tinha uma pandemia. Com ela, a crise não só piorou como ganhou aspectos de terror. O governo militar é responsável por 540 mil mortes e 20 milhões de famintos. O fracasso é retumbante e para onde se olhe só vemos desgraças, equívocos, corrupção e coronéis, capitães, generais. É muita corrupção.   Os militares passaram os primeiros dois anos do governo se vendendo como algo diferente de Jair Bolsonaro. Também tentam mostrar que têm conflitos com outros grupos que apoiam o presidente, como os lunáticos olavistas. E os militares são muito bem-sucedidos nessa operação de autopromoção. Eles têm, provavelmente, a assessoria de imprensa mais eficiente do país. É impressionante como conseguem falar em off com jornalistas e serem pintados como bom moços por uma enorme gama de colunistas.  A essa altura, com quase três anos de governo, com tudo o que foi escancarado pela CPI da Covid-19, com o show de horrores protagonizado por figuras como Pazuello, Élcio Franco e, por que não?, Braga Neto, não dá mais para separar as Forças Armadas de Bolsonaro. Eles são uma coisa só, pelo menos enquanto for conveniente para os militares.  Houve um momento em que se acreditava que havia uma disputa entre militares e civis no comando dos esquemas de compra de vacina. Hoje essa versão não pára em pé. Não tinha disputa alguma. Os militares e os civis do ministério da Saúde estavam todos muito bem acomodados e cada um na sua com a parte que lhe cabia. Um mandava dinheiro para paraíso fiscal ali com a Covaxin, outro comprava Sputnik com o Centrão aqui, outro adquiria Coronovac superfaturada acolá. E, claro, todos ignoravam a Pfizer porque aparentemente ali não deu para fazer nenhuma tramoia. Ou seja, os militares até podem tentar empurrar tudo pra cima de deputados e outros funcionários civis do ministério. Podem entregar uma cabeça como a de Élcio Franco. Não importa.  A CPI já foi longe demais e está claríssimo: havia militares em toda a cadeia de comando e tomada de decisão da compra da vacina.  Não é mais questão de um militar chegar ao poder caso Bolsonaro caia: hoje sabemos que os militares já estão no poder. Não dá para termos a medida exata, mas estamos falando de dezenas de pessoas. Tem general, tem coronel, tem tenente. E tem, como o presidente da CPI, Omar Aziz, já deixou claro, Braga Neto — o ministro todo-poderoso que era chefe da Casa Civil e, lembre-se, o cabeça do comitê gestor da Covid-19. Omar Aziz foi categórico no depoimento de Roberto Dias, ex-funcionário do ministério: "o senhor recebia ordens através de um e-mail da Casa Civil". Bolsonaro pode se esforçar para mudar o rumo do debate público dando todo dia uma entrevista mais absurda que a outra. Os milicos podem tentar subir o tom para ver se amedrontam aqueles que estão liderando as investigações. Tudo isso é perfumaria, porque os fatos estão dados: a pandemia foi uma grande oportunidade de negócio para o governo militar. Muita gente faturou e ia faturar muito mais enquanto centenas de milhares de famílias perdem seus entes queridos.  É por isso que o governo militar está em pânico. E é por isso que vivemos um momento tão delicado.  Vou repetir algo que disse ali em cima: a CPI já foi longe demais. Há uma enorme quantidade de contratos, sigilos quebrados, registros de conversas e áudios, documentação de embaixadas, enfim: muita informação acumulada e que indica vários caminhos de investigação.  Apenas um exemplo: o caso Covaxin. Esse era um negócio de R$ 1,6 bilhão que iria evaporar. O governo pagaria a uma empresa de fachada num paraíso fiscal. Esse é o maior golpe que eu já vi. Notem: a Lava Jato diz que a Petrobras recuperou R$ 5,3 bilhões por causa de anos de corrupção. Apenas a canetada da Covaxin seria quase um terço disso.  É diante desses fatos que eu te pergunto: o que aconteceria no dia seguinte ao impeachment de Jair Bolsonaro? Quem assume a cadeira? Qual o indicativo que temos de que os militares respeitarão as investigações, a Polícia Federal, o Congresso Nacional, o STF? A lama já chegou até os coturnos de muita gente poderosa, mas o que vai acontecer quando começarmos a ver ordens de prisão para os fardados? Não tenho resposta para essas perguntas, claro. O que eu sei, a partir do que vi nas nossas apurações recentes e de conversas que realizei nos últimos dias, é que estamos diante de um megaescândalo de corrupção.  Se não é o maior escândalo de corrupção da nossa história, seguramente é o mais letal. É por tudo isso que acredito que o impeachment de Bolsonaro é insuficiente para sairmos desse buraco no qual ele e os generais nos meteram.  As Forças Armadas passaram duas décadas se promovendo como reserva moral e técnica do país. Balela. São tecnicamente medíocres, moralmente execráveis. Pazuello foi incapaz de erguer uma logística eficiente para distribuir vacinas para os estados. Hoje, para tentar fugir das investigações, é defendido por um advogado que tem no currículo a defesa de vários milicianos notáveis, entre eles Cristiano Girão e Ricardo Teixeira Cruz, o Batman. Que coincidência, não?  Estou usando Pazuello de exemplo, mas você sabe que eles são abundantes. As maracutaias no orçamento são infinitas: generais no governo agora ganham acima do teto, mais de R$ 60 mil por mês vão para o bolso de Mourão, Ramos e Braga Neto. Conseguiram um monte de penduricalhos e foram os únicos que saíram da reforma da previdência ganhando dinheiro — e não perdendo. Eles exaltam torturadores, ameaçam a democracia sem nenhum constrangimento, abominam a liberdade de expressão.  Como eles vão reagir ao perceberem que o consenso que conseguiram criar nos últimos 20 anos está se rompendo ainda não sabemos. Mas essa é a grande história desse momento: é preciso investigar o governo militar, responsabilizar culpados e colocá-los de volta nos quartéis de onde não deveriam ter saído. Esse momento é chave para enfraquecê-los e isso não se resolve com o impeachment.  Mostramos no último sábado, aqui na newsletter, como eles já estão se articulando para a eleição do ano que vem. Não tenho dúvida de que Jair Bolsonaro é uma enorme ameaça para a democracia brasileira, mas os militares são ainda piores. Se fraquejarmos agora, se abaixamos a cabeça para as notinhas desaforadas que eles gostam de soltar, onde eles vão parar? Vão aceitar as investigações? E o resultado das eleições do ano que vem, vão respeitar? A história brasileira é cheia de momentos como esse, em que a pressão sobe e os militares assumem o comando nos jogando em uma temporada obscura. Dessa vez não pode ser assim. É preciso acertar as contas com eles e mostrar sua real face para a população brasileira.  É por tudo isso que estamos mergulhados na cobertura de um grande volume de documentação da CPI. É também por isso que estamos focados em apurar tudo que é relacionado aos militares. Esse foi o tema do nosso programa no YouTube na última quarta-feira, o Cama de Gato, e da newsletter de sábado, apenas para citar dois exemplos.  É esse jornalismo que o Intercept pretende te entregar nos próximos meses. Jornalismo de impacto e de interesse público. Tudo, como sempre, gratuito, aberto, sem paywall, feito de maneira profissional e absolutamente autônoma. Aqui no Intercept, general não fala em off para lustrar a imagem do Exército. Aqui eles são investigados.  Acredito que você compreendeu que esse é um momento crucial. Mas para de fato conseguir entregar tudo que desejamos precisamos de mais ajuda do que em qualquer outro momento.  Estamos em campanha com o objetivo de reunir 5 mil novos assinantes até agosto e está bem difícil chegar lá. Eu realmente estou com medo de não conseguirmos. Estou ciente de todas as dificuldades que enfrentamos no momento, mas eu não tenho outra alternativa que não pedir. Precisamos de muitos novos doadores mensais, com qualquer valor. Porque se conseguirmos reunir mais 2 mil novos apoiadores, com cada um doando 25 reais, sei que teremos força para tocar nosso trabalho com todos os recursos que precisamos. Por que tão pouco?  Simples: porque para continuarmos verdadeiramente independentes não temos interesse em trabalhar com um único financiador ou com anunciantes. Nosso foco não é atrair milionários. O que nós queremos é criar uma comunidade grande o suficiente que sustente não os salários de quem trabalha aqui apenas, mas o jornalismo de que o país precisa.  Quero te pedir para ponderar o que pode significar para você e para o país uma doação hoje de 25 ou 50 reais para o Intercept. E a partir disso espero que você considere nos ajudar. Sendo muito sincero, tenho convicção de que esta é uma das melhores atitudes políticas que você pode tomar atualmente. Basta clicar aqui. Se você leu isso tudo, muito obrigado! Eu ainda fico impressionado com o alcance do trabalho do Intercept e às vezes até me assusto como isso aqui cresceu.  Antes de me despedir, uma curta nota pessoal. Eu já fui auxiliar de serralheiro, montador de box de banheiro, instalador de alarme residencial. Eu nem sabia que existia faculdade de jornalismo. Hoje, não é raro que um texto meu seja lido por uma audiência que equivale a 10 vezes a população da minha cidade no interior de Santa Catarina. Assusta um pouco, mas ao mesmo tempo me anima demais.  Temos uma chance única aqui no Intercept de fazer jornalismo com liberdade, impacto e coragem. É o que eu quero te entregar nos próximos meses e é do que o país precisa. Isso se tornará muito mais fácil se você nos ajudar hoje. Topa? FAÇA PARTE DO TIB →   Um abraço, Leandro Demori Editor-executivo Recebeu este e-mail encaminhado por alguém? Assine! É grátis.  Mudou de ideia e não quer receber nossa newsletter? Clique aqui para cancelar a inscrição. Obrigado por nos ler! 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Resistance and Repression in Cuba - Mary Anastasia O’Grady (WSJ)

