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Concerns increase over Russian military activity near Ukraine
Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Sweden, shares his perspective from Europe:
What are the Russians up to with Ukraine?
Well, we don't know. But what we do know is that they are concentrating quite substantial military forces, moving towards the borders with Ukraine at the same time as they are de facto stopping the diplomatic dialogue with them. Very strong message coming from Washington and from the European capitals that they should abstain from early military operation. But you never know. It is a fairly sort of worrying situation.
Why are there anti-vaccination protests in several European countries?
Well, I wish I knew. But there are odd people who are against vaccinations for one reason or the other. Sometimes these people are against state and authority for sort of more general reason, but sometimes there are genuine worries, I guess. And this is also utilized primarily by far-right groups, creating violence in some of the countries. I hope it will not affect vaccination rates because they have to go up.
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Biden's vaccine mandates caught in a growing culture war
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, shares insights on US politics:
What is happening with Biden's vaccine mandates?
Well, Biden put in place a mandate for employers to vaccinate or test, on a weekly basis their employees, if they have more than 100 of them. And there's been pushback from a lot of corners of society. Some smaller businesses have objected. Some governors, particularly Texas, Louisiana, have objected.
Texas said the mandate doesn't apply for large employers in its state, even though that puts the employers in a terrible situation of having to choose which level of government they should listen to. And these states have sued in federal courts. The federal courts have stayed the mandate, meaning it won't be implemented until the decision is made probably by the Supreme Court on the grounds that the Labor Department overstepped its authorities in issuing this mandate, claiming that they have the ability to protect workplace safety.
A lot of large employers have embraced the mandate. They want their employees to be vaccinated, but they don't want to worry about people quitting in mass numbers. If everyone has to get vaccinated, that's not really an issue. The evidence shows vaccine mandates generally work. People respond to them. The numbers of people who have actually quit their jobs over vaccine mandates is relatively small, although you are seeing widespread protests.
Interestingly, as coronavirus cases have dropped in the country, the vaccine mandate has probably become a little bit less important, but it is growing as a culture war issue and fostering some backlash against President Biden.
Interestingly, the Democratic Governor of Kansas herself said she's against the vaccine mandate. Kansas is a pretty conservative state, but she claims it won't achieve the President's goals, at least in Kansas, and they want to find their own way.
Aaron Rodgers takes "Cheesehead" literally
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here. Happy start to your week. I'm going to talk about something completely different today, NFL football. Aaron Rodgers. Green Bay, lost to the inferior Kansas City Chiefs yesterday, 13-7. And do you know why? It's because their star quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, wasn't playing. He has COVID. And he was asked before whether he was vaccinated, he said, "yes".
Here's the video: "Are you vaccinated and what's your stance on vaccinations?" "Yes, I have been immunized."
Turns out he wasn't vaccinated. Now that's his right but he did not adhere to the required protocols for unvaccinated NFL players because he's a weasel. Now Aaron is saying, he's being demonized by the woke mob. He's done his research. He's listened to Joe Rogan. He took Ivermectin and a homeopathic immunization protocol, whatever the hell that is. And he's allergic to an ingredient in mRNA vaccines, which of course doesn't include J&J, which he doesn't talk about. No reason for that but nonetheless, he even sent 500 pages of research that he did to the NFL.
Stop this. Stop. I mean good Lord people, tell you what? Here I actually sent, I did my research today on the NFL, the X's and O's of football. Right here, five hundred pages of my research on football strategy. I sent today to the Green Bay Packers management. I printed it out for you, so you'd see it. Now, I assume that they're going to throw it away, which is exactly what you do when somebody that knows literally nothing about a topic like me on football or Aaron Rodgers on COVID. That's your response. I mean dammit Aaron, "Cheesehead" is supposed to be an aphorism. It's not meant to be taken literally and I know we don't really want to punish Aaron Rodgers. He's a superstar. I mean it's not like he illegally deflated footballs like Tom Brady and he's a white quarterback. This isn't calling Colin Kaepernick we're talking about. We don't really want to do anything.
And by the way, the Pack could go all the way this year. So, we need him back on the field. I get it. But when it comes to the pandemic, where the United States today is the lowest vaccination rate of all of the G7 countries, even though we created the best vaccines and we secured them. We bought them faster than any other country in the world. And you know why? It's because there are people that think that Aaron Rodgers is more knowledgeable than the doctors and the scientists. And so to you, Aaron Rodgers. I want to say that the Kansas City Chiefs salute you and the rest of the country would like you to shut up and grow a pair.
