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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. Im Amy Goodman. Forty-eight states are at least partially reopening this week, even as more than a dozen states are seeing an uptick in cases, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns the U.S. death toll will pass 100,000 by the beginning of June. Last week, ousted U.S. vaccine chief Rick Bright testified that if the U.S. fails to improve its response to the virus, COVID-19 could resurge after summer and lead to the darkest winter in modern history. Coronavirus hot spots Italy and United Kingdom are both also slowly reopening businesses.

This comes as the World Health Organization will meet virtually today with all 194 member states, and the global coronavirus death count passes 315,000 with more than 4.7 million confirmed infections. This is Dr. Mike Ryan, head of the World Health Organizations Emergencies Programme, speaking at a recent briefing.

DR. MICHAEL RYAN: To put this on the table, this virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities. And this virus may never go away. HIV has not gone away, but weve come to terms with the virus.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, as global leaders prepare to discuss what to expect in the months and years to come, were going to look back today at the history of pandemics and how they end, with the renowned historian Frank Snowden. Hes a professor emeritus of the history of medicine at Yale University and author of the new book, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. Professor Snowden is joining us from Rome, Italy, where he traveled for research before the coronavirus outbreak and has remained under quarantine since. He has recently recovered from COVID-19 himself. He also lived through a cholera outbreak in Rome while conducting research there almost half a century ago.

In his book, Professor Snowden writes, quote, Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning. On the contrary, every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities. To study them is to understand that societys structure, its standard of living, and its political priorities.

Professor Frank Snowden, its wonderful to have you with us, albeit from Rome, where youre under lockdown. What an amazing history yourself, as you are an expert in pandemics. In Italy, you survived the cholera outbreak half a century ago, and now, though getting COVID-19, you have survived this coronavirus pandemic. Can you talk about those two experiences?

FRANK SNOWDEN: Oh, certainly. Thank you. Im delighted to be with you.

And the cholera outbreak was in 1973. Its one of the reasons that I was I took up an interest in the field, because the sorts of events that I was witnessing as a young man were quite extraordinary. They included such things as Naples was the epicenter. Rome was nonetheless affected, but Naples was the center. And cars with Naples license plates were being stoned in the center of Rome. And there are open-air markets in Rome, and the vendors there were having their stalls overturned, and they were being attacked by crowds as being guilty of spreading the disease.

At the same time, Italy, at this time, lets remember, was the seventh industrial power in the world, in the 1970s. And the minister of health of this power went on television. And what he did was to say that the microbe that causes the cholera is exquisitely sensitive to acid, so all you need to do is to take a lemon and squeeze just a bit of it on your raw muscles, and then youll be perfectly safe. And, of course, if you believe that, youre likely to believe just about anything. And so, it was this sort of event that caught my attention.

And later on, when I was studying something else entirely, there was a cholera outbreak in Italy, and I began thinking, in my studies, that actually this showed more conclusively what values were in Italy, in Italian society, what living standards were, and so on, than any other kind of work that I might do. And so I moved into studying the history of epidemic diseases, and Ive been doing that alongside an interest in modern Italian history, those two things ever since. So, thats the cholera story.

With the coronavirus story is that I finished a book, my book that you mentioned, kindly, in October. It was published then. And I had been quite concerned about the possibility of a major pandemic disease not just myself, but many people were and I wrote that in the book. And so, I was stunned, though. I didnt know when it was likely to happen; I thought one day in the future. And so I was stunned that in December the epidemic started.

And then, by the time I came to Italy in January, it really began to ramp up. And very soon, I was living in the epicenter of the coronavirus at that time. So, that was a very important experience for me. I was not able to do the research I came to do, and Ive devoted myself ever since to doing that. And I guess you might say that I had a little bit too much enthusiasm for my work and caught the disease myself fortunately, a mild case, and Im here to tell the tale, and so I was lucky in that regard. But I certainly have had a close look at this event, this series of events, in Italy, and Ive been reading intensively about it and talking to people about it around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: And our condolences on the death of your sister just a few weeks ago.

FRANK SNOWDEN: Oh, arent you kind? Yes, that was not a result of coronavirus, but, yes, and I wasnt able to go back. And thats, you know, another part of the times were living in. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, your family history is so fascinating, your father the first African American envoy to Italy in the 1950s. He goes on to write Blacks in Antiquity and Before Color Prejudice. And your connection, all of these years, to studying Italy, until now you are locked down there for months. Can you talk about the comparison of the lockdown there and what youre viewing, your country here, the United States? You joked about not really joked, but talked about lemon as a cure. Do you see comparisons to the president of the United States, President Trump, telling people to inject themselves with disinfectants?

FRANK SNOWDEN: Im glad you asked that question. And I would say that what Ive observed here, Ive heard a lot of discussion across in the States, about Italys terrible response to the coronavirus. And I find that surprising, because it seems to me quite the opposite.

