Leon Black is a very successful financier, co-founder of Apollo Global Management, a group that ranks among the most powerful on Wall Street. The billionaire attributes a sizeable part of his wealth to Jeffrey Epstein, estimating that as much as $2bn in benefits can be traced back to Epstein’s financial acumen. Epstein committed suicide in jail while awaiting trial on sex charges committed against underage girls.

Leon Black paid $158m to Epstein over a five-year period ending in 2017 during which the disgraced businessman served as Mr Black’s high-priced adviser on issues ranging from audits by the tax authorities, management of his yacht and private plane and a dispute over the ownership of a sculpture by Pablo Picasso.  They socialised or held meetings at Epstein’s Caribbean island and his other properties in New York, Paris, Florida and New Mexico.

Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting sex from a minor that resulted in a lenient 13-month prison sentence. Rather than ending the business relationship after the conviction, Leon Black employed Epstein as an adviser in 2012. Black described himself as someone who “believes in . . . giving people second chances”. Black thought of Epstein as a ‘confirmed bachelor with eclectic tastes’. 

Epstein’s “most valuable” assignment was to design a trust structure that had been designed to allow Mr Black to transfer some assets to his heirs without paying estate or gift tax. One sleight of hand involved a series of loans between Black and some trusts. Epstein said that alone saved Black $600 million. On went the scams  from 2012 to 2017 

A report by law firm Dechert, which was hired by Apollo to probe Black’s ties to Epstein said, “It is clear that the compensation paid by Black to Epstein far exceeded any amounts Black paid to his other professional advisors,” despite Epstein’s lack of formal training in law or accounting. .

 “Paying tens of millions to a novice is beyond strange,” a lawyer at a top law firm said. “Maybe there’s some justification, but I’d love to see what it is.”

Black’s social relationship with Epstein deteriorated in 2017 over a dispute surrounding money Epstein said he was owed.  

Black stepped down this week as chief executive after an internal power struggle  following the firm’s inquiry into his relationship with Epstein. Black is staying on as chairman in what may prove to be little more than a ceremonial role.

Biden’s executive orders are receiving much attention from the president-friendly media. But what are the real effect of them?

One such presidential order is to phase out the Department of Justice’s contracts with privately managed prisons.

Biden’s private prison executive order fails to scale back incarceration. The federal Bureau of Prisons — which makes up slightly more than 8 percent of the current U.S. penal population — but just 9 percent of the people incarcerated under the Bureau of Prisons are held in a private prison.

Biden has excluded the Department of Homeland Security, and therefore privately run immigration detention centers, from his order. In contrast to the small percentage of private prisons within the Bureau of Prisons, the majority of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities are currently under private contracts. Yet there is no indication that the Biden administration will extend the executive order to the Department of Homeland Security. There is so far no indication that the Biden administration will extend the executive order to the Department of Homeland Security, as the order is careful to only refer to “criminal” detention facilities in contrast to ICE’s “civil” detention facilities.

Rather than taking a step toward dismantling mass incarceration, Biden’s private prison executive order shores up the legitimacy of the state to imprison people. He could issue a moratorium on U.S. Marshals Service and ICE contracts with local jails and on the United States Department of Agriculture loan program, which finances jail expansion in the name of “community development,” and which together have been driving rural jail expansions. He could halt federal executions and commute the sentence of every person on federal death row. 

Biden could institute broad-based de-carceration by ending pre-trial federal detention and giving clemency to most people incarcerated in federal prisons. He could end federal policing initiatives that target sex workers. And he could champion the repeal of the 1994 Crime Bill, the law that helped build Biden’s political career.

The problem of private prisons is not that they are private but that they are prisons. This executive order is simply an act of moving chairs around the deck of the Titanic. When a private prison contract runs out, imprisoned people will be transferred to a different federal prison where they will still be subject to inadequate medical care, violence and premature death. 

 Italy failed to protect the “right to life” of more than 200 migrants and refugees who died when the boat they were on capsized in the Mediterranean Sea.

The Human Rights Committee said on Wednesday that Italy “failed to respond promptly to various distress calls from the sinking boat, which was carrying more than 400 adults and children”. It also called on Italian authorities to “proceed with an independent and timely investigation and to prosecute those responsible” for the deaths.

Had the Italian authorities immediately directed its naval ship and coastguard boats after the distress calls, the rescue would have reached the vessel at the latest two hours before it sank.

Italy could have saved 200 drowning migrants: UN committee | Human Rights News | Al Jazeera

 The UK has once again lost an international court case regards its claim of sovereignty over the Chagos Islands.

