The Covid-19 crisis is on track to cut average pay packets by £1,200 a year by 2025, according to new analysis from the Resolution Foundation.

 Meanwhile reports show that 26 million Americans are experiencing hunger. 

“The increases in billionaire wealth continue to defy gravity in the real economy where millions have lost their jobs, health, and livelihoods,” said Chuck Collins from IPS in a statement. 

The $1 trillion growth in U.S. billionaire net worth since March represents an increase of more than one-third. Collins noted that 29 billionaires have seen their wealth double since the pandemic began, and the combined wealth of this super-rich class is now “twice the amount of wealth held by the bottom 50% of households combined, roughly 160 million people.”

Collins warned that “we’re at risk of the oligarchic death spiral,” wherein “wealth concentrates and power concentrates, and the wealthy use their power to rig the rules to get more wealth and power.”

 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ wealth increased by nearly $70 billion over the past eight months, growing from $113 billion to more than $182 billion.  Meanwhile, the Bezos-owned Washington Post on Wednesday published a harrowing photo essay documenting the worsening hunger crisis in the U.S., where “26 million now say they don’t have enough to eat, as the pandemic worsens and holidays near.”

The yawning chasm between the super-rich haves and the struggling have-nots is not a coincidence.  Working-class immiseration is NOT an aberration but rather a feature of the concentration of wealth and power that characterizes capitalist class rule. 

There is no “equal sacrifice” in this pandemic. The ultra-wealthy continue to win. The impending expiration of federal unemployment benefits threatens further financial hardship for an estimated 12 million Americans the day after Christmas, and the end of the national eviction moratorium and student loan forbearance is also looming.  

“The ultra-wealthy continue to win,” IPS tweeted, while Collins said that “it’s going to be a billionaire Thanksgiving.”

Stock Market Soars and Billionaire Wealth Swells by $1 Trillion as Food Lines Stretch ‘As Far As the Eye Can See’ | Common Dreams News

Globally, the UK military has a presence in 145 sites in 42 countries.  

Phil Miller’s overview of Britain’s military footprint for Declassified UK shows, “…the UK has the second largest military network in the world, after the United States.”

The UK military, for instance, has a presence in five countries in the Asia-Pacific: naval facilities in Singapore; garrisons in Brunei, drone testing facilities in Australia; three facilities in Nepal; a quick reaction force in Afghanistan.  The head of the British Army, General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, spoke in September about there being “a market for a more persistent presence from the British Army (in Asia).  It’s an area that saw a much more consistent Army presence in the Eighties, but with 9/11 we naturally receded from it.”  The time had come “to redress that imbalance”.

Cyprus remains a favourite with 17 military installations.  

In Africa, British personnel can be found in Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Mali.  

Then come the ever dubious ties to Arab monarchies. On September 12, UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced that a further £23.8 million would go to enhancing the British Joint Logistics Support Base at Duqm port, thereby tripling “the size of the existing UK base and help facilitate Royal Navy deployments to the Indian Ocean”.  T

 The UK has never had a problem with authoritarians it can work with.  A closer look at such relations usually reveal the same ingredients: capital, commerce, perceptions of military necessity. 

Over the next four years, the UK military can expect to get an extra £16.5 billion – a 10% increase in funding.

 “I have decided that the era of cutting our defence budget must end, and ends now,” declared Johnson. 

Keeping the Empire Running: Britain’s Global Military Footprint | Dissident Voice

 Several drug-makers now optimistically forecast that they can put into production an effective vaccine for COVID-19 and they stand to make enormous profits. The Covid-19 pandemic, which has already caused at least 1.33 million deaths around the world, means massive profits for Big Pharma. 

While all these individual companies across the world scrambled to develop a vaccine, one would think these companies and governments would have been able to come together to coordinate and pool their research to stem the spread of a virus that threatens us all. Not so.  Nations treated the development of the vaccine as a race, competing to win and accrue all the lucrative rewards of being first. All the scientific efforts and experiments were done in an uncollaborative manner. What mattered first and foremost to the pharmaceutical corporations was the effect on the value of their shares.