First thing has to do with compliance. And there, I think a lot has to do with the messaging. That is to say that in this country, you have a single health authority, and it acted it acted quickly and responsibly, and it imposed social distancing. And as it did so, there wasnt a cacophony of noise from a president speaking differently from his advisers, differently from the governments of 50 states, from local school boards, local mayors, different members of Congress. No, there was one policy. It was announced. It was explained very clearly to the population that until we have a vaccine, that we have exactly one weapon to deal with this emergency, and thats social distancing. And therefore, if we Italians were told, if we Italians want to save our country, we have to do it together. Were all in the same boat. This is the only means available to save the country, to save our families, to protect our communities, to protect ourselves.

And as a result, theres been and Ive observed this even in the neighborhood where Im living, that the compliance has been extraordinary. There havent been protests against it as in the States. And I would say that its interesting that the local newspaper its called Il Messaggero, which means The Messenger had an article in which it said this is the first time in 3,000 years of Romes history that the population of Romans has ever been obedient. And I think thats because people were the government was very clear. Vans went through the neighborhoods. There were posters everywhere. The regulations were explained to everyone. They were very severe, more severe than in the States. But people were justifiably afraid. The government explained why this was a danger, and people were afraid, and they wanted to do something.

I myself heard the kinds of conversations that people had when they were waiting outside grocery stores, were wearing their masks, and they were conversing with each other and saying things like I wonder if this was like the way it was during World War II. Is this maybe the way it was during the Blitz in London, that everyone is in this together, its a terrible sacrifice, but this is what we have to do? This was the attitude that I observed.

And now that Im able to go outside again the last few days, Ive observed on the streets again that this compliance is continuing. People have been well educated in the dangers of the coronavirus. And quite frankly, no one wants it to surge up again. I would say thats the basis of it.

The opposite is happening and has happened in the United States, where we had, as I said, this cacophony of fragmented authorities all saying different things in an extraordinarily confusing way, and our great CDC, the world sort of model, the gold standard for emergency response, being underfunded and almost invisible throughout this crisis. So, its been staggering, a country that has extraordinary medical centers, has this extraordinary CDC, wonderful doctors, an extraordinary tradition of scientific research in universities, national labs like the NIH, and yet and yet, when this virus approaches, it has been unable to respond unwilling to respond, in a scientific, coherent way with a single message to the American public. And so the public is confused.

AMY GOODMAN: And you have the president also defunding the World Health Organization, an organization you have studied for years. You quote Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organization upon his return from China. Can you tell us what he said, Professor Snowden?

FRANK SNOWDEN: Yes. He said that the world China has had a model response, and the world will soon realize that it owes China a debt of gratitude for the long window of opportunity it provided by delaying the further onset of this virus, which gave the world a chance to prepare to meet it. Thats essentially what he said on return.

AMY GOODMAN: Did he also talk about people having to change their hearts and minds to deal with this global catastrophe?

FRANK SNOWDEN: Yes. That was the second thing he said, that he said we must be prepared. And people said, Well, how do we prepare? And he said, The first thing that happens is that we need to change our hearts and minds, because thats the premise for everything else that we need to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Frank Snowden, you have long studied epidemics, and I was wondering if, in the brief time we have together, though we do have the whole show if you can go back in time to the bubonic plague and very briefly talk about the Black Death, caused by a bacteria, then move on to smallpox, how it wiped out Indigenous people, from Haiti to the United States, and its connection to this caused by a virus its connection to colonization, to colonialism. Start with the Black Death.

FRANK SNOWDEN: Oh, absolutely. The Black Death reached Western Europe in 1347. It broke out first in the city of Messina in Sicily and spread through the whole continent. And it lasted until, in Western Europe the story to the east is rather different, but in Western Europe, the last case was once again in Messina in 1734. So, that makes, unless I have my math wrong, 400 years in which it ravaged Europe and killed extraordinary numbers of people.

Now, this is a disease thats spread by fleas, also by and theyre carried by rats. It also can be spread through the air in a pulmonary form. And its extraordinarily lethal. Its something like 50% of those who get the disease from being bitten by fleas perish. Nowadays we have antibiotics, but at the time of the Black Death, we didnt, of course, and so 50% of those afflicted died. And the pneumonic version of the disease is 100% lethal. Even today, its almost 100% lethal.

And so, this is an extraordinarily dangerous disease. Its symptoms are also extremely powerful, painful and dehumanizing, and patients die in agony. And this can it strikes very quickly, and so people can also be struck down in public. And so this becomes a terrifying public spectacle as people collapse in the streets. So, this

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Snowden, the people suffered from what? Buboes, these massive inflammations of the lymph nodes?

FRANK SNOWDEN: Yes. Thats as the disease spreads from the flea bite to the lymph node. Theres a massive inflammation, and you have a swelling, let us say, in your thigh or under your armpit or in your neck, thats maybe the size of an orange, a large navel orange, under your skin. And it was said to be so painful that people even jumped into the in London, into the Thames, into the Arno in Florence, to escape from the agony of this terrible pain they were suffering.

But there were other symptoms, as well: terrible fevers and also hallucinations, as people it has neurological effects. Thats part of the dehumanizing side of it. There are these skin discolorations. There are many symptoms, and its an entirely dreadful and horrible disease.

