The BBC Is Animated
A report in The Times – 26/2/21- stated The BBC wanted to end the dominance of American cartoons on television because they prevent British children from absorbing their own culture, a senior executive said.
Children are part of families which come from many different countries with their own cultures. Is it that they mean or is for them to adhere to “British Culture” (whatever that means) ?
The broadcaster is hoping to create Britain’s answer to The Simpsons as it pours extra funds into animation to win back viewers from Disney and Netflix.
The Director Of Children’s Programmes & Education at The BBC, Patricia Hidalgo, said too many cartoons watched in this country are made overseas. She is telling producers to insert more identifiably British moments, such as roast dinners, into family shows.
Hidalgo cited “The Amazing World Of Gumball” as an animated series created in the UK but set in a fictional Californian town.
Maybe The BBC could consider a cartoon about Socialism. An animated series about a world without leaders, a world without money, a world where everything that is produced is available freely to everyone in the world.
As we know the dominant view in the world is the one of the Capitalist class.
Socialism is a big idea, it’s a story that has to be told, which needs a platform.
The BBC Is Animated
A report in The Times – 26/2/21- stated The BBC wanted to end the dominance of American cartoons on television because they prevent British children from absorbing their own culture, a senior executive said.
Children are part of families which come from many different countries with their own cultures. Is it that they mean or is for them to adhere to “British Culture” (whatever that means) ?
The broadcaster is hoping to create Britain’s answer to The Simpsons as it pours extra funds into animation to win back viewers from Disney and Netflix.
The Director Of Children’s Programmes & Education at The BBC, Patricia Hidalgo, said too many cartoons watched in this country are made overseas. She is telling producers to insert more identifiably British moments, such as roast dinners, into family shows.
Hidalgo cited “The Amazing World Of Gumball” as an animated series created in the UK but set in a fictional Californian town.
Maybe The BBC could consider a cartoon about Socialism. An animated series about a world without leaders, a world without money, a world where everything that is produced is available freely to everyone in the world.
As we know the dominant view in the world is the one of the Capitalist class.
Socialism is a big idea, it’s a story that has to be told, which needs a platform.
Germany’s Roma Still Stigmatised
“You’re nothing, you can’t do anything, you’re the bottom of the pile.” That’s what members of Germany’s Sinti and Roma communities have been told for centuries.
RomnoKher is the nationwide association of Sinti and Roma for the promotion of culture and education, and and issues a survey of Sinti and Roma people living in Germany, among them both Germans and immigrants.
The authors of the study refer to racism, anti-ziganism and discrimination.
Some 40% of respondents reported discrimination against their children — including in the classroom — by teachers and fellow students.
Two-thirds of all respondents feel discriminated against because they belong to a minority, including in the education system.
What caused the Syrian Civil War?
Climate change alone cannot be blamed for the outbreak of war in Syria in 2011. However, neither can it be ignored as a reason the once blossoming country became a parched, war-torn place
“Syria serves as prime example for the impact of climate change on pre-existing issues such as political instability, poverty and scarce resources,” Jamal Saghir, Professor at the Institute for the Study of International Development at McGill University, told DW.
“Climate disruption was an amplifier and multiplier of the political crisis that was building up in Syria,” as Staffan de Mistura, former UN Special Envoy for Syria between 2014 and 2018, explained. “A toxic cocktail started to turn into an explosive mixture with the ingredients of the Arab Spring, the anger of losing jobs, migration to cities, as well as the purchasing power decline and the anger against the very tough and very cruel reactions by the government,” de Mistura said.
In the past, Syria’s farmers have benefited from relatively fertile and productive lands, as well as the state’s promotion of staple crop production between the 1970s and 1990s. The country of around 17 million people has been hit by three droughts since the 1980s. The most recent stretched from 2006 to 2010, and was recorded as the worst multiyear drought in around 900 years.
Decreased precipitation combined with rising temperatures resulted in desertification and devastation of agricultural land, particularly in eastern Syria. Along with this, 800,000 people lost their income and 85% of the country’s livestock died.
