Drug companies are giving groups of MPs and peers that campaign on health issues hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in “hidden” funding that could hand them “undue influence” the medical journal PLOS One has revealed. It uncovered the long history of funding by examining parliament’s register of APPGs and drug company payment disclosure reports. Both sources contain information about big pharma’s funding of APPGs, and also its financing of health charities

The pharmaceutical industry has built up a “hidden web of policy influence” over dozens of all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) at Westminster by making hundreds of “non-transparent” payments to them, as part of the industry’s wider effort to lobby those in power.

“In the context of health-related APPGs, payments from the pharmaceutical industry represent institutional conflicts of interest as they create circumstances where the primary interest, policymaking in the interests of public health, is at risk of being unduly influenced by the secondary interest, the pharmaceutical industry’s goal of maximising profits”, the authors concluded. 

Drug companies can use their close relationship with APPGs to argue for policies that favour their commercial interests and have that reflected in reports, all without the public knowing about those links, according to Emily Rickard and Dr Piotr Ozieranski, from Bath University’s department of social and policy sciences.

16 health-related APPGs received 168 payments from 35 drug firms worth £1.2m in 2012-18 – one-sixth of their total funding

Two APPGs, on health and cancer, accepted more than £600,000 in that time

50 health-focused APPGs received almost another £1m in 304 payments from patient organisations or health charities, which themselves take sums of money from big pharma.

“APPGs have an important role to play in holding the government to account and shaping policy by bringing together voices from across the political spectrum and from a range of stakeholders”, said Dr John Chisholm, the chair of the British Medical Association’s medical ethics committee. “However, it is vitally important that there is full transparency around who is behind these groups and what is driving their calls for change. This is especially important for the development of health policy, which must be underpinned by the principle of improving the health of the population, and not risk being swayed by other conflicting interests.”

Drug firms giving MPs ‘hidden’ funding, research shows | Pharmaceuticals industry | The Guardian

Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, has used a retirement account designed to help ordinary Americans save for their golden years to amass a $5bn tax-free nest-egg.

Thiel, a right-wing libertarian and vocal opponent of higher taxes, is one of a number of ultra-rich Americans to use a Roth individual retirement account (IRA) to amass a tax-free fortune. Roth IRAs were established in 1997 to encourage middle-class Americans to save, tax-free, for retirement. In 2018 the average Roth IRA held $39,108. The proceeds of a Roth IRA are tax-free as long as they are not withdrawn before the account holder reaches 59.5 years old.

Thiel, 53, placed 1.7m shares of then-private PayPal into a Roth IRA in 1999. At the time annual contributions to the plans were capped at $2,000. The shares were valued at just $0.001 per share. Within a year, the value of Thiel’s Roth increased from $1,664 to $3.8m. Thiel then used his Roth to make highly lucrative investments in Facebook and Palantir Technologies, according to tax records and other documents obtained by ProPublica. By 2019, Thiel’s Roth held $5bn “spread across 96 subaccounts”.

Thiel is not the only super-wealthy investor to have amassed a fortune in a Roth IRA. Warren Buffett had $20.2m in a Roth IRA at the end of 2018. Ted Weschler, an investment manager at Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, had $264.4m in his Roth in 2018 and hedge fund manager Randall Smith of Alden Global Capital had $252.6m in his. Robert Mercer, former Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager and one of Donald Trump’s richest backers, had $31.5m in his Roth, ProPublica reported.

The latest revelations come after ProPublica revealed that the 25 richest Americans paid a “true tax rate” of just 3.4% between 2014 and 2018 despite their collective net worth rising by more than $400bn in the same period. Using legal strategies billionaires including Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk paid $13.6bn in federal income taxes in those five years, ProPublica’s data shows – equivalent to a true tax rate of only 3.4%. Over the same period, the median American household paid 14% in federal taxes.

 Increasing violence towards refugees and migrants held in Libyan detention centres has forced Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to suspend its operations at two facilities, the medical charity said.

MSF said its teams witnessed guards beating detainees, including those seeking treatment from MSF doctors. It said its doctors treated patients suffering from fractures, bruises, cuts and blunt trauma from beatings.

