Category Archives: Resource Based Economy

COVID-19 is a major global public health challenge. Its outbreak in China presented the fastest spread, the widest scope of infections and the greatest degree of difficulty in controlling infections of any public health emergency since the founding of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949.

In the battle against the outbreak, China actively leveraged digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, cloud computing, blockchain, and 5G, which have effectively improved the efficiency of the countrys efforts in epidemic monitoring, virus tracking, prevention, control and treatment, and resource allocation.

Here are a few of the ways information technologies were effectively leveraged:

A new strain of Coronavirus, COVID 19, is spreading around the world, causing deaths and major disruption to the global economy.

Responding to this crisis requires global cooperation among governments, international organizations and the business community, which is at the centre of the World Economic Forums mission as the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.

The Forum has created the COVID Action Platform, a global platform to convene the business community for collective action, protect peoples livelihoods and facilitate business continuity, and mobilize support for the COVID-19 response. The platform is created with the support of the World Health Organization and is open to all businesses and industry groups, as well as other stakeholders, aiming to integrate and inform joint action.

As an organization, the Forum has a track record of supporting efforts to contain epidemics. In 2017, at our Annual Meeting, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched bringing together experts from government, business, health, academia and civil society to accelerate the development of vaccines. CEPI is currently supporting the race to develop a vaccine against this strand of the coronavirus.

In a crisis, collaboration is key. During the outbreak, a range of companies made their algorithms publicly available to improve efficiency and to support coronavirus testing and research.

Baidu Research, a world leader in AI R&D, open-sourced LinearFold (its linear-time AI algorithm), to epidemic prevention centers, gene testing institutions, and global scientific research institutions. The algorithm is an important tool for gene testing institutions, and R&D institutions during the epidemic, reducing the time taken to predict and study coronaviruss RNA secondary structure from 55 minutes to just 27 seconds. The algorithm also improves the speed of predicting and studying coronaviruss RNA secondary structure by 120 times and saves the waiting time for virus detectors and researchers by two orders of magnitude With the improved algorithm comes much-improved efficiency in virus detection and diagnosis than traditional algorithm.

Additionally, Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Zhejiang CDC) launched an automated genome-wide testing and analysis platform. Based on the AI algorithm developed by the Alibaba DAMO Academy (a platform funded by Jack Ma for science research), the group has shortened the genetic analysis of suspected cases from several hours to half an hour and can accurately detect virus mutations.

A security guard looks at a screen at Wuhan's Hankou Railway Station as travel restrictions for leaving the city, the epicentre of a global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, are lifted and people will be allowed to leave the city via road, rail and air, in Wuhan, Hubei, China April 8, 2020.

Image: REUTERS/Aly Song

Artificial intelligence was also leveraged in subway stations, train stations and other public places where there is a high concentration of people and a high degree of mobility. While using the traditional method of temperature measurement is time-consuming, and would increase the risk of cross-infection due to the clustering of the people, companies such as Wuhan Guide Infrared Co. Ltd put forth new temperature measurement technology based on computer vision and infrared technology. This technology made it possible to take body temperature in a contactless, reliable, and efficient manner, with the people even unaware of it. With this technology in place, those whose body temperatures exceeded the threshold could quickly and accurately be located.

After the outbreak, big data played an important role in prediction and early warnings, analyzing the flow of people and the distribution of materials. Qihoo 360, a leading Internet company in China, released Big Data Migration Map this past February which users can access through mobile phones or computers to view the migration trend of the Chinese mainland from January 1, 2020 up to date. The tool became an important means of understanding and predicting changes in the epidemic situation nationwide.

A student attends an online class at home as students' return to school has been delayed due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, in Fuyang, Anhui province, China March 2, 2020. Picture taken March 2, 2020

Image: China Daily via REUTERS

In the epidemic response, relatively mature cloud computing technologies became as essential as water or electricity. Alibaba Cloud made its AI computing power available to public research institutions around the world for free to accelerate the development of new pneumonia drugs and vaccines. Meanwhile, Didi offered GPU cloud computing resources and technical support for combating the novel coronavirus to domestic scientific research institutions, medical and rescue platforms, for free.

As the virus spread, the demand for cloud-based video conferencing and online teaching has skyrocketed. Various cloud service vendors have actively upgraded their functions and provided resources. For example, Youku and Ding Talk (an all-in-one platform under Alibaba Group) launched the "Attending Class at Home" program to provide students with a secure learning environment and convenient learning tools. The Online Classroom function, which is made available for students of universities, primary and middle schools across China without charges during the epidemic, can support millions of students to take online classes simultaneously and has also covered schools in vast rural areas.

Furthermore, other enterprise companies increased access to their tools. Tencent Meeting made unlimited-time meetings for up to 300 participants free until the end of the epidemic. WeChat Work can support the audio and video conference up to 300 participants during the epidemic. During the epidemic, the tool provided free access to stable HD video conferences are accessible from phones allowing sharing documents and screens among up to 300 participants.

Blockchain technology eliminates intermediary, prevents data loss and tampering and provides traceability. It can play an important role in ensuring the openness and transparency of the epidemic information and the traceability of the epidemic materials. For example, blockchain technology can be used to record epidemic information and ensure that information sources are open, transparent, and traceable, thus effectively reducing rumors.

Lianfei Technology launched the nation's first blockchain epidemic monitoring platform, which can track the progress of COVID-19 in all provinces in real time, and register the relevant epidemic data on the chain so that the data can be traced and cannot be tampered with. The data links based on transparent monitoring and accountability are initially established to ensure that epidemic information is open and transparent.

5G, which has just been commercialized, has also played an important role in the epidemic prevention and control. It is mainly used in the fields of live-streaming video and telemedicine. China Mobile opened 5G base stations at Huoshenshan and Leishenshan hospitals, and realized 5G high-definition live broadcasting of the construction of these two hospitals, providing real-time views of the construction sites on a 24-hour basis for more than 20 mainstream media platforms such as People's Daily and Xinhua News Agency. The content was also distributed by China Daily overseas simultaneously, and the number of online viewers exceeded 490 million.

In addition, the epidemic also witnessed the transition of 5G + health from "experimental phase" to "clinical phase". In order to make full use of the resources of experts in large cities and hospitals, the 5G + remote consultation system has been quickly implemented in many hospitals across the country. The first remote consultation platform of Huoshenshan Hospital allows medical experts far away in Beijing to work with front-line medical staff of Huoshenshan Hospital through remote video connections and conduct remote consultations with patients, thus further improving the efficiency and effectiveness of diagnosis and treatment.

"New generation information technologies have unique advantages and can play an important role in responding to major public health challenges."

China's practice has proven that the new-generation information technologies have unique advantages and can play an important role in responding to major public health challenges.

The COVID-19 outbreak is a common challenge faced by mankind with all countries' interests closely intertwined. Countries continue to develop new solutions as the epidemic spreads. As it does, countries must share their learnings and work together. By doing so, they can collectively find the solutions needed to fight the virus and save lives.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with our Terms of Use.

Written by

QI Xiaoxia, Director General, Bureau of International Cooperation, Cyberspace Administration of China

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

View original post here:

How emerging technologies helped tackle COVID-19 in China - World Economic Forum

Consultant Aecom is working with Highways England to embed circular economy thinking across some of the countrys biggest road projects including the A303 at Stonehenge.

Sustainability in design and construction is a hot topic with organisations increasingly seeking routes to mitigate environmental damage and reduce resource depletion.

The concept of the circular economy offers a philosophy for sustainable resource management, which has gained increasing traction in the construction industry in recent years.

But varying academic definitions of circular economy principles have ultimately led to some confusion about what the concept actually means.

Consultant Aecom started working to develop a circular economy approach for Highways England in 2015 and sought to adopt a specific working definition for the concept. It has based its definition on that promoted by charity the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

This relies on the principles of designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use and regenerating natural systems.

In a traditional linear economy, you take resources, you use them and then you dispose of them at end of life or you might recycle a certain proportion. Its very much about take, use and dispose, explains David Smith, Aecoms technical director for business sustainability.

In contrast, circular economy thinking aims to disrupt this conventional approach and avoid disposal to landfill by keeping resources at the highest level of utility for as long as possible.

Within the context of an organisational approach to the circular economy, its critical to embed these processes from the start of a project, insists Smith.

Traditionally, companies follow processes and end up with waste. They then start to think about how or where that waste can be recycled.

With the circular economy approach, you plan the route for the sustainable management of resources right from the outset.

Mitigating the environmental impact is an obvious benefit of the approach, but there are also advantages in terms of reducing supply chain risk.

With major construction projects getting the green light across the UK, there is more competition for resources.

But from a business perspective, circular economy principles can help an organisation retain control.

For example, if a business recycles its own resources, then theres less need to go out into the marketplace to buy in those new materials,says Smith.

However, the circular economy approach is broader and far more ambitious than simply recycling resources.

Smith explains it is about taking a holistic view of how resources are managed from the outset and making design decisions that keep opportunities open.

So how has Aecom applied these principles to its work with Highways England?

With the circular economy approach you plan the route for the management of resources right from the outset

Its first commission from the highways operator was at a corporate level. The project involved developing a transition plan to explore existing activities that could contribute to a circular economy, as well as identifying key stakeholders andhow they might facilitate that transition.

A key element of this work was a pathfinder project, which involved developing and recording the practical applications of circular economy thinking at project level to support the transfer of knowledge to future projects.

It was about finding out what works and what doesnt work, says Smith.

The 1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon improvement scheme is the first Highways England project to incorporate circular economy principles. Aecom joined the project during the detailed design phase.

Most of the key elements of the scheme had been designed before Aecom joined the project, laments Smith.

From a theoretical perspective, the earlier youre involved in a project, the greater your ability to influence the design.

The bottom line is that humanity isnt using resources sustainably, so something has to change

In contrast, for the 1.9bn A303 Amesbury to Berwick Down (Stonehenge) project Aecom was involved through the preliminary design phase. The scheme includesa 12.8km dual carriageway and a 3.2km tunnel underneath the World Heritage Site.

The team has participated in the statutory powers and procedures phase of the scheme, which includes work towards the appointment of main contractors.

Smith says: Weve sought to integrate circular economy requirements into the contracts so that they get taken forward in the project. Potential contractors need to demonstrate particular behaviours, impacts and deliverables.

Weve learnt and refined our approach from our experience on the A14 project, he adds. Weve deliberately sought to integrate the circular economy into business as usual. Instead of being an academic research exercise, its practical, its hands on, and its about collaboration.

A collaborative approach is key to the success of circular economy principles. Smith insists it is impossible for any organisation to embrace the approach in isolation.

You need to work with other stakeholders. You need to be aware of where your materials are coming from and what infrastructure and requirements are likely to be available to manage those resources at the end of service life, he says.

It is also important for organisations to understand any critical restrictions or limitations on resources. For example, combining particular materials during a project might prevent them from being recycled or reprocessed at a later date, so understanding resource flows and communicating this to key stakeholders is essential.

Ensuring consistent communication across projects is vital, especially because circular economy principles can be highly nuanced, and organisations tend to approach them from differing perspectives.

Everybody has a piece of the puzzle, but they dont necessarily see the big picture. The approach requires fundamentally changing how we do things, explains Smith.

He insists the key to Aecoms success in implementing circular economy thinking across projects has been identifying the right stakeholders with the influence and motivation to make it happen. As a consultant, gaining client buy-in is crucial.

Highways England has been brilliant as a client from that perspective, he adds. They get it and theyre really committed.

Aecom is increasingly looking to promote the circular economy across projects and ensure it is widely recognised as a requirement.

With sustainability high on the agenda for most organisations, circularity offers a much-needed step change to ensure that a thriving economy does not come at the expense of the natural environment.

The bottom line is that humanity isnt using resources sustainably, so something has to change, says Smith.

The circular economy is a way of contributing to a more sustainable future.

Like what you've read?To receive New Civil Engineer's daily and weekly newsletters click here.

Here is the original post:

Highways England and the circular economy - New Civil Engineer

If philosophy ever manifested itself as helpful, redeeming, or prophylactic, it was in a healthy culture. The sick, it made ever sicker.Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

In 1919, after the First World War, the French poet Paul Valry in Crisis of the Spirit wrote: We later civilizations we too know that we are mortal.1 It is only in such a catastrophe, and as an aprs coup, that we know we are nothing but fragile beings. One hundred years later, a bat from Chinaif indeed the coronavirus comes from batshas driven the whole planet into another crisis. Were Valry still alive, he wouldnt be allowed to walk out of his house in France.

The crisis of the spirit in 1919 was preceded by a nihilism, a nothingness, that haunted Europe before 1914. As Valry wrote of the intellectual scene before the war: I see nothing! Nothing and yet an infinitely potential nothing. In Valrys 1920 poem Le Cimetire Marin (Graveyard by the Sea) we read a Nietzschean affirmative call: The wind is rising! We must try to live! This verse was later adopted by Hayao Miyazaki as the title of his animation film about Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed fighter aircraft for the Japanese Empire that were later used in the Second World War. This nihilism recursively returns in the form of a Nietzschean test: a demon invades your loneliest loneliness and asks if you want to live in the eternal recurrence of the samethe same spider, the same moonlight between the trees, and the same demon who asks the same question. Any philosophy that cannot live with and directly confront this nihilism provides no sufficient answer, since such a philosophy only makes the sick culture sicker, or in our time, withdraws into laughable philosophical memes circulating on social media.

