Author: ajohnstone

Brazil’s Callous COVID-19 Attitude

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Julio Croda, an epidemiologist who used to head Brazil’s health ministry’s department of immunization and transmissible diseases, said he encountered a lack of urgency from the government when his department predicted that the elderly would bear the brunt of the coronavirus.

Croda reported that when informed that older people would be more likely to die from the disease, Solange Vieira, who leads the Superintendence of Private Insurance, linked to the country’s finance ministry and who helped reform the country’s pensions, said:
 “It’s good that deaths are concentrated among the old. That will improve our economic performance as it will reduce our pension deficit.” 



Climate change is a killer

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A new study has found “substantial underreporting” in the numbers of deaths caused by environmental crises.
Dr Arnagretta Hunter, of ANU Medical School who co-authored the study, said in a statement: “Climate change is a killer, but we don’t acknowledge it on death certificates. If you have an asthma attack and die during heavy smoke exposure from bushfires, the death certificate should include that information. We can make a diagnosis of disease like coronavirus, but we are less literate in environmental determinants like hot weather or bushfire smoke.”



The research, published in journal The Lancet Planetary Health this month, revealed that over the past 11 years, the number of deaths attributed to excessive natural heat is at least 50 times greater than is recorded on death certificates in Australia.





During that time some 340 deaths in Australia were recorded as excessive heat but experts from The Australian National University (ANU) found that 36,765 could be attributed to the environmental conditions, following statistical analysis. The study indicates that the heat-related mortality rate in Australia is actually around 2 per cent.

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-deaths-kill-records-wildfires-a9533536.html





Making sure CEOs are looked after

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Sonic Automotive which operates 95 U.S. car dealerships, started laying off and furloughing about a third of its workforce as the coronavirus pandemic crushed its sales. Then it changed its executives’ pay packages – handing them a multimillion-dollar windfall. On April 10, Sonic’s board gave its top executives stock options to replace performance-based share awards. The options it gave Chief Executive David Smith, whose family controls the company, are now worth about $5.16 million – more than four times the value of the performance-based stock awards he got last year. Sonic’s terminated employees, meanwhile, face hard times. 



Sonic is one of six U.S. companies identified in a Reuters review of regulatory filings that have moved to shield their executives’ compensation from the pandemic’s economic fallout as they laid off or furloughed workers. The others include plush toy seller Build-A-Bear Workshop, restaurant operator Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, retailer Signet Jewelers, fashion brand DKNY owner G-III Apparel Group and fracking sand producer Covia Holdings. Reuters found 75 other companies that disclosed they are considering changes to executive pay plans in light of the pandemic’s impact on their businesses. Among them are ridesharing giant Uber Technologies, hotel operator Hilton Worldwide Holdings, carrier Delta Air Lines, satellite radio company Sirius XM Holdings and Thomson Reuters, the parent company of Reuters News. 



Sirius XM said it “may be prudent” to change executive pay terms to ensure it can attract and retain “senior management talent.” Delta said in a filing that its performance measures no longer suited the “current reality” and that the value of executives’ incentive pay had declined by more than half in the pandemic. G-III and Signet said the changes were needed to retain management talent, while Build-A-Bear said the moves aligned the interests of executives with shareholders. Build-A-Bear, which sells customized stuffed animals, announced a 20% executive salary reduction in March as it furloughed more than 90% of its 4,300 workers. That translated to a cut of $142,800 from the $714,000 salary of CEO Sharon John. Two weeks later, however, the company granted its top management stock grants of roughly equivalent value to the salary cuts.  



 Covia, Red Robin, Uber and Hilton said in filings that uncertainty arising from the pandemic caused them to revisit performance pay. Thomson Reuters said in a filing that it had approved executive performance targets in February and early March without the benefit of being able to consider the pandemic’s impact on its business.



More than 500 companies in the Russell 3000 index have announced cuts to the base salaries of their chief executives, to save money or show they are sharing workers’ pain, according to compensation consultant Semler Brossy. Base salaries, however, account for only a tenth of the median pay of chief executives at the largest 500 U.S. companies, according to research firm Equilar. They earn the bulk of their compensation through stock awards.