It still exists, by the way. There are people who think that its just a medieval disease. No, there are something like 3,000 people around the world who die of bubonic plague every year, and some a trickle in the United States, in the Southwest in particular, where there is a reservoir of it. So, its still there.

AMY GOODMAN: You knew a woman in Arizona who had bubonic plague?

FRANK SNOWDEN: Yes, I knew someone in Arizona who got the bubonic plague, because theyre a disease endemic disease of prairie dogs in the Southwest of the United States. And if pet dogs are taken out into areas where the prairie dogs live, they can have an exchange of fleas, and the fleas can be brought back to a hotel or motel. And thats what happened to my friend. There were contaminated fleas in the room where she slept, and therefore she became a she survived but was a victim of bubonic plague in the 21st century. So, we could be

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Snowden, you talk about the bubonic plague, the responses to it, being quarantined, the sanitary cordons, mass surveillance and other forms of state power. And I also want to follow that through with these pandemics, is you have you also are a scholar of fascism and the direction countries can go when such a crisis happens.

FRANK SNOWDEN: Yes. Well, one of the things, I think, if a 15th century Florentine were to come back in a time machine today to look at what we as a society are doing, he or she would find it a rather familiar landscape. That is to say, the things that youre saying were adopted and devised as self-protection by the Italian city-states that were at the center of the trade in the Mediterranean, and so were repeatedly scourged.

So, yes, there was this terrible disease, and they dealt with it by creating health magistrates we call them boards of health by creating the first forms of personal protective equipment, PPE, the masks, the long gowns, social distancing, hospital systems for dealing with this one single disease, the measure of quarantine quarantine even being an Italian word, quaranta, for 40 days, because people were locked down for 40 days before they were released. It had sanitary cordons. All of this was part of the defensive measures that we see today and that were also present during the Spanish influenza.

Public health was a legacy of the bubonic plague. So, while we look at these terrible events, we also need to remember that human beings are inventive and that there have been silver linings. The development of public health, the development of science and scientific medicine are also gifts of these terrible events. And indeed, I would say that the modern state is also part of it was molded in part by the need for a centralized authority as part of our life protective system. So, yes, the bubonic plague does that, and it affected every area of society.

Its not true to say that pandemics all do the same things. There are some things that have been repeated again and again. During the bubonic plague, the Black Death, the first years of it, there was this horrible surge of anti-Semitism across Europe, in France, in the Rhineland, in northern Italy, elsewhere. And this was, in a way, the first Holocaust, when Jews were persecuted and put to death, not just in spontaneous ways by crowds, but the bureaucratic apparatuses of political authorities were used to torture Jews into submission, to confessing crimes that of course they had never committed, and then they were judged and burned. The Holy Roman Empire did this, and local authorities and leaders of city-states. So this was a systematic purging and killing of Jews, who were thought to have or so the case against them was that they were trying to put an end to Christendom and were poisoning the wells of Christians. And so, you have Jews tortured, broken on the wheel, burned alive, run through by the sword, and so on.

So, this xenophobia is this blame, scapegoating, we see that today with the coronavirus. Its something that can happen, has repeatedly happened, with the idea that this is a Chinese disease. Its a foreign disease, were told, and therefore shutting borders against Chinamen. And we see that Chinese Americans, children being attacked in schools, Chinese Americans afraid to ride alone on the New York subway and arranging to travel in groups so they wont do that. This is part of a long-term legacy of these diseases. And we see it in Europe, as well. Chinatowns were deserted long before the coronavirus actually arrived. And the right-wing nationalist politicians of Europe have been using that, saying its been imported by immigrants. So, thats one of the false stories thats followed in the wake of this. So thats another really terrible recurring feature of these pandemic diseases.

They dont always lead to you were asking about does this always increase state power. Well, certainly, the Black Death in Eastern Europe, there were authoritarian countries, and they used these draconian, violent measures. Yes, it was part of their assertion of power. Indeed, this is one reason that these draconian measures appealed, because rulers, not knowing what to do, this gave the impression that they did: They knew what they were doing, and they were taking decisive measures. And so, it was thought that these sorts of measures would possibly be effective, and would certainly be a display of power and resolution. So, we do see that happening.

But lets take the Spanish influenza of 1918, when, again, its a good comparison to today, because it was the time its a respiratory disease. It was terribly much more contagious than this and deadly. Something like 100 million people are thought to have died around the world as a result of the Spanish influenza. And people practiced social distancing. Assemblies were banned. The wearing of masks was compulsory. Spitting in public, which was very popular at the time, was forbidden, and there were heavy fines in places like New York City for doing so. But it doesnt result measures were taken, but they were revoked at the end of the emergency, and one doesnt find this leading, as it may in some countries, to a long-term reassertion of draconian power by political authorities.

With COVID-19, I think the message is mixed. And remember, anything anyone says about it, we have to remember that this is very early in this pandemic, and so well have to wait and see what the final results will be. But we know already that Hungary and Poland have witnessed rulers who use COVID-19 as a cover for ulterior motives of becoming prime minister for life, with the capacity to rule by decree, to censor and shut down the press, to put their political enemies under arrest and so on. And those arent public health measures. So, I would say, yes, it has this potential, but its not necessarily something that well see around the globe, although there is that danger, and weve seen those two countries where it clearly is leading to exactly those results.

