A survey reveals that the many pressures on vulnerable households created by the pandemic are also having a knock-on impact on local authorities, many of which were nearing breaking point even before the Covid crisis emerged.

More than nine in 10 district councils, which represent cities, towns and urban areas across England, have reported an increase in food bank use in the past year.

 In Bradford, three times as much food was distributed from 21 sites during the peak of the demand, compared to pre-Covid levels. Other recent research has suggested that one in five UK schools have set up a food bank since the start of the pandemic. More than a third of teachers said their school delivered food parcels to pupils’ homes.

Most local councils in England have also reported increased numbers of people needing help for homelessness, with warnings that many poorer households will face “disaster” unless emergency support is extended well beyond the pandemic. During 2020-21, 85% of English councils said they had seen an increase in claims from homeless households for temporary accommodation

93% of councils  had seen an increase in demand for help with paying council tax. Councils are calling for an increase in the local housing allowance, which is used to calculate the amount of housing benefit tenants can claim. They are also warning that extra council tax support and extra grants may be needed, with council tax increasing across England this year and unemployment set to rise.

Many also saw a rise in demand for help in dealing with disputes between landlords and tenants, according to a survey by the District Councils’ Network (DCN). It has prompted concerns that the evictions ban, put in place during the pandemic and recently extended, is not giving vulnerable households complete protection.

There have already been concerns that almost half a million private tenants who pay more than half their income on rent could be at risk of eviction when the ban ends. Senior figures across local authorities are worried that a further crisis in rough sleeping will emerge when the eviction ban ends at the end of May. Nearly three-quarters of councils anticipate a rise in rough sleeping, and almost nine in 10 districts expect an increase in homelessness.

Two-thirds reported an increase in family disputes requiring mediation

Giles Archibald, the leader of South Lakeland district council warned that the survey findings revealed “the devastating toll of coronavirus on households who have struggled to pay the bills, put food on the table, and keep a roof over their heads. The government has stepped in and provided much-needed additional support for families,” he said. “But while this has been welcome, there are serious concerns that if many measures do not continue, many families will be unable to get by…Without this many families could face disaster.”

Nine in 10 councils in England see rise in people using food banks | Food banks | The Guardian

 For those who don’t know, I currently work at a call center where we mainly act as middlemen between towing companies and insurance customers needing roadside assistance. You get the occasional rude caller, but it’s a pretty slow and easy job most of the year until things start to pick up in the winter time. Even winter isn’t much busier the entire season, there’s just crazy spikes that happen after snow storms that lead to us having back-to-back calls for more than a week sometimes. Aside from dispatching roadside assistance, we also handle after hours filing of auto accidents and property claims for a few different insurance companies. I usually file a few auto accident claims per night, but property claims are pretty rare, with the most common being a tree falling on a house or something due to extreme weather conditions.

Among the anarchist and anti-Bolshevik left, 1921 is remembered for two events. The New Economic Policy (NEP) where Lenin acknowledged the primacy of the capitalist system within Russia. And the mutiny at the Kronstadt naval base. It was an event where many in the socialist movement concluded that there was nothing to choose between Russian state capitalism and Western private capitalism

 In February 1921 strikes broke out in Petrograd after the government had announced that the very meagre bread ration was to be cut by a third. At the Kronstadt naval base, the sailors rebelled in support of the factory strikers, deposed the Bolshevik officials, and in the planks of their platform they demanded such elementary rights as freedom of speech for workers; right of assembly; liberation of political prisoners; new free and secret elections to the soviets. In effect they sought the fulfilment of the promise of a  ‘soviet government’ rather than the one-party rule of the Bolsheviks. The leading Bolsheviks, vehemently denounced the revolt. Lenin’s government responded by sending in the Red Army to suppress this challenge to their rule. Those sailors who were not killed or captured, fled to Finland. It was partially the Commune’s economic demands which were met without being acknowledged as such by the NEP.

The revolutionary sailors of Kronstadt had the prestige of being considered heroes who contributed to the 1917 Bolshevik victory, but had come to realise that they had been duped; that there was no semblance of liberty or democracy in the regime they had helped to create. In due course this led 1921’s act of defiance against the new tyranny. The autocratic nature of Bolshevism cannot be blamed upon Stalin. The apparatus of oppression was already built into this “workers’” state as the Kronstadt massacre happened under Lenin and his second-in-command, Trotsky. 

