Author: ajohnstone

Making billions V making ends meet

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Inequality was a pre-existing condition for the US economy long before the coronavirus started its spread. The pandemic has merely exposed its “ugly face”.



  It took developer Joe Farrell just one day to rent Sandcastle, his 15-bedroom mansion with sunken tennis courts in the wealthy enclave of The Hamptons, for $2m for the summer to “a textile tycoon and his family who were stuck in Manhattan and wanted to leave the city on a day’s notice. 



 Stock markets are setting new highs driven by soaring prices for the tech companies that enable those lucky enough to work from home. Apple is close to being valued at $2tn. The total wealth of US billionaires has soared $685bn since the middle of March to a combined $3.65tn. 



 Rock-bottom interest rates have triggered a home sales boom for some as those with the money reconsider their priorities in the work-from-home era. With nowhere to go, those Americans who can are saving at record rates.



 “We are all in this together” may be the rallying cry for the pandemic but the truth is the poor, and particularly people of color, have been devastated by coronavirus and its attendant recession while the wealthy have weathered it and in some cases made huge gains.



 Meanwhile roughly 30 million people are unemployed in the US, about 20% of the workforce. Almost 30 million Americans recently reported that they have not had enough to eat at some point in the previous seven days. The vast majority – about 26 million – had lower rates of educational attainment.

The recession has also further exposed the racial wealth gap. The job market ticked up again last month but 14.6% of Black and 12.9% of Latinx adults were unemployed in July, versus 9.2% of whites.
Only one in four Americans can work from home. 
“It’s white-collar professionals who are able to work from home. In some ways, this is a sign that the economy is just officially split in two,” Glenn Kelman, chief executive of property company Redfin, told NPR.
For people able to work from home, “life has returned largely to normal”, said Peter Atwater, adjunct lecturer in the economics department at William & Mary. “In fact, the wealthiest today are even richer than they were before the outbreak.”
Economists often talk of V-shaped economic recoveries, a sharp drop and an equally sharp bounce back. Sometimes the economy drags along the bottom before bouncing back – a U-shaped recovery. Now there is talk of a “K-shaped” recovery. A fall followed by a split where the well off and well educated tick up while the poor and poorly educated fall further behind.
For those people, on the arm of the K, Atwater said it’s “almost as if the outbreak never happened. That’s starkly different for people on the leg. If you are a small business person, work in the service industry, had to go back out into a manufacturing facility, a job in the ‘real world’, as it were, that has weighed heavily. Sadly it has weighed particularly heavily on minority communities at a time when they are the largest populations experiencing the outbreak. It’s a stacked inequity.”
“We talk about the American dream, the ability to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Rags to riches. All this American mythology is being challenged by this extraordinary wealth divide,” said Atwater. “The rubber band has been pulled too far. People are uncomfortable with how divided we have become. At the same time I don’t think the wealthy appreciate how vulnerable they are to those who are out in the real world. They are not immune to the world around them.”

The City and the Coronavirus

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The economic collapse in Britain during the second quarter of 2020 was the worse on record. Unemployment is forecast by the Bank of England to soar to 2.5m by Christmas. The Brexit cliff edge approaches. Yet in the City, the FTSE 100 has been on the up.



 The FTSE jumped 2% on the same day it was revealed the economy had slumped by 20%.