Since crop yields had also plummeted by up to two-thirds, the country had to start importing large quantities of grain. Consequently, food prices doubled. “But the drought still continued and people were hopeless,” Saghir said, thus explaining why 1.5 million rural workers headed to the cities for work. Those who stayed were mainly impoverished farmers who became easy targets for terrorist recruiters from groups like the so-called Islamic State (IS).
The crisis was aggravated by Bashar Assad’s decisions to reduce fuel, water and food subsidies over the years. In addition to water scarcity in rural areas, tensions rose between Kurds, Arabs, Alawites and Sunnis.
Geopolitically, the situation didn’t become any easier with ongoing competition over Syria between archenemies Iran and Saudi Arabia. “We started seeing horrible medieval sieges around many cities or villages when people were cut off from food and water, like in Homs or Aleppo,” de Mistura remembered.
Vast parts of the country have been devastated by war, water remains scarce and infrastructure is in dire need repair across almost the entire country.
“Assad has almost won the territorial war but is still very far from winning peace,” said de Mistura.
Jamal Saghir agrees: “For peace, you need reconstruction,” he said.
But with economic sanctions still imposed and Assad’s allies reluctant to invest the future is far from promising.
How climate change paved the way to war in Syria | NRS-Import | DW | 26.02.2021
Poverty Apartheid
For building new homes, certain regulations were introduced to include affordable housing. This proved a problem for the up-market property developers aiming to attract the wealthy buyers who did not wish to mingle with the less affluent.
So the solution was to design apartment blocks in a way that the rich and the poor were segregated. What has been termed “poor doors” and “poor floors” have been introduced and facilities such as courtyards, communal lounges and roof gardens divided. Separate entrances, lifts and stairs were installed to keep the wealthier and the less wealthy residents apart. Technology allows developers to control which parts of new buildings people have access to. In many tenure-split blocks, access to certain floors is via a key-code, which prevents movement between levels.
One vast £1bn Convoys Wharf development in Deptford, south-east London, will have different entrances for residents paying London affordable rents – those on social housing waiting lists – and for slightly better-off households buying into shared ownership. The most common form of segregation, however, is the tenure-specific block. West London’s Ealing council, with Malaysian developer EcoWorld, is planning six towers with nearly 200 affordable homes confined to two blocks.
‘Poor floors’: anger over new plans to segregate tower block residents | Housing | The Guardian
Pandemic – Blood on their hands
Countries seeking their own COVID-19 vaccine doses are making deals with drug companies that threaten the supply for the global COVAX programme for poor and middle-income countries, the World Health Organization said.
COVAX aims to vaccinate 20% of people in low- and middle-income countries by the end of 2021 – a modest ambition, to UK ears. Late last week, COVAX was boosted by additional donations from the US, UK and European Union. But COVAX and the low-income countries that depend on it are still on the back foot. Despite wealthy countries’ apparent support for COVAX, most have raced to clinch bilateral deals with pharmaceutical companies, “pre-ordering” vaccines even before efficacy trials had been completed – and there is a global shortage of vaccine stock.
The WHO director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told the body’s recent executive board that 44 bilateral deals had been done in 2020 and a further 12 this year. Manufacturers, Tedros said, have prioritised regulatory approval in rich countries where the profits are highest
“Even as they speak the language of equitable access, some countries and companies continue to prioritize bilateral deals, going around COVAX, driving up prices and attempting to jump to the front of the queue. This is wrong,” said Tedros. Securing private bilateral deals directly with pharmaceutical companies is unaffordable for the least developed countries. Uganda, for example, is paying the Serum Institute of India $7 per dose for the AstraZeneca vaccine – triple the price paid by the European Union ($2.16).
Young people in wealthy countries were being vaccinated before vulnerable groups, including the elderly and health workers, in poorer countries.