Thank you and I'll be with you real soon.
G-20 summit to focus on COVID-19 as Eastern Europe faces a new surge
Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Sweden, shares his perspective from Europe:
What is happening with COVID in Europe?
Well, primarily the east of Europe is a worrying situation. Russia has substantially more than a thousand deaths every day. And Bulgaria, Romania, difficulty for the Baltic states at the moment are surging infection rates. Vaccination rates must improve. It's primarily a problem, of course, in Russia, where people don't have trust in the vaccine and trust in the records.
What's up at the G-20 Summit in Rome this weekend?
A number of officials, although neither Xi Jinping or Putin is going to be there. But one critical issue is whether there's going to be the willingness to really pay the money that is necessary to pay for vaccines and treatments in the low and the medium income countries. And if you don't get to grips with that, the risk of new variants coming and creating havoc also in our countries is substantial. So, that remains to be seen.
Protest rally against COVID-19 vaccinations on 30 August 2021 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
The world’s worst COVID outbreak (for now)
Right now, only one region of the world is reporting an increase in new daily COVID cases. Here's a hint: it's one of the places where vaccines are, for the most part, easiest to get.
It's Europe. According to the World Health Organization, the region last week notched a 7 percent uptick in new daily infections, the third week in a row that infections rose there.
Much of that comes from Central and Eastern Europe, which is currently mired in its worst COVID outbreak to date. Home to just four percent of the world's population, the former Eastern Bloc is now racking up 20 percent of all new cases each day.
Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria have in the past three days all reported their highest daily numbers of infections and deaths since the start of the pandemic.
Romania, where funeral parlors are now running out of coffins, leads the world with 22 daily COVID deaths per million people, followed closely by neighboring Bulgaria and eleven other Eastern European countries in a row.
Governments in the region, once hailed for their early action to "flatten the curve," are yet again imposing fresh restrictions on businesses, schools, and entertainment venues. Latvia recently went back to an almost full lockdown. Russia has ordered most businesses and schools to close for a full week beginning October 30, with some regions of the country starting already.
Part of the story is that vaccination rates throughout the region are still low. While three-quarters of all EU adults are fully vaccinated, those numbers fall off a cliff as you move eastward. In Romania it's barely 36 percent, while Bulgaria's mark is still below 25 percent. In Russia, which developed one of the earliest COVID vaccines, Sputnik V, just 32 percent of the population has been fully immunized. In Ukraine, it's 16 percent.
And it's not because there aren't enough jabs in stock. Despite early hiccups with securing vaccines, the EU now has more than it needs. Russia now makes its own supply in large quantities. Ukraine is a partial exception here, as the country's fractious politics have hampered its ability to buy and distribute shots.
But the region's problem isn't supply, it's demand — or, more specifically, it's vaccine hesitancy.
EU surveys find that rates of vaccine hesitancy are much higher in Eastern Europe. A recent EU poll found that just 31 percent of Bulgarians were keen to get the shot, and fewer than half of Slovaks, Croatians, and Latvians were with them. Other countries like Romania are in the 50s, but that's far off the overall EU mark of 59 percent, or the Western European countries which are almost all above 70. Surveyed separately, Russia had one of the highest rates of vaccine skepticism in the world, as does Ukraine.
Why is this happening? Not coincidentally, public trust in government is also markedly lower in Eastern Europe, where democracies are in general younger and less well established, than in Western Europe.
It's hard to draw a direct link between trust in government and willingness to take a vaccine — but in countries where people generally don't believe what their governments tell them, it's harder for those governments to convince people that vaccines are safe and important.
Moreover, political turmoil in some of the worst-hit places isn't helping: Romania's government collapsed after a no-confidence vote earlier this month, and Bulgaria is heading next month into its third election of the year, in a vote where new coronavirus restrictions are shaping up to be a salient issue.
Upshot: Unlike in earlier waves of the pandemic, most of Eastern Europe has the tools to grapple more successfully with COVID-19. But political bickering, weak trust in government, and high skepticism about the jabs are proving to be an endemic condition of their own.