  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ceopay-insight/u-s-firms-shield-ceo-pay-as-pandemic-hits-workers-investors-idUSKBN2341N9

Mutual Aid is there for the Asking

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Many still cling to the hope that the COVID-19 crisis will transform the use of state power into an altruistic tool acting on behalf of the vulnerable and powerless, rather than view it as an opportunity for governments to harness the state’s intervention to advance the oligarchy’s interests and increase its privileges. Nationalist and populist political leaders are stoking prejudice and  xenophobia accusing cunning foreigners of nefarious scheming. Aspiring strongmen politicians are reinforcing divisions while at the same time rewarding their corporate sponsors and donors.

Our message to our fellow-workers is that those who do not own the means of production are nothing but the slaves of those who do. The forces of production long ago reached the point where they could produce the abundance necessary for the change from private ownership into social ownership. The interdependence of society has outgrown local and national bounds and is world wide. The workers of the world must organise politically to dispossess the capitalist class of the means of production and distribution and establish common ownership. The Socialist Party urges our fellow working men and women of all nations and races to join with the World Socialist Movement in order to free society from the tyranny of class rule. Socialism requires an economy developed to the point where production for need supersedes production for profit. Humanity will no longer produce goods to be exchanged for money on the market. It will produce use values distributed to all members of society in order to satisfy their needs


The only real way forward, in the end, is the world socialist cooperative commonwealth.



The ‘Bolsonarization’ of Bolivia

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Last November’s coup removed Bolivian President Evo Morales from power. Since then the world’s media has fallen silent. 



 Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party governed the country for 14 years. Certain negative actions and policies of the MAS government over these years in power contributed to its own crisis of legitimacy in the lead up to the October 2019 elections.  In the lead up to the October 20, 2019 election, the MAS and Morales were already mired in a crisis of legitimacy, making them an easier target for the right, which had been consolidating forces and capitalizing off of the errors of the MAS. The issue of fraud during the October 20th elections, which indicated Morales won another term, has been widely debated and investigated. Following the election, protesters against Morales allied with right-wing leader Fernando Camacho and other racist figures, fomenting destabilization and violence in the country in an effort to force Morales out of office. These efforts ultimately created the pretext for a police and military intervention   Regardless of the extent or existence of fraud, the Organization of American States strategically threw gasoline on the fire during a critical moment of the October crisis with their early claims of fraud, pushing the country into violence. On November 8, police across the country mutinied against the government, and the military “suggested” Morales step down on November 10. Morales and other MAS leaders were forced to flee or go into hiding. Morales left the country for Mexico.



 The Right, having planned for a seizure of the government, took advantage of the power vacuum and entered office with the crucial blessing of the Bolivian armed forces and the US embassy. 



 Senator Jeanine Áñez declared herself president in front of an empty Congress on November 12.  State repression immediately following the coup left dozens dead of unarmed protesters and bystanders dead in Senkata and Sacaba, key areas of resistance to the coup regime. and the government has been throwing political enemies behind bars. 

Following Áñez’s seizure of power, Bolivia has endured the worst state violence and political persecution it has seen in decades.





“They’re criminalizing social protest…” Bolivian journalist Fernando Molina explained. “There’s a ‘Bolsonarization’ of Bolivia.”


The Áñez government threatens to roll back major progressive policies of the MAS, as well as victories won in the streets by Bolivia’s broad social, labor, and indigenous movements.


“The coup d’état is not just against the state, the government, but also the social movement organizations,” Aymara feminist activist Adriana Guzmán explained.


https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/05/28/bibles-barricades-how-right-seized-power-bolivia

The IMF on Climate Change

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Equity markets have generally ignored the increasing number of natural disasters over the past 50 years and tougher rules are needed to make investors aware of the dangers posed by the climate crisis, the International Monetary Fund has said.



