How far has Brand America fallen? The US as a failed state | Las Vegas gets big coronavirus test donation from the United Arab Emirates

I few months back I joked with a co-author of the book Brand America, that the new Brand America under President Trump is "Can't Do. Won't Do. You Do. F*** You."

-- "It's Official.  Brand America is Tanking," Forbes

I see that Nevada is boosting its covid19 testing capacity because of a donation of 200,000 testing kits from the United Arab Emirates ("Las Vegas needed help testing for coronavirus. Then a crown prince stepped in," Los Angeles Times; "After the end of the world: the eerie silence of the Las Vegas Strip," Guardian; "Effects of coronavirus fear hit Las Vegas economy hard," Las Vegas Review-Journal). From the article:

One of the largest mass coronavirus testing sites in Nevada has opened in Las Vegas, a move that puts the city one step closer to reopening its economy. And it might not have been possible without the donation of more than 200,000 test kits, worth as much as $20 million, from the United Arab Emirates.

Within weeks of the coronavirus reaching Las Vegas, members of the public were clamoring to be tested, and hospitals and laboratories were running out of supplies. Nasal swabs were so difficult to come by that some clinics closed, and state officials called on the federal government for help.

AP photo of an empty Las Vegas Strip in March 2020 

Help did arrive in Las Vegas. Supply chains eased, allowing hospitals to buy more tests, and aid trickled in from Washington.

But the intervention that changed the state’s fortunes was a large donation from Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, according to members of Nevada’s COVID-19 Response, Relief and Recovery Task Force, a group of business leaders supporting the state’s recovery.

Jim Murren, the former chief executive of MGM, who chairs the task force, said this week that the gift was the result of discussions with G42, an Emirati artificial intelligence and cloud-computing company. Although talks initially centered on how to bring back concerts and sports events to Las Vegas during the epidemic, Murren said his counterparts in the United Arab Emirates quickly realized Nevada didn’t have enough test supplies to help stem the spread of the disease.

Las Vegas Strip in 2017.  Photo: Atlantic City Press. 

At the time, the state could only manage to test hundreds, not thousands, of people daily. Those who did get tested endured lengthy wait times for results as their samples were shipped out of state to private labs in California or Arizona that could take as long as two weeks to deliver an answer. By the time state health officials learned someone had tested positive, it was too late to prevent them from spreading the virus. ... 

Nevada has received money and supplies from the Federal Emergency Management Agency but nothing that approaches the scale or the speed of the United Arab Emirates’ donation. [emphasis added] According to state health officials, FEMA has equipped Nevada with 26,000 testing swabs and 25,600 testing transport components. More supplies are on the way, officials said, but the shipments haven’t arrived.

For Murren and others on the task force, the United Arab Emirates’ gift is a sign of the relationships Vegas business leaders have cultivated overseas. But public health experts, who praised the donation, said it was also an indictment of the U.S. government’s halting response. [emphasis added] 

It made me think of "the song" "The Americans" from 1973. I didn't realize originally it was an on air editorial by newscaster Gordon Sinclair from CFRB radio in Toronto.

Instead, I was familiar with the "spoken word" 45 record version by Byron MacGregor, a newscaster at CKLW-AM radio. Back then, "CK" a high-power radio station based in Windsor, Ontario, focused on serving the American market for listeners and advertisers. It was definitely the #1 station in "Detroit."

The record focused on how much the US helps others and gets derided in response.



Obviously, that's the attitude that President Trump has, which has led to his America First agenda. 

Still, it's incredibly damning that the federal government's failure to take the lead in coronavirus testing is so severe that some states are turning to foreign countries for help.

Maybe Gordon Sinclair would think it's an example of the US finally getting back the kind of help it has given to so many others.

Instead I see it as an example of the USA as a "failed state" ("We Are Living in a Failed State," The Atlantic)."  From the LAT:

The Emirati donation “is reflective of the failure of the federal government to step up to its responsibility to make sure that in a time of scarcity every community gets the resources they need to respond to this pandemic,” said Jeffrey Levi, a professor of health policy at George Washington University.

