G.M. Suspends Production Indefinitely and Cuts Paychecks: Live Updates [feedly]

G.M. Suspends Production Indefinitely and Cuts Paychecks: Live Updates
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/business/stock-market-rises-coronavirus.html

General Motors said on Thursday it would suspend production at its North American factories indefinitely, lay off 6,500 salaried employees and cut executive pay, signaling that the automaker believes that coronavirus will take a serious toll on its business.

"We are actively monitoring the situation and the possible impact of the crisis on consumer demand," a G.M. spokesman, David Barnas, said. "When we can safely resume production, we will."

G.M. and other automakers shut down their North American plants in the last few days in an effort to prevent the spread of the virus. Most had hoped to restart production next week, but have now scaled back those plans.

Ford Motor aims to restart production at several plants across the United States on April 14, and a plant in Mexico on April 6. Fiat Chrysler said its plants would stay closed until April 14, "dependent upon the various state stay-in-place orders and the readiness of each facility to return to production." Toyota Motor said its North American plants would remain closed until at least April 17.



The United Automobile Workers union has been pushing G.M., Ford and Fiat Chrysler to keep their plants closed.

I
A General Motors assembly plant in Lansing, Mich. The automaker announced emergency measures on Thursday.Credit...Brittany Greeson/The New York Times

"The only guideline in a boardroom should be management asking themselves, 'Would I send my family — my son or my daughter — into the plant and be 100 percent certain they are safe,'" Rory Gamble, the union's president, said in a statement.

To cut costs, G.M. said it was suspending development work on some new models. Senior executives will take a pay cut of 5 percent or 10 percent, and defer 20 percent of their salaries to be paid at a later date. The 6,500 salaried put on furlough will receive 75 percent of their normal pay.

Wall Street shakes off record unemployment claims.

Boeing is up nearly 90 percent this week. American Airlines has jumped almost 50 percent. Carnival Corporation has soared nearly that much as well.

Wall Street has been in rally mode, as investors bid up shares of companies that were set to receive support from Washington's $2 trillion coronavirus aid bill.

With the package advancing through the Senate, the gains continued on Thursday. The S&P 500 climbed 6.2 percent, even after the government reported a staggering jump in unemployment claims by workers.

As it has been all week, investors' focus was on companies likely to get help from the spending plan that passed the Senate on Wednesday night. The House of Representatives and President Trump are expected to approve it.

Boeing rose nearly 14 percent on Thursday because the package specifically sets aside $17 billion for "businesses critical to maintaining national security" — language that was seen as intended at least partly for the aircraft manufacturer and key Pentagon contractor.

Other companies that were hit hard in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak continued to soar. American and Delta Air Lines rose nearly 2 percent. Carnival was up about 14 percent.

The gains on Thursday also spread to Europe, with major benchmarks there reversing their losses to end the day sharply higher. The FTSE 100 in Britain climbed more than 2 percent.



The three-day rally has lifted the S&P 500 by more than 17 percent, its best such run since 1933, according to data from Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for S&P Dow Jones Indices. Most of those gains came on Tuesday, when stocks rose 9.4 percent, amid growing hope that the large stimulus package would offer support to an economy crippled by the outbreak and efforts to curtail the spread of the virus.



But the economic crisis is perhaps the most daunting since World War II. On Thursday, a government report showed a record rise in weekly applications for unemployment benefits, which jumped to nearly 3.3 million from 282,000 in a week.

Until now, the record occurred in the fall of 1982, when 695,000 Americans applied for benefits in one week. At that point, the United States was more than a year into a recession, and the unemployment rate had passed 10 percent.

The numbers, released by the Labor Department on Thursday, are some of the first hard data on the economic toll of the coronavirus pandemic, which has shut down whole sectors of American life.


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How Much Each State Will Receive From the Coronavirus Relief Fund in the CARES Act [feedly]

How Much Each State Will Receive From the Coronavirus Relief Fund in the CARES Act
https://www.cbpp.org/research/how-much-each-state-will-receive-from-the-coronavirus-relief-fund-in-the-cares-act

The new bipartisan economic stimulus legislation — known as the CARES Act — contains significant new resources to help states address their massive, immediate budget problems due to COVID-19, though states will almost certainly need more aid in coming months.