The nihilism Valry contested has been constantly nurtured by technological acceleration and globalization since the eighteenth century. As Valry wrote towards the end of his essay:

But can the European spiritor at least its most precious contentbe totally diffused? Must such phenomena as democracy, the exploitation of the globe, and the general spread of technology, all of which presage a deminutio capitis for Europe must these be taken as absolute decisions of fate?2

This threat of diffusionwhich Europe may have attempted to affirmis no longer something that can be confronted by Europe alone, and probably will never be completely overcome again by the European tragist spirit.3 Tragist is first of all related to Greek tragedy; it is also the logic of the spirit endeavoring to resolve contradictions arising from within. In What Begins after the End of the Enlightenment? and other essays, I have tried to sketch out how, since the Enlightenment, and after the decline of monotheism, the latter was replaced by a mono-technologism (or techno-theism), which has culminated today in transhumanism.4 We, the moderns, the cultural heirs to the European Hamlet (who, in Valrys Crisis of the Spirit, looks back at the European intellectual legacy by counting the skulls of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Marx), one hundred years after Valrys writing, have believed and still want to believe that we will become immortal, that we will be able to enhance our immune system against all viruses or simply flee to Mars when the worst cases hit. Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, researching travel to Mars seems irrelevant for stopping the spread of the virus and saving lives. We mortals who still inhabit this planet called earth may not have the chance to wait to become immortal, as the transhumanists have touted in their corporate slogans. A pharmacology of nihilism after Nietzsche is still yet to be written, but the toxin has already pervaded the global body and caused a crisis in its immune system.

For Jacques Derrida (whose widow, Marguerite Derrida, recently died of coronavirus), the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center marked the manifestation of an autoimmune crisis, dissolving the techno-political power structure that had been stabilized for decades: a Boeing 767 was used as a weapon against the country that invented it, like a mutated cell or virus from within.5 The term autoimmune is only a biological metaphor when used in the political context: globalization is the creation of a world system whose stability depends on techno-scientific and economic hegemony. Consequently, 9/11 came to be seen as a rupture which ended the political configuration willed by the Christian West since the Enlightenment, calling forth an immunological response expressed as a permanent state of exceptionwars upon wars. The coronavirus now collapses this metaphor: the biological and the political become one. Attempts to contain the virus dont only involve disinfectant and medicine, but also military mobilizations and lockdowns of countries, borders, international flights, and trains.

In late January, Der Spiegel published an issue titled Coronavirus, Made in China: Wenn die Globalisierung zur tdlichen Gefahr wird (When globalization becomes deadly danger), illustrated with an image of a Chinese person in excessive protective gear gazing at an iPhone with eyes almost closed, as if praying to a god.6 The coronavirus outbreak is not a terrorist attackso far, there has been no clear evidence of the viruss origin beyond its first appearance in Chinabut is rather an organological event in which a virus attaches to advanced transportation networks, travelling up to 900 km per hour. It is also an event that seems to return us to the discourse of the nation-state and a geopolitics defined by nations. By returning, I mean that, first of all, the coronavirus has restored meaning to borders that were seemingly blurred by global capitalism and the increasing mobility promoted by cultural exchange and international trade. The global outbreak has announced that globalization so far has only cultivated a mono-technological culture that can only lead to an autoimmune response and a great regression. Secondly, the outbreak and the return to nation-states reveal the historical and actual limit of the concept of the nation-state itself. Modern nation-states have attempted to cover up these limits through immanent infowars, constructing infospheres that move beyond borders. However, rather than producing a global immunology, on the contrary, these infospheres use the apparent contingency of the global space to wage biological warfare. A global immunology that we can use to confront this stage of globalization is not yet available, and it may never become available if this mono-technological culture persists.

During the 2016 refugee crisis in Europe, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk criticized Germanys chancellor Angela Merkel in an interview with the magazine Cicero, saying, We have yet to learn to glorify borders Europeans will sooner or later develop an efficient common border policy. In the long run the territorial imperative prevails. After all, there is no moral obligation to self-destruction.7 Even if Sloterdijk was wrong in saying that Germany and the EU should have closed their borders to refugees, in retrospect one may say that he was right about the question of borders not being well thought out. Roberto Esposito has clearly stated that a binary (polar) logic persists concerning the function of borders: one insists on stricter control as an immunological defense against an outer enemya classical and intuitive understanding of immunology as opposition between the self and the otherwhile the other proposes the abolition of borders to allow freedom of mobility and possibilities of association for individuals and goods. Esposito suggests that neither of the two extremesand it is somewhat obvious todayis ethically and practically undesirable.8

The outbreak of the coronavirus in Chinabeginning in mid-November until an official warning was announced in late January, followed by the lockdown of Wuhan on January 23led immediately to international border controls against Chinese or even Asian-looking people in general, identified as carriers of the virus. Italy was one of the first countries to impose a travel ban on China; already in late January, Romes Santa Cecilia Conservatory suspended oriental students from taking classes, even those who had never in their life been to China. These actswhich we may call immunologicalare conducted out of fear, but more fundamentally out of ignorance.

In Hong Kongright next to Shenzhen in Guangdong province, one of the major outbreak regions outside Hubei provincethere were strong voices urging the government to close the border with China. The government refused, citing the World Health Organization advising countries to avoid imposing travel and trade restrictions on China. As one of two special administrative regions of China, Hong Kong SAR is not supposed to oppose China nor add to its recent burden of underwhelming economic growth. And yet, some Hong Kong restaurants posted notices on their doors announcing that Mandarin-speaking clients were unwelcome. Mandarin is associated with virus-carrying Mainland Chinese people, therefore the dialect is considered a sign of danger. A restaurant that under normal circumstances is open to anyone who can afford it is now only open to certain people.

All forms of racism are fundamentally immunological. Racism is a social antigen, since it clearly distinguishes the self and the other and reacts against any instability introduced by the other. However, not all immunological acts can be considered racism. If we dont confront the ambiguity between the two, we collapse everything into the night where all cows are grey. In the case of a global pandemic, an immunological reaction is especially unavoidable when contamination is facilitated by intercontinental flights and trains. Before the closing of Wuhan, five million inhabitants had escaped, involuntarily transporting the virus out of the city. In fact, whether one is labelled as being from Wuhan is irrelevent, since everyone can be regarded as suspect, considering that the virus can be latent for days on a body without symptoms, all the while contaminating its surroundings. There are immunological moments one cannot easily escape when xenophobia and micro-fascisms become common on streets and in restaurants: when you involuntarily cough, everyone stares at you. More than ever, people demand an immunospherewhat Peter Sloterdijk suggestedas protection and as social organization.

It seems that immunological acts, which cannot simply be reduced to racist acts, justify a return to bordersindividual, social, and national. In biological immunology as well as political immunology, after decades of debate on the selfother paradigm and the organismic paradigm, modern states return to border controls as the simplest and most intuitive form of defense, even when the enemy is not visible.9 In fact, we are only fighting against the incarnation of the enemy. Here, we are all bound by what Carl Schmitt calls the political, defined by the distinction between friend and enemya definition not easily deniable, and probably strengthened during a pandemic. When the enemy is invisible, it has to be incarnated and identified: firstly the Chinese, the Asians, and then the Europeans, the North Americans; or, inside China, the inhabitants of Wuhan. Xenophobia nourishes nationalism, whether as the self considering xenophobia an inevitable immunological act, or the other mobilizing xenophobia to strengthen its own nationalism as immunology.

The League of Nations was founded in 1919 after the First World War, and was later succeeded by the United Nations, as a strategy to avoid war by gathering all nations into a common organization. Perhaps Carl Schmitts criticism of this attempt was accurate in claiming that the League of Nations, which had its one-hundred-year anniversary last year, mistakenly identified humanity as the common ground of world politics, when humanity is not a political concept. Instead, humanity is a concept of depoliticization, since identifying an abstract humanity which doesnt exist can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as ones own and to deny the same to the enemy.10 As we know, the League of Nations was a group of representatives from different countries that was unable to prevent one of the greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century, the Second World War, and was therefore replaced by the United Nations. Isnt the argument applicable to the World Health Organization, a global organization meant to transcend national borders and provide warnings, advice, and governance concerning global health issues? Considering how the WHO had virtually no positive role in preventing the spread of coronavirusif not a negative role: its general director even refused to call it a pandemic until it was evident to everyonewhat makes the WHO necessary at all? Naturally, the work of professionals working in and with the organization deserves enormous respect, yet the case of the coronavirus has exposed a crisis in the political function of the larger organization. Worse still, we can only criticize such a gigantic money-burning global governing body for its failure on social media, like shouting into the wind, but no one has the capacity to change anything, as democratic processes are reserved for nations.

If we follow Schmitt, the WHO is primarily an instrument of depoliticization, since its function to warn of coronavirus could have been done better by any news agency. Indeed, a number of countries acted too slowly by following the WHOs early judgment of the situation. As Schmitt writes, an international representational governing body, forged in the name of humanity, does not eliminate the possibility of wars, just as it does not abolish states. It introduces new possibilities for wars, permits wars to take place, sanctions coalition wars, and by legitimizing and sanctioning certain wars it sweeps away many obstacles to war.11 Isnt the manipulation of global governance bodies by world powers and transnational capital since the Second World War only a continuation of this logic? Hasnt this virus that was controllable at the beginning sunken the world into a global state of war? Instead, these organizations contribute to a global sickness where mono-technological economic competition and military expansion are the only aim, detaching human beings from their localities rooted in the earth and replacing them with fictive identities shaped by modern nation-states and infowars.

The concept of the state of exception or state of emergency was originally meant to allow the sovereign to immunize the commonwealth, but since 9/11 it had tended towards a political norm. The normalization of the state of emergency is not only an expression of the absolute power of the sovereign, but also of the modern nation-state struggling and failing to confront the global situation by expanding and establishing its borders through all available technological and economic means. Border control is an effective immunological act only if one understands geopolitics in terms of sovereigns defined by borders. After the Cold War, increasing competition has resulted in a mono-technological culture that no longer balances economic and technological progress, but rather assimilates them while moving towards an apocalyptic endpoint. Competition based on mono-technology is devastating the earths resources for the sake of competition and profit, and also prevents any player from taking different paths and directionsthe techno-diversity that I have written about extensively. Techno-diversity doesnt merely mean that different countries produce the same type of technology (mono-technology) with different branding and slightly different features. Rather, it refers to a multiplicity of cosmotechnics that differ from each other in terms of values, epistemologies, and forms of existence. The current form of competition that uses economic and technological means to override politics is often attributed to neoliberalism, while its close relative transhumanism considers politics only a humanist epistemology soon to be overcome through technological acceleration. We arrive at an impasse of modernity: one cannot easily withdraw from such competition for fear of being surpassed by others. It is like the metaphor of modern man that Nietzsche described: a group permanently abandons its village to embark on a sea journey in pursuit of the infinite, but arrive at the middle of the ocean only to realize that the infinite is not a destination.12 And there is nothing more terrifying than the infinite when there is no longer any way of turning back.

The coronavirus, like all catastrophes, may force us to ask where we are heading. Though we know we are only heading to the void, still, we have been driven by a tragist impulse to try to live. Amidst intensified competition, the interest of states is no longer with their subjects but rather economic growthany care for a population is due to their contributions to economic growth. This is self-evident in how China initially tried to silence news about the coronavirus, and then, after Xi Jinping warned that measures against the virus damage the economy, the number of new cases dramatically dropped to zero. It is the same ruthless economic logic that made other countries decide to wait and see, because preventive measures such as travel restrictions (which the WHO advised against), airport screenings, and postponing the Olympic Games impact tourism.

The media as well as many philosophers present a somewhat naive argument concerning the Asian authoritarian approach and the allegedly liberal/libertarian/democratic approach of Western countries. The Chinese (or Asian) authoritarian wayoften misunderstood as Confucian, though Confucianism is not at all an authoritarian or coercive philosophyhas been effective in managing the population using already widespread consumer surveillance technologies (facial recognition, mobile data analysis, etc.) to identify the spread of the virus. When the outbreaks started in Europe, there was still debate on whether to use personal data. But if we are really to choose between Asian authoritarian governance and Western liberal/libertarian governance, Asian authoritarian governance appears more acceptable for facing further catastrophes, since the libertarian way of managing such pandemics is essentially eugenicist, allowing self-selection to rapidly eliminate the older population. In any case, all of these cultural essentialist oppositions are misleading, since they ignore the solidarities and spontaneity among communities and peoples diverse moral obligations to the elderly and family; yet this type of ignorance is necessary for vain expressions of ones own superiority.

But where else can our civilization move? The scale of this question mostly overwhelms our imagination, leaving us to hope, as a last resort, that we can resume a normal life, whatever this term means. In the twentieth century, intellectuals looked for other geopolitical options and configurations to surpass the Schmittian concept of the political, as Derrida did in his Politics of Friendship, where he responded to Schmitt by deconstructing the concept of friendship. Deconstruction opens an ontological difference between friendship and community to suggest another politics beyond the friendenemy dichotomy fundamental to twentieth-century political theory, namely hospitality. Unconditional and incalculable hospitality, which we may call friendship, can be conceived in geopolitics as undermining sovereignty, like when the Japanese deconstructionist philosopher Kjin Karatani claimed that the perpetual peace dreamed of by Kant would only be possible when sovereignty could be given as a giftin the sense of a Maussian gift economy, which would follow the global capitalist empire.13 However, such a possibility is conditioned by the abolition of sovereignty, in order words, the abolition of nation-states. For this to happen, according to Karatani, we would probably need a Third World War followed by an international governing body with more power than the United Nations. In fact, Angela Merkels refugee policy and the one country, two systems brilliantly conceived by Deng Xiaoping are moving towards this end without war. The latter has the potential to become an even more sophisticated and interesting model than the federal system. However the former has been a target of fierce attacks and the latter is in the process of being destroyed by narrow-minded nationalists and dogmatic Schmittians. A Third World War will be the quickest option if no country is willing to move forward.

