Author: ajohnstone

Meat Shortage? A Lie

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As workers in meat processing plants around the United States earlier fell ill with the COVID-19, threatening production, the meat industry called for the government to allow the facilities to remain open, citing the threat of a catastrophic domestic food shortage.  After slaughterhouses in several states were closed when thousands of workers tested positive and dozens died, the industry publicly lobbied the Trump administration to intervene with state and local officials or risk major meat shortages across American grocery stores. Indeed, some retailers put limits on the amount of meat customers could buy, and the fast-food chain Wendy’s, at one point, ran low on hamburger. 



 Trump issued an executive order allowing the plants to stay open as essential businesses even as workers were getting sick and dying. 



 According to the New York Times and USA Today, the industry was lying about the threat of a shortage in order to maintain large exports to overseas markets.



 “It was a fake meat shortage,” tweeted labor journalist Steven Greenhouse.



 “The meat companies were saying the sky was falling, and it really wasn’t,” Food & Water Watch senior lobbyist Tony Corbo told the Times. “It wasn’t that there was not enough supply. It was that the supply was being sent abroad.”



 A record amount of pork to China in April, 129,000 tons, even as the industry was wringing its hands over shortages and appealing to the federal government for exemptions to Covid-19 restrictions imposed on the plants at the state and local level. Keeping the plants open was yo protect their long-term investments in exporting to China, a country that is vital to their growth.



 Ben Lilliston, a co-executive director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, which advocates for fair and sustainable food systems, told USA Today  that industry claims about shortages do not appear to have been about maintaining American food supplies.



 We’ve been very skeptical about these claims around shortages,” said Lilliston. “I think they were able to use the idea of food shortages as leverage.”



 https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/17/it-was-fake-meat-shortage-reporting-suggests-industry-sacrificed-workers-during

Patents Before Patients

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The United Nations, International Red Cross and Red Crescent, and others said it was a “moral imperative” that everyone have access to a “people’s vaccine.” 

 Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo agreed.
“The global spread of COVID-19 has told us in no uncertain terms that disease knows no boundaries and no country can afford to go it alone,” he said. “Only a people’s vaccine with equality and solidarity at its core can protect all of humanity from the virus. … A bold international agreement to this end cannot wait.”
But such grand declarations are unenforceable.

“We have this beautiful picture of everyone getting the vaccine, but there is no road map on how to do it,” said Yuan Qiong Hu, a senior legal and policy adviser at Medecins Sans Frontieres in Geneva. She said numerous problems must be resolved to manage distribution and that few measures have been taken. In the past, Hu said, companies have often applied for patents for nearly every step of a vaccine’s development and production: from the biological material like cell lines used, to the preservative needed to stretch vaccine doses and even how the shots are administered.

“We can’t afford to face these multiple layers of private rights to create a ‘people’s vaccine,’” she said, urging “very open conditions” so every manufacturer capable of doing so can produce a vaccine once its proven effective.
The World Health Organization and others have called for a COVID-19 “patents pool,” where intellectual property rights would be surrendered so pharmaceuticals could freely share data and technical knowledge. Numerous countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada and Germany have already begun revising their licensing laws to allow them to suspend intellectual property rights if authorities decide there is an overwhelming need given the pandemic. But the response from the industry has been lukewarm. Executives at Pfizer and some other major drug makers say they oppose suspending patent rights for potential COVID-19 vaccines.
 There is no precedent for divvying up vaccines that would arguably be needed by every country on the planet.
“We can’t just rely on goodwill to ensure access,” said Arzoo Ahmed, of Britain’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics, noting that precedents of how innovative drugs have been distributed are not encouraging. “With HIV/AIDS, it took 10 years for the drugs to reach people in lower-income countries.”

Protecting their land

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PanAust, an Australian-registered miner ultimately owned by the Chinese state-owned Guangdong Rising Assets Management, has proposed building a gold, silver and copper mine on the Frieda river, a tributary to the Sepik.



 Chiefs from 28 haus tambarans – “spirit houses” – representing 78,000 people along Papua New Guinea’s remote Sepik river have formally declared they want a proposal for the country’s largest ever mine halted.

Haus tambarans are the cultural and political hub of villages in the Sepik region. Pre-colonisation their function was analogous to a local parliament, where debates were held and collective decisions taken. But they also play important roles in spiritual and ancestral connection and in rituals and initiations. In an unprecedented move, the 28 haus tambarans issued a collective Supreme Sukundimi Declaration calling for “a total ban on the Frieda river mine”.
It said: “The river is the life of the Sepik and therefore it must be protected at all cost. It is our innate role to guard the river from exploitation and destruction by outsiders. Our future is in peril from this proposed mine and, therefore, we have gathered together as guardians of the river to stand firm as one.”
Peni, from Korogu village on the Sepik River, said the villages felt the need to make the collective declaration – admissible in court – because “they do not trust the government, the police, the army and the outsider who is the owner of the Frieda mine”.
Peni said villages along the Frieda and Sepik rivers would seek to halt the mine through legal and legislative channels but would ultimately defend their ancestral lands.
“There will be an uprising in the Sepik region and lives will be lost. No one will win this uprising. The government of PNG will have blood on their hands.”