 Toll

There’s not one hundred thousand Covid deaths,

But one personal death a hundred thousand times,

With tears the unit of grief. As frost rimes

The season still, so the count of last breaths

Continues unstaunched, with lockdowns unlocked

Only to be locked again and borders

Closed, as if virus observes such orders,

While politicians appear publicly shocked.

Inter-governmental squabbles have started,

Contending for vaccines. Should supplies stall,

A failure for one is a failure for all:

Common weal and common health can’t be parted.

If the free market’s promoted to decide,

What then the cost, how many will have died?

D. A.

 Most poor countries will not achieve mass Covid-19 immunisation until at least 2024 and some may never get there, according to a new forecast, which maps a starkly divided world over the next few years in which a handful of developed countries are fully vaccinated while others race to catch up.

84 countries that make up the world’s poorest will not receive enough doses to sufficiently immunise their populations for at least a further year, a global faultline that will run through the first half of this decade, said Agathe Demarais, of the the Economist Intelligence Unit global forecasting director and author of the report.

The key reason is the myriad hurdles in delivering doses: securing vaccine ingredients, production constraints, delays in delivery, poor medical infrastructure in some countries and lack of trained health workers to administer injections, among others.

The report was sceptical of forecasts by Covax, a global vaccine-sharing alliance, that it would supply enough doses this year to cover 27% of populations in member countries including more than 92 lower-income ones. The scheme aims to being administering vaccines next month and will announce each country’s first allocations this week. “There’s a lot of political hope that the targets will be hit … but we can see there are already delays for production and delivery in richer countries, so we can expect some delay in poor countries,” Demarais said.

A report from the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) said. “Sharing vaccines equitably is not charity, it is economic common sense,” said the ICC’s secretary-general John Denton.

The WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the world was on the edge of a “catastrophic moral failure” in the unequal distribution of vaccines so far, with more than 40m doses given in about 50 countries, most of them wealthy or upper-middle income.

Medical rights groups have called for patents on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments to be shared so that qualified manufacturers can also begin producing them and ease global shortages. Demarais said that, even if pharmaceutical companies shared their technology, patents and knowhow, there would still be challenges in finding workers trained to produce vaccines.

“There are a number of factories now that are running out of labour supply, experienced workers who can manufacture the vaccines to sufficient quality,” she said.

Most poor countries will not achieve mass Covid-19 immunisation until 2024 | Society | The Guardian

 As Indian farmers protest and resist new laws that they claim will threaten their livelihoods, the wealth of the country’s billionaires increased by an estimated 35 per cent during the lockdown, while 84 per cent of households suffered varying degrees of income loss.

 The  income increases for India’s top 100 billionaires since March 2020, when the lockdown was enforced, was enough to give each of the 138 million poorest people a cheque for 94,045 rupees. If India’s top 11 billionaires were taxed at just one per cent on the increase in wealth during the pandemic it could increase allocation to the Jan Aushadhi scheme – which makes quality medicines available at affordable prices – by 140 times.

It would take an unskilled worker 10,000 years to make what Reliance Industries’ Chairman Mukesh Ambani made in an hour.  And three years to make what Ambani made in one second.

 Covid protocols like social distancing and washing of hands were a luxury when 32 per cent and 30 per cent of households live in one room and two room houses, respectively, in urban India.

Wealth Of Indian Billionaires Increased 35% During Covid Pandemic | Countercurrents

EXTERMINATE

Autonomous and automated weaponry with artificial intelligence (AI) is humanitarian, according to  a government-appointed panel has said in a draft report for Congress.

The US should not agree to ban the use or development of robotic weapons, the panel, led by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt concluded. Instead it should consider AI for national security and technological advancement.

Vice-chairman, Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense, said such weapons are expected to make fewer mistakes than humans do in battle, leading to reduced casualties or skirmishes caused by target misidentification.

Concern has been mounting with the development of AI to power such systems, along with research finding biases in AI and examples of the software’s abuse.  Previously, a coalition of non-governmental organisations has pushed for a treaty banning “killer robots”, saying human control is necessary to judge attacks’ proportionality and assign blame for war crimes. Thirty countries including Brazil and Pakistan want a ban and a UN body has held meetings on the systems since at least 2014. This panel said would be against US interests and difficult to enforce.

US has ‘moral imperative’ to develop AI weapons, says panel | Weapons technology | The Guardian

 Poland, a nation with a population of more than 38 million, registered 357,400 births last year and some 486,200 deaths from various causes. The overall data showed a population loss of some 129,000 people, compared with a decline of some 36,400 the year before. Poland’s population has slowly decreased in the past 20 years mostly due to the emigration of young people seeking better opportunities.