The litany of anti-working class measures implemented by the Bolsheviks  is long : the crushing of the factory committees, the subordination of the trade unions to the state, the imposition of top-down ‘one-man’ management in the factories, the introduction of the notorious ‘militarisation of labour’ programme under Trotsky and the systematic elimination of all political opponents both inside and outside the Party, culminating in the ruthless suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion on fabricated charges that it was a White Army plot. It should be noted that the now often lauded Workers Opposition were fully complicit in the deceit and supportive of the crushing of the Kronstadt Commune. Clearly the Bolshevik regime was no dictatorship of the proletariat but a dictatorship over the proletariat.

 No matter what sympathies we have with the Kronstadt we evaluate situations from a Marxist point of view. Even if they had been victorious, it was not going to bring socialism. The Kronstadters had no economic agenda other than various reforms favouring the ability of the peasantry to engage in trade. But they may have succeeded in achieving improved democracy and public accountability and avoided an era of state terror, show trials and gulags.

Among the anarchist and anti-Bolshevik left, 1921 is remembered for two events. The New Economic Policy (NEP) where Lenin acknowledged the primacy of the capitalist system within Russia. And the mutiny at the Kronstadt naval base. It was an event where many in the socialist movement concluded that there was nothing to choose between Russian state capitalism and Western private capitalism

 In February 1921 strikes broke out in Petrograd after the government had announced that the very meagre bread ration was to be cut by a third. At the Kronstadt naval base, the sailors rebelled in support of the factory strikers, deposed the Bolshevik officials, and in the planks of their platform they demanded such elementary rights as freedom of speech for workers; right of assembly; liberation of political prisoners; new free and secret elections to the soviets. In effect they sought the fulfilment of the promise of a  ‘soviet government’ rather than the one-party rule of the Bolsheviks. The leading Bolsheviks, vehemently denounced the revolt. Lenin’s government responded by sending in the Red Army to suppress this challenge to their rule. Those sailors who were not killed or captured, fled to Finland. It was partially the Commune’s economic demands which were met without being acknowledged as such by the NEP.

The revolutionary sailors of Kronstadt had the prestige of being considered heroes who contributed to the 1917 Bolshevik victory, but had come to realise that they had been duped; that there was no semblance of liberty or democracy in the regime they had helped to create. In due course this led 1921’s act of defiance against the new tyranny. The autocratic nature of Bolshevism cannot be blamed upon Stalin. The apparatus of oppression was already built into this “workers’” state as the Kronstadt massacre happened under Lenin and his second-in-command, Trotsky. 

The litany of anti-working class measures implemented by the Bolsheviks  is long : the crushing of the factory committees, the subordination of the trade unions to the state, the imposition of top-down ‘one-man’ management in the factories, the introduction of the notorious ‘militarisation of labour’ programme under Trotsky and the systematic elimination of all political opponents both inside and outside the Party, culminating in the ruthless suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion on fabricated charges that it was a White Army plot. It should be noted that the now often lauded Workers Opposition were fully complicit in the deceit and supportive of the crushing of the Kronstadt Commune. Clearly the Bolshevik regime was no dictatorship of the proletariat but a dictatorship over the proletariat.

 No matter what sympathies we have with the Kronstadt we evaluate situations from a Marxist point of view. Even if they had been victorious, it was not going to bring socialism. The Kronstadters had no economic agenda other than various reforms favouring the ability of the peasantry to engage in trade. But they may have succeeded in achieving improved democracy and public accountability and avoided an era of state terror, show trials and gulags.

 The global “middle class” (or perhaps better described as the middle-income)  shrank last year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, with almost two-thirds of households in developing economies reporting they suffered a loss in income, according to two new estimates based on World Bank data.

Researchers at the non-partisan Pew Research Center found that the ranks of the global “middle class” – those earning $10-$50 per day – fell by 90 million people to almost 2.5 billion last year to swell the ranks of the poor, (those living on less than $2 a day), by 131 million.

The Pew data on the middle class actually understates the impact because an estimated 62 million high-income people, or those earning $50 or more per day, dropped into the middle tier as a result of the pandemic. That meant the number of people who went into the crisis as members of the global “middle class” and fell out actually topped 150 million last year. South Asia accounted for more than a third of the decrease in the ranks of the middle class seen last year

“In modern history it is hard to come up with examples where you saw such a sharp downturn in global economic growth,” Rakesh Kochhar, the study’s author said.

The World Bank expects the ranks of the world’s poor to continue to grow this year. Its estimate show as many as 124 million people fell below its $1.90 line for extreme poverty in 2020. That number of new poor is projected to continue growing this year to as many as 163 million people.

