End of the Year Review – Meeting held online via Discord, introduced by Mike Foster & Bill Martin, 30th December 2020

 New York governor, Andrew Cuomo , has fallen from grace. Last year he was the media’s darling, the Democratic Party’s caring public face to Donald Trump’s detachment with his hands-on approach to the Covid-19 pandemic in his state. This blog, however, was not impressed and back in May 2020 posted a critique about his callous policies towards the elderly in care-homes. Well, the chickens have truly come home to roost and Cuomo’s political reputation has withered away. Cuomo now faces calls for his resignation, an investigation by the FBI and federal prosecutors, and angry state legislators from his own Democratic party who want to strip him of the emergency powers they granted him during the pandemic.

Covid deaths in New York nursing homes which accounted for almost a third of the total death toll of about 46,000. Cuomo directed nursing homes to accept patients back from hospital who were infected or might be infected with coronavirus. The homes had to admit anyone who was “medically stable” – no resident was to be denied readmission “solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of Covid-19”. The motivation behind the notice was clear – there was an “urgent need” to expand hospital capacity in order to meet the surge in Covid cases. In other words, free up hospital beds by getting older patients back to their nursing homes.

Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, had admitted to Democratic leaders in a conference call that the administration had withheld the true nursing home death toll from state lawmakers and the state revised its official tally from 8,500 to more than 15,000 deaths – making a mockery of Cuomo’s longstanding boast that his state had among the best records in the country with regard to nursing homes Covid fatalities.

‘Meet the governor we’ve known all along’: how Cuomo fell from grace | Andrew Cuomo | The Guardian

 The number of British households plunged into destitution more than doubled last year. It has emerged that there were 220,000 more households living in destitution by the end of last year, potentially more than half a million people.

The increase in destitution – from 197,400 to 421,500 households last year – is defined as a two-adult household living on less than £100 a week and a single-adult household on less than £70 a week after housing costs.

The disproportionate economic impact on regions such as the north-west of England that were placed under stricter restrictions during the tier system last autumn. National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) estimated that the number of households living in destitution in north-west England was three times the UK figure.

Louise Casey, Johnson’s adviser on homelessness last year, said she would be willing to be a part of a review, warning Britain had been “torn apart” by the pandemic.  She said. “By March, there will be 6 million people on Universal Credit. Almost 4 million are furloughed, and those still working are on less income. Unemployment has doubled and will keep rising. If 25% of your population is affected, then you can’t just tweak old policies, working out the least expensive, least challenging thing that can be done. You need big new policies.”

“We need to move into Royal Commission territory,” she said. “A new Beveridge report. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Government can, if it wants to, do something on a different scale now. The nation has been torn apart, and there’s no point being defensive about that. We’ve got to gift each other some proper space to think. We’ve got to work out how not to leave the badly wounded behind.”

Professor Jagjit Chadha, the director of NIESR, repeated a warning that the official unemployment rate of 5% “seems to be under-reporting the true level”. He said: “As a result of lockdowns, levels of destitution seem to be rising across the country. But what’s terribly worrying is that in certain regions – in the north-west in particular – we might see some 4, 5 or 6% of the population living in destitution.

Call for new Beveridge report as number of destitute UK households doubles during Covid | Poverty | The Guardian

 In Texas a propaganda war has broken out over the cause of its electrical power collapses.

“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott told Fox News. Abbott faulted renewable energy sources for Texas’s “situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis”. 

His lieutenant governor, fellow Republican Dan Patrick, however, told Fox News  that the problems were not attributable to green energy. “We had a breakdown everywhere,” Patrick said,

“The Green New Deal has nothing to do with our problems in Texas,” said Daniel Cohan, associate professor of engineering at Rice University.  “…Natural gas systems failed to provide those plants with a reliable supply of fuel.” 

“There is no Green New Deal in Texas, nor has there ever been,” said Joshua Rhodes, an energy research associate at the University of Texas at Austin. “Any investment in renewables has been because private companies have seen the opportunity to make money, which is core to the Texas ethos.” He said that gas supply issues and freezing water pipes appear to be the main issue when it comes to loss of capacity at power plants, and that the recent blackouts are no excuse to question the durability of alternative energy.