 In many countries scientific research receives state funding, but the resulting profits end up in private hands. The Bayh-Dole Act allows U.S. universities to sell patents on discoveries funded by tax dollars.  Operation Warp Speed (OWS), a Trump administration initiative, already reached an agreement with Moderna, and on August 11, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “announced up to $1.5 billion in funds to support the large-scale manufacturing and delivery of Moderna’s investigational vaccine candidate” in exchange for 100 million doses. That came on top of earlier support to the tune of $483 million and $472 million. Among the main investments of OWS, there was “approximately $1 billion in funds to support the large-scale manufacturing and delivery of Johnson & Johnson’s (Janssen)” — added on August 5 to a previous $456 million. On May 21, HHS announced “up to $1.2 billion in support for AstraZeneca’s candidate vaccine, developed in conjunction with the University of Oxford.” On July 7, HHS announced $1.6 billion in funds to support Novavax. And on July 31, $2 billion were announced for Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) investigational adjuvanted vaccine. This $10 billion budget for OWS alone was approved by Congress.

While Pfizer received no OWS funds. The government reached an agreement to buy 100 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine if it wins approval, which would be enough to guarantee the two doses needed for 50 million people. The agreement also included an option to buy an additional 500 million doses. 

These companies have raked in public funding and increased their share prices, and now will add to that through deals with countries that will have to pay millions of dollars for access to the vaccine.

Global Justice Now have already pointed out, a majority of the vaccine doses that could be available in the near future have already been claimed by wealthy countries. For example, 780 million doses — or 78 percent of the doses Moderna claims it can produce by next year — have already been sold to the world’s wealthiest governments. The vaccine race has left most of the world to scramble for whatever is left when the great powers are done.

The challenge won’t only be purchasing vaccines but also handling the expensive distribution requirements, including access to freezers and dry ice. Dr. Germán Malaga, who is working on Peru’s response to the pandemic, told CNN that there are about 30 ultra-cold freezers in Lima to handle the Pfizer vaccine, but that “for the other 20 million Peruvians, including in the Andes and the rainforest, there are none.”

 India and South Africa submitted a request to the WHO to “guarantee a waiver from certain provisions of the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement for the prevention, containment and treatment of Covid-19.” In other words, the manufacture of vaccines will be held back by patents.

The capitalists are touting vaccine development as an example of the merits of innovation. In reality, though, the global vaccine race has exposed the falsehood of some of the most closely held beliefs of the capitalist elite. These include the idea that capitalism “raises all boats” and “stimulates innovation.” As we have seen, rather than coordinating and sharing the results of scientific research, each multinational company is working on its own, in complete secrecy. Companies are wasting resources on duplicate research and taking much longer to find a vaccine. Imagine if the world’s great scientific minds all collaborated to develop the best possible vaccine in the shortest possible time. It is not hyperbole to say we would likely already have a vaccine saving lives. Medicines should be made for the public good, not patented by private companies. All medicines, vaccines, and beneficial therapies should belong to the people. [the World Socialist Movement goes further and demands that all necessities be made freely available to all]

We need to eliminate competition and unite research and development efforts across borders. 

Taken from here

Capitalist Competition Is Sabotaging the Race for a Vaccine | Common Dreams Views

With every crisis within capitalism the price of it is paid by the workers in some way or other. With the COVID-19 pandemic while the pharmaceutical industries and the online home-delivery businesses and the booming stock-market look to the future with optimism, ordinary workers can expect more austerity cuts.

Millions public sector workers are to have their pay frozen. “This is austerity plain and simple,” said Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, the public sector union. 

“For all the government’s talk of levelling up, this spending review will level down Britain, hitting key workers’ pay and breaking the government’s promises to the lowest paid,” said Frances O’Grady, TUC general secretary.

Many retired workers will now see their future pensions reduced. A personal finance analyst at the investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “This is a horrible blow for pensioners, who will pay the lion’s share of the eye-watering cost of this move.”

Ignoring the increased plight of those in developing and undeveloped countries, the UK is to cut the amount given to foreign aid. Andrew Mitchell, a former Conservative international development secretary, said the aid cuts “will be the cause of 100,000 preventable deaths.”

 Hunger is not new in America. Even before the pandemic, 35 million people relied on food banks every year, according to Feeding America. But the pandemic has been catastrophic – despite initial lauded federal interventions such as the stimulus cheques and enhanced unemployment benefit. As many as 54 million people could experience hunger this year, including a quarter of all children.