“This is not an easy decision to make, as it means we won’t be present in detention centres where we know people are suffering on a daily basis,” said MSF head of mission in Libya, Beatrice Lau. “However, the persistent pattern of violent incidents and serious harm to refugees and migrants, as well as the risk to the safety of our staff, has reached a level that we are no longer able to accept. Until the violence stops, and conditions improve, MSF can no longer provide humanitarian and medical care in these facilities.” 

MSF said it had received reports of detainees being injured by automatic fire at the Abu Salim centre on 13 June but was not given access for a week afterwards. In April, it reported that one migrant was killed and two were injured when shots were fired into cells after rising tensions between detainees and guards.

Detention centres in Libya have been the repeated focus of allegations of abuse and violence by human rights organisations and charities. The UN has condemned the EU-backed system of using the Libyan coastguard to intercept migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean and return them to detention centres in Libya, which it deems unsafe.  In March the UN said it was concerned by conditions in the centres, with thousands of people “detained in dire conditions with limited access to basic services and overcrowding”.

So far this year 14,000 people have been intercepted and returned to Libya, exceeding the total number in 2020.

Vincent Cochetel, the UN’s envoy for migrant crossings in the Mediterranean, tweeted: “End arbitrary detention in Libya starting now, with all women and children & do not claim it is not possible.”

 According to research from Amnesty International, there has been a “catalogue of violations” committed by Israeli police against Palestinians in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem.

Arab citizens of Israel have been subjected to unlawful force from officers during peaceful demonstrations, sweeping mass arrests, torture and other ill-treatment in detention, and police have failed to protect Palestinians from premeditated attacks by right-wing Jewish extremists.

Palestinians face a culture of increasing repression and violence from the Israeli authorities and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, said Saleh Hijazi, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa.

“There are always periods where the institutionalised structural violence and discrimination against Palestinians becomes severe, but this is the worst it has been in a long time. There is a complete disregard for civilian life,” Hijazi said.

At least 2,150 people – 90% of them Palestinian – have been arrested, most for allegedly insulting or assaulting a police officer or taking part in an illegal gathering rather than for violent offences, while right-wing Jewish extremists have for the most part continued to organise freely. In Haifa and Nazareth police attacked groups of unarmed protesters without provocation, Amnesty reported. Amnesty also documented the torture of detainees who were tied up, beaten and deprived of sleep at a police station in Nazareth and at Kishon detention centre.

 Palestinians critical of the PA have reported mounting pressure to silence them in recent weeks. Nizar Banat, a well-known critic of the PA, died during an arrest by Palestinian security forces in the city of Hebron. A large demonstration in Ramallah in response to his death, calling for PA officials to resign, was met with teargas and the use of metal batons from Palestinian security forces. Banat had planned to run in cancelled parliamentary elections this year and called on western countries to cut off aid to the PA because of growing human rights violations and endemic corruption. Last month, gunmen he claimed were loyal to the PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, attacked his house with bullets, stun grenades and teargas while his wife and children were inside. He had also accused Abbas’s supporters of waging an incitement campaign against him on social media.

Amnesty: ‘catalogue of violations’ by Israeli police against Palestinians | Israel | The Guardian

 The EU is phasing out palm oil biofuels because of concerns over deforestation.  Research also suggests that making biodiesel from palms grown on newly cleared land increases greenhouse gas emissions instead of reducing them. Undeterred, Indonesia is working to increase the palm component in its biodiesel, which it markets as “Green Diesel,” and to develop other palm-based biofuels.

Today there are enough oil palm plantations worldwide to cover an area larger than the state of Kansas, and the industry is still growing. It is concentrated in Asia, but plantations are spreading in Africa and Latin America. Palm oil is everywhere today: in food, soap, lipstick, even newspaper ink. It’s been called the world’s most hated crop because of its association with deforestation in Southeast Asia. Between 2018 and 2020, almost 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares) of rainforest were cleared in just three countries: Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea, leading to Indigenous communities losing their land.  But despite boycott campaigns, the world uses more palm oil than any other vegetable oil – over 73 million tons in 2020. That’s because palm oil is cheap. The plant that makes it, the African oil palm, can produce up to 10 times more oil per hectare than soya.

