Clive Hamilton, an Australian, and Mareike Ohlberg, a German, are well qualified to join in what has become a globally growing discussion on China and its place in world affairs. He's long been a think tank type; she's specialised in matters Chinese. There seem to be two main schools of thought among Western observers: those who think China is a benign influence, and those who think it's a threat. Hamilton and Ohlberg are firmly in the latter camp.

China is not unusual among civilisations in having traditionally seen itself as the centre of the world. But what is unusual is the number of Westerners who think so too. Perhaps it has to do with the (supposed) tenets of Buddhism or Taoism or Confucianism or Maoism, or maybe it's the sheer longevity of Chinese culture. Hamilton and Ohlberg don't talk about this, but they clearly think the place needs demystifying.

It is now more than 70 years since China's communist revolution and under Xi Jinping the country is very different than it had been under Mao Zedong. Xi talks about Confucius and Marx but his State is all about social control and material progress. Evoking the holy names is done to establish legitimacy and exercise power. As Kai Strittmatter wrote in "We Have Been Harmonised" (which I reviewed in Watchdog 153, April 2020) when the State can spout nonsense and everyone nods and smiles gratefully, it has little to fear from a quiescent citizenry.

Strittmatter's focus was on how Xi controls at home. While it endorses Strittmatter, the present account is more about China's external relations and the undue influence it might wield over Western politics and business. Both books make much of how Xi is "Leninist" in that the Party is dominant. But this is superficial.

All dictatorships, by definition, create ruling mechanisms that exclude opposition, so it could be said that the rulers of Myanmar or Uganda (say) were "Leninist", when they might well know nothing about Lenin and his government. It is the purpose of the power that is important, and Xi's purpose has little in common with Lenin's. Xi is at the centre of a personality cult; Leninism refers impersonally to policy.

A Whiff Of Anti-Communism?

So, the suspicion is raised that all three of our China analysts are motivated in part by an undeclared and perhaps unconscious anti-communism. Several times those who have advocated accommodation with China are dubbed "naïve", but it surely cannot often be the case that those who have been in a position to affect their country's business' relations with Beijing are taken in by the displays of friendship that are routine in diplomacy. If you are negotiating a trade deal or a border dispute you know that the person opposite represents the interests of the Chinese government. He's not chatting with you because you're mates.

Admittedly, one anonymous person is cited as having said that his interlocutor "really likes me". And George Bush the Younger did say that he had met with Putin and "looked into his soul" to deem him honest. So, yes, perhaps some world leaders are such poor judges of character (Trump, of course, saw everything in terms of "getting along" with people and was a dupe to flattery, but Trump's inadequacies might well be unprecedented and unique).

Others who have occupied high office in conventional settings have surprised with their fondness for Chinese politicians. We're told of Paul Keating, a former Labor PM of Australia, who thinks that human rights are merely "Western values" that do not apply to the Chinese Communist Party, which is the "best government in the world in the last 30 years. Full stop".

Then there's the recent example of John McCallum, Canadian Ambassador to China during the fuss over Huawei. He suggested that Canada has more in common with China than it does with the USA. Why do people come out with absurdities of this nature? It could be a psychological thing, a pleasure derived from coming out with stuff that almost no-one back home would agree with. Maybe they want to shock. Or they could have been exemplars of the liberal intellectual's penchant for comparing their own country unfavourably with an unpopular foreign country in the belief that this establishes their freedom from uncool prejudice.

If so, the Keatings and McCallums of the world illustrate not the power of Chinese propaganda but the fallibility of the human psyche. Or is it something simpler and more despicable? Australia and Canada are culturally similar to NZ, and all three have had to endure the humiliation of listening to politicians prostrate themselves before Xi lest he slap a tariff on their exports.

Trade or human rights: so goes the dilemma as it is frequently posed. Keating notwithstanding, it is not easy to make the case that China respects human rights (which are universal, not "Western"). But neither is it sensible to turn your back on China because you don't like some stuff there. They - or others - could have the same opinion about you, sincerely or not. And where would it stop? In a world of relativities how to judge objectively?

