Canada amidst ecological damaging heatwaves and an economic destroying pandemic is planning to spend tens of billions of dollars on fighter jets.

The Canadian government wishes to buy 88 warplanes at an initial cost of about $19 billion but the full life cycle cost of the planes is said to be closer to $77 billion. 

 Canada has bombed Libya, Iraq, Serbia, and Syria. Many innocent people were killed directly or as a result of the destruction of civilian infrastructure and those operations prolonged conflicts and contributed to refugee crises.

Opinion | 100 Public Figures Oppose Trudeau’s $77 Billion Fighter Jet Purchase | Canadian Foreign Policy Institute (commondreams.org)

 More than 100 developing countries have set out their key negotiating demands ahead of the COP26 climate meeting in Glasgow. These include funding for poorer nations to fight and adapt to climate change and compensation for the impacts they will be subjected to. Without progress on these points, they say that COP26 will be worthless and will end in failure.

 Freedom Days

Stadia are filling, crowds are crowding back.

The mask slips, though international vaccine lags,

Pubs are pulling pints again; who needs track

And trace? Meanwhile, the infection count drags

The graph line sharper, as work discipline

Is being restored and inflation rises.

The world is still there for workers to win

Away from the grasp of capitals’ misers.

‘Nothing’ll be the same again!’ it was said

When the NHS was being applauded,

But now, the leaders are telling the led

Even vague promises can’t be afforded.

Unless the wealthy are relieved of our wealth

Of course, to secure everyone’s future health.

D. A. 

 A record number of Americans died from drug overdoses last year.

93,331 Americans died of overdoses in 2020 – a nearly 30% increase from the previous year.

 The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that the drug’s makers Auden Mckenzie and Actavis UK, now known as Accord-UK, used their position as the sole providers of hydrocortisone to inflate the price of the drug. Tens of thousands of people in the UK depend on hydrocortisone tablets to treat adrenal insufficiency, which includes life-threatening conditions such as Addison’s disease.

The UK’s competition watchdog has imposed fines totalling more than £260m on pharmaceutical companies after an investigation found that they overcharged the NHS.

The companies were able to inflate the price of hydrocortisone tablets by more than 10,000% compared with the original branded version on sale in 2008. This meant the amount the NHS had to pay for a single pack of 10mg tablets rose from 70p in April 2008 to £88 by March 2016. Before April 2008, the NHS spent about £500,000 a year on hydrocortisone tablets but this had risen to more than £80m by 2016.  companies also paid would-be rivals to stay out of the market.

Andrea Coscelli, the chief executive of the CMA. explained, “The actions of these firms cost the NHS – and therefore taxpayers – hundreds of millions of pounds.”

UK drug companies fined £260m for inflating prices for NHS | Pharmaceuticals industry | The Guardian

Migrants are the easy target as scapegoats for economic woes. It is not new. Blaming migrants for lower wages growth is easy and simplistic.

Last week, Philip Lowe, the head of the Australia Reserve Bank suggested migration could have caused lower wages growth. He commented the hiring of migrants brought in to deal with “specific gaps where workers are in short supply … dilutes the upward pressure on wages in these hotspots”.

This is not altogether startling, but he then added,  “…it is possible that there are spillovers to the rest of the labour market”.

The problem is, as Lowe noted earlier in his speech, “immigration adds to both the supply of, and demand for, labour”.

Essentially migrants increase the supply of people looking for work, but also the demand for things that need people to work to provide. In effect – both taking away and adding to the pressures on wages. Nothing in Lowe’s speech suggested that migration had a stronger impact on wages growth going down than up.

A number of economists were quite dismayed that the head of the central bank should stoke the anti-migration fires – especially, as Australian National University economist Ryan Edwards noted on Twitter, it goes against a vast majority of economic scholarship.

Most studies suggest migration has a positive impact on wages growth.

This is because migrants, as was noted in an article published in the Oxford Economic Papers journal in 2020, “perform complementary tasks, rather than substitutable tasks, in the labour market” – ie they don’t take your job, they work with or for you.

The positive finding is consistent with the landmark study led by ANU economist Robert Breunig in 2016 which found “almost no evidence that outcomes for those born in Australia have been harmed by immigration”.

A recent update by Gabriela D’Souza found that “wages are positively correlated with proportion of migrants” and “immigration has largely been a positive for incumbent workers”.

Even a study published in May by the Melbourne Institute which looked at the specific impact on youth workers found that young foreign students increase the competition for work for under 25s, but they also now have to compete with older workers who are staying in their jobs longer.

The government was reducing the budget deficit – in effect reducing demand in the economy – and all the while was arguing for smaller minimum wage rises and capping public sector wages.

We also had a collapse of the bargaining system, which reduced enterprise agreements and reduced strikes.

When the system makes it harder to bargain for wages rises, not surprisingly wages don’t rise as fast.

Blaming migrants for Australia’s lower wages growth is easy but too simplistic | Greg Jericho | The Guardian

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world, and is particularly popular with farmers growing common food crops. But there is heated debate in many countries about whether or not glyphosate herbicides should continue to be used due to concerns they may cause cancer. The new finding of flaws in industry studies means regulatory assurances about glyphosate safety in Europe and the United States have been based, at least in part, on shoddy science.