 Segundo antigo dirigente do KGB, a máquina de repressão do comunismo cubano é muito mais eficiente do que jamais o foi o KGB na finada União Soviética. O número de pessoas envolvidas no trabalho de vigilância é muito maior do que tinha a Stasi na RDA. 

Trecho: "The corrupt former president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, is blaming the U.S. trade embargo for the events. That’s either stupid or evil. Cubans want liberty and justice."

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Resistance and Repression in Cuba

Protesters knew they would meet brutality. They went out anyway, demanding liberty.

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2021 7:12 pm ET

During a visit to Moscow in 1991, members of the Cuban-American National Foundation had a quiet meeting with a top KGB official. Diego Suarez, who was at that meeting, told me last week by phone from Miami that, in the KGB man’s opinion, Havana’s internal-security apparatus was more sophisticated than the Kremlin’s.

A former senior U.S. official told me on Wednesday that when he and others met with the same KGB general— Oleg Kalugin —in Washington in 2001, he told them that the machine controlling the Cuban police state was more “effective” than the Soviet system had been.

This testimony is worth contemplating in the wake of unprecedented antigovernment demonstrations across Cuba last week. The island’s rich ruling elite have spent decades cultivating a monstrous, merciless state-security structure for occasions such as this. Now it has unleashed a wave of terror on the island that would make Stalin blush.

Watching the Interior Ministry and the military do their dirty work, it’s hard to believe regime collapse is imminent. Yet last week’s protests overwhelmed a network that is supposed to be airtight. The breadth of the uprising reveals a nation at the breaking point. Any lingering pretense of regime legitimacy has been shredded—at home and abroad.

On July 11 in the municipality of San Antonio de los Baños, some 22 miles from Havana, a group of pro-democracy activists launched a protest. It was far from the first of its kind. This column has been documenting the work of Cuban dissidents for more than two decades. But on that Sunday something new happened.

Cuba’s internal security is constructed in concentric circles. Closest to home, there is the “committee to defend the revolution,” which has spies in every nook of life and rewards them for ratting out “counter-revolutionaries.” Next there are regime-controlled activists and “rapid response brigades” to meet and punish anyone who ventures outside to protest.

According to Maria Werlau, executive director of Cuba Archives, the ratio of secret police to the population is higher than it was under the Stasi in East Germany. National police, shock troops and elite-trained military squads are another layer of defense.

With Big Brother everywhere, Cubans are taught to tremble before authority and to keep nonconforming thoughts to themselves. Yet in a flash on that day, large numbers of ordinary Cubans made the decision to raise their voices against their oppressors. The outcry spread as if a fuse had been lit. The fear factor failed.

