No good news for climate change

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The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to cause the biggest fall in carbon dioxide emissions since World War Two but it will likely be short-lived and will not stop climate change, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said.



 The WMO expects a 6% drop in carbon emissions this year, an estimate on the high end of a range given by scientists, but the U.N. agency warned that it could be followed by even higher emissions growth than before the crisis. 



“This drop of emissions by 6%, that’s unfortunately short-term good news,” WMO’s Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said. “In the most likely case we will easily go back to normal next year and there might even be a boost in emissions because some industries have been stopped.”



In fact, the drop is not even enough to get the world back on track to meet the target of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims for global temperature rise of no more than 1.5 degree above pre-industrial levels, Taalas said. That would require at least a 7% annual drop in emissions, he added. Carbon dioxide remains in the air for centuries so falls in emmissions do not immediately impact climate and would need to be sustained over a period to eventually do so.



2015-2019 was the warmest five-year period on record, with the global average temperature up 1.1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels.  So far this year, global temperatures on a monthly basis have been either the warmest or second warmest on record.



Taalas added that climate change was a “different magnitude of problem” compared with COVID-19 and urged governments to tackle it in the same spirit as they have the pandemic. “To be optimistic, we would learn from this example and use the same spirit to tackle the climate problem,” he said.



https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-climate/drop-in-emissions-due-to-pandemic-wont-fix-climate-wmo-says-idUKKCN2241ED

Migrants’ Remittances to Home Countries Falls

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Global remittances are set to tumble by $142bn in 2020 as the coronavirus crisis curtails a lifeline for hard-pressed households in poorer countries.



The World Bank said that a drop of almost 20 percent in the money migrant workers send home would mostly be due to a fall in their wages and employment overseas.



“Remittances are a vital source of income for developing countries. The ongoing economic recession caused by COVID-19 is taking a severe toll on the ability to send money home and makes it all the more vital that we shorten the time to recovery for advanced economies,” said World Bank Group President David Malpass.



Remittances have become an integral part of the funding for governments in emerging economies, exceeding official aid by a factor of three since the mid-1990s and last year overtaking foreign direct investment flows as the main source of foreign exchange for low- and middle-income countries.



An estimated one billion migrants – about 270 million who work outside their home countries and 760 million internal migrants – each help feed, clothe and shelter up to three people “back home”, Dilip Ratha, lead author of the World Bank’s new report on the impact of COVID-19 on remittances, explained. “You’re looking at one-third of humanity.”



 Hardest hit will be countries such as Tajikistan and Nepal, where remittances account for around 30 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), said Ratha. Other countries that rely on payments include the Philippines, South Sudan, Tonga, and Haiti.





Lockdown or chained down?

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“A lockdown without access to food is going to be very tough on people, and one can expect social unrest arising out of it,” Andy Sumner, a professor of International Development at King’s College London, told IPS.



Sumner, along with Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez of King’s College London and Chris Hoy of Australian National University, is co-author of a report published in the U.N. University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) earlier this month, which estimates COVID-19’s impact on poverty could push anywhere between 85 million people (at the very least) to 580 million globally into poverty.



WFP’s Senior Economist, Arif Husain said in a statement, “COVID-19 is potentially catastrophic for millions who are already hanging by a thread. It is a hammer blow for millions more who can only eat if they earn a wage…”



Sumner explained, “One important question is: will there ever be a vaccine especially so if there is no guarantee of immunity from COVID-19 even with infection. Then we need to ask, will everyone have access to the vaccine and will it be 100 percent effective. Or will we end up living in a new apartheid of COVID-19 between the vaccinated and non-vaccinated living in separate areas and working in different labour markets?”

Disney Tales

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Abigail Disney, an heir to the Walt Disney fortune has criticised the company for protecting executive bonuses and dividends of more than $1.5bn (£1.2bn) while cutting the pay of more than 100,000 workers to help weather the financial impact of coronavirus.



She said the $1.5bn in typical dividend pay-outs would keep staff paid for months.