The mine would be the largest in PNG’s history, and one of the largest in the world, covering 16,000 hectares, and is forecast to yield gold, silver and copper worth an estimated US$1.5bn a year for more than 30 years.

Campaigner Emmanuel Peni told the Guardian PanAust had not been “honest or transparent” in its consultations with those who live in the Sepik river valley. He said people whose lives and livelihoods depended on the river feared their villages could be permanently damaged or destroyed by the mine, citing the case of Rio Tinto’s Panguna mine, which has left downstream villages with poisoned water, polluted fields and a ruined river valley.
“If the dam collapses it will be catastrophic and destroy the Sepik river and our way of life,” he said. “We need to ensure that the Sepik is protected. It is our identity, our life, and the heartbeat of our culture. A life without the Sepik river as we know it would devastate our communities forever.”

Refugee Numbers Rise

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80 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide by the end of last year as a result of conflict, violence, persecution and human rights violations, according to the United Nations.



  26 million were refugees, 4.2 million asylum seekers and 45.7 million internally displaced people (IDPs) – those who fled to other parts of their own country.



 11 million more people fled their homes in 2019, almost doubling the total figure over the past decade. 



 People from Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Myanmar made up more than two-thirds of the refugee population.



 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/80-million-people-forcibly-displaced-worldwide-200617162524605.html

The price of war

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 In 2019 alone (the last year for which worldwide spending figures are available), federal spending on the U.S. military soared to $732 billion.  (Other military analysts, who included military-related spending, put the figure at $1.25 trillion.)



   As a result, the United States, with about 4 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 38 percent of world military spending.  Although it’s certainly true that other nations engaged in military buildups as well, China

accounted for only 14 percent of global military spending that year, while Russia accounted for only 3 percent.  Indeed, the United States spent more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.



 In February 2020, the administration introduced a 2021 fiscal year budget proposal that would devote 55 percent of the federal government’s $1.3 trillion discretionary spending to the military.  By 2030, the military proportion of the federal budget would rise to 62 percent.



 While the COVID-19 pandemic continues with over 110,000 deaths thus far, a large portion of the economy has collapsed, unemployment has reached the catastrophic levels of the Great Depression, and American cities are torn by civil unrest Republican officials argue that  public assistance measures are “too expensive.” America cannot afford to address its deep problems in healthcare, educational opportunity, and decent housing. Military spending is affordable! America possesses 5,800 nuclear weapons, capable of being launched from land, sea, and air, and is presently involved in a vast “modernization” program to rebuild the entire nuclear arsenal.  The price tag for this enormous undertaking over the next three decades, has been estimated as at least $1.5 trillion.

Causing Death but No Jail-Time

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In a highly unusual US corporate acknowledgment of criminal wrongdoing, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) pleaded guilty to the deaths of 84 people in a wildfire.  The California utility  admitted the 2018 Camp Fire, the state’s deadliest and most destructive, was caused by its faulty equipment.



 The company will be fined millions of dollars, but no-one will go to jail. But some survivors have condemned the plea deal as a slap on the wrist for PG&E, which has been linked to several dangerous blazes since 2015. They accuse state officials of long failing to hold the utility accountable because of its political clout.



 Over 10,000 homes were burned down and more than 153,000 acres razed. The utility has already committed to settle claims from insurers and local government agencies for more than $25bn. That includes a $13.5bn settlement with fire victims.

The Pandemic – Cooperation and Solidarity

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From empty supermarket shelves to crowded parks, public behaviour has come in for criticism during the Covid-19 outbreak. But blaming the spread of Covid-19 on selfishness or thoughtless behaviour is misguided and distracts from the real causes of fatalities, according to one of Britain’s leading behavioural psychologists.
“Despite media campaigns to vilify some people as selfish and thoughtless ‘covidiots’, the evidence on reasons for non-adherence shows that much of it was practical rather than psychological.” 
Prof John Drury, a member of a subgroup to the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said evidence shows that rather than mass panic or selfishness in times of emergency, people actually tend to show solidarity and cooperation.
“All the government evidence shows widespread adherence to the public health measures for Covid-19,” said the University of Sussex professor. 
The findings of surveys suggesting that adherence to lockdown measures in the UK is falling, particularly among younger adults, were unlikely to be down to selfishness, said Drury, noting the drop coincided with a decline in confidence in the government. Drury told the Guardian that public behaviour had often been misrepresented. “It is implicit in some politicians comments, but it was more often commentators, journalistic commentators, saying these kinds of things,” said Drury.
Drury’s comments come as he and colleagues published a commentary in the British Journal of Social Psychology arguing that “psychologising” disasters obscures the true causes of bad outcomes and instead blames victims.
The team argue that better explanations for the high Covid-19 death toll in the UK than public behaviour include lockdown being implemented too late because of under-reaction by politicians, as well as systemic problems such as poverty and other inequalities putting certain groups at risk, and failures of communication, including an early focus on self-protection rather than on protecting others.
“Where people think that others are not acting as one, that undermines the unity we need,” said Drury. Unity, Drury stressed, will be crucial as lockdown is relaxed while the success of the test-and-trace system hinges on public trust in the authorities administering and running it. “The same issues of common identity, collective interests, and collective responsibility that were relevant, and were effective, in the case of messaging around distancing and staying at home apply here also,” he said.