AMY GOODMAN: Frank Snowden, we have to break. Then were going to come back, and I want to ask you about smallpox, about Haiti, the island of Hispaniola, and about Native Americans. Frank Snowden, professor emeritus of history of medicine at Yale University, author of the new book, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. He is speaking to us from the lockdown in Rome, Italy. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Killing Me Softly with His Song, performed by Marcella Bella. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. Were spending the hour with professor Frank Snowden, professor emeritus of history of medicine at Yale University, author of the book Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. He has devoted his life to looking at epidemics and teaching thousands of students. He is now in Rome, Italy, where he has been for months, coincidentally went there for another project but got caught in the lockdown, got COVID-19, has recovered from that, and we are lucky enough to have him as our guest for the hour.

Professor Snowden, take us to Hispaniola in 1492, a different version of history that we learn about Hernn Corts and Pizarro, from the Incas in Peru to the Aztecs of Mexico, what happened in Haiti and in the United States when it came to smallpox.

FRANK SNOWDEN: Yes. Well, Columbus landed at Hispaniola, the first place. His idea the Arawaks were the Native population, and there were a couple of million inhabiting the island when he arrived. His idea was that he would be able to reduce them to slavery. He wrote about how friendly the Arawaks were and how welcoming to him, his ships and his men. But Im afraid that the hospitality wasnt reciprocal. And Columbuss view was this was a money-making expedition, and here it would be wonderful to have the Native population as mines in slaves, and mines to cultivate the fields.

The problem was that there was a differential mortality. This has come to be called the Columbian exchange. That is to say that Native populations in the New World didnt have the same history of exposure to various diseases, and therefore not the same herd immunity to them. The most dramatic example is smallpox. Measles was another. That is to say that Native Americans had never experienced those diseases. Columbus and his men, on the other hand, had, because it was rife in Europe. And so, unintentionally, for the most part, the Arawaks simply died off as they were exposed to these new diseases, smallpox and measles, and by 15, 20 years later, there were just a couple thousand left.

And it was at this time that in Hispaniola there was the beginning this is one of the reasons for the beginning of the African slave trade. The Native population of the United States died from these diseases, and so the Europeans turned instead to importing people from Africa, because they shared many of the same bacterial histories, and therefore immunities, and could survive being enslaved in the Caribbean and then in the New World, on North America and also in South America. So, we get the beginning of the slave trade in part as a result to this differential immunity.

This, then, on the wider scale of the New World, this was something that was devastated the Native population. When the Spaniards, the British, the French came, the Native population contracted their diseases and just was destroyed. This destroyed the Inca and Aztec empires. In fact, they were so devastated, that they lost their religion. They thought the White man had much more powerful gods than they did, and so this drove the missionary and conversion experience, as well, and cleared the land for European settlers across the whole of the continent. This was a tremendous impact of smallpox disease. Its called a virgin soil disease because they were so the population had never experienced it and had no herd immunity.

Theres an irony that we can see. Lets go back to Hispaniola, that is now the island divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. And lets talk about Haiti. It was Saint-Domingue at the time, by the 18th century certainly. And lets remember that the French this is now an island that had become, extraordinarily enough to think, the wealthiest colony in the world, the jewel of the French Empire. And that is because of its sugar plantations. And the sugar was exported to Europe and was the foundation of French wealth in this period. And slaves are continuing to be imported throughout the 18th century at breakneck speed to cultivate the fields of sugarcane.

During the French Revolution, French power was neutralized. The attitude of the French revolutionaries toward slavery was entirely different. And you got this upsurge of the slaves with the greatest slave revolt in history, led by the Haitian Spartacus, Toussaint Louverture. And the colony was functionally operating under Toussaint Louvertures control and was independent of France. Napoleon there was regime change, however, by 1799, and Napoleon comes to power. And by 1803, hes thinking that he wishes to put an end to this rebellion, to restore the Haitian rebels, to reenslave them and to restore the colony to being this economic warehouse for France. So he sends a tremendous armada, led by a general who was married to his sister Pauline. And it was something like 60,000 troops and sailors who were sent to the former Hispaniola, now Saint-Domingue, to crush the revolt.

Once again, we see a difference in immunity to disease that proved decisive. That is to say that yellow fever was something to which the African slaves had a differential immunity, whereas Europeans had no immunity. They had no history of experience with yellow fever. And so, what happens is that the French soldiers in Saint-Domingue begin to die at a rapid rate of a terrible epidemic of yellow fever that sweeps through the Caribbean and especially through Saint-Domingue. And what happens, by Toussaint Louverture was very aware of this and took advantage of it, luring the French troops, not fighting them in pitched battles but only small guerrilla campaigns, waiting for the summer months to come, and an upsurge of the disease, which happens. And pretty soon the French commander writes to Paris to say

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Snowden, Im only interrupting because we only have a minute. Of course, Haiti becomes the first country born of a slave rebellion, as you are so graphically describing with an alternative view of history, that many may not have understood, with the role of disease. But in this last minute we have, I wanted to ask you about how pandemics end and what you think will happen now.

