Deborah French,  Arconic’s UK sales manager, that made Grenfell Tower’s cladding would “by default” sell flammable materials to construction projects, including high-rise buildings.

 Even before the current pandemic, millions of people in the U.S. went hungry. 

In 2019 the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that over 35 million people were “food insecure,” meaning they did not have reliable access to affordable, nutritious food. Now food banks are struggling to feed people who have lost jobs and income thanks to COVID-19.

As unemployment has risen during the pandemic, so has the number of hungry Americans. Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks, estimates that up to 50 million people – including 17 million children – may currently be experiencing food insecurity. Nationwide, demand at food banks grew by over 48% during the first half of 2020. 

Through 2020, consumer food costs rose by 3.4%, compared to 0.4% in 2018 and 0.9% in 2019.  Research shows that retail concentration correlates with higher prices for consumers. It also shows that when food systems have fewer production and processing sites, disruptions can have major impacts on supply.  In 2020 Christopher Lischewski, the former president and CEO of Bumblebee Foods, was convicted of conspiracy to fix prices of canned tuna. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison and fined US$100,000. In the same year, chicken processor Pilgrim’s Pride pleaded guilty to price-fixing charges and was fined $110.5 million. Meatpacking company JBS settled a $24.5 million pork price-fixing lawsuit, and farmers won a class action settlement against peanut-shelling companies Olam and Birdsong. 

Industry consolidation is hard to track. Many subsidiary firms often are controlled by one parent corporation and engage in “contract packing,” in which a single processing plant produces identical foods that are then sold under dozens of different brands – including labels that compete directly against each other.

Recalls ordered in response to food-borne disease outbreaks have revealed the broad scope of contracting relationships. Shutdowns at meatpacking plants due to COVID-19 infections among workers have shown how much of the U.S. food supply flows through a small number of facilities.

With consolidation, large supermarket chains have closed many urban and rural stores. This process has left numerous communities with limited food selections and high prices – especially neighborhoods with many low-income, Black or Latino households.

Consolidation makes it easier for any industry to maintain high prices. With few players, companies simply match each other’s price increases rather than competing with them. Concentration in the U.S. food system has raised the costs of everything from breakfast cereal and coffee to beer.

 Disruptions in food supply chains forced farmers to dump milk down the drain, leave produce rotting in fields and euthanize livestock that could not be processed at slaughterhouses. Between March and May of 2020, farmers disposed of somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 hogs and 2 million chickens – more than 30,000 tons of meat.

A few months into the pandemic, meat shelves in some U.S. stores sat empty, while some of the nation’s largest processors were exporting record amounts of meat to China. U.S. Senators. Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker, cited this imbalance as evidence of the need to crack down on what they called “monopolistic practices” by Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS and Smithfield, which dominate the U.S. meatpacking industry.  Store shelves are no longer empty for most cuts of meat, but processing plants remain overbooked, with many scheduling well into 2021.

Opinion | Corporate Concentration in the US Food System Makes Food More Expensive and Less Accessible (commondreams.org)

 In 2020 nearly 2 million people died from coronavirus , tens of millions more lost their jobs and countless others faced unprecedented disruption to their daily lives.

Yet for a privileged few, it was a very profitable year.

The world’s top 15 hedge fund managers collectively made $23.2bn (£16.9bn) last year. That is the equivalent of more than six Marks & Spencers or more than the gross domestic product of Iceland or Zambia.

The best performing hedge fund manager, Chase Coleman III, the founder of Tiger Global Management (TGM), made $3bn in performance management fees and gains on his personal investment in the fund. Coleman’s personal pay last year was more than the GDP of dozens of countries including Gambia, Bhutan and Eritrea. It is thought to be the biggest single year’s pay for anyone since another hedge fund manager, John Paulson, made $5bn in 2010. Coleman’s $3bn adds to the $4.5bn fortune he had already amassed. He was born into money and got his start in hedge funds at 24 when Julian Robertson, the founder of Tiger Management, gave him $25m seed money to start Tiger Global. Coleman attracted Robertson’s attention as he was good friends with Robertson’s son Spencer, growing up in the wealthy Glen Head community on Long Island. He married Stephanie Ercklentz, the daughter of banker and industrialist Enno Ercklentz who once said she gave up working for a living because it required “too many hours”.

 The second-highest paid was Jim Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies, who made $2.6bn. Third was Israel Englander of Millennium Management. Also on the list is Bill Ackman, the founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management. Ackman, who according to the list made $1.3bn.

Luke Hilyard, the executive director of the High Pay Centre thinktank, said: “The research shows the extraordinary riches accruing to a tiny number of individuals for speculative financial activities of dubious value to wider society. “It ought to be completely clear that this is a really terrible way for wealth to be distributed, in the midst of a global pandemic with families losing jobs and homes, businesses going under and public services under immense strain.”