Millions of Americans must rely on charity to put Thanksgiving dinner on the table this year, as hunger surges amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

 Less than half of US households with children feel “very confident” about having enough money to afford the food needed over the next month. 

 5.6m households struggled to put enough food on the table in the past week.

Families of color are suffering disproportionately with 27% of Black and 23% of Latino respondents with children reported not having enough to eat sometimes or often over the past week – compared with 12% of white people.

Overall food insecurity has doubled since last year due to record unemployment and underemployment rates. For families with children, hunger is three times higher than in 2019.

“We’re now seeing families who had an emergency fund but it’s gone and they’re at the end of their rope. We’re going to be doing this for a really long time, and that’s frankly terrifying given the impact hunger has on physical health, learning and development for children and parents’ stress,” said Kristin Warzocha, president of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

 “Hunger isn’t hidden anymore,” said Trisha Cunningham, CEO of the North Texas Food Bank. “If it isn’t you, then this is your neighbor, this is your child’s classmate, this is your hairdresser.”

According to the Lakeview pantry CEO Kellie O’Connell. “The pandemic has brought to light how normal wasn’t working for so many people, especially black and brown communities.”

‘No end in sight’: hunger surges in America amid a spiraling pandemic | Food | The Guardian

 Even before the pandemic surfaced nearly a year ago, an estimated 690 million people around the world were undernourished, 144 million or 21 per cent of children under five-years-old were stunted, and about 57 per cent of people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia could not afford a healthy diet. The COVID-19 pandemic may add between 83 and 132 million people to the total number of undernourished in the world this year alone, depending on the scale of the economic slowdown, according to preliminary assessments.

Yet we do produce enough food for the world’s 7.8 billion people. It’s our food systems that are broken. Hunger is rising even as the world wastes and loses more than one billion tonnes of food every year.

Our food choices matter not just for health and social justice, but also for their impact on the climate and bio-diversity.  The current food system responsible for around 21 to 37 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions.

Africa is a huge net importer of food but 75 per cent of crops grown in sub-Saharan Africa are produced by smallholder farms, with family farms estimated to number over 100 million. Women do the bulk of weeding work while three-quarters of children aged 5 to 14 are forced to leave school and do farm labour at peak times.

Post: Edit (blogger.com)

 Tesco has drawn accusations of racial profiling and fuelling discrimination after displaying anti-shoplifting signs in Romanian.  The posters singled out Romanians and were evidence of a prejudicial attitude towards the diaspora.

“Hoții din magazine prinși for fi urmăriți penal” (Shoplifters caught will be prosecuted) said the posters, which were placed along aisles with expensive items, such as alcohol.

“Tesco has used a heavy-handed and discriminatory approach that not only will not discourage shoplifters but also offend the majority of law-abiding and well-integrated Romanians living in the UK,” Alexandra Bulat, the chair of Young Europeans, “Many of them will be customers of the chain – I am one of them. EU citizens living in the UK are no more likely to commit a crime than British citizens.”

 The Romanian daily newspaper Libertatea, said: “The idea that ‘the Romanian is a thief’ is programmatically induced in the masses. That is, to be Romanian means to be a criminal. This phenomenon is a very serious matter. Terrible violence has taken place in history around these phenomena.”

Romanians in the UK have often been stereotyped and baselessly maligned by the far right as taking employment opportunities from the British people. Romanians are the second-biggest immigrant community in the UK, with many working long hours in British supermarkets, farms and hotels.

Tesco accused of racism with Romanian anti-shoplifting posters | Romania | Al Jazeera

 The UN’s Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)  called for an immediate stop to the continuing siege that has caused a near-collapse of economic activities in Gaza and a poverty rate of 56 percent.

“This unfair blockade in which two million Palestinians are kept inside Gaza should be lifted immediately. They should be allowed to move freely, do business, trade with the outside world and reconnect with their families outside of the Strip,”  Mahmoud Elkhafif, coordinator of the Assistance to the Palestinian People of UNCTAD, said. “The situation is going to get worse if the blockade continues.”

“Unless Palestinians in the Strip get access to the outside world, it is difficult to see anything but underdevelopment being the fate of the Gaza Palestinian society,” said  Richard Kozul-Wright, director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies at UNCTAD. “It is really shocking that in the 21st century, two million people can be left in that kind of condition.”