“That’d pay for three months’ salary to frontline workers,” she said. “And it’s going to people who have already been collecting egregious bonuses for years. Dividends aren’t all bad, given the number of fixed-income folks who rely on them. But still 80% of shares are owned by the wealthiest 10%. Pay the people who make the magic happen with respect and dignity they have more than earned from you. This company must do better.”



Disney executives claimed to have made salary sacrifices to “better enable the company to weather the extraordinary business challenges”. Iger gave up the remainder of his $3m salary for this year, while Bob Chapek, who recently replaced Iger as chief executive, will forgo half his $2.5m base salary.



But Abigail Disney explained, “Salary is a drop in the bucket to these guys. The real payday is in the rest of the package.” The company has protected those lucrative incentive schemes. 
Iger earned a total of $65.6m in 2018 and $47m last year. His latest package is more than 900 times that of the median Disney worker’s earnings. Chapek could potentially receive an annual bonus “of not less than 300%” of salary, in addition to a long-term incentive award of “not less than $15m”.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/22/disney-heir-criticises-company-over-15bn-bonuses-cuts-pay

COVID-19 in Central America

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Most Central American governments reacted quickly to the pandemic, implementing strict quarantine and lockdown measures. But high rates of inequality, poverty and an informal workforce have led to civil unrest in countries where more than 30 percent of the population lives on $5.50 a day or less. In some cases, desperate citizens have been met with repression and arbitrary detentions as police and military, not doctors or nurses take to the front line in the war against COVID-19.



In Central America citizens are often forced to decide between staying home and feeding their families. 



  “After some days, the need to bring home some food became stronger,” said Tiziano Breda, Central America analyst for NGO the International Crisis Group.



 Throughout the region, citizens living in poverty have taken to the streets to protest government measures. Hungry street vendors protested in Guatemala. Panama reported recent arrests for looting. In El Salvador, discontent reached a head in late March when Salvadorans showed up in droves at the government office in charge of administering a $300 government subsidy. 

“The government is insisting on using confinement as a punishment to whoever violates executive orders, which are unsustainable,” said Celia Medrano, chief programme officer of San Salvador-based human rights organization Cristosal. “They have to consider that there is a situation of informal employment for subsistence for many people who are not in conditions to maintain quarantine in their own home.”



 In Honduras street vendors, laid-off workers and trash collectors have blocked roads in protest of a strict curfew that has worsened conditions for the nearly 50 percent of the population that lives in poverty.



“Most people in this country live day by day. You sell some socks and you buy some eggs,” said Bertha Oliva, coordinator of the Honduran human rights group the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras (or COFADEH, its acronym in Spanish). “They are hungry and they have to go out.” In Honduras, the situation has created a “pressure cooker” for people who don’t have enough to feed their children, according to Oliva. “It’s not the same to have everything in your house or to have kids at home dying of hunger,” she said. “So what does [the government] do? They repress the people who should not be in the street.”



“The only thing we are asking for is food,” one protester told Honduran media outlet La Tribuna. “We have taken this curfew seriously and we haven’t left.”



Protesters asking for food have been met by tear gas, according to a report by COFADEH. In at least one case, protesters have reported that police have threatened to shoot them with live bullets, the report says. This fits in with a pattern of excessive use of force against protesters by Honduran security forces. The Honduran government promised to distribute food to 800 million families. But recipients of the aid told Honduran media outlet Contra Corriente that the rice, flour and beans in the package is only enough to feed a family for two days.



In El Salvador, the Bukele government has suspended utilities payments, offered a $300 subsidy to some citizens and received a $389m International Monetary Fund loan for emergency assistance. In Panama, workers who have lost their jobs can receive $40 every 15 days to cover their basic costs. Guatemala has set up an emergency fund to provide struggling families with about $130.



These programmes are only short-term solutions, said Breda of the International Crisis Group, and they risk being manipulated for political purposes. 

“The risk of these packages is that the help is not being equally distributed,” he said.  Breda also warns that repressive measures to arbitrarily detain citizens and control their movements could become normalised in the long term, particularly if these abuses happen without resistance from citizens or civil society, he said.



