Making money from death and suffering

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UK arms sales to repressive regimes increased by £1bn last year compared with 2018. The increase, of more than 300%, has been condemned by arms control campaigners, who accuse the government of putting profits before human rights.
In 2019 the UK sold £1.3bn worth of weapons to 26 of the 48 countries that are classed as “not free” by Freedom House, the US government-funded pro-democracy institution. This was compared with just £310m in 2018. Business is brisk among those countries which the Foreign Office itself identifies as having poor human rights records.



In 2018, the UK sold £173m worth of arms to states on the Foreign Office list of “human rights priority countries” – nations identified as having human rights issues. But last year this increased to £849m, an increase of 390%.
Andrew Smith, of Campaign Against Arms Trade, said: “The UK government is always telling us how robust its arms export controls supposedly are, but these figures make clear that nothing could be further from the truth. The UK arms industry is dominated by human rights abusers, despots and dictatorships. The figures may be good for the arms dealers, but these weapons could be used in atrocities and abuses for years to come.”
2019 was a lucrative year in terms of licences to Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and UAE. The increase could have been significantly larger. A court ruling freezing arms sales to Saudi Arabia had a considerable impact on UK exports to the kingdom in the second half of last year.
And the figures do not include open licences which allow the export of an unlimited number of consignments over a fixed period, typically between three and five years.
In 2018, the Observer revealed that, for the previous five years, the UK had been selling missiles and bombs to the Saudis under the open licence system.
“These sales are only possible because of the complicity of the UK government, which has consistently put arms company profits ahead of human rights,” Smith said. “UK-made fighter jets and bombs are doing terrible damage in Yemen. The war has killed tens of thousands of people and depleted the healthcare system in a time of crisis.”






Humanity’s way forward

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“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew….It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” – Arundhati Roy
With the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, human society faces a moment of reckoning. No country has been spared and all have suffered in some shape or form. The lockdowns have deprived millions of daily wage earners pushing many families into hunger. Many small farmers continue to work their fields or rear their livestock but their local markets have shut down making it difficult for them to sell their produce and harvests have been left rotting in the fields. Fishing communities have also suffered unable to transport their catch to towns and cities. The global corporate Big Ag food industry which relies on international supply chains to function has been hit even harder because of travel bans affecting labour supply and international distribution and their normal reserves in storage are running out. Singapore, for example, imports some 90 percent of its food; Iraq, which used to be the breadbasket of the Middle East, also gets more than 80 percent of its food from abroad. For global food security, the pandemic bodes ill. The World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) are warning of the risk of worldwide “food shortages”.

For socialists, the food supply, a necessity for all, should rely on cooperation and not competition. Principles of solidarity should determine its production and distribution. Socialism which promotes life over profits must become the foundation of human civilisation. We are not living in such a world now, but we surely can. It is now the time to start building an equitable and just society. Wealth is in the hands of a few while the majority struggle simply to get by. People across the world are turning to their governments for desperately needed health services and financial support. The pandemic is thus strengthening state power and nationalism in many countries.



 But now the inequalities and injustices are no longer invisible. Some are beginning to ask why are some rich and others poor (nations and people),  why are some privileged and most not. Some now see that our system is designed to perpetuate rather than eradicate social divisions, and that must be changed.



The pandemic is merely bringing to the fore the threat food production faces from the climate crisis where much of the world will face disruptions of supplies of food and water. We need desperately to create a fairer society. We all deserve a better world where our well-being comes before profits. We can make it happen but we have no time to waste. We have a much work to do even as we are at present largely confined to our homes. Our problems are solvable. It’s so simple. All that is required is a shift in attitude, a switch in thinking and the start to take action. COVID-19 may be the trigger for the change in the way we want to live our lives.

COVID19 – Can the Market Bring the Cure?

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Jane Halton is a former secretary of Australia’s health and finance departments, is chair of the coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations, a global body playing a critical role in financing and coordinating Covid-19 vaccine development.
The question she and  her team come back to time and again is when the successful vaccines emerge, what can be done to ensure they don’t simply go to those with the deepest pockets? If market power is allowed to dictate access, how can those most vulnerable to Covid-19 be assured of protection?