Rivers and lakes are vital ecosystems. They cover less than 1% of the planet’s surface, but their 17,000 fish species represent a quarter of all vertebrates, as well as providing food for many millions of people. Healthy rivers are also needed to supply clean water. Yet only 14% of rivers have fish populations that has escaped serious damage from human activities. Scientists found that the biodiversity of more than half of rivers had been profoundly affected. The worst-hit regions are western Europe and North America. In the UK, there have been no prosecutions or fines issued to farms by the Environment Agency (EA) despite 243 violations of legislation designed to curb the agricultural pollution of waterways in England. The scale of pollution in English rivers from the agricultural runoff of chemicals and sewage pollution was exposed when in 2020, for the first time, no river achieved good chemical status, suggesting that pollution from chemicals and agriculture is having a huge impact on river quality. Sewage wastewater discharges by water companies into rivers account for damage to 36% of waterways, and runoff from agricultural industries is responsible for 40% of the damage.

“Human well-being lies in protecting the health of the planet,” declared the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. “It’s time to reevaluate and reset our relationship with nature.” 

The UN on Thursday released a report on the triple emergency of the climate crisis, the destruction of wildlife and habitats, and deadly pollution in what Guterres described as  humanity’s “senseless and suicidal war on nature.” He added. “Human well-being lies in protecting the health of the planet. It’s time to reevaluate and reset our relationship with nature. 

The UN’s report recommends various reforms such as carbon taxes; a redirection state subsidies and new business models. 

An article by Vandana Shiva, an eco-activists, proposes much more fundamental changes as a solution and it is in the title of this article by her, ‘Reclaiming Our Common Home: Expand the Commons to Include Everything We Need’. 

She explains “Through reclaiming the commons, we can imagine possibility for our common future, and we can sow the seeds of abundance through “commoning.” In the commons, we care and share—for the Earth and each other.”

Her language is not ours, but she reflects our aspirations for a sustainable steady-state economy of common ownership, where production is for peoples’ needs and not for a capitalist’s profit. 

  Rich countries are on course to have over a billion more doses of COVID-19 vaccines than they need, leaving poorer nations scrambling for leftover supplies.

The advocacy group, the ONE Campaign, which campaigns against poverty and preventable diseases, said wealthy countries, such as the United States and Britain, should share the excess doses to “supercharge” a fully global response to the pandemic and that a failure to do so would deny billions of people essential protection from the COVID-19-causing virus and likely prolong the pandemic.

To date, the United States, the European Union, Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan have already secured more than 3 billion doses – over a billion more than the 2.06 billion needed to give their entire populations two doses.

“This huge excess is the embodiment of vaccine nationalism,” said Jenny Ottenhoff, ONE Campaign’s senior director for policy. “Rich countries understandably hedged their bets on vaccines early in the pandemic but with these bets paying off in spades, a massive course correction is needed if we are going to protect billions of people around the world.” 

The analysis found that, along with other COVID vaccine supplies procured by the global COVAX vaccine-sharing plan and in bilateral deals, the excess rich-country doses would go a long way to protecting vulnerable people in poorer countries. This would significantly reduce the risk of deaths from COVID-19, it said, as well as limiting the chances of new virus variants emerging and accelerating an end to the pandemic.

Rich nations stockpiling a billion more COVID-19 shots than needed: report | Reuters

 In all the other mature democracies when it comes to election reforms the purpose is to encourage participation and make it easier for electors to vote. Not so in the USA. There are at least 165 bills pending in 33 states that would make it harder to vote, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.

Georgia has unveiled sweeping new legislation that would make it dramatically harder to vote in the state, following an election with record turnout and surging participation among Black voters.

The bill would block officials from offering early voting on Sundays, a day traditionally used by Black churches to mobilize voters as part of a “souls to the polls” effort. It would place new limits on the use of mail-in ballot drop-boxes, restrict who can handle an absentee ballot, and require voters to provide their driver’s license number or a copy of other identification with their application for a mail-in ballot. It would also require voters to provide the same driver’s license information on the mail-in ballot itself or the last four digits of their social security number if they do not have an acceptable ID.

