From Gerrymandering to Voter Suppression

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Republicans are pumping millions of dollars into efforts to restrict voting and aggressively fight Democratic efforts to make it easier to cast a ballot during the Covid-19 pandemic.  Republicans have fought Democratic efforts in Wisconsin and other states to make it easier to vote by mail.



The Republican National Committee has allocated $20m so far to oppose Democratic lawsuits across the country seeking to expand voting. Republicans are also seeking to recruit up to 50,000 people in 15 key states to serve as poll watchers and challenge the registration of voters they believe are ineligible, according to the New York Times.



Republicans have consistently supported voting restrictions citing voter fraud. Democrats have pushed to make it easier to vote, saying the focus on voter fraud is just an excuse Republicans use to disenfranchise certain Americans, particularly students and minorities. Several studies, however, have shown that voter fraud is exceedingly rare.



https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/18/republicans-devote-20m-and-50000-people-into-efforts-to-restrict-voting





The UK Rich List

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1 Sir James Dyson and family, household goods and technology, £16.2bn.

=2 Sri and Gopi Hinduja and family, industry and finance, £16bn.

=2 David and Simon Reuben, property and internet, £16bn.

4 Sir Leonard Blavatnik, investment, music and media, £15.78bn.

5 Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Ineos chemical giant, £12.15bn.

6 Kirsten and Jorn Rausing, inheritance and investment, £12.1bn.

7 Alisher Usmanov, mining and investment, £11.68bn.

8 Guy, George and Galen Jr Weston and family, retail, £10.53bn

9 Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken and Michel de Carvalho, inheritance, brewing and banking, £10.3bn.

10 The Duke of Westminster and the Grosvenor family, property, £10.29bn.



International Day of Living Together in Peace

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The UN General-Assembly has declared 16 May the International Day of Living Together in Peace, in order to promote a sustainable world of solidarity and harmony. Socialists say we must replace our narrow national loyalties by a loyalty to humanity as a whole. 


 The Socialist Party does not deny the sincerity of many peace campaigners. Often their courage cannot fail to impress. All across the globe people have always been striving for peace between nations. However, the preaching of peace does not necessarily further the cause of peace. Most people are against war. War is so terrible that only a small number of deviants or professional soldiers or completely ruthless financiers can support it. Even the practical politician  must pretend to themselves that they are against war. But we have seen that wars do not result from what people wish and believe; and that being against war does not prevent people from bringing war about.


The Socialist Party stands for the abolition of the profit system, the end of wars growing out of the profit system but most of, for peace and plenty for all. The Socialist Party is opposed to militarism. We are the world’s peace party. Socialism and militarism are necessarily opposed to each other. The Socialist Party is against any and every war undertaken by the capitalist state and is the implacable enemy of the capitalist state – the political representative of the class enemy – on every occasion. We support only one particular kind of war – the class war – since only through the class war can capitalism be overthrown and the causes of war thereby removed. The task of the Socialist Party is to direct anti-war into class-war.


Technology and science has given humanity the possibility of a comfortable decent life free from hunger and all the necessities for a good life guaranteed. The eradication of smallpox in 1979 was a triumph of medical science combined with international cooperation. Yet we live in a world in which roughly ten million children die each year from diseases related to poverty. As well as an enormous waste of young lives through malnutrition and preventable disease, there is a huge waste of opportunities through inadequate education. The total number of illiterates in the world is estimated to be 800 million. Meanwhile every 60 seconds the world spends roughly $2 million on armaments. The world spends almost two trillion dollars each year on armaments. It is madness.


Peace is possible. But it requires that the working class unite politically to outlaw private ownership of the tools of production at the ballot box.  Peace is possible — but not until production for sale and private profit is supplanted by production for use.




COVID-19 should be a wake-up call

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 STAY HOME. WASH YOUR HANDS. WEAR MASK. KEEP SOCIAL DISTANCE.



The problem is that in at least two of the warnings: a staggering 3.0 billion people worldwide have no water to wash their hands and over 1.8 billion people have no adequate shelter—or homes to go to.



“The poorest people in the world are being left to face the COVID-19 pandemic alone,” says WaterAid, “with not even the most basic defence — clean water and a bar of soap”.



In 2018, says Habitat, the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless reported that homelessness had skyrocketed across the continent.



And in the United States, 500,000 people are currently homeless, 40 per cent of whom are unsheltered. In a locked-down New York city, the homeless have virtually taking over empty subway cars while turning subway stations into homeless shelters – even as City authorities are physically driving them out to the streets, with no homes to go to.
Pedro Conceição, Director of the Human Development Report Office at UNDP, told IPS  that more than 40 percent of the global population does not have any social protection and more than 6.5 billion people around the globe – 85 percent of the global population – still don’t have access to reliable broadband internet, which limits their ability to work and continue their education. 