“We are acutely aware of this and it is literally a topic that is being discussed on a daily basis,” she tells the Guardian. “Because to us it is just unacceptable that there is not fair access to a successful vaccine across the world’s population. “The notion that this would be a question of going to the highest bidder, to us is just totally unacceptable.”
A paper published in the Lancet last month warned of the significant prospect that wealthy countries would monopolise global supply of Covid-19 vaccines.
“This risk is real,” the paper warned. “Such an outcome would result in a suboptimal allocation of an initially scarce resource.”

The world has witnessed what happens when the market is left to dictate vaccine distribution. During the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, wealthy nations negotiated large advance orders of the vaccine, effectively crowding out poorer countries.

The West African ebola crisis – an outbreak that killed

11,325 people – exposed its own galling market failure. As the death toll in West Africa grew and grew, big pharmaceuticals could not see a way to recoup the considerable losses they would face attempting to find a vaccine.



The leader of Britain’s ebola response, Adrian Hill, said there was simply no “big market” to make it worthwhile for massive corporations.

“There was no business case to make an ebola vaccine for the people who needed it most,” he said.

The coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations explained at the time , “The world’s response to this crisis fell tragically short. A vaccine that had been under development for more than a decade was not deployed until over a year into the epidemic. That vaccine was shown to be 100% effective, suggesting that much of the epidemic could have been prevented. It was evident that we needed a better system to speed the development of vaccines against known epidemic threats.”
Halton predicts the pressure to secure access to successful vaccines will be “astronomical”.

“One of the things I’m worried about is vaccine nationalism and I’ve started to use that terminology when I talk to people,” she says. “We’ve been worrying about this issue now for months and months…What is a mechanism to ensure equitable access?”
For private companies, vaccine development is considered risky, protracted and hugely expensive. Companies are faced with the prospect of spending extraordinary amounts to develop vaccines, with a low likelihood of success.
“As a company, you are not going to spend the hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars that are needed to develop a vaccine,” Halton says. “One, because you think your chances of being successful are about 5%. Secondly, because you don’t even think there’s going to be a market for it. So this part of market failure is completely understandable. And that’s why the coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations was set up.”
The World Health Organisation announced it planned to design mechanisms to ensure equitable distribution.

“While we’re looking for vaccines, unless we break the barriers to equitable distribution of the products, whether it’s vaccines or therapeutics, we will have a problem, so we need to address the problem ahead of time,” WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said. “There should not be a divide between the haves and the have-nots.”



Lock and Load against Lockdown

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“Reopen America” protest groups in various US states against recent coronavirus lockdown measures were set up by conservative gun lobbyists. The coordinated effort seems to be driven by the apparent long-term aim of building a larger base of support for gun law relaxation.

Between April 8 and 16, at least 34 website addresses  were purchased. These web addresses automatically redirect to pages on pro-gun sites. The registration of so many reopen website addresses in a short period of time led social media users to conclude that the campaign was “astroturfing” — the practice of making a campaign appear grassroots while withholding that it was organized by a single entity.  These reopen websites were for Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio, each of which has laws allowing open carry of firearms with a permit, with five tracing back to one family in the American Midwest, the Dorrs. These laws are not loose enough for the Dorrs, who are ultra-conservative pro-gun political campaigners.

For example, the “reopen” websites for Ohio, Pennsylvania and Minnesota were registered in quick succession, indicating that they were bought in the same transaction. They also all share the same Google Analytics tracking ID, which is a unique code used to track webpage visits. Websites for Iowa and Wisconsin also use this code, in addition to having been set up on the same day. The active “reopen” websites owned by the Dorrs redirect to anti-lockdown protest pages, mostly on the Dorrs’ pro-gun websites. On top of this, they look the same and contain similar, often identical text. Analyzing the inner workings of the website, namely the HTML code files, helps identify more connections to other pages and groups the Dorrs manage or people they collaborate with.

Unrestricted carry (sometimes referred to as permitless carry or constitutional carry) is already law in a number of US states, but not in any of the states for which the Dorrs have bought “Reopen America” domains. Based on the locations of these political campaigns and their previous political activity, it would appear that the Dorrs have a long-term goal of building a bigger supporter base for the gun lobby, using the coronavirus pandemic unrest as a vehicle.