The bill gives voters less time to request and return mail-in ballots, not only moving up the deadline to return an application but also limiting requests to start 78 days ahead of an election instead of the current 180. It requires election officials to reject ballots mistakenly cast in the wrong precinct and bans organizers from offering food or water to voters standing in line to cast a ballot.

A separate bill under consideration in the state senate would eliminate no excuse absentee voting, something Republicans wrote into law in 2005, only allowing people to vote by mail if they are 75 or older or have an excuse.

The effort to shorten mail-in voting comes after many voters saw severe delays in getting their mail-in ballots because of delays with the United States Postal Service and overwhelmed election offices. About one third of early votes in the state were from Black voters and Joe Biden overwhelmingly won the mail-in vote in Georgia. The problem with early voting is simple: too many African-Americans in Georgia used it.

“With exacting precision, the bill targets voters of color,” said Nse Ufot, chief of the New Georgia Project, one of the groups that mobilized voters of color in Georgia. “Georgia Republicans saw what happens when Black voters are empowered and show up at the polls, and now they’re launching a concerted effort to suppress the votes and voices of Black Georgians.”

Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, one of the groups that helped mobilize Black voters last year, said there was no justification for the bill. One of the ways Butler’s group helped voters ahead of the election was by assisting them in returning their absentee ballot applications to election officials. The Republican proposal would prohibit that.

“There’s no reason for it other than this ideology and this misinformation that there was fraud. There was no fraud in the election. The governor, everyone said there was no fraud,” she said.

“The right lost! So now they are trying to change the rules and make it harder to vote,” Deborah Scott, the executive director of Georgia Stand-Up, another group that worked to mobilize Black voters, said 

Georgia Republicans in sweeping new effort to make it harder to vote | Georgia | The Guardian

 California’s Proposition 22 exempted some major tech firms from fully complying with labor laws. In November, California voters passed Prop 22, with 58.63% of voters in favor of the amendment to exempt app-based gig workers from California assembly bill 5, which granted gig workers the rights of employees such as unemployment insurance, health insurance, minimum wage, and collective bargaining. Uber, Lyft, and other gig companies refused to comply with AB5 and threatened to shut down operations in the state of California if they were forced to do so. Prop 22, authored by Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and DoorDash, went into effect in mid-December 2020 after an aggressive public relations campaign of more than $200m launched by the companies. The companies out-spent opponents to Prop 22 by 10 to one, making it the most expensive ballot measure in California’s history.

“It’s clear that as soon as Prop 22 passed, it was open season to start cutting my pay again,” said Peter Young, a rideshare driver for four years in Los Angeles. “If you try to earn money, just purely on the delivery fee, it comes out to about $5 an hour. A good day for me is maybe earning $100 before gas and expenses off eight hours of work,” said Young.

Ben Valdez has worked part-time as an Uber driver in Los Angeles for five years.

“I was under the impression that I was going to get an additional $0.30 per mile after Prop 22,” said Valdez, but he hasn’t received that extra compensation. “A lot of drivers were duped because they expected they were magically going to be able to qualify for benefits that the companies made it sound like they were going to pay for up front and that drivers were going to be getting reimbursement for the mileage,” said Valdez. “They also made drivers believe that if Prop 22 didn’t pass then Uber and Lyft were going to leave the state of California because they couldn’t afford to pay drivers as employees.”

“Prop 22 hasn’t made anything better because the companies still don’t take into consideration the waiting time and driving time to stores, so their guaranteed 120 percent of minimum wage is fraudulent,” said Okawa. She pays about $180 a week to rent a car through Uber’s partnership with Avis and spends about $90 on gas a week. She works five to six days a week from 7.30am to 6pm. She claimed the gig companies had changed base pay without giving a reason.

A study by labor economists at the University of California, Berkeley, in October 2019 found Prop 22 guarantees a minimum wage of $5.64 an hour, as only engaged time is accounted for in the wage calculations. The minimum wage in California is $14 an hour as of January 2021, and $13 an hour for employers with less than 25 employees.

