Author: ajohnstone

Deporting Migrants

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Young migrants and asylum seekers as young as 10 and would normally be allowed to live with relatives while their cases wind through immigration courts are quickly being deported  under an emergency declaration citing the coronavirus pandemic.
 600 minors expelled in April alone.
Border agencies say they have to restrict asylum claims and border crossings during the pandemic to prevent the virus’s spread. Migrants’ advocates call that a pretext to dispense with federal protections for children. The expulsions are the latest administration measure aimed at preventing the entry of migrant children, following other programs such as the since-rescinded “zero-tolerance” policy that resulted in thousands of family separations.
Brenda, 16, left Guatemala in hopes of reaching the US to eventually work and help her family. Her father works on a farm, but it’s not enough. “We barely eat,” she said.



Under a 2008 anti-trafficking law and a federal court settlement known as the Flores agreement, children from countries other than Canada and Mexico must have access to legal counsel and cannot be immediately deported.

They are also supposed to be released to family in the US or otherwise held in the least restrictive setting possible. The rules are intended to prevent children from being mistreated or falling into the hands of criminals.





Elderly going hungry

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There has been a dramatic increase in the number of older people malnourished or at risk of malnutrition since the coronavirus crisis began, according to Age UK and the Malnutrition Task Force.



Age UK has reported a rise in numbers without food or the support to plan, to cook and eat by themselves.



 Dianne Jeffrey, the chair of the Malnutrition Task Force, said: “We are extremely worried that the number of those suffering malnutrition is rising. Many of these people will eventually be admitted to hospital.”



“We know there are older people living on their own in the community who are running out of food and struggling to replenish their supplies because they are too frightened to go out, confused by the guidance or because their usual support networks have collapsed as a result of a pandemic,” said Caroline Abrahams, the charity director of Age UK. “These people are not on anyone’s list,” she added. “Typically they are not online. However, the pandemic has pulled the rug out from under them, so that their usual strategies for getting by are no longer working.”

Abrahams said she had a conversation recently with an elderly man called Nigel. “He has no food in his house but he is scared to leave it because of coronavirus,” she said. “Nigel isn’t online. He was recently discharged from hospital but no longer gets any support at home. Nigel was told that food parcels would be delivered but has only received one some time ago. He is now out of food and has no family or friends who can help him.”



79-year-old Betty, relies on her friend to top up her gas meter. “She doesn’t have funds to do it herself and is unable to go out. She has emphysema but is just using a blanket to keep warm,” said Abrahams. “She hasn’t got any food, only some bread and bacon that a neighbour gave her. She is worried and lonely, with no support. She is unable to contact her GP because she does not have much phone credit or enough money to top it up,” she said.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/13/charities-report-rise-in-older-people-struggling-for-food-in-lockdown

Who pays the piper calls the tune

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The US will have priority access to a Covid-19 vaccine if and when Sanofi develops one, the French pharmaceutical giant told Bloomberg, explaining that the US offered more money to fund vaccine research. 



“The US government has the right to the largest pre-order because it’s invested in taking the risk,” Sanofi’s Chief Executive Officer Paul Hudson said.  The U.S., which expanded a vaccine partnership with the company in February, expects “that if we’ve helped you manufacture the doses at risk, we expect to get the doses first.” Sanofi will be “responsible,” making any vaccine affordable, Hudson said.



Whichever country succeeds in bringing a coronavirus vaccine to market first is likely to claim ownership over some of the distribution process, said Krishna Kumar, a senior economist and director of international research at the RAND Corp. think tank.

“We cannot even trade with each other without getting into questions of tariffs, and so on,” he said. When it comes to a life-saving vaccine, “it’s not going to be easy to come up with arrangements.”



Mexico, Covid-19 and the supply chain

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Mexico’s border states are home to more than 6,000 maquiladoras – largely foreign-owned factories that manufacture products for export – and the plants, which employ hundreds of thousands of people, have been the focus of several coronavirus outbreaks. Cramped conditions make some maquiladoras prime areas for contagion.



When the coronavirus pandemic reached the Mexican border city of Mexicali, operations at first continued as normal at the US-owned factory where Sergio Ayala has worked for the past three years.