This widespread online activity has contributed toward the impression that there is large-scale opposition to the lockdown measures. In contrast, nearly 70% of Republican voters and 95 percent of Democratic voters supported a national stay-at-home order, according to recent research by Quinnipiac, a nationwide independent public opinion poll.



https://www.dw.com/en/revealed-how-the-us-gun-lobby-exploits-the-coronavirus-pandemic-to-further-its-aims/a-53230399

From Pandemic Emergency to the Emergence of Socialism

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We should not return to the type of society that enabled this pandemic to emerge and spread. We must instead create a new socially just and sustainable world. We, working people, can shut the system down and we have the numbers to break the power of capitalist class and their State. We should send a clear signal that things cannot and must not return to normal. We must transform our broken and inequitable society, and build a new society run by and for us – the working class majority. We seek a world safe not for profit-making, but for people.



Capitalists maximise profits. Capitalism has proved extremely inefficient in its response to the virus. Why return to such a normal? Why fix capitalism yet again, given its cyclical crashes and  costly requirement to keep fixing it? Absurd, isn’ it? The problem is the structure of capitalism and not the particular management team running the capitalist enterprise. Capitalists either cannot or will not hire because to do so is not profitable for them. Why reproduce capitalism that so undemocratically organizes its businesses. Why replace one group of employer dictators with another, when a better alternative exists? Why revert back to a profit system that generates social divisions and inequality, which is regularly unstable?



We must use this opportunity to create a global economy that meets our basic needs while at the same time securing sustainable communities for humanity and a healthy environment for both people and planet. We must end the power of profit-maximising corporations and self-organise production, providing for everyone and assuring everyone to the necessities of life. We can achieve and we deserve a better society than the one we presently have. We can’t know for sure what a successful socialist revolution will look like, but we can say that it will definitely be “ the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”

The Socialist Party rejects capitalism in all its disguises and there is no equivocation on its part — no acceptance of government ownership nor even cooperatives. Ours is the only message worth listening to, and the only one that holds a real promise of the final end of privilege, insecurity, poverty and oppression in all its forms. Let us work  for the great day when the capitalist social parasites who have paralysed society will be banished into the limbo of the past.






Will COVID-19 make prison a death sentence?

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The global prison population is 11 million and 102 countries have prison occupancy levels of more than 110% with 20 countries at double their capacity limit.  Bukavu prison in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, exceeds its capacity by 528%.  In a Sierra Leone prison for females 64 inmates live in a space designed for 18.



 Social distancing and personal infection control are almost impossible in overcrowded settings where poor ventilation and sanitation are likely increase the speed at which the virus spreads. In Bangladesh 10 doctors serve 68 prisons, while Ghana has two doctors covering 46 prisons with 15,000 inmates.



 In prisons the mortality rate is already up to 50% higher than in the outside world.



Florian Irminger, executive director of Penal Reform International (PRI), said: “Prison systems globally were at crisis point before the coronavirus pandemic. Now prisons across the world are ticking time bombs set to be devastated by this virus because of overcrowding, lack of basic healthcare, limited access to clean water … and inhumane living conditions.”



Outbreaks of Covid-19 and deaths from the virus have been recorded in prisons in numerous countries including China, Iran, Kenya, India, Belgium, Spain and the UK. There are grave concerns about the impact the pandemic will have on prisons across sub-Saharan Africa, where the full force of Covid-19 is yet to be felt.

Doreen Namyalo Kyazze, PRI’s Africa programme manager in Kampala, said: “It is frankly terrifying to think how Covid-19 will impact on prisons in the region, which are some of the most severely overcrowded in the world and are extremely lacking in healthcare services, as well as the most basic sanitary conditions.”



Sarah Belal of the Justice Project Pakistan explained that the virus has lifted the lid on existing systemic issues: “The capacity of our prisons is 63,000 but we have 74,118 prisoners … there is just no way we have the capacity to manage with the number of people that are in our prisons, neither do we have the resources. In Punjab alone, before Covid-19 there were 108 vacant posts for medical officers, there is usually one in each prison … 10% of Punjab prisons did not have ambulances, and the rate of tuberculosis and hepatitis was rampant. You are looking at a population that is already extremely vulnerable to dying of an infectious disease like Covid-19.”

he UN assistant secretary general for human rights, Ilze Brands Kehris, has called on states to reduce their prison populations, including by releasing those who are vulnerable to the virus or are low-risk offenders.
Measures have already been taken in some countries that have suffered outbreaks. In France, courts were asked to delay short-term prison sentences, while states including Iran and Kenya opted to release some people from prison early.
In the UK, where the Ministry of Justice confirmed earlier this week that 15 prisoners have died from Covid-19, the government’s temporary release scheme to combat the spread of the virus had to be suspended after six inmates were mistakenly freed. Plans to release 4,000 risk-assessed prisoners within two months of release are due to resume this week.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/apr/23/pandemic-potentially-a-death-sentence-for-many-prison-inmates-experts-warn



To CCS or not?

