Purdue Pharma, the company that makes OxyContin and other potentially addictive prescription opioids, has agreed to plead guilty to three felony counts and reached a settlement potentially worth at least $8.3 billion with the Justice Department. The deal could clear the way for Purdue to transform from a profit-seeking privately held company into a public trust that serves the public good.

Rather than attempting to get profit-making companies to do the right thing, or hoping that a single ethically marketed drug could win out,  the proposed transformation of Purdue would legally require a major pharmaceutical manufacturer to make public health a higher priority than shareholder profits.

This would, at least in theory, serve two important goals.

First, by legally defining the company’s obligations to public health rather than to shareholders, it would eliminate the kinds of abuses that can result from the pursuit of profit such as marketing that encourages unnecessary or improper use.

Second, by providing addiction treatment at no cost, it would increase access to health care to the sorts of patients – addicted, poor and lacking adequate health insurance – typically ill served or even ignored in today’s system.

But by all accounts, the new trust would still be a for-profit entity. 

Indeed, profits from continued sales of pain medicines like OxyContin and addiction treatment medications like buprenorphine and naloxone – estimated by Purdue to be up to $8 billion per year – are crucial as the “payment” Purdue is offering to compensate the public for the company’s share of the costs of the opioid crisis.

 In the Purdue settlement, it would have to pursue profits just like the old Purdue. And since all pharmaceutical companies officially declare themselves to be dedicated to serving the public good, how different would it really be? The new trust would still be Purdue Pharma, a company with a well-entrenched culture of maximizing sales and profits.

History does not offer much assurance that isolated public-sector and nonprofit drug-makers can make a big difference in a pharmaceutical system designed for and powered by profit.

https://theconversation.com/oxycontin-maker-purdue-pharma-may-settle-legal-claims-with-a-new-public-trust-that-would-still-be-dedicated-to-profit-148604

 Marginalised ethnic minority groups in conflict-plagued regions of Myanmar, will be excluded in their homelands from the vote in next month’s national elections.

 Nearly two million people will now be disenfranchised by the election commission which has announced a long list of constituencies where voting will not take place. 

More than a million voters will be disenfranchised in Rakhine alone as well as hundreds of thousands in other states across the country — notably in Shan, Kachin and Karen.

The election commission is wholly appointed by the government.

The commission is “blatantly denying minorities representation”, said Kyaw Win of Burma Human Rights Network.

 Following the abolition of slavery in 1888, Brazilian authorities refused to implement any kind of public policy to integrate Black people into society. Instead, over the course of the 20th century, they carefully constructed a narrative in which Brazil is cast as a rare haven where people of all races are able to live in harmony. 

As a result, despite Black and mixed-race Brazilians suffering the worst of police violence, having limited access to education, making up some 64 percent of the unemployed, having limited representation in prominent decision-making bodies, and being almost three times as likely to be victims of homicide, most of the Brazilian population remained convinced there is effectively no racism in their country.

 That there is now a higher number of Black candidates contesting the elections and that the political parties are obligated to spend some money on their campaigns does not necessarily mean the upcoming municipal elections are going to lead to more diversity, let alone racial justice.

While the total number of Black and mixed-race candidates is now higher than the total number of white candidates when it comes to mayoral elections – the position that holds the most power – white people still dominate the lists. Indeed, of the 19,100 people who registered to run for mayor in the upcoming election, only 35 percent are Black – this in a country where 56.2 percent of the general population identify as Black.

The high number of Black city council candidates do not guarantee more racially diverse city councils either. In the Brazilian electoral system, not only the votes received by an individual candidate but also the total number of votes received by all of a political party’s registered candidates influence the outcome of an election. So it is possible for a popular candidate to fail to be elected solely due to the overall poor performance of his or her party. Knowing this, Brazilian parties often register a high number of candidates for each contested seat, just to gain a few more votes that can prove decisive in a tight election. Because of this, many fear that Black candidates running for a position in the municipal elections will only help their party’s strongest candidates (many of whom are white) to get elected, but fail to gain a seat themselves.

A Supreme Court’s decision in August obliges political parties to spend a proportional percentage of the public money they receive on the campaigns of their Black candidates, it does not instruct them to divide that money equally between these candidates. This means a party with 30 percent Black candidates can lawfully spend 30 percent of the public funds it receives on a single Black candidate’s campaign, and completely ignore the rest. This would result in a few strong Black candidates gaining office, with the overall racial makeup of councils across the country not changing significantly.

 There is one issue that categorically demonstrates that racial justice is not yet within the grasp of Brazilians. A significant percentage of the “Black” candidates running for a seat in the municipal elections, many of whom are already holding office or well-known public figures, only publicly acknowledged their Blackness in the run-up to this election. According to a survey of the 107 “Black” candidates running for the mayorship of a Brazilian state capital in the 2020 elections, 23 had claimed to be white in a previous election. If the candidates who changed their race in the run-up to the election were to be counted as white, the percentage of Black Brazilians running for a mayorship this year would decline to 26.4 percent. The percentage of white mayoral candidates, meanwhile, would jump to 73 percent.