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, tropical forest clearing for oil palm plantations threatens nearly 200 at-risk species, including orangutans, tigers and African forest elephants. However, the IUCN and many other advocates argue that shifting away from palm oil is not the answer. Since oil palm is so productive, they contend, switching to other oil crops could cause even more harm because it would require more land to cultivate substitutes.

Instead, there are more just and sustainable ways to make palm oil. Studies show that small-scale agroforestry techniques, like those historically practiced in Africa and among Afro-descendant communities in South America, offer effective ways to produce palm oil while protecting the environment.

Africa: How Palm Oil Became the World’s Most Hated, Most Used Fat Source – allAfrica.com

 Less than 12% of Brazilians are fully vaccinated against the disease, more than 2,000 are dying daily. Experts warn Brazil may be entering its third wave. That is raising concern that those in poor communities will fall even further behind the wealthy.

Brazil has 15 million unemployed. Brazil has 27.5 million poor people, defined as households living on less than one minimum wage ($220). If the federal government ceased its current aid program, that number would go automatically to 34.3 million. That lifeline was first reduced and then suspended at the end of 2020. It was reinstated in April. Bolsonaro announced his administration intends to extend the welfare program for poor and informal workers by at least two months. Economy Minister Paulo Guedes faced accusations of insensitivity after his off-the-cuff proposal to feed the homeless with leftovers.

Some cities have created programs of their own to complement the federal effort. Salvador, the capital of Bahia state in Brazil’s impoverished northeast, has been giving 270 reais ($54) to 20,000 people each month. Sao Paulo state, home to one-fifth of Brazilians, the local government announced on June 17 that it would provide 100,000 needy families with monthly vouchers for cooking gas.

Nestlé donated 500 tons of food and beverages, and brewer Ambev gave $50 to 20,000 street vendors who usually work during Carnival, suspended due to the pandemic. Mining giant Vale announced it would donate a million food kits to 220,000 families in five states by year-end. Rio de Paz, a nonprofit, has delivered tens of thousands of hot meals in favelas.

Central Union of Favelas set out to distribute 500,000 cellphone chips in favelas throughout the country so children can have internet access to online classes. In Paraisopolis, one of Sao Paulo’s biggest favelas, another nonprofit, G10 of Favelas, hired so-called “street presidents” to tutor unschooled children whose parents work.

Brazil scrambles to help the poor, while they barely hang on (apnews.com)

 African Union special envoy Strive Masiyiwa has accused the world’s richest nations of deliberately failing to provide enough Covid-19 vaccines to the continent. Masiyiwa, the union’s special envoy to the African vaccine acquisition task team, said the Covax scheme had failed to keep its promise to secure production of 700 million doses of vaccines in time for delivery by December 2021.

The UK has fully vaccinated 47% of its citizens and the US has vaccinated 45%, less than 1% of Africa’s population have been fully vaccinated. 

“It’s not a question of if this was a moral failure, it was deliberate. Those with the resources pushed their way to the front of the queue and took control of their production assets,” Masiyiwa explained. “Imagine we are in a village and there is drought and there will not be enough bread and the richest guys grabs the baker and they take control of the production of bread and we all have to go to those rich guys to ask for a loaf of bread,” he said.

He continued that if ever there was an inquiry into how vaccines have been distributed, Covax – an initiative by the World Health Organization to enable poor countries to get free vaccines – would be found culpable, “because we were misled”.

“We were led down the garden path…We got to December believing that the whole world was coming together to purchase vaccines, not knowing that we had been corralled into a little corner while others ran off and secured the supplies.” He said that when he met vaccine manufacturers in December, he was told that all production capacity for 2021 had been sold.

“So, the people who bought the vaccines and those who sold them the vaccines, knew that there would be nothing for us,” he said.

Rich countries ‘deliberately’ keeping Covid vaccines from Africa, says envoy | Global development | The Guardian

Billionaires have armies of lawyers and accountants to devise tax circumvention schemes that adhere to the letter (though not the spirit) of the law, allowing them to pay a pittance in taxes compared to the riches they’re reaping.