Companies should be forced to disclose their exposure to climate risk because a voluntary approach does not go far enough, the IMF said.
The IMF said global temperatures were currently 1.1C above their pre-industrial level and were on course to rise by a total of 3C unless stronger action was taken.
“Climate change induced by this level of warming is, in turn, expected to adversely impact the world’s stock of natural assets, lead to a significant rise in sea level, and increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather event,” the IMF said. “As the frequency and severity of climatic hazards rise, the resultant socioeconomic losses could be significantly higher than in recent history.”

Last year was also marked by a series of severe weather-related events, including flooding in the US and bushfires in Australia, but the IMF said this was part of a trend for the number of disasters to increase “considerably” in the past few decades, from slightly more than 50 in the early 1980s to about 200 since 2000. It noted that Hurricane Kartrin devastated New Orleans in 2005, and Dominica suffered damage amounting to more than twice its GDP when Hurricane Maria struck in 2017.



Even so there had been little indication that investors had become more aware of the potential losses they could face if global temperatures continued to rise, with only a modest impact on stock markets, shares in banks and insurance companies from large disasters. The IMF said. “This suggests that equity investors may not be paying sufficient attention to climate change risks.”



“Of course, strong policy actions to mitigate climate change would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and future physical risk in the first place, conferring benefits to mankind that extend well beyond the realm of financial stability. Yet, from a financial stability perspective, this transition to a lower-carbon economy needs to be carefully managed to avoid abrupt and unanticipated repricing of portfolios and economic dislocation.”



https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/29/markets-not-paying-attention-to-climate-crisis-imf-warns

To own the vaccine or not?

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The United States and the UK were the only two holdouts in the World Health Assembly from the declaration that vaccines and medicines for COVID-19 should be available as public goods, and not under exclusive patent rights. The United States explicitly disassociated itself from the patent pool call, talking instead of “the critical role that intellectual property plays”—in other words, patents for vaccines and medicines. 


All other countries agreed with the Costa Rican proposal in the World Health Assembly that there should be a patent pool for all COVID-19 vaccines and medicines. All countries supported this proposal, barring the United States and its loyal camp follower, the UK. The United States also entered its disagreement on the final WHA resolution, being the lone objector to patent pooling of COVID-19 medicines and vaccines, noting “the critical role that intellectual property plays in incentivizing the development of new and improved health products.”

China and the EU have already agreed that any vaccine developed by them will be regarded as a public good. Even without that, once a medicine or a vaccine is known to be successful, any country with a reasonable scientific infrastructure can replicate the medicine or the vaccine, and manufacture it locally. India in particular has one of the largest generic drug and vaccine manufacturing capacities in the world. What prevents India, or any country for that matter, from manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines or drugs once they are developed—only the empty threat of a failed hegemon on breaking patents?

Most countries have compulsory licensing provisions that will allow them to break patents in case of epidemics or health emergencies. Even the WTO, after a bitter fight, accepted in its Doha Declaration (2001) that countries, in a health emergency, have the right to allow any company to manufacture a patented drug without the patent holder’s permission, and even import it from other countries. Why is it, then, that countries are unable to break patents, even if there are provisions in their laws and in the TRIPS Agreement? The answer is their fear of U.S. sanctions against them. Every year, the U.S. Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issues a Special 301 Report that it has used to threaten trade sanctions against any country that tries to compulsorily license any patented product. 
 India figures prominently in this report year after year, for daring to issue a compulsory license in 2012 to Natco for nexavar, a cancer drug Bayer was selling for more than $65,000 a year. Marijn Dekkers, the CEO of Bayer, was quoted widely that this was “theft,” and “We did not develop this medicine for Indians… We developed it for Western patients who can afford it.” This leaves unanswered how many people even in the affluent West can afford a $65,000 bill for an illness. But there is no question that a bill of this magnitude is a death sentence for anybody but the super-rich in countries like India. Though a number of other drugs were under also consideration for compulsory licensing at that time, India has not exercised this provision again after receiving U.S. threats.
One issue is now looming large over the COVID-19 pandemic. If we do not address the intellectual property rights issue in this pandemic, we are likely to see a repeat of the AIDS tragedy. People died for 10 years (1994-2004) as patented AIDS medicine was priced at $10,000 to $15,000 for a year’s supply, far beyond their reach. Finally, patent laws in India allowed people to get AIDS medicine at less than a dollar a day, or $350 for a year’s supply. Today, 80 percent of the world’s AIDS medicine comes from India. For big pharma, profits trumped lives, and they will continue to do so, COVID or no COVID, unless we change the world.