FRANK SNOWDEN: I think theres not one answer to that. Pandemics are all different, and they end in different ways. Some die out because of sanitary measures that people take against them, so that were not vulnerable in the industrial world to cholera or typhoid fever, that are spread through the oral-fecal group, because we have sewers and clean, safe drinking water. And other diseases end, like smallpox, because of vaccination, the development of a scientific tool. So it really depends. Some diseases are not very good candidates for vaccines.

And I would say that COVID-19, Im sure that we will develop a vaccine, but I also fear that it may not be the it wont be the magic bullet that people believe, that it will put this behind us, because the sort of features you want are, for an ideal candidate, like smallpox, a vaccine that doesnt have an animal reservoir so it cant return to us. A vaccine is an ideal candidate if in nature it produces a robust immunity in the human body, so people, having once had it, are totally immune for life. That doesnt seem to be the case with COVID-19. So I expect it to become long-term with us. Were going to have to learn to live with this disease. Its probably going to become an endemic disease, and so were going to have to adjust to

AMY GOODMAN: Were going to have to leave it there. And I want to thank you so much, Professor Frank Snowden, professor emeritus of history of medicine at Yale University, author of the new book, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. Im Amy Goodman. Stay safe.

View post:
How Will COVID-19 Change the World? Historian Frank Snowden on Epidemics From the Black Death to Now - Democracy Now!

In Kosovo, the recently elected government was ousted during the pandemic thanks to political scheming by entrenched political elites.

In a surreal development, pot-banging protests took place to express support for the outgoing government and urge leaders to refrain from creating an artificial political crisis in the middle of a health crisis.

The government will serve in a caretaker role until the Constitutional Court rules on whether the country needs a fresh election or the formation of a new government is possible without elections.

Albania suffers from the fact that it does not have a real and representative opposition.

Following last years unprecedented decision by opposition lawmakers to resign en masse and renounce their parliamentary mandates, experts say there is no effective check on the excesses and abuses of the government.

North Macedonia, meanwhile, is battling the pandemic with a caretaker government and had to postpone snap parliamentary elections scheduled for April 12.

Across the region, the collusion between powerful businessmen and governing elites feeds unfair practices, harms economic competition and discourages investment, analysts say.

The COVID-19 crisis risks serving as an opportunity for companies to engage in anti-competitive practices while there is less scrutiny of government mismanagement and corruption in public procurement.

Not that the pandemic is to blame for stagnant reforms and backsliding on democratic standards. But experts say it has thrown those deficiencies into sharp relief.

Amid draconian measures, secretive decision-making on procurement and selective distribution of resources for groups hit by the virus, local efforts to promote transparency and accountability have morphed into a Sisyphean struggle.

Amid draconian measures, secretive decision-making on procurement and selective distribution of resources for groups hit by the virus, local efforts to promote transparency and accountability have morphed into a Sisyphean struggle.

In the meanwhile, even positive news like the EUs decision to start accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia went largely unnoticed.

More than the pandemic itself, the main factors overshadowing the talks are skepticism about the pace of much-needed domestic reforms and doubts about the viability of EU membership in the short-to-medium term.

As countries move towards reopening, analysts predict that the strange mix of economic shock, institutional fragility and frustration with dysfunctional politics will lead to renewed and strengthened calls for change.

The leaders of the region have benefitted in the recent past from migration as a valve to release pent-up frustration. Rather than asking for change at home, those dissatisfied with the economic and political realities mostly went quietly and tried their luck in Western countries.

As the West is itself hit by economic uncertainty, this option will be less available and attractive. Dissatisfaction will have to express itself differently.

Optimists say this period represents a new opportunity to channel the overwhelming desire for change. They say the region needs to forge ahead at last with real reforms that lead to fairer economies, stronger institutions and more prosperity.

But the window of opportunity after the pandemic will not be open for long. If time is squandered, disillusionment risks turning into the regions defining emotion for years to come.

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Democracy Digest: Frustration Looms Over Western Balkans | Reporting Democracy - Balkan Insight

What the app lacks also sets it apart. India has no national data privacy law, and its not clear who has access to data from the app and in what situations. There are no strong, transparent policy or design limitations on accessing or using the data at this point. The list of developers, largely made up of private-sector volunteers, is not entirely public.

Kumar stresses that the app was built to the standards of a draft data privacy bill that is currently in the countrys parliament, and says access to the data it collects is strictly controlled. But critics have expressed concern because it is not open source, despite an Indian government mandate that its apps make their code available to the public. Kumar says that this is a goal for Aarogya Setu and will happen down the line, but he could not confirm a timeline or expected date.

When Aarogya Setu was first announced, the Indian government did seek consent, and using the app initially sounded voluntary. Today, at least 1 million people have been given orders to use it, including central government workers and employees of private companies like the food delivery services Zomato and Swiggy. Its a well-practiced tactic in India, where voluntary mandatory technology has a history of being used as a gatekeeper to certain important rights.

