:The Economist: Hard Look t Biden's China policy

I suspect the economist reflects the dominant Globalist view of China:  They are trashing Biden's policy as a loser. I submit this indicates a big split in the coalition of anti-Trump bourgois forces.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGkZQKvchBSvDZNRBpfwPMfjvbW

Optimists long hoped that welcoming China into the global economy would make it a "responsible stakeholder", and bring about political reform. As president, Donald Trump blasted that as weak. Now Joe Biden is converting Trumpian bombast into a doctrine that pits America against China, a struggle between rival political systems which, he says, can have only one winner. Between them, Mr Trump and Mr Biden have engineered the most dramatic break in American foreign policy in the five decades since Richard Nixon went to China.

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Mr Biden and his team base their doctrine on the belief that China is "less interested in coexistence and more interested in dominance". The task of American policy is to blunt Chinese ambitions. America will work with China in areas of common interest, like climate change, but counter its ambitions elsewhere. That means building up the strength at home and working abroad with allies that can supplement its economic, technological, diplomatic, military and moral heft.

Much about Mr Biden's new doctrine makes sense. The optimistic case for engagement has crumbled under the realities of Chinese power. Led by President Xi Jinping, China has garrisoned the South China Sea, imposed party rule on Hong Kong, threatened Taiwan, skirmished with India and has tried to subvert Western values in international bodies. Many countries are alarmed by China's "wolf warrior" diplomacy.

But the details of the Biden doctrine contain much to worry about—not least that it is unlikely to work. One problem is how Mr Biden defines the threat. Because politics in Washington is broken, he seems to feel that he needs the spirit of Pearl Harbour to help rekindle a sense of national purpose. That is a miscalculation.

It is true that Republicans jump on anything they can portray as soft on China (even though every time they say that the presidential election was stolen, they do the work of Chinese propagandists). However, Republicans are unlikely to start backing Mr Biden's domestic agenda just because it has the word "China" stamped on the cover.

Worse, the more Mr Biden uses strident rhetoric to galvanise Americans, the harder he makes his task of galvanising allies and big emerging powers like India and Indonesia. By framing the relationship as a zero-sum contest, he is presenting them with a Manichean struggle between democracy and autocracy, rather than the search for co-existence. Alas, in this he is overestimating America's influence and underestimating how much potential allies have to lose by turning their back on China.

By many economic measures China will become a dominant force, whatever America does. It will have the world's biggest economy and it is already the largest trading goods partner of almost twice as many countries as America. Germany, Europe's export powerhouse, aims to sustain commercial links with China even as political links buckle. In South-East Asia many countries look to America for their security and China for their prosperity. If forced to choose between the superpowers, some may pick China.

Rather than imposing a decision on other countries today, Mr Biden needs to win them around. And his best chance of that is for America to demonstrate that it can thrive at home and be the leader of a successful and open world economy.

Here, too, the details of Mr Biden's scheme are troubling. Rather than build on America's strengths as the champion of global rules, the administration is using the threat of China to further its domestic agenda. Its doctrine is full of industrial policy, government intervention, planning and controls. It is uncomfortably like the decoupling being pursued by China itself.

For a glimpse of what this could entail, look at the administration's report on four crucial supply chains—for semiconductors, batteries, rare earths and vital pharmaceutical ingredients—published last month. The report does not just make the national-security case for government intervention in these industries. It also embraces union representation, social justice and pretty much everything else. More such reports will come later. If this one is a guide, Mr Biden will propose to use subsidies and regulation to ensure that jobs and production remain within America's borders.

Inevitably, Mr Biden's plans have trade-offs. Central to his attack on China is its abuse of human rights, especially of the Uyghurs, subject to internment and forced labour in Xinjiang. Central to his policy on climate change is to shift to renewables. Yet the two are entangled, at least in the short term, because Xinjiang is the origin of 45% of the silicon used in generating solar power.

A more fundamental problem is the China doctrine's soft protectionism. This favours incumbents over competitors and is likely to weigh down the economy rather than supercharge it. The country's new Moon programme is popular largely as a way to show that America has an edge over China. Yet it is vibrant precisely to the degree that it allows the sort of competition in which private firms such as SpaceX and Blue Origin can shine.

A third problem is that Mr Biden's doctrine will make America's allies even more wary. If the purpose of cutting ties with China is to create good union jobs in America, allies will ask themselves what is in it for them.

Mr Biden's plan is a missed opportunity. If America wants to stop China from rebuilding the global order in its image, it should defend the sort of globalisation that always served it well. At the centre of such an approach would be trade and the multilateral system, embodying the faith that openness and the free flow of ideas will create an edge in innovation.