The low birth rate surprised observers because some experts predicted the lockdown measures the Polish government has imposed on and off since mid-March would lead to a baby boom

Economist Rafal Mundry said, “We have a huge demographic crisis.” 

‘Demographic crisis’: Poland population shrinking under pandemic | Poland News | Al Jazeera

For capitalism a fall in numbers but accompanied by an ageing population is a problem.

Less people means a smaller market to sell to but it also means less people of working age supporting more who aren’t being productive.

China suffered it with their one-child policy and call it the 1-2-4 problem…one worker supporting his or her parents and also grandparents. It being made worse by the lack of an effective state welfare system in China to take up the burden of looking after the elderly.

Capitalism does offer solutions to this under-population. Increased productivity of those who are working. Reducing the dependency by raising the retirement age. Encouraging more immigration of younger healthier workers. To some degree or other, all three options are being introduced but not with equal priority. Japan, for instance, has done very little to invite immigration.

But we also have to note that even with fertility drop the population still grows because of what is called population momentum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum

Socialism will not suffer any unwelcomed consequences of a reduced population and we would welcome it, in general.

But our current political problem are those who wish to embark upon eugenic programmes supposedly to protect the environment. Delve a bit deeper and it is racist family-planning policies aimed at the undeveloped and developing countries with the purpose to protect the high levels of, and very profitable for capitalism, consumption and GDPs of the industrialised developed nations. Also with the land-grab and the mechanisation of plantation farming and high-tech extractive idustries, much of the labour-force is superfluous and surplus to requirements so push them into the mega-city slums and engage in service work.

 Anti-poverty agencies, programmes and others lobby and fight for attention by showcasing their own policy agendas, ostensible achievements and potential. Many believe that the more indicators they get endorsed by the ‘international community’, the more financial support they can expect to secure.

Collecting enough national data to properly monitor progress on the Sustainable Development Goals is expensive. Data collection costs, typically borne by the countries themselves, have been estimated at minimally over three times total official development assistance (ODA). With data demands growing, more pressure to measure has led to either over- or under-stating both problems and progress, sometimes with no dishonest intent. ‘Errors’ can easily be explained away as statistics from poor countries are notoriously unreliable.

Economists generally prefer and even demand the use of money-metric measures. The rationale often is that no other meaningful measure is available. Many believe that showing ostensible costs and benefits is more likely to raise needed funding. Using either exchange rates or purchasing power parity (PPP) has been much debated. Some advocate even more convenient measures such as the prices of a standard McDonald’s hamburger in different countries. Money-metrics imply that estimated economic losses due to, say, smoking or non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including obesity, tend to be far greater in richer countries, owing to the much higher incomes lost or foregone as well as costs incurred.

In 2000, the UN Secretariat drafted the Millennium Declaration. This, in turn, became the basis for the Millennium Development Goals which gave primacy to halving the number of poor. After all, who would object to reducing poverty. The poor were defined with reference to a poverty line, somewhat arbitrarily defined by the Bank. Presuming money income to be a universal yardstick of wellbeing, this poverty measure has been challenged on various grounds. Most in poorer developing countries sense that much nuance and variation are lost in such measures, not only for poverty, but also for, say, hunger.

Improving such metrics has thus become an end in itself, with little debate over such one-dimensional means of measuring progress. The consequent ‘tunnel vision’ has meant ignoring other measures and indicators of wellbeing. In recent decades, instead of subsistence agriculture, cash crops have been promoted. Yet, all too many children of cash-poor subsistence farmers are nutritionally better fed and healthier than the offspring of monetarily better off cash crop or ‘commercial’ farmers.

Meanwhile, as cash incomes rise, those with diet-related NCDs have been growing. While life expectancy has risen in much of the world, healthy life expectancy has progressed less as ill health increasingly haunts the sunset years of longer lives.

As poor countries get limited help in their efforts to adjust to global warming, rich countries’ focus on supporting mitigation efforts has included, inter alia, promoting ‘no-till agriculture’. Thus attributing greenhouse gas emissions implies corresponding mitigation efforts via greater herbicide use. Maximising carbon sequestration in unploughed farm topsoil requires more reliance on typically toxic, if not carcinogenic pesticides, especially herbicides. But addressing global warming should not be at the expense of sustainable agriculture. Similarly, imposing global carbon taxation will raise the price of, and reduce access to electricity for the ‘energy-poor’, who comprise a fifth of the world’s population. The UN proposed a Global Green New Deal (GGND) which included such cross-subsidisation by rich countries of sustainable development progress elsewhere. The 2009 London G20 summit succeeded in raising more than the trillion dollars targeted. But the resources mainly went to strengthening the IMF, rather than for the GGND proposal. 

Poor Lives Matter, but Less | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)