Even if unemployment surges, and consumer spending in the UK fails to recover fully, the stock market can continue rising.
Three out of the four biggest companies in the FTSE 100 were this week trading at share prices above their levels at the start of 2020, as if the pandemic never happened.
Unilever, maker of consumer goods from Domestos to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, was trading at about £45 a share this week, compared with £43 in January. Drug giant AstraZeneca (boosted by vaccine hopes) is fetching £85 a share from £68 in January, and even mining conglomerate BHP (largely Australian, but listed in London) is a smidgen above its January price.
Ocado, the food delivery firm, has leapt in value and now has a total stock market capitalisation (£17bn) that is significantly greater than Sainsbury’s and Morrisons combined.
The FTSE 100 is yet to fully recover to the 7,500 level it enjoyed before the lockdown, but the steep market fall in February and March – when it dropped below 5,000 – is now a distant memory. Some pension funds, such as the Nest scheme which covers 9 million “auto-enrolled” workers, are back to where they were before the pandemic. Nest’s default pension fund currently has a unit price of 207p, compared with 208p at the start of January. The millions of UK savers in Nest may cheer the recovery of their funds, but it has little do with the performance of the UK. The five biggest holdings in the Nest default fund are all American: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and Johnson & Johnson.
UBS, which styles itself as the world’s “leading wealth manager” with $2.3tn under management, thinks UK shares, and sterling, will go even higher. Its economist Dean Turner said the worst of the slump in the economy is over, there is a strong bounce-back in activity, and pent-up consumer demand will power a strong recovery later in the summer and into autumn.
“In our view, UK assets look undervalued. In this environment, we continue to maintain a preference for UK equities relative to other eurozone stocks, and expect sterling to strengthen versus a weaker US dollar over the next 12 months,” said Turner.
Some big investment groups suggest that even if there is a downturn later in the year, the Bank of England will rescue investors by injecting money into the market, known as quantitative easing (QE). Previous rounds of QE have pushed up share prices, although critics say it increases wealth inequality.
BNY Mellon Investment Management chief economist, Shamik Dhar, says: “If the recovery does stall, or turns out to be significantly less positive, then I expect the government to step in with further fiscal measures, extending job and income support programmes, and the Bank of England to step in with more QE towards the end of the year.”
Fidelity, one of the world’s biggest investment groups, is rather less confident.
 Investment director Tom Stevenson said: “No one knows exactly what the recovery from coronavirus will look like – particularly with the potential for a second wave of infections and further local lockdowns – but it is likely that it will be a slow crawl towards pre-Covid levels with further government stimulus needed to restore sustained growth … Much depends on whether rising unemployment creates a negative feedback loop into lower appetite to spend and invest.” 
Fidelity reckons that holding gold – a standard safe haven in troubled times – may still make sense.



 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/15/ftse-100-rises-economic-covid-unemployment

Demographic Debt

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 The Lancet magazine last month showed the global population is now set to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064 before falling by more than 9% by the end of the century.
While that may be a relief for the environment, it has serious impacts upon economic growth and public debt implications.
Deutsche Bank meanwhile notes that the “central scenario” of Britain’s official fiscal watchdog shows a 2070 government debt/GDP ratio of 418%. During the austerity drive just five years ago, that same 2070 forecast was just 87%.
“It’s almost inconceivable that we’ll reach that point, so something will likely have to give,” said Deutsche strategist Jim Reid, opining on options from cutbacks to age-related pension and healthcare costs, to higher taxes, faster inflation, central bank bond buying or even – whisper it – default. “Economic growth could bail us out but this will be tough given demographics.”
Populations in some 23 of the 195 countries in the study – including Japan, Spain, Portugal, Thailand and Ukraine – are expected to halve by the end of the century and China could see a drop of 48%. Another 33 countries are seen declining by between 25% and 50%. Both China and India should expect to see their numbers peak before 2050.
Add in ageing in countries forecast to see 25% population declines and the ratio of those over 80 to those under 15 is expected to balloon to 1.5 from just 0.16 now.
Helped by immigration, the population of the United States is expected to grow until mid-century followed by a moderate decline of less than 10% of the peak by 2100. 

Is This How A Democracy Works?

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The US Postal Service (USPS) has warned that millions of mail-in votes may not arrive in time to be counted on the presidential election day, 3 November.
In letters to states across the country last month, the agency said “certain deadlines… are incongruous with the Postal Service’s delivery standards”. In a letter to Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, the USPS said mail-in ballots requested one week before the 3 November election – allowed under the state’s election laws – may not reach their destination on time because the state’s deadlines are too tight for its “delivery standards”. USPS General Counsel Thomas Marshall said a “mismatch” between Pennsylvania’s laws and the mail system’s delivery capabilities “creates a risk that ballots requested near the deadline under state law will not be returned by mail in time to be counted under your laws as we understand them”.
Critics have blamed the new USPS head – a loyal supporter of Trump – for a slowdown in deliveries. Trump said he was blocking additional funding for the USPS to help with election issues, because he opposed mail-in voting.
A record number of people are expected to vote by mail due to the pandemic.
Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar asked the state’s supreme court to allow ballots to be counted as long as they were received up to three days after the election. Currently, votes are discarded if they are received after election day.
Pennsylvania is a battleground state, which Mr Trump won by less than 1% in the 2016 election. Other battleground states, including Florida and Michigan, also received letters, according to US media reports.
The Democratic governor in Pennsylvania’s neighbouring New Jersey announced on Friday that the state would pre-emptively send ballots to every registered voter in the state. The process of sending out ballots is known as universal mail-in voting, and has been adopted in nine other US states.