If America really wanted to counter China in Asia, it would join the pan-Asian trade deal it walked away from in 2016. That is highly unlikely now, but it could seek fresh agreements on the environment and digital trade. It should also put money and clout behind new ideas that reinforce the Western order, such as a vaccine programme for future pandemics, digital payment systems, cyber-security and an infrastructure scheme to compete with China's Belt and Road Initiative. Rather than copying China's techno-nationalism, a more confident America should affirm what made the West strong. ■

For more coverage of Joe Biden's presidency, visit our dedicated hub

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John Case
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Enlighten Radio
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Fwd: 🎉 Dean Baker just shared "The Drug Companies Are Killing People" for patrons only

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From: Patreon <bingo@patreon.com>
Date: Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 7:14 PM
Subject: 🎉 Dean Baker just shared "The Drug Companies Are Killing People" for patrons only
To: John Case <jcase4218@gmail.com>

Dean Baker The Drug Companies Are Killing People I get to say this about the drug companies, now that President Biden has said that Facebook is killing people because it was allowing people to use its system to spread lies about the vaccines. There is actually a better case against the drug companies. After all, they are using their government-granted patent monopolies, and their control over technical information about the production of vaccines, to limit the supply of vaccines available to the world. As a result, most of the population in the developing world is not yet vaccinated. And, unlike the followers of Donald Trump, people in developing countries are not vaccinated because they can't get vaccines. The TRIPS Waiver Charade The central item in the story about speeding vaccine distribution in the developing world is the proposal put forward at the WTO last October (yes, that would be nine months ago), by India and South Africa, to suspend patents and other intellectual property rules related to vaccines, tests, and treatments for the duration of the pandemic. Since that time, the rich countries have been engaged in a massive filibuster, continually delaying any WTO action on the measure, presumably with the hope that it will become largely irrelevant at some point. The Biden administration breathed new life into the proposal when it endorsed suspending patent rights, albeit just for vaccines. This is the easiest sell for people in the United States and other rich countries, since it is not just about humanitarian concerns for the developing world. If the pandemic is allowed to spread unchecked in the developing world it is likely only a matter of time before a vaccine resistant strain develops. This could mean a whole new round of disease, death, and shutdowns in the rich countries, until a new vaccine can be developed and widely distributed. After the Biden administration indicated its support for this limited waiver, many other rich countries signed on as well. Germany, under longtime chancellor Angela Merkel, has been largely left alone to carry water for the pharmaceutical industry in opposing the vaccine waiver. I had the chance to confront the industry arguments directly last week in a web panel sponsored by the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (link included when it becomes available). It's always educational to see these arguments up close and real people actually making them. The first line of defense is that the waiver of patent rights by itself does not lead to any increase in vaccine production. This is of course true. Vaccines have to be manufactured, eliminating patent rights is not the same thing as manufacturing vaccines. But once we get serious, the point is that many potential manufacturers of vaccines are being prevented from getting into the business by the threat of patent infringement suits. In some cases, this might mean reverse engineering the process, something that might be more feasible with the adenovirus vaccines produced by Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca, than with the mRNA vaccines. The manufacturing process for these vaccines is similar to ones already used by manufacturers in several countries in the developing world, as well as several in the rich countries that are not currently producing vaccines against the pandemic. Another possible outcome from eliminating patent rights is that the drug companies may opt to do more voluntary licensing agreements under the logic that it is better to get something than nothing. If manufacturers are using reverse engineering to produce vaccines, the patent holders get nothing. They would be much better off with a limited royalty on a licensing agreement, even if it is less than they could have expected if they had been able to maintain an unchecked patent monopoly. The other route that suspending patent monopolies may open is one where former employees of the pharmaceutical companies may choose to share their expertise with vaccine manufacturers around the world. In almost all cases these employees would be bound by non-disclosure agreements. This means that sharing their knowledge would subject them to substantial legal liability. But some of them may be willing to take this risk. From the standpoint of potential manufacturers, the patent waiver would mean that they would not face direct liability if they were to go this route, and the countries in which they are based would not face trade sanctions. Open-Sourcing Technology While suspending patent rights by itself could lead to a substantial increase in vaccine production, if we took the pandemic seriously, we would want to go much further. We would want to see the technology for producing vaccines fully open-sourced. This would mean posting the details of the manufacturing process on the web, so that engineers all over the world could benefit from them. Ideally, the engineers from the pharmaceutical companies would also be available to do webinars and even in-person visits to factories around the world, with the goal of assisting them in getting their facilities up-to-speed as quickly as possible. The industry person on my panel didn't seem to understand how governments could even arrange to have this technology open-sourced. He asked rhetorically whether governments can force a company to disclose information. As a legal matter, governments probably cannot force a company to disclose information that it chooses to keep secret. However, governments can offer to pay companies to share this information. This could mean, for example, that the U.S. government (or some set of rich country governments) offer Pfizer $1-$2 billion to fully open-source its manufacturing technology. Suppose Pfizer and the other manufacturers refuse reasonable offers. There is another recourse. The governments can make their offers directly to the company's engineers who have developed the technology. They can offer the engineers say $1-$2 million a month for making their knowledge available to the world. This sharing would almost certainly violate non-disclosure agreements these engineers have signed with their employers. The companies would almost certainly sue engineers for making public disclosures of protected information. Governments can offer to cover all legal expenses and any settlements or penalties that they faced as a result of the disclosure. The key point is that we want the information available as soon as possible. We can worry about the proper level of compensation later. This again gets back to whether we see the pandemic as a real emergency. Suppose that during World War II Lockheed, General Electric, or some other military contractor developed a new sonar system that made it easier to detect the presence of German submarines. What would we do if this company refused to share the technology with the U.S. government so that it was better able to defend its military and merchant vessels against German attacks? While that scenario would have been almost unimaginable – no U.S. corporation would have withheld valuable military technology from the government during the war – it is also almost inconceivable that the government would have just shrugged and said "oh well, I guess there is nothing we can do."  (That's especially hard to imagine since so much public money went into developing the technology.) The point is that the war was seen as a national emergency and the belief that we had to do everything possible to win the war as quickly as possible was widely shared. If we see the pandemic as a similar emergency it would be reasonable to treat it in the same way as World War II. Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is what the industry representative saw as the downside of making their technology widely available. The argument was that the mRNA technology was not actually developed to be used against Covid. Its value against the pandemic was just a fortunate coincidence. The technology was actually intended to be used for vaccines against cancer and other diseases. From the industry perspective, the downside is that if they made their technology more widely available, then other companies may be able to step in and use it to develop their own vaccines against cancer and other diseases. In other words, the big fear is that we will see more advances in health care if the technology is widely available, pretty much the exact opposite of the story about how this would impede further innovation. I gather most of us do not share the industry's concerns that open-sourcing technology could lead to a proliferation of new vaccines against deadly diseases, but it is worth taking a moment to think about the innovation process. The industry has long pushed the line that the way to promote more innovation is to make patent and related monopolies longer and stronger. The idea is that by increasing potential profits, we will see more investment in developing new vaccines, cures, and treatments. But these monopolies are only one way to provide incentives, and even now they are not the only mechanism we use. We also spend over $40 billion a year in the United States alone on supporting biomedical research, primarily through the National Institutes of Health. Most of this money goes to more basic research, but many drugs and vaccines have been developed largely on the government dime, most notably the Moderna vaccine, which was paid for entirely through Operation Warp Speed. If we put up more public money, then we need less private money. I have argued that we would be best off relying pretty much entirely on public money.[1]This would take away the perverse incentives created by patent monopoly pricing, like the pushing of opioids that was a major factor in the country's opioid crisis. It would also allow for the open-sourcing of research, which should be a condition of public funding. This could create the world the industry fears, as many companies could jump ahead and take advantage of developments in mRNA technology to develop vaccines against a variety of diseases. But even if we don't go the full public funding route, it is pretty much definitional that more public funding reduces the need for strong patent monopolies to provide incentives. If we put up more dollars for research, clinical testing, or other aspects of the development process, then we can provide the same incentive to the pharmaceutical industry with shorter and/or weaker monopoly protections. In the vaccine context, open-source means not only sharing existing technology, but creating the opportunity for improving it by allowing engineers all of the world to inspect production techniques. While the industry would like to pretend that it has perfected the production process and possibilities for improvement do not exist, this is hardly plausible based on what is publicly known. To take a few examples, Pfizer announcedback in February that it found that changing its production techniques could cut production time in half. It also discovered that its vaccine did not require super-cold storage. Rather, it could be kept in a normal freezer for up to two weeks. In fact, Pfizer did not even realize that its standard vial contained six doses of the vaccine rather than five. This meant that one sixth of its vaccines were being thrown into the toilet at a time when they were in very short supply. Given this history, it is hard to believe that Pfizer and the other pharmaceutical companies now have an optimal production system that will allow for no further improvements. As the saying goes, when did the drug companies stop making mistakes about their production technology? Has Anyone Heard of China? It is remarkable how discussions of vaccinating the world so often leave out the Chinese vaccines. They are clearly not as effective as the mRNA vaccines, but they are nonetheless hugely more effective in preventing death and serious illness than no vaccines.[2]And, in a context where our drug companies insist that they couldn't possible produce enough vaccines to cover the developing world this year, and possibly not even next year, we should be looking to the Chinese vaccines to fill the gap. China was able to distributemore than 560 million vaccines internally, in the month of June, in addition to the doses it supplied to other countries. Unless the country had a truly massive stockpile at the start of the month, this presumably reflects capacity in the range of 500 million vaccines a month. The Chinese vaccines account for close to 50 percent of the doses given around the world to date. It would be bizarre not to try to take advantage of China's capacity. There obviously are political issues in dealing with China, but the U.S. and other Western countries should try to put these aside, if we are going to be serious about vaccinating the world as quickly as possible. "Mistakes Were Made," Should not be Our National Motto If a vaccine resistant strain of the coronavirus develops, and we have to go through a whole new round of disease, deaths, and shutdowns, it will be an enormous disaster from any perspective. The worst part of the story is that it is a fully avoidable disaster. We could have had the whole world vaccinated by now, if the United States and other major powers had made it a priority. Unfortunately, we were too concerned about pharmaceutical industry profits and scoring points against China to go this route. Nonetheless, we may get lucky. Current infection rates worldwide are down sharply from the peaks hit in April, but they are rising again due to the Delta variant. It is essential to do everything possible to accelerate the distribution of vaccines. It is long past time that we start taking the pandemic seriously. [1] I discuss a mechanism for public funding of drug development in chapter of 5 of Rigged (it's free). [2]The NYT had a peculiar articlelast month celebrating Covid illnesses and death in Seychelles, where most of the population has been vaccinated with one of the Chinese vaccines. Seychelles largely avoided the pandemic until the point where it began large-scale vaccinations. If we take the whole period since the pandemic began, the percent of the population that has died from Covid in Seychelles is 0.08 percent, less than half the 0.19 percent in the United States. View on Patreon Get the Patreon app Patreon Inc. 600 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA 94103 This email was sent to jcase4218@gmail.com Manage email settings