It is unlikely that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 will provide a lifetime immunity like the smallpox vaccine. Unlike AIDS, where the patient numbers were smaller and were unfortunately stigmatized in different ways, COVID-19 is a visible threat for everyone. Any attempt to hold people and governments to ransom on COVID-19 vaccines or medicines could see the collapse of the entire patent edifice of TRIPS that big pharma backed by the United States and major EU countries have built. That is why the more clever in the capitalist world have moved toward a voluntary patent pool for potential COVID-19 medicines and vaccines. A voluntary patent pool means that companies or institutions holding patents on medicines—such as remdesivir—or vaccines would voluntarily hand them over to such a pool. The terms and conditions of such a handover, meaning at concessional rates, or for only for certain regions, are still not clear—leading to criticism that a voluntary patent pool is not a substitute for declaring that all such medicines and vaccines should be declared global public goods during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the anthrax scare in 2001, the U.S. Secretary of Health issued a threat to Bayer under “eminent domain for patents” for licensing the anthrax-treatment drug ciprofloxacin to other manufacturers. Bayer folded, and agreed to supply the quantity at a price that the U.S. government had set. And without a whimper. Yes, this is the same Bayer that considers India as a “thief” for issuing a compulsory license.


 

When Terrorism Succeeds

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Timothy McVeigh, on the fringe of white supremacy blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklohama City in 1995 with a fertilizer bomb. He killed 168 people and wounded hundreds more. The Oklahoma City bombing was the most successful act of terrorism in American history. It led the FBI and other Federal agencies, as well as local law enforcement in many instances, to back off the white supremacists, neo-Nazis and kindred groups, leaving them be unless they did something really egregious. 


In the 1990s, Federal agencies like the FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were called in to deal with heavily armed white terrorists. A 1992 stand off at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, between gun nut Randy Weaver (whose family was with him) ended in tragedy when FBI snipers took out Weaver and his wife. Weaver had refused to show up for his trial on weapons charges (he had sawed off a shotgun, which is illegal in Idaho). Then the following year the David Koresh splinter of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, was investigated for stockpiling weapons, and a raid left 4 ATF agents and 6 Branch Davidians dead, with many agents wounded. That firefight led to an FBI siege of the compound and ultimately to the deaths of 76 members, including Koresh, in fires that they may have set themselves.


It is one of the reasons for which the Obama administration did not take resolute action when Cliven Bundy staged a stand-off over his refusal to pay fees for grazing on Federal land. People like Bundy were looking for further ammunition to grow their “sovereign citizen” movement, and a violent crackdown would have helped them. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer merely complained about the mob that came for her with assault weapons, but did not order them dealt with by law enforcement. The Michigan state legislature actually just shut down to accommodate these white terrorists. But if any of them had been shot by police, you know that it would just have brought more gangs to Lansing and that Trump would have been whipping up the fringe into a lather.


The white supremacists and other far right elements are armed to the teeth. There are about 255 million guns in the US, but something like 75 percent of Americans say they don’t own a gun. So between 22% and 31% of Americans, about 80 to 100 million people, own all the guns. Then 3 percent of the population, some 10 million people, own 100 million guns.



Let me underline that. About 40 percent of all guns in the United States are owned by about 10 million people, some 3 percent of the population. A tiny percentage within that percentage of super-gun-owners are far-right wing extremists, and law enforcement is understandably reluctant to get them het up.