The centerpiece of the state aid is the $150 billion Coronavirus Relief Fund, which state, tribal, and local governments can use this year to meet costs connected to the virus. Each state will receive at least $1.25 billion — though the District of Columbia will only receive about $500 million — while the most populous states (California and Texas) will receive over $10 billion each, we estimate. (See Table 1.) In most states, a portion of the funding will go to local governments serving populations over 500,000. Tribal governments will receive $8 billion.

The CARES Act also includes $30 billion for elementary and secondary schools and colleges and universities, $25 billion for mass transit systems, $5 billion for community development block grants (30 percent of which will go to state governments), $3.5 billion for child care, and $400 million to prepare for elections, among other funding directed to states.

States and tribes are incurring huge new costs as they seek to contain and treat the coronavirus and respond to the virus-induced spike in joblessness and related human needs. At the same time, they're projecting sharply lower tax revenues due to the widespread collapse of economic activity brought about by the virus' spread and needed containment activities. If they respond to this dire fiscal crisis by laying off state and tribal employees, scaling back government contracts for businesses, and cutting public services and other forms of spending, those actions will make the recession worse. (Tribes are uniquely vulnerable to the downturn since tribal businesses deeply affected by the virus and downturn, such as casinos, often generate vital government revenue for tribes to run programs such as public health and child care.) Given the economy's extremely rapid decline and the extraordinary damage being done to state, tribal, and local budgets, federal policymakers very likely will need to come back and provide more help to states and families affected by the crisis.

TABLE 1
Distribution of Coronavirus Relief Fund, by State
State	Total distribution (millions)
Alabama	$1,901
Alaska	$1,250
Arizona	$2,822
Arkansas	$1,250
California	$15,321
Colorado	$2,233
Connecticut	$1,382
Delaware	$1,250
District of Columbia	$495
Florida	$8,328
Georgia	$4,117
Hawaii	$1,250
Idaho	$1,250
Illinois	$4,914
Indiana	$2,610
Iowa	$1,250
Kansas	$1,250
Kentucky	$1,732
Louisiana	$1,803
Maine	$1,250
Maryland	$2,344
Massachusetts	$2,673
Michigan	$3,873
Minnesota	$2,187
Mississippi	$1,250
Missouri	$2,380
Montana	$1,250
Nebraska	$1,250
Nevada	$1,250
New Hampshire	$1,250
New Jersey	$3,444
New Mexico	$1,250
New York	$7,543
North Carolina	$4,067
North Dakota	$1,250
Ohio	$4,533
Oklahoma	$1,534
Oregon	$1,635
Pennsylvania	$4,964
Puerto Rico	$2,241
Rhode Island	$1,250
South Carolina	$1,996
South Dakota	$1,250
Tennessee	$2,648
Texas	$11,243
Utah	$1,250
Vermont	$1,250
Virginia	$3,310
Washington	$2,953
West Virginia	$1,250
Wisconsin	$2,258
Wyoming	$1,250
Territories*	$263
Tribal governments	$8,000
U.S. TOTAL	$150,000

*Guam, Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa

Source: CBPP estimates using population data from the U.S. Census Bureau

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Enlighten Radio:LIVE 5:30 -- The End of the Road show -- tonight

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Triple Crisis: Economic Crisis Was Foreshadowed Before the Coronavirus [feedly]

Economic Crisis Was Foreshadowed Before the Coronavirus
http://triplecrisis.com/economic-crisis-was-foreshadowed-before-the-coronavirus/

By Alejandro Nadal

Republished from La Jornada, March 11, 2020, with permission.

It is with great sadness that we announce that Alejandro Nadal, an economist, lawyer, professor at the  Centro de Estudios Económicos (CEE) of the Colegio de México, and a longtime contributor to Triple Crisis blog, passed away on March 17 after a short time with fast-moving cancer. As former D&S co-editor and former Triple Crisis administrator Timothy A. Wise put it, "A great loss for us all, far too young and otherwise healthy and vibrant. Like Frank Ackerman. Tough times, just when we need those clear, critical minds most."  This article was his last for the Mexico City daily newspaper La Jornada, where he was a columnist. It was submitted on March 10 and published on March 11, just six days before he died. Even though he wrote it almost two weeks ago and the news is moving so quickly, it still seems to capture powerfully the current moment and the economic context of the pandemic. The journal Sin Permiso, on whose editorial board Nadal served, has posted an obituary and tribute here, and has made available a pdf compiling some of his articles.  —Eds. 