In a separate study based on surveys of 47,000 households in 34 developing countries, researchers at the World Bank found that 36% of households saw job losses last year and almost two-thirds saw incomes fall. The result was the first increase in global poverty seen since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, the bank’s researchers wrote.

As in many rich countries, the surveys of countries ranging from Burkina Faso to Colombia, Indonesia and Vietnam show the burden of the economic hit disproportionately fell on women, young people and the self-employed in urban centers. But they also point to the consequences that slower recoveries are expected to have. While the U.S. has unleashed unprecedented fiscal rescue efforts for its economy, many developing economies have had smaller resources to draw on.  As of September 2020, advanced economies had on average spent 7.4% of gross domestic product on rescuing businesses and people hit by the pandemic versus 3.8% of GDP in emerging markets and 2.4% in low-income developing countries.

Global middle class shrinks for first time since 1990s | Business and Economy News | Al Jazeera

About 500,000 Jewish settlers live in more than 250 illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. Settlers in the occupied West Bank, who long depended on Israeli soldiers for protection, have now established their own security force in every settlement, which works hand-in-hand with the Israeli military.

 According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 94 violent attacks took place against Palestinian civilians between December 21, 2020, to March 13, 2021. Settlers have also forced the closure of main roads in the West Bank cities of Nablus, Tulkarm, and Jenin.

Munir Kadus, a researcher with the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, described the recent attacks as an “unprecedented escalation of violence against Palestinians across all of the West Bank”.

 A group known as the “Hilltop Youths” is accused of attacking Palestinians and their property.

Idan Zendi, an Israeli from the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, said the area is “Israeli land, not Palestinian”. He declared, “Palestinians have many lands to live in – Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt – they have many lands. We have only one land,” Zendi said 

The Israeli military told Al Jazeera that its authority is limited to separating the two sides when clashes occur, saying it has no power to arrest, detain or investigate settlers occupying the West Bank, which is the responsibility of Israeli police.

“The Israeli security forces must take decisive and effective steps to prevent any friction between settlers and Palestinians, because it is in the interest of Israeli security to maintain a state of calm and stability, not to create security chaos through settler violence against Palestinians,” David Chacham, a former Arab affairs adviser for the Israeli defence ministry, explained.

Israeli settler attacks surge against Palestinians | Occupied West Bank News | Al Jazeera

The horrendous killings of children in military conflicts and civil wars – both by national armed forces and militant groups – have triggered widespread condemnation by human rights organizations worldwide. But a “list of shame” singling out some of these perpetrators have been politicized leaving out some of these countries.

According to Human Rights Watch, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has been repeatedly criticized for letting national armed forces and non-state armed groups off the hook for grave violations against children in war. In 2020, Guterres “delisted” the coalition led by Saudi and United Arab Emirates for killing and maiming children in Yemen, as well as Myanmar’s army for recruiting and using child soldiers.

Yet each was responsible for hundreds of violations the previous year, according to the report. o Becker, Advocacy Director, Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS that Guterres has been reluctant to hold all perpetrators to account since he first took office about four years ago.

Asked whether Guterres is paying politics in a year he is seeking re-election, Becker said: “So his failure to list all perpetrators is definitely not just an issue of this being an “election year.” She said the UN Security Council first requested the annual list, and over the past two decades, has carefully created the UN’s framework for children and armed conflict. As the architects of the agenda, they should insist that the Secretary-General ensure it functions as it was intended, and that he list all perpetrators, without exception, Becker declared.

The numbers, however, are staggering, according to a new report released by the Eminent Persons Group, including Lt-General (Ret) Romeo Dallaire, the former UN force commander during Rwanda’s genocide; Yanghee Lee, former chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child; Benyam Dawit Mezmur, a child rights expert; and Allan Rock, former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations.

Afghan security forces have reportedly killed or injured more than 4,000 children since 2014 but have not been listed.

In 2014, Israeli forces killed 557 Palestinian children and injured 4,249, largely during fighting in Gaza. But Israeli forces were not on the list of shame– even though the number of children killed was the third highest in the world that year.

In Somalia, the armed group Al-Shabab has been repeatedly listed for sexual violence against children, but the Somali National Army has not been listed, despite comparable numbers of cases.

Without an accurate list, the UN’s children and armed conflict framework is seriously undermined. The experts urged the secretary-general to change his approach and list all perpetrators “without fear or favor.” Without such action, they warn, children will be put at even greater risk, said HRW. “The secretary-general should take the experts’ recommendations to heart and put the protection of children first”.

