Preserving Collective Memory in the Shadow of Pandemic--Priya Gupta and Peer Zumbansen Launch the Online "CoronaJournal"

"Time just flies now. As as the time is now, “let’s make this moment last”. Because living through this “time takes too much time”, and it appears to me how valuable it might be to have an open, transnational diary that collects our impressions of the lives we live now. But, it might also be the platform for an anatomy of the crisis, its before, its now and how we might be able to shape the after." (The Journal’s Beginning [pzumbansen] First entry: Wednesday, 1 April (no joke), 2020))

So ends the first entry of the brand new Coronajournal, an online journal meant as a collective project that provides multiple first person chronicles of life during the COVID-19 pandemic.  It is curated by Priya Gupta and Peer Zumbansen.  Here is how they describe the new Journal:
 

Today, Priya and I have launched an online platform – CoronaJournal – which will likely just add to all of our never ending wish-I-had-time-to-write-let-alone-read obligations and may just as well go nowhere. But, we got the idea from spending – like everyone – hours and hours every day reading from people around the world as how they experience the current moment. Much of that, for example, in Twitter, just pops up and is gone again. But, what can you do when you want to hold on and come back to it? Our little wordpress website is meant to be a platform for more or less informal diary / journal entries on we, those we know and others are experiencing this time. Entries can use different formats, include pictures, observations, reflections, links to interesting sites, whatever you would like it to be. Short is good. Our first entry is just to get us started. It does not have to be (that) long.

Here is the link to the site: https://crisis-diary.net/

Submissions should be sent to coronajournal@yahoo.com. We are still learning how to make the submissions process for blog entries more effective…. When you make a submission, please be so kind to include a short byline with your name and which city you are writing from. That would be great!

Thanks!

Priya Gupta & Peer Zumbansen

I hope you will consider contributing to this marvelous communal effort. The insight that the production, preservation and dissemination of collective memory will be a useful project, especially from those of us usually in the business of understanding rather than producing knowledge is quite powerful.  This enterprise provides us all with the opportunity to move from the analysis to the production of primary sources that cab serve as a small gift from the present to the future.

Announcing Publication of "The Many Lives of Transnational Law: Critical Engagements with Jessup's Bold Proposal" (Peer Zumbansen, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2020)

I take a moment from our focus on the COVID-19 pandemic to announce the publication of The Many Lives of Transnational Law: Critical Engagements with Jessup's Bold Proposal (Peer Zumbansen, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2020) (ISBN: 9781108490269). Peer has done a magnificent job of putting together a marvelous and envelop pushing collection of essays and engagements with both the concept of the "transnational" in law and of Jessup's continued influence in those engagements. The book may be ordered here or here. 

The publisher's description provides a nice summary:

In 1956, ICJ judge Philip Jessup highlighted the gaps between private and public international law and the need to adapt the law to border-crossing problems. Today, sixty years later, we still ask what role transnational law can play in a deeply divided, post-colonial world, where multinationals hold more power and more assets than many nation states. In searching for suitable answers to pressing legal problems such as climate change law, security, poverty and inequality, questions of representation, enforcement, accountability and legitimacy become newly entangled. As public and private, domestic and international actors compete for regulatory authority, spaces for political legitimacy have become fragmented and the state's exclusivist claim to be law's harbinger and place of origin under attack. Against this background, transnational law emerges as a conceptual framework and method laboratory for a critical reflection on the forms, fora and processes of law making and law contestation today.

Legal scholars, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and cultural theorists offer critical engagements with transnational law and regulatory governance across a wide range of issues. . . Explores the concept, theory and pedagogy of transnational law and its development into the present. . . Contributions offer intriguing insights into the history and idea of transnational law and argue for its relevance as a critical framework for the study of law in a global context

Information about the book (editor, contributors, front matter, contents plus links) follows below.

My own contribution (pre-publication), "The 'Cri de Jessup' Sixty Years Later: Transnational Law’s Intangible Objects and Abstracted Frameworks," may be accessed here. 

COVID-19 and Suicide--The Dark Side of Narrative and the Agony of Pandemic

(Pic credit here)

Hysteria, obsession, and what feels like the inescapable reality of a pandemic served up in a never ending stream of exclamation points. Thsi si what surrounds the masses in thsi era of pandemic:

The COVID-19 pandemic brings suffering, and instability, and dislocation, and trauma, and loss.  And it brings death.  It brings the death of individuals, it brings the statistics of death, it brings the ratings of death, it brings accountability for death.  It brings a constant chatter about death--death that has come, death that is here, death that is yet to come.