The regime was caught off guard. It shouldn’t have been. The island was simmering with discontent before 2020, but Covid-19 has put regular privation on steroids and exposed the injustice of a system in which the Communist Party enjoys lavish privileges and everyone else grovels for crumbs.

A further unprecedented development: What was happening in San Antonio de los Baños didn’t stay there. Images of Cubans chanting “liberty” and “down with communism” went viral. Within hours, thousands were marching in more than 30 cities. Some reports say that the protests extended to 60 towns and municipalities.

Dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel loaded up buses with trained military hit men and sent them, dressed in civilian clothing and carrying metal bars and sticks, to attack the demonstrators. They chased, beat and dragged citizens in the streets. Uniformed enforcers, some dressed in riot gear, were also used. Some fired weapons. One man was killed.

In the aftermath of the marches there were home-to-home searches for enemies of the revolution. Democracy advocates on the island say some 5,000 people have been arrested and the whereabouts of nearly 200 are unknown. Arrests include important dissident leaders like José Daniel Ferrer and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and the journalist Henry Constantin.

Many protesters were young. They knew their demands would be answered with brutality. They went out anyway, out of desperation, hoping that someone in power would hear their pleas.

Some have. The nephew of Gen. Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, who sits atop the military’s tourism conglomerate, uploaded a video last week condemning repression and calling for change. Some intellectuals and artists quit their associations with the regime, including film director Carlos Lechuga, who on Facebook called the president a murderer. Speculation is rampant that family members of the ruling elite are heading out of the country.

The corrupt former president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, is blaming the U.S. trade embargo for the events. That’s either stupid or evil. Cubans want liberty and justice.

More blood will be shed. But the financially and morally bankrupt authorities won’t be able to feed their security apparatus indefinitely.

The six-decade lie that the revolution produced well-being and equity has been laid bare. What Cubans—and the world—have seen cannot be unseen.

https://www.google.com.br/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/resistance-cuba-protests-coronavirus-san-antonio-de-los-banos-diaz-canel-11626638849

Plagues and empires - John Rapley (Aeon)

 

Plagues and empires

What can the decline of the Roman Empire and the end of European feudalism tell us about COVID-19 and the future of the West?

John Rapleyis a political economist at the University of Cambridge, as well as a senior fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study. His latest book is Twilight of the Money Gods: Economics as a Religion and How it all Went Wrong (2017). He lives in London and Johannesburg.

Aeon, 13/07/2021

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Brought to you by Curio, an Aeon partner

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Edited bySam Haselby

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Early in 2020, after a mysterious coronavirus emerged out of China and then raced across the globe, a quiet new year took a screeching turn. Stark images of ventilated patients in Italian hospital hallways soon filled our newsfeeds. Panic erupted across the West. One after another, governments that had been telling their citizens everything was fine suddenly screamed at everyone to shelter in place and avoid all human contact. It felt like the modern world had just met its Black Death.

With no living memory of such scenes, Western audiences reached for the timeless literature of apocalypse to make sense of it all. But whereas ancient traditions of end times blamed spiritual causes for the collapse of civilisations, we, being the moderns that we are, opted for what we imagined to be a ‘scientific’ discourse – the so-called genre of collapsology. Although some modern scholars, such as Edward Gibbon, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, retained essentially spiritual explanations for civilisation decline, while embedding them in empirical ground, those who would shape our interpretation of COVID-19 came from a different tradition, one that took inspiration from Thomas Malthus’s 1798 thesis about the natural consequences of human development.

Neo-Malthusians credited environmental feedback loops, not moral failings, for regime collapse. In the 1960s and ’70s, works by Paul Ehrlich and Donella Meadows et al argued that the world’s population was growing so fast it would soon outstrip resource supplies, leading to (among other things) widespread food shortages. More recently, Jared Diamond wrote of the role that environmental depletion and diseases played in the fall of civilisations, and his theory that the collapse of Easter Island resulted from overexploitation of the natural environment has enjoyed particular resonance. For its part, the COVID-19pandemic revived old theories about the role that diseases played in regime collapse, and we were reminded that plagues had laid low the Roman Empire and destroyed European feudalism.

Except, that wasn’t what happened. At least, not quite the way supposed.

The thesis that environmental stresses cause regime collapse remains a topic of great debate. We can start just with the cases mentioned above. The alarmist warnings in the 1970s about overpopulation soon gave way not to concerns about food shortages, but about the problems caused by global overproduction of food, which was driving down food prices and accelerating the urbanisation of the developing world. Regarding Diamond’s book about Easter Island, pretty much from the get-go it faced strong criticism for its questionable evidence. For similar reasons, many historians of the Roman Empire doubt that the plague played a part in its downfall. As for the Black Death, in much of Europe it didn’t end feudalism but actually reinforced it. More generally, measured by the scale of the loss in human life as a proportion of the total population in the affected areas, 19th-century epidemics of cholera, and the flu pandemic of 1918, all took a far greater toll in the Western world than COVID-19. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find hints of regime stress in response to any of them.

Still, the scholars who make a case for the civilisational impact of epidemics might be on to something. For starters, the link between empires and disease is quite strong, with cholera, tuberculosis, syphilis, bubonic plague, smallpox and other diseases all fanning out across the trade routes of empire. Tellingly, when one contrasts the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic of, say, China and Western countries, it seems plausible that this pandemic could hasten the relative decline, if not the fall, of the West. But given that China and the West confronted the same plague, why have the outcomes differed so wildly? Fortunately, history offers some insights.

An exogenous shock must encounter a vulnerability to bring down a regime

Let’s return to the Black Death of 14th-century Europe. The thesis that the plague ended feudalism starts with the fact that Europe’s labour supply dropped suddenly and sharply. This then augmented the bargaining power of the labouring classes, altering their relations to the nobility. But as mentioned, in much of Europe, and particularly in the east, the nobility responded by then reinforcing feudal bonds. However, in other places, the legal system permitted the renegotiation of the relationship between lords and producers. For example, in England, the evolution of Common Law had created a framework that made it possible for land tenure to change from feudal to market-based relations. As a result, when the Black Death caused an agrarian crisis, English society produced new forms of tenancy, thereby accelerating the decline of feudalism. In effect, English feudalism had a vulnerability to exogenous shock that was not present in other parts of Europe.