According to the UN World Economic Situation and Prospects (WESP) mid-2020 report, released May 13, the pandemic will likely cause an estimated 34.3 million people to fall below the extreme poverty line in 2020, with 56% of this increase occurring in African countries,
An additional 130 million people may join to the ranks of people living in extreme poverty by 2030, dealing a huge blow to global efforts for eradicating extreme poverty and hunger.



AMAZON TO CUT WORKERS’ PAY

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Amazon announced this week that it is planning to end both $2-an-hour pay increases and double overtime for warehouse workers at the end of May.



Whole Foods, the Amazon-owned supermarket chain, also informed employees Tuesday that their $2 hourly raises will end on June 1.



As Amazon moves to end small hazard pay increases for its workers, an analysis released Thursday by the Institute for Policy Studies found that Bezos—the richest man in the world—saw his wealth increase by $30 billion between March 18 and May 14.



“Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential,” said former Amazon vice president Tim Bray, who resigned in disgust earlier this month over the company’s treatment of whistleblowers. “Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.”



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/14/slap-face-bezos-wealth-jumps-30-billion-amid-pandemic-amazon-end-2-hour-hazard-pay

Super salaries at the supermarkets

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Dave Lewis, Tesco’s chief executive has been handed a £6.42m pay package.



Lewis, who will leave the business in September, has received a £2.4m annual cash bonus and another £2.4m long-term share bonus on top of £1.6m in basic salary and benefits. His basic salary alone is 355 times that of the lowest-paid average employee.



Lewis, who will leave the business in September, has received a £2.4m annual cash bonus and another £2.4m long-term share bonus on top of £1.6m in basic salary and benefits. His basic salary alone is 355 times that of the lowest-paid average employee.



Morrisons revealed that its chief executive, David Potts, received a total £4.2m pay package last year including a £2.3m long-term share bonus. 



https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/13/tesco-chief-executive-handed-642m-pay-package-dave-lewis

Pandemic – But Capitalism Prevails

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When markets slumped in March as the spread of coronavirus gathered pace, wealth managers’ trading volumes soared as ultra rich clients reshuffled their portfolios. It was this market frenzy that helped Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse – the world’s biggest wealth managers – post bumper first-quarter profits.



The big wealth managers have found that banking for billionaires has swelled their own coffers with outsized transaction fees.



“Situations like this, while they pose risks and need to be very proactively managed, also provide opportunities, as we saw,” said Iqbal Khan, co-head of UBS’s $2.3 trillion global wealth business, which recorded its best first quarter since the financial crisis.  UBS’s net margins on managed money rose to 20 basis points, their highest in years. 



Credit Suisse managed double-digit profit growth in the quarter. U.S. lenders Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Bank of America also recorded jumps in wealth management revenue while private banks Pictet and Vontobel plan to open new branches and expand their teams. 



The question now, however, is how to sustain profits as market volatility and trading volumes subside. Many are focusing on finding clients’ investment opportunities outside public markets – often involving distressed assets – as well as lending more to those whose businesses need extra cash to tide them through the crisis. 





“If you’re a large family office today, you’re sitting on cash hopefully. You might loan that cash or provide it to a company you own, or you might deploy that cash to buy distressed assets that have long-term value,” said Claudio de Sanctis, Deutsche Bank’s global head of wealth management. 



Private equity – particularly in areas related to distressed assets, healthcare or technology – has become a focal point, senior managers from four leading lenders told Reuters.





“Our investor sentiment survey clearly showed that, around the world, wealthy investors still have liquidity available to commit to risk assets,” said Tom Naratil, Khan’s co-head of wealth at UBS. The bank’s survey found that 37% of wealthy investors wanted to increase their investments over the next six months.  And large banks are looking to help them do so through increased lending.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-global-banking-wealth-analysis/coronavirus-crisis-a-window-of-opportunity-for-bankers-to-the-rich-idUKKBN22Q1U7

Mexico, Covid-19 and the supply chain

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Mexico’s border states are home to more than 6,000 maquiladoras – largely foreign-owned factories that manufacture products for export – and the plants, which employ hundreds of thousands of people, have been the focus of several coronavirus outbreaks. Cramped conditions make some maquiladoras prime areas for contagion.



When the coronavirus pandemic reached the Mexican border city of Mexicali, operations at first continued as normal at the US-owned factory where Sergio Ayala has worked for the past three years.