George W Bush  declared that “most people in America understand that the rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to necessarily pay all the taxes” 

He cut the IRS units that audit the wealthy expecting everyone not to realize the connection between the IRS departmental cuts and the tax evasion.

Analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, showed that roughly $380bn of owed taxes goes unpaid every year.

A report from Harvard University researchers showing that about three-quarters of that tax gap is from underpayment by the wealthiest 1%.

The Center for Equitable Growth finding that more than one-fifth of the top 1%’s income is going unreported to tax authorities.

The takeaway: the richest 1.6 million households are pilfering somewhere between $175bn and a quarter-trillion dollars of owed-but-unpaid taxes every single year – and they are apparently getting away with it.

We are told that while their tax avoidance schemes to reduce tax liability may be immoral, the tactics are all perfectly legal. Billionaires may occasionally be depicted as greedy fat cats– but no longer portryed as robber barons.

Why does anyone make such a generous and charitable assumption? The legal presumption of innocence is questionable. The answer is class bias from both government and the media.  White-collar crime is almost never prosecuted, crime is seen by the government as something that only poor people do. Through this lens, grand larceny is presumed to be just shrewd accounting rather than lawbreaking. News outlets quick to convict the poor via sensational headlines are hesitant to do the same to billionaires who can weaponize media law.

 They bankroll the political and media system itself.  They are the owners of television stations and newspapers. They are the benefactors of thinktanks and universities who employ the pundit class. They pay intellectuals for defense speeches. They take cases to court with unlimited resources, bankrupting news outlets that cross them. They are the donors who finance the politicians to get themselves legislative favors .

After using a one-time gift of free tuition to generate positive headlines for himself, the Vista Equity Partners billionaire Robert Smith last year settled a massive criminal case over tax evasion.  Robert Smith was granted a non-prosecution agreement, giving his firm necessary cover to continue managing workers’ pension money. 

 UBS, Credit Suisse, HSBC and KPMG have paid fines to settle justice department cases uncovering their roles in rampant tax evasion – and in the process, some of them have confessed to criminal wrongdoing. Bank executives money-laundering for drug cartels, facilitating dictators looting their state treasuries never entails jail-time.

These schemes were not isolated incidents: as prosecutors noted in the emblematic Credit Suisse case, the bank “knowingly and willfully aided and assisted thousands of US clients in opening and maintaining undeclared accounts and concealing their offshore assets and income from the IRS”.

The banks and accounting firms in the aforementioned tax evasion cases were given deferred prosecution agreements. Both Credit Suisse and UBS were granted government waivers from laws that could have barred them from managing retirees’ money.

For decades,  officialdom has been tough on crime drum for the working class, while actively helping the wealthy cheat the system. Trump preached about “law and order” while gutting the IRS enforcement budget and trying to shield corporations from consequences when they violate foreign laws. 

The IRS now audits low-income beneficiaries of the earned income tax credit at twice the rate as it audits corporations, the IRS audit rate for those making more than $1m has plummeted, and the agency has been referring a record low number of cases for criminal prosecution.

Adapted from here

We’re told billionaire tax avoidance is ‘perfectly legal’. But is it? | David Sirota | The Guardian

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is preparing a report but most of the report will not be published in time for consideration by policymakers at Cop26.

 However, a draft of the report apparently from early this year has been leaked.

Previous work by the IPCC has been criticised for failing to take account of tipping points. The new report is set to contain the body’s strongest warnings yet on the subject. The IPCC draft details at least 12 potential tipping points:

 “The worst is yet to come, affecting our children’s and grandchildren’s lives much more than our own,” the report says.

It warns of a series of thresholds beyond which recovery from climate breakdown may become impossible. 

It warns: “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems … humans cannot.”

A decade ago, scientists believed that limiting global warming to 2C above mid-19th-century levels would be enough to safeguard the future. It says that with 1.1C of warming clocked so far, the climate is already changing. Earlier models predicted that Earth-altering climate change was not likely before 2100. But the UN draft report says prolonged warming even beyond 1.5C could produce “progressively serious, centuries-long and, in some cases, irreversible consequences.”