Before that day arrives, and before an even more serious catastrophe brings us closer to extinction (which we can already sense), we may still need to ask what an organismic global immune system could look like beyond simply claiming to coexist with the coronavirus.14 What kind of co-immunity or co-immunism (the neologism that Sloterdijk proposed) is possible if we want globalization to continue, and to continue in a less contradictory way? Sloterdijks strategy of co-immunity is interesting but politically ambivalentprobably also because it is not sufficiently elaborated in his major worksoscillating between a border politics of the far-right Alternative fr Deutschland (AfD) party and Roberto Espositos contaminated immunity. However, the problem is that if we still follow the logic of nation-states, we will never arrive at a co-immunity. Not only because a state is not a cell nor an organism (no matter how attractive and practical this metaphor is for theorists), but also more fundamentally because the concept itself can only produce an immunity based on friend and enemy, regardless of whether it assumes the form of international organizations or councils. Modern states, while composed of all their subjects like the Leviathan, have no interest beyond economic growth and military expansion, at least not before the arrival of a humanitarian crisis. Haunted by an imminent economic crisis, nation-states become the source (rather than the target) of manipulative fake news.

Lets return here to the question of borders and question the nature of this war we are fighting now, which UN Secretary-General Antnio Guterres considers the biggest challenge the UN has faced since the Second World War. The war against the virus is first of all an infowar. The enemy is invisible. It can only be located through information about communities and the mobility of individuals. The efficacy of the war depends on the ability to gather and analyze information and to mobilize available resources to achieve the highest efficiency. For countries exercising strict online censorship, it is possible to contain the virus like containing a sensitive keyword circulating on social media. The use of the term information in political contexts has often been equated with propaganda, though we should avoid simply seeing it as a question of mass media and journalism, or even freedom of speech. Infowar is twenty-first century warfare. It is not a specific type of war, but war in its permanence.

In his lectures collected in Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault inverted Carl von Clausewitzs aphorism war is the continuation of politics by other means into politics is the continuation of war by other means.15 While the inversion proposes that war no longer assumes the form Clausewitz had in mind, Foucault hadnt yet developed a discourse on infowar. More than twenty years ago, a book titled Wars without Limit (, officially translated as Unrestricted Warfare or Warfare beyond Bounds) was published in China by two former senior air force colonels. This book was soon translated into French, and is said to have influenced the Tiqqun collective and later the Invisible Committee. The two former colonelswho know Clausewitz well but havent read Foucaultarrived at the claim that traditional warfare would slowly fade away, to be replaced by immanent wars in the world, largely introduced and made possible by information technology. This book could be read as an analysis of the US global war strategy, but also more importantly as a penetrating analysis of how infowar redefines politics and geopolitics.

The war against coronavirus is at the same time a war of misinformation and disinformation, which characterizes post-truth politics. The virus may be a contingent event that triggered the present crisis, but the war itself is no longer contingent. Infowar also opens two other (to some extent pharmacological) possibilities: first, warfare that no longer takes the state as its unit of measure, instead constantly deterritorializing the state with invisible weapons and no clear boundaries; and second, civil war, which takes the form of competing infospheres. The war against coronavirus is a war against the carriers of the virus, and a war conducted using fake news, rumors, censorship, fake statistics, misinformation, etc. In parallel to the US using Silicon Valley technology to expand its infosphere and penetrate most of the earths population, China has also built one of the largest and most sophisticated infospheres in the world, with well-equipped firewalls consisting of both humans and machines, which has allowed it to contain the virus within a population of 1.4 billion. This infosphere is expanding thanks to the infrastructure of Chinas One Belt, One Road initiative, as well as its already established networks in Africa, causing the US to respond, in the name of security and intellectual property, by blocking Huawei from extending its infosphere. Of course, infowar is not waged only by sovereigns. Within China, different factions compete against each other through official media, traditional media such as newspapers, and independent media outlets. For instance, both the traditional media and independent media fact-checked state figures on the outbreak, forcing the government to redress their own mistakes and distribute more medical equipment to hospitals in Wuhan.

The coronavirus renders explicit the immanence of infowar through the nation-states necessity to defend its physical borders while extending technologically and economically beyond them to establish new borders. Infospheres are constructed by humans, and, in spite of having greatly expanded in recent decades, remain undetermined in their becoming. Insofar as the imagination of co-immunityas a possible communism or mutual aid between nationscan only be an abstract solidarity, it is vulnerable to cynicism, similar to the case of humanity. Recent decades have seen some philosophical discourses succeed in nurturing an abstract solidarity, which can turn into sect-based communities whose immunity is determined through agreement and disagreement. Abstract solidarity is appealing because it is abstract: as opposed to being concrete, the abstract is not grounded and has no locality; it can be transported anywhere and dwell anywhere. But abstract solidarity is a product of globalization, a meta-narrative (or even metaphysics) for something that has long since confronted its own end.

True co-immunity is not abstract solidarity, but rather departs from a concrete solidarity whose co-immunity should ground the next wave of globalization (if there is one). Since the start of this pandemic, there have been countless acts of true solidarity, where it matters greatly who will buy groceries for you if you are not able to go to the supermarket, or who will give you a mask when you need to visit the hospital, or who will offer respirators for saving lives, and so forth. There are also solidarities among medical communities that share information towards the development of vaccines. Gilbert Simondon distinguished between abstract and concrete through technical objects: abstract technical objects are mobile and detachable, like those embraced by the eighteenth-century encyclopedists that (to this day) inspire optimism about the possibility of progress; concrete technical objects are those that are grounded (perhaps literally) in both the human and natural worlds, acting as a mediator between the two. A cybernetic machine is more concrete than a mechanical clock, which is more concrete than a simple tool. Can we thus conceive of a concrete solidarity that circumvents the impasse of an immunology based in nation-states and abstract solidarity? Can we consider the infosphere to be an opportunity pointing towards such immunology?

We may need to enlarge the concept of the infosphere in two ways. First of all, the building of infospheres could be understood as an attempt to construct techno-diversity, to dismantle the mono-technological culture from within and escape its bad infinity. This diversification of technologies also implies a diversification of ways of life, forms of coexistence, economies, and so forth, since technology, insofar as it is cosmotechnics, embeds different relations with nonhumans and the larger cosmos.16 This techno-diversification does not imply an ethical framework imposed onto technology, for this always arrives too late and is often made to be violated. Without changing our technologies and our attitudes, we will only preserve biodiversity as an exceptional case without ensuring its sustainability. In other words, without techno-diversity, we cannot maintain biodiversity. The coronavirus is not natures revenge but the result of a mono-technological culture in which technology itself simultaneously loses its own ground and desires to become the ground of everything else. The mono-technologism we live now ignores the necessity of coexistence and continues to see the earth merely as a standing reserve. With the vicious competition it sustains, it will only continue to produce more catastrophes. According to this view, after the exhaustion and devastation of spaceship earth, we may only embark on the same exhaustion and devastation on spaceship Mars.

Secondly, the infosphere can be considered a concrete solidarity extending beyond borders, as an immunology that no longer takes as its point of departure the nation-state, with its international organizations that are effectively puppets of global powers. For such concrete solidarity to emerge, we need a techno-diversity which develops alternative technologies such as new social networks, collaborative tools, and infrastructures of digital institutions that will form the basis for global collaboration. Digital media already has a long social history, though few forms beyond that of Silicon Valley (and WeChat in China) assume a global scale. This is largely due to an inherited philosophical traditionwith its oppositions between nature and technology, and between culture and technologythat fails to see a plurality of technologies as realizable. Technophilia and technophobia become the symptoms of mono-technological culture. We are familiar with the development of hacker culture, free software, and open-source communities over the past few decades, yet the focus has been on developing alternatives to hegemonic technologies instead of building alternative modes of access, collaboration, and more importantly, epistemology.

The coronavirus incident will consequently accelerate processes of digitalization and subsumption by the data economy, since it has been the most effective tool available to counter the spread, as we have already seen in the recent turn in favor of using mobile data for tracing the outbreak in countries that otherwise cherish privacy. We may want to pause and ask whether this accelerating digitalization process can be taken as an opportunity, a kairos that underlines the current global crisis. The calls for a global response have put everyone in the same boat, and the goal of resuming normal life is not an adequate response. The coronavirus outbreak marks the first time in more than twenty years that online teaching has come to be offered by all university departments. There have been many reasons for the resistance to digital teaching, but most are minor and sometimes irrational (institutes dedicated to digital cultures may still find physical presence to be important for human resource management). Online teaching will not completely replace physical presence, but it does radically open up access to knowledge and return us to the question of education at a time when many universities are being defunded. Will the suspension of normal life by coronavirus allow us to change these habits? For example, can we take the coming months (and maybe years), when most universities in the world will use online teaching, as a chance to create serious digital institutions at an unprecedented scale? A global immunology demands such radical reconfigurations.

This essays opening quote is from Nietzsches incomplete Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, written around 1873. Instead of alluding to his own exclusion from the discipline of philosophy, Nietzsche identified cultural reform with philosophers in ancient Greece who wanted to reconcile science and myth, rationality and passion. We are no longer in the tragic age, but in a time of catastrophes when neither tragist nor Daoist thinking alone can provide an escape. In view of the sickness of global culture, we have an urgent need for reforms driven by new thinking and new frameworks that will allow us to unbind ourselves from what philosophy has imposed and ignored. The coronavirus will destroy many institutions already threatened by digital technologies. It will also necessitate increasing surveillance and other immunological measures against the virus, as well as against terrorism and threats to national security. It is also a moment in which we will need stronger concrete, digital solidarities. A digital solidarity is not a call to use more Facebook, Twitter, or WeChat, but to get out of the vicious competition of mono-technological culture, to produce a techno-diversity through alternative technologies and their corresponding forms of life and ways of dwelling on the planet and in the cosmos. In our post-metaphysical world we may not need any metaphysical pandemics. We may not need a virus-oriented ontology either. What we really need is a concrete solidarity that allows differences and divergences before the falling of dusk.

I would like to thank Brian Kuan Wood and Pieter Lemmens for their comments and editorial suggestions on the drafts of the essay.

Yuk Hui currently teaches at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, his latest book is Recursivity and Contingency (2019).

2020 e-flux and the author

The rest is here:

One Hundred Years of Crisis - Journal #108 April 2020 - E-Flux

As the chief executive of one of the largest U.S. hotel ownership groups, Pebblebrook Hotel Trust CEO Jon Bortz has felt the dire coronavirus impact on travel demand. Pebblebrook has temporarily closed 46 of its 54 upscale hotels across the U.S., and its operators have furloughed most of the roughly 8,000 employees across Pebblebrooks entire hotel portfolio.

Bortz went to the White House in March with a group of hotel executives that included Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson and Hyatt Hotels CEO Mark Hoplamazian to appeal to the Trump administration for a $150 billion bailout for the industry while a stimulus bill was being drafted. While the resulting $2 trillion relief packagewill help hoteliers and their employees, Bortz thinks more is needed to navigate through a recovery he expects will take longer than initial forecasts predicted.

Get the Latest on Coronavirus and the Travel Industry on Skifts Liveblog

Bortz was at the center of the $5.2 billion 2018 merger between Pebblebrook and LaSalle Hotel Properties, the lodging real estate investment trust he oversaw for 11 years.In an interview with Skift Tuesday, he outlined what steps are needed to move from survival to recovery and why a fourth piece of legislation is a necessity to bring the hotel industry back to its feet.

Note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Skift: How much of a lift do you expect the $2 trillion CARES Actrelief package will have on the overall hotel industry?

Bortz: I think its helpful, but I also think its kind of a down payment. It was originally set up to cover a challenging period of about eight weeks, and this is obviously going to be a lot longer than that. We think it has some nice aspects to it. It helps small businesses and is done by property instead of by employer or major owner, so that gives operators the ability to apply for small business loans by individual property.

The challenge is these properties in any major resort market shut down already. Employees were furloughed. The idea of bringing people back only to let them go after eight weeks because business isnt there doesnt make a lot of sense, and it doesnt really cover a lot of other expenses.

Skift: How will Pebblebrooks properties benefit from the CARES Act?

Bortz: Like everyone, the way the program is set up right now, there are still a lot of unanswered questions submitted to the Treasury Department and Small Business Administration. Were waiting on answers as an industry. We filed for a loan for all our properties as well as the corporate entity. We have 20 different operators, and about a third of our properties are affiliated with a major brand. They all qualify.

Skift: In March, you said you were looking at closing more than half of Pebblebrooks 54 properties and that 4,000 employees had been furloughed with an additional 2,000 expected by the end of the month. Can you give us an update on those plans?

Bortz: Forty-six properties have closed some of which for three weeks already. Out of a little more than 8,000 employees working across all our properties, operators have furloughed a little over 7,500. Obviously, thats a vast majority.

Pebblebrook Hotel Trust CEO Jon Bortz

Skift: There is much discussion on what shape the recovery will take. Given what we know so far, how do you anticipate the hotel industry will come out of this?

Bortz:Were planning for a very slow, very mild recovery because were concerned about human behavior, government regulations, and whats going to be allowed. Can you have a group meeting? Can you have a wedding? How many people can gather in a space or location? We think there are some basic aspects that will be necessary in order to cause the recovery in travel and hotels to accelerate.

We have to have the mass of testing where, when someone comes down with coronavirus, we can trace interactions and quarantine people quickly so we can avoid this becoming an epidemic again. The second piece is an antiviral treatment that reduces the outcome quickly, more akin to what happens when you have the flu, so you dont end up in the ICU with a ventilator.