As it happens, the thesis that an exogenous shock must encounter a vulnerability to bring down a regime happens to fit the case of the Roman Empire. Recent historiography attributes that empire’s fall not to plagues but to the Hunnish invasions. Importantly, though, the sudden incursion of the Huns didn’t itself signal the Roman Empire’s collapse. The Huns emerge into the historical record in the 4th century, but it would be another century before they toppled the empire – which is to say, the exogenous shock alone didn’t change anything. Until well into the 5th century, the Romans dealt with the Huns as they had always done with frontier invaders, using a combination of repression and negotiation to neutralise the threat. But in the mid-5th century, at around the time of the empire’s greatest economic output, its reckless expansionism multiplied the conflicts on its borders, such that it could no longer concentrate its firepower on one foe. Thus, the vulnerability did not result from Rome’s internal weakening, as the Gibbon thesis had maintained. It actually came at the point when the empire was at its peak in both economic output and, it would appear, hubris.

That an empire’s strength might actually be its weakness, creating vulnerabilities to exogenous shocks that didn’t exist in earlier stages of its history, bears consideration in light of the comparatively poor performance of Western countries in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Even more importantly, it could help us chart the likely long-term geopolitical impacts of the pandemic. While far more devastating in human lives, the 1918 flu pandemic did little economic harm to Western societies. In contrast, COVID-19 plunged today’s West into an economic slump that will set back growth, in some cases by years, hastening its decline relative to China and much of the erstwhile global periphery. All told, the same exogenous shock, a very different outcome: COVID-19 seems to have found a vulnerability that did not exist in the West in 1918 – and does not exist in much of the Western world’s former periphery.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and countries went into lockdown, markets crashed. To keep their markets and economies afloat, Western governments began raining cash, borrowing trillions of dollars and adding an average fifth of gross domestic product to national debts. The result was dramatic. Instead of the feared New Great Depression, Western economies by and large experienced short recessions, followed by sharp rebounds. Markets, meanwhile, scaled unprecedented heights. The economic firepower of the Western world was shown to be seemingly limitless. When contrasted with the relatively modest expense incurred by governments in response to the 1918 flu pandemic, observers noted how much more Western countries could now do than before. Richer than ever, and with deep pools of capital, governments enjoyed the luxury of being able to spend heavily to protect their citizens and preserve their economies.

But if that appears to be a sign of strength, it might also reveal a weakness. Consider an analogy. I once had a conversation with an Irish colleague in which I marvelled at how, in the space of little more than a generation, Ireland had transformed from a poor country into a rich one. ‘Correction,’ he said, ‘we’re a high-income country, we’re not yet rich,’ going on to explain that it would take many more generations to actually accumulate the wealth in endowments, investment funds and the like that characterise rich countries. And the thing about wealth is that, when you have it, you have to keep spending to preserve it. Suppose, for example, that one year you earned $1 million. You could spend it, enjoying the high life, but running the risk alluded to by my colleague – that, if in the next year you lost your job or business, you’d be back down to zero. So instead, you could invest it, say, by building a house. That way you’d have capital you could live off if hard times returned. But you’d also have incurred other expenses – repair bills, utility charges, property taxes, decorating costs, and the need to buy and replace furnishings.

Empires also entail ongoing costs. The richer an empire becomes, the more it must spend to preserve that wealth. As the Roman Empire expanded into virgin lands, it built up the massive estates that enabled it to accumulate its endowment of capital, much of which survives to this day in roads, ruins and aqueducts. But those lands were virgin only to the Romans. Other people already lived there, and as they were beaten back or enslaved by the Romans, resistance to the empire inevitably grew. Rebellions were thus a constant feature of frontier life. That created the need for a standing military and the tax revenues to sustain it.

For most of the history of its empire, Rome was able to concentrate military forces on comparatively disorganised and weak opponents and, coupled with diplomatic measures such as subsidies, thereby neutralise the threats. However, as the empire grew richer, not only did it make more enemies, but those enemies had the capacity to more effectively withstand Roman assaults because they’d been increasingly exposed to Roman military and administrative technologies, and had accumulated wealth from trading across the imperial frontier (the Vindolanda tablets revealed just how much of a frontier garrison’s food was sourced from across the frontier). The very wealth of the empire was what had produced this vulnerability.

Today’s immigration bolsters Western capital, plugging the labour shortages that are emerging

The modern West shows a similar arc. At the time of the 1918 pandemic, most of the world outside Europe and its then ‘white dominions’ (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the former colonies of the United States were either colonies of one of the European empires, notionally independent but in an economically subservient status (China, Latin America), or struggling to resist Western assimilation (Japan, the Ottoman Empire). Nationalism was embryonic in the Asian and African colonies, but it would be the 1930s, and especially during the Second World War, before it began to significantly challenge European dominance. In terms of its share of global output, the West was still rising, its peak to come only after the war when the US used a set of institutions (NATO, the World Bank and IMF, the United Nations) to effectively unify Western countries into a confederal empire – a model not unlike that used in the late Roman Empire, in fact. The flow of capital in the world economy came from the global periphery to the West. Firms in New York, London, Paris and other Western cities banked the surpluses. Meanwhile, the population of the Western world was young and growing, meaning that the vast majority of its people were either in or about to enter the workforce. In short, the West was still ascendant, and busily accumulating its wealth.

At the turn of the millennium, the West (developed OECD countries) accounted for four-fifths of global economic output. Since then, with the erstwhile periphery of the global economy rapidly rising as the net flow of capital shifted in its favour for the first time, that share has been declining, suggesting that the highwater mark reached 20 years ago was in fact the peak of the West. Some contemporary commentators, recalling that the wealth of the peak Roman Empire attracted the barbarian invasions, warn that we face a similar fate today if we don’t act urgently. Spotting the foe among immigrants from the global periphery, Right-wing politicians who want to close the borders find support from scholars such as Niall Ferguson, who, in accounting for Islamist terrorism in Western countries, has written that immigrants today resemble the invaders of Rome in that they ‘have coveted [Europe’s] wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith … Like the Roman Empire in the early 5th century,Europe has allowed its defences to crumble.’ This, he says, ‘is exactly how civilisations fall’. It sounds reasonable but it’s not true.