 The introduction of women’s quotas failed to significantly increase the number of women in elected office in Brazil. There is little reason to believe the cosmetic increase in the number of Black candidates in this year’s municipal election or the Supreme Court’s recent decision to force political parties to give some Black candidates more public funds would yield more successful results.

There is no guarantee candidates who declared themselves to be Black in the run-up to the election would be willing to contribute to the fight against racism, sexism and other injustices once they are in office. In the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, for example, the Minister of Human Rights, Damares Alves, is a woman, but she does not consider herself a feminist and opposes women’s right to abortion. Sergio Camargo, the Black president of the Palmares Foundation, a government-funded institute tasked with promoting and protecting Afro-Brazilian culture, meanwhile, denies the existence of racism in Brazil and has described Black rights activists as “damned scum”.

 The Brazilian far right has learned how to use the diversity discourse of the left to its electoral advantage. Being forced to acknowledge the issue of race that it for decades chose to completely ignore, it is now finding ways to manipulate the public thirst for racial justice to further its own conservative and destructive agendas.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/10/22/diversity-in-brazil-is-still-just-an-illusion/

 FAQ Conspiracy theories Paddy Shannon, 2nd September 2020

Why not reformism? pt.1 Keith Graham, 4th September 2020

Why not reformism? pt.2 Keith Graham, 4th September 2020

FAQ Is propaganda different from marketing Paddy Shannon, 9th September 2020

Roadmap to Socialism Binay Sarkar, 11th September 2020

Tropical forest and peatland areas bigger than the Netherlands have burned in Indonesia in the past five years, Greenpeace has said, lambasting President Joko Widodo’s government for allowing the pulpwood and palm oil sector to act with impunity despite bearing “considerable responsibility” for the fire crisis. Indonesia, which has the biggest forests outside the Amazon and the Congo, is the world’s largest producer of palm oil and each year fires are linked to slash-and-burn practices used to clear areas for palm oil cultivation.

In a new report on Thursday, the prominent environmental group said some 4.4 million hectares (9.9 million acres) of land have burned in Indonesia between 2015 and 2019. Despite government promises to punish companies found to be deliberately burning concessions – particularly in the aftermath of the 2015 crisis that caused trans-boundary haze, affecting tens of millions of people across Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore – “palm oil and pulp firms continue to operate with few or no sanctions”, Greenpeace said. There has been no action against eight of the 10 palm oil companies with the largest burned areas in their concessions from 2015 to 2019, despite fires burning in multiple years within their concessions, it added.

 Indonesia’s government and legislators recently passed a new law that dismantles environmental protections, Greenpeace said. The “omnibus” Job Creation law, drafted with the involvement of the plantation sector approved by parliament earlier this month, weakens liability for environmental crimes, the group said, as the “palm oil and pulp sectors will be relieved of responsibility for prior damage they have inflicted on Indonesia’s peatlands”. The law will also protect the plantation sector from future liability for damage to the environment and fires in their concessions, the report said.

“Palm oil and pulp multinationals have practically set the rules in recent decades. Year after year they have broken the law by allowing forests to go up in flames, yet they evade justice and go unpunished,” said Kiki Taufik, global head of Greenpeace Southeast Asia Forest campaign. “Measures like the pro-business ‘Omnibus Law’ that ignore people and see nature as a bottomless resource to be extracted for short-term profit, can only have a catastrophic outcome for human health, human rights and the climate,” he added.

Three of the five companies, Greenpeace said, had the largest burned areas in their concessions from 2015 to 2019 are suppliers to Indonesia’s biggest conglomerate, Sinar Mas Group, and one of the country’s largest pulp and paper companies, Asia Pulp & Paper (APP).

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/10/22/area-burned-in-indonesia-fires-greater-than-the-netherlands

 What is the role and purpose of the American president? To stabilize the system of exploitation and maintain the economic power of the class that owns and controls the means of production. It is well to remember that.

Once again, as has happened so many times in American history, the issue of political corruption in the highest echelons of the government has come to the fore. It is of no use for the World Socialist Party of the United States to simply join the cacophony of loud and discordant voices calling for removal of Trump and his accomplices in government and accuse them of of criminal misconduct. Our concern is to reveal the relationship of crime and corruption to capitalism in general. The goal of the WSPUS is to tear away the veil of secrecy and factional politics and bring out the real issue.