We think its more likely an L-shaped or angled-L with an opportunity to escalate with treatments or testing or a vaccine, which I dont think is until next year. There is potential for a hockey stick-shaped recovery if there is a vaccine and it works.

Skift: What are you going to need to see to move from survival mode to recovery?

Bortz: We think we need to see health solutions; otherwise, we could be in that W-shaped recovery. We should all be hopeful since there are a huge amount of resources devoted to finding medical solutions around the world.

In the meantime, we think leisure travel comes back first, as those travelers are not accountable to anyone but themselves. People are cooped up and anxious to get on the road. I think well see more drive-to than fly-to initially. We think leisure comes first, then some business travel comes back, and group travel comes back last.

Skift: Economy extended stay hotels are performing the best at the moment, and some analysts predict luxury hotels will take the longest to recover. Do you agree with that sentiment, and could that change your portfolio strategy going forward?

Bortz: Extended stay may be performing better at the moment because they tend to be in secondary rural locations that might not have [coronavirus] hotspots. They may have business that is residential in nature or construction crews. I dont think thats a real indicator of whos going to benefit in a recovery.

Drive-to locations will probably be the biggest and earliest beneficiary in a recovery. Resorts fall into that category, particularly those with more space and are wide open where people feel comfortable outdoors. I dont think it will be a socioeconomic recovery where luxury is somehow negatively impacted.

Skift: What other cost-cutting measures are being considered at Pebblebrook to survive the downturn in travel?

Bortz: Weve cut pretty deep at this point. Closing hotels is about as severe as you can get. There are limited skeleton teams at those properties. Its a total crew between five and 10 people, and were talking at hotels as large as 400, 500, or even more rooms. At a hotel level, were pretty lean at this point.

There were cuts at the corporate level in terms of compensation and [general and administrative expenses]. I voluntarily offered to forgo my salary for the rest of the year, and the senior team volunteered to cut their compensation by 30 percent. We also had retention grants the board provided for senior folks in late February before all of this happened, and we voluntarily forfeited those a couple weeks ago.

Skift: Other hotel executives are making similar moves, but some have faced scrutiny over gains still made through stock awards. How do you suggest conveying the right message when it comes to executive compensation at this time?

Bortz: We have three pieces of compensation: base salary, a target bonus, and stock grants we get each year. My base salary is 15 percent of our target, so its performance-based. If there are any bonuses earned this year and our board decides to pay any, the bonus would be paid in stock instead of cash. Wed retain cash for the company, which is the resource so dear.

Given the stock performance in this event, its not really going to be worth much of anything. The whole idea of stock is to align with shareholders and seems to be the appropriate piece of compensation that would continue on.

Skift: Have you looked at renegotiating covenants? If so, what are those discussions like?

Bortz: For most folks, it varies. Some folks have individual property debt and will call their mortgage holder. Particularly if youre a small business, youll look for forbearance for a period of time and interest on future payments. Its up to the individual borrower and lender. Id expect there to be cooperation because everyone is in the same boat, and nobody caused this to happen.

Ours is at the corporate level, and were working with a bank weve had relations with for as many as 40 years. Weve seen one lodging REIT renegotiate with their bank group and receive waivers on covenants through March of next year. You should expect that to happen with everyone, and not just in our industry.

Our corporate debt is at half the level of any corporate borrower. Were running the company at a 30 to 35 percent leverage, so its a very low debt level. We dont have a debt issue, we have an EBITDA issue like anyone ese. Everything is closed and by government order.

Skift: Say recovery does take longer than expected. What happens when and if the humane side of banking stops and difficult conversations need to happen?

Bortz: Thats going to be an issue for many owners, particularly those that dont have access to liquidity. We have over $700 million in cash, so we dont have an issue in liquidity. Folks who own a few hotels and who dont have the same level of liquidity are going to need different solutions.

We do expect there will be properties that go back to lenders and equity thats wiped out. The financial assistance package cant keep that from happening, particularly the longer this goes on. There will be plenty of properties that end up back at their lenders, even if they dont want them. We also think there will be hotels that dont reopen.

Skift: What goes into dissecting the relief package and determining if government assistance is worth it?

Bortz:I think many of the terms are reasonable as it relates to dividends, buybacks, and no increases on executive compensation. But there are some potentially that relate to labor neutrality, and thats kind of a non-starter for most companies and that would be for us as well, but we dont need that level of assistance. For those that do need it, its a big roadblock down the line.

Skift: Is a phase four piece of legislation needed?

Bortz: We do think itll be needed and highly likely to be provided. Think of what were talking about: Thirty percent of the economy has no revenue. Thats not a business model that can work. Those industries, in order to work in the future, are going to need help getting to the other side.

I believe, based on conversations weve had with folks in the administration and in Congress, they get it. I dont sense a resistance to doing whats necessary to keep businesses alive and keep the economy in a position where it can recover in a reasonable way.

Skift: What are specific provisions youd like to see in new legislation?

Bortz:Particularly to SBA loans, we think the period to rehire needs to be extended at least to September 30th, if not to the end of year. We think the amount of a loan that can go for other expenses like debt services, real estate taxes which the city and states desperately need insurance, and rent needs to increase. Those are at least equivalent to your payroll costs. Without assistance, a lot of hotel owners are not going to get to the other side.

See full article

Excerpt from:

Leisure Travel Comes Back First as Drive-To Rather than Fly-To: Pebblebrook Hotel Trust CEO - Skift

PVB logo

Fresno, CA, April 09, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Premier Valley Bank and its sister banks are currently processing approximately $1.5B in Paycheck Protection Program loans said Lo Nestman, President and CEO of Premier Valley Bank. After they received over 7,000 requests for loans under the CARES Act Paycheck Protection Program in 72 hours, Premier Valley Bank and its sister banks stopped accepting new requests for the program on Monday afternoon. Nestman stated, Our customers and wide-spread local communities are depending on us now more than ever, and our teams across the company have stepped up and worked countless hours to provide a lifeline to our customers as they navigate the provisions of the CARES Act.

Unlike many banks across the country, Premier Valley Bank and other Heartland Financial USA, Inc. community banks began accepting applications for the Paycheck Protection Program early on Friday morning just hours after the SBA published interim rules for participation. We have been closely monitoring developments and preparing to be agile to accommodate the many changes introduced by the SBA, so that we were able to support our customers and local communities during this time of need, added Nestman. Our small business customers across the Wisconsin footprint have struggled to navigate the complexity and changing requirements of the of the Paycheck Protection Program and we have hosted an educational webinar, built resource centers on our bank website and individually consulted with customers to provide support and assist them in calculating payroll costs and completing applications correctly. he said.

On Monday, April 6, the Federal Reserve released a statement committing the central bank to providing financing to lenders processing the $350B Paycheck Protection Program. Additionally, early on Tuesday morning, April 7, U.S. Treasury Security Steven Mnuchin, told Fox Business Network, that over 3,000 lenders were participating in the $349 billion small business loan program and the Federal Reserve and Treasury were working to set up facilities to support main street and municipal borrowers. Mnuchin said, If you cant get the loan today or tomorrow, dont worry there will be money. If we run out of money, well go back for more. There is extraordinary demand.

Nestman commented, Its encouraging to see our government agencies rapidly responding to the demand for the program and recognizing that banks, even those like Premier Valley Bank that have strong liquidity and are well capitalized, do not have unlimited resources to meet the needs of customers during this crisis alone.

Premier Valley Bank is not only relying on the government and the CARES Act to support customers and employees as they battle the current COVID-19 pandemic. They have delivered relief programs for consumers and business customers that include waiving account maintenance and ATM fees, deferral on loan payments and waiving penalties on early redemption of CDs. And in addition to moving most employees to work from home arrangements, the companys liberal pandemic time off program provides 100% compensation through May 31, for employees who are unable to work due to illness, school and daycare closures or other reasons caused by the pandemic. Premier Valley Bank is paying front line workers in their branches and call centers a premium and has offered 100% coverage for health care expenses related to COVID-19. Nestman shared, Our employees take care of our customers every day and are the reason for our success, and during these unprecedented times, our number one priority is the health and safety of the Premier Valley Bank family. We want our employees to take care of themselves, their families and each other and not worry about a paycheck. Our employees have peace of mind knowing weve got them covered.

CONTACT:Nichole LermaMarketing Specialist559.256.6429NLerma@premiervalleybank.com

AboutAbout Premier Valley Bank Premier Valley Bank, a member of Heartland Financial USA, Inc., (NASDAQ: HTLF), is a community bank with assets of more than $900 million. Premier Valley Bank offers a wide array of deposit, loan and private client services from locations in Fresno, Oakhurst, Mariposa, Groveland, San Luis Obispo, Paso Robles and Morro Bay. For more information, visit http://www.premiervalleybank.com or call 877.280.1863. Premier Valley Bank is a member of the FDIC and an Equal Housing Lender. About Heartland Financial USA, Inc. Heartland Financial USA, Inc. is a diversified financial services company with assets of $13.2 billion. The company provides banking, mortgage, private client, investment and insurance services to individuals and businesses. Heartland currently has 114 banking locations serving 83 communities in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Colorado, Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, Texas and California. Additional information about Heartland Financial USA, Inc. is available at http://www.htlf.com. Safe Harbor Statement This release, and future oral and written statements of Heartland and its management, may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 about Heartlands financial condition, results of operations, plans, objectives, future performance and business. Although these forward-looking statements are based upon the beliefs, expectations and assumptions of Heartlands management, there are a number of factors, many of which are beyond the ability of management to control or predict, that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in its forward-looking statements. These factors, which are detailed in the risk factors included in Heartlands Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, include, among others: (i) the strength of the local and national economy; (ii) the economic impact of past and any future terrorist threats and attacks and any acts of war, (iii) changes in state and federal laws, regulations and governmental policies concerning the Companys general business; (iv) changes in interest rates and prepayment rates of the Companys assets; (v) increased competition in the financial services sector and the inability to attract new customers; (vi) changes in technology and the ability to develop and maintain secure and reliable electronic systems; (vii) the loss of key executives or employees; (viii) changes in consumer spending; (ix) unexpected results of acquisitions; (x) unexpected outcomes of existing or new litigation involving the Company; and (xi) changes in accounting policies and practices. All statements in this release, including forward-looking statements, speak only as of the date they are made, and Heartland undertakes no obligation to update any statement in light of new information or future events.

Read the original here:

Heartland Financial USA, Inc. & Premier Valley Bank Processing $1.5B in Paycheck Protection Program Loans - GlobeNewswire

At present, COVID-19 has affected over 200 countries and territories around the world. Although the virus originated in China, it has now spread among all other countries. Even though the world is marching towards a technological boom, no one has been able to find a successful medicine and remedial measures. (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)

Daily statistics of the COVID-19 has surprisingly increased with the highlight of USA reporting the highest number of total cases of 311,357 and; in Europe, Italy 124,632 Spain 126,168 and Germany 96,092. The average total cases in the world have increased to 154 per one million up to date while death ratio in all the infected countries has increased to 8.3 per one million (5 April).

According to the WHO data the total COVID-19 cases in the world have doubled in seven days while it doubled in five days in the United States, 10 days in Italy and six days in Spain. China where COVID-1 originated has controlled the situation and the cases double only every 50 days.

Meanwhile China has announced that it has concluded all operations against corona and it was able to reduce the total cases to 57 per one million. Compared to this the rate in Iceland has increased up to 5,152 and Vatican City 8,739 (5 April).

The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) Director Robert Redfield told CNN that it would probably be around beyond this season, beyond this year. Redfield conceded that the larger medical community didnt really have a clue about what was going to happen. This is especially true, time series nonlinear forecasting model predict that total cases case scenarios of more than two million infection of world populations by mid of April, forecasting model results present in Graph 1 and 2.

Furthermore, it has found that average temperature of the countries and spread of COVID-19 significantly correlate. Correlation coefficient 0.317 is significant at 0.01 level of confidence. (Used cross sectional data from 164 countries). It may be one major case to rapidly spread the virus among the countries in Europe.

China has planned to reopen the country soon. The pandemic seems to have created a world crisis similar to the one after the Great Depression which happened during the 1930s. It is affecting the global economy through health, industries, education and service sectors.

Dynamic changes of macroeconomic characteristics

Under this situation some economists are already calling for governments to introduce measures to shore up aggregate demand. In the current situation, countries suffer from unprecedented supply shock. People are not at work because most of them are sick or quarantined. As a result of limitation of supply, demand stimulus will merely boost inflation and weak or falling GDP growth due to supply chain issues.

Estimates of the global impact of GDP in the second quarter vary: The OECD predicted that COVID-19 would lower the global GDP growth by one-half a percentage point for 2020. GDP growth could fall to zero in a worst-case pandemic scenario. As a result of depressed activity, the United Nations projects that Foreign Direct Investment flows could fall at a considerable rate, to their lowest levels since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.

Judging by the data, the shock to Chinas economic activity from the coronavirus epidemic is greater than the (2008) global financial crisis, said Zhang Yi, Chief Economist at Zhonghai Chenggong Capital Management.

The COVID-19 outbreak has generated both demand and supply shocks deepening across the global economy. OECD forecasts the largest downward growth revisions will be in countries deeply interconnected to China, especially South Korea, Australia, and Japan. Major European economies will experience dislocations as the virus spreads and countries adopt restrictive responses that curb manufacturing activity at regional hubs, including in Northern Italy.

As China is the worlds second-largest economy and a leading trading nation, their economic downturn threatens global growth. Every individual and society must give their fullest support to control the cause and Government policies would need to be focused on preventing large-scale bankruptcies and unemployment.