The Graphic Truth: No trust, no jab in EU
After a very rocky start, the EU stepped up its COVID vaccination game in the spring, and by the end of summer had vaccinated more people per capita than the US. Close to 80 percent of EU residents are now fully vaccinated, yet inoculation levels have either plateaued or remain low where people don't trust the government, the vaccine — or both. This is leading to a third wave of the pandemic mainly in Eastern Europe, and as a result Europe is the only continent where COVID cases are now rising. We compare how much people in the EU trust their government with their willingness to get vaccinated.
Congressional spending cuts | US Politics :60 | GZERO Media
From $3.5 trillion to $2 trillion: Cuts to US spending bill mean less money for families
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, shares insights on US politics:
What does it actually mean to cut $1 trillion from the Democrats' $3.5 trillion social spending bill?
President Biden has proposed one of the most ambitious expansions of federal spending in recent memory. If he gets everything he wants, it would probably be the largest expansion of government since the Great Society, but he's not going to get everything he wants. Democrats have basically said they cannot do all $3.5 trillion in spending. They're probably going to end up around $2 trillion. So what gets cut? Well, we don't know yet. There's kind of two ways to go about this. They could either cut the number of programs that have been proposed, doing fewer things with more money on a permanent basis, or they could try to do more things, each program getting less money and potentially doing them on a temporary basis. So, a future Congress would have to extend it. What does this mean for you? Well, a lot of the money in here is designed to go directly to families, either in the form of cash payments, through the tax code, the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, or subsidies for things like child care, early childhood education, and community college. And if you cut these things back, it means less money is going to go out the door to the American people. It also means less tax increases to finance it. So the implications of what's being proposed could actually end up being a big deal for a lot of Americans who would qualify for benefits under these new programs.
More American law enforcement officers have died from COVID-19 than from other work-related causes. What is happening to them?
It turns out police officers really reflect the rest of society. They tend to be a little bit more conservative than the general population, and they read the same misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine that the rest of us do. So what you've seen, as you've seen in the case of other unions and other workforces that have tried to mandate vaccines and force their workers to protect themselves against the coronavirus, is some resistance on the part of police officers, who also happen to be in a dangerous line of work. There've been many stories of unionized workforces resisting vaccine mandates. The New York teachers union protested the mandate to the mayor a couple of weeks ago. There were rumors that a slowdown among Southwest pilots that happened last weekend was related to the vaccine mandates. Although those rumors have generally been unfounded, and could have more to do with the way that Southwest manages its airline fleet. However, this is a really common theme and it's going to continue to be common as individuals push back against these mandates, putting themselves at risk of catching the coronavirus.
US most unequal, least vaccinated in G7
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi everybody, Ian Bremmer here. Welcome to your week, happy to be back in the offices, of course, in New York City. And by the way, and what do I have at my desk here? A fan sent me a Moose the dog cookie, which how does one eat that? You can't eat that because it's Moose, you just keep it! But that's pretty awesome, a Norfolk Terrier in a cookie right there, very talented. Thank you so much.
And let's get started. So what I was thinking about as I saw over this weekend, today. Not only is the United States today the most economically-unequal of the G7 advanced industrial democracies, and the most politically divided, but we're also now in terms of first jabs of the COVID vaccine, we are the least vaccinated of the G7, which is annoying because we were the most vaccinated of the G7 months ago. And of course, all of this speaks to the fact that the United States is enormously wealthy, enormously powerful, there are so many great things about this country, but the politics are deeply, deeply screwed up. And the problems we have are self-inflicted.
And after the 9/11 commemorations this weekend, which I thought were very well done, and I thought the speeches across the spectrum were good, and did reflect both the seriousness of the event and the tragedy of the event, but also how much work is ahead of us today. But if you look at what 20 years of the global War on Terror did and did not accomplish in terms of America's position in the world, in my view, it's not that it distracted us from fighting China. I would say that the problem there was the foreign policy establishment in the US thinking that the Chinese were poor and could never innovate on their own, and to the extent that they became developed, they'd have to align with us or they'd fail.
So it was a level of exceptionalism and arrogance. And it's not like the Americans can't chew gum and walk at the same time. We are capable of having a few thousand troops in Afghanistan and still talking about, and dealing with China. Rather, I think that 20 years of the global War on Terror, both at home and internationally, allowed us to forget about the work that needs to be done all the time to be an effective democracy, to be an example for ourselves, and to be an example internationally. Because the United States is not just a superpower, we are a superpower, but more importantly, the example of our power internationally, and the power of our example for ourselves is a big piece of what makes America the great power that it is. And that is something that has eroded significantly over the last 20 years. And again, and I don't think that this is about the power position of the United States. I think that China is actually creating backlash faster internationally than the United States is, concerning its allies.