Cycles and crises in capitalism can happen in an irregular way. This is part of the anomalous movement of an economy that is inherently unstable. The great crisis of 2008 was the result of such processes. And to bring an economy that has fallen into imbalance back to life, you need to inject it with liquidity in good quantities. For example, the monetary easing policy measures implemented by the Federal Reserve were felt before the crisis and their speculative effects began to spread throughout the economy from 2009–2010. Astronomical amounts went into the pension funds and treasury departments of large corporations, where they served to fuel global speculation. But what they did not do was promote investment and employment.

The recovery process has been widely publicized, but the reality is that if by recovery we mean a more or less prolonged period of growth, then that has manifested itself. But, on the other hand, if that growth has been very slow and job creation has been weak, then the recovery can be characterized as a long recession. Even before this major recession broke out, it was clear that quantitative easing schemes in monetary policy were not working to promote the real economy. All they had achieved was to promote share buybacks, carry trades, in which large corporations took speculation to all ends of the earth, in territories where lower yields prevailed.

Faced with this picture of fragility, with a lazy U.S. economy creating poor-quality jobs, a reluctant Europe and the Chinese and Indian economies falling into recession, the specter of a trade war with all its implications, very marked imbalances in the entire world economy and the specter of a global crisis, is becoming clearer.

And in the face of the widespread threat of a recession looming over the world economy, things are getting confused. And the first thing that needs to be clearly observed is the prospect of a crisis that is intensifying. The new coronavirus encourages people to stay home and avoid travel, cutting demand for air travel and hotel services significantly. Production cuts in China and elsewhere have disrupted value chains. This process, in turn, has triggered a steady stream of alarm warnings about how the now infamous virus will affect the rest of the economy.

For the U.S. economy, the longer the pandemic lasts and the more intense the efforts to counteract it—although for the moment the situation remains very uncertain because so many places are affected and so many people have been harmed—the severity of the situation has not been able to be accurately assessed.

For an economy that was already in a state of semi-stagnation, the situation has become very complicated. To begin with, with China everything depends on the speed with which the global epidemic can be brought under control, the prospects for curbing it and the process of massive restrictions and quarantines never before seen. That country is suffering its first economic contraction since 1971 and the consequences will be felt throughout the global economy. If these procedures do not work, recession will be inevitable.

Several analysts predict falls of 2% and even 3% in the world's GDP if the recession is declared and extended further. But let no one be fooled in this context. The tremors that have been predicted have been present for months and the remedies that were supposedly designed to ease the pain have intensified them. The contradictions of capitalism have been felt since the crisis of 2008 and the remedies do not signify that we have overcome these problems. In any case, those most vulnerable to the crisis of the pandemic remain the poorest and most exploited by the capitalist system. Under capitalism, this will continue to be the history and the fate of the exploited of the earth.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version).

Alejandro Nadal was a professor at the Centro de Estudios Económicos (CEE) of the Colegio de México

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Drivers Say Uber and Lyft Are Blocking Unemployment Pay [feedly]

Drivers Say Uber and Lyft Are Blocking Unemployment Pay
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/business/economy/coronavirus-uber-lyft-drivers-unemployment.html

text only:

In a typical week, Jerome Gage, a Lyft driver in Los Angeles, makes $900 to $1,000 before expenses during roughly 50 hours on the road. This week, with most of the state holed up and demand for rides evaporating, he expects to work even longer to make far less than half that amount.

Given the option, Mr. Gage said, he would stop wasting his time and risking his health and file for unemployment benefits. But unlike workers employed by restaurants, hotels and retail establishments, gig workers like Uber and Lyft drivers typically have not been able to collect unemployment benefits or take paid sick leave.

In a call with analysts last week, the Uber chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, alluded to the problem, suggesting that his hands were tied because Uber drivers are independent contractors. "This situation certainly demonstrates the downside of attaching basic protections to W-2 employment," he said.

And in a letter to President Trump on Monday, Mr. Khosrowshahi asked that any economic stimulus or coronavirus-related legislation provide "protections and benefits for independent workers," along with "the opportunity to legally provide them with a real safety net going forward." A Lyft spokeswoman said her company was also pushing to extend any forthcoming stimulus to drivers, and said, "The vast majority of drivers on the Lyft platform use it to earn supplemental income," rather than as a primary job.