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How do we significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions before it’s too late?



Some say by carbon capture and storage (CCS), what is in essence the process of separating carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, or from gases produced in electricity generation and industrial processes, then injecting the captured CO2 into geological rock formations typically located several kilometers underground? 
CCS technology features in a number of government and industry proposals. But it is still not on track and is in fact far behind where it will need to be within decades to meet the necessary targets for global emission reductions.
Part of the problem is how these technologies are still very much at the developmental stage, despite using them since the 1970s. 
“In terms of the actual efficiency of carbon capture, it’s not nearly as effective as people claim it is,” said Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. His research into two CCS projects, factoring in production and processing emissions, found they trapped only between 10-11 percent of net carbon emissions averaged over 20 years. “It’s never better to capture carbon than it is to use that money to replace coal or gas,” Jacobson said.

Questions also surround just how meaningfully CCS technologies are currently contributing to carbon emission reductions. For example, CCS is being used to funnel CO2 back underground to stimulate oil fields that are running dry, in a process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR) — a way, say CCS critics, not so much of reversing course on global warming but of prolonging the life-blood of the fossil fuel industry. Strictly speaking, such technologies fall under the umbrella of carbon capture, utilization and storage, or CCUS.



“You have biofuels. Nuclear power. Coal and carbon capture. They all claim that they can do things, and all they need is another billion dollars to solve it,” said Jacobson. “It becomes a part of what people assume is working, whereas really, it’s just a pyramid scheme.”



https://truthout.org/articles/is-carbon-capture-and-storage-a-climate-solution-or-a-pyramid-scheme/

The Anti-Union Campaign Continues

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US corporations are cracking down on unionization efforts as workers try to organize. 



Companies, including grocery chains Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, airport concession operators, local authorities and even a furniture company owned by the billionaire Warren Buffett have moved to control efforts to unionize as workers become increasingly concerned about workplace safety during the pandemic emergency.



As workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic have organized protests and strikes, several employers have responded by stepping up attempts to oppose unionization, repeal workers’ rights won in bargaining, and fire workers en masse who had recently publicized intent to organize a union in their workplace.



 The Trader Joe’s chairman and CEO, Dan Bane, sent a  blatant anti-union letter to all employees on 31 March opposing labor unions, and calling attempts to recruit staff “a distraction”, the latest in a series of memos and actions taken by the company to suppress union organizing efforts calling for hazard pay and adequate protections for grocery store workers during the pandemic.



A Trader Joe’s employee in New Jersey said, “It’s in bad taste and shows the greed this company has instead of taking proactive measures to keep the crew and customers safe.”



Concession workers at Orlando international airport have filed official complaints against their employer, HMSHost, over the lack of coronavirus safety protections, which included continuing to hold anti-union captive audience meetings during the pandemic. A union election for workers to join Unite Here scheduled for late March was delayed and is currently being rescheduled due to the pandemic.



“I tried to refuse to go because we were short-staffed,” said Rosanny Tejeda, a Starbucks barista at Orlando international airport for about one year before recently being furloughed. Tejeda claimed the meeting did not adhere to social distancing or take into account any coronavirus safety precautions, and she was targeted throughout the meeting for wearing a union pin. “They didn’t care about our health when they sent us to those meetings,” said Tejeda. “To them, the union was a more important issue than the coronavirus. They made sure to give us papers about the union, but didn’t give us training or protective equipment for us in the stores.”
Citing the pandemic, the manager of Clark county, Nevada, unilaterally suspended all union contracts with the county. The decision affects about 9,000 workers, including hospital workers at University Medical Center of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas.
The Teamsters union has filed federal unfair labor practice charges of unlawful termination against CORT furniture, a subsidiary of billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, accusing the furniture rental company of retaliating against workers for supporting unionization just as the pandemic broke in the US.