Our authors are impatient with any degree of tolerance directed at China. They talk of Hunter Biden, the President's son with links to Beijing, suggesting that Obama and Joe Biden were "sitting on their hands" as Xi built his military islands in the Pacific while Hunter was investing in China. Biden "clings to the belief, now abandoned by most, that engagement with China will induce it into being a responsible stakeholder". There's an unfair implication in this, and anyway it's wrong. The new Administration in Washington is showing every sign of a hard line toward China.

The book is strong in highlighting the many ways in which China tries to co-opt and compromise Westerners, and is a valuable resource for any wanting to research the topic. But it's unrelenting attack on any and all engagement gets to be shrill. Who doesn't get the stick? Targets of their wrath include US billionaire Michael Bloomberg and advisers close to Tony Blair and Trump.

Some of the statements attributed to people close to Blair, for instance, do sound credulous, but not all Westerners are naive. Profit and advantage go both ways. It's not a party political thing in either the US or UK. Pros and cons come from a range of backgrounds. A topical case is that of highly influential US Senator Mitch McConnell. We're told that Mitch married the daughter of a Chinese tycoon and then received millions of dollars of campaign funds from father-in-law.

Extent Of Chinese Influence Is Surprising

We're told of a resort in Italy favoured by Chinese nationals where the local authorities have allowed police from China to keep an eye out. The local Italians wouldn't care about any bigger picture. It's weird though, and sinister. The authors do make the case that Xi and his mates seek global influence, but is that surprising or dangerous for everyone else?

Some of us - and our parents and grandparents - have been living under the influence of first the British Empire and then the American empire for centuries. A key difference is that Xi is stretching out in the age of surveillance technology, where power is exercised widely and covertly in a way that the Raj and the Yankee could not have imagined. One target frequently cited is Anne-Marie Brady, a Canterbury University academic who has been harassed by Chinese agents. She merits our respect in a way that a Paul Keating does not. There will be many nasty things in many places because of Xi and his Thought.

But are we talking about a tangible global threat as is being implied? The first sentence of the preface suggested from the start that our authors are a naturally pessimistic pair. Before writing a word about China they let us know that "[t]he comforting belief that democratic freedoms have history on their side and will eventually prevail everywhere has always been tinged with wishful thinking".

Yes, of course, when Putin and Trump and all the other sordid autocrats are in the news that's an obvious reaction. But democracy is the world's default position and there are more democracies now than there ever were in the past. Every thuggish dictator knows that he has to give lip service to the ideal because it's what his people expect.

China cannot sustain its present economic growth, regional suppression, and rising inequality indefinitely, and if cracks in the facade of unity were to open, its future could be unpredictable and violent. A genuine loosening of controls that accepted diversity could yet be seen as a more skilful option. Sometimes you have to change in order to stay the same.

And might there be room for a more nuanced take than the binary positions that have long dominated? Xi's China as global saint? Xi's China as would-be hegemon? Maybe it's time to look at something between these poles. Its future is anyone's guess. In the meantime, it would be nice if governments and corporations resisted Chinese demands, whether explicit or implicit, to self-censor. Acceding to a bully is a humiliation. It's morally wrong and politically short-sighted.

THE PALACE LETTERS
by Jenny Hocking
Scribe, Melbourne, 2020

Jenny Hocking is a very persistent historian. In 1975 the Governor-General (GG) of Australia fired the Prime Minister in murky circumstances. For years Hocking had tried to access documents which would shed light on what had gone on. For decades she was rebuffed. This is the story of her campaign, which has ended in success, the "palace letters" having been released.

The palace concerned is Buckingham Palace, from where the Queen's Secretary corresponded with John Kerr, the GG (he was actually Sir John but as almost everyone involved in the tawdry affair was a fellow knight, and because the letters would make anyone a republican, I am omitting honorifics). All told, 212 letters were exchanged over three years.

The crisis arose because under Australia's eccentric Constitution, there were enough votes in the Senate opposing the Government to prevent the Prime Minister from passing a Budget, the "supply" that, from time to time, we hear about in NZ, where Governments sometimes might have to rely on support from coalition partners for "confidence and supply". Officialdom had always presented the crisis as a fluky moment when the GG had no choice. He was, after all, the Queen's representative, and the Queen was a ceremonial figure who never dipped into partisan politics. In reality she was very much involved in helping an antipodean Kerr to oust his PM.