But for many drivers, the problem is not a legal void. It is that the companies they work for have not complied with existing laws or agency rulings.

The highest-profile case is in California, which passed a law last year requiring companies to classify workers as employees if the companies control how they do the work, or if they hire workers to perform a job central to the business.

The bill's author has said she intended the law to apply to Uber and Lyft drivers, which would make them eligible for unemployment benefits and state-mandated sick leave. Legal experts have agreed with this interpretation. But Uber launched a legal challenge to the law late last year, and the two ride-hailing companies are investing tens of millions of dollars in a November ballot initiative that would effectively exempt them from it.

A LOOK AT THE LAWA guide to who qualifies for paid leave under the new coronavirus law.

In the meantime, the companies have chosen not to report drivers' income to the state, as is required of employers. While the companies' legal challenges play out, the state is failing to approve many unemployment claims from drivers, potentially leaving thousands in the lurch as their earning power collapses.

Loree Levy, a spokeswoman for the California Employment Development Department, which oversees unemployment benefits, said by email that applicants who were not eligible for benefits because the state lacked their wage information could follow up, and that the department would investigate, awarding benefits if it deems them misclassified. She said the department investigated many such cases even without a follow-up, but declined to say whether it was working to require Uber and Lyft to report drivers' wages.
Employers are obligated to contribute to a state unemployment insurance fund, but the companies' failure to do so does not disqualify workers from receiving benefits. The state can pursue unmet payroll-tax obligations later.

Uber and Lyft declined to comment on the situation in California, but both companies have announced that they would provide pay to drivers nationwide who were diagnosed with Covid-19 or were asked by a public health authority to isolate themselves.

The stalemate has set up a showdown with increasingly desperate drivers. On March 11, Shannon Liss-Riordan, a Boston-based plaintiff's lawyer who has won rulings against Uber and Lyft over the employment status of drivers, filed complaints seeking to force the companies to follow the state's new law immediately, giving drivers access to unemployment benefits and sick days.

"It is very unfortunate that such a crisis may be necessary to prompt these companies into actually complying with the law and extending employment protections to their drivers," Ms. Liss-Riordan said in an email.

Her complaints are pending in federal court.

While the cases play out, drivers around the state have stepped up efforts to demand that Uber and Lyft provide them with employment protections. A union-backed group called Mobile Workers Alliance, which Mr. Gage is involved with, began circulating a petition Friday demanding that the gig companies abide by the state's new law deeming them employees. The petition has collected more than 6,000 signatures.

Lisa Opper, a Lyft driver involved with a group called Rideshare Drivers United, which held demonstrations on Thursday in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, said she typically worked 40 to 50 hours per week and made $900 to $1,000 before expenses. She made $226 the week before last, after which she stopped driving out of concern for her health.

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"I won't risk it," Ms. Opper, who is 60 and diabetic, said on Friday. "The virus is airborne, and I had three or four people last week coughing." She said she had been driving with a blue surgical mask but didn't have access to the N95 mask that experts say is most effective at stopping the spread of the illness.

Ms. Opper said she planned to file for unemployment insurance and hoped to get benefits, at least on appeal. "I just believe Uber and Lyft are ignoring the law," she said.

California is not the only state where many Uber and Lyft drivers have not received the employment protections to which they appear to be entitled. In 2018, New York's unemployment insurance appeal board, its highest executive branch authority on such questions, ruled that three Uber drivers were eligible for unemployment benefits, along with all "similarly situated" drivers.

But New York State has yet to require Uber, Lyft and other gig economy companies to contribute to its unemployment insurance fund on workers' behalf — a sum that would likely be worth at least tens of millions of dollars — while it identifies which drivers are "similarly situated" to those in the appeal board's ruling.

The companies have so far declined to report drivers' wages to the state, forcing drivers to undertake a monthslong bureaucratic process to prove their employment status and secure unemployment benefits. An Uber official said the company had received a request from the state for driver wage information over the weekend and was "likely" to comply.

Still, an Uber spokesman said the company believed the appeal board's 2018 ruling "uniquely applies to the three claimants" because Uber has changed many of its policies affecting drivers in recent years.

But Nicole Salk, senior staff attorney at Legal Services NYC, who has represented drivers seeking unemployment benefits, said she was personally aware of dozens of drivers who had been deemed employees by the state in the past few years.