While India is the only democracy to make its contact tracing app mandatory for millions of people, other democracies have struck deals with mobile phone companies to access location data from residents. In Europe, the data has largely been aggregated and anonymized. In Israel, law enforcement focused on the pandemic has used a phone tracking database normally reserved for counterterrorism purposes. The Israeli governments tactics have been the subject of a legal battle that made its way up to the countrys Supreme Court and legislature.

Many of these difficulties can be traced to a lack of transparency. Neither the privacy policy nor the terms of service for the app were publicly accessible at the time of publication, and the developers have not shared them despite requests. Since the app is not open source, its code and methods cant easily be reviewed by third parties, and there is no public sunset clause stating when the app will cease to be mandatory, although Kumar says data is deleted on a rolling basis after, at most, 60 days for sick individuals and 30 days for healthy people. And there is no clear road map for how far Indias national and state governments will go: one recent report said the government wants Aarogya Setu preinstalled on all new smartphones; another said the app may soon be required to travel.

In the early days of the apps development, Kumar said it would leverage the technology being jointly developed by Apple and Google for iPhone and Android. That system will be released in just a few days, but it now comes with rules that include requiring user consent and banning location trackingneither of which Aarogya Setu complies with. Kumar says Google engineers have been in close contact with Aarogya Setus developers, and his team will evaluate whether they can still implement the decentralized Silicon Valley system, which is intended to preserve privacy. Google and Apple have fast-tracked the app into both the Android and iOS app stores.

But there are still deep concerns that blurring the line between voluntary and mandatory, and between privacy-preserving and privacy-invading, will have long-term consequences.

There is no effort made by the state to earn citizen trust, says Anivar Aravind, executive director at the civic-technology organization Indic Project. Here are a set of private-sector corporate volunteers, with no accountability, that built an app for governments that is forced to personal devices of everyone.

View post:
India is forcing people to use its covid app, unlike any other democracy - MIT Technology Review

Maike Bohn, co-founder of the 3Million Campaign, explains how thousands were disenfranchised last year and their plan to take the Government to court over a dangerous precedent.

Yesterday all of us were meant to go to the polls for local elections. It was a day that brings back painful memories for EU citizens at home in the UK many of whom were denied a vote in the European Parliament elections last May.

French citizen Bernadette was one of the thousands affected: I rang the electoral services and spoke to a chap who almost interrupted me to say I didnt need my polling card and everything was fine. I insisted saying that I was an EU national but he assured me that I was on the register and would be able to vote. I went to the polling place with my passport and lo and behold the lovely people at the station found that my name was crossed through in the register and that I was denied my vote.

We were ready to cast our votes for a better future, for hope, she recalled only to be told, computer says no.

It was by all accounts an appalling day for UK democracy last May when people like Bernadette and Francisca were turned away from the polling stations. Francisca had moved from the Netherlands 19 years ago and she felt ignored, tied up in red tape, powerless and treated like a second-class citizen We were ready to cast our votes for a better future, for hope, she recalled only to be told, computer says no. Or worse, go back to your own country. Seriously? This is our country. This is our home.

EU citizens came out in droves last May to use their fundamental right to participate, to contribute, to vote for what they believe in to find themselves at the polling booths rejected, treated with disrespect and incompetence every step of the way.

Unnecessary bureaucratic requirements and a lack of information meant people who were entitled to vote and wanted to vote were unable to do so. Many of them felt frustrated, disappointed and angry, their stories made headlines across the globe.

Since 2014 the government knew that its poor system was stripping EU citizens of their rights and subsequently not only failed to deliver on its promise to put it right but also refused a public enquiry despite the Electoral Commissions special report last November confirming the sorry state of affairs, concluding that this was unacceptable in a modern democracy. In addition, the report also confirmed that significant numbers of British citizens abroad had been disenfranchised too.

The grassroots campaign group the3million is now taking the government to court over these alleged breaches of rights under EU law, the European Convention of Human Rights and UK domestic anti-discrimination law. The UK court has granted permission to take their test case forward to finally rule on this matter.

It is not just an issue of righting a historic wrong but about ensuring that it wont happen again.

The group are crowdfunding to seek the clearest of rulings that discrimination against EU citizens as a group is unlawful.

This case is still as relevant today as it was on the day EU citizens were denied their vote. It is not just an issue of righting a historic wrong but about ensuring that it wont happen again. It matters because the right to vote is fundamental to the functioning of democracy and the government has a duty to ensure that all those who have the right to vote are able to do so. If we allow the government to deny people their right to vote once, it may do so again in future.

The incompetence and unwillingness of the government and the Electoral Commission have denied EU citizens a vote and a voice in determining their future and we need to make sure this can never happen again. We are the UKs nurses, engineers, teachers, the policemen and women who keep this country safe, the people who run the restaurants and cafes we all love to eat in, who clean our streets and take care of our elderly. We are at the heart of this great nations communities.