White supremacists, militia movement members, and other fringe groups of the far right may make up 10 percent of the US population. The form a key if unspoken part of the Republican Party and provide the margin for Republicans in many tight congressional races. This is why Sarah Palin and other GOP leaders engage in code-speak, talking about the “patriots,” which sounds inoffensive until you realize about whom exactly she was speaking.  Republicans in Congress actually stopped Federal agencies from keeping tabs and good statistics on far right extremism, lest one of their constituencies be upset. Trump is the first major national Republican leader openly to cultivate the far right constituency, but he has plenty of predecessors who did so.


African-Americans are made to look big and menacing by the white media and many political figures, but they are a minority. They are only 12 percent of the population. If you had a gathering of 100 representative Americans, only 12 of them would be of African heritage.  They are systematically discriminated against on employment, which keeps them poor. They have only 10 cents for every dollar a white person has. As a disadvantaged minority they are still, despite the supposed end to Jim Crow, subjected to enormous amounts of surveillance and are incarcerated at a rate many times more than whites. It is systematic racism that allows the authorities to treat African-Americans like pariahs and to crack down hard on them if they protest.



 In Georgia, Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down and shot dead in broad daylight for being in a white neighborhoo, the wrong place at the wrong time. In Central Park New York, an African-American had the police called out to him by a white woman for telling her to put her dog on a leash. In Minneapolis, George Floyd was slowly killed by a police-officer who presently remains free and uncharged of any crime. 



 Yet the media is upset that his death has resulted in righteous rage from his community.



 adapted from here

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/05/28/top-6-reasons-authorities-are-cracking-down-hard-black-protesters-while-treating

Ecuador and Inequality

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Ecuador’s coastal city of Guayaquil has been one of the hardest-hit areas of COVID-19 in Latin America. Last month, photos of dead bodies lying in the streets or on park benches flooded social media, showing the collapse of the local healthcare and mortuary systems.  Human rights workers say the virus has highlighted the city’s vast social inequalities, and has disproportionately affected working-class families. Many of these families now find themselves jobless, turned away from saturated public hospitals, facing inflated costs of medication and mortuary services, and having to adapt to a quarantine they cannot afford.  Ecuador’s strict quarantine measures have weighed particularly heavily on these families in Guayaquil. Like most places in the world, lockdown measures include social distancing and the prohibition of all non-essential businesses, but it also includes a strict 2pm curfew, enforced by military and police, that has been in effect since mid-March. The coronavirus has also disproportionately affected African descendent communities in Guayaquil, which has the largest Black population of any city in Ecuador. Most in this community are informal workers who live in the same marginalised areas that were harshly affected. Those most affected by these hospital conditions have been the marginalised urban sectors, where families survive off of their daily income so have been unable to maintain quarantine.



According to official figures, there were 37,355 confirmed coronavirus cases and 3,203 COVID-19-linked deaths in Ecuador as of Monday, but many say the numbers are drastically underreported. Last month, the state registry released data showing that over 10,000 deaths were recorded for the months of March and April, just for the province of Guayas, where Guayaquil is located. Officials say this is nearly 6,000 more deaths than the same time period in the last two years, leading many to conclude that the vast majority are COVID-19 related. They also include deaths that could have been prevented had the healthcare system not collapsed under the weight of COVID-19, yet no data exists to make this differentiation.



Some of these neighbourhoods include Monte Sinai, Bastion Popular, Suburbio, and Trinitaria in the northern and southern peripheries of the city. Many of these communities do not have access to basic services like sewage systems or drinking water, and have high population densities. These provide the perfect conditions for a virus to spread, Billy Navarrete, director of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Guayaquil, said.



 “I don’t agree with the government who always blames the people for not staying at home. You can stay at home when you have your necessities met, and savings in the bank,” said Giselle Viteri Cevallos, with the local organisation Asphalt Women (Mujeres de Asfalto) that promotes the rights of women of African descendent.



Luis Alfonso Saltos, architect and urban planner in Guayaquil, said people who live in peripheral regions that lack infrastructure would inevitably end up being more exposed to the virus, and carrying it greater distances, as they are forced to leave their home or neighbourhood to find basic necessities.



“Understand citizen logic. If you don’t have water in your house or a store nearby, that obliges you to have to leave and find it,” Saltos said. 