The isolation of the Strip has not prevented the coronavirus pandemic from reaching Gaza, worsening an already critical situation. As of Monday, 14,768 people had contracted COVID-19, with 65 deaths. Health authorities in Gaza warned of an imminent catastrophe if Israel continued to block humanitarian access as well as the entry of necessary health equipment and medical supplies. Hospitals and healthcare staff are in need of protective clothing, ventilators and beds.

“The health crisis is exposing the underlying conditions that have been worsening over a decade,” said Kozul-Wright.

Over 1m Palestinians under poverty line in besieged Gaza: UN | Palestine | Al Jazeera

 The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)  has a legal duty to review government policies to ensure they are not racially discriminatory, and that they comply with equalities legislation.

In its latest damning report EHRC concluded that the Home Office broke equalities law when it introduced its hostile environment immigration measures.  The EHRC study detected “a lack of commitment” within the Home Office to the importance of equality.

Negative consequences of the hostile environment were “repeatedly ignored, dismissed, or their severity disregarded”, the report found. “This happened particularly when they were seen as a barrier to implementing hostile environment policies in a highly politicised environment.” The department’s approach to its legal duty to ensure that its policies complied with equality legalisation was “perfunctory”, half-hearted, in other words.

It found that officials failed to appreciate the severity of the negative impacts of its policy on this group of people. Even when the damaging consequences of the hostile environment policies began to emerge, the department failed to engage with representatives of the Windrush generation. 

The report found “there was a narrow focus on delivering the political commitment of reducing immigration, and a culture where equality was not seen as important. Identifying risks to equality was therefore not encouraged.” The EHRC detected an organisation-wide “lack of commitment, including by senior leadership, to the importance of equality and the Home Office’s obligations under the public sector equality duty. There was a misconception by some officials that immigration was exempt from all equalities legislation.”  

A series of hostile environment policies were introduced by Theresa May from 2012 during a drive to bring down net migration; the measures made it harder for people without documentation proving their right to be in the UK to get jobs, rent properties, access healthcare and open bank accounts. Large numbers of people who had the right to live in the UK, but no documentation, were adversely affected by the policies.  It was very politically charged environment; there was a very clear direction to reduce immigration. The Home Office did not comply with its obligations under the public sector equality policy.

Satbir Singh, the chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said campaigners had repeatedly warned the Home Office that hostile environment policies would lead to serious discrimination.

“Successive home secretaries ignored these warnings. Today’s landmark EHRC report confirms that this was not only dangerous, it was unlawful. The Home Office has for too long cared more about its reputation and its political objectives than the real-life consequences of its decisions on individuals.”

Halima Begum, director of the Runnymede Trust, said: “This latest report is yet more evidence of the discriminatory nature of the government’s hostile environment. The report’s findings are nothing short of a national scandal.”

A September 2020 IPPR research paper reported “hostile environment” policy has fostered racism, pushed people into destitution and wrongly targeted people who are living in the UK legally. The measures also failed to achieve their key objective of increasing the numbers of people choosing voluntarily to leave the UK.

An independent review into the causes of the Windrush scandal found that he Home Office demonstrated an “ignorance and thoughtlessness” towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation consistent with elements of the institutional racism. Warnings were repeatedly ignored. The scandal was “foreseeable and avoidable”, and came about in part because of “officials’ poor understanding of Britain’s colonial history”.

Back in March 2019, a public accounts committee report, said the Home Office made life-changing decisions based on incorrect data and remains complacent about its systemic and cultural problems and that it  displayed a lack of concern for the impacts of its immigration policies on people without documents.

Even earlier, the National Audit Office in December 2018 criticised officials for poor-quality data that wrongly classified people as illegal immigrants, the risky use of deportation targets, poor value for money offered by hostile environment policies, failure to respond to numerous warnings that the policies would hurt people living in the UK legally. While in July of that year, the home affairs committee said that “Windrush generation” have been treated as if they were in the country illegally despite being lawfully resident for many decades. People have lost their homes and their jobs and been refused healthcare, pensions and access to social security. And a month previous the Joint Committee on Human Rights took the view that there was in all likelihood a systemic failure.

Home Office broke equalities law with hostile environment measures | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian