‘Low oil prices pose major threat’
‘We must get rid of corona corruption’
“THE main threat to Kuwait is not the coronavirus, it is a transient pandemic and will not last long, despite the seriousness,” columnist Dahem Al-Qahtani wrote for Al-Qabas daily.
“The main danger that everyone should pay attention to is the low oil price, in light of an unstable global system in which the government and the National Assembly are forced to pay a high price for this stability.
“The citizen will not stop demanding financial rights and benefits, whether due or exaggerated. And companies will not stop looking for tenders and projects, whether due or exaggerated.
“And between this and that the public money is under attack from snipers of opportunity, who are making all kinds of methods in order to harm it. How can we protect the public finances in Kuwait and make oil revenues and investment profits safe from excesses and unjustified exchange?
“This is the challenge facing the Kuwaiti people through its constitutional institutions, whether the National Assembly, the Council of Ministers, the Audit Bureau, or the Anti-Corruption Authority.
“For many years, the State pays unimaginable high prices, including what is paid from subsidies for electric energy, water, and car fuel, which for many years has benefited all, including residents without paying actual costs, and without rationalization of these subsidized services.
“The Kuwaiti government is required to set an immediate plan to rationalize subsidized government services in order to spare the State from paying burdensome public money costs, and serious dealing with this issue is required and not to be raised on a seasonal basis only when oil prices drop.
“We support citizens and provide them with an adequate standard of living, but it is also required to ensure that subsidies go directly to the citizen to meeting their requirements of the imperative things and without any squandering and exaggeration.
“On the other hand, the State should encourage and support the private sector by proposing the necessary major projects, which have a positive impact even on the ordinary citizen. Likewise, the State should refrain from launching unnecessary projects which are aimed at benefiting a specific denomination of authorities and individuals in the private sector.
“As a reminder, all this effort will not succeed unless there is a political system immune to interference, and it is formed through a real electoral law, and safeguarded through a law that regulates political action to prevent intruders and personal interests from reaching parliamentary seats. We will get rid of Corona disease, but we have to get rid of corona corruption.”
Also:
“There is a question looming on the horizon of this global crisis: What will the existing international system be. Would it be similar to the system witnessed after the Second World War, i.e. an international system with bipolarism or it’ll restore the same recent history to be a new emission of global uni-polarism as it was after the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Union, or is the question itself an exaggeration?” Ahmad Ghloum Bin Ali wrote for Al-Seyassah daily.
“Whoever tracks the Western and European media these days finds an unprecedented campaign against China, such as its lack of transparency in transferring the reality of infected numbers to racism towards the brown skinned people, and also to a society with barbarism and nutritional backwardness. This campaign, reports and programs that started in the same week, refers in one way or another to a global crisis in those countries that make up the international system (of permanent membership of the Security Council) led by the United States.
“This crisis among the countries stems from their inability to fill the void left by the ‘Corona’ crisis in the world, and many Western thinkers acknowledge this void. In Frie’s Affairs edition for this month, Louise Richardson says: ‘One aspect of discouragement concerning the new coronavirus pandemic is the almost total absence of the international institutions in shaping response to the global crisis. The Group of Seven major industrialized countries (G-7) was unable to agree on a joint statement, let alone a joint action, and the G20 only agreed that the problem was global and serious.’
“The Security Council has been silent, despite appeals of the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for a coordinated global response. This vacuum produced by the existing world order is a premeditated vacuum in the American newspaper, The Nation, in light of the accusations between the Republicans and the Democrats published a plan for the US Ministry of Defense for the year 2017 in which the administration warned of a future pandemic, and with careful description of the ‘most likely threat, it’s a respiratory disease (...) new influenza disease’, and the title of the plan was ‘Pandemic Influenza and Response to Infectious Diseases.’
“Not only does this epidemic tolerate what caused and causes the emptiness, but America (willingly) abandoned some tasks. Finally, America stopped funding for the World Health Organization, in which she had the largest share of contribution. She also withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement 2017, UNESCO, and froze aid funds to UNRWA 2018. In other words, the US failure to lead the world also extended to its allies to steal allies’ masks and to arm itself with the Defense Production Act to localize America’s medical products without aiding any of its allies who paved the way after World War II and remained loyal to the NATO alliance.
“This international system, which was produced by imbalance of power after the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union, could never maintain the international balance. Three decades ago, wars and unrest increased in non-allied countries, and the arms race reached the peak in human history, as it produced a neoliberal financial system. The accumulation of capital was in the hands of a few of inhabitants of the globe, and this financial system benefited from beating or bankruptcy of countries in Latin America and East Asia, using them to implement neoliberal extremist ideas, such as reducing the world’s population to match the global food production.
“Henry Kissinger did this in X (NSSM 200), which he developed in 1970 as a consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation and signed by President Ford in 1975, when the former took over the US State Department. His philosophy of using food as a weapon was aimed at reducing population, setting 13 target countries (including Bangladesh, India, Egypt, Nigeria, Brazil and Colombia ... ), And it was kept under a very secret title, as mentioned by Ismail Sukkariya a columnist in the Lebanese newspaper ‘Al-Akhbar’. Far from dwelling on the failure of the existing international system, the answer to the question’s introduction to the article about what the international system will look like after the Corona pandemic, which is expressed by Nicholas Burns (professor at Harvard University’s School of Government).
“He said in an interview with the ‘Frien Police Magazine’ that: COVID-19 pandemic is the largest global crisis in this century, in terms of depth and enormous size threatening every person on the face of the earth.” It will, in fact, accelerate what had started before this pandemic, which is the disintegration of the existing international system to enter new active poles, and the rush to a multi-polar system returns many economic, security, political, geopolitical, and even cultural matters.
“With a quick narrative, economically, the accumulation of the American public debt, which owes two trillion dollars in this crisis is a challenge in terms of the declining oil prices and inability of the shale oil companies to sell at the current price of production costs, in addition to the upcoming economic changes for transcontinental companies that will focus on the next stage which is stable production (i.e. localization of the product) instead of cheap and massive production that relied on cheap labor in countries whose currency is lower than the dollar.
“This shift will reduce the accumulation of capital, and hence the decline in growth in the United States of America, especially with the presence of an alternative (China) with a national workforce and an abundance of production at a minimal cost, in addition to the escalation of regional economic and security blocs such as the ‘Shanghai Organization’ and the ‘BRICS Group”.