Kerr's problem was that rather than the dispassionate semi-regal figure, stuffed with gravitas, that he was meant to be, he was a needy and bitter man who did not care for the PM. Gough Whitlam's sin was rooted in his being not just Labor, but a very smart and progressive leader. The constitutional crisis was real enough, but there were alternatives that were never looked at. Shockingly, Kerr never told Whitlam what he was planning.

The letters reveal that Kerr had told Prince Charles two months before the dismissal about his choices. Worried that if Whitlam got to know of the intrigue, he could fire Kerr, Charles opined that "surely the Queen does not have to accept" Whitlam's advice. At another point Kerr referred directly to Secretary "Charteris' advice to me on dismissal".

Queen Elizabeth and Kerr had an ally in the National Archives of Australia, which ostensibly exists in order to help researchers like Hocking access public information, but which did all it could to block her. She does not ask why, but readers might. Were the archivists under instruction from successor Governments? Would not a later Labor PM have helped achieve the transparency and accountability that governments always pledge?

And what about the Palace? Malcolm Turnbull, a recent Liberal PM, has provided a foreword. He was chosen as a republican with a background as the defence lawyer who won another epic fight against opaque officialdom in the notorious "Spycatcher" case. Turnbull remarks that the Queen's motive was to not provide a precedent for future access. From what's reported here, it's more likely that she had the same motive as official Australia. She would look bad.

No Mention Of Wider Imperial Interest

In the small worlds of capital cities like Canberra it is not surprising that senior judges became entwined in Kerr's intrigue, but there is no mention in Hocking's palace-centric account of a wider imperial interest. As discussed in "A Secret Australia", reviewed below, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was upset over Whitlam's moves to disentangle Australia from US military policy.

He was looking critically at the Pine Gap US spy base and had found out that the US was spying on his Government. The US warned that if Whitlam persisted with his announced intention of naming names in Parliament, they would stop sharing info with Australia. That was on Monday, November 10. On Tuesday, November 11, Whitlam was fired.

For a complete account of events, we need more background. Whitlam's choice of Kerr as GG in 1973 had surprised some within Labor (ALP). As Guy Rundle puts it in his chapter in "A Secret Australia", "Kerr had been heavily involved with CIA fronts... for decades. Kerr had made clear his fervent anti-communism and his belief that the Cold War was an epochal struggle between good and evil. He was also of the belief that the Left of the ALP was bound up with communist currents...".

In the context of the letters, it is surprising to find that, in their Introduction to "A Secret Australia", the editors had quoted a US Embassy cable reported by WikiLeaks. It depicted a very different Whitlam to the one that is in the public record. The Yanks were praising him. "Whitlam's forthright defence of US joint facilities was the clearest public statement he has yet made. It was effective and most welcome".

That cable was sent in February 1975, so, where are we? Did Whitlam change his mind about foreign policy issues in the nine months between this endorsement of the US and his November wariness? He seemed to have travelled a way leftwards (it is confusing, and if readers of "A Secret Australia" do not read Rundle's chapter they will be left with the idea that Whitlam was a leading Cold Warrior, having been singled out by the editors. He was certainly not that in November 1975).

Absence Of Context

None of this is discussed by Hocking, for whom the villains are exclusively Brits and Aussies. Including the US State Department in the prosecution's case could have provided a fuller explanation of why Whitlam had to go. Anyway, after Kerr deposed Whitlam and invited Liberal Malcolm Fraser to take over, Parliament, with its Labor majority, passed a motion of no confidence in the new outfit, but Kerr hid so he could not be told about it, and did not emerge until after he had dissolved Parliament.

In these circumstances, the immediate optics looked bad for Labor and at the general election that followed Fraser won a big majority. Soon Kerr was himself fired, leading him to declare that, compared to Fraser, Whitlam was a good bloke. Kerr was subsequently appointed as Ambassador to UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), where, in the face of a public outcry, he lasted one day. In 1983 none other than Gough Whitlam became Oz's UNESCO rep. Kerr was to spent most of his time after that in the UK, where his allegiance lay.