Death is both a physical manifestation of personal tragedy and loss; death is an abstraction that is used as an illustration, as a sign, as the symbol and harbinger of this or that. Death becomes the marker because of the identity between pandemic and death.  This is not the orderly death that can be understood by the application of the metrics of the cycle of life, a production line in the factory ordering undifferentiated passages from birth to death, nor is this death that is positioned at the end of ordinary medical protocols for the ordinary experiences of life.  It is the ultimate terror--it brings with it the potential of death, where everyone is potentially marked even as only some suffer directly or indirectly.  But in the process death becomes the air we breathe, it becomes the substance of the information we receive.  It is the subtext of all communication and the excuse for every action. We are choking on the fumes of death and touched by its drama as it is played out in personal tragedy projected through the miracle of technology to all corners of the earth.

Pix Credit HERE

Every one of us experiences death, engages with it, and participates in its passage from a potentiality on the horizon, to the whirlwind that uproots everything, to the detritus of an engagement around us that is indifferent to the way in which we clean it up.  Death comes in the petri dishes that cruise ships have sometimes become; it surrounds islands of isolation like the rising sea, always threatening to overwhelm those islands of isolation situated precariously between the satisfaction of prevention and the guilt of as passive witness of the flows of death swirling about them. witness. To avoid testing is to tempt Death, to test positive is to acquire a marker of death's potential. 

The last three paragraphs are histrionic; they read like a bad poem; they are suffocating. They mean to convey intensity, panic, emotion, alarm, and all of the other reactions appropriate to a crisis of this kind.  They are meant to contribute to a narrative that is useful for getting people to take the pandemic seriously, and to treat institutional instructions with even greater seriousness. News reports, governmental statements, the analysis of experts, the attention of social media--all of these add layers  that in the end read like a constantly reinforcing reminder of societal distress at a macro and micro level.  

But the effects of these narratives are not necessarily always positive. In its more negative forms it may be possible to surmise that these pandemic narratives spread death beyond the effects of the COVID-19 virus and its attacks on the human body.  It penetrates the human psyche and insinuates itself as a point of ecstasy of pandemic, of a euphoria that moves from light to darkness. The frenzy of death that throbs through the reporting of the pandemic and through the responsibility borne by those who confront the physicality of death, is both a great molder of societal response, of popular feeling, and when it manifests as despair, in suicide.   

Suicide is worthy of far greater attention in the midst of the many challenges of the pandemic.  It is an expression of personal agony, of illness, of despair, and of the power of the narratives of pandemic--and its expression through mechanisms of societal communication, policy and management--that is likely a far more powerful factor in the framework of epidemic response than one might gather from the single minded focus on the narratives of state and of those who seek to use their voices to move discourse towards particular ends.  It kills as surely as the virus at the heart of the pandemic. "Crisis hotlines nationwide are surging with calls from Massachusetts to Oregon, both of which are states with “shelter-in-place” orders implemented, keeping people out of work and isolated at home. In Portland, Police Chief Jami Resch said Tuesday suicide threats or attempts are up 41 percent from this time last year and have jumped 23 percent since 10 days before a declared state of emergency" (More People Died From Suicide Than Coronavirus In Tennessee This Week).

Beyond the certainty of the alignment of a sociology of pandemic and suicide, of the culture of response and of this terrible ending of life, there is little but the vast space of knowledge in need of production (two examples below: Anxiety and depression likely to spike among Americans as coronavirus pandemic spreads; and a study of the mental healthj effectys of the pandemic on front line medical personnel in Wuhan (Factors Associated With Mental Health Outcomes Among Health Care Workers Exposed to Coronavirus Disease 2019)).  

At the same time there are stories.  And these stories of those who in the face of epidemic chose that path are worthy of retelling.  A few of those stories follow. Suicide is an an abstraction; it is the sum of the stories of individuals confronted by a context of meaning, of significance, we have all helped to build.

COVID-19 and the Unadorned Italian Experience: Flora Sapio Reports from the Field

The world's attention moved quickly from China to Italy after February 2020.  Where this had been treated as an Asian problem around the New Year, that sense of distance evaporated quite quickly when the habits of globalization produced its inevitable result--the diffusion of what eventually was labelled "pandemic" around the world.

Italy has been hit hard by the CVID-19 pandemic.  Along with Spain, the human and institutional tragedies that COVID-19 will leave in its wake will require some time to assess.  Its lingering effects on EU Member States and on the structures and functioning of that great experiment in constitutional multilateralism remains to be seen. 