The global stock market has sharply fallen after the end of February by less than -30%. Consequently, the Sri Lankan stock market began to fall since the inception of the cases.

Another considerable case of liquidity support by the financial agencies is most important. The world is already awash in liquidity, with nominal interest rates close to or below zero nearly everywhere. More interest-rate cuts into deep-red territory might help stock markets. The bank of England (BOE) announced an emergency cut to interest. The US Federal Reserve followed a similar decision last week.

Aggregate demand, supply and employment

In 1936, British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to explain why the Great Depression had lasted for such a long period of time where labour markets did not seem to come into equilibrium.

For years, lots of people were looking for jobs but couldnt find them. Keynes argued that the problem was a lack of demand for goods and services, resulting in a lack of demand for labour. The way to solve this problem, according to Keynes, was to increase government spending.

Keynes has used two key terms, namely, aggregate demand price and aggregate supply price, for determining effective demand.

In figure 4, if aggregate supply price is H and demand price is C, organisations have more profit and they can hire more workers and increase the production until N2 equilibrium level of employment. The economy would be in equilibrium when the aggregate supply price and aggregate demand price become equal.

In figure 3, both aggregate demand and supply will be sharply decreasing during corona affected period (Supply S1 to S2 Demand D1 to D2 in figure 1) Global production will decrease (Q1 to Q2) but price level will be not changed and stat at the same level at (p*) under this situation a large rate of unemployment will occur globally. The meaning of globally huge unemployment is that all production resources are not used and it will be affecting low income and it will be cause to further sharply reduce the aggregate demand.

The same case happened in the Great Depression period which happened in 1930s. But the current situation is different because unemployment occurs due to compulsory isolation of people as the solution for recovery from COVID-19 until a certain period. International organisations assume that more than 2.5 million jobs will be lost in the near future.

Keynes proposed to increase demand through increasing government expenditure to increase employment. Even though the aggregate demand increased through increasing the government expenditure, aggregate supply cannot increase as much as required level to meet full employment level of equilibrium because the global economy has shut down for a considerable period. Therefore it requires a solution beyond Keynes fiscal remedies. As we know decreasing the interest rate has no power to manipulate the money market and to settle-down the crisis. Hence monetary policy also will be challenged under this situation.

Presently many governments provide funds to maintain the smooth functioning of the basic necessities of the people. IMF and international organisations are going to inject money by providing loans for the affected countries. These actions are more important to push the demand in the short run but it will be affecting price increases and inflation.

Sri Lanka has introduced maximum pricing policy for the essential goods and it is managed by the government. The uncertainties ahead swing between extremes. As the shortages worsen before they get resolved, prices of many products could go up for consumers even if laws exist against price- gouging. At the same time, constrained supplies could cause declines in demand, which in turn may end up weakening prices. All those things will happen and have already happened. Theres no magic answer here.

Aviation and tourism industry

The World Travel and Tourism Council has warned the COVID-19 pandemic could cut 50 million jobs worldwide in the travel and tourism industry. Asia is expected to be the worst affected. Once the outbreak is over, it could take up to 10 months for the industry to recover. The tourism industry currently accounts for 10% of global GDP.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) predicted the COVID-19 outbreak could cost airlines $113 billion in lost revenue as fewer people take flights. The travel and tourism industries were hit early on by economic disruption from the outbreak. In addition the impact on airlines, the UNs International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) forecasts that Japan could lose $1.29 billion of tourism revenue in the first quarter due to the drop in Chinese travellers, while Thailand could lose $1.15 billion. Meanwhile around 600,000 employments in Sri Lanka tourism and hospitality sector will be a big challenge.

The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has revised its 2020 forecast for international arrivals and receipts. UNWTO has strengthened its collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) for future actions.

Manufacturing sector

Chinas economy has spread with globalisation and it has complex supply chains, as companies worldwide came to depend on supplies from their operations. As a consequence, factory shutdowns in virus-affected provinces have resulted in shocks across a wide range of industries.

Apples manufacturing partner in China, Foxconn, is facing a production delay. Some carmakers including Nissan and Hyundai temporarily closed factories outside China because they couldnt get parts. Apple experienced shortages in its iPhone supply as a result of the company's primary manufacturer, Foxconn, shutting down much of its production in China. The pharmaceutical industry is also responding negatively for disturbance to global production. Many trade, cultural and sporting events across the world have been cancelled or postponed.

If the virus continues to spread across the world regions, uncertainty and disruption will increase and factory shutdowns would unavoidably follow all over the world. Some companies might consider revising their supply chains to find alternatives for China and affected countries. But China has announced that she has controlled the situation and is going to revamp the economic activities.

Technology sector

When considering the technology sector, China is the leading exporter of electronic components, with nearly 30% of the global export market. Disruptions in deliveries are particularly harmful for countries highly dependent on electronic supplies from China. However the technological sector will be helpful to control COVID-19 in different aspects and some experiences are mentioned below.

Immediate actions taken by the affected countries

At present, the global economy is shutting down. The German Government has introduced a short-time work allowance and granted generous credit assistance, guarantees or tax deferrals for distressed companies. Public events across the country have been cancelled. Many countries have closed their borders. Schools, universities and most shops have also been closed. India, Sri Lanka and some other countries are adopting curfew and country lockdown system.

South Korea employed a central tracking app, Corona 100m, that publicly informs citizens of known cases within 100 metres of where they are. Some countries have organised distance learning for children who are at home, with priority for children who are due to take final exams this year. The Sri Lankan Government has achieved fourth place among the countries which has successfully handled the case while most highly developed European countries are becoming worst cases.

Remedial measures

Short-term and immediate solutions

The Government and private sector have been taking immediate action with the short experience in China and some other countries. KPMG has announced a package of recommendation as well as some other experts proposing strategies to mitigate global crisis. Those recommendations can be summarised as below.

Mid-term and long-term strategies to increase supply

Scenario planning:

Risk management:

Businesses have sharpened their risk mitigation tools after each successive disruption to supply chains. For example, after the 2011 tsunami, companies like Cisco and Boeing have invested substantially in supply chain risk management policies, strategies and infrastructure so that they can be aware of [such] an event and understand its consequences, Cohen said. Now, theres a fairly well-understood methodology, and most major companies have some kind of supply chain risk management process in place.

However, those risk management processes are not healthy enough to cope with the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, Cohen said. This is unprecedented in its scale and in the extent of it. Weve never seen a disruption like this where a large number of countries are telling their populations to stay home, to not work there are lockdowns all over the world.

KPMG (March, 2020) has mentioned that theoretical and practical suggestions to manage supply under uncertain situation, it will be important to handle business under the situation of COVID-19 as well as any case of disasters.

(Search; https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/insights/2020/03/medium-to-long-term-actions.html) for details

Inward-looking economic policy for sustainability

Small countries such as Sri Lanka that depend on developed countries will definitely create big challenges with this kind of situation. Our facilities and resources are very limited compared to China, Italy, Spain and America. Sri Lanka is lagging behind them and should move to self-sufficiency instead of being an open and globalised economy.

Each and every piece of land should be cultivated, and local industries such as handloom, food processing, agricultural and manufacturing need to be urgently started, expanded and developed. Sri Lanka could even control the spreading of the new coronavirus by limiting international relations for a considerable duration.

Big workforce who are in the tourism, construction and manufacturing sectors will be unemployed during the pandemic period. It may be more than two million. These unemployed should redeploy in local sectors such as biomedical, agricultural, domestic industries, supply and distribution service (e.g. home delivery and technology based new productions). Supply chains need to reorganise accordingly.

This is a big opportunity to expand production in indigenous medicine and consumable products based on local material. It is an urgent need to give attention to provide direct and immediate support to local small and medium businesses as well as micro business to ensure their efficient operation. This is the time to restate the King Parakramabahu vision to accelerate development of agriculture and domestic industries in line with Sustainable Development Goals.

[Upali Rathnayke, Navoda Edirisinghe (RO) and Uda Weerasinghe (RO) at National Human Resource Development Council of Sri Lanka, thank you for your support.]

(The writer is Director, National Human Resources Development Council of Sri Lanka, Ministry of National Polices and Economic Affairs and can be reached via lalithadheera@gmail.com)

Read the original:

Economic impact of COVID-19 and future challenges - ft.lk

Is the world at war with the coronavirus? Last month, Xi Jinping called the Chinese suppression effort a peoples war; in the past week, Donald Trump labeled himself a wartime president, while Emmanuel Macron declared that France is at war with COVID-19. As the global response to the pandemic gathers steam, the rhetoric of wartime mobilization is everywhere. In Italy, the worst-affected country in Europe, the governments anti-virus czar has called for the country to equip itself with a war economy to confront the disease.

During the 2008 global financial crisis, policymakers became fond of using warlike language to describe their stabilization efforts, invoking big bazookas and shock and awe. But the total nature of the global response to the coronavirus makes the metaphor of wartime economics even more relevant today. Governments currently have to manage a public health emergency at the same time as central banks act to calm financial markets, armed forces are deployed to build hospitals, and citizens movements are restricted by social distancing.

But in what ways is the war economy a useful way to understand the fight against the coronavirus? The idea has been invoked to mean a variety of things: productivity, sacrifice, reform, solidarity, and resourcefulness. In some of these areas, war isnt an appropriate way to think about the global pandemic. In other respects, however, its time for Western governments to go beyond merely using wartime rhetoric. The history of 20th-century war economies offers important lessons that policymakers should already be drawing on today.

Our campaign against the disease most clearly recalls wartime emergencies in the urgent need to expand production and care. As COVID-19 cases overwhelm intensive care units around the world, we need more test kits, hospital beds, ventilator machines, masks, and protective clothinglots of them, fast. Expanded emergency care capacity is encountering supply bottlenecks, for instance of the chemical reagents used in testing, and the looming shortage of trained medical personnel. The U.S. governments invocation last week of the Defense Production Act (DPA), a Cold War law allowing it to prioritize and allocate resources to help expand private industries in strategic sectors, is a step on this road to constructing a larger medical mass-production base.

But as historian Tim Barker points out, the DPA is not the only model for such resource mobilization, or even the most effective one. There are models less reliant on the private sector than the DPA; one important peacetime predecessor is the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration. This sort of public scheme would be able to put to work the large numbers of workers who are facing unemployment in the coming weeks and months. Besides having positive economic side effects, such public employment expands state capacity and removes the need to rely on improvised exploitative labor practices, such as New York States use of prison labor to mass-produce hand sanitizer.

War-economic production is often conceived of as a national enterprise. But most war economies in the 20th century were deeply international in their supply lines. The medical mobilization against COVID-19 will have to be similarly global. There are currently about 173,000 ventilators in the United States. In the short term, the increase in American needs alone will probably exceed the entire global annual production of 40,000 to 50,000 machines. Given the complex nature and high sanitary requirements of ventilator assembly, even the DPA will only allow a small conversion of manufacturing plants for medical machine production. The shortage cannot be solved within national borders. East Asia, where the virus is under relative control, is where ventilators can be produced on a serious scale. Just as Lend-Lease and the Berlin airlift provided U.S.-produced war material for the rest of the world in the 1940s, so the realities of the global manufacturing base in 2020 suggest that mass airlifts of ventilators and machine parts from China will be needed to support adequate Western emergency care.

[Mapping the Coronavirus Outbreak: Get daily updates on the pandemic and learn how its affecting countries around the world.]

Beyond the immediate treatment of those infected with coronavirus, however, Western governments have almost universally shut down rather than ramped up production. As one financial analyst pointed out, lockdown economics is in many ways the exact opposite of the wartime economics of total mobilization. During both world wars, economic mobilization enrolled unprecedentedly large groups of male and female workers in mass production. The coronaviruss disruption of supply chains and the social distancing measures of today, however, are currently putting millions of employees in the manufacturing and service sectors out of work.

Despite the atomized nature of life under quarantine, its clear that the coronavirus resembles war in one crucial aspect: As a highly infectious virus with a significant mortality rate, it has the potential to cause mass death on a scale unseen in European societies since the 1940s. Facing up to this reality is politically difficult but unavoidable. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has asked his compatriots for 60 million small great sacrifices as they weather the pandemic. Even those who would rightly avoid the language of war, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, acknowledge that the coronavirus demands a level of collective action unseen since World War II.

Beyond the sick, wounded, and dead, war economies are based on other sacrifices, too. Under capitalist conditions, war economics raises the question of how many resources society is willing to set aside from profit-seeking ventures to protect itself. Both military power and health care fall into the category of expenditures that are essentially protective rather than productive in nature.

But beyond this, the analogy falters. Emergencies often present economies with real resource constraints. In early-20th-century war economics, the key dilemma was usually a choice between prioritizing defense or civilian productionguns or butter. The coronavirus forces us to think hard about how public health measures can be reconciled with economic production. But this is not a problem of prioritizing expenditures or limited resources. The issue is sustaining circulation. In the short run, the demands of disease prevention (quarantine measures) and care (hospitalization) will put the livelihood of those dependent on other forms of capitalist production at risk. Only massive government intervention to protect the channels of economic circulation can resolve this tension in a way that does not sacrifice the former for the latter. We might call this the ventilation or butter dilemma.

The inescapable need for state involvement helps explain why the war economy is a favorite metaphor of the technocratic imagination. Crises have always granted reformist policymakers powers to bypass legislative gridlock and entrenched interests. The coronavirus crisis is already allowing the implementation of ideas that would have been considered very radical just months ago. The speed with which U.S. legislators have embraced interventionist ideas such as direct cash transfers, freezes on mortgage foreclosures, and government nationalization of distressed firms is a major intellectual vindication of the left. For a long time, the progressive left has highlighted the very problems that the virus has now exposed so starkly: precarious employment; galloping income and wealth inequality; the unaffordable cost of health care, housing and education for many; and the peril of personal indebtedness.