World’s top 15 hedge fund managers made $23.2bn in total last year | Hedge funds | The Guardian

Research, published in a special issue of the Lancet Planetary Health journal, looked at three scenarios: carrying on the current path, increasing efforts to achieve the Paris goals, and a more ambitious scenario, which put health at the heart of tackling climate change.

 In the UK, implementing policies to meet international climate goals would save 98,420 lives a year by 2040 through better “flexitarian” diets, which involve less meat and more vegetables, legumes and fruit.

Meanwhile, 21,480 lives could be saved by people taking more exercise and 3,458 from reductions in air pollution.

If even more ambitious plans were put in place to make sure health was the focus of climate policy, 100,000 lives a year could be saved through dietary changes, with 50% adopting flexitarian diets and 50% going vegan.

A further 5,770 lives could be saved from cuts to air pollution and 38,440 from more active travel, with 75% of people walking or cycling over the course of a week, the modelling suggests.

 Across nine countries, including the US, China and Brazil, implementing national climate plans which meet the Paris goals could save 5.8 million lives due to better diet, 1.2 million lives due to cleaner air, and 1.2 million lives due to increased exercise. 

And putting explicit health objectives in their plans, known as nationally determined contributions or NDCs under the Paris accord, could lead to a further reduction of 462,000 deaths due to air pollution, 572,000 from diet, and 943,000 from physical inactivity a year by 2040.

The lead author, Ian Hamilton, executive director of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, said: “Unlike the direct benefits of carbon mitigation which are ultimately long-term and understood in terms of damage limitation, the health co-benefits of ambitious climate policies have an immediate positive impact. Not only does delivering on Paris prevent millions dying prematurely each year, the quality of life for millions more will be improved through better health.

Climate action could save ‘millions of lives’ through clean air, diet and exercise | Climate change | The Guardian

 Four Ocado bosses are being handed shares worth £116m after its stock market value soared on the back of the pandemic boom in grocery home shopping.

The company’s chief executive, Tim Steiner, will be granted 2.45m shares, worth £66.2m at the current share price. Minerva, a shareholder adviser, said the scheme could transfer significant equity value to the chief executive and considering Steiner was already a significant shareholder it was hard to accept it was there to “attract, recruit and retain”.

The group’s chief operating officer, Mark Richardson; Luke Jensen, who runs its tech business, Ocado Solutions; and Neil Abrams, the company secretary, will also each receive 600,000 shares, worth £16.2m under the so-called “value creation plan”. 

The pay gap between the Ocado chief executive and the company’s median employee is already the widest of any company in the FTSE 100.

Luke Hildyard of the High Pay Centre said,  “The size of these payouts will prompt debate about governance reforms such as profit sharing schemes or worker representation on boards that would enable some of the company’s 17,000 delivery drivers, warehouse operatives and administrative staff to win a share of the tens of millions lavished on directors.”

Ocado bosses pocket shares worth £116m amid pandemic home deliveries boom | Ocado | The Guardian

Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, insisted that it remain patent free. Asked who owned the patent 65 years ago, he replied, “The people I would say. There is no patent. You might as well ask, could you patent the sun?”

Making life-saving vaccines, medicines and equipment available, freely or affordably, has been crucial for containing the spread of many infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS, polio and smallpox. Refusal to temporarily suspend several World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property (IP) provisions to enable much faster and broader progress in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic is resulting in the deaths of many and some experts say should be grounds for a International Criminal Court prosecution. Enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRs) is relatively recent. The 1994 WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) greatly strengthened and extended IP transnationally. IPRs have effectively denied access to patented formulas and processes except to the highest bidders.

Vaccine developers expect to be very profitable, thanks to national and transnational IP laws. Thus, IP has distorted research priorities and discouraged cooperation and knowledge sharing, so essential to progress. Wealthier nations are falling out among themselves, fighting for access to vaccine supplies, as IP profits take precedence over lives and livelihoods. ‘Vaccine nationalism’ involves cut-throat contests responding to scarcity due to limited output. Vaccine nationalism has also meant that among the rich, the powerful come first. Consequently, most developing countries and most of their people will have to wait longer than necessary for vaccines, while the powerful and better off secure prior access, regardless of need or urgency.

Although TRIPS now allows such government public health efforts, developing countries remain constrained by compulsory licensing’s complex rules, procedures and conditions. Threats and inducements by transnational corporations and their governments limit its use. Hence, use of compulsory licensing by developing countries has been largely limited to several more independent middle-income countries and HIV/AIDS medicines.