Biden and Trump who are respectively the chosen or self–appointed spokesmen for their political parties may have widely different opinions on many issues but upon economic questions affecting the present social order they are at one. They represent the capitalist system and they stand or fall with capitalism. The issues which divide the capitalist political camps are merely quarrels between rival groups of capitalists over the division of the spoils which they have expropriated from the workers. As workers, we are no more interested in the outcome of these political squabbles than we would if two hold–up men had robbed us and then fell-out over the split of the haul. What are the issues about which the Republicans and Democrats are fighting? Do they mean anything to you?

The lords of Big Business are seeking ways and means to undermine and destroy the workers’ own organizations, the trade unions. They want to convert the workers into helpless serfs, unable to defend their hard-won rights and living standards. To defend itself with its united power in every field where it is attacked, labor must break for all time with the capitalist political parties, the Democrats and Republicans, and every type of boss politician. There are no “friends of labor” in the capitalist parties. The capitalists control the media. They control the politicians. They control the schools, colleges, and churches. They let you vote because they know that through their control of the means of information they can make you vote for what they want, and that no matter which way you vote, their right to rob you will be protected. The government is merely a big machine to help the capitalists keep their system of private ownership of the industries and natural resources, through which you are oppressed and exploited. The government is built to do the work of the capitalists. The laws which are made protect the capitalist interests. The government protects the capitalists no matter which party is in power. It cannot help you. It is intended only to hold you down, so that the capitalists can continue to make big profit for themselves out of your work. 

Choose between the trickster Trump or the shyster Biden. All capitalist politicians lie – they have no other choice. Both capitalist parties have amply earned the contempt of the people. Workers cannot rely on the capitalist system, the capitalist government or a piece of legislation by capitalist politicians to solve the basic evils of the private profit system. So long as the capitalists are permitted to rule, so long will there be unemployment, war, terrorism, food insecurity and police brutality.

No capitalist politician dares to lift a finger to challenge the Wall St. Corporate wealth controls the government of this nation. The corporations will continue to write our laws to please its share-owners and investors. The World Socialist Party intends to supplant corporate wealth by common wealth. That means common ownership by the people and democratic control by their communities. There is no hope for a new and better world except through the achievement of socialism, a world of peace, freedom and plenty for all.

The World Socialist Party calls upon fellow-workers to join us in the overthrow of capitalism through capturing the powers of government and transferring the ownership of the world from capitalism to socialism. It points out the staggering burden of militarism, the colossal fraud and  indescribably corruption of capitalist business, the cant, the chicanery, and the hypocrisy of capitalist society. Our aim is not to reform the evils of the day, but to abolish the social system that produces them, that is why the World Socialist Party is organized. It is the party, not of reform, but of revolution.

 Boycott the election! Refuse to vote for the capitalist fools who oppress and murder the workers. Refuse to vote for the fake progressives who mislead the workers and betray them when they get into office. 

  Under new guidance opposition to capitalism will be barred from England’s schools. The Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein approves, writing that “enemies of capitalism have no place in school”.  It mirrors Trump’s recent announcement of a “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education” in the US, or Victor Orban’s February announcement of a national school curriculum reflecting “Hungarian values”. School curricula have become flashpoints for populist regimes around the world.

 The Department of Education’s new policy goes much further than any British government during the cold war. It goes further than Prevent, the 2011 anti-radicalisation programme which gave the state new authority to review curricula. 

So why target anti-capitalism?

Movements such as Occupy and Extinction Rebellion have attracted mass followings with their systematic critiques of capitalism, inequality and environmental crisis. The appeal of such movements to young people may have motivated the government to act.

In 1954, Hartley Shawcross, British prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials, praised British “doctrines of toleration and liberty” that gave citizens “the right even to attack our whole system of government”. “We have refused to allow ourselves to be stampeded by fear,” he said.

https://theconversation.com/anticapitalism-wasnt-banned-in-english-classrooms-during-the-cold-war-why-is-it-now-147121

 The UK’s means-tested system of unemployment benefits, which operate as a “bare minimum” safety net, has failed to provide sufficient support to hundreds of thousands of people during the pandemic.

Thousands of middle-income professionals who have lost their job during the pandemic have reported turning to food banks, going into debt and suffering from stress and anxiety after they were turned down for universal credit, research reveals. The majority were turned down because access to benefits in the UK is subject to household “wealth tests”. Some 45% were ineligible because they or their partner earned too much, and 23% because they had savings above a £16,000 threshold.

The study, by the Economic and Social Research Council-funded Benefits at a Social Distance project, found nearly three-quarters were surprised when they were refused benefits, or said it was “unfair”. Many are probably to have had little interaction with the benefit system prior to the pandemic.

The study found nearly half the people rejected for unemployment benefits between March and July reported increased financial strains, while more than half reported problems with mental health, and around one in six said they had struggled to afford food.

At least 290,000 people were turned down for benefits – about one in 10 of all claims made for universal credit during the period – leaving many with little or no state support as they faced often huge reductions in household income.