A poster produced by British Railways during World War II to remind passengers of the companys services to the war effort. (Frank Henry Mason/SSPL/Getty Images)

But successful crisis management is no guarantee of durable reform. War economies can be powerful incubators of political change. But technocracy cannot make its offspring survive through its own power alone. What renders these innovations durable is the emergence of political and electoral alliances.

In the case of the European welfare state, the real fruits of wartime crisis management were only reaped after the end of conflict. Policies meant to deal with the damage of the Great Depression and the world wars created new constituencies. Despite being framed as exceptional wartime or postwar measures, many provisions rapidly became entrenched. In interwar Britain, France, and Germany, it was financial support for war victimsveterans and those left widowed, orphaned, and disabled by the warthat created the foundations for later universal pensions and child care. If the emergency response measures to COVID-19 grow to encompass a large enough groupfor example, the millions of service workers being laid offthis, too, may coagulate into a new semi-organized group with a future political role.

Precisely because of their reliance on state action, war economies are deeply political systems. War economies do not suspend politics; they raise the stakes. As opportunities for empowerment and enrichment abound, novel distributions of benefits and burdens arise in which some groups acquire power and resources not just in excess but at the expense of others. Short-lived emergencies can temporarily bracket distributional questions from political debate, for instance over wages. But the longer warlike exceptions last, the greater the opportunities for subordinate groups to leverage their power. In the early 20th century, war production made labor unions more powerful in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States, and elsewhere. Even when organized labor negotiated pacts of national unity with government and business interests, it put its power on display in the immediate postwar periods of 1918-1921 and 1945-1948, which witnessed the largest strike waves of the 20th century.

In this respect, the coronavirus lockdowns present a deeply lopsided situation. After decades of falling unionization, Western economies are confining much of their workforce to their homes while enormously increasing their reliance on a vital set of workers in the care, logistics, and retail sectors. Doctors, nurses, delivery people, postal and transport workers, grocery store employees, shelf stockers, sanitation workers and janitors, mechanics and tech employees, and farm hands are now, very clearly, the indispensable foundation of a functioning society. There is no precedent for the asymmetric mix of mobilization and demobilization of labor that we are witnessing right now. And as anyone currently working from home with children knows, the realms of office work, child care, and other forms of domestic labor are colliding as never before.

A new podcast from Foreign Policy covering all aspects of the coronavirus pandemic

Invoking warlike sacrifice heightens the need for governments to balance rewards across boundaries of class, race, region, and age. The history of war economies offers lessons in the management of solidarity under such circumstances. Beyond pioneering forms of economic planning, resource mobilization, and industrial policy, war economies spearheaded many initiatives that directly promoted solidarity in the face of sacrifice. As millions volunteered to fight while civilians on the homefront manned factories, schools, and hospitals, states were able to create a new moral economy. Its central object of contempt was the figure of the war profiteer. Every society at war between 1914 and 1945 reserved a special hatred for individuals who reaped massive profits while others risked their lives and offered their labor.

The first tool against war-induced rent-seeking was excess profits taxation. Between 1915 and 1918, every major belligerent in World War I taxed the profits of private individuals and corporations. Wisconsin Sen. Robert La Follette denounced war profiteers as the enemies of democracy in the homeland. Excess profits taxation was even higher in the next war; by 1943, U.S. firms were taxed at a rate of 95 percent for every dollar they earned above an 8 percent rate of return on capital. President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it simply: I dont want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.

Wartime economics didnt only recast what counted as legitimately earned income. As historian Mark Wilson has emphasized, one legal innovation created by wartime arms spending was the U.S. governments development of the power of statutory renegotiation. This allowed the government to revisit fulfilled private contracts, demanding lower prices in cases where it had been overcharged by private suppliers. Although these clawbacks were widely despised by industrialists, they allowed the government to avoid wasting public money because of price-gouging by contractors. In urban planning and city politics, landlords came under scrutiny as possible residential war profiteers. World War I did more than anything in the 20th century to make rent control a widespread practice in capitalist democracies. As growing numbers of people worked and lived in cities, the cost of living had to be kept within reach of the average workers income. Minimum-wage laws served the same function, ensuring workers got their fair share of the gains of the wartime boon.

These war-economic mechanisms of solidarity offer valuable ideas about how to address the current pandemic world disaster. Pharmaceutical corporations and health care middlemen can have their excess profits taxed to ensure they do not reap the exclusive benefit of the common fight against the virus. The Economist estimates that U.S. health care providers make excess profits of $65 billion a year. This is enough to produce 1.3 million ICU ventilators at $50,000 a piece or to fund the hospital stays of millions of people who will require urgent treatment for COVID-19. Congress should also investigate reinstating the Renegotiation Act of 1951 to revisit medical supply contracts resulting in excessive profits for the private sector. Rent caps and minimum-wage floors should be instituted to ease pressures on the balance sheets of households.

Economic and financial measures alone are not enough, and major interventions in housing and utilities are also needed. The initiatives of states like California and New York and such cities as Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, and Seattle to freeze evictions and postpone utility shut-offs should be expanded nationwide. (Detroit has even restored water access to those previously cut off.) The U.S. government can use eminent domain law to take over empty private residences, hotels, parks, and other spaces needed to expand the capacity of emergency health care. As James Galbraith has suggested, large logistical corporations such as Amazon, Walmart, and FedEx can be employed as public utilities, with underemployed Uber drivers filling in as additional delivery staff.

War economics emerged around the turn of the 20th century as a field that mixed careful analysis with fearful speculation. Could mass societies based on industrial production and globalized supply routes survive modern wars?

The question was pressing, since wars are by their very nature open-ended clashes whose duration cannot be predicted. Early war economists such as Polish businessman Ivan Bloch and Austrian scientist Otto Neurath examined how large and small statesGermany and Russia as well as Japan and Serbiawould fare if they had to wage war for extended periods of time. Bloch predicted that the overburdening of markets would result in major convulsions in the social order. Neurath argued that the proper organization of material supply would be a stronger foundation of national survival than financial wealth.

What both of them agreed on was that the most resilient war economies were those that did the most with limited resources. Rationing was one way of doing this, but so was technological invention. Being isolated from the rest of the world economyeither by economic crisis or by enemy armies or blockadeswas a powerful stimulus to such invention, which brought about the development of synthetic forms of polymer, fabrics, fuel, and fertilizer during the world wars.

Such resourcefulness holds an important lesson for the present. It is certainly within the material and financial means of the United States and the European Union to overcome the virus and the social and economic dislocation caused by it. Moreover, although the death toll will likely be high, we know that the pandemic will eventually end. But beyond the resolution of the COVID-19 crisis looms another problem: climate change. Will an emergency response to the disease send us out of the frying pan of the virus, into the fire of climate breakdown? The challenge we currently face is to mobilize unused labor and resources in certain sectors while protecting lives in the rest of the economyincluding future lives that depend on winding down the fossil fuel industry. Here the global effects of the virus, which has lowered carbon emissions, saved lives by reducing air pollution, and paused much of our ordinary carbon-intensive lifestyles, create opportunities for a turn to green policy across the board.

The resourcefulness of wartime economies offers a useful template for thinking about the broader context of the coronavirus crisis. Mounting a serious campaign to mitigate climate change demands a response so large that many of the virus response measures are just a start. Despite calls for a return to normality, it is difficult to imagine the post-pandemic world economy, whatever it looks like, as a restoration of any sort. Even if the virus subsides in several months or years from now, the larger state of exception in policymaking and collective action to which it already belongs is unlikely to end.

Twentieth-century war economies played an important role in allowing the peacetime economies that followed them to flourish. The key now will be to draw on their lessons of solidarity and inventiveness as the coronavirus confronts the 21st-century world economy with a new kind of warlike hazard.

Read the rest here:

How the Coronavirus War Economy Will Change the United States and the World Forever - Foreign Policy

Environment March 30, 2020 Richard Sandbrook

When we have dealt with the coronavirus crisis, we need to address the climate emergency. We have learned a lot from handling the pandemic that will help in tackling climate change.

Having learned these lessons, one hopes that recovery from the pandemic-recession would be the ideal time to leap to a green economy. Carbon emissions have fallen, as has consumption, and fracking and oil-sands production are no longer economically viable. [Canadian Crude has dropped from $52 a year ago to $8.50 today.] The battle against the coronavirus has demonstrated the importance of public goods such as health services and unemployment benefits and the centrality of collective action in an emergency. To reverse the economic slump, create good jobs and decarbonize the economy, we could massively invest in green energy and green infrastructure.

We could do so. It makes good sense to do so. Many people might now be willing to support such measures. But the problem is that global heating is primarily a political problem. Even with existing technologies, let alone those that will be available within five years, we could attain a carbon-neutral economy in a decade or two. The 2017 book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming presents a hundred ranked solutions to global warming, drawing on the work of about 200 scientists. Climate activists and scientists have reason and evidence-based projections on their side, but power structures and the culture of possessive individualism buttress the existing carbon-intensive system.

The problem is not that we dont know what to do, but that we dont do it. What we should do is implement a Green New Deal that combines socioeconomic transformation with ecological protection. This is rapidly becoming the defining position of the broad left, as ably presented by Naomi Klein in a recent book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. But achieving such a goal is fraught with political dangers and obstacles. We need to reckon with these now in order to avoid the shoals. The passage is inevitably perilous.

It is widely believed, at least by those under 40, that only a mass movement creating a lot of disruption can prevail on governments to take climate change seriously. Few readers of The Bullet would disagree. And this is an era of mass protests, many successful. In 2019, these protests occurred on every continent and across 114 countries, in the global south and north. But forming a mass movement, though a difficult challenge by itself, is just the beginning. In a turbulent and polarized era, spontaneity must give way to strategic planning.

Recently, the climate movement has gained considerable momentum. The ramping up of campaigns to divest from carbon stocks, the climate strikes organized by school students throughout the world, the worldwide protests of Extinction Rebellion and other groups. The flurry of dire reports on climatic trends all these events have brought climate issues to the forefront in rich countries. In the US, there is evidence of a cultural shift that has fossil fuel companies running scared. And media outlets are also reporting more and more urgently on climate issues, in some cases (for example UKs The Guardian) adopting the phrases climate crisis or climate emergency in reportage. We are making progress, and the struggle to banish the coronavirus shows what can be done in an emergency. But much more needs to be done.

Reversing global warming at this late stage requires deep changes in production, distribution and consumption. You dont need to be a socialist to accept this statement; it is common sense. If we had seriously responded two or three decades ago, when the science of climate change was already established, more minor actions might have sufficed. A robust and progressive carbon tax, if instituted then, might have been enough. But remediation at this point demands more radical measures.

Consider the magnitude of the challenge. The safe concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is 350 ppm. In February, readings recorded 413 and 414 ppm. According to NASA, this concentration is higher than its been in 3 million years. Although there is a lag between high concentrations and climate heating, that heating will come even if we achieve a carbon neutral economy. The challenge is not just net-zero emissions but drawing carbon out of the atmosphere. And to hold warming to under 2C (the maximum tolerable change), according to the well-known estimate of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), requires cutting carbon emissions in half in a decade and attaining net-zero by 2050. And that in a time when emissions were rising (until the coronavirus-induced recession).

This urgency has given rise to the advocacy of a Green New Deal (GND), Green Marshall Plans, and Just Transitions. The Leap Manifesto, the forerunner of these programs in Canada, contained most of the elements. They included a transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050, the building of a more just society in the process, the enactment of higher, and new forms of, taxes, and a grassroots movement to back the needed changes and to deepen democracy.

Although Green New Deals (the most popular formulation) vary in their ambition from one iteration to another, the logic is the same. Ecological transformation cannot be achieved without deep economic and social changes, both as an end (to cut emissions) and as a means (to win popular support). The transition to a net-zero carbon economy must be just and systemic to be effective.

Famously or infamously, the GND sponsored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey in the form of a resolution in the US House of Representatives in 2019, follows this logic. Denounced as a socialist plot, the plan is closer to a Rooseveltian New Deal for the 21st century. It calls for a 10-year national mobilization to achieve 100% renewable energy, giant investments in infrastructure and a carbon-free economy, and jobs for all who want to work. Accompanying the transition are measures that are mainstream in Western welfare states: universal healthcare, free higher education, affordable housing, enhanced labour rights, a job guarantee, and remedies for racism. Enforcement of anti-trust laws would, if successful, weaken the economic and political power of oligopolies. We can argue about the degree of systemic change that is needed. Any effective plan, however, must garner support through a vision of a better life, not just fear.

Conservatives, especially right-wing populists, have become climate-deniers, partly on the grounds that combatting climate change is a socialist Trojan horse. They are certainly right that the GND is a progressive project, but whether it is necessarily a socialist project is debatable. It depends partly on ones definition of socialism. For the sake of unity in a diverse movement, that debate is one we should avoid.

Regardless of ones position, we can agree the stakes are high. Powerful interests will lose out, and they will resist.

The deep economic and tax changes required to drastically cut emissions will saddle major corporations and wealthy individuals with major losses in assets, income and power. As reported in the Globe & Mail on 12 Feb 2020, Canadas banking regulator says the financial sector should assume the transition to a low-carbon economy will be sharply negative. A few brief illustrations suggest why.

These threats to the profitability and even survival of major corporations add up to a major challenge to plutocracy.