 The combination of IP and vaccine warfare is responsible for more avoidable losses of both lives and livelihoods. Developing nations, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, have been left far behind in most programmes for COVID-19 prevention, containment, treatment and vaccination.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General (DG) Tedros warns “the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure…the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries”. He explains that “the international community cannot allow a handful of companies to dictate the terms or the timeframe for ending the pandemic”; “vaccine nationalism combined with a restrictive approach to vaccine production is in fact more likely to prolong the pandemic … tantamount to medical malpractice on a global scale”

At current rates, more than 85 poor countries will not have significant access before the end of 2023! In 70 lower income countries, only one in ten will be vaccinated. Of the 7.2 billion confirmed sales of COVID-19 vaccine doses, 4.2 billion have gone to the wealthiest nations. With only 16% of the world’s population, high income countries have secured 60% of available doses. Meanwhile, the African Union has only procured 670 million for the continent’s 1.3 billion people.

The IP system discourages, rather than encourages cooperation and sharing, both essential for accelerating progress. Although IP requires sharing research results, no vaccine developer has done so yet. Vaccine developers do not expect to profit much from the poor, so there exists little commercial incentive to provide them with adequate supply.  Many people die needlessly for profit.

Intellectual Property Cause of Death, Genocide | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 Biden is receiving praise from many liberals for imposing certain controls over the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia to ensure they are not used in its involvement in the civil war in Yemen.

However, the UK response is that what the US does is America’s business and Britain will continue to provide Saudi Arabia with weapons to be deployed against the Houthis. 

And there are other countries very happy to supply Saudi’s with armaments.

In a statement, the Chinese foreign ministry said China and Saudi Arabia are “comprehensive strategic partners” and “maintain friendly cooperation in all areas, including in the area of arms sales”. 

 Saudi Arabia has a growing share of business with Russia. According to Rostec’s CEO, Saudi Arabia is currently in talks with Russia to purchase the S400 missile systems. This came following a bilateral agreement reached during a visit by Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz to Moscow in October 2017, marking the first visit by a Saudi monarch to Russia.   Russia’s Sputnik also reported that Saudi Arabia would finalise a deal to domestically produce Russian Kalashnikov rifles.

 Colombia announced that the country would grant temporary protection status to around one million undocumented migrants from Venezuela after which they can apply for a residence visa. Under the new status, the migrants will receive basic services such as access to the national health system and COVID-19 vaccination.

Filippo Grandi, the UN high commissioner for refugees said, “This bold humanitarian gesture serves as an example for the region and the rest of the world.”

Meanwhile, after the European Court of Justice ruled that Hungary’s deportation of refugees to Serbia was unlawful, Viktor Orban’s government is ignoring the judgement — and continuing to deport refugees. 

The Hungarian government is making no attempt to conceal its violation of the law. These “pushbacks” contravene international treaties to which Hungary is a signatory, such as the Geneva Convention.  Orban, and several members of his government have repeatedly confirmed that they intend to continue the practice.

How Hungary is violating EU law on refugees | Europe| News and current affairs from around the continent | DW | 08.02.2021

 The farmers’ strike has changed the political picture in India. Many Modi RSS/BJP voters have become disillusioned. The nationalist Hinduvta movement has been stalled. This powerful movement is challenging the Indian government which seeks a new model of farming for India, under international pressure to replicate American or Australian model of farming in India, where the corporations control vast swathes of land for monoculture-style cash-crop farming

But socialists should be wary of placing over-optimistic hopes in the protests and the blockade of Delhi by the farmers. It’s a protest of big and small property-owners against being sold-out to global capitalist corporations, not a workers’ movement. These land-owning farmers in the past have not hesitated to repress the lower caste labourers such as the Dalits when asked for more pay or better conditions. Just because a struggle involves millions of people doesn’t make it a class struggle in the sense of a struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. The protagonists are large-and-medium-sized landowning farmers against a government that wants to introduce measures that will harm their interests and benefit corporate capitalists. It’s not anti-capitalist.

The Indian economy has always been predominantly state-capitalist since independence but it has increasingly relaxed the government control with various privatisations and removing protectionist laws to permit more foreign investment under pressure from the reality of international capital. The farmers’ resistance is combating the consequences and effects of the operation of the economic laws of capitalism. Once again, they place their illusory hopes in the regulatory power of the State to protect them. The present laws have not prevented poverty and land-grabs but they believe that the proposed new laws will exacerbate their problems. It is ultimately a futile fight but if the farmers don’t resist, they may as well roll over and be walked all over.