Invasion was the proximate cause of one civilisation’s fall, not the underlying cause. To begin with, the argument that modern immigration amounts to an exogenous shock is feeble at best. The invasions that toppled Rome were large-scale military assaults organised by external actors. Today, aside from a very small share of illegal immigration, the influx is fragmented and managed almost entirely by the importing state. If you doubt how extensive that state’s control is, spend a day with an undocumented immigrant. More importantly, the invasions of antiquity seized capital, especially when the invaders obtained land and any loot they could find. Today’s immigration actually bolsters Western capital, plugging the labour shortages that are emerging amid ageing populations.

The more significant analogy is to the vulnerability to exogenous shock that comes from having accumulated so much wealth. The location of that vulnerability today is entirely different, though. Over the previous generation, as economic growth has slowed in Western countries, wealth has started growing faster than income. And whereas wealth once depended on income, now for much of the population income depends on wealth. This is especially true for the share of the population that is retired, which in Western societies averages around a fifth. Since a drop in wealth entails a loss of income for wealth-holders, that gives the state a very strong incentive to preserve the value of that wealth. This incentive is further strengthened by the fact that the retired share of the population tends to be the most engaged in politics (illustrating Machiavelli’s rule that today’s losers constitute a more formidable political constituency than tomorrow’s winners).

What threatens that wealth, which is held largely in real estate and pension funds, is not a foreign invasion whose purpose is to seize those assets, as happened to Rome. For all the talk of fearmongering and xenophobia, we would have to be facing something like organised raids by undocumented immigrants hacking into share-registries and appropriating the assets of pension funds for Ferguson’s analogy to be remotely apt. Nor for that matter is the threat a disease outbreak that reduces the agricultural income of land, as was the case for Europe’s medieval nobility. The coronavirus pandemic ravaged Western people and societies but, as has been much discussed, the performance of stock markets has continued to be great for owners. Nevertheless, in the response of markets to the year’s events, there might be a clue to the vulnerability of the West, one that COVID-19helped to expose and possibly exacerbate.

Consider the difference between market crashes today and those of history. When in 1929 the stock market collapsed, the Great Depression followed. Then, after the massive government wartime spending that John Maynard Keynes himself said was the first major successful experiment with fiscal stimulus, the economy took off. But it wouldn’t be until the 1950s that the stock market returned to the levels it had reached in 1929.

In contrast, over the past 30 years or so, Western countries have used a different set of tools when addressing market crashes, be they in stocks, bonds or real estate. They have pumped monetary stimulus directly into asset markets, and have targeted fiscal stimulus less at protecting incomes than at preserving asset values by, for example, bailing out banks or providing tax breaks for property purchases. After all, governments had committed themselves to the neoliberal dogma of fiscal prudence and were, if anything, cutting spending. So, while the economy has chugged along sluggishly, asset markets have repeatedly bounced right back. Those two outcomes might not be unrelated to one another. By inflating asset values, monetary stimulus amid fiscal austerity raises fixed costs and steers investment away from productive activities, thereby inhibiting economic growth. In other words, whereas government stimulus programmes once kickstarted economic growth, today they tend to protect accumulated wealth. Western societies spend a lot of money just to stay rich.

COVID-19 did not topple the West. But it might have hobbled it in its competition with the global South

The massive fiscal and monetary response to the COVID-19 pandemic looks no different. When Western economies were forced into lockdown, their governments borrowed some $17 trillion in order to keep businesses and consumers afloat, and to shore up asset values. For now, the size of the tab doesn’t overly concern economists. Western countries have carried higher debt loads in the past and, with interest rates expected to remain ultra-low for years, the cost of servicing the debt remains very manageable. The problem, rather, is what the debt is used for.

Returning to the analogy of the million-dollar year and the house you built with it, the difference between fiscal stimulus then and fiscal stimulus now is arguably the difference between taking out a loan to add a sundeck or swimming pool to the house, and taking out a loan to repair flood damage. The first will augment the house’s value, the second merely preserves it. Last year’s massive stimulus was not designed for a new era of economic growth. It was heavily oriented towards just keeping businesses and the economy afloat. But the risk is that, by bailing out many firms that added little dynamism to the economy, Western countries will lock in a Japanification of the economy, a syndrome that first emerged after Japan’s 1989 crash, characterised by chronic anaemic economic growth. In the global periphery, debt-fuelled investment tends to increase output and productivity more than is the case in Western countries, where much borrowing is essentially geared to keeping us in the lifestyles to which we’ve grown accustomed. The odds are therefore good that the response to the pandemic will only reinforce the long-term trend, of future growth being increasingly skewed towards the periphery. COVID-19 did not topple the West. But it might have hobbled it in its competition with the rising economies of the global South, most of which were once colonies of, or subservient regimes to, Western countries.

The wealth of the Roman imperial economy lay in land. Owned by the 10th of society that comprised the nobility, its revenues were taxed to support the military, whose job it was to protect the asset from outsiders. The wealth of today’s Western economy lies in financial markets, and is owned mostly by the top 10th of society that belong to the global 1 per cent. A wider group than one might suppose, since it includes almost any homeowner with a defined benefit pension, this is effectively the modern nobility. Although it faces no threat from invasion, the cost to society of preserving it in its current state might be getting as onerous as that of the late Roman Empire.

Illness and diseaseNations and empiresGlobal history

13 July 2021

Economics as a moral tale - John Rapley, 2019 (Aeon)

 Interessante, e muito provocador, mas eu sempre me pergunto se esses sociólogos que fazem uma leitura organizada do processo histórico, escolhendo cuidadosamente conceitos e personagens para ilustrar o seu relato, realmente acreditam que eles detêm a chave explicativa de uma complexa dinâmica social e societal que me parece escapar de qualquer tentativa humana - individual ou nacional - no sentido de controlar, moldar ou dirigir o que é, finalmente, o carro da História se movendo lentamente (algumas vezes para a frente, outras para trás, ou para os lados, ou até o abismo), sem dar a minima para esses sociólogos, economistas ou historiadores, que pretendem, ou têm a pretensão de, entender, explicar e tentar guiar esse mesmo processo histórico, caótico e não planejado como ele sempre é.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasilia, 19/07/2021

Economics as a moral tale

John Rapley

Aeon, 9/01/2019

The development sector set out to summon the magic of capitalism from the ashes of communism. How is it going?

John Rapleyis a political economist at the University of Cambridge, as well as a senior fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study. His latest book is Twilight of the Money Gods: Economics as a Religion and How it all Went Wrong (2017). He lives in London and Johannesburg.