Three-quarters of global vaccinations have taken place in only ten countries, while 130 countries don’t have access to a single vaccine,
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for countries to waive intellectual property rules, to allow other countries to make vaccines more quickly.
The WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) requires countries to give pharmaceutical corporations lengthy monopoly control over the knowledge and technology used to produce medicines. India and South Africa in October 2020 introduced a proposal (pdf) calling on the WTO to exempt member nations from enforcing pandemic-related patent protections. The TRIPS waiver is backed by more than 100 countries, but a small group of powerful states in the Global North—led by the U.S., U.K., and Canada—is actively and successfully impeding the will of a majority of the world.
Biden, despite having had the opportunity to do so at two recent WTO committee meetings, has not yet ended U.S. opposition to India and South Africa’s proposal—even though current trends indicate that the world’s poorest countries will be forced to wait until 2024 for mass inoculation, causing needless suffering and death, and generating more than $9 trillion in economic losses.
“As an expert in intellectual property law and access to life-saving medicines, I can assure the Biden administration that intellectual property barriers are real, and they’re blocking millions of people around the world from accessing life-saving Covid-19 vaccines,” Brook Baker, senior policy analyst at Health GAP and professor of law at Northeastern University, said during the press conference. “By obstructing the TRIPS waiver proposal, President Biden is breaking his promise to share Covid-19 vaccine technologies with the world.”
The world does not have time to wait for the usual, slow, and unequal distribution of treatments, diagnostics, and vaccines. The new Covid-19 variants, which show more resistance to vaccines, prove that further delay in immunity around the world will lead to faster and stronger mutations. The TRIPS waiver would give countries more ways to tackle the legal barriers to maximizing production and supply of medical products needed for Covid-19 treatment and prevention.
Akshaya Kumar, director of crisis advocacy at Human Rights Watch, pointed out, “Sharing the recipe for vaccines by pooling intellectual property and issuing global, open, and non-exclusive licenses could help scale up manufacturing and expand the number of vaccine doses made.”
Abby Maxman, president of Oxfam America, said that “rather than slicing the existing pie of vaccines even more finely, we need to share the recipe so that we have enough for everyone. We need a people’s vaccine. A vaccine that is free to everyone around the world, that is fairly distributed based on need and not on nationality or ability to pay.” Decrying the “vast chasm of inequality” created by giving “just a handful of giant pharmaceutical corporations… monopoly control over the live-saving technologies we all need,” Maxman noted that the U.S., with only 4% of the world’s population, has purchased almost half of Pfizer’s total expected supply in 2021.
Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, emphasized that “rich nations have an obligation to share with the global community. That is the only way to protect the vulnerable here and abroad. The United States must stop blocking the WTO TRIPS waiver in order to share the vaccine with the developing world and to prevent the killing of our vulnerable siblings in the developing world,” Campbell added. “If we don’t get the waiver, we in the United States, I believe, will have blood on our hands, and we cannot allow that to happen. Let’s change this.”
Asia Russell, executive director of Health GAP, which has campaigned for equitable access to medicines for over two decades says, “The only solution is for vaccine manufacturers to share their technology so we can start to overcome artificial vaccine supply scarcity through easing monopoly restrictions. Why is gross profiteering being tolerated, while front-line health workers in poor countries are dying waiting in line for access? Aren’t their lives worth as much as people in the UK or US? Pharmaceutical companies must wake up. Donation schemes and feel-good initiatives won’t fix vaccine apartheid. They must relinquish their patents, share their know-how, and co-operate.”
Food Wasted
Supermarket chains are throwing away the equivalent of 190 million meals a year that could be given to the hungry.
Britain’s top 10 chains are donating less than 9 per cent of their surplus food for human consumption. The worst-performing supermarkets were Sainsbury’s and Iceland, with 3.8 and 1.7 per cent donated respectively. Tesco, meanwhile, was top with 13.7 per cent, while Aldi and Co-op also managed above 10 per cent.