Plutocracy is a term now widely used, in this neoliberal era, to describe the fusing of economic with political power in Western liberal democracies. The result is that economic and other policies are skewed to the advantage of the top one per cent. This idea is so widely accepted that even economists, mainly the maverick variety such as Paul Krugman, employ the concept.

Its applicability, however, should not be restricted to degraded liberal democracies such as the US and the UK, but extended to authoritarian cases such as Russia and China. In the latter cases, political power has encroached on economic power, a reversal of the process in the West. But the outcome is similar: a power structure highly resistant to the major changes proposed by Green New Deals. True, some investors are attracted to the investment opportunities offered by the green economy. However, the threat to key industries may cast climate activists not as benign tree-huggers, but as security threats.

Even a cursory Google search uncovers disconcerting evidence that security services view climate activists as threats to national security. In the United Kingdom, an anti-extremism briefing issued by the government to all schools and other institutions in late 2019 included environmental groups and anti-racism organizations along with neo-Nazi and Islamist groups in the list of suspects. Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion, Sea Shepherd, Stop the Badger Cull, PETA and a vegan organization all respectably non-violent in tactics appeared. Readers were advised to be aware of the symbols employed by extremist groups and report any concerns to counter-terrorism police.

In Canada, documents released under Freedom of Information Act revealed that, during the era of Conservative government under Stephen Harper, the two main counter-terrorism agencies regarded environmental and indigenous activists as extremists. Security and police services regularly monitored these activists. Security agencies regarded protests and opposition to Canadas resource-based economy, especially oil and gas, as national-security threats (Guardian, Feb 14, 2013). The National Observer, an award-winning digital newspaper specializing in human-rights issues, reported in 2016 and 2017 that surveillance of environmental activists (which includes indigenous activists) was undertaken by the RCMP (the national police force), Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, provincial police forces and, in some large cities, municipal police forces. Jeffrey Monaghan, a Carleton University criminologist studying espionage, identifies a petro-security apparatus linking security agencies to energy corporations in Canada. This collaboration flows from the alleged threat to critical infrastructure posed by environmental activists. So the warning signs are there.

Its a safe bet that climate activists, albeit engaged in legitimate non-violent action, are under surveillance in plutocracies both western and eastern. And thats in a time of relative calm. Perhaps thats just par for the course in what has been dubbed surveillance capitalism. What is troubling is that the means of surveillance facial recognition and tracking of individuals via their cell phones is now far advanced. Should it come to a crackdown, security agencies will already know who is involved in climate activism and where they live. Civil disobedience will be seen as extremism.

What makes this outcome probable is that the climate crisis is not a stand-alone crisis; it is part of a multi-dimensional crisis of neoliberalism. This unbridled variety of capitalism has fostered problems it is unable to solve. That of course is one reason why the Green New Deals normally advocate social and economic, in addition to ecological, transformation. The Green New Deal is an alternative to neoliberalism, though not necessarily to capitalism. It is a reasonable and just response. That matters little, however, in a context increasingly characterized by dislocation, insecurity and polarization. The multidimensional crisis threatens disorder and therefore property rights. The deeper the disorder and polarization, the more likely a right-wing reaction becomes.

We might describe the simultaneous crises in various ways. They afflict the countries of the global south even more than the north, but here Im narrowing my attention to the latter. In the West in particular, three trends are asserting themselves:

These trends in tandem produce a treacherous environment.

Consider the robotics revolution. The significance of this technological shift is best understood in the context of recent history.

Neither digitalization nor the more recent sharing economy lived up to its early promise of ushering in shared prosperity or more flexible working arrangements. Instead, the neoliberal age has seen inequality and insecurity rise to new levels. This story is well known. The gig economy with its precarious and poorly paid jobs has expanded to encompass one-third of all jobs in the US, according to some estimates. Millennials in particular have had trouble finding good jobs, as well as being saddled with high debts from post-secondary education. Moreover, the economic collapse of 2008 dealt a heavy blow to many in the middle and working classes. Their recovery took years, and it is now threatened by the recession induced by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

The fourth industrial revolution of robotics is wreaking further insecurity. The higher productivity wrought by artificial intelligence could lead to a greener, more egalitarian future where available work is shared and working hours shrink. But that will not happen automatically, especially in societies already characterized by inequality, precarious employment and weak democracy.

The employment impact during the next 30 years is likely to be major. Artificial intelligence, as it well understood, displaces workers not just in routine activities in the industrial and service sectors, but in professional occupations as well. A 2017 report by the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that just over half of the waged tasks in 2017 could be done by robots and computers by 2050. In the next decade, 14 per cent of the global workforce will lose their jobs according to the institutes mid-way estimate. The job loss in industrial countries such as the US, Japan and China are much higher than the world average. These estimates, of course, simply tell us what could happen, given technological developments, not what will happen. Political trade-offs and union power, where it exists, may intercede to save jobs. Nonetheless, a lot of people in good jobs as well as bad are going to be out of work.

Economists are confident that the economy will develop new jobs to replace those that are lost: in the longer run. There will be a lag. And will those who lose their jobs be qualified for the tech-savvy, knowledge-based jobs that do emerge? Perhaps if the governments were willing to invest heavily in retraining people for the new economy. However, we cant expect that expensive path to be taken in plutocracies responsive to the demands for the wealthy for lower taxes. We are more likely to see, in many Western countries, further marginalization and inequality.

You dont need to be a rocket scientist, or even a political scientist, to foresee the political dynamics of the unfolding crisis of neoliberalism. Social stress is rising. A growing sense of marginalization and precarity is likely to produce higher anger and resentment, especially at times of recession.

Simultaneously unless we respond swiftly global heating will precipitate extreme weather events that wreak widespread damage. More extensive heat waves, floods, droughts, fresh-water shortages, inundations of coastal cities and islands, falls in agricultural and fishing yields and declines in human health are rendering certain regions uninhabitable while inducing panic.

The consequent population movements add another element of instability. The global south, suffering a more extreme climatic shift than in the north, will witness a growing stream of climate migrants to join the existing refugees displaced by war and disorder. Estimates of the numbers of climate migrants vary, but the most frequent estimate is 150-200 million by 2050. This total includes temporary as well as permanent migrants, and those who are internally displaced as well as cross-border migrants. At the minimum, several millions will join political refugees in heading for sanctuary in Europe, North America and Australia in recurrent waves.

These migrants are the victims of a climatic shift for which they bear virtually no responsibility. The rich countries, having generated most of the carbon in the atmosphere, have an ethical duty to be generous in their reception of these migrants. And yet. The movement of just a million migrants to Europe in 2015-2016 amplified support for right-wing populist parties throughout the continent. The new waves are likely to be far more numerous.

The political danger is clear. With threats to property posed by mass movements and the radical policies of the Green New Deal, concentrated economic power may ally with reactionary political forces. Conservatives feeling under threat from social movements and generalized anxiety will be tempted to turn to reactionary political forces as a means of re-establishing order and safeguarding power and property (as in the 1930s). Hitherto climate-deniers on the right may see in the unfolding of climate change an unparalleled opportunity: to appeal to the ethno-nation, casting migrants and immigrants and their elite enablers as the enemy.

The situation is the more dangerous owing to the decline of democratic institutions. Trust in government has declined during the past two decades world-wide according to numerous surveys. The Edelman Trust Barometer 2020, which surveyed population in 28 countries in late 2019, concluded that a global trust crisis is deepening. More than half the population of developed liberal democracies felt that democracy is losing its effectiveness and 56 per cent believed that capitalism does more harm than good. The far right thrives on declining trust, fear and lies.

Fortress America or Fortress Europe is the opposite of the Green New Deal. It means restricting liberal freedoms, closing borders, blaming aliens, repressing dissent and regulating national economies while safeguarding existing property rights and ethnic and class hierarchies. It involves abandoning the global south to its fate and reversing globalization. Fascism has no viable answer to the climate crisis or the socioeconomic crisis except repression.

Our future could indeed be dark, but our task is to ensure that what could happen, doesnt happen. Within limits, we can make history.

Reversing climate change is a hard sell in societies where right-wing populists have gained a following among the less-educated and more rural elements of the population. Climate change is as much a threat to these elements as to cosmopolitan elites, but the former do not see it that way. Climate change has become entangled in political polarization. Conservative populists have cast climate change as a hoax allowing governing elites to impose new taxes, expand state intervention and welcome new waves of migrants. The populist message resonates with those who feel left behind. Inequality, the exodus of good jobs, and a loss of status in multicultural societies generate resentment, anger and mistrust. Populists have shaped this anger; the left has not.

How then can the climate movement break through the class division? How can they dispel the mistrust to expand their support beyond affluent urbanites and the more highly educated? The only feasible strategy is one that attacks inequality and precarity together with global warming. Hence the importance of the Green New Deal. It envisions a more desirable and feasible future than that offered by nationalist populists.

The GND provides a vision of universal well-being to counter the hateful message of ethno-nationalism. We all the people are vulnerable to climate change, and thus must work in unison. We have a common enemy threatening our future: an economic system that is out of control. We can win the struggle by making a just transition to a net-zero carbon economy through measures that also create an egalitarian, secure and democratic society. That story-line may not work, but its the best available.

But can we forge a broad coalition of progressive forces animated by this vision? Unity and coherence are key. Civil society encompasses a variety of social movements, each with its own agenda, whether social, economic, or ecological. Furthermore, the movements operate at different levels. Some are local, some regional or national, and others transnational. Consequently, there is a cacophony of voices: how do we make them into a choir, singing the same hymn? Presumably, a political party tries to organize and channel the demands. Which party, however?

That raises the issue of the political hue of the GND. Naomi Klein contends, and I agree, that the climate movement is inherently a movement of the left. It seeks social and economic change to achieve its climate objectives. But what left? The fact is that the left has never been good at creating unity (unlike the right); some factions seem more engaged in attacking back-sliders in their own camp than engaging with the real enemy. Achieving an accord is a major challenge.

Can this change, as the threat from the far right escalates? The coalition, to be successful, would surely need to unite most climate activists with left liberals, human-rights defenders, trade unions, social democrats, socialists, indigenous activists, and identity-based groups seeking justice. Perhaps the most fruitful coalition-building strategy is to articulate a powerful vision but offer a program that remains vague in details about the future sustainable society.

But we can all agree that, in means as well as ends, the Green New Deal is a democratic project. Democracy, unfortunately, does not now favour the project of halting global heating. When given the opportunity, electorates throughout the world have voted against, or even rebelled against (as with the gilets jaunes in France), carbon taxes and other inconvenient climate measures. Political polarization and widespread alienation are having this effect. Democracy is thus a gamble, but a necessary one. Only if the Green New Deal is popular will it succeed. Yet if the polarization deepens, the struggle will ultimately be waged between a democratic and egalitarian new deal and an increasingly authoritarian, ultra-nationalist populism.

Finally, we need to counter ethno-nationalism with progressive internationalism. The fight for a Green New Deal cannot be exclusively fought at the national level. Climate change is a global issue and requires global cooperation. I cannot broach the many issues surrounding a progressive international order here. But one contentious issue open borders as part of a just transition does require comment.

Presumptive admission of climate migrants to apparent havens in North America, Europe and Australia is ethically admirable. The emissions that have caused the crisis in the global south have emanated largely from the global north (in addition to China and India more recently). But presumptive admission would likely be politically disastrous. It would provide the Far Right with an issue it could exploit.

If open borders is a policy that is right in principle but disastrous in practice, one is obliged to discuss other options. Winning power or influence is crucial for our success. Certainly, we must support a generous immigration policy. But that will not be enough to fulfill our moral obligation. Major transfers from the rich countries to the global south for mitigating climate change are critical. The Paris Agreement obliges rich countries to make financial and other transfers, but governments have shirked their obligations. A Green New Deal must include provisions for a generous immigration policy (though not presumptive admission for all), together with major transfers of green technologies and financial resources to the beleaguered populations of the global south. Even those pragmatic measures, however, may not be enough to stem the popular appeal of Fortress Europe and Fortress America.

The climate movement, with its allies, is called upon to make history at a critical juncture. The threat posed by climate change is more complex and, in the longer term, more deadly than that posed by the corona virus. But the pandemic has shown what can be done in an emergency. Can we harness the lessons weve learned? Whether we succeed cannot be foretold, and a livable and just world hangs in the balance.

Richard Sandbrook is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Toronto.

Read the original here:

From Coronovirus to the Green New Deal - The Bullet - Socialist Project

Alliance Resource Partners, L.P. (NASDAQ: ARLP) today announced a series of actions in response to the rapidly evolving impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The unprecedented decision by world leaders to lockdown the global economy to combat the deadly virus has crushed demand for energy. The price war initiated by Saudi Arabia and Russia has lowered oil prices even more. All Americans are having to adjust to a way of life none of us could have imagined two months ago.

Given the essential, life-sustaining nature of its business, ARLP continued to operate during the 2020 first quarter. For the past six weeks, however, we have been working at reduced levels while evaluating the needs of our customers amid the disruptions caused by the pandemic. It appears these disruptions will continue for the immediate near future and in light of the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, ARLP is taking the following actions:

"It is important to note that approximately 75% of our domestic sales are targeted to states that depend on coal, more than any other fuel, to generate electricity," said Joseph W. Craft III, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer. "As serious as the disruption caused by the virus has been to the citizens of these states, imagine the impact if our miners didnt show up every day to ensure the reliable supply of this essential fuel necessary to keep the lights on. We remain in constant contact with our customers and stand ready to meet their needs for this essential fuel."