The problem, Ms. Salk said, is that many other drivers have abandoned the process when faced with bureaucratic hurdles. "There are at least three additional questionnaires," after the initial application, she said. "It takes months and months." Ms. Salk said she represented a driver who applied for benefits during the third week of December and had yet to complete the process.

Last year, the federal Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board issued findings contending that gig workers are contractors, not employees, but those findings are not binding on state agencies that oversee unemployment benefits.

A spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said the state had requested disaster unemployment assistance from the White House that could make benefits available to drivers and other gig workers. Congress, for its part, is working on a stimulus bill well in excess of $1 trillion that could make such benefits available nationally.

But even if the contractor benefits are enacted, they may not apply to drivers in states where they have been deemed employees, according to Zubin Soleimany, a lawyer for the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a driver advocacy group.

Mr. Soleimany's group is pushing for New York to expedite the application process for those seeking routine unemployment benefits so that drivers can receive them promptly, like other workers. "It's a completely unacceptable outcome now," he said.


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Summers: Trump is missing the big picture on the economy [feedly]

Trump is missing the big picture on the economy
http://larrysummers.com/2020/03/25/trump-is-missing-the-big-picture-on-the-economy/

Larry Summers

As an economist, I am normally enthusiastic when presidents or other political leaders emphasize the economic aspect of public policy issues. I am all for economic growth, cost benefit analyses, trade agreements, more flexible markets and prudent deregulation. Yet I am appalled by President Trump's invocation of economic arguments as a basis for overriding the judgments of public health experts about battling the coronavirus pandemic.

In fact, as a matter of pure economics — even leaving aside moral considerations that should be taken into account — the president's arguments are flatly wrong. When Trump tweets and says things like "we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself" or "you can destroy a country by closing it down" and raises the prospect of reversing measures taken to promote social distancing, he misunderstands the fundamental economic problem posed by the pandemic, as well as the most rational, economically sensible way to address it. In the end, economic growth and well-being would be harmed, not helped, by the course he is advocating.

It is an elementary confusion to believe that lost growth and lost jobs are primarily a consequence of social-distancing measures rather than the pandemic itself. There are currently more than 50,000 diagnosed cases in the United States; the number is doubling every few days. Perhaps some people would be traveling, shopping and eating out as usual if there were no prohibitions. But does anyone believe that ordinary life will continue if millions of Americans have the virus and our hospitals are overflowing? This is where we surely will be in a few weeks if we abandon social distancing.

I recovered over the past year from ruptured quadriceps tendon. At a certain point, sick of the braces that kept my knees rigid, I pressed my physicians to take them off. They responded by pointing out that taking them off prematurely would put at risk all the progress I had made. If I ruptured the tendons again, they said, I would have to start the whole process over — and from a worse starting point. Fortunately, I saw their point, managed my impatience and am doing well today.

The same logic applies to social-distancing policies. Prematurely abandoning or relaxing social distancing will be disastrous on both economic and health grounds. If restrictions are lifted prematurely, the result will be a follow-on pandemic surge. More people will die. What will the policy choice be then? If it is a return to restriction, starting from a much less favorable point and much more disease spread, then the cumulative economic loss will be greatly magnified. The costs we have already borne will have been totally in vain.

Indeed, as a matter of logic, overly temporary social distancing represents the worst of all policy alternatives. In the view of almost all experts, it would be a grave mistake to accept the full and rapid spread of coronavirus as inevitable. But if this is to be our strategy, there is no reason not to get on with it, rather than suffer the additional burden of temporary distancing.

Ending restrictions too soon and allowing a further disease spike carry a range of collateral risks and costs. When it is safe to take up old habits, will the public trust the advice of authorities who misled them? What extra uncertainty cost will be baked into all financial markets when it becomes clear that the federal government has offered false assurances on safety? Will other countries be willing to buy our goods when the United States has turned itself unnecessarily and against the advice of experts into an exporter of products?

The president has compared the challenge of pandemic to the challenge of war. But Americans do not fight wars for our freedom saying we can only keep going for another few weeks and then we will give up. Elevating temporary economic expedience over the long run health of the citizenry is a dangerous strategy. And we deserve better from our business community than demands to go back to selling when disease counts are still rising.