Mouin Rabbani, Senior Fellow with the Institute for Palestine Studies and Co-Editor, Jadaliyya, an independent ezine produced by the Arab Studies Institute, told IPS, “It seems to me indisputable that political factors are in play. In part this consists of the traditional deference to the powerful and their clients, which is compensated for with sanctimonious outrage – which would otherwise be justified – against the weak and marginalized”.  He argued, it reflects electoral considerations, with Guterres gearing up for election to a second term. And in part it reflects financial concerns, with the UN continuing to suffer a budget crunch and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia being once again given a pass.

UN Sanitizes Killings of Children in Armed Conflicts | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 Further to this earlier post the number of Indians in the middle class or middle income, those earning between $10 and $20 a day, shrank by about 32 million, compared with the number that could have been reached in the absence of a pandemic.

A year into the pandemic, the numbers of those in the ‘middle class’ has shrunk to 66 million, down a third from a pre-pandemic estimate of 99 million, it added.

“India is estimated to have seen a greater decrease in the middle class and a much sharper rise in poverty than China in the COVID-19 downturn,” the Pew Research Centre said.

 Pew estimated the number of poor people, with incomes of $2 or less each day, has gone up by 75 million as the recession brought by the virus clawed back years of progress. A rise of nearly 10 percent in domestic fuel prices this year, job losses and salary cuts have further hurt millions of households, forcing many people to seek jobs overseas.

COVID pushed 32 million Indians out of middle class: Pew research | Coronavirus pandemic News | Al Jazeera

In 1980, big company CEOs averaged 42 times more compensation than their typical workers. These gaps rapidly expanded in the 1990s, as wages stagnated for most workers and stock-based executive pay exploded. During the 21st century, the annual gap between CEO pay and typical worker pay has averaged about 350 to 1.

 Only 1 percent of CEOs at our country’s 500 largest corporations are Black, 2.4 percent are East or South Asians, 3.4 percent are Latino, and 6 percent are women.

 In the three years leading up to the 2008-09 meltdown, the top five executives at the 20 biggest bailed out banks had averaged $32 million each in personal compensation.

Coca-Cola: None of the soft drink maker’s top executives met their bonus targets last year, but the board gave them all bonuses anyway. CEO James Quincey wound up with a total compensation package worth more than $18 million, over 1,600 times as much as the company’s typical worker pay.

Carnival: The pandemic has been devastating for the cruise industry. At Carnival, CEO Arnold Donald not surprisingly failed to meet his pre-Covid bonus targets. He also accepted a cut in his base salary from $1.5 million in 2019 to $857,413 in 2020. But thanks to a special “retention and incentive” award, Donald’s total 2020 compensation grew to $13.3 million — nearly $2.2 million more than in 2019. He received the bulk of his special stock awards on August 28, 2020. 

After the industry shut down in mid-March amid Covid-19 outbreaks on several ships, Carnival and other cruise lines focused on getting paying customers home while leaving employees stranded on board for months without pay. The company reportedly even charged the abandoned workers for basic necessities like soap.

Tyson Foods: The meat processing company’s top executives didn’t meet their cash bonus targets either. So what did the board do? The Tyson directors gave them stock awards to make up the difference. Frontline employees, meanwhile, were facing high risks on the job. More than 12,000 of the company’s workers have contracted Covid-19, and at least 38 have lost their lives to the virus—more than at any other meatpacking company. One of the executives who benefited from the Tyson board’s special Covid stock awards is company chair John Tyson, who was hardly in dire need of support. The heir and grandson of the company founder, Tyson has watched his personal wealth increase 62 percent during the pandemic—to $2.4 billion.

According to research by the Institute for Policy Studies colleagues and Americans for Tax Fairness, the nation’s 657 billionaires have enjoyed a stock-fueled boost in their net wealth of 44 percent since the rough start of the pandemic crisis. 

As of March 10, 2021, their combined fortunes stood at $4.2 trillion—up $1.3 trillion since March 18, 2020. Many of these billionaires owe their fortunes to their years as CEOs.

More than 500 publicly held U.S. companies announced cuts to their CEO’s base salary in 2020. These moves garnered considerable positive press coverage, but they had a negligible impact on pay levels since straight salary makes up on average only 10 percent of executive compensation packages. A.O. Smith CEO Kevin J. Wheeler, for example, took a 25 percent salary cut while enjoying a 36 percent increase in his overall compensation. At Whirlpool, CEO Mark Bitzer accepted a 25 percent trim on his base salary during April and May 2020 while his total compensation for the year rose 22 percent to more than $17 million.