Jobs Galore??

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An entry-level position as a paralegal which received 4,228 applications. Some 3,333 people applied for a job as a human resources assistant and 3,272 for a trainee accountancy job, according to jobs website CV-Library.
An advert for a job as a warehouse worker in Northumberland received 2,932 applications, 2,653 applied for a factory job in Sunderland and 2,154 for an administrator role in Coventry. An NHS 111 call handler job attracted 1,656 applicants.

Less Lethal Riot Weapons Still Do Harm

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A group of doctors in Austin, Texas, warned Friday against police use of so-called “less lethal” munitions for crowd control after they treated people who were severely hurt during protests in May.
In a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 12 doctors from the Dell Seton Medical Center at The University of Texas said Austin police who fired beanbag rounds caused injuries including bleeding on the brain and a skull fracture.
“I have been around the world and I have never seen beanbag injuries like this ever,” said Dr. Jayson Aydelotte, who helped author the letter. “I always thought they bruised your chest and that is it.”
Aydelotte, a trauma surgeon at Dell Seton Medical Center, said that based on his experiences in the military, beanbag bullet injuries resemble those caused by a regular bullet. He said all the doctors were surprised at the severity of the impact wounds among the patients who were hit.
“Although our report reflects the experience at only one center during a short period and we cannot determine the frequency of injuries when these munitions are used, these findings highlight the fact that beanbag munitions can cause serious harm and are not appropriate for use in crowd control,” the letter said. ”In light of the ongoing nationwide protests, these observations are relevant to the broader medical community as well as to policymakers seeking to reduce rates of police-induced injuries and fatalities.”
Some cases they witnessed in Austin resulted in a need for serious treatment including emergency intubation and prolonged stays in intensive care units.
Dr. Kristofor Olson said he was on duty at the Dell Seton emergency room when the patients who were hit by beanbags came in. He said he was shocked at the volume of people coming in with beanbag injuries both nights in late May.
Patients ranged in age from 16 to 54, the letter said, and five of those injured had head injuries. Two had facial fractures, and 12 had other injuries including contusions, cuts and other bone fractures. The doctors’ letter includes images of CT scans to show brain and skull injuries and a photograph of a patient with a beanbag stuck in her face.

Less Lethal Riot Weapons Still Do Harm

Uncategorised No Comments
A group of doctors in Austin, Texas, warned Friday against police use of so-called “less lethal” munitions for crowd control after they treated people who were severely hurt during protests in May.
In a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 12 doctors from the Dell Seton Medical Center at The University of Texas said Austin police who fired beanbag rounds caused injuries including bleeding on the brain and a skull fracture.
“I have been around the world and I have never seen beanbag injuries like this ever,” said Dr. Jayson Aydelotte, who helped author the letter. “I always thought they bruised your chest and that is it.”
Aydelotte, a trauma surgeon at Dell Seton Medical Center, said that based on his experiences in the military, beanbag bullet injuries resemble those caused by a regular bullet. He said all the doctors were surprised at the severity of the impact wounds among the patients who were hit.
“Although our report reflects the experience at only one center during a short period and we cannot determine the frequency of injuries when these munitions are used, these findings highlight the fact that beanbag munitions can cause serious harm and are not appropriate for use in crowd control,” the letter said. ”In light of the ongoing nationwide protests, these observations are relevant to the broader medical community as well as to policymakers seeking to reduce rates of police-induced injuries and fatalities.”
Some cases they witnessed in Austin resulted in a need for serious treatment including emergency intubation and prolonged stays in intensive care units.
Dr. Kristofor Olson said he was on duty at the Dell Seton emergency room when the patients who were hit by beanbags came in. He said he was shocked at the volume of people coming in with beanbag injuries both nights in late May.
Patients ranged in age from 16 to 54, the letter said, and five of those injured had head injuries. Two had facial fractures, and 12 had other injuries including contusions, cuts and other bone fractures. The doctors’ letter includes images of CT scans to show brain and skull injuries and a photograph of a patient with a beanbag stuck in her face.

THE DAMNOCRAT

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On Tuesday November the 3rd the quadrennial ritual of the voting booth takes place. Based on  Engels’ comment that elections under the conditions of universal suffrage offer a “gauge of the maturity of the working class” we can conclude that the political maturity of the working people is extremely low and one reason is that the American working class does not as yet have its own independent political expression. The glaring weakness of the U.S. left-wing is nowhere more dramatically revealed than it its overwhelming irrelevance to elections.  The inability of the left to serve as a magnet for the popular discontent is a telling commentary on the crisis of the America’s progressive movement.