Murray Horton's obituaries of Gough Whitlam and his successor, Malcolm Fraser, are in Watchdog 138, April 2015. John Kerr died in 1991 - Watchdog never dignified him with an obituary. For fans of Netflix's The Crown, please note that it has never mentioned the role of the British monarchy in the overthrow of a democratically elected Australian government. Ed

A SECRET AUSTRALIA
edited by Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau
Monash University Publishing, 2020

A secret Australia is "revealed by the WikiLeaks exposes" the subtitle continues. This set of essays is based on the work of Julian Assange. A good deal of the content is about Assange the man. He's hugely praised here. Assange was a journalist, not a hacker. That's the central assertion. He broke no laws, but he did provide a great service for researchers by exposing the machinations of the Australian state. Assange came up with the "dropbox", whereby researchers can protect their anonymity as they probe.

The contributors share a deep dislike, often a contempt, for the Australian federal Government, which hides behind ever more secrecy. Censorship is tight, and in the tense atmosphere that prevails, journalists often feel the need to self-censor. As a Five Eyes partner, NZ gets a couple of mentions. Nicky Hager alerted us to the role of the Lange government, the one which, having publicly made a big fuss about being nuclear free, went on undisturbed as part of the US-led surveillance partners, a reality that "should not be acknowledged in public".

Detailed Look At Clandestine Involvements

Most of the book is a detailed look at the clandestine involvement of the Government with outside forces, almost always in league with America. The UK appears a few times. Assange's fate remains unclear, but surely, whatever the truth might be, the business needs to be resolved. His prolonged detention is a human rights issue as much as a legal one.

Sometimes he has done himself no favours. When Trump ran for President Assange made supporting remarks which alienated public support for him. He did so, it says here, because he thought a new person might be more sympathetic to his predicament than the Democratic lot. Hillary Clinton is portrayed as the chief tormentor. Perhaps Assange is politically and socially naive. Yet to talk with the poisonous Sean Hannity of Fox TV, as he did, was a serious misjudgement.

The political picture is as clear as the world of imperial power is murky. The Oz state - and its influential media allies - have done nothing to help the man or his cause as they cringe before the American leviathan. Would it play out the same dismal way if there were to be a New Zealand Assange? All that we know from experience is unfortunately, that, yes, it would.

LIVING WITH THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Voices From Aotearoa
edited by Tom Doig
BWB Texts, Wellington 2020

As its title suggest, this is a collection of essays about living with the climate crisis, as opposed to analysing the crisis or advocating responses. The contributors are almost all writing from a personal perspective, often recalling their own encounters with natural New Zealand. Is this the best approach to such an important topic? Of the 14 pieces, one is from an economist and two are from environmentalists. One of the latter is James Renwick, perhaps NZ's best-known expert on climate change, but his essay, like those of the other eleven generalists, is anecdotal and personal.

So, there is very little here about the science or the politics of climate. Suzi Kerr, the economist, provides a useful look at the big picture, discussing why effective action on a global scale has been so weak. Poorer countries need help if they are to cleanse their often-dirty economies, but they lack the resources, whether scientific or financial, to cope. Richer countries - who have been emitting carbon for centuries - need to subsidise them.

Kerr introduces the concepts of the "tragedy of the commons" and the "tragedy of the horizon". The former refers to the key dilemma: we all need to cut emissions and reduce consumption, but if we do it alone, others will figure that they will need to get their share before the resource runs out. The latter refers to the fact that, if an ecological collapse is seen as a distant prospect, we might carry on polluting in the meantime.

We Need Global Cooperation

For all these problems to be solved we need global cooperation. This has always been a faltering thing. Kerr advocates the creation of international networks, based on both formal and informal relationships. After outlining the situation that we face practical examples of how NZ society might foster its version of this would have been welcome. Neither is there any discussion of specific NZ ecology or biodiversity.

Many of the contributors are identified as writers. They are eloquent enough about their love of special places, but how much do the likely readers need to be convinced to care? They share the feeling and they want answers about what to do. Seven of the authors are Maori women, who explicitly write as such, and while all are passionate and socially involved, they are not scientists. So, their exhortations become repetitive. An eighth contributor is a schoolboy of Samoan descent. A Polynesian lament for lost places and alienated relationships with Nature is one all New Zealanders can sympathise with. We all share this loss.

One writer looks at a grouping in northern Norway to conclude that so many of their values are like Maori ones. That is true enough, because pre-technological cultures tend to share basic tenets, as do post-industrial cultures. But non-Maori New Zealanders are lost children too. All of them came here because of poverty or alienation in (mostly) Europe. The point that needs to be made is that we all share a love of the place and wish to restore it. We and our forebears all degraded the land over the centuries.