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Enlighten Radio:Talkin Socialism: The Battle of Blair Mountain Anniversary.

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The Mine Wars, and their meaning.

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Enlighten Radio:Talkin Socialism: Red States Bury Slavery -- The West on Fire

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Comments on June Employment Report [feedly]

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The headline jobs number in the June employment report was above expectations, and employment for the previous two months was revised up.   However, the participation rate was unchanged and the unemployment rate increased slightly to 5.9%.

Leisure and hospitality gained 343 thousand jobs.  In March and April of 2020, leisure and hospitality lost 8.2 million jobs, and are now down 2.2 million jobs since February 2020.  So leisure and hospitality has now added back almost 73% of the jobs lost in March and April 2020.

Construction employment declined 7 thousand in June, and manufacturing added 15 thousand jobs.

NOTE: State and Local education added 230 thousand jobs, seasonally adjusted.  But this is a seasonal quirk - there were actually 413 thousand education jobs lost in June NSA, but that was fewer than normal for June, so seasonally adjusted this showed a gain.

Earlier: June Employment Report: 850 Thousand Jobs, 5.9% Unemployment Rate

In June, the year-over-year employment change was 7.919 million jobs. This turned positive in April due to the sharp jobs losses in April 2020.

Permanent Job Losers

Click on graph for larger image.

This graph shows permanent job losers as a percent of the pre-recession peak in employment through the report today. (ht Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg).

This data is only available back to 1994, so there is only data for three recessions.

In June, the number of permanent job losers decreased to 3.187 million from 3.234 million in May.

These jobs will likely be the hardest to recover.

Prime (25 to 54 Years Old) Participation

Since the overall participation rate has declined due to cyclical (recession) and demographic (aging population, younger people staying in school) reasons, here is the employment-population ratio for the key working age group: 25 to 54 years old.

The prime working age will be key as the economy recovers.

The 25 to 54 participation rate increased in June to 81.7% from 81.3% in May, and the 25 to 54 employment population ratio increased to 77.2% from 77.1% in May.

Part Time for Economic Reasons

From the BLS report:

"The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons decreased by 644,000 to 4.6 million in June. This decline reflected a drop in the number of persons whose hours were cut due to slack work or business conditions. The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons is up by 229,000 since February 2020. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs."

The number of persons working part time for economic reasons decreased in June to 4.627 million from 5.271 million in May.

These workers are included in the alternate measure of labor underutilization (U-6) that decreased to 9.8% from 10.2% in May. This is down from the record high in April 22.9% for this measure since 1994 and close to pre-recession lows.

Unemployed over 26 Weeks

This graph shows the number of workers unemployed for 27 weeks or more.

According to the BLS, there are 3.985 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks and still want a job, up from 3.752 million in May.

This does not include all the people that left the labor force. This will be a key measure to follow during the recovery.

Summary:

The headline monthly jobs number was above expectations, and the previous two months were revised up by 15,000 combined.  However, the headline unemployment rate increased slightly to 5.9%.

There was a sharp decline in part time workers (for economic reasons), but the number of permanent job losers - and the long term unemployed - remain high.

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Enlighten Radio:Tallkin Socialism: The India Walton Campaign

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