“The highest form of the state,” writes Engels, “the democratic republic, which under our modern conditions of society is more and more becoming an inevitable necessity, and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can be fought out–the democratic republic officially knows nothing any more of property distinctions. In it wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely. On the one hand, in the form of the direct corruption of officials, of which America provides the classical example; on the other hand, in the form of an alliance between government and stock exchange, which becomes the easier to achieve the more the public debt increases and the more joint stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production itself, using the stock exchange as their center.”

 How well Engels remarks anticipate the developments of capitalist politics.

Has there been a  presidential election campaign in this century in which the general course of events would have been significantly altered had the presidential election result been reversed?  Presidential elections in the U.S., are where voters are dealt from undoubtedly  stacked deck, one more elaborate charade which can in no way alter or modify either the underlying property relations of the capitalist system or the actual policies that the capitalists seek to pursue over the next four years. The Democrats possess a strategy of running as moderate conservatives to chase and capture the forever rightward-shifting “center.”

Trump has made it clear what is at stake in this November’s presidential election. By the very tone of the Republican campaign, Trump has declared that if he is elected for a second term, he will take it as a mandate to continue his first-term reactionary attacks on the people. He promises to use the power and authority of the White House to carry out the right wing’s ominous agenda. The pervasive message of Trumps whole campaign is one of racism and repression using coded language about “law and order,” “the American family” and “suburbia” to fan up the fears of whites as society polarizes more and more along economic and racial lines. His whole campaign creates an atmosphere in which racist and fascist groups are free to continue their attacks on people of color and workers with impunity. We are told that if a Democratic administration can slow the reactionary tide, even in a small way, it is objectively better for the people. But it is clear that we cannot take confidence from the Biden campaign strategy – a conservative and defensive strategy which focuses on convincing a narrow sector of Republicans while  squandering much of the support that could have led to a Democratic sweep in November. It is clear that Biden and the Democratic Party operatives are not leading the struggle against the right, and in many ways are resisting the movement to open the party up to more radical ideas. The defeat of militant movements within the Democratic Party has allowed the assaults of capital and the right–wing to advance.


The World Socialist Party recognize that politics, political parties, and electoral campaigns represent class interests. The Democratic and Republican parties exist for one reason only: to advance the rule of the capitalist over every aspect of American and world society. They operate on behalf of those who own and control all of American wealth, industry, and institutions of American society. The Democrats and the Republicans represent the corporations of the military-industrial complex, the exploiters and the polluters. They are the ones who profit from the desperate needs of the people. Both Democrats and Republicans represent the same ruling class whose drive for profits takes the country to war, to occupation with military bases throughout the world. Their actions in the White House, in both houses of Congress, and in the judicial system all aim to oil the gears of the private profit system at the expense of working people.


All previous efforts to reform the Democratic Party from within have ended up neutralized as agents of change. The price for entry to party committees, campaign caucuses, the primaries and debates is allegiance and adherence to the DNC party-machine. The WSPUS has a simpler straightforward way to attract radicals and progressive from the Democrats to an independent socialist party: Build it and they will come. A breakaway from the Democratic Party has to have somewhere viable and strong to go. There is no more receptive audience to socialist thinking today than among the activists who are fighting the capitalist parties on the popular issues.


On the other hand, the working people who constitute the overwhelming majority of the people have no political party of their own. They have no instrument to fight for their interests in the American political scene. And, even the working class institutions that do exist such as unions and other working class organizations, are almost entirely linked to one section of the bosses’ political parties. The majority of Americans, the people who work for a living by producing all the goods and providing all the services society needs, have no political representatives and no candidates in the running. 


The main problem with the Green Party is that it does not oppose the capitalist system itself. While they campaign for reforms such as a universal healthcare system, environmental regulation, and more, they offer no real alternative because at heart the Green Party supports the continuation of the capitalist system while seeking to eliminate its worst excesses. But the existence of capitalism depends on the impoverishment of the working class, the despoliation of nature. It depends on war to secure trade routes and resources. Working people have no interest in perpetuating this system. The Green Party does not offer any real alternative because it can’t and won’t break from capitalist politics. It consciously seeks to reform capitalism, not end it. The Green Party politics is capitalist-lite.