The selection here is narrow. Different generations and sub-cultures express themselves differently, but in essence we do not differ. Ironically, perhaps, in a selection touting grassroots reality, virtually all the contributors are based in North Island universities, Australia or New York. There's a team of five million living here, many thousands of whom are actively involved in restoring ecosystems. Their relationship with nature extends beyond the rhetorical. But none of these often - and still - invisible activists is here. Next time round, why not include (a few) more diverse voices? And why not a recent immigrant? A view from outside might see what we have not noticed.

TRADE WARS ARE CLASS WARS
How Rising Inequality Distorts The Global Economy And Threatens International Peace
by Matthew C Klein & Michael Pettis
Yale, New Haven 2020

- Greg Waite

Sounds like a throwback to writing of Lenin and Marx, doesn't it? This is certainly class analysis, by far the best I've read in many years, with lots of interesting new statistics supporting a readable and enlightening historical analysis. There's no soft-talking here. Right from the start the authors state: "Trade war is often presented as a war between countries. It is not: it is a conflict mainly between bankers and owners of financial assets on one side and ordinary households on the other - between the very rich and everyone else".

That bold statement is evidenced by the author's unique analysis of three key global economies: China, Germany and the United States. They look first at the very different national mechanisms which have ensured the profits of global industrialisation in both China and Germany have gone to their elites. China has a minimal social safety net and the hukou system which restricts the rights of migrant workers, while Germany slashed welfare and unemployment benefits and restricted the ability of workers to demand pay increases after integration.

As a consequence, both economies have declining domestic spending, driving an ever-larger share of surplus investment overseas. The result for the United States was an excessive demand for apparently safe assets, which their investment banks were only too happy to meet by creating A-rated securities out of B-grade mortgages, and the flight of productive jobs offshore to increase export profits.

Plenty Of Interesting Detail

I particularly enjoyed their thorough coverage of critical role played by seamen and wharfies in holding back the tide of globalisation up to the 1980s. The massive efficiencies of containerisation were proven in the Second World War and international trade would have ramped up much earlier were it not for their politically-informed restrictive practices/ resistance.

The authors are rightly concerned about the rising risk of increasing global conflicts, with Rightwing politicians pushing their nationalist explanation for trade impacts on jobs which conveniently ignores the underlying cause, rising national inequality. The book instead argues for greater equity in the future economy, and a new global trading system which reduced dependence on the US currency as a global reserve.

On the political front - i.e., how might this happen - the authors may be on shakier ground. They state: "The deficit countries must find a way to force the elites in the surplus countries to internalise the costs of their behaviour, and they must do so in the face of substantial opposition from their own elites". I guess it's hard not to be USA-centered when you're born in the USA, but I doubt many New Zealand readers will be keen to wait for an American saviour.

THE DEFICIT MYTH
Modern Monetary Theory And How To Build A Better Economy
by Stephanie Kelton
Yale, New Haven 2020

This book is important because it argues that, under the right conditions, governments can run large deficits with positive net economic consequences. That message is particularly relevant in ultra-conservative USA, where decades of law works to constrain new spending. It's also ironic, of course, because US governments have been free to run enormous deficits when bailing out financial crises and stimulating corporate profits - no economic theory is required when you help corporations because it's business-as-usual.

Specifically, Kelton argues that governments do not need to raise taxes to spend more. Reserve banks can bankroll governments ("print money") provided a) the economy has unused capacity i.e., is in recession b) the funded projects generate new consumer spending through creating jobs c) the Government has a floating exchange rate and avoids borrowing in foreign currencies.

"Modern monetary theory" emphasises functional economics, by which they mean evaluating policy on its social outcomes rather than models or ideology. For example, Kelton makes the case for a job guarantee, with the Government the main funder to generate socially valuable new employment in green and community initiatives.

While there are risks around the quality of Government-driven jobs, a job guarantee has clear strengths. The largest is the security desperately needed today by low-income households. Government jobs paid at a fair livable wage also set a floor under private wages. The book uses only simple language and is a breath of fresh air on economic priorities. As they state bluntly, with policies like these, you gain greater flexibility to stop funding financial crises, and start dealing with the real crises - 21% of US children in poverty, nil wage growth, inequality creating a new "gilded age", impending climate change disaster, and the US's particular speciality, health inequality.