Saltos collated reports left by families on social media platforms, begging for help to remove the cadavers of their loved ones from their homes and produced a map. The map indicates that the vast majority of these reports came from either the city centre, where there was a large flow of people, or in the peripheral areas in the north of the city, where there are higher population densities and lack of infrastructure, he said. Although this data is not conclusive, it provides an idea of the dynamics of the virus, he added. 



Despite being the commercial capital of Ecuador, Guayaquil is one of the most unequal cities in the country. It has the highest poverty rate, at 14 percent, and the highest rate of workers in the informal economy. Nearly half of the working population in the city work in the informal sector, according to the national statistics institute. The informal sector includes jobs like street vendors and domestic workers, those who live off their daily wages with no social security benefits, and earn well below the national minimum wage of $400 per month.



Ecuador has a three-tier healthcare system, which includes public hospitals that serve everyone; social security hospitals, generally for people with permanent jobs who pay into the system; and private clinics. 



Ricardo Ramirez Aguirre, a retired physician in Guayaquil and head of a regional Anti-Corruption Commission, said the public and social security hospitals in the coastal city have shown “improper handling” of the COVID-19 crisis. Several people have reported hospitals turning away non-COVID-19 patients, leaving them with nowhere to go. Others reported that hospitals not designated to treat coronavirus were turning away patients with dengue thinking it was COVID-19.

President Lenin Moreno reportedly cut nearly 4,000 jobs in the healthcare sector nationwide last year. During the pandemic, the government also failed to provide protective gear to hospitals or assure long term job security for new recruits, so many healthcare workers refused to fill necessary positions, said Ramirez. At least 117 doctors and nurses lost their lives while treating COVID-19 infections in the province of Guayas alone, according to local unions.



Apart from saturated hospitals, one of the biggest struggles for families is paying for medication and mortuary services, as high demand has shot up prices. Paracetamol that normally costs $0.25 a pill can no longer be found in pharmacies, but is being sold for $4.00 in informal commercial areas, said Viteri. Some families have also been forced to go into debt, as they try to pay the high costs of a coffin and cemetery plot, which could range from $3,000 to $5,000, for their deceased family members. 



https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/coronavirus-pandemic-exposes-inequality-ecuador-guayaquil-200527151935203.html

Let off the hook

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Ten corporations that agreed to a total of $56m in civil penalties for allegedly breaking environmental laws are not being required to make payments under a pause granted by the US government during the Covid-19 pandemic. They signed settlements with the government agreeing to pay fines without admitting liability but the justice department last month advised most of the companies of extensions.

One company, Virginia power provider Dominion Energy, settled and agreed to pay $1.4m for allegedly releasing 27.5m gallons of water from a coal ash impoundment that seeped into groundwater along the shore of the James River. Coal ash contains dangerous pollutants, including mercury, cadmium and arsenic, which can cause widespread environmental damage. The company said it plans to pay the settlement penalty once it is finalized.

Dominion has a number of ties to high-ranking Trump officials, including EPA’s former top enforcement official, Patrick Traylor, who had Dominion has a client. Attorney general William Barr has served on the company’s board of directors and received more than $500,000 from Dominion.

Another  violator, one of the world’s largest steel companies, ArcelorMittal’schief executive was at a Trump roundtable of business leaders in India in February and also was one of about 20 executives to dine with Trump in Davos at the World Economic Forum in January. Trump’s commerce secretary Wilbur Ross was previously on the company’s board of directors.

Denver-based oil and gas company K P Kauffman allegedly violated air pollution laws, emitting volatile organic compounds that form smog in the Denver-Julesburg Basin. KP Kauffman spent $200,000 lobbying the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2019 and the beginning of 2020, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2016, the company hosted a meeting between oil industry executives and president Donald Trump. CEO Kevin P Kauffman is a major GOP donor.

Chris Saeger, director of strategic initiatives at Accountable.US, said:

“When we’re facing a public health crisis that causes respiratory problems, this is a time to be holding companies to a higher standard of air quality, not a lower one.”



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