The need for mobility of labour

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Germany has a shortage of nurses and caregivers. Health Minister Jens Spahn has made an effort to ease the hiring of foreign workers, but the coronavirus pandemic brought this recruitment drive to a halt.



 For years, Germany has reported a dearth of nurses and caregivers. According to German Health Minister Jens Spahn, some 50,000 positions need to be filled. And the German Nursing Council (DPR) predicts up to 300,000 vacant positions may have to be filled until 2030. In 2013, the federal employment agency launched a recruitment drive, encouraging foreign nurses and caregivers to relocate to Germany.



 Minister Spahn wanted to lend new momentum to the initiative in 2019, when he traveled to Kosovo and then Mexico, hoping to strike a recruitment deal. After returning, Spahn created a special agency designed to ease immigration for foreign nurses and caregivers. 



 Spahn’s ministry, however, informed DW that currently all recruiting efforts have been “indefinitely” suspended due to the pandemic. Presently, 1,300 nurses from Mexico and the Philippines are waiting to have their applications processed.



 Thomas Hesse, who heads Saarbrücken hospital’s HR department, is eager to hire more foreign staff. “We need to train up more people here, and hire staff from abroad.” He is convinced this is the only way Germany will be able to tackle the staff shortage in its health care system. Last year, he teamed up with Homburg university hospital, the Carl Duisberg language centers, and Germany’s employment agency to hire Mexican caregivers. Hesse says they are known to be highly trained. But because of the pandemic, they have remained at home, studying German.



 Asklepios is Germany’s second largest hospital company, operating about 160 hospitals, nursing homes and other institutions. The company hires international staff by tasking special recruiters. The group employs many Mexican and Filipino nurses. 



 A mere4,000 nurses and caregivers from abroad have come to Germany since the country’s employment agency launched its recruitment drive in 2013. Additional staff may have been hired through other agencies. Yet it is unlikely any more foreign nurses and caregivers will come to Germany this year, due to the pandemic.



 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-nurses-and-caregivers-from-abroad-wanted/a-54576126

Vaccine Nationalism Again

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Russia is not the only country pursuing domestic politics over global cooperation in the fight against coronavirus. To call this vaccine nationalism seems unnecessary since every stage of the coronavirus crisis has been marked by resurgent nationalism; and by the states previously most invested in the idea of an interconnected world recoiling from it, thrashing about in anger when the system no longer seemed to serve their interests. Take for instance Trump’s sudden discovery that despite its immense wealth, the US doesn’t really make drugs (or gowns, or masks, or ventilators) any more.



 The WHO last week warned against “vaccine nationalism”, noting that unless countries cooperate, an actually successful vaccine could touch off a worldwide frenzy. Similar to the scramble for PPE gear and testing reagents when governments seized exports, and the US reportedly tried to intercept other nation’s shipments at global ports, demand for vaccine supplies could result in another pitched battle for limited resources.



 While some vaccine projects have promised to make the results as cheap and widely available as possible, others are frighteningly marketised.  A financial analyst was positively giddy speculating that the leading US candidate – Moderna’s mRNA vaccine – could end up selling for more than $70 a dose worldwide, a price that would consign the world’s poorest countries to the back of the line, or out of the line altogether.



 The WHO’s solution is to ask countries to join its Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) programme, one part of which is dedicated to funding open access research, and buying up stocks of vaccine to ensure equitable distribution. The project recently received $8bn from a group of EU nations, the Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. A heartening amount, but likely to be swamped by the waves of cash being thrown around by countries trying to go it alone. In the past month the US has inked or began talks for deals with Pfizer ($2bn), GlaxoSmithKline ($2.1bn), Moderna ($1.5bn), and AstraZeneca($1bn) to supply potential vaccines. The UK has signed six such deals, for a combined 340m potential doses, although the pricing isn’t yet known for all of them.



 International institutions such as the WHO, which have warned about potential pandemics and created initiatives around vaccine research and distribution and public health preparedness, haven’t been taken seriously or funded at a proper level for years. The groundwork needed for a truly cooperative international response to this crisis should have been laid long ago.



 If a vaccine really does mark the end of the crisis, it will be a particularly perverse tragedy if the very nations that have failed up until now manage to turn it into a zero-sum game in which the country with the most money buys the most vaccine – leaving everyone else shut out.



 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/14/vaccine-nationalism-stands-in-the-way-of-an-end-to-the-covid-19-crisis

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