As part of the Conference Roundtable on COVID-19 and International Affairs, some of our participants have agreed to prov de periodic inputs for the Roundtable around which their live participation will be built.  The idea is to extend the boundaries of the Roundtable from a specific physical (even if only online) event to a learning experience that is both broader and more interactive over time. 

It is in that spirit that Flora Sapio has kindly contributed a brief and unadorned report of the Italian experience .  It follows below.  It may also be accessed in pdf form at the Conference-Roundtable website. 

Yuri Gonzalez Hernandez: Report on the Emerging Scope of COVID-19 in Cuba

(All Pix Yuri González Hernández )

The Coalition for Peace & Ethics has been reporting on the pandemic situation in Cuba (see here, here, and here). In particular we have been connecting the issues of sustainability and the UN sustainability development goals, especially related to water, and the situation of developing states like Cuba (see, Sustainability and COVID-19--Water Scarcity, Epidemics, and the Case of Cuba).

This post, prepared by Yuri Gonzalez Hernandez provides a brief and more general timeline of Cuba's engagement with the pandemic.  It is the story of a transformation from a state policy projecting medical assistance abroad, to one in which the state has to deal with a growing incidence of infection at home. It is particularly useful for comparing the arc of response in Cuba to other states in Latin America. To that end Mr. Gonzalez Hernandez will be reporting on responses in Panamá and Perú.

Mr. Gonzalez Hernandez is a Cuban Lawyer (University of Havana 2009) who is currently in residence at Penn State where he is working on his LLM degree. He had been worked as legal advisor for different Cubans companies, the tax office of La Havana and The Historian Office of the City of Havana. Since 2016 he has provided legal advice to self-employed workers, and also has participated in non-profit entrepreneur projects, aimed at the development of some communities of the City of Havana. He may be contacted at glezyuri15[AT]gmail.com 

The Report Follows below. 

It may also be found at the "Inputs" Section of the COVID-19 and International Affairs Roundtable Website(click here). In future posts we will consider  the Cuban government coverage of this matter (which may be unprecedented) and citizenship initiatives.

Sustainability and COVID-19--Water Scarcity, Epidemics, and the Case of Cuba

Sustainability, which appeared to be slated for substantial attention and action by both governments and enterprises, appears to have receded a little into the background as states and enterprises seek to survive COVID-19 while taking measures to confront and respond to the pandemic.

To the extent sustainability remains in the public consciousness--and that of social media and its influencers--it appears to be centered on economic sustainability (itself subject to whatever meaning makes the most sense to those advancing this discursive trope).  The UN Secretary General, a guest of the G20 at its 26 March 2020 meeting was quoted (by the propaganda apparatus of the UN) on this point: “We must work together now to set the stage for a recovery that builds a more sustainable, inclusive and equitable economy, guided by our shared promise — the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, he concluded. (A sustainable global economy must arise once COVID-19 pandemic is reversed, UN chief tells G-20 summit). See also here, here, and here. 

Buts sustainability is not limited to the shepre of human economic activity; nor does it revolve around the reconstitution of the customs and traditions of economic behaviors (and the rules created to enforce them). The global community has reminded itself of the complex interplay among a large number of goals the coordinated interworkings of which are necessary to achieve sustainability as something other than the maximization of value for each of its fractured and disconnected parts.

Among the sustainability development goals is Goal No. 6 Clean Water and Sanitation. Sustainability Goal No. 6 is described this way:

"Clean, accessible water for all is an essential part of the world we want to live in and there is sufficient fresh water on the planet to achieve this. However, due to bad economics or poor infrastructure, millions of people including children die every year from diseases associated with inadequate water supply, sanitation and hygiene."

"Water scarcity, poor water quality and inadequate sanitation negatively impact food security, livelihood choices and educational opportunities for poor families across the world. At the current time, more than 2 billion people are living with the risk of reduced access to freshwater resources and by 2050, at least one in four people is likely to live in a country affected by chronic or recurring shortages of fresh water. Drought in specific afflicts some of the world’s poorest countries, worsening hunger and malnutrition." (UN Sustainability Development Goals, Goal 6: Ensure access to water and sanitation for all).

The linkages between epidemics and access to water is now becoming painfully and tragically clear.  As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads to states with challenges for providing access to clean water, the ability of states to protect their people from disease can be imoeded by an inability to assure access to clean water, and by the challenge of dealing with sewage.  Where contamination is an issue both access ot clean water and proper management fo sewage ina  sustainable way  can increase national risk of containing pabdemic.

