The blog has previously posted upon vaccine nationalism and how the poorer nations are suffering from shortages of Covid vaccines. Updated reports reveal little has changed. While some politicians in the developed world are boasting that they are inoculating young healthy adults who are at very little risk, in the undeveloped countries, the very vulnerable are being neglected.

“Africa needs vaccines now,” Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, said  “Any pause in our vaccination campaigns will lead to lost lives and lost hope.

Only 1% of the 1.3 billion vaccines injected around the world have been administered in Africa – and that comparative percentage has been declining in recent weeks. From Africa to Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean, the same issues have been replicated.

Only 28 million doses have been delivered across Africa so far – that’s less than 2% of the continent’s population – at a time when some wealthier countries have vaccinated well in excess of half their populations.

Africa needed at least 20 million AstraZeneca doses in the next six weeks to give second shots to all those who had received the first dose. In addition, another 200 million doses of approved vaccines are needed to enable the continent to vaccinate 10% of its population by September.

Vaccine inequality exposed by dire situation in world’s poorest nations | Africa | The Guardian

  A report by  Fair Tax Foundation singled out Amazon, Facebook, Google’s owner, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft said they paid $96bn less in tax between 2011 and 2020 than the notional taxation figures they cite in their annual financial reports.

The six firms named handed over $149bn less to global tax authorities than would be expected if they had the paid headline rates where they operated.

Overall, they paid $219bn in income tax over the past decade, 3.6% of their total revenue of more than $6tn. Income tax is paid on profits, but the researchers said the Silicon Six companies deliberately shift income to low-tax jurisdictions to pay less tax.

The report found that Amazon, the internet retailing and cloud services provider run by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, collected $1.6tn of revenue, reported $60.5bn of profit and paid $5.9bn in income taxes this decade. Amazon would have been expected to pay $10.7bn in taxes on those profits based on international tax rates, the report said. The tax paid as a percentage of profit was just 9.8% over the period 2011-20, the lowest of the Silicon Six.

Facebook, run by Mark Zuckerberg, who has a personal fortune of $123bn, has paid just $16.8bn in income taxes this decade, despite making profits of $133bn and revenues of $328bn, according to the report. The tax paid as a percentage of profit was just 12.7%, the second-lowest of the so-called “Silicon Six” after Amazon.

Paul Monaghan, chief executive of the Fair Tax Foundation, said the group’s analysis provided “solid evidence that substantive tax avoidance is still embedded within many large multinationals and nothing less than a root-and-branch reform of international tax rules will remedy the situation”.

‘Silicon Six’ tech giants accused of inflating tax payments by almost $100bn | Tax avoidance | The Guardian

 China, as expected, which ended its one-child rule has now relaxed its two-child policy and will permit couples to have three children.

China’s population has grown at its slowest pace in decades and faces a demographic problem with an ageing population and a reduced number of working age to support the elderly.

 Age is a legally protected characteristic, just like gender, ethnicity, religion and disability, but age discrimination is still widely seen as a socially acceptable form of prejudice.

Unemployment levels among workers in their 50s and 60s have soared by 48% over the last year, and redundancies among the over-50s hit an all-time high in 2020.

More than 1 million workers over the age of 50 are still on furlough, raising fears that a new wave of redundancies may be on the horizon for this age group.

The number of age discrimination claims taken to employment tribunals has increased dramatically in England and Wales since Covid lockdown, according to an analysis of Ministry of Justice data. Claims increased by 74% over the last year, with a 176% rise between October and December 2020 compared with the same period the year before.

Patrick Thomson, a senior programme manager at the Centre for Ageing Better, said: “Employment tribunals are often the last course of action for people facing discrimination or unfair treatment in the workplace, and it is worrying to see so many older workers needing to pursue them…We know a third of people in their 50s and 60s feel their age disadvantages them in applying for jobs, higher than any other age group.”

Tribunal claims for ageism at work soar since Covid lockdown | Discrimination at work | The Guardian

The enormity of the environmental crisis means we have arrived at a turning point in human history. Human society is confronted with a most critical challenge. Our world is being poisoned by pollution and our environment degraded. The source of the problem lies in the very nature of the social system under which we are forced to live. The crisis of the environment, like other crises, has its roots in the inherent characteristics of capitalism. There is a crisis because we are dealing with the problem of the environment within an outmoded social and economic system dominated by a class whose policy is maximum private profits regardless of social costs. The drive for private profit insists on a disregard for natural resources. The threat can be erased for good only when capitalism is discarded and replaced by a social order that is motivated by the promotion of public welfare. There is a crisis because capitalism is not propelled by human need. Corporations are not going to do anything to safeguard the environment if it affects their drive for maximum profits. The insistent drive for maximum private profits by corporate interests has been and is ever more sharply in conflict with the overall general interests of society.