 Corporate-backed scientific studies are raising troubling questions about a history of regulatory reliance on such research in assessing the safety of the widely used weedkilling chemical known as glyphosate, the key ingredient in the popular Roundup herbicide.

 In a 187-page report researchers from the Institute of Cancer Research at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria said a thorough review of 53 safety studies submitted to regulators by large chemical companies showed that most do not comply with modern international standards for scientific rigor, and lack the types of tests most able to detect cancer risks.

“The quality of these studies, not of all, but of many of these studies is very poor. The health authorities … accepted some of these very poor studies as informative and acceptable, which is not justified from a scientific point of view,” Siegfried Knasmueller, the lead author.

The new analysis challenges safety assurances, finding that much of the methodology used in the industry studies is outdated and not in keeping with international quality standards. Of the 53 studies submitted to regulators by the companies, only two were acceptable, according to current internationally recognized scientific standards, said Knasmueller.

The corporate studies at issue focus on the genotoxic properties of glyphosate – whether or not it causes DNA damage – and they support corporate assurances that the chemical is safe when used as directed and does not cause cancer. They were commissioned and/or conducted by the former Monsanto Co, which is now a part of Bayer AG, as well as Syngenta, Dow, and others involved in making and/or selling glyphosate.

Particularly problematic was the focus on testing for chromosome damage in early stages in red blood cells of the bone marrow in laboratory mice and rats. These tests routinely detect only 50-60% of carcinogens, according to Knasmueller. “So many carcinogens are not detected with this method,” he said.

A type of test known as “comet assay” has a much higher value for identifying carcinogens because it can quantify and detect DNA damage in individual cells in a variety of organs, and is commonly used for evaluating genotoxicity, according to Knasmueller. But no comet assay tests were included, according to the analysis.

“I cannot understand why the health authorities did not ask for such data,” said Knasmueller, who is an expert in genetic toxicology.

Linda Birnbaum, former director of the US National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, said there has been an ongoing problem that is not unique to glyphosate with regulators taking industry studies “at industry’s word” while ignoring red flags raised in non-industry-funded research.

“This puts once more a finger on a sore spot: that national regulators do not seem to pay close scrutiny when looking at the quality of industry’s studies,” said Nina Holland, researcher at the watchdog group Corporate Europe Observatory. “This is shocking as it is their job to protect people’s health and the environment, not to serve the interests of the pesticide industry.”

Corporate studies asserting herbicide safety show many flaws, new analysis finds | Monsanto | The Guardian

  California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has dramatically overblown the state’s achievements in key elements of wildfire suppression, repeatedly overstating how many acres of the state were treated with fuel breaks and hazardous tree removal.

Newsom claimed that 90,000 acres protecting the most vulnerable communities had been treated, the data showed only a fraction – roughly 11,400 acres – was actually completed. Newsom slashed roughly $150m from Cal Fire’s wildfire prevention budget.

The clearest and probably biggest discrepancy related to 35 priority projects that were identified early on by the Newsom administration. When he came into office one of the first things he did was ask Cal Fire for recommendations on how to get the problem under control. One of the main recommendations was 35 projects for fuel reduction – things like thinning and prescribed burns – that will protect 200 of the most vulnerable communities in California. In early 2020, Newsom came out and said “mission accomplished”.

Gavin Newsom oversold California’s fire prevention efforts. A journalist uncovered the truth | California | The Guardian

 A report by the National Audit Office (NAO) found average per-pupil funding in the most deprived fifth of schools fell in real terms by 1.2% between 2017-18 and 2020-21, while it increased by 2.9% in the least deprived fifth.

Funding for deprived schools in England has shifted to wealthy areas, study finds | Education | The Guardian

The world’s nuclear powers actually increased spending on nuclear weapons by $1.4 billion more than they had put out the previous year. 

And that increase was only a small percentage of the ongoing investment of nine countries in their growing nuclear arsenals.

More than half of the total 2020 “investment” in weaponry appropriate for world-ending scenarios, $37.4 billion to be exact, was by the USA. A staggering $13.3 billion was given to weapons maker Northrop Grumman alone to begin the development of a new intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, the one thing our thoroughly troubled world obviously needs.  The US is now be planning to devote at least $1.7 trillion over the next three decades to “modernizing” what’s already the most modern nuclear arsenal on the planet.  in 2020, the USA alone had more than 5,000 nuclear weapons, at least 1,300 of them deployed and ready to use—enough, that is, to destroy several worlds. In 2021, the U.S. is preparing to invest more than $100 billion in producing a totally new ICBM, whose total cost over its “lifespan” is already projected at $264 billion—and that’s before the cost overruns even begin.

A nuclear war between two regional powers, India and Pakistan, could throw so many particulates into the atmosphere as to create a nuclear winter on this planet, one likely to starve to death billions of us. 

 In all, those nine nuclear powers spent an estimated $137,000 a minute in 2020 to “improve” their arsenals. Imagine if all that money had instead been devoted to creating and disseminating vaccines for most of the world’s population. Imagine a planet on which every dollar earmarked for nuclear weapons would be invested in  green solutions to a world growing ever warmer.

Opinion | Nuclear Weapons: An All-American Horror Story | Tom Engelhardt (commondreams.org)