“Where there’s no check, the government will implement these kinds of initiatives even when the crisis has passed,” Breda said.

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/central-america-unrest-repression-grow-coronavirus-crisis-200422202713659.html

COVID-19 – Australia denies non-citizens help

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An estimated 1.1 million people are in Australia on temporary visas and are excluded from the jobkeeper and jobseeker support. 



 They include international students, working holiday makers, skilled work visa holders, asylum seekers and refugees.



Far from being the great leveller it is asserted to be, Covid-19 has laid barethe structural inequalities that exist in Australia. Those who are in Australia temporarily – to study, to work, to pick fruit, to be protected from persecution – have had their second-class status brutally exposed by the extremis of Covid-19. They face the very real prospect of destitution, of being left homeless, of not having enough to eat.



Many work in jobs and industries severely affected by shutdowns. They have lost jobs in their tens of thousands. But they are excluded from all government support measures, including the centrepiece jobkeeper wage subsidy and jobseeker welfare payments. As the government has rolled out massive and unprecedented rescue packages for jobs and businesses – $214bn – for those in Australia on temporary visas there is no safety net at all.



Their treatment reflects a more fundamental conception in Australia that people temporarily in the country – who live among Australian citizens as neighbours, work alongside them as colleagues, catch the bus as fellow commuters, and pay taxes as fellow contributors – are somehow less deserving of the country’s protection. A government’s most fundamental duty, after all, is to protect its people. But who are its people? Who are the people the government should care for and consider its own? Australia’s government has chosen to define that narrowly – as citizens and permanent residents. It has consciously decided that those in Australia on temporary visas are undeserving of support.



These are extraordinary times. The world faces a global pandemic the likes of which has not been seen for a century. There exists an obligation to offer some measure of assistance to people in this country in a time of unprecedented crisis.



Telling people they should “make their way home” is simplistic and impractical. Many simply cannot: they cannot afford flights home; the borders of their country have been sealed shut – even to citizens; transit countries will not allow them to pass through; or they have come to Australia seeking protection and cannot safely go back. Others have lived in Australia for years and have built families and lives and communities here, there is no other “home” to go back to. 



  Portugal has temporarily granted all migrants in the country the rights of its citizens.



https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/apr/23/australias-coronavirus-relief-exclusions-prove-we-are-not-all-in-this-together

COVID-19 and Civil Rights

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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned about ”rising ethno-nationalism, populism, authoritarianism and a pushback against human rights,” in many nations as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.



The UN chief pointed to existing discrimination in the delivery of public services to tackle COVID-19 and the ”structural inequalities that impede access to them.” 



“We see the disproportionate effects on certain communities, the rise of hate speech, the targeting of vulnerable groups, and the risks of heavy-handed security responses undermining the health response,” Guterres said. “The crisis can provide a pretext to adopt repressive measures for purposes unrelated to the pandemic,” he added. 



”Heavy-handed security responses undermine the health response and can exacerbate existing threats to peace and security or create new ones,” Guterres said. ”The message is clear: People and their rights must be front and center.”  



 It did not take long. Three weeks after the outbreak, the Hungarian parliament conferred formidable executive powers on prime minister Viktor Orbán, allowing him to rule by decree. Numerous governments have exploited the pandemic to undermine democratic principles, violate human rights and perpetrate crimes against citizens and migrants.



https://www.dw.com/en/un-chief-pandemic-is-fast-becoming-human-rights-crisis/a-53214547

Capitalism is No Cure for COVID-19

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Everything in the world is connected with something else. The individual is a part of the world interacting in various ways with that world. Separate cultures are not closed, isolated islands. Society lives and functions as long as there is a certain interaction of the elements in these systems or of the systems themselves with other systems. Everything that happens in the world may be attributed to the interaction of things. The unity of the world is achieved through interaction. Nowhere in the world can there be any phenomena that do not give rise to certain consequences and have not been caused by other phenomena. Ours is a world of cause and effect.



“It is unrealistic to expect capitalists to manage any social crisis. Their goal is to accumulate capital, which they do exceptionally well, as evidenced by their enormous wealth in a world where billions struggle to survive.



