Author: ajohnstone

An Israeli War Crime?

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 Netanyahu cut off fuel for the sole power plant in the Gaza Strip. The denial of fuel to the Gaza Strip came in response to Hamas sending balloons and kites over Israeli territory with incendiary materials attached. The balloons have caused some brush fires. 



 In retaliation Israeli fighter jets have bombed Gaza on several occasions during the past week. The Israelis have also stopped Palestinians from fishing. Now they will have electricity for only 4 hours daily.



 The General Union of Worker Organizations in Gaza estimated that 90% of the Gaza Strip’s factories and workshops would be idled by the closure of the power plant. That is some 500 factories that will be left dark, leaving 50,000 workers unemployed.

Waste water treatment will also be impeded, meaning more raw sewage going into the Mediterranean.

Hospital patients are at special risk from lack of electricity. The spokesman for the Gaza ministry of health, Dr. Ashraf al-Qudra, said that the lack of power poses a threat to premature babies nurseries, to patients in intensive care units, and to kidney patients (dialysis needs electricity). It will also halt surgeries and deliveries by Caesarean section.

While the incendiary balloons are condemnable and justify Israeli bombing of Hamas facilities, but cutting of diesel supplies to the whole population is not.

It is collective punishment on a mass scale.

After the Rwanda genocide, a special court was set up to judge war crimes and Shane Darcy notes, “The Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) enumerates collective punishment as a war crime…”

As Doctors without Borders notes, “International humanitarian law posits that no person may be punished for acts that he or she did not commit. It ensures that the collective punishment of a group of persons for a crime committed by an individual is also forbidden…”

Hamas has 30,000 activists in its military wing. The smaller Islamic Jihad, which is not affiliated with Hamas and often defies it, is thought to have 6,000 fighters. So there are like 36,000 combatants in Gaza and nearly 2 million noncombatants, i.e. persons who do not take direct part in hostilities.

CEO Wealth Rises

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The Economic Policy Institute shows that the top executives at the largest corporations in the United States now make 320 times more than what their typical employees earn in wages and benefits.



 EPI’s latest annual analysis of executive compensation finds that the CEOs of the top 350 firms in the U.S. raked in an average of $21.3 million in 2019, a 14 percent increase from 2018. The 320-1 ratio of CEO-to-worker pay in 2019 is more than five times higher than the 61-1 ratio reported in 1989.

EPI’s new report shows that CEO compensation grew by 1,167 percent from 1978 to 2019, “far outstripping” the growth of the stock market.


“CEOs who volunteer to take salary cuts aren’t giving up a lot given how much of their pay comes from stock awards and options,” EPI said.


Lawrence Mishel, a distinguished fellow at EPI and co-author of the new report, said in a statement that “while wage growth for the majority of Americans has remained relatively stagnant for decades, CEO compensation continues to balloon.”


“This has fueled the spectacular income growth of the top 0.1% and 1.0% and the growth of income inequality overall,” said Mishel, who told The Washington Post that CEO pay could rise again in 2020 despite the nationwide economic collapse caused by the Covid-19 crisis. “CEOs offering salary cuts during the coronavirus pandemic yield press releases,” Mishel added, “but no real progress toward reducing inequality and raising workers’ wages.”


Jori Kandra, research assistant at EPI and co-author of the new report, said the “huge growth in CEO pay” over the past four decades “is not a reflection of the market for talent.”
“We know this because CEO compensation has grown more than three times faster than the growth of earnings for the top 0.1% of earners, which was 337% over the same period,” said Kandra. “This means that CEO pay can be curbed to reduce the growing gap between the highest earners and everyone else with little, if any, impact on the output of the economy or firm performance.”


https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/18/wages-stagnate-and-executive-pay-continues-balloon-report-shows-top-ceos-now-make



Democrats Renege on Environment Pledges?