Capitalism has come to threaten our very civilisation on earth – through the threat of nuclear war, through the spread of new and virulent pandemics, but predominantly through the consequences of CO2 emissions creating the greenhouse effect destabilising the climate. We need to confront the system as a whole and not seek to make piecemeal reforms to it. The only solution is the creation of a planned society in which the quest for profits has been abolished and the results of our science and technology are used for the benefit of the people.  The question for the future of human society is that we want to produce a liveable environment in which to build sustainable lives.

Capitalism has never been concerned with human problems, including human life. Why should anyone think capitalism is going to change now? One can judge a social system by its history. Tens of thousands of human beings die prematurely because of malnutrition every day of the year. These deaths occur not because the human race cannot raise or produce enough, but because capitalism is geared to making private profits for the few! These thousands are daily victims of capitalism.

We endure a  deliberate, cruelly contrived and highly effective system that has been devised to extract the maximum work and productivity for the cheapest possible price. The method is exploitation. The aim is private profits. The result is starving people. The question is why should anyone expect this system and the government that represents it to seriously place a priority upon the environment?

Capitalist production is unplanned. It is anarchic. Each corporation is motivated only by how it can squeeze out the maximum profits. The environment cannot be left to the mercy of individual corporations who have no social consciousness.

Socialism corrects the flaws of capitalism. It sets human society on a new path. The means of production, factories, mines and mills become the common property of the people. They operate and produce only to fulfill human needs. They are not motivated by profits. This is the foundation for a new set of values. If a process does not serve the common good, it does not take place. A clean environment is for the common good. It is therefore pursued. Saving the environment becomes a social necessity.  Capitalism is replaced by a pressure to do only that which is in the best interests of all in society, that no process will take place that endangers a continuation of life on this planet. The capitalist rewards hunger, misery, death and the destruction of the environment. Socialists support a system based on the elimination of exploitation. Capitalist society cannot basically stop the destruction of the environment under capitalism. Socialism is the only way that makes it possible. The power of environmental control must be with the people.

Capitalism is in its very essence a system through which a small minority class exploits the majority to further enrich itself from the profits that come from exploitation.

The median pay package for a CEO at an S&P 500 company hit $12.7 million in 2020.

 That means half the CEOs in the survey made more, and half made less. It’s 5% more than the median pay for that same group of CEOs in 2019 and an acceleration from the 4.1% climb in last year’s survey. Meanwhile, regular workers also saw gains, but not at the same rate as their bosses. And millions of others lost their jobs.

Advance Auto Parts, CEO Tom Greco’s pay for 2020 was in line to take a hit because of a mountain of pandemic-related costs. Extended sick-pay benefits and expenses for hand sanitizer and other safety equipment totaling $60 million dragged on two key measurements that help set his performance pay. But because the board’s compensation committee saw these costs as extraordinary and unanticipated, it excluded them from its calculations. That helped Greco’s total compensation rise 4.7% last year to $8.1 million.

Carnival, the cruise operator gave stock grants to executives, in part to encourage its leaders to stick with the company as the pandemic forced it to halt sailings and furlough workers. For CEO Arnold Donald’s 2020 compensation, those grants were valued at $5.2 million, though their full value will ultimately depend on how the company performs on carbon reductions and other measures in coming years. That helped Donald receive total compensation valued at $13.3 million for the year, up 19% from a year earlier, even as Carnival swung to a $10.2 billion loss for the fiscal year.

Wages and benefits for all workers outside the government rose just 2.6% last year. That’s according to U.S. government data that ignore the effect of workers shifting between different industries. It’s an important distinction because more lower-wage earners lost their jobs as the economy shut down than professionals who could work from home.

Sarah Anderson, who directs the global economy project at the Institute for Policy Studies, said, “This should have been a year for shared sacrifice. Instead it became a year of shielding CEOs from risk while it was the frontline employees who paid the price.”

CEO pay rises to $12.7M even as pandemic ravages economy (apnews.com)

 It appears that the Palestinian Authority is doing the dirty work of the Israeli’s by cracking down on militants in the demonstrations against the occupation. The campaign of arrests as a fear tactic, which is taking place at the same time as Israel’s “law and order” operation within the 1948 territories where hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel have been rounded up, is in line with how authoritarian governments behave.

Tarqi al-Khudeiri was charged with “stirring up strife”, “incitement” and “insulting symbolic leaders”.