Mr. Craft added, "Although we are suspending formal guidance, we currently anticipate ARLP's total sales tons for 2020 will be approximately 25% below our initial expectations. At the same time, assuming we can successfully fulfill our coal sales commitments this year, the improvements to ARLPs cash flow resulting from the steps outlined above are expected to substantially offset lower revenues, allowing us to maintain ample liquidity and protect our strong balance sheet."

Mr. Craft concluded, "In implementing these actions, ARLPs highest priorities remain safeguarding the employees health and safety, supporting the communities in our operating areas and serving our customers by continuing to safely and reliably operate our critical infrastructure. I want to thank the employees throughout our company for their dedication, resiliency and commitment during these challenging times. I also want to express my appreciation to our customers, suppliers, communities, unitholders, friends and elected officials for the sacrifices you are enduring during these uncertain times. We are all in this together. We will get through this and be stronger for it. I look forward to updating each of you as our circumstances change."

About Alliance Resource Partners, L.P.

ARLP is a diversified natural resource company that generates income from coal production and oil & gas mineral interests located in strategic producing regions across the United States.

ARLP currently produces coal from seven mining complexes it operates in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland and West Virginia. ARLP also operates a coal loading terminal on the Ohio River at Mount Vernon, Indiana. ARLP markets its coal production to major domestic and international utilities and industrial users and is currently the second largest coal producer in the eastern United States.

ARLP generates royalty income from mineral interests it owns in premier oil & gas producing regions in the United States, primarily the Permian, Anadarko, Williston and Appalachian basins.

In addition, ARLP also generates income from a variety of other sources.

News, unit prices and additional information about ARLP, including filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), are available at http://www.arlp.com. To request a copy of ARLPs Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019 or for more information, contact the investor relations department of ARLP at (918) 295-7674 or via e-mail at investorrelations@arlp.com.

The statements and projections used throughout this release are based on current expectations. These statements and projections are forward-looking, and actual results may differ materially. These projections do not include the potential impact of any mergers, acquisitions or other business combinations that may occur after the date of this release. We have included more information below regarding business risks that could affect our results.

Story continues

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS: With the exception of historical matters, any matters discussed in this press release are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from projected results. Those forward looking statements include optimizing cash flows, reducing operating and capital expenditures, preserving liquidity and maintaining financial flexibility, among others. These risks to our ability to achieve these outcomes include, but are not limited to, the following: the impact of COVID-19 both to the execution of our day to day operations including potential closures, as well as to the pandemics broader impact on demand for coal, oil and natural gas, the financial condition of our customers and suppliers, available liquidity and credit sources and broader economic disruption that is evolving. In addition, the actions of Saudi Arabia and Russia to decrease oil prices may have direct and indirect impacts over the near and long term to our minerals segment. These risks compound the ongoing risks to our business, including changes in coal, oil and natural gas prices, which could affect our operating results and cash flows; changes in competition in domestic and international coal, oil and natural gas markets and our ability to respond to such changes; legislation, regulations, and court decisions and interpretations thereof, both domestic and foreign, including those relating to the environment and the release of greenhouse gases, mining, miner health and safety and health care; deregulation of the electric utility industry or the effects of any adverse change in the coal industry, electric utility industry, or general economic conditions; risks associated with the expansion of our operations and properties; our ability to identify and complete acquisitions; dependence on significant customer contracts, including renewing existing contracts upon expiration; adjustments made in price, volume or terms to existing coal supply agreements; changing global economic conditions or in industries in which our customers operate; recent action and the possibility of future action on trade made by United States and foreign governments; the effect of new tariffs and other trade measures; liquidity constraints, including those resulting from any future unavailability of financing; customer bankruptcies, cancellations or breaches to existing contracts, or other failures to perform; customer delays, failure to take coal under contracts or defaults in making payments; fluctuations in coal demand, prices and availability; changes in oil & gas prices, which could, among other things, affect our investments in oil & gas mineral interests; our productivity levels and margins earned on our coal sales; decline in or change in the coal industry's share of electricity generation, including as a result of environmental concerns related to coal mining and combustion and the cost and perceived benefits of other sources of electricity, such as natural gas, nuclear energy and renewable fuels; changes in raw material costs; changes in the availability of skilled labor; our ability to maintain satisfactory relations with our employees; increases in labor costs including costs of health insurance and taxes resulting from the Affordable Care Act, adverse changes in work rules, or cash payments or projections associated with post-mine reclamation and workers' compensation claims; increases in transportation costs and risk of transportation delays or interruptions; operational interruptions due to geologic, permitting, labor, weather-related or other factors; risks associated with major mine-related accidents, mine fires, mine floods or other interruptions; results of litigation, including claims not yet asserted; foreign currency fluctuations that could adversely affect the competitiveness of our coal abroad; difficulty maintaining our surety bonds for mine reclamation as well as workers' compensation and black lung benefits; difficulty in making accurate assumptions and projections regarding post-mine reclamation as well as pension, black lung benefits and other post-retirement benefit liabilities; uncertainties in estimating and replacing our coal reserves; uncertainties in estimating and replacing our oil & gas reserves; uncertainties in the amount of oil & gas production due to the level of drilling and completion activity by the operators of our oil & gas properties; a loss or reduction of benefits from certain tax deductions and credits; difficulty obtaining commercial property insurance, and risks associated with our participation in the commercial insurance property program; uncertainties in our ability to generate sufficient cash from operations to maintain our per unit distribution level; uncertainties in our ability to meet guidance, market expectations and internal projections; and difficulty in making accurate assumptions and projections regarding future revenues and costs associated with equity investments in companies we do not control.

Additional information concerning these and other factors can be found in ARLP's public periodic filings with the SEC, including ARLP's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, filed on February 20, 2020. Except as required by applicable securities laws, ARLP does not intend to update its forward-looking statements.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200330005152/en/

Contacts

Brian L. Cantrell Alliance Resource Partners, L.P.(918) 295-7673

Here is the original post:

Alliance Resource Partners, L.P. Announces Actions In Response to Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic - Yahoo Finance

I AM certain I am not alone in thinking that the UK Governments handling of the Covid-19 outbreak has an air of Dads Army about it. The needless letter I will receive from Captain Mainwaring in 10 Downing Street, which apparently represents more than 5 million of taxpayers money is unwelcome at a time we have so much variety in media, and I feel the money should have gone to the NHS. I would rather he sent me a Covid-19 testing kit.

No, Boris Johnson, you cant laugh your way out of this one. There is a world of difference between having a notional plan for medical emergencies and being fully prepared for one. In this case our sentries seem to have been asleep on duty and never had bullets for their rifles anyway. Since we abandoned a manufacturing-based economy for a service-based one we cannot respond quickly in scale to emergency resource needs. Ventilators? Aprons? Masks? Everyone in the UK seems to have discovered panic buying and now finally our Government is at it. I would have expected more foresight.

The problem with a parliamentary democracy is that investment in the mythical secret warehouses we used to think existed for emergencies does not win votes.

Considering the millions we provide through government agencies and charities to research into cancer, strokes, heart disease and so forth, we have to ask ourselves how much we commit for research into combating viruses which we now know can bring the whole country to a halt and also for provisioning the processes required for testing and immunology.

But the fact remains that we knew since early January the genetic code for Covid- 19 and we could have been geared up to test everyone and isolate the positive. Instead we have adopted a universal keep away policy which has been used since biblical times to stop contagion. A cheap solution now, perhaps, but I expect more costly in the long term.

A democratically elected governments prime directive is to ensure the health, safety and welfare of its people. If this Government has been so unprepared for the current crisis, I believe we must ask ourselves what other emergencies are it also not prepared for?

Bill Brown, Milngavie.

I AM not a virologist, but cannot help expressing surprise and concern over official statements concerning the test for antibodies (Ab) against Covid-19. At least one Cabinet minister has described the test as a "game changer", and even more worrying, test-yourself-at-home kits are becoming available on the internet.

The test, if shown to be reliable, may be a useful epidemiological tool with which to map where the virus is, and has been, and of use in vaccine development, but it surely cannot be used as a signal of readiness to return to work or to abandon social distancing. A positive test for Ab means a person has immunity due either to a recent or current Covid-19 infection, it does not mean that person is no longer shedding infectious viruses. Used indiscriminately as an all-clear, could it not lead to a dangerously false sense of security and an actual increase in population exposure to virus particles? I would be delighted if one of your readers were to correct me on this.

Professor Angus Mackay, Ardrishaig, Argyll.

MORE than two weeks ago, when I saw how Covid-19 was spreading from China, I made the decision that I would not go to hospital if I became ill. Although I am frequently told how fit I am for my age I only have to look at my birth certificate to confirm that I am no longer in the first flush of youth. I feel it would be better that a younger person make use of a ventilator and the services of the medical staff. Our planets future lies with the young. I was therefore most interested to hear similar ideas being expressed on BBC Radio 4's Any Answers on Saturday.

I told my family last week who are, of course, not happy, but they know my opinions as I have a Living Will, written in 1998, and a DNAR. They have their own families and I had 57 happy years of marriage with my beloved late husband.

Obviously the worst feature of this decision would be that one could be alone at a time when family would normally be coming from far and near to provide support. One contributor on Saturday had a suggestion for those of us who are making this decision. There would be a dedicated telephone line which would lead to someone medical (in the widest sense of the word) coming to be there at the end.

Perhaps a Herald reader has a different solution.

(Mrs) Kathleen Gorrie, Helensburgh.

WE are in the grip of a deadly virus that is robbing our children of both normality and an education. It may require a lockdown that extends for months perhaps a year until a vaccine is widely available. However, while toilet roll is in short supply, we have an abundance of television channels, several of which could be utilised for social purposes in the interim.

Scotlands Government should be arranging for a full education curriculum to be broadcast daily, with groups of leading ( and charismatic) teachers in each subject, contact numbers for guidance for children and parents, and course work which can be down-loaded or sent through the post. None of this should be difficult to arrange, and we dont want children to lose a year in their educational lives. Plus, it will give them a semblance of normality, and relieve parents of the burden of entertaining their delightful progeny.

GR Weir, Ochiltree.

I ENTIRELY agree with Sheila Duffy's point about cancelling Trident and diverting the money to the NHS (Letters, March 30); however, I don't agree with her comment that standing on our doorsteps last Thursday clapping NHS workers was a "meaningless gesture". It was a very small thing to do and took up only a minute of our time, but it was an act of solidarity to show our appreciation of dedicated, brave people who are working hard under difficult circumstances to care for people who are at their most vulnerable.

I suspect that many people who stood on their doorsteps or at their windows, clapping, may never have actively supported a cause before. Making this gesture might just encourage them to join campaigns in the future; after all, every journey begins with a single step, and I am reminded of the 2014 independence referendum when people who had never before been politically involved found themselves joining in with the campaigns on either side of the debate.

Like Thelma Edwards (Letters, March 30), I too heard neighbours clapping in the misty night last Thursday, and felt comforted. This Thursday, I hope others will join us and let the clapping be heard even louder.

Ruth Marr, Stirling.

NHS staff have received tremendous praise from all members of the general public and rightly so. Once the crisis is past, I would like see places of entertainment football clubs, theatres and the like give any unused seats to local hospital staff as a way of showing our appreciation of the great work they are doing.

John Connor, Dunfermline.

I DO so agree with the expressions of thanks to the various health workers who are doing such a wonderful job of caring for the victims of this virus, but would also like to thank the many legions of frontline home carers who are coming and going and are at particular risk when carrying out such close-up work as washing, dressing and the like amongst the elderly and disabled.

Alan Stephen, Glasgow G44.

AN Englishman's home is his castle. However, the virus crisis has made it his prison and for many a place of solitary confinement, which should open the eyes of all to the misery of prison sentences and the punishments within.

Perhaps more will now take an enlightened view about the prison conditions the inmates experience and come to regard the purpose of such incarceration to be rehabilitation rather than punishment.

What the virus has also done is to convert us all to a Cyclops limited to our own little islands and kept amused by the one-eyed idiot in the corner of our homes, being liberally brainwashed by the innumerable public announcements.

We will all welcome our release from this bondage but it may take us a bit longer to recover our freedom of thought after the deluge showered upon us from this public platform.

Denis Bruce, Bishopbriggs.

I MAY be locked in but I can still look out to a ruined building where a bunch of daffodils are nodding their heads in the breeze. Wordsworth watched the daffodils, and sitting on his couch years later he sat back closed his eyes and saw the scene again with his inner eye. We can all do that.

Kay Murray, Largs.

I SEE that Prince Charles is out of self-isolation. Jings, crivvens, help ma boab. If that was a fortnight it'll be the end of June in nae time.

Rachel Martin, Musselburgh.

YOUR headline "Six months before life in Britain 'returns to normal'" (The Herald, March 30) made me remember that those of us who lived through the war had six years of it: six years of grey-coloured breakfast cereal, toilet paper you could see through, no holidays, children including me evacuated to places far from home, air raid warnings in the middle of the night, austerity everywhere.

So, let us get this "six months" threat into proportion. We can keep in touch and do many sociable activities with the help of the hitherto-despised, electronic devices.

We can weather this storm so long as we obey the rules for six months at least.

Alison Lambie, Stirling.

COULD someone please advise me if I have missed an announcement that speed restrictions have been lifted during the current crisis?

The A741 between Paisley and Renfrew seems to have become a race track rather than a dual carriageway with a 30mph speed restriction.

As we have been advised to limit our travel unless essential, I wonder if these vehicles are unmarked emergency vehicles using the reduced volume of traffic to speed to someone's salvation, or is this the hooligan element in our society showing their complete disregard for the laws of the land?

Allan Halliday, Paisley.

Read more: Now we know for sure that austerity was not necessary

Originally posted here:

Letters: Why on earth was this Government so unprepared? - HeraldScotland