In 1970 the US had the highest life expectancy in the world. In 2020 it is the lowest among advanced member states of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economies. And the US's infant mortality rate is more than twice the OECD average - only Chile, Turkey and Mexico have higher rates. Keep voting Trump USA, the rich will save you for sure.

The policy priorities are convincing, but the economic argument less so. Modern monetary theory advances the rather odd proposition that governments don't need to tax. Taxes are only required because they act as an incentive for citizens to work and earn the cash to meet tax obligations. Employment is the end goal of taxation, not income, because - remember - the Government can print money anytime to pay for services.

This Is Just Plain Silly

We work because we need to eat, among other things. It's hard to understand how Kelton was chief economist on the United States Senate Budget Committee. Presumably she offered a plausible argument for increased deficits at a time when they were needed. There are definitely limits on governments' capacity to print money, beyond the inflation risk.

Normal economic management requires the accounting of assets purchased by governments, and those assets carry both risks and returns. If the US government buys up junk bonds to force down interest rates for corporations, as it did, and those bonds fail they will take a loss. If a government pays wages or subsidies, however worthwhile, it needs a long-term income stream from higher growth to eventually pay that down.

The value of this book is it very clearly makes a case for reserve bank bond buying (i.e., government debt to support new spending, but not raised from the private sector) as an anti-cyclical, pro-employment, pro-environment tool - rather than the current exclusive focus on driving interest rates down while profits and housing speculation soar.

DARK TOWERS
Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, And An Epic Trail Of Destruction
by David Enrich
John Murray, London 2020

Reads like a novel. If you can get it from your local library, you'll enjoy it - and learn a lot about the deviousness of modern investment banks. The Trump story is really a sideshow, but it's certainly eye opening. To cut a long story short, when Deutsche Bank expanded into the US, no US banks would loan to Trump. Deutsche did, but cash got tight as he poured funding into his election, so he defaulted - claiming the financial crisis was a "force majeure" - an act of God - which negated his contract...

The main story is that of Deutsche Bank, originally a stable and stodgy lender in regional Germany, which sold its soul to break into the US investment banking market. And that's not an exaggeration! Deutsche Bank had an unusual, change-resistant hierarchy. There was a board of directors who supervised the company and its executives, then another board below that called the vorstand, made up of the eight top executives responsible for different parts of the bank.

There was no Chief Executive Officer at the bank; instead, one of the vorstand was selected as speaker and was in charge - so long as he had the support of his colleagues and the supervisory board. The vorstand operated by consensus, with members even taking turns providing meeting minutes. All this was about to change, because Deutsche Bank had decided to recruit a team of derivatives traders and break into the lucrative (pre-2009) US market.

This team rapidly became the profit centre of the bank. How? Simple. To beat the US investment banks, they went even further outside the law. They laundered Russian money, distorted global interest rates through the London Interbank Offer Rate (Libor) scam, devised tax frauds. Here's just one example. Up to 2009, Deutsche had been a net payer of sales taxes in the UK. After June, a Government investigator noted a refund claim for £15 million had been processed and paid. Three months later, Deutsche submitted another refund request, this time for £48 million.

Seriously Scary

An investigation was launched and the bank was advised its traders appeared to be partaking in a fraud. Nothing changed. The British government was forced to alter its tax laws, and only then did the traders respond - by moving to claim refunds in Germany. This book was a seriously scary story, even after reading other books on investment banking.

The author was able to get plenty of inside interviews because Deutsche Bank came very close to failing after 2009. These people were way beyond control through regulation. The world needs to wise up, ensuring investment banks are taxed and regulated back to much smaller businesses, separate from mainstream banking and offering real products, not financial theft.

DEAD EPIDEMIOLOGISTS
On The Origins Of Covid-19
Articles by Rob Wallace
Monthly Review Press, 2020

- Richard Keller

Of what importance is it to know where the Covid virus (SARS-Cov2) began or was released? Yes, understanding the causes of this pandemic may help with prevention or lessening the effects of the next. But as author Wallace discusses frequently in both of his recent books, the global vertically integrated industrialised (agricultural corporations and finance) food chain has very deep effects as well on the ecosphere and global justice, and he sees how the health system (epidemiologists, etc) doesn't get it and thus couldn't prevent the pandemic.