Capitalists are highly skilled at sustaining their rule. They prioritize military spending in order to defend and expand their wealth. They invest in politicians, scientists, journalists, authors, psychologists, and other ‘experts’ to promote their views and enforce their rules. They excel at finding ways to profit from disaster.

When it comes to protecting human beings, capitalists are absolutely abysmal. They have to be:
Extracting capital from human labor creates massive social and environmental harm. Capitalists cannot reduce this harm without lowering their profits and becoming less competitive. Whether or not they care about the damage they cause, they accept it as ‘the cost of doing business.’

Capitalists will invest in social supports, but only to the minimum necessary to sustain a profit-producing labor force. Whenever possible, they strive to cut costs by shifting responsibility for social care to individual families and charities.

The problem is not only that capitalists fail to meet human needs. That has been clear for centuries. The deeper problem is that the rest of us expect them to behave differently and are surprised and dismayed when they don’t.

The results are entirely predictable; capitalists have a 100 percent success rate for creating social problems and a 100 percent failure rate for solving them.

We keep banging our heads against their wall, wanting capitalists to do what they cannot do and be who they cannot be. We point out their errors. We devise better policies for them to enact. We scold them when they fail to do what is needed. We expect them to behave, not as capitalists, but as the benevolent parent-guardians we crave. This is unrealistic.

It’s true; some capitalists are digging deep into their petty cash to counter the pandemic. Jeff Bezos donated $100 million for food banks (less than 0.1 percent of his fortune). Bill Gates is funding research to develop a potentially profitable vaccine. Jack Ma, the richest person in China, pledged $14.5 million of his $44 billion fortune. The world’s richest family, the Waltons, donated $25 million of their $191 billion fortune. This is pure public relations.

Capitalists are not concerned about poor people dying in their own nation or anywhere else. On the contrary, they welcome a reduction in what they consider the ‘surplus population’ (those who cannot be profitably employed) and whose needs they treat as a ‘drain on the public purse.’ This is why people trapped in nursing homes, jails, psychiatric facilities, and immigrant and refugee detention are left to die of disease.

Because profits are their lifeblood, capitalists must prioritize profit-taking even over the need to protect the workers who produce those profits. This is why medical staff are warned not to complain about systemic failures that put them and their patients at risk, why workers who try to protect their co-workers are fired, and why millions of essential workers are denied the legal right to a safe workplace. That is why people go hungry, while mountains of food are destroyed, and why the COVID-19 death count is deliberately minimized to justify resuming production as quickly as possible.

Why are we shocked? To stay in business, capitalists must prioritize their own interests, even when it means throwing humanity under the bus. Their refusal to stop extracting fossil fuels or abandon nuclear weapons proves this.

To the capitalist class, ordinary people are problems: they want more pay; they want social supports; they want equality; they question the rules; they make demands; they demonstrate and strike; they are troublemakers.



Capitalists claim the right to be society’s only problem-solvers. However, they care to solve only one problem – how to accumulate more capital than their competitors.

Capitalists cannot allow workers to solve social problems because they might begin to question why they need a ruling class at all. And yet, the inability of capitalism to meet people’s needs forces workers to solve many problems, every day, in order to survive.

This crisis has revealed who are society’s real problem-solvers, not self-serving capitalist free-loaders, but the legion of workers whose labor is essential to sustain life.

Unlike capitalists, workers have the motivation, skills, and ability to cooperate that would make it possible to end war, inequality, poverty, pandemics, environmental pollution, and climate change. They could do what is necessary, without regard for profit.

We defer to the capitalist class only because we lack confidence in ourselves and each other to manage society without them. The result is mass suffering.

Never have an oppressed majority been more patient with their oppressors! They impose on us the harshest cruelties and deprivations, yet we forgive them again and again.

When is enough, enough?

It’s time to put away our childish fantasies of how things should be, and face how they actually are. It’s time for us to grow up and take collective control of our lives.



Workers are experienced problem-solvers, and the most pressing problem we must solve is how to free ourselves from capitalist rule.