Roughly half those rejected were graduates, and a third were in professional or managerial jobs, the study found. Over half reported losing at least 25% of their household income. Nearly two-thirds said they were unsure how they would cope financially when they heard they did not qualify for benefits.

Nearly two-thirds of unsuccessful claimants reported poor mental health or high anxiety as a result. Nearly half reported at least one of the following: falling behind on housing costs or bills; not being able to afford daily fresh fruit and vegetables; and being hungry and not eating.

Most had used savings or borrowed money on credit cards to tide them over. Around 4% reported using food banks. Pre-Covid studies show that most food bank users prior to the pandemic were destitute and reliant on benefits.

The £16,000 savings cap in particular proved unpopular, with many people complaining that money set aside for tax bills, mortgage deposits and retirement funds deprived them of benefits support, penalising them at a time of crisis not of their own making.

Although many turned down for universal credit are middle-income households, researchers have also found that around a quarter of the 3 million successful new claimants were also in professional jobs, suggesting the pandemic has brought many middle-class people into intimate contact with the UK benefit system for the first time.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/oct/22/thousands-of-people-refused-universal-credit-turning-to-food-banks

 The Financial Conduct Authority said 12 million adults were struggling to pay their bills, up by 2 million since coronavirus struck in February.

 It also found that 31% of UK households had experienced a decrease in income, with affected families typically having lost a quarter of their income.

The FCA found that 37% of BAME adults had taken an income hit, and were the most likely to have been forced into reduced working hours.

Young adults aged 25 to 34 – many of whom work in bars, restaurants and the arts and entertainment industry – have been the most likely to have had a change in employment as a result of the pandemic. The FCA found that one in five young adults were now more likely to be seeking debt advice, compared with just one in 50 in the 55-64 age group.

4.4m payment deferrals of some sort – including car loans, credit cards and mortgages – had been granted since the pandemic began, but only 323,700 were still in place.

Lenders had provided a total of 2.5m mortgage payment holidays, with 162,000 home buyers still on a payment deferral on 9 October, said UK Finance. The banks said households struggling to meet their mortgage payments could choose from one of four options: extending the length of the mortgage term, switching to interest-only from repayment, deferring payment of the interest, or capitalising the interest and adding it to the total balance outstanding.

The energy regulator, Ofgem, has told utility companies to offer struggling customers “realistic” debt repayment plans, or emergency credit if they are on prepay energy meters.

The Consumer Council for Water separately warned that the financial help offered to 900,000 households risked running dry without a long-term solution to managing water debts.

Citizens Advice said millions of people were in a financially calamitous position.

The chief executive of Citizens Advice, Dame Gillian Guy, said: “With the finances of 12 million people now fragile, there’s a real possibility that new lockdown restrictions will force many people into debt this winter. It’s in the government’s power to prevent this happening. By strengthening the support for those struggling with essential bills.”

It called for improved government support and a continuation of the £20 a week uplift in universal credit beyond spring.

Many of those who have remained employed are now flush with cash as a result of spending less on holidays and going out. The UK savings ratio – the proportion of total income that is put into savings – has leapt from 6% before the pandemic to 29%.

The financial analyst Laith Khalaf, at the investment group AJ Bell, said: “We are now at least a two-tier nation when it comes to finances. The pandemic has served to widen the wedge between the have and have nots in the UK. While 2 million more people may now struggle with bills and repayments as a result of the pandemic, only a few weeks ago mortgage approvals hit a 13-year high, according to the Bank of England. Those who have kept their jobs and income will likely have a new cash buffer in their bank account as lockdown [in effect] imposed a spending freeze.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/coronavirus-crisis-uk-wealth-divide-bills-bame

 A team of researchers from the University of Leeds have built an energy-model to evaluate the global population’s needs in terms of energy consumption by 2050. Their study showed that our global energy consumption could be reduced to the levels of the 1960s, when the Earth counted 3 million inhabitants, less than 40% of today’s energy consumption and still provide a decent standard of living to all.

Their scientific model was based upon data and comparisons from 119 countries worldwide. They calculated minimum final energy requirements to provide decent living standards (heating, petrol, electricity, WiFi, etc) to the entire population (projected to be 10 billion people in 2050).

“We find that, with a combination of the most efficient technologies available and radical demand-side transformations that reduce excess consumption to sufficiency-levels, the final energy requirements for providing decent living standards to the global population in 2050 could be over 60% lower than consumption today,” reads the study.

 Lead author Joel Millward-Hopkins, from the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds University, explained, “Overall, our study is consistent with the long-standing arguments that the technological solutions already exist to support reducing energy consumption to a sustainable level. What we add is that the material sacrifices needed for these reductions are far smaller than many popular narratives imply.” 

Full study can be read at:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378020307512?via%3Dihub