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Think of human development as a long journey. At the beginning, we live at the mercy of nature. Dependent on its bounty, we pray for rains and freedom from natural disasters and plagues. At the end of the journey, nature lives at our mercy. We use science and technology to release new wealth and remake the planet. Today, as humans implant themselves with microchips, install artificial organs and plan Mars colonies, we even aim for a ‘singularity’ that will lift us out of nature once and for all.

Economists began to compose the narrative of this odyssey, from subjection to dominion, in the 1700s. Once it became apparent that Europe had broken with millennia of stasis to begin a long period of rising growth – the same through which we are still living – political economists abandoned philosophical reflection to draft roadmaps to development.

Two broad types emerged. One approach described the walk, the other the walker. The first presumed that the context in which we made the journey – the natural environment, the institutions, the culture, the legal and political systems – determined the direction of the path. In this model, the government bore responsibility to build the path so that it could accommodate as many people as possible. Progressive taxation was simply an investment in social prosperity, key to maintaining an ascendant society and a reasonable return payment from those who had most benefitted.

The second approach took a more individualist perspective. It presumed that the walker determined his or her own success in the journey. It concentrated on the moral, intellectual and physical attributes it believed an individual needed to advance. In this model, the task of the government was to sweep aside obstacles impeding the gifted few from embarking on their personal journeys – restraints that ranged from restrictions on labour mobility to usury laws. Thus liberated, gifted individuals would beat the path to prosperity. Progressive taxation on those who had completed the journey would only reduce incentives to make it, ultimately hampering the economic growth of society. The secret to success lay in a minimalist state. Presuming that nature selected some to lead and others to follow, this roadmap was essentially aristocratic – although, given aristocracy’s association with feudalism, sociologists later coined the term ‘meritocracy’ to describe this principle of radical individualism.

Meritocracy loomed large over Victorian capitalism. However, in the course of the 19th century, the free market largely failed to deliver the developmental goods, proving itself to be more adept at generating than distributing wealth. And so, in the early decades of the 20th century, stirred by both political and intellectual developments – the growing appeal of communism to a working class that had tasted comparatively few of the market’s fruits, and the consequent rise of economic schools that aimed to renew capitalism, such as Keynesianism and the German social-market – the state gradually took on a much more active role in both society and the economy. Immediately after the Second World War, with Europe in ruins, the communist threat seemed to reach its peak. To spearhead reconstruction, Western states created institutions such as the World Bank to assist governments in their work, and private charities arose to join this crusade. Oxfam (1942), CARE International (1945) and UNICEF (a joint private-United Nations charity created in 1946) all came into being to provide famine relief to war-torn Europe.

Thus a tremendously successful initiative that would come to be known as the development industry was born. By 1948, Western economies had emerged from crisis, beginning a decades-long period of rising growth and prosperity. Rather than pack up and go home, the development industry now turned its attention to a new frontier. With Europe’s overseas empires breaking up, dozens of new nation-states were coming into being, each of them eager to ‘catch up’ with its erstwhile colonial master. Amid this exciting atmosphere, the development industry could use its expertise to play a clear and prominent role, one captured in the subtitle to the then-Bible of development, Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth (1960) – ‘a non-communist manifesto’. By now, statist economics was enshrined in theory and sanctified by practice. Turkey had successfully pioneered a mixed economy in the 1920s, and Latin American governments had used protectionist policies to build their industrial sectors to substitute for the loss of imports during the Great Depression. Thus, the conventional model for rapidly moving countries through the stages of which Rostow spoke was for the state to marshal resources and then spur private activity, with the development industry playing a supportive role in this essentially liberal, optimistic crusade.

But when growth slowed in the 1970s, governments began to turn away from state-led approaches and to free up the market. Leaders such as Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, early proponents of this new libertarian approach, harkened back to the unbridled individualism of the Victorian age. Reagan told a 1981 development summit in Cancun that Third World countries ought to follow the model set by the US, whose economy, in this telling, had been built by self-sufficient, independent farmers. Reagan elided the roles of slavery and industrialisation behind post-Civil War tariff-walls, major chapters in US history impossible to square with the libertarian ideal. But with a bit of editing of the historical record, the ‘neoliberals’ took a decidedly dim view of the government. They tended to think that those who can, do, while those who can’t, administer, looking for ways to frustrate society’s makers.

The ‘less government, more growth’ approach became orthodoxy, but it brought back – with a vengeance – the challenges of distribution. By the end of the 20th century, social indicators in developing countries were going backwards, just as the tide was turning against conservative politics in the West. Unlike what happened after the Second World War, though, the pendulum this time did not swing back toward the more social roadmap to development. Instead, the development industry asserted its autonomy from government, and assumed a new role. Rather than have the state build the bridge between accumulation and distribution, we now learned that philanthrocapitalism, a radically new approach to development, would offer a whole new way of doing things.

As the state withdrew behind the curtains, the development industry took centre stage

Reagan and Thatcher and other exponents of free-market economics had been social conservatives. By the 1990s, a new generation had come along, represented by leaders such as Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK, who mixed conservative economics with social liberalism. As much as possible, they preferred a progressive politics that channelled private initiative, and the logic of philanthrocapitalism was pleasingly straightforward. Since the rich were getting richer, they had more money to throw around. The lure of yet more lucre could now be used to steer them into sinking some of this new wealth into the poorest communities, something touted by Clinton late in his presidency when he went on a four-day ‘new markets’ tour of deprived American neighbourhoods. Urging the super-rich to do some good with a portion of their rapidly growing prosperity, Clinton told them that a better world would make them richer yet. ‘Every time we hire a young person off the street in Watts and give him or her a better future,’ he said, ‘we are helping people who live in the ritziest suburb in America to continue to enjoy a rising stock market.’

In fact, in the two decades after Clinton took office, the number of charitable foundations doubled. A new problem arose, though. Due to the worsening inequality produced by free-market policies, this growing number of foundations and NGOs found themselves relying on a diminishing pool of wealthy donors. Inevitably, that forced them to cultivate the plutocrats, and reflect their views. However, even this supposed vice could be turned into a virtue. If the free market had in fact sorted the best from the rest, and enabled them to use their ingenuity to enrich themselves, it followed that this same ingenuity could subsequently be applied to the solution of social problems. As the state withdrew behind the curtains, the development industry thus moved beyond its traditional supporting role in tackling social problems to take centre stage. If Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth had articulated the ideals of a liberal age, Matthew Bishop and Michael Green’s Philanthrocapitalism (2008) did it for a neoliberal one. As Rostow’s subtitle had done, theirs offered a pithy summation of the doctrine: ‘How the Rich Can Save the World’.