Tipping points are triggered when temperatures reach a certain level, whereby one impact rapidly leads to a series of cascading events with vast repercussions. For instance, as rising temperatures lead to the melting of Arctic permafrost, the unfreezing soil releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that in turn causes more heating. Other tipping points include the melting of polar ice sheets, which once under way may be almost impossible to reverse even if carbon emissions are rapidly reduced, and which would raise sea levels catastrophically over many decades, and the possibility of the Amazon rainforest switching suddenly to savannah, which scientists have said could come quickly and with relatively small temperature rises.

Bob Ward, the policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said:

 “Scientists have identified several potential regional and global thresholds or tipping points in the climate beyond which impacts become unstoppable or irreversible, or accelerate. They could create huge social and economic responses, such as population displacements and conflict, and so represent the largest potential risks of climate change. Tipping points should be the climate change impacts about which policymakers worry the most, but they are often left out of assessments by scientists and economists because they are difficult to quantify.”

Simon Lewis, a professor of global change science at University College London, said: 

 “…But put together, the stark message from the IPCC is that increasingly severe heatwaves, fires, floods and droughts are coming our way with dire impacts for many countries. On top of this are some irreversible changes, often called tipping points, such as where high temperatures and droughts mean parts of the Amazon rainforest can’t persist. These tipping points may then link, like toppling dominoes.”

Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford, commented on that avoiding dire impacts was still possible. 

“It’s important people don’t get the message ‘we’re doomed anyway so why bother?’. This is a fixable problem. We could stop global warming in a generation if we wanted to, which would mean limiting future warming to not much more than has happened already this century. We also know how. It’s just a matter of getting on with it.”

IPCC steps up warning on climate tipping points in leaked draft report | Climate change | The Guardian

 The U.S. Supreme Court decision (pdf) in Cedar Point Nursery vs. Hassid “makes a racist, broken farm labor system even more unequal,” said the United Farm Workers of America (UFW). “SCOTUS fails to balance a farmer’s property rights with a farm worker’s human rights.”

The ruling 6-3 that a California regulation granting union representatives access to farms challenges land-owners private property rights. It dealt a significant blow to the rights of agricultural workers to organize. At issue was a California regulation that allows labor organizers to enter private farms to talk with farm workers during non-working times about joining a union.

Chief Justice John Roberts argued that “the access regulation grants labor organizations a right to invade the growers’ property.”  He characterized it as an appropriation without just compensation because it limited the employers’ “right to exclude.”

Steve Vladeck, the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law said, as a result of the decision, Vladeck” states cannot authorize unions (or anyone else) to enter private property, even for lawful activities (like union organizing) without compensating the property owners”—an additional cost the labor movement can ill afford.

“Farm workers are the hardest working people in America,” UFW explained. “This decision denies workers the right to use breaks to freely discuss whether they want to have a union.”

Samir Sonti, assistant professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, described the decision as “an attack on California agricultural workers and their right to organize for better working conditions.”

“The 1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (CALRA) was a landmark victory for the UFW and others, which at least in one state confronted the historic injustice of farm worker exclusion from federal labor law,” Sonti commented. “That important law has now taken a major hit…Decades of precedents have already undermined the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) as it pertains to union organizers’ access to the workplace,” he said. “Only under the most exceptional circumstances are private sector workers attempting to form a union able to speak to an organizer while on the employer’s property.”

Jenny Breen, associate professor of law at Syracuse University, says the decision is setting a judicial precedent with potentially profound consequences.

“Employers continue to wield property rights as forms of their “sole and despotic dominion” (in the words of Blackstone, quoted approvingly by the court) over their employees, with no meaningful check by the court. It is truly incredible that the court interprets a regulation impacting a workplace employing thousands of workers in the same manner it would interpret a regulation impacting your backyard. There is no justification for such an extreme commitment to ignoring reality.” She continued,  “This decision does not bode well for the fate of labor regulations—or any other government regulations that could conceivably impact private property rights—in future cases to reach this court.”

Breen warned of a return to the Lochner era, a pre-New Deal period when the Supreme Court routinely shot down regulations and defended employers’ right to exploit workers without state interference.

Right-Wing SCOTUS Majority Rules Union Organizing on Farms Violates Landowners’ Rights | Common Dreams News

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” ― Warren Buffett