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Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris called to end subsidies for the oil and gas sector during the primaries.  Biden has said that he would end new oil and gas permits on public lands but has stopped short of calling for a ban on hydraulic fracturing, the drilling technique dubbed fracking.



 The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has dropped from its party platform a demand for no more oil and gas subsidies and tax breaks, Huffington Post reported on Tuesday.

The statement – “Democrats support eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuels, and will fight to defend and extend tax incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy” – originally appeared as an amendment to party demands last month and was approved, the report said. However, the final draft of the platform was missing that statement.
Bill McKibben, environmentalist and founder of climate non-profit 350.org, tweeted: “Hoping this was just a mistake, because ending fossil fuel subsidies is a no-brainer. Pretty sure it was in the 2016 platform (pretty sure I wrote it in, in fact) Seems like something they could and should fix easily.”
However, a DNC spokesperson told HuffPost that amendment was “incorrectly included” in the draft and taken out “after the error was discovered”.

Minorities and the misery of old age

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Ethnic inequalities are “deeply entrenched” among the over-50s in England, with older black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people falling behind white peers on income and home ownership, new research has shown.
BAME people are more likely to retire later than white peers, have a lower weekly income, and are far less likely to own their own home, analysis by the Centre for Ageing Better, Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and University College London (UCL) revealed.
People from ethnic minority backgrounds aged 50-70 are more likely to be in the poorest 20% of the population in England compared with white people, the study found. It showed that black men and women are living on an average of £100 less per week compared to white men and women in the same age group.
 Black people in their 50s and 60s are more likely to be working, with white people in the age group three times more likely to have retired, suggesting a disparity in the access to other sources of income, such as pension savings and assets.
Anna Dixon, chief executive of the Centre for Ageing Better, said: “Our new research shows that ethnic inequalities are deeply entrenched among the generation approaching later life, with those from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds facing disadvantages across many areas of life.”
The research discovered that nearly half of white people in their 50s and 60s own their home outright, compared with just 13% of their black peers. Nearly a third of black and a quarter of Asian people live in the most deprived areas, as against just 16% of the white population.
Anna Round, senior research fellow at IPPR, said: “All too often, we hear lazy stereotypes applied to everyone in middle or later life. But these findings show stark differences within this age group – for example, in health and in financial wellbeing.
Paola Zaninotto, of the institute of epidemiology and healthcare at UCL, said: “An increasing number of black, Asian and minority ethnic people are now approaching later life, and our results show that compared with white people, they are facing challenges across a large number of areas in their life, putting them at risk of missing out on a good later life.”

Money goes to money

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Elon Musk has soared through the global wealth league this year and become the world’s fourth richest person, after a boom in the share price of the Tesla car company he co-founded and part-owns increased his wealth by more than $13.3bn (£10bn) in two days of trading.



 He is now worth more than $90bn and has overtaken France’s richest person, the luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault, chairman of Louis Vuitton. Still ahead of Musk are Facebook’s co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, and Amazon’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who is some distance ahead with an estimated net wealth of $195bn, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.



 Tesla’s price continued to climb to the point where it overtook Toyota as the world’s most valuable car company in July. Analysts from Morgan Stanley warned earlier this year that Tesla is “grossly overvalued” and that the share price would plunge, but it has continued to defy predictions.



 Should the company’s valuation continue to rise at such astonishing rates, it could supercharge Musk’s fortune, with a $55bn bonus, agreed in 2018 and payable on the achievement of a series of targets. 



 The most ambitious of those targets, at the time, appeared to be increasing the firm’s market capitalisation to $650bn – 12 times what both Tesla and General Motors were worth. Today, Tesla is worth more than eight times General Motors.



 In 2018 Tesla and Musk were fined $20m by the US Securities and Exchange Commission after he tweeted plans to take the firm private, driving up the share price.