Meanwhile, the 1990s offered no shortage of laboratories in which to test this new doctrine of development. The biggest prize of all was Russia, the country that had just chucked the most extensive state ever to build a market economy. After Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to reform the communist state and economy finished with the Soviet Union’s collapse, Boris Yeltsin took the reins of the newly independent Russia. Deciding that the only way to revive the economy was to start from scratch, Yeltsin oversaw a programme of ‘shock therapy’. It aimed to release the phoenix of capitalism from the ashes of state communism. Western advisors flooded into Moscow, with the ‘Harvard Boys’, led by the wunderkindeconomist Jeffrey Sachs, playing a central role. Coupled to crash-privatisation was to be an efflorescence of civil society. Non-state actors would now assume the functions previously performed by a totalitarian state. Private foundations, such as Ford, MacArthur and Soros, pumped tens of millions of dollars into civil-society construction, helping to build political parties, independent media and NGOs. State actors, including the US government, supplemented the efforts.

Russia was merely the most ambitious instance of a trend then spreading globally. In one country after another, governments were withdrawing from the economy and liberalising the environment in which NGOs and private charities worked. Western governments helped to fund the activism. At about the same time that Yeltsin was opting for shock therapy, the Indian finance minister was preparing to dismantle much of Indian dirigisme, abandoning the mixed model that had defined the Indian state since its independence in 1947. India’s civil society, however, was far more vibrant and autonomous than Russia’s had ever been. It proved able to step some way into filling the new gap in social welfare. The Indian government had never before encouraged NGOs, having previously seen them as something of a threat to its authority. But it too adapted, and opted to give them more freedom to manoeuvre and operate.

In Beijing, the Communist leadership watched what was going on in Russia and India with real interest. Like the Russians, the Chinese took the advice of US-based economists, some of them Chinese. But they also looked elsewhere. A broad debate about China’s future direction took place within the leadership. Some called for China to do like Russia and plunge into a more Westernised future. Others insisted that the state needed to tighten its political control in order to provide the stability necessary to absorb the profound economic changes about to occur. The statists looked for insight less to the West than to China’s own neighbourhood – to South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. In these East Asian ‘tigers’, the market economy was developing under strong state guidance. In the end, the Chinese leadership opted to go with a hybrid: more political control and less democracy than in the tigers, but much less state than with either Maoism or Soviet central planning.

At the time, many assumed that the Chinese ‘developmental state’ approach was doomed to failure. Political science then took as axiomatic that an expanding class of independent businesspeople would demand the same liberties in the political sphere that they enjoyed in the market. It’s true that there was a debate about which came first, democracy or development. But it was in a sense a chicken-and-egg debate, for few scholars saw economic development and political democracy as separable in the long run. The echoes of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 were still sounding. Most analysts had seen Tiananmen as China’s instalment in the 1989 democracy movement. They were confident that, in one form or another, such protests would recur, and recur, and China would eventually democratise.

The story that philanthrocapitalists told was a great one: history marching forward, heroes and villains, and a Hollywood ending. History has a way of surprising us, however, and most of the script ended up on the cutting-room floor, the actors left to ad-lib parts they weren’t expecting to play. Russia’s shock therapy didn’t beget a flourishing capitalist democracy. Chinese autocracy didn’t collapse under the weight of its contradictions – in fact, scholars today wonder if China gives the lie to the long-cherished rule that economic dynamism demands a lean state. As for the rich people who were meant to save the world, almost to a man, they chucked the script in the bin: for every billionaire funding a progressive cause, there would be dozens who used their wealth to support conservative campaigns to further roll back the state’s social provisions.

Most importantly, the newly liberated development industry failed to resolve the tension at the heart of free markets. In short, they produced growth more effectively than development. While the ascent of the developing world has reduced global inequality over the past quarter-century, within countries, it has generally worsened, as a global plutocracy emerges to dominate the world’s economy and politics. A wave of popular anger against disconnected ‘elites’ has resulted, which authoritarian populists have skilfully exploited to launch crackdowns on the development industry. Whether it be the Orthodox chauvinism of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the Hindu nationalism of India’s Narendra Modi, or the Muslim fundamentalism of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, they are tapping into disillusionment with the old model to repress ‘globalist elites’. As they decry NGOs for their lack of patriotism, these governments are pushing them to fall into line behind government, or to leave the field altogether (as Hungary, for instance, has done with its notorious ‘Stop Soros’ law).

Although the liberal reflex has been to defend civil society, the populists are addressing a real discontent. Take, for example, Russia, the one-time poster-child for philanthrocapitalism. Putin’s repression of activists, journalists, NGOs and all critics apparently enjoys substantial support, in part because the NGOs of the 1990s had often been considered elitist. Many Russians saw them as closer to global civil society than to ordinary Russians, more loyal to their donors than to their supposed constituents, and too little preoccupied with the day-to-day struggle that was the lot of most Russians in that lost decade. In fact, the model of civil society emerging in today’s Russia has converged somewhat with India’s changing approach. There, the hiatus in the uneasy relationship between the government and civil society proved short-lived. Modi’s government has turned to tightly regulating NGOs, regarding them as political opponents, and subjecting organisations that dissent too loudly to harassment and repression.

And as disturbing as their conspiracy-theories of ‘globalist’ or ‘metropolitan’ elites can sound, the populists might be on to something. In 2011, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology conducted a network analysis of the global corporate elite. What they found was a small web, made up of a few hundred tightly networked and extraordinarily wealthy individuals, dominated by bankers, and commanding vast pools of capital. If this was Davos man, then meritocracy was arguably its governing ethos – its mission, to replace the narrow, limiting confines of the old nation-state. Through compulsion and cajoling, much of the development industry got drawn into an alliance with this new global elite.

The idea that the rich should be left to solve the world’s problems ignores the science behind success

It might be that the industry suffered more harm than good from this alliance. Human-rights NGOs, in particular, which won hard-fought gains advancing transnational laws and norms, are now being forced to defend the advances they made against the new authoritarians. But rather than just stick up unconditionally for the development industry, liberals could benefit from returning their focus, at least in part, to the old model of NGOs aligning themselves more with national than global goals. Because while the development industry can point to considerable progress, it can’t claim all that much of the credit.