Eventually, workers went on strike at the Autolite plant, which makes spark plugs for export, in protest at the management’s alleged failure to introduce sanitary measures, and the state labor secretary to shut it down. 
A few days after the stoppage, Ayala got a text message inviting him back to work – on condition he did not drive to work: the factory parking lot had to stay empty. “They offered us a bonus of 250 pesos and a vacation day,” he said.
Ayala decided it wasn’t worth the risk but dozens of workers accepted the terms – and the factory kept operating.
Companies and US government officials have urged the Mexican government to keep maquiladoras running at any cost.
Baja California, the Mexican state with the largest number of maquiladoras, is the now the state with the second-greatest number of Covid-19 deaths. All along the 2,000-mile border maquila workers have died of Covid-19: in Ciudad Juárez, 18 workers at a textile factory owned by the US-owned Lear Corp have reportedly died of coronavirus.
“There are maquiladoras that say it’s cheaper to pay a fine for noncompliance than to lose million-dollar contracts,” said Mago Avalos, director of the Tijuana-based labor rights organization Ollin Calli. “It’s better to have workers working – even if they get sick – than to have them resting and getting paid.”
Twenty-four cases have been confirmed among maquila workers in Tijuana and 17 in Mexicali, said Avalos, but the real number is probably far more, as testing is severely limited and the health system is chronically overloaded.
“There are workers who have gone to be tested and seen that the lines are 12, 15, 20 hours long,” Avalos said. “They won’t wait for over 10 hours in line if they feel sick.”
Nanci Ramos used to work at Terminados Rogers in Mexicali, making paper products such as notebooks and calendars.
When the pandemic was declared, she and her coworkers received a pamphlet advising them to wash their hands and maintain a safe distance – but no measures were taken to keep workers apart. A report from the Border Committee of Women Workers noted that some maquiladoras lack soap in bathrooms and eating areas. Many lack windows and proper ventilation.
“The problem is, workers need to eat both now and in 2021,” Avalos said. “The economic and health crisis is not coming after Covid. The working class is living it right now.”



Who pays the piper calls the tune

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The US will have priority access to a Covid-19 vaccine if and when Sanofi develops one, the French pharmaceutical giant told Bloomberg, explaining that the US offered more money to fund vaccine research. 



“The US government has the right to the largest pre-order because it’s invested in taking the risk,” Sanofi’s Chief Executive Officer Paul Hudson said.  The U.S., which expanded a vaccine partnership with the company in February, expects “that if we’ve helped you manufacture the doses at risk, we expect to get the doses first.” Sanofi will be “responsible,” making any vaccine affordable, Hudson said.



Whichever country succeeds in bringing a coronavirus vaccine to market first is likely to claim ownership over some of the distribution process, said Krishna Kumar, a senior economist and director of international research at the RAND Corp. think tank.

“We cannot even trade with each other without getting into questions of tariffs, and so on,” he said. When it comes to a life-saving vaccine, “it’s not going to be easy to come up with arrangements.”



Elderly going hungry

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There has been a dramatic increase in the number of older people malnourished or at risk of malnutrition since the coronavirus crisis began, according to Age UK and the Malnutrition Task Force.



Age UK has reported a rise in numbers without food or the support to plan, to cook and eat by themselves.



 Dianne Jeffrey, the chair of the Malnutrition Task Force, said: “We are extremely worried that the number of those suffering malnutrition is rising. Many of these people will eventually be admitted to hospital.”



“We know there are older people living on their own in the community who are running out of food and struggling to replenish their supplies because they are too frightened to go out, confused by the guidance or because their usual support networks have collapsed as a result of a pandemic,” said Caroline Abrahams, the charity director of Age UK. “These people are not on anyone’s list,” she added. “Typically they are not online. However, the pandemic has pulled the rug out from under them, so that their usual strategies for getting by are no longer working.”

Abrahams said she had a conversation recently with an elderly man called Nigel. “He has no food in his house but he is scared to leave it because of coronavirus,” she said. “Nigel isn’t online. He was recently discharged from hospital but no longer gets any support at home. Nigel was told that food parcels would be delivered but has only received one some time ago. He is now out of food and has no family or friends who can help him.”



79-year-old Betty, relies on her friend to top up her gas meter. “She doesn’t have funds to do it herself and is unable to go out. She has emphysema but is just using a blanket to keep warm,” said Abrahams. “She hasn’t got any food, only some bread and bacon that a neighbour gave her. She is worried and lonely, with no support. She is unable to contact her GP because she does not have much phone credit or enough money to top it up,” she said.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/13/charities-report-rise-in-older-people-struggling-for-food-in-lockdown

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