 Several gig apps announced fees for customers in California would increase to cover the costs of Prop 22 driver benefits after several of the apps used fear of prices increases  if Prop 22 didn’t pass.

‘I can’t keep doing this’: gig workers say pay has fallen after California’s Prop 22 | California | The Guardian

 The domination of global medicine by major pharmaceutical companies needs to be confronted to provide fairer access to vaccines , said Mustaqeem De Gama, South Africa’s delegate at the World Trade Organization (WTO) on intellectual property rights. 

“While Rome is burning, we are fiddling around,” said De Gama. “The first effective vaccines were ready four or five months ago. Do you think it would have made a difference if we had the capacity to manufacture? I certainly think so.” De Gama said more structural change was needed to enable countries to make their own vaccines instead of relying on terms set by donors or profit-driven companies. “The infrastructure right now is providing a minimum and leaving the rest to the private sector,” said De Gama. “I don’t think governments should be outsourcing their responsibility for public health to private companies who are responsible to shareholders only.”

Backed by dozens of developing countries, the proposal, introduced by South Africa and India, argued that by-passing intellectual property rights would allow more of the world’s population to be quickly vaccinated by boosting production.

Supplies are low after rich countries bought more vaccines than they needed to, leading to predictions that many low-income countries may not be able to reach mass immunisation until 2024.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) on Thursday called for urgent delivery of vaccines to lower-income countries in order to avoid further mutations of the coronavirus, such as the 501Y.V2 variant that has spread throughout southern Africa.

Roz Scourse, a policy adviser for MSF Access, said the EU had been “hypocritical” in its recent outrage over undelivered AstraZeneca vaccines while blocking the proposed patent waiver, alongside other countries that host big pharmaceutical companies, including the UK.

“This is really showing the EU and other rich countries what happens when you hand over all the rights and control of the manufacture and distribution of Covid vaccines in the time of a pandemic to huge multinational corporations,” said Scourse.

South Africa leads backlash against big pharma over access to Covid vaccines (msn.com)

 “Everybody’s worst fear about capital punishment is that innocent people will be wrongfully convicted and executed,” Robert Dunham, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) executive director, said. “But the more we learn about what actually happens in these cases, the worse the problem gets.”

The DPIC added 11 cases to its “Innocence List” that tracks American death row exonerations on Thursday, bringing the total to 185 and raising concerns over the likelihood more innocents – especially people of colour – will be condemned.

DPIC has found wrongful death penalty convictions in “virtually every part of the country, with exonerations documented in 29 states and 118 different counties”, the report found. By their estimate, one in every 8.3 people sentenced to death in the United States since capital punishment resumed in 1970 were exonerated.

The cases reveal trends of “misconduct and racial bias”, the DPIC said. About 70 percent involved misconduct from police, prosecutors or other government officials. Roughly 80 percent “involved some combination of misconduct or perjury/false accusation and more than half involved both”.

Black exonerees saw misconduct in their cases at a much higher rate, 78.8 percent, than white exonerees at 58.2 percent. “Black exonerees spent an average of 4.3 more years waiting for exoneration than white exonerees”, the report said.

A major concern involving cases that involve capital punishment is false evidence, including false confessions – which occur at rates as high as 25 to 30 percent in exonerations won by DNA evidence. Forensic practices, such as hair analysis, bitemark analysis and bloodshot patterns, played an outsized role in wrongful convictions. DNA evidence has played a profound role in exonerations, the DPIC report said. DNA uncovered mistakes in official misconduct, false confessions, mistaken witness identification and more in capital punishment cases at much higher rates than cases where no DNA was present.

Despite concerns over capital punishment, the federal government conducted 13 executions between 2020 and the end of former President Donald Trump’s administration in January 2021, including the first killing of a female inmate since 1953. The executions were uniformly challenged based on faulty evidence or the mental acuity of the condemned, though none won reprieves.

‘We can be sure innocents died’, US death row exonerations show | Crime News | Al Jazeera