And furthermore, I mean, I think if you look around the world, the Asians particularly, very, very worried about Xi Jinping and Chinese consolidation domestically, focusing on their authoritarian and state capitalist consolidated model, and also expanding in their backyard, whether it's about Hong Kong, or recent statements about Taiwan, or the expansion in the South China Sea, the nine-dash line, all of that is making them much more desirous to see American leadership in the region, irrespective of what's happened inside the United States or what happened over the last 20 years in the global War on Terror.
If you're Canada, if you're in Mexico, you have no choice. Whatever you think of the United States, your economies are completely integrated with the US, you're going absolutely nowhere. If you are Europe, you're much more concerned, but you don't actually want to pay for the alternative. Strategic autonomy that the French and the Germans talk about, the willingness to create alternative defense models to build the kind of robust diplomatic engagement internationally that would create an alternative to American leadership, there just isn't even the beginning of that. And of course that's made harder post-Brexit, and it's also made harder post-Merkel. There was just a big debate for the German elections last night, the three main candidates to succeed Angela Merkel, and foreign policy literally was not discussed. And that tells you a lot about what the Germans think is and is not a priority these days.
Now there are other countries that clearly are less aligned with the United States, but that has a lot to do with the fact that the Americans just don't care as much, and now we're talking about the Middle East, and we're talking about Eurasia. And so whether it's the Americans saying, "Well, Ukraine, Georgia, we like your governments, but we're not really prepared to defend you if you get invaded." Or, "Afghanistan, we liked your government, but it's far away, and it's way too expensive. We don't really want to persist on the ground even with a small footprint going forward." In Syria, we say, "Assad has to go," but actually we're not really willing to do anything about it. And so the Russians, the Turks, the Iranians can take over. I mean, that is broadly speaking a part of the world that just does not matter as much to the average American, or to the American national security interest. And as a consequence, there's more of a power vacuum in a lot of those places.
But American legitimacy in terms of, to what extent its power as an example to others, its rulemaking capacity and interest, its moral legitimacy and suasion, those things are really eroding significantly. And 20 years after 9/11, those are the things the Americans need to be focusing on much more. That should be the lesson from 20 after 9/11, the lesson should be that the last act of the United States in the war of Afghanistan was 10 Afghan civilians getting killed mistakenly when we thought we were taking out a suicide bomber that was going to attack the Hamid Karzai International Airport, we were wrong.
And how many times do we need to be wrong, and do so many hundreds and thousands of people, millions of people, that are displaced from these wars need to suffer the ultimate price as a consequence? The torture, the illegal renditions, those were things the Americans did in service of national security and to fight terror, but as a consequence we hurt our own moral authority. We hurt what America stands for, who the Americans need to be, the country we want to be internationally, at least I think we want to be; I certainly want us to be.
And at home, the increasing surveillance, the lack of privacy, the erosion of civil liberties and human rights, this is something that we can't take for granted. And 20 years of the War on Terror have absolutely eroded those rights inside the United States. And now our country is more divided than it's been at any point in any of our lifetimes, it's worse than 1968. You'd have to go back to the gilded age before the Great Depression to see an American economy that was as divided, even though we are, of course, as a whole so much wealthier now, and you'd have to go back really to the election of 1876 before you saw a polity that was so incredibly divided.
And that's why the news of this weekend, that suddenly the United States is less vaccinated with its first jabs than any other G7 country, we've got the vaccines, but suddenly it's become tribal warfare in the United States about whether or not you want to be vaccinated. And that's an insane thing. But in a country that's this divided, where your way of sticking it to the man is saying that you're opposed to the thing that they're telling you to do, because you know that you can hurt them as a consequence, and we see this, it's so pernicious, it's so dangerous to our system, and it is decidedly worse than in any other advanced industrial economy. You do not see this level of dysfunction in the UK, in Canada, in Germany, in France, in Japan. And those are the lessons we need to be taking 20 years after 9/11, after the global War on Terror got started.
So, I hope that's a little interesting to kick off this week. Those are my thoughts, and I'll be with you all real soon. Be good.- Make the COVID vaccine mandatory - GZERO Media ›
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