Anthony Salcedo, a driver at the warehouse for nearly four years who was laid off, said: “They’re telling us the reason why they terminated us is because of work reduction, but how is there work reduction if you are hiring contractors to do our work? It’s obvious why we were terminated. It wasn’t because of work reduction, it was because we were supporting a union.”
Several other companies have been accused of opposing union organizing efforts among workers during the pandemic. Amazon-owned Whole Foods is using a data-powered heat mapping tool to monitor unionization risks among its over 500 stores throughout the US, as workers have held sick-out protests in response to a lack of protections for workers during the pandemic. Workers at the online clothing retailer Everlane and the art logistics company Uovo have filed federal labor charges accusing the companies of firing workers during the pandemic for union organizing.



“It’s an absolute disgrace they would take advantage of a pandemic to frustrate workers’ ability to organize and get better representation for themselves so they’re not risking their lives to perform essential services,” said Celine McNicholas, government affairs director at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “This is an extreme moment we’re in, but unfortunately this is the traditional employer playbook in opposing workers’ efforts to organize and collectively bargain for better pay and better health and safety provisions,” added McNicholas.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/labor-unions-trader-joes-workers-coronavirus-us

Planet of the Humans (video)

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Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs (2020). Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary By Socialist Party of Canada







This 2020 Gibbs-Moore exposé compliments the case for non-market Socialism rather well. 




It’s fact-filled sleuthing explicitly cites the profit motive as root cause of the double-speak hypocrisy much of the ‘green movement’ suffers — a movement which is doing little if anything to mitigate climate warming or ecological collapse in authentic and meaningful ways — if what Gibbs & Moore report is correct.




This is not to denigrate the well-meaning intentions behinds the sentiments of making the earth a greener saner place; the documentary more importantly shows the obscured control by global capital usurping well-known non-profits that claim they are fighting the good fight for the environment when in fact they are naively complicit in its delay. 




The documentary further underscores what Gibbs and Moore see as the sea-change behaviour needed to move away from using incredibly wasteful amounts of energy capitalists demand to keep their profits circulating; they illustrate it is not average citizen clamouring for such energy, but rather the swindling class who currently own and monopolize the global means of life for solely their own gain.




A film worth spending the 1hr 45mins viewing, if for anything, to inform oneself on the growing debate to chuck capitalism for good — a sentiment implicitly echoed by popular groups such as ‘FridaysForFuture’ and ‘Extinction Rebellion,’ who although having fast growing global influence, appear to have cultural amnesia about the futility of reformism to chart deep and systemic improvement of society where-in equal access to the means of life — one free of the capitalist yoke — is globally generalized. 




The film is free to view until May 21, 2020 

Pygmy Lance





No more capitalism but a culture of care

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A new report by the National Priorities Project (NPP) at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), examining the federal budget illuminates the deep connections between the climate emergency and the U.S. military, arguing that the shift to a green economy requires a just transition away from both fossil fuels and endless war.




The report, entitled No Warming, No War: How Militarism Fuels the Climate Crisis—and Vice Versa (pdf), says that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic “has utterly changed life as we know it” and warns against working toward a return to an old normal which was “defined by unfettered capitalism that thrives on the devastation of our planet, the devaluation of human life, and the use of military force to perpetuate both.” The report also takes aim at the corporations—both military contractors and energy giants—that reap massive profits from the devastation of war and fossil fuel extraction. The analysis specifically calls out Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman as well as BP, Shell, Chevron, and ExxonMobil.




“On a local and global scale, humanity and community have been co-opted by profit and violence. This ‘normal’ has now brought us to the brink of an existential crisis as climate change continues nearly unabated,” co-authors Lorah Steichen and Lindsay Koshgarian write in the foreword. “In the face of both COVID-19 and the climate crisis, we urgently need to shift from a culture of war to a culture of care.” On a warming planet, migration is rising. Instead of responding with solidarity, the US is escalating border militarization while defunding climate solutions.



Half of all international wars since 1973 have been linked to fossil fuel resources, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East. According to NPP:

 “The U.S. military spends an estimated $81 billion a year to protect the world’s oil supplies—even before accounting for the Iraq war.”



The U.S. military—with an annual budget exceeding $700 billion—is “among the biggest polluters” on the planet, producing about 59 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year, more than countries such as Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. A B-52 consumes as much fuel in an hour as the average car driver uses in 7 years. “To achieve climate justice, we must transform the extractive economy we have now that is harming people and ecosystems,” the report says. “Resisting militarization is core to building an economy that works for people and the planet. As such, we must pursue solutions to the climate crisis that challenge the violent and oppressive systems that have fuelled war and warming for generations.”



One of the report’s five conclusions is there is enough for everybody.



Promoted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.

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