One of the points made in "The Americans" is that at that time only the US made airplanes capable of long distance flights. These days, we have the Boeing 737MAX debacle that includes not just the airplane manufacturer but the failed oversight from its regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration.

Another was that the US aid and expertise rebuilt foreign railways in India, France, and Germany. Now, the passenger railroad system in the US is the worst of any major developed nation.

Of course, the UAE isn't a fully benevolent actor either. According to the LAT:

In addition to offering humanitarian relief, the United Arab Emirates has a financial interest in seeing Vegas come back to life. Dubai World, the state-controlled investment vehicle of Dubai, owns half of the sprawling CityCenter complex, which when it opened in 2009 on the Strip was the largest and most expensive private development in the city.

You get what you pay for.  WRT Las Vegas, too it's somewhat ironic. Las Vegas casino operator Sheldon Adelson is a strong investor in President Trump and the Republican Party for support of reduced taxes and an ultraconservative approach to Israel and the Mideast.

The tax cuts favoring the wealthy put hundreds of millions of dollars in Adelson's pocket, which was a pretty good return on his investment in Republican election campaigns, which he continued in both the 2018 and 2020 election cycles ("Sheldon Adelson to donate $100m to Trump and Republicans," Guardian).

Now the financial losses in Las Vegas at the Sands, owned by Adelson, and other casinos because of federal government failures to respond properly to the pandemic has cost all of that and more ("Las Vegas Sands Posts Loss Amid Coronavirus Shutdown," Wall Street Journal). From the article:

Casino operator Las Vegas Sands Corp. reported a 51% drop in revenue, with Las Vegas shut down in response to the coronavirus pandemic and reopened casinos in Macau struggling to recover.

On Wednesday, Sands posted $1.78 billion in net revenue for the three months ended March 31, down from $3.6 billion at year earlier. The company had a net loss of $51 million for the quarter, compared with $744 million in net income a year earlier.

Things are way worse in the US than I can imagine

(Except for the UK.

They're likely to have more deaths per capita than the US, for the same reasons, an inept government pretty much unfocused. "How did Britain get its coronavirus response so wrong," Guardian)

I've mentioned Simon Anholt's book Brand America: The Mother of All Brands, co-authored with Jeremy Hildreth. More recently, I was joking with him that the new Brand America is:

Can't do.  Won't do.  You do.  F*** you.

This article by Simon appeared even before he became president: "Is Trump tarnishing the American brand?," Guardian. It's much worse now.

First you have the June cover story by George Packer in The Atlantic, "We are living in a failed state."

From the article:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos. ...

Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

An anti-Trump protester at a rally in Sacramento on April 20. Josh Edelson, AFP.

Second, economist Jeffrey Sachs calling the Trump Administration's response to the pandemic "shambolic"  ("Jeffrey Sachs on the Catastrophic American Response to the Coronavirus," New Yorker). 

From the article:

There are many aspects of any major crisis that are similar in character, in that they require governments to assess the situation with sophistication, to identify options, to come up with strategies, and to implement them. Crisis management has a lot of common points. The nature of the crisis could be geopolitical. It could be a climate-related shock or a disease.

I would say the core issues are the capacity of political leaders and their inner team, and the capacity of the institutions of governance—agencies, departments, and ministries—to be able to process information in a timely way and to be able to harness expert advice and evidence in a timely way. We live in a complicated world. If you try to wing it, as Trump does, you end up with more than forty thousand deaths. If you want to solve a problem, you have to be systematic about it, and know whom to turn to and how to listen and amass evidence. For politicians, that doesn’t necessarily come naturally, and for our President it doesn’t come at all.

Third, economist Joseph Stiglitz avers that the catastrophic response by the Trump Administration is leading us to another Great Depression ("Top economist: US coronavirus response is like 'third world' country," Guardian).

Fourth, incredibly disturbing interview with psychiatrist Bandy Lee, about the potential for serious violence on the part of Trump and his supporters ("Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee: Lockdown protesters resemble “child soldiers” and “urban gangs”," Salon).

---

Notes

1. Sweden's touted response of no stay at home orders has led to a much higher per capita death rate than neighboring countries ("The Grim Truth About the “Swedish Model”," Project Syndicate).