Because of this, he says: "Almost the entirety of the profession (epidemiology) is presently organised around post hoc duties, much as a stable boy with a shovel following the elephants at a circus". Political ideologies are seen generally as outside the discussion of the most important story about food and pandemics.

Wallace observes that US Leftists may metaphysically disagree about the existence of a "Professional Managerial Class", but he says in the health system "I've met its members in the flesh. They exist!". We in New Zealand would benefit from this analysis in understanding our place in that global food chain, even though Aotearoa/New Zealand is not mentioned in the book. New Zealand with its fundamentally colonialist history on this land is neither isolated nor innocent.

Robert G Wallace is an evolutionary biologist. Among other topics his research has addressed influenza phylogeography and the economics of agriculture in China, epidemiological resilience across food production systems, and the evolution of pathogen virulence across livestock landscapes. He is cofounder of the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps. And author of "Big Farms Make Big Flu" (2016).

Ben Ehrenreich, author, says about this book: "In his brilliance and in the extraordinary depth, range, and courage of his thinking, Rob Wallace is unique. "Dead Epidemiologists" makes sense of the Covid-19 pandemic like no other work I've encountered anywhere. This is radical thinking in the very best sense. Written in perfect, pissed-off, punk-rock eloquence and fury". Woo Hoo! I agree.

Like "Big Farms Make Big Flu", "Dead Epidemiologists" is a compilation of his articles, interviews, collaborations and submissions. In this book they range over 2020, as early as January in a general discussion of origins of industrial agriculture pathogens which includes discussion of the origins of agriculture itself, through to July where he analyses the work of epidemiologists in the 2002/03 SARS epidemic as they descended into bat caves to study the breeding physiologies and cycles of the Chinese horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus sinicus), among other species, perhaps, as he puts it, discovering "our inner bat" in possible similarities of those cycles with the way virus masses work in the human body in pandemics.

Planet Earth Is Planet Farm

At his best he is comprehensive, concise, and angry all at once. For example, in discussing the role of transnational companies and finance in spreading this virus he summarises much in one "Planet Earth is largely Planet Farm at this point, in both biomass and land use. Agribusiness is aiming to corner the food market. The near-entirety of the neoliberal project is organised around supporting efforts by companies based in the more advanced industrialised countries to steal the land and resources of weaker countries. As a result, many of the new pathogens previously held in check by long-evolved forest ecologies are being sprung free, threatening the whole world".

The chapter titled "Midvinter-19" is a must read in order to understand the debate about "wild" vs "lab" springing this virus loose. The title is a play on the name of the horror movie "Midsommar", by Ari Aster (2019) in which the ritual burning alive of men seems illustrative of the cruelty of our systems. "Indeed, with culture as much part of human biology as the enamel on our teeth, the violence, however clothed, is threaded deeper through mind and meat alike".

The chapter lays out Wallace's case for wild or lab in equal parts, concise and readable. But the focus of his discussion is in seeing the context which both lab and wild work within. In his words, "... we need to readjust our conceptual sights on the processes (author's emphasis) by which increasingly capitalised landscapes turn living organisms into commodities and entire production chains ... into disease vectors".

In the end he sees the cases for lab and wild connected "... scattered together around the dictates of capital and the imperial states which serve it, the various factions of power ... all back some version of expropriation or power building that regularly spring deadly diseases". Not really an isolated situation, then.

Must Return To Caring For The Land

So as to solutions, Wallace suggests we must, of course, first reject techno-capitalist innovations and then look to those who are producing on the land, "tightly disciplined mass rural movements calling for agrarian reform and agroecology,"... "decision-making in the spirit of the Zapatista principle of leadership from below ... to help re-internalise a cycle of caring for the land generation to generation".

As for the title of the book, Wallace lets his colleague, agrarian sociologist Max Ajl say it: "There's nothing necessary about (capitalism's) cruelty. Transnational agribusiness, mining, logging, and real estate chop at the tree of life for greed first and foremost ... Pleased at the ruins it surveys, the system, tended by dead epidemiologists, served up Covid-19 on its proverbial arm".