This is now worrying a number of states. Recent reporting by Inter-Press Service in Cuba, Prevención del coronavirus choca con crisis del agua en Cuba (29 March 2020) provided a contemporary window on the issues.

“Me dicen que hay que lavarse las manos con agua y jabón abundantes, mantener limpia la meseta de la cocina, lavar bien todos los alimentos y la ropa en cuanto regresamos de la calle… Pero el agua no me alcanza”, se lamenta una vecina de La Habana Vieja, entre los municipios más afectados por la sequía. (Ibid.) ("They tell me that I have to wash my hands with water and a lot of soap, to maintain kitchen counters clean, to wash carefully food and our cloths when we return from the street. . . But I do not have enough water for these tasks," lanented a resident of Habana Vieja, among the neighborhoods most affected by lack of water")

 The reporting (in the original Spanish) follows.

Shasha Li: Commentary on "Binwen Xing (Jilin University School of Law): 'Can meeting of People’s Congress be held in the form of online video?'" 邢斌文:人大会议能否以网络视频的形式召开?

Over the course of the last several years, Chinese scholars have been engaging in a very interesting discussion about the way that constitutional sensitivities to human rights affects Chinese law and practice in a number f areas. The conversation intensified after 2004 when the State Constitution was amended to include a third paragraph in its Article 33 that provides: "The State respects and preserves human rights."

This year I have the great privilege of hosting a marvelous visiting scholar from China, Shasha Li. Professor Li is an Associate Professor of Law School of Dongbei University of Finance and Economics. She obtained her Bachelor of Law from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, her Master of Law at Nankai University; ad her Doctor of Law at Jilin University. Professor Li may be contacted at fishsuncat [AT] 126.com.

I have prevailed on Professor Li to offer readers in English a glimpse at some of the rich discussion among academics who are considering the application of principles of human rights with Chinese characteristics and compatible with the Chinese political and normative system. Earlier Commentary may be accessed HERE, and HERE.

For her next  commentary, Professor Li has chosen the essay, "Binwen Xing (Jilin University School of Law): 'Can meeting of People’s Congress be held in the form of online video?'" The essay suggests the Chinese context of a global challenge.  That challenge touches on the default rules for determining the way in which we as a society can act collectively in ways that are authoritative. This becomes a significant issue where the core premise of collective action is based on the ideal of physicality, that is of the physical presence of representatives or other governance power wielding individuals at a place designated in accordance with rules whose collective actions thereby acquire a binding character by operation of law.  That, in essence is the old old definition of congress, and of the way in which public and private power have been manifested in economic, political, societal, and religious communities.

 

The Commentary, as well as the underlying article, make for interesting reading. The article considers within the broad parameters of the fundamental challenge outlined above, the legality of necessary changes to the way that the National People's Congress meets.  These changes, requiring much more remote participation was made necessary by the government's own restrictions on meetings imposed to meet the challenge of COVID-19 in China.

There is a substantial relevance to issue that are arising now in the U.S. Both Congress and business corporations are currently facing similar issues.  In that context, the legality of online or remote participation meetings becomes much more relevant. With respect to the meetings of Congress, passage of the CARE Act, meant to pump several billion dollars into the economy and support COVID-19 programs, was potentially jeopardized when a member of the House of Representatives challenged the legality of voting for the measure where a quorum of Representatives were not present in the Chamber of the House. 

Friday began on a note of chaotic uncertainty in the House, where the threat of a procedural objection from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) had forced more than 200 lawmakers to return to Washington. These lawmakers traveled by plane and car, some coming from places like New York where people are supposed to quarantine after leaving. Leaders had hoped to pass the massive legislation by “unanimous consent” or by “voice vote” with just a few members present, so that lawmakers scattered to their states wouldn’t have to return to the tight quarters of the Capitol in the midst of a pandemic. But Massie, who opposes the legislation because it adds to the deficit, was prepared to insist on a quorum — or majority of the House — which is specified in the Constitution but rarely enforced. Massie’s move drew bitter complaints from lawmakers of both parties and from Trump, who derided him over Twitter as a “grandstander” who should be tossed out of the Republican Party. (Trump signs $2 trillion coronavirus bill into law as companies and households brace for more economic pain)

With respect to corporate law, several states have had to change the law respecting shareholder annual meetings, either by executive order pursuant to a statutory grant of authority (Executive Order No. 202.8, available here), or by legislation (New Jersey, available here) to permit (but not mandate) virtual only shareholder meetings.  Expect much more in this respect n both the U.S. and China in the coming months. "California permits virtual meetings provided that prior consent from shareholders is obtained.  Still other states, such as Georgia, do not currently permit meetings to be held virtually, with or without an in-person meeting" (here).  See also the SEC Coronavirus Guidance.