Musk has also been an outspoken critic of lockdown policies during the Covid-19 crisis. In a diatribe during a call outlining quarterly results in April, Musk described public health measures to reduce transmission as fascist.
The 10 richest people in the world
Jeff Bezos – Amazon $195bn
Bill Gates – Microsoft $121bn
Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook $99.4bn
Elon Musk – Tesla $90.3bn
Bernard Arnault – LVMH $83.7bn
Mukesh Ambani – Reliance Industries $80bn
Warren Buffett – Berkshire Hathaway $79bn
Steve Balmer – Microsoft $76.1bn
Larry Page – Alphabet $74.2bn
Sergey Brin – Alphabet $71.9bn

Only Obeying Orders

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‘Immigration Nation’, the six-part documentary series on immigration enforcement under Trump  was released on Netflix this month. The US authorities did not want you to see it. After viewing a final cut, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), which had allowed the film-makers, Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz, to embed with agents for over two years, attempted to intimidate the production team into delaying the release. The agency threatened Clusiau and Schwarz with lawsuits, according to a New York Times report, and to use the “full weight” of the federal government to block publication of certain Ice scenes usually invisible to the American public.



  It is clear why the agency did not want the footage to become public. Immigration Nation, more than any other documentary of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, allows Ice agents and officials to explain their perspective. And thus more than any other documentary, ‘Immigration Nation’ reveals how a government agency upholds and perpetuates evil. Two-plus years of Cops-style embedment doesn’t glorify Ice agents, but instead reveals the agency to be populated by, in some cases, callous people who gloat over arrests; more often, affable people fulfilling their small part of the contract as directed, with the compartmentalization it requires.



 ‘Immigration Nation’ captures Ice agents manipulating confused people to admit them into their homes (agents cannot legally enter unless given permission), mocking people in custody, presenting inaccurate figures to mislead the public and in one case, illegally entering a residence by picking a lock. But more often, Immigration Nation reveals the individual justifications that compound into a punishing system, and the rationalizations that allow said system to metastasize. Clusiau and Schwarz embedded with agents in New York, in the “detention center” in El Paso, in a center in Charlotte, North Carolina, in Arizona. In each of these places, agents and officials explain their work through a common phrase that runs like a mantra throughout the series: “I’m just doing my job.”



 “I’m a soldier, I was in the military before – I do what I’m told,” says Arturo, an Ice deportation officer in El Paso. “We are a politically driven agency. If you change the law, that’s the law we’re going to follow,” says Joe, the officer in charge of the El Paso detention center. “I’m not a judge,” says a deportation officer of non-detainees (often, people who have lived for years or even decades in the US or arrived as a child, and whose deportations, once deprioritized, have been encouraged by the Trump administration). “My job is just to remove you … it’s not personal, it’s just business.”



 As Becca Heller, the director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, explains, “But when you add up all of the people ‘just doing their job’, it becomes this crazy, terrorizing system.”



 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/aug/19/netflix-immigration-nation-ice-true-horror

The Drug Pushers Deal with Prosecutors

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A Department of Justice internal memorandum obtained by the Guardian shows that government prosecutors found evidence that executives at the drugs giant Purdue Pharma may have committed multiple crimes, including wire fraud and money laundering, to boost sales of its billion-dollar OxyContin opioid.



 A six-page document, dated 6 October 2006,  confirms that a $654m settlement between Purdue Frederick – a company affiliated with Purdue Pharma at the time – and the government over deceptive marketing claims in mid-2007 fell far short of what prosecutors had actually sought just six months earlier. 



 The memo suggests that had the government accepted prosecutors’ recommendations and brought a criminal prosecution, Purdue – which the DoJ then estimated to be making $100m a month – might have been put out of business, senior executives jailed and perhaps tens of thousands of opioid-related deaths avoided. 



 Instead, the government agreed to limit Purdue’s exposure to claims of deceptive marketing to six years, from 1996, when the drug was introduced with first-year sales of $48m, to 2001, when sales had already reached $1.1bn. Over that period, the government estimated, Purdue’s revenue from OxyContin sales of $2.8bn. 