Capitalists cannot save us from this pandemic or any other crisis. We need to escort them to the exit and do the job ourselves.”


Taken and adapted from here
 https://susanrosenthal.com/capitalism/we-cannot-expect-capitalists-to-manage-a-pandemic/




Are the elderly expendable?

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There are reports of an increase in the use of “do not resuscitate”, “do not treat” and “do not convey to hospital” orders for older people during the pandemic.
Under the Equality Act, it is illegal to deny an older person access to healthcare on the basis of their age. 
But a “frailty” tool is being used across the NHS to determine which older people should be asked about limits to treatment, with age making up 50% of the frailty score.



Dave Archard, emeritus professor at Queen’s University, Belfast, said an overburdened service is no excuse for discrimination that would result in a “cull” of older people.



Using age as an indicator of clinical frailty and the likelihood of survival is, he said, crude and unreliable. “And if it is not a marker of something else then it is hard to see why age should be used as the determinative criterion,” he added. “It becomes exposed as wrongly discriminatory because it licences differential treatment based on ‘unwarranted animus or prejudice’ against old people. To discriminate between patients in the provision of care on the grounds of age is to send a message about the value of old people. Such discrimination publicly expresses the view that older people are of lesser worth or importance than young people. It stigmatises them as second-class citizens.

“It would be hard not to think – even if it was not intended – that a cull of elderly people was what was being aimed at.”



Older people should be denied treatment for the coronavirus if a younger, healthy person needs help, according to Prof Arthur Caplan, a prominent US medical ethicist and the founding head of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s School of Medicine. Age, he said, was a “valid criterion” to use when making the “terrible choice” of who should receive scarce resources during the pandemic. To the extent to which data supports the risk of failure or the odds of success, age can justifiably be used to ration care if maximisation of lives saved is the overarching goal.” Caplan pointed out that it is already often used to decide who gets care when rationing is unavoidable. “There are two main principles which ground the use of age [in deciding who gets treatment],” he said. “The first is the notion of fair innings – that each existing person ought to enjoy an opportunity to live a life. [The second is if] the overarching principle for rationing is to maximise the number of lives saved.”
Catherine Foot, director of evidence at the Centre for Ageing Better countered, “Chronological age must never be the principle factor that determines a person’s right to care. Medically speaking, it is a poor proxy for a person’s capacity to respond well to intensive care and to recover. And rationing care based on age speaks of a dangerous kneejerk ageism, where the older we get, the less value we have and the less important our lives are to save,” she said.

The Migrants Trump Welcomes

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It is the harvest  season when  tens of thousands of migrant workers from Mexico head to the fields in the United States to do the work that puts food on people’s tables.



 Temporary visa programmes are rife with abuse, from the moment workers are recruited in their communities. They suffer fraud, they are offered jobs that don’t even exist in the United States. It’s a perverse system in which recruiters and employers have all the control. There are systemic flaws that will become more evident now.



Exposed to illegal charges for visa, transport and accommodation costs, labour exploitation, lack of access to basic services and unhealthy housing, Mexican seasonal workers driven from their homes by poverty must also now brave the risk of COVID-19 contagion.



Jeremy McLean, policy and advocacy manager for the New York-based non-governmental organisation Justice in Motion, expressed concern about the conditions in which migrants work.

The way the system works, “it’s not going to be easy to follow recommendations for social distancing. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to come and won’t be able to follow these recommendations, and they will put themselves at risk. It could spell another wave of infection and transmission,” he warned IPS. “This population group has no health services and no medical insurance. If they fall ill in a remote area, what help can they get?”

In response to the pandemic and its risks, 37 organisations called on the U.S. government on Mar. 25 for adequate housing with quarantine facilities, safe transportation, testing for workers before they arrive in the United States, physical distancing on farms and paid treatment for those infected with COVID-19.



The ordeal that migrant workers face will not end with their work in the U.S. fields, because in October they will have to return to their hometowns, which will be even more impoverished due to the consequences of the health crisis, and with COVID-19 in all likelihood still posing a threat.



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