The president and the business leaders who urge him to abandon a public health orientation to pandemic policy are nonetheless correct to want to move through the current difficult period rapidly as possible. The right focus is not on false hopes. It is on realistic strategies that permit a targeted approach to reducing transmission. That means more testing, more contact tracing, and more and better facilities for those who need to be separated from others or treated.

There will come a time when we can gradually let up on current restrictions and help the economy in the process. It will be the moment when new case counts are no longer accelerating; when we have adequate measures in place to quickly catch and contain new outbreaks; and when we are confident that we are not endangering hard-won progress by impetuous actions.

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The Securitization of COVID-19: Three Political Dilemmas [feedly]

Dilemma indeed

The Securitization of COVID-19: Three Political Dilemmas
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/25/03/2020/securitization-covid-19-three-political-dilemmas

Nathan Alexander Sears wonders whether the explosion of state power in response to CORVID-19 will abate or become a feature of our lives.

The COVID-19 virus has now spread to 168 countries, with well-over 400,000 confirmed cases and nearly 20,000 deaths. Not surprisingly, policy responses to the global pandemic increasingly reflect the politics of security — or, rather, securitization. The process of securitization follows a familiar logic: an issue is framed as an existential threat to some referent object, which justifies extraordinary measures for protection. According to Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde,

Security is the move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue… as an existential threat, requiring emergency measures and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure.

The global response to COVID-19 contains all the critical elements of securitization: referent object(s), threat, audiences, securitizing acts and actors, and emergency measures. However, the politics of securitization is neither simple nor unproblematic. The analysis here points to three political dilemmas behind the securitization of COVID-19, which involve the referent object(s), securitizing acts, and emergency measures.

The Referent Object: Security for Whom?

Since the World Health Organization (WHO) characterized COVID-19 as a "pandemic" on March 11th, two opposing discourses have shaped the politics of securitization. On the one hand, the pandemic is framed as a common threat to the "citizens of the world", which requires international cooperation between governments and global coordination of policy responses. For instance, United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, has stated that "all of us face a common threat" and that "no one country can address it alone." Similarly, WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros, has said that COVID-19 represents an "an unprecedented threat, but it's also an unprecedented opportunity to come together as one against a common enemy — an enemy against humanity."

On the other hand, the pandemic is framed as a threat to "national security", whereby nation-states seek to protect their citizens and institutions. Notably, U.S. President, Donald J. Trump, has declared COVID-19 a "national emergency" and threat to "national security" by Executive Order, and employed the metaphor of the United Stated being "at war" and himself as a "war-time president". Importantly, national security generally perceives other countries as the sources of threat, which is reflected in the language that describes COVID-19 as the "Chinese Virus" (or "Wuhan Virus"), and the practice of unilaterally closing borders to other countries.

There is, of course, a practical explanation for this divergence in how policy-makers frame the security threat of COVID-19: the former are representatives of international institutions and so their message speaks to — and for — the "international community"; the latter are political leaders of particular countries and speak for national communities. Yet the inconsistencies between how policy-makers frame the pandemic illustrates a deeper political tension between two referent objects: "humanity" and "nation". The political struggle over the narrative of COVID-19 is, to a large extent, a question of identity: i.e., security for whom?

The basic protagonists in this story reflect a political tension in international politics driven by globalization. While the nation-state has proven highly resilient to a variety of challenges—e.g., world wars, nuclear weapons, economic interdependence, global recessions, transnational terrorism, and global communications technologies—the growing scope and speed of material changes in technology and the environment are driving a growing spectrum of global catastrophic risks. A global pandemic is but one example. The securitization of COVID-19 in terms of two distinct "referent objects" reflects the political tension between the nation-state in international politics and the changing material circumstances that affect the security of human beings all around the world.

(De-)Securitizing Moves: A Catastrophic Threat?

As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads around the world, news headlines—and social media feeds—track the numbers of confirmed cases and deaths from the virus. Images of the lockdown in China, or bodybags in Italy illustrate the human costs of political action and inaction. Conversely, the "low" mortality rates—especially for the "young and healthy"—fuel claims that the risks are "exaggerated", and encourage individuals to flout public health recommendations—and government orders—and flock to groceries stores and beaches. Historic comparisons are made to both less-than-catastrophic outbreaks (e.g., SARS), and truly catastrophic pandemics (e.g., H1N1 Influenza, or "Spanish Flu").