 The six-page memo, titled Proposed Indictment of Purdue Pharma LP recommended indicting the company for mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy – charges that could have put the company out of business. The memo recommends charging the Purdue executives Michael Friedman, Paul Goldenheim and Howard Udell with felonies that could have sent them to prison. “The Indictment charges a multi-object conspiracy with the overall goal of maximizing the revenues from the sale of OxyContin through fraud, deceit, and false statement, “ wrote Kirk Ogrosky, deputy chief of the fraud section at DoJ in Washington. 



 Ogrosky wrote that Purdue’s crimes began in 1992 and were still continuing at the time of the memo in 2006. 



 In May 2007, it looked very different from what Ogrosky recommended. The maker of the powerful painkiller OxyContin and three executives pleaded guilty to misleading the public about the drug’s risk of addiction.



 The three non-Sackler executives, who included its president and its top lawyer, pleaded guilty as individuals to misbranding, a criminal violation. They agreed to pay a total of $34.5m in fines and were given probation. But none of the three executives had been in charge of Purdue during the years of the alleged crimes – Purdue’s presidents at the time were Raymond Sackler and, from 1999, son Richard.



 The investigations of Purdue have dragged on for decades, during which as many as 400,000 Americans have died from opioid-related causes. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, OxyContin accounted for 65% of the national growth in overdose death rates since 1996.



 “We are calling on the government to prevent Purdue and the Sacklers from buying their way out of criminal prosecution and to not repeat the shortcomings of the 2007 settlement,” said Michael Quinn, an attorney for the Ad Hoc Committee on Accountability in the current Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case.



 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/19/purdue-pharma-oxycontin-justice-department-memo-opioid

UN World Humanitarian Day

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Even before COVID-19, 2020 was going to be a year marked by humanitarian need. Mark Lowcock, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), predicted that in 2020 “168 million people worldwide will need humanitarian assistance and protection. That represents about one person in 45 on the planet. It is the highest figure in decades.” 



  Conflict in Yemen, Syria, DR Congo, the Sahel, and elsewhere is driving food shortages and displacement of people—the UN estimated that 80% of Yemenis require urgent humanitarian aid. Deepening economic crises, such as in Venezuela, are causing hunger and mass migration, and climate change is increasing the risk of natural disasters, famine, and drought. 



 There were 79·5 million forcibly displaced people by the end of 2019, and access to health care is often poor in these settings; 80% of all refugees live in low-income and middle-income countries with weak health systems.



 COVID-19 is exacerbating the inequalities faced by individuals and families in humanitarian crises. With national governments looking inwards and putting their own citizens first, people in need of humanitarian assistance are being neglected. Governments worldwide have introduced travel restrictions, inadvertently stopping aid workers from travelling, and thereby hampering humanitarian responses. In some cases, aid workers already in-country cannot deliver vital services because of government restrictions aimed at protecting their own citizens.  Globally, the risk of starvation in some refugee camps because of a lack of access to aid constitutes a bigger threat than the virus itself, according to Amnesty International. Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh has a population density of 40 000 people per km2, 40 times more than the country as a whole. Isolating confirmed cases is extremely difficult under these circumstances, and personal protective equipment is often difficult to obtain because countries have introduced export restrictions.



 Governments are also using the pandemic as an excuse to advance anti-migrant agendas under the flimsy pretext of protecting their citizens from COVID-19. The USA suspended asylum and large swaths of the immigration programme, despite having the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world. Since March 20, the Trump administration has turned back more than 20 000 migrants at the US border, which is a violation of domestic and international legal obligations. 



 In Bosnia, local authorities cut off the water supply to migrant populations to force them to move on.



 UNOCHA suggests that the global COVID-19 humanitarian response plan will cost US$10·3 billion, but only 20% has so far been pledged. By contrast, in just 2 months, governments spent $10 trillion on economic stimuli for their own economies. 