Over the past 30 years, poverty and hunger across the planet have fallen dramatically. Exponents of the free-market model like to remind us that this happens to be the era in which neoliberal governments dismantled much of the social state. But such a correlation holds up only at the most aggregate level. Once you look at what was happening on the ground, the picture turns around. China is thriving under an autocratic state. Russia floundered under a minimalist one in the 1990s. India is doing relatively well at market reform – while pressing civil society to line up behind national rather than transnational goals. All told, the supposedly deadweight state doesn’t look so dispensable after all.

But then, we’ve known that for a long time. On the face of it, it seems puzzling that philanthrocapitalism ever got much of a hearing, because history had surely shown it would never work. If the rapid but unequal economic growth of the Victorian age failed to produce commensurate social development, what made anyone think that the rapid but unequal growth of the contemporary period would do any different? Moreover, the idea that the rich should be left to use their wealth to solve the world’s problems because they have proved their merit in the market ignores the science behind success. Does anyone really believe that, if Steve Jobs had been born into a Bengali peasant family, he would have still created Apple? In fact, economists who’ve actually worked out scientifically what contribution our own initiative plays in our success have found it to occupy an infinitesimally small share: the vast majority of what makes us rich or not comes down to pure dumb luck, and in particular, being born in the right place and at the right time.

At heart, philanthrocapitalism offered not a new science of development, but an old-fashioned moral tale – one in which a hero, who would reveal himself by some magnificent achievement, would come along to save us from some peril. There is no shame in weaving moral tales. Economics has always given us moral narratives by which to live our lives – in fact, that’s arguably its primary reason for being. But if it is to enter our canon, a story needs an audience that finds it rings sufficiently true to then retell it. Philanthrocapitalism failed that test. It will probably end up in history’s remainder bin as a result, while storytellers devote themselves to crafting more compelling narratives.

EconomicsPolitical philosophyEconomic history

9 January 2019

CFP: "Pandemic and Narration: COVID-19 Narratives in Latin America" - Vernon Press

CFP: "Pandemic and Narration: COVID-19 Narratives in Latin America"

by Ellisa Anslow

Your network editor has reposted this from H-Announce. The byline reflects the original authorship.

Type: Call for Papers

Date: July 16, 2021 to November 5, 2021

Subject Fields: Latin American and Caribbean History / Studies, Literature, Theatre & Performance History / Studies, Film and Film History, Social Sciences

Vernon Press is seeking contributions for a forthcoming edited volume on narration and COVID-19 in Latin America.

From the first contagion to the peak of the death toll's curve and the timid returns to 'normality' after the lockdowns declared globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has been subjectively and collectively narrated across Latin American; in the news, government reports and statistics, presidential speeches, literature, theatre, cinema, photography, social media etc. Fictional and non-fictional stories, official discourses, as well as personal and political accounts, have documented and represented the health crisis, laying bare how – in Latin American countries – the spread of the virus intersects with corruption, gender violence, inequality and exclusion, and a disconcerting rise of authoritarianism.

Departing from the fact that, in the time of COVID-19, life not only continues to be experienced but also continues to be told, this book will put together pandemic and narration in Latin America. It aims to present an interdisciplinary dialogue that contributes to understanding the local, national, and regional impacts of the health crisis on the region. We welcome chapters paying critical and empathic attention to the narratives being crafted and circulated in Latin America's pandemic times. As our purpose is to engage with a broad range of scholarly disciplines, we are interested in contributions addressing the intersections of narration and COVID-19 from diverse perspectives and methodologies. Chapters can be written in Spanish or English.

Possible contributions may explore (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Latin American literature in the time of COVID-19, from real-time literary responses on social media to long-term literary projects engaging with the pandemic and its consequences.
• Fictional and non-fictional testimonies of the pandemic in Latin America.
• Narratives of gender violence in Latin America's pandemic times, from governments responses to increases in domestic abuse to NGOs communication campaigns and actions for supporting victims of gender-based violence in lockdown.
• Official discourses about the spread of the virus in Latin America, including government reports and statistics, presidential speeches, officials' declarations and other forms of official communication about the crisis.
• Portrayals of the COVID-19 in Latin American media, film and TV.
• Visual narratives of the pandemic in Latin America, from photographic accounts of the crisis on mass media to independent projects to document health emergency visually.
• Latin American theatre and performance in lockdown.
• Representations of the virus, its consequences, and its victims in Latin American journalism.

Please submit an abstract (max 300 words) to the volume editors: Luis A. Medina Cordova (luis.medina@manchester.ac.uk) and Andrea Espinoza (andrea.espinoza@kcl.ac.uk). Inquiries also welcome.

Deadline for proposals: 5th of November 2021.

Completed chapters should be between 5000 and 7000 words and will be due in early 2022 (date TBA).

Contact Info: 

Luis A. Medina Cordova (luis.medina@manchester.ac.uk) and Andrea Espinoza (andrea.espinoza@kcl.ac.uk)

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Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer (lançamento em setembro de 2021)

 An epic, sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the United States—from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day—written by one of the world’s leading historians of Cuba.

  

In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, where a momentous revolution had taken power three years earlier. For more than half a century, the stand-off continued—through the tenure of ten American presidents and the fifty-year rule of Fidel Castro. His death in 2016, and the retirement of his brother and successor Raúl Castro in 2021, have spurred questions about the country’s future. Meanwhile, politics in Washington—Barack Obama’s opening to the island, Donald Trump’s reversal of that policy, and the election of Joe Biden—have made the relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more.

Now, award-winning historian Ada Ferrer delivers an ambitious and moving chronicle written for a moment that demands a new reckoning with both the island’s past and its relationship with the United States. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade.

Along the way, Ferrer explores the sometimes surprising, often troubled intimacy between the two countries, documenting not only the influence of the United States on Cuba but also the many ways the island has been a recurring presence in US affairs. This, then, is a story that will give American readers unexpected insights into the history of their own nation and, in so doing, help them imagine a new relationship with Cuba.

Filled with rousing stories and characters, and drawing on more than thirty years of research in Cuba, Spain, and the United States—as well as the author’s own extensive travel to the island over the same period—this is a stunning and monumental account like no other.