The politics of (de-)securitization is a process of contestation. For COVID-19 this entails "securitizing" moves that frame the pandemic as a catastrophic threat, and "de-securitizing" moves that frame it as a manageable situation amenable to public policy interventions. This process of (de-)securitization not only plays out in the news and social media, but also scientific debates between experts. For example, a report by the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team begins by stating that "The global impact of COVID-19 has been profound, and the public health threat it represents is the most serious seen in a respiratory virus since the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic." The authors predict repeat outbreaks to quickly rebound once mitigation measures are relaxed, and conclude that "suppression" will require a combination of measures (minimally, social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases, and household quarantine of their family members), which "will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more)".

Source: Neil M. Ferguson, et al. (2020, March 16th) "Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand. Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team.

In a critical response to the Imperial College report, Shen, Taleb and Bar-Yam argue that "their conclusions that there will be resurgent outbreaks are wrong… The outbreak can be stopped completely with no resurgence as in China." Public policy interventions like lockdowns can result in "exponentially decreasing numbers of cases", which makes it possible to "achieve pathogen extinction, after which relaxing restriction can be done without resurgence."

Laypersons may wonder how scientists could disagree so much on such an important matter. Since developing models to predict outbreaks from COVID-19 entails making certain assumptions and abstractions, the validity of the results drawn from them may be questioned and criticized by other scientists. Science, too, is a social process of contestation. In the case of COVID-19, the process of scientific debate is embedded within the political process of (de-)securitization. Therefore, scientific debates become political debates about (de-)securitization.

Emergency Measures: To Securitize, or Not to Securitize?

Security always has a cost. This is because "security" as something that we value faces tradeoffs against other values, such as "liberty" or "wealth". The tradeoff, say, between security and wealth is clear from how the pursuit of security from COVID-19 comes at the economic cost of probable recession. Securitization therefore implies a form of societal calculation about the acceptable gains and costs of security. For instance, many people may be willing to accept economic losses at the individual or household-level if it means reducing the loss of life from a pandemic.

Securitization also implies political costs from the acceptance of extraordinary measures. Indeed, the political risks of securitization—such as the increase in state power at the expense individual liberties—was the principal reason that Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde maintained a general normative preference for de-securitization. What political risks do societies face from the securitization of COVID-19?

For liberal-democratic societies, the political risks of securitization are the sacrifice of individual liberties. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in a quarantine, whereby the state enforces restrictions on the movement of peoples for the purposes of security. The quarantine implies the sacrifice of individual liberty—and perhaps life—for the security of society as a whole. Of course, society may accept this as a perfectly legitimate emergency measure to contain and suppress a pandemic.

Yet it is salient for our present times that Michel Foucault should describe the sociological phenomenon of the quarantine for his discussion of "panopticism" in Discipline and Punish.

First, a strict spatial partitioning… Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death.… This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor. At the beginning of the 'lock up', the role of each of the inhabitants present in the town is laid down, one by one; this document bears 'the name, age, sex of everyone, notwithstanding his condition': a copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter, another to the office of the town hall, another to enable the syndic to make his daily roll call. Everything that may be observed during the course of the visits—deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates. The magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they have appointed a physician in charge; no other practitioner may treat, no apothecary prepare medicine, no confessor visit a sick person without having received from him a written note 'to prevent anyone from concealing and dealing with those sick of the contagion, unknown to the magistrates'. The registration of the pathological must be constantly centralized. The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes through the representatives of power, the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on it.

The use of surveillance technology—such as cell-phone detection data and digital check-points—is one extraordinary measure that some states are employing with an incredible degree of sophistication and success—often combined with the threat of punishment—to contain and suppress COVID-19. Again, society may willingly accept such measures.

The political question is whether this expansion of state biopower—or the "explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations"—will be an "emergency measure" that withers away as the threat of the pandemic subsides, or if it will become an enduring feature of a new biopolitics for the purposes of "security". This tension between security and liberty is just one of the political dilemmas that surround the securitization of COVID-19.

 

 

Nathan Alexander Sears is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at The University of Toronto. He is also a Trudeau Fellow in Peace, Conflict and Justice at the Munk School of Global Affairs; and 2019-20 Cadieux-Léger Fellow at Global Affairs Canada.

Photo by Korhan Erdol from Pexels

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