The proposed new farming laws are said to allow private corporate players a greater role in the farming sector, which the government assures will not hurt farmers’ incomes. They take farmers out of the state-controlled markets, so they can take advantage of higher prices. Socialists need to be aware that many of the farmers unions are not representing the small basically subsistence farmer or the landless agricultural labourers but are acting in the interest of the better-off commercial farmers who perceive a threat to their incomes. Small and marginal farmers with less than two hectares of land account for 86.2% of all farmers and  these 126 million farmers together owned about 74.4 million hectares of land —or an average holding of just 0.6 hectares each.  It is they who lack the political organised clout which is in the hands of the semi-medium and medium land–holding farmers who account for 13.2% of all farmers, but own 43.6% of crop area

These deep structural problems with Indian farming – productivity with other comparable countries show how bad it is. But the problems are very much infrastructure, as in transport, storage, the accompanying wastage but perhaps the most crippling thing is the never-ending debt incurred by farmers, not just from the banks but the traditional money-lenders.

The Delhi blockade is mainly Punjabi Sikh dominated but the movement is nation-wide, multi-cultural and involves the trade unions acting in solidarity. As with most anti-government protests, grievances spread and become incorporated in a general strike. Circumstances arise that highlights fundamental conflicts of interests between the capitalist class and its subordinate and subjugated subservient suppliers.

When the potential of such struggles transcend sectional interests then we cannot with-hold our solidarity but instead we should reach out with the socialist analysis and answer to the problem. Small farming in Asia is dependent for success on mutual aid, helping each other out on shared schemes such as machinery hire, irrigation and cooperatives. Dog-eat-dog rivalry over a bone between them would be suicidal for survival. They develop their own local customs of decision-making, often outside the State’s officialdom.

It is a rare moment in Indian history that the divisive  barriers of religion, caste and ethnicity is being eliminated as farmers recognise their collective problems and get together in this fight, casting away the caste prejudices  that were deeply entrenched within rural districts. Punjab’s largest farmer union has overcome the caste divide and has begun to support Dalit’s demand for land rights.

It’s increasingly leading to the emergence of a massive united farmers’ front of all the religions, Hindu/ Sikh/Muslim. These protests have also saw the merging of the urban and the rural populations as the general public in the towns express their sympathy with the farmers and extend support, seldom seen in any previous protest movements. Unity is the biggest strength of this movement.  It should be noted how the protesters immediately distanced themselves from the flying of a Sikh separatist flag at the Red Fort and re-emphasised the secularism of the protests. The strike and protests rather than fighting each other has brought a fresh understanding that brought the different communities closer together.  We are very careful not to say what is occurring in India is a socialist movement. But it is contributing to a change in political consciousness within the rural communities, where people are identifying shared problems and engaging in a common cause to resist government policies that they perceive as a threat to their livelihoods and standard of living. In addition, another cultural change is occurring, women have taken on the entire responsibility of managing their farms and households back in Punjab while the men-folk camp-out at Delhi.

The movement is exercising more control over its leadership.  Some reports say this is a relatively leader-free movement, or perhaps multi-leader is better way of describing it, having too many leaders and organisations for any to dominate. It may have its roots in a fairly conservative society but it is reminding all that there is still power in the streets.

 If the farmers are destined to prosper, and remain out of poverty, to improve their lot in life, they must set aside their own sectional interests and adopt the socialist case for the ending of capitalism. The farmer’s position, impoverished or well-off is essentially the same as the worker’s: that of a wage slave. The farmer neither shares in the bounties of the harvests nor benefits from the subservience to the government food ministries. There was no escape for the farmer other than the socialist one.

We know all resistance to the capitalists is eventually doomed if they and their State are determined to prevail and fully incorporate India’s farming into the world market where the global businesses hold the power over food production. It is unstoppable and can only be delayed. India is not the only region facing the exact same attacks on traditional small-holder farming methods. But it is the struggle to fight back which is important as it is in this strike that people are discovering solidarity and unity against the religious and cultural differences which had been used previously to keep people divided. 

Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil was responsible for 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, which was one in five of all people who died that year. The death toll outlined in the study may even be an underestimate of the true picture, according to George Thurston, an expert in air pollution and health at the NYU school of medicine who was not involved in the research.

 The study finding more than one in 10 deaths in both the US and Europe were caused by the resulting pollution.

As well as nearly a third of deaths in eastern Asia, which includes China.

The death toll exceeds the combined total of people who die globally each year from smoking tobacco plus those who die of malaria.

 Without fossil fuel emissions, the average life expectancy of the world’s population would increase by more than a year.

“We don’t appreciate that air pollution is an invisible killer,” said Neelu Tummala, an ear, nose and throat physician at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “The air we breathe impacts everyone’s health but particularly children, older individuals, those on low incomes and people of color. Usually people in urban areas have the worst impacts.”

‘Invisible killer’: fossil fuels caused 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, research finds | Environment | The Guardian