“Palestinians need to hold on to this unity that we’ve witnessed has been forged over the recent events in Sheikh Jarrah and the rest of Jerusalem, in Gaza, and in 1948 Palestine,” he said. “We need to remain united under one flag to fight the Israeli normalisation, occupation and security coordination as a way of burying the so-called peace process, which is as dead as it gets. At the end of the day, what we are doing in the streets is so that our people can thrive and live honourably and in freedom.”

Al-Khudeiri’s case is one of the dozens of recent arrests of Palestinian activists and university students by Palestinian Authority security forces in the occupied West Bank. Other detainees include Mahdi Abu Awwad, Mustafa Al-Khawaja, Akram Salamah, Anas Qazzaz and Hussam Amareen, a medical student at al-Quds University. 

Shaker Tameiza, a lawyer with the Addameer prisoners’ rights group, the campaign of arrests began following the end of the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, and after the West Bank witnessed popular protests expressing their support and solidarity.

“According to the testimonies we’ve heard, the arrested were subjected to torture in the form of shabah, verbal abuse, and physical beating,” he said. All of the arrests are based on the violation of freedom of expression, such as social media posts and chants during protests. “Most of the charges the activists are accused of are more or less the same, such as ‘stirring up sectarian and racial strife’ – which is taken to mean insulting the PA,” Tameiza said.

The crackdown on activists is not new, and is rooted in what political analyst Khalil Shaheen described as the PA’s “survival policy”. The PA is hanging on to its legitimacy from the international community by solely adopting the two-state solution discourse and the so-called peace process negotiations, he explained.

“That means that it sees any other policy, even if it is rooted in popular protests, as a threat against it. Any deviation from this PA strategy results in the government cracking down on activists, as it is not in the PA’s interest to see protests turn into an Intifada. The PA is worried that armed confrontation with Israel will spread to the occupied West Bank.” 

Shaheen went on to say, “On top of that, there’s a new generation of activists coming out that are not politicised according to party membership, and therefore cannot be co-opted. These youth have been at the forefront of confrontations with Israeli forces, either in Jerusalem or in Haifa, and are not traditionally known to the PA.”

Shaheen continued, “The PA rules with fear because it is desperate to maintain its authority,” he said. “This is why they have postponed elections because they knew it would be an embarrassing defeat for the dominant party Fatah.”

Why is the Palestinian Authority arresting West Bank activists? | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

  For $25 billion dollars (3% of the U.S. annual military budget) the world could establish regional manufacturing hubs to produce eight billion coronavirus vaccine doses in less than a year.

The report compiled by Dr. Zoltán Kis, a research associate at the Centre for Process Systems Engineering at Imperial College London, and Zain Rizvi, law and policy researcher in Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines Program, shows that with minimal investment by the wealthiest nations, enough vaccine supply could be produced to inoculate 80% of the population in low- and middle-income countries by May 2022.  If present trends continue, impoverished nations in the Global South won’t be vaccinated until 2024, experts say.

“The global vaccine apartheid is a policy choice,” the People’s Vaccine Alliance tweeted. “We have the means to end it.” 

Africa and Latin America have 0.17% and 2% of global vaccine production capacity, respectively, but Kis and Rizvi noted that the WHO has said: “19 manufacturers from more than a dozen countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have expressed interest in ramping up mRNA vaccine production.”

Peter Maybarduk, Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines director, said in a statement, “It will require resources and coordination, but we know this can be done. The sooner we start, the more lives we will save and the faster our world will stop unravelling.”

Rich Nations Could ‘Make Enough Vaccine for the World’ With Just $25 Billion: Analysis | Common Dreams News

 The Lancet said efforts to curb the habit had been outstripped by population growth with 150 million more people smoking in the nine years from 1990, reaching an all-time high of 1.1 billion.

Smoking killed almost 8 million people in 2019 and the number of smokers rose as the habit was picked up by young people around the world.

89% of new smokers were addicted by the age of 25 but beyond that age were unlikely to start.

Just 10 countries made up two-thirds of the world’s smoking population: China, India, Indonesia, the US, Russia, Bangladesh, Japan, Turkey, Vietnam and the Philippines.

 One in three tobacco smokers (341 million) live in China.

Number of smokers has reached all-time high of 1.1 billion, study finds | Smoking | The Guardian

 The owner of JD Sports, Millets and Black Leisure, and a string of overseas sportswear chains,  Peter Cowgill, has been handed almost £6m in bonuses since February last year despite the company accepting more than £100m in government support.

The retailer has already been criticised for restarting dividend payments to shareholders while retaining the government pandemic financial support. In April, after revealing that it was paying out £14m to shareholders.

JD Group paid its boss £6m after government support of £100m | Executive pay and bonuses | The Guardian