A 2017 Bloomberg survey found that U.S. CEOs were making more than twice as much, on average, as German CEOs, more than six times as much as Japanese CEOs, and nearly eight times as much as their Chinese counterparts.

A report for the Institute for Policy Studies found that 80 percent of S&P 500 firms paid their CEO over 100 times more than their median worker in 2018.

Opinion | The Single Most Dramatic Driver of Our Country’s Economic Divide: The Growing Gap Between CEO and Worker Pay (commondreams.org)

 The drug manufacturing industry during the pandemic has presented its humanitarian caring face during the Covid 19 pandemic and its PR departments have done well in giving the image that they are not taking any mercenary advantage of the health emergency. Short term tactics however are not the same as a long term marketing strategy.

Executives at Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer—the pharmaceutical corporations that supplied the Covid-19 vaccines —are quietly planning to hike prices on doses “in the near future,” once they decide the pandemic is over.

Many epidemiologists expect the coronavirus to continue to mutate, requiring booster shots on a regular basis and the pharmaceutical companies understand the business opportunities about cashing in.

Pfizer is very clear about the enormous moneymaking opportunity they see in the vaccines.

“As this shifts from pandemic to endemic, we think there’s an opportunity here for us,” Pfizer’s Chief Financial Officer Frank D’Amelio said during a recent healthcare conference sponsored by Barclays Bank. The potential need for booster shots, D’Amelio added, provides “a significant opportunity for our vaccine from a demand perspective, from a pricing perspective, given the clinical profile of our vaccine.” 

Carter Lewis Gould, an analyst with Barclays Bank, noted that Pfizer faced the particular challenges with “optics” but asked when the company could “pursue higher pricing down the road.” The current pricing, answered D’Amelio, is “clearly not being driven by what I’ll call normal market conditions, normal market forces,” but rather the “pandemic state that we’ve been in and the needs of governments to really secure doses from the various vaccine suppliers.” Once the pandemic ends, he continued, there will be “significant opportunity” for Pfizer.

Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have indicated to investors that they plan to return to more ‘commercial’ pricing as early as later this year.”

Moderna President Stephen Hoge said that “post-pandemic, as we get into those what I will call seasonal epidemics that you would expect to happen with a SARS-CoV-2 virus, we would expect more normal pricing based on value.”

And at the Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference earlier this month, Johnson & Johnson’s Executive Vice President Joseph Wolk told investors that the company would “reevaluate the vaccine for ‘pricing that’s much more in line with a commercial opportunity’ when the pandemic is over.”

The Covid-19 vaccines are already poised to be some of the most lucrative drugs of all time and will be expected to bring in billions in profit this year alone. But a one-time bonanza is not enough, a steady constant stream of revenue is what the stock-market seeks. 

Through its massive army of lobbyists, Big Pharma has been fighting calls to regulate drug prices as well as the India and South Africa-led proposal to temporarily waive the World Trade Organization’s patent protections, which currently enable a handful of private companies to monopolize knowledge and technology related to coronavirus tests, treatments, and vaccines.

 Pfizer’s Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla told investors during a call that “the company had little to worry about in terms of political opposition.”

“We believe the industry has generated a great deal of goodwill with Congress and public opinion through our Covid-19 treatment and vaccine efforts,” said Bourla.

Companies like Pfizer, which has not made the vaccine available to 85% of the world’s population, are enjoying immense popularity in the U.S. and Europe because of the fact that they got the vaccines done fast, and they seem to work well. That’s an unusually good position for pharma, they’re not used to being thought of as benefactors and saviors.

Big Pharma’s profit-maximizing behavior is that they are now waiting for the opportune time to raise prices once enough people have been vaccinated.

Last year routine visits to the doctor’s office and demand for new prescription medications fell sharply as a result of the pandemic. The pharmaceutical industry made up for lost revenue by raising prices on more than 300 drugs in the U.S. on January 1.

As Bernie Sanders indicated, “It is unconscionable that amid a global health crisis, huge multibillion dollar pharmaceutical companies continue to prioritize profits by protecting their monopolies and driving up prices rather than prioritizing the lives of people everywhere, including in the Global South.”

Covid Vaccine Makers Promise Investors They’ll Hike Prices (theintercept.com)