COVID-19 will worsen health burdens in humanitarian settings, and international disputes over resources have left people in these settings without support. This is nonsensical. If nothing else, COVID-19 is likely to persist in humanitarian settings where health care is poor even if the rest of the world moves on, constantly risking another outbreak.
As states find themselves consumed with their own more immediate problems, they must remember that other humanitarian crises around the world have not diminished, and that the inequality exacerbated by COVID-19 is not resolved by myopically focusing on local problems. True concern for inequality demands attention to all the world’s humanitarian needs.

Lockdown and locked out of school

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Lockdown widened learning gaps between richer and poorer primary school children, an analysis of thousands of families in England suggests.
Children from poorer families did at least one hour less learning a day compared with those in richer families, the Institute of Fiscal Studies found.
One head teacher says it could take up to two years to bring some children back to their correct attainment level.
The IFS surveyed the parents of 5,500 school-aged children in England during lockdown. It compared the richest 20% of pupils with the poorest 20%. In May, the IFS said children from wealthier families were spending more time studying during the pandemic than poorer children. And in its latest research, the think tank gives a more detailed picture of how coronavirus has widened the gap between the richest and poorest primary school children. Its findings suggest richer primary school children spent 75 minutes a day more on educational activities, compared with those in poorer families during lockdown.
Resources provided by schools are also unequally distributed, the IFS suggested. Around 42% of poorer primary-aged children received some sort of online lesson, conference call or support from their school, compared to 58% of richer children. And the IFS said it found evidence suggesting children who have had better access to learning resources are also more likely to spend more time learning than children who do not. 
Richer children were (37%) more likely to have their own space to study than their poorer counterparts. And although a large majority of children from all backgrounds had access to a computer or tablet, richer children were also more likely to have access to a computer or tablet.
Kirsty Tennyson is Executive Principal of the Three Saints Academy Trust and explained,  “In a deprived area there is already a gap that we’re striving to close – to narrow and ultimately to close the gap,” she says. “Children who have not got that support at home and have not been able to access that learning – that gap will have grown hugely.” She admits there is a mountain to climb. “This is going to take into this academic year and the one after to really get those children back to where they need to be and for some children it will take longer.”

Real Suffering in the UK

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Poverty and destitution. That’s the reality for thousands of migrants in the UK since the pandemic started.
As lockdown hit, migrants across the nation who often work in casual and low-paid roles saw their jobs disappear or incomes slashed. But unlike the rest of the country, they have no welfare safety net to fall back on, because a controversial immigration policy known as No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) means they cannot access benefits.
There are an estimated 1.4 million migrants to the UK from outside the EU who have visas subject to this rule, according to the Migration Observatory, at the University of Oxford.
These migrants cannot receive most government-funded benefits, including child benefit, child tax credits, council tax benefit and disability living allowance or even free school dinners for their children. As a last resort, many migrants are having to turn to charities for help.
The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) pointed out that,  “…we’ve seen an increase in people becoming street homeless, acutely hungry and not being able to afford even basic medication because they literally have no support available to them.”
Since Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic, the Citizens Advice Bureau says it receives calls every 20 minutes from migrants desperate to access benefits.
The charity Khalsa Aid set up a food parcel delivery service soon after lockdown, responding to migrants on student visas and undocumented migrants who were struggling to feed themselves. The charity’s workers are delivering more than 200 food parcels each week. Not much but even a little helps.
Charities across the sector, the Local Government Association and the Work and Pensions Committee have recommended the government suspend NRPF altogether during the coronavirus crisis. MP Stephen Timms, who chairs the committee, says: “What we need is for the ‘no recourse to public funds’ restriction to be suspended for the duration of this crisis. So that hard-working, law-abiding families can apply for universal credit, just as three million other people have done since this crisis began.”
Home Secretary Priti Patel insists there are safeguards in place to support those affected and that the policy is in the public interest. Migrants who are applying for, or who have, leave to remain on family or private life grounds can apply to the Home Office for NRPF to be lifted. But the decision can take months.

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