Happy America?

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14% of American adults say they’re very happy, down from 31% who said the same in 2018. That year, 23% said they’d often or sometimes felt isolated in recent weeks. Now, 50% say that. Compared with 2018, Americans also are about twice as likely to say they sometimes or often have felt a lack of companionship (45% vs. 27%) and felt left out (37% vs. 18%) in the past four weeks.



 Only 42% of Americans believe that when their children reach their age, their standard of living will be better. A solid 57% said that in 2018. 

Reimagining happiness is almost hard-wired into Americans’ DNA, said Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside.
“Human beings are remarkably resilient. There’s lots and lots of evidence that we adapt to everything. We move forward,” she said, adding that she’s done happiness studies since the pandemic started and found that some people are slightly happier than last year.

Our Solidarity Must Be Global.

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 “

Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.” — Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal.”

The social inequalities we live under every day gets magnified during a crisis. Corporations must profit at all times, and at times of crisis they can rely on governments to help them out. The ruling class can always depend on governments to find money when it comes to saving capitalism. 
Capitalist economists vacillates between apologists, obscurants and fantasists, presenting policies to advance the interests of the elite while pretending to serve the common good. None will work for common folk.
The current uprising against racism should be just beginning and has to become a deeper and broader resistance to capitalism itself. To achieve real change that will solve the many crises we face, demands must address the root causes of them. We must hold the ruling class accountable. Reformers seek to protect the system that has created inequality and injustice. The main political parties are the various wings of the ruling class. The State and its police are the enforcement arm that protects our masters. The police exist in order to protect property and wealth from those who do not own any. Reform is not enough. 
The protest movement needs to become more radical, not more moderate, and call for the elimination of capitalism. Social change will only come if we shift power into our own hands and exercise self-determination. The people would be in democratic control of how their communities are run. Defunding the police as being currently advocated without changing society means the wealthy elites will find other ways to protect themselves, private security and more gated communities. 
Anti-racism must be accompanied by the call for revolution, and the organising effort to dismantle the entire system. Those who hold power have started to make some concessions and compromises over the past few weeks of protests, but none of these has altered the systems that maintain the current inequalities and injustices. The protests have planted the seeds of transformation now it is our task to nurture them. We do that by putting out a vision of the changes we require and continuing to protest in support of that vision. We need to build relationships with others in our community to raise awareness of the crises and how to stop them. We need to support each other through mutual aid and building alternative systems to meet basic needs. Through our collective effort, we can create a new world. Only socialism brings solutions to the multiple problems at once — the pandemic crisis, the economic crash and the ecological collapse that threatens the future of organised human society. Socialism is the lifeboat that can save everyone.

Racism Facts

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The income of the median African American household is about 60% that of the median white household and this income gap, after narrowing a bit over the first couple of decades after World War II, is now wider than it was in 1970.  



 One in five African Americans live in poverty (more than twice the rate for whites) and a third of African American children live in poverty. 



 The unemployment rate among African Americans in the US is about twice as high as unemployment among whites, and this has been true for as long as we have been measuring US unemployment rates by race. 



 The wealth of the median African American household is one tenth that of the median white household. 



  And—as is painfully evident these days – racial inequality manifests itself in other realms of social life as well: education, health care, life expectancy, infant mortality, housing, access to capital, exposure to toxins, and more. 



  COVID-19 is killing African Americans at more than twice the rate of whites.  And “law enforcement” and “criminal justice” in the US systematically victimize and brutalize people of color.

The economist Darrick Hamilton, in his “Racial Equality is Economic Equality,” conveys succinctly that this racist history is essential for understanding racial inequality in 2020:
“The racial wealth gap is an inheritance that began with chattel slavery, when blacks were literally the capital assets for a white landowning plantation class. The gap continued after Emancipation, when discriminatory laws and institutions established insurmountable barriers to the American middle class for black families. 
Today, hundreds of years removed from chattel slavery, there has virtually never been a substantive black middle class when defined by wealth. In contrast, the implementation of FDR’s New Deal and post-war vision facilitated an asset-based white middle class to cumulatively build wealth and pass it on to their heirs.”


Over the course of the 20th Century, millions of American families, through home ownership, accumulated wealth as never before. African Americans were, overwhelming, excluded from this bonanza. Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro get it just right in their book, Black Wealth/White Wealth: African Americans were “locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history.” 

Promoted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.

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