That is why the3million is taking the UK government to court: this case will have a huge effect on EU citizens rights in a post-Brexit Britain. John Halford, partner at BindmansLLP is one of the lawyers working on the case and he says: The #DeniedMyVote test case asks the High Court to rule that last years disenfranchisement was unlawful and establish a precedent that discrimination against EU nationals as a group is as unlawful as it is unacceptable in a democracy.

This time it was EU citizens living in the UK, and British citizens living abroad, but if we dont all stand up for democracy, what next?

The #DeniedMyVote case is not only about fighting the injustice which occurred last year but it will set a precedent that will help us to draw a line against future discrimination of EU citizens from a UK Government. It will send an important signal to those administering our democracy that there are consequences if they dont care enough to act properly.

At this time of unprecedented crisis that leaves us all stripped back to our own humanity, our need for food, health, shelter and the kindness of strangers, we have time to think about what we want our home, the UK, to look like, be like in ten or twenty years time. Welcoming, successful, forward-facing or a backwater of bitterness and intolerance? Our journey together into the future: It starts and ends with democracy.

Maike Bohn is co-founder of the3million which is fundraising to permanently establish a legal team to help protect EU citizens rights and fight discrimination in 2020 and beyond.

Read more from the original source:
A Year On from the Scandal of the European Elections - Democracy is Still in Danger - Byline Times

Review of Post-Democracy After the Crises, by Colin Crouch (Polity, 2020).

These are no easy times for liberal theorists. The multiple crises we are living through all seem to carry negative implications for the liberal orders credibility and its future. Rampant inequality, widespread political dissatisfaction, the rise of anti-liberal populist movements and, indeed, the devastating consequences that the pandemic will have for a globalized economy all seem to pose serious challenges to liberalism.

Even before the coronavirus outbreak, this was already a theme widespread in political science literature, from Edward Luces The Retreat of Western Liberalism, to William A. Galstons Anti-Pluralism, and Patrick Deneens Why Liberalism Failed a trend amplified by the growth of all sorts of populist movements. Furthermore, on the economic front, neoliberalism as really existing liberalism is blamed for many of the ills societies are experiencing, at a time of huge economic inequality and failing public services. The dominant atmosphere in liberal circles is thus, understandably, one of dejection and confusion. And all that liberal theorists seem to have to offer is an appeal to the lofty ideals of liberal democracy and trite pleas for a more rational, well-informed, and balanced politics.

This disorientation is reflected not only among unrepentant Blairites such as Yascha Mounk, but also among more progressive liberal political scientists that have been critical of the neoliberal involution of liberal democracy. The foremost example is Colin Crouch, emeritus professor at the University of Warwick. He is the theorist of post-democracy a notion that has become widely used by sociologists and political scientists to express the progressive erosion of democratic accountability in a neoliberal era, marked by technocracy, the government of experts, and suspicion toward all forms of popular participation.

Coining this term at the turn of the millennium, Crouch reported that while society continues to have and to use all the institutions of democracy, [...] they increasingly become a formal shell. In Post-Democracy After the Crises (Polity, 2020), a title just released amid the coronavirus emergency, Crouch aims to revise and update this influential thesis, at a time marked by multiple crises that seem to further aggravate the hollowing out of democracy. Indeed, from a diagnostic perspective, current events seem to be a vindication of his early thesis.

Yet this impressive analytical prescience is not matched by a convincing prognosis. All Crouch has to offer are symptomatic remedies, a mere tweaking of the global system, with more effective forms of transnational cooperation, the return to a truly competitive market system as a means to reduce political interference by economic oligarchies, and more institutional responsiveness. But is this really enough to address the crisis of democracy?

The term post-democracy was first introduced by Crouch in 2000 in the book Coping with Post-Democracy, and then developed in a number of later works such as Post-Democracy in 2004, and The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism in 2011. According to this theory, our democracy is marked by a split between political form and substance, in which democracy continues to exist formally but its substance is lost. In this context, the energy and innovative drive pass away from the democratic arena and into the small circles of a politico-economic elite.

Putting forward this concept at the height of Tony Blairs New Labour, Crouch had different trends in mind: the growth of technocratic government, making all political decisions a matter of expertise; the lurching of political debates toward propaganda and advertising; the privatization of public services through practices known as new public management, with the profit logic encroaching on health and education; and, more generally, the disruptive role of globalization on economics and politics. These different tendencies were leading to increasing fatigue of the electorate and serious short circuits in political accountability, with nefarious consequences for democracys legitimacy.

Updating this thesis in his new book, Crouch asserts that many of the trends identified at the beginning of the 2000s are coming to maturity. He argues that the economic crisis of 2008 and the way governments managed it marked a further blow to democracy. The European sovereign debt crisis, and the way in which in 2011 the Troika of European institutions forced both Greece and Italy to change their prime ministers, provided glaring demonstrations of this suspension of democratic substance. However, amid this crisis, Crouch does not seem to find any ally in the political arena. In fact, he paints all emerging actors of both the Left and Right who have criticized failing neoliberal democracy as populists who do not deserve a serious hearing.