Professor Li's English language Commentary follows below along with the original article (Chinese language only; English language Abstract).

Text of the “Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act” or the “CARES Act” (HR 748)

In very quick action, the political branches have passed and the President has signed the “Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act” or the “CARES Act” (HR 748S. 3548).  

President Trump on Friday signed a massive $2 trillion emergency spending bill into law, promising to deliver a tidal wave of cash to individual Americans, businesses and health care facilities all reeling from the coronavirus pandemic. His signature came just hours after the House of Representatives passed the massive package by an overwhelming voice vote, and less than 48 hours after it received unanimous approval from the Senate. * * * But tensions between the White House and Congress over how the law will be implemented became immediately apparent. In a signing statement, Trump wrote that he would not permit a new inspector general to issue certain reports to Congress “without presidential supervision.” Democrats insisted on the creation of the new inspector general in order to make sure the White House didn’t improperly disburse taxpayer money. (Trump signs $2 trillion coronavirus bill into law as companies and households brace for more economic pain)

The CARES Act is several hundred pages long; it is a miracle that the hundreds of members of Congress were able to read through the provisions carefully and deliberate.  But then this is not that type of bill and Congress has now become accustomed to passing law  of this sort, leaving to others the task of careful read through of the bill in its entirely. That suggests a longer discussion about the state of the exercise of political power in the United States, but let us leave that for another day. 

Fidelity to the highest ideals of our Republic, however, might suggest the utility of making widely available the actual text of the CARES Act for those of the electorate still attached to the principle that the electorate serves an important accountability role for its representatives.  In addition, close reading of provisions of particular interest to specific constituencies might clarify  many of the provisions that have been reduced to talking points and summarized by the press and political officials.  

For those who find value in summaries, I have included below a perfectly reasonable summary provided by the Daily Mail (and yes conscious irony in the choice).   

FINAL VERSION MAY ALSO BE ACCESSED HERE.

Chinese Policy Moves Forward in the Shadow of COVID-19 Analysis of 习近平主持中央政治局会议 分析国内外新冠肺炎疫情防控和经济运行形势 研究部署进一步统筹推进疫情防控和经济社会发展工作等 [Xi Jinping presides over the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee to analyze the domestic and foreign new COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control and economic operation situation]

For those following the evolving situation of the COVID-19 pandemic especially in leading states, it might be useful to consider the report of the 27 March Meeting of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.  

The Politburo Report was remarkably candid for reports of this type. It is worth quite careful study.

The Report (in the original Chinese--习近平主持中央政治局会议 分析国内外新冠肺炎疫情防控和经济运行形势 研究部署进一步统筹推进疫情防控和经济社会发展工作等) as reported by Xinhua News Agency, and in a crude English translation ("Xi Jinping presides over the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee to analyze the domestic and foreign new COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control and economic operation situation"), follows. 

The text of the Report is preceded by my summary of the 10 most significant areas of policy covered in the Report and what it may signal for Chinese policy in the coming half year. 

 

Dueling COVID-19 Banjos: The United States and China Fiddle With Narrative While the Pandemic Burns

(Pix Credit: HERE)

It appears that, even in the midst of substantial human suffering, there is always time for propaganda and propaganda wars.  The extraordinary narcissism of nations, taxed almost to the limits of their capacity to respond to the pandemic, devoting substantial resources to the spinning of propaganda with the objective of producing narratives of their respective greater glory, has now become an essential feature of the battles that later generations will come to understand as the COVID-19 wars. 

Thus it is that one finds oneself assaulted by the simultaneous self aggrandizing and heroic efforts of three leading political authorities to control the narrative of COVID-19 origin stories (discussed earlier here). At the same time--and as the complicit, pandering, and enabling media institutions suggest--these heroic efforts extend to the role of each of these states as the leading global force for the defeat of the pandemic.  The stakes are high, at least as measured by the lusts of the propaganda ministries of these states. The state that can claim the leading role in the glorious defeat of the plague believes that it can, at the same time, claim that the defeat reveals some sort of divine sign of the "worthiness" of the political apparatus and normative structures of the "victorious" state. The stage on which these performances for mass consumption are undertaken  reflect the logic of the institutional apparatus of each of these states.

Even to state these suppositions, the "rules" of the "game" that these states now indulge is to suggest the underlying buffoonery at the heart of these antics--but when coupled with the real consequences of the pandemic is assumes a much more macabre shading. Some brief reflections on this theme follow.