Just 24,242 tons was passed on to the needy out of 282,338 tons of unsold food approaching its use-by or best-before date.
Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) says that an additional 80,000 tons of the leftover food would have been suitable to donate. Every 1,000 tons amounts to 2.4 million meals.
For 2019-20, 258,096 tons were either sent for animal feed or pulped in crushers at the back of superstores and sent to anaerobic digestion plants to produce biogas or fertiliser.
In the first few weeks of lockdown, up to 3.7 million adults sought charity food or used a food bank, while the plight of those struggling to feed children has been highlight.
Clare Oxborrow of Friends of the Earth said, “It is clearly unacceptable that with a climate and ecological crisis, as well as rising poverty and hunger, supermarkets in the UK are wasting tens of thousands of tons of edible food. The land, water and energy used to produce, then dispose of, uneaten food is sickening.”
Revealed: UK’s largest supermarkets throw away enough food for 190 million meals | The Independent
Biden Backtracking on Fossil Fuels
Biden is getting plenty of plaudits from the liberal media for returning America to the Paris agreement but when it comes to actual policies, he is reneging on his campaign promises. He is cleverly masquerades pro-fossil fuel policies as climate action.
“No more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.”
His actual executive order only paused the leasing program for some indeterminate period while the administration reviews it. Indeed, the order was accompanied by an announcement that existing leases and permits — stockpiled by the industry under Trump — would be untouched.
Energy Secretary nominee Jennifer Granholm voiced support for exporting fossil fuels (in the form of liquified natural gas, or LNG). Boosting LNG exports means an increase in fracking in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio — creating a host of serious public health problems — along with building massive new facilities to handle these exports.
The administration is backing plans to create new ‘carbon markets’ in the agricultural industries which would let financial speculators and corporate polluters team up to monetize soil practices that increase carbon removal (which is extremely difficult to measure in the first place). The point of all of this is to allow fossil fuel corporations to purchase ‘carbon credits’ from farmers instead of actually reducing their own pollution.
Carbon capture schemes sound great in theory, but the technology, to the extent it works, is used to pump more oil out of the ground — the opposite of climate action. Several high-profile carbon capture projects have been shuttered recently, mostly because relying on ‘market incentives’ to coax compliance from fossil fuel corporations is a fool’s errand. If these companies can’t find a way to make the numbers work, they’re not going to bother disturbing their business model.
Increasing the amount of drilling to send fracked gas overseas, or creating accounting tricks that conceal continued reliance on fossil fuels, aren’t climate progress. It is a matter of old wine in new bottles.
America’s Inequality – the Cost
$50 trillion , that is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades, according to a new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation.
Had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.
Price and Edwards calculate that the cumulative tab for the US four-decade-long inequality had grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020.
America’s inequality is old news. Many other studies have documented this trend. The RAND report brings the inequality price tag directly home by denominating it in dollars—not just the aggregate $50 trillion figure, but in granular demographic detail.
For example, are you a typical Black man earning $35,000 a year? You are being paid at least $26,000 a year less than you would have had income distributions held constant.
Are you a college-educated, prime-aged, full-time worker earning $72,000? Depending on the inflation index used (PCE or CPI, respectively), rising inequality is costing you between $48,000 and $63,000 a year.
At every income level up to the 90th percentile, wage earners are now being paid a fraction of what they would have had inequality held constant.
According to Oren Cass, executive director of the conservative think tank American Compass, the median male worker needed 30 weeks of income in 1985 to pay for housing, healthcare, transportation, and education for his family. By 2018, that “Cost of Thriving Index” had increased to 53 weeks (more weeks than in an actual year). But the counterfactual reveals an even starker picture: In 2018, the combined income of married households with two full-time workers was barely more than what the income of a single-earner household would have earned had inequality held constant. Two-income families are now working twice the hours to maintain a shrinking share of the pie, while struggling to pay housing, healthcare, education, childcare, and transportations costs that have grown at two to three times the rate of inflation.
America’s 1% Has Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% | Time