For Crouch, populism in all its forms is no solution to present problems. If anything, it leads to an even worse situation, where we move from technocracy to outright autocracy and xenophobia. Populisms particularism, furthermore, puts us in an untenable position when it comes to dealing with global issues such as climate change. The term populism here is not only used to take aim only at Trump, Bolsonaro, and Salvini. Rather, as with other liberal theorists such as Atlantic contributing writer and former director at Tony Blairs Global Change Institute, Yascha Mounk the term is also used to attack all new left phenomena from former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to Podemos and La France Insoumise.

Adopting a spiteful bitterness that has become prevalent among many left-liberals both in the United States and in Europe, Crouch accuses this post-crash left wave of being on par with right-wing populism, because of its supposed anti-internationalism and even hostility to migrants. This, despite the fact that these same forces are the most adamant defenders of the rights of migrants and refugees. Ultimately, what seems unacceptable to Crouch is the way so-called left-populists have mounted a critique of economic globalism and again invoked the need for state interventionism. In other words, for Crouch, while the global liberal system is failing, none of the alternatives that have emerged in recent years are any better.

Crouchs book is most disappointing when he makes recommendations on a better politics. All he has to offer is some tweaking of some structural mechanisms of liberal democracy that do not seem to be working too well. Crouch calls for fully democratic responsive politicians and a more resilient democracy. Some readers may find this as an expression of empty rhetoric. And to a large extent, it is. It seems that, for Crouch, a few changes around the edges would be sufficient to deliver us from the sorry state of liberal democracy and open the way for a real democracy, closer to the lofty ideals liberal theorists such as himself associate with the term. If only communication were more rational, information more available, capital less concentrated, markets truly competitive, our public sphere more open, our institutions more responsive, liberal democracys ills would be resolved, and we would not have to witness the deranged behavior of anti-liberal populists such as Donald Trump.

This is most evident when Crouch discusses the way the political class allowed financial deregulation, creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Crouch makes no excuses for the disastrous way in which the crisis was handled. However, he seems to read this mismanagement simply as a problem of information or institutional design. Thus, he argues, had politicians in the 1990s been willing to listen to a wider range of opinion ... cautionary voices would surely have been more likely to have been heard and deregulation would have proceeded more carefully. Similarly, had politicians been in more active, two-way contact with groups in society outside the financial elite, they would have been less ready to concede the banks initial deregulatory demands.

Had politicians done this and that But the fact is that politicians did not do that. And they didnt do it, not because of a problem of communication or of inadequate institutions, but because they could not listen, because they were representing interests that were by and large incompatible with citizens interests. Alike what happens in large swathes of Anglo-American political science, dominated by obtuse liberal positivism, there is little attention for the material interests that motivate different parties. All comments are made at the level of political institutions, as if political institutions were independent from society. The narrow functionalism of Crouch dispenses with everything that makes politics political, starting from political conflict and class interests. It dubiously suggests that with some minor superstructural adjustment, there will be no need to really delve into the root causes of current social and political ills.

The image Crouch offers of the current political scenario is ultimately one of impotence a Catch-22 situation in which the Left has no clear path forward. This is most evident in his discussion of globalization and its discontents. He acknowledges that globalisation certainly takes us to places where democracy is very weak, but warns that we cannot recreate the world that existed before globalization. While Crouch is clear about the fact that globalization is to a large extent responsible for the failure of democratic institutions, he does not call for a surpassing of globalization.

Trying to exit globalization, according to Crouch whose pro-European sympathies are evident, despite his criticism of EU failures would not return us to the 1970s, because there is never a return to preexisting conditions. A deglobalization would happen in a context of growing international hostility in which income and wealth would decline as gains from trade were lost and as populations became more nationally conscious they would grow in enmity towards, and suspicion of, foreigners of all kinds, including those living among them. For him, any departure from globalization would just be a nostalgic and impossible return to the past.

Crouchs proposal is thus a disappointingly modest one: a progressive liberal proposal with no serious calls for a redistribution of economic and political power. For him, we need to be realistic and improve what we already have, rather than devising something altogether new. Big concentrations of capital need to be overcome and anti-trust measures reintroduced, moving back to a truly competitive market situation, which has not been seen for decades if not for centuries. Furthermore, we should even accept that lobbying can be good for democracy, current problems being due merely to an excess of the influence of lobbying. Finally, we need to stop being so critical of the European Union, because it may well be weak and post-democratic, but it exists, and the EU is the only example of an elaborate system of cross-national cooperation that extends beyond trade relations.

In short, Crouch is a perfect representation of the current impasse of the globalist liberal left, caught between a moral denunciation of the fallacies of the system and a refusal to take stock of their structural motivations. The present is wrong, but the future may be worse. In the meantime, lets stick with what we have, tweak it a bit, and most importantly lie low, because some rocks may be incoming. What we are thus offered, in short, is a recipe of paralysis and impotence. A truly unexciting prospect for future politics. But perhaps the failure in projecting any coherent alternative is not a failure of imagination or analytical perceptiveness virtues which Crouch does not lack. It is simply the reflection of a structural reality: that counter to what is hoped by the likes of Crouch, liberalism cannot be repaired; it has to be overcome.

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Liberal Democracy Is in Trouble And Liberals Won't Save It - Jacobin magazine