2. Fox News is starting to backtrack on hydroxycloroquine, which doesn't seem to be having the effect that was touted.

3. President Trump says Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is moving too fast on reversing restrictions ("Georgia’s reopening plan gets thrown a curve as Trump criticizes Kemp," Atlanta Journal-Constitution), after Trump spent the weekend promoting protests around the country against stay at home orders--conveniently in states run by Democratic Governors.

Even on Independence Day, it's hard to feel "patriotic" in 2019 Trump America

Staging featuring tanks for the President Trump "Salute to America" speech at the Lincoln Memorial for July 4th, 2019. Photo: Erik S. Lesser/European Press Agency.

The city is agog to some extent because of how President Trump has changed the traditional Fourth of July celebration in DC -- a parade and fireworks in the evening -- to include a speech at the Lincoln Memorial, with a VIP section, and the display of tanks and other military vehicles.

That's bad, sure.

But far worse is the demonization of just about anyone other than his hardcore base of supporters and the foreign dictators he likes to kow-tow to as "the other."

The treatment by the US of people crossing the border with Mexico seeking asylum is unconscionable ("Crammed into cells and forced to drink from the toilet – this is how the US treats migrants," Guardian).

It makes me feel sick. So challenging to my beliefs about what the United States stands for. Oppposite of the language on the plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.

Asylum seekers aren't breaking a law and shouldn't be imprisoned.

It's a sad say when Uganda does a better job dealing with refugees than the United States ("We care for refugee children in Uganda. It's really not that hard to do it," Washington Post).

The photo of the father and daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande River, trying to cross in the U.S. is tragic.

People wouldn't be driven to such lengths if the US would just have a reasonable process for dealing with people seeking to leave Central and South America--areas and countries riven in part because of a negative history of US actions in those countries, along with the impacts of climate changes, the impact of US demand for drugs on governance and stability in those countries, etc.

The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter, Valeria, lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, Monday after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martinez' wife, Tania, told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. | AP

Rather than focus on building a big wall, how about investing in those countries, both in social and political institutions as well as the economy, so that people are motivated to stay rather than to leave for either political or economic reasons.

The Guardian has an article, "Tree planting has 'mind-blowing' potential to tackle climate crisis," about how tree planting can be a significant and successful response to climate change.

One initiative could be a massive tree planting and broader environment program in Central and South America.

Etc.

From the standpoint of public diplomacy and "Brand America" Trump may complain about the trade deficit, but the "brand withdrawals" and destruction of brand value by the Trump Administration is immense and it will take a long time to be able to recover.

And the US will not be able to fully revive its reputation, as other countries, especially China, step into the breach as the US increasingly becomes hermetic and transactional in its approach to the world.

-- "Rebranding America," Boston Globe, 2005

From today's parade in Takoma Park, Maryland. (Sorry that my phone camera isn't that great--it takes in too much light.)

This grouping followed Marc Elrich, the County Executive, who walked in the Parade--he wasn't driven--and he wasn't surrounded with a security detail.

Brand America

Last year, I wrote a blog entry, "Re-branding America," about the U.S. as a brand and how it is perceived overseas. The piece focused on an op-ed from the Boston Globe featuring Simon Anholt, a British pro on branding, nation branding, place branding, and public diplomacy. Among others, he authored the book Brand America: The Mother of All Brands.

Just think, Hollywood, celebrities and all that are the primary communicators (other than diplomacy, war and whatever U.S. based multinational corporations do overseas) of U.S. brand values.
Japanese passersby walk past the ad poster of the recent Japanese edition of Harper's Bazaar featuring a nude and pregnant Britney Spears , at Omotesando subway station in Tokyo Monday, Aug. 28, 2006. Tokyo's subway authority allows a station advertisement of its publisher Tokyo-based HB Japan Inc, featuring a nude and pregnant Spears, dropping an earlier plan to censor the photo. (AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama)

I hope I'm not merely becoming a fuddy-duddy. Also see "Identity ≠ branding or Authenticity is the basis of identity."