Eventually, workers went on strike at the Autolite plant, which makes spark plugs for export, in protest at the management’s alleged failure to introduce sanitary measures, and the state labor secretary to shut it down. 
A few days after the stoppage, Ayala got a text message inviting him back to work – on condition he did not drive to work: the factory parking lot had to stay empty. “They offered us a bonus of 250 pesos and a vacation day,” he said.
Ayala decided it wasn’t worth the risk but dozens of workers accepted the terms – and the factory kept operating.
Companies and US government officials have urged the Mexican government to keep maquiladoras running at any cost.
Baja California, the Mexican state with the largest number of maquiladoras, is the now the state with the second-greatest number of Covid-19 deaths. All along the 2,000-mile border maquila workers have died of Covid-19: in Ciudad Juárez, 18 workers at a textile factory owned by the US-owned Lear Corp have reportedly died of coronavirus.
“There are maquiladoras that say it’s cheaper to pay a fine for noncompliance than to lose million-dollar contracts,” said Mago Avalos, director of the Tijuana-based labor rights organization Ollin Calli. “It’s better to have workers working – even if they get sick – than to have them resting and getting paid.”
Twenty-four cases have been confirmed among maquila workers in Tijuana and 17 in Mexicali, said Avalos, but the real number is probably far more, as testing is severely limited and the health system is chronically overloaded.
“There are workers who have gone to be tested and seen that the lines are 12, 15, 20 hours long,” Avalos said. “They won’t wait for over 10 hours in line if they feel sick.”
Nanci Ramos used to work at Terminados Rogers in Mexicali, making paper products such as notebooks and calendars.
When the pandemic was declared, she and her coworkers received a pamphlet advising them to wash their hands and maintain a safe distance – but no measures were taken to keep workers apart. A report from the Border Committee of Women Workers noted that some maquiladoras lack soap in bathrooms and eating areas. Many lack windows and proper ventilation.
“The problem is, workers need to eat both now and in 2021,” Avalos said. “The economic and health crisis is not coming after Covid. The working class is living it right now.”



Pandemic – But Capitalism Prevails

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When markets slumped in March as the spread of coronavirus gathered pace, wealth managers’ trading volumes soared as ultra rich clients reshuffled their portfolios. It was this market frenzy that helped Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse – the world’s biggest wealth managers – post bumper first-quarter profits.



The big wealth managers have found that banking for billionaires has swelled their own coffers with outsized transaction fees.



“Situations like this, while they pose risks and need to be very proactively managed, also provide opportunities, as we saw,” said Iqbal Khan, co-head of UBS’s $2.3 trillion global wealth business, which recorded its best first quarter since the financial crisis.  UBS’s net margins on managed money rose to 20 basis points, their highest in years. 



Credit Suisse managed double-digit profit growth in the quarter. U.S. lenders Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Bank of America also recorded jumps in wealth management revenue while private banks Pictet and Vontobel plan to open new branches and expand their teams. 



The question now, however, is how to sustain profits as market volatility and trading volumes subside. Many are focusing on finding clients’ investment opportunities outside public markets – often involving distressed assets – as well as lending more to those whose businesses need extra cash to tide them through the crisis. 





“If you’re a large family office today, you’re sitting on cash hopefully. You might loan that cash or provide it to a company you own, or you might deploy that cash to buy distressed assets that have long-term value,” said Claudio de Sanctis, Deutsche Bank’s global head of wealth management. 



Private equity – particularly in areas related to distressed assets, healthcare or technology – has become a focal point, senior managers from four leading lenders told Reuters.





“Our investor sentiment survey clearly showed that, around the world, wealthy investors still have liquidity available to commit to risk assets,” said Tom Naratil, Khan’s co-head of wealth at UBS. The bank’s survey found that 37% of wealthy investors wanted to increase their investments over the next six months.  And large banks are looking to help them do so through increased lending.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-global-banking-wealth-analysis/coronavirus-crisis-a-window-of-opportunity-for-bankers-to-the-rich-idUKKBN22Q1U7

Super salaries at the supermarkets

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Dave Lewis, Tesco’s chief executive has been handed a £6.42m pay package.



Lewis, who will leave the business in September, has received a £2.4m annual cash bonus and another £2.4m long-term share bonus on top of £1.6m in basic salary and benefits. His basic salary alone is 355 times that of the lowest-paid average employee.



Lewis, who will leave the business in September, has received a £2.4m annual cash bonus and another £2.4m long-term share bonus on top of £1.6m in basic salary and benefits. His basic salary alone is 355 times that of the lowest-paid average employee.



Morrisons revealed that its chief executive, David Potts, received a total £4.2m pay package last year including a £2.3m long-term share bonus. 



https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/13/tesco-chief-executive-handed-642m-pay-package-dave-lewis

Child Mortality to Rise

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As many as 6,000 children around the world could die every day from preventable causes over the next six months due to the impact of coronavirus on routine health services, the UN has warned.



Global disruption of essential maternal and child health interventions – such as family planning, birth and postnatal care, and vaccinations – could lead to an additional 1.2 million deaths of under fives in just six months, according to analysis by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, published in the Lancet Global Health Journal.  Visits to healthcare centres are declining due to lockdowns, curfews and transport disruptions, and fear of infection, it says.



This projected figure threatens to reverse nearly a decade of progress on ending preventable child deaths, said the UN’s children’s agency, Unicef

“Children’s lives are being upended across the globe – their support systems ripped away, their borders closed, their educations lost, their food supply cut off. Even in the UK, children face the threat of a measles outbreak and school closures are putting vulnerable children at increased risk.” said Unicef UK’s executive director Sacha Deshmukh.



https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/13/unicef-6000-children-could-die-every-day-due-to-impact-of-coronavirus

Nukes Comes First

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The world’s nuclear-armed nations spent a record $73bn on their weapons last year, with the US spending almost as much as the eight other states combined, according to a new report.



The new spending figures, reflecting the highest expenditure on nuclear arms since the height of the cold war, have been estimated by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican), which argues that the coronavirus pandemic underlines the wastefulness of the nuclear arms race.



The nine nuclear weapons states spent a total of $72.9bn in 2019, a 10% increase on the year before. Of that, $35.4bn was spent by the United States, which accelerated the modernisation of the US arsenal while cutting expenditure on pandemic prevention.



“It’s clear now more than ever that nuclear weapons do not provide security for the world in the midst of a global pandemic, and not even for the nine countries that have nuclear weapons, particularly when there are documented deficits of healthcare supplies and exhausted medical professionals,” Alicia Sanders-Zakre, the lead author of the report, said.



Russia, which has announced the development of an array of new weapons – including nuclear-powered, long-distance cruise missiles, underwater long-distance nuclear torpedoes and a new heavy intercontinental ballistic missile – spent $8.5bn on its arsenal in 2019, according to Ican’s estimates. China, which has a much smaller nuclear force than the US and Russia but is seeking to expand, spent $10.4bn.




Those expenditures were far overshadowed by the US nuclear weapons budget, which is part of a major upgrade also involving new weapons, including a low-yield submarine-launched missile, which has already been deployed. The cost of the US programme over the coming decade will be $500bn, an increase of nearly $100bn, about 23%, over projections from the end of the Obama administration

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/nuclear-weapons-world-record-spending

Pandemic? Who pays the price? Not shareholders

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P&O Ferries has announced plans to cut 1,100 jobs after reporting a severe downturn in demand.

The cuts, affecting more than a quarter of the group’s workforce, come after the firm’s owner, the Dubai-based DP World, had been seeking about £150m in UK government aid. The firm has also received some further government assistance via a freight scheme announced by the Department for Transport last month, although P&O would not reveal how much the support was worth.
 DP World said it would be paying its investors about £270m in dividends.



Pharmaceutical Profits and the Pandemic

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Pharmaceutical companies often defend their pricing by claiming that their costs are incredibly high. However, when calculating the price of a generic version of the drug, the researchers factored in export costs, taxes and even a 10% profit margin. In some cases, pharmaceutical companies have minimised their costs by receiving government subsidies. 



A study published this month in the Journal of Virus Eradication looked at nine of the drugs that have been identified as possible Covid-19 treatments and are in various stages of clinical trials globally. The team of researchers looked at how much each of the drugs is sold for in countries where data was available. Then they calculated what a generic version of these drugs might cost.


One of the study’s authors, Dr Jacob Levi, explained: “There has been a long history of big pharmaceutical companies charging unnecessary and unwarranted high prices for medications, even if they actually spent very little on research and development for that medication.” Levi added: “That’s been extremely common with infectious disease medications in the past, like hepatitis and HIV, and we can’t let it happen with medications for Covid-19. Otherwise, hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths would occur and healthcare inequality amongst the poor will worsen.”


For example, a course of sofosbuvir (a drug currently used to treat hepatitis C) costs around $5 to make but the current list price in the US is $18,610.


Pirfenidone, a drug used for lung fibrosis, costs around $31 for a 28-day treatment course. In the US, a course is priced at $9,606, or $6,513 if patients are able to access it through the Department of Veterans Affairs. Though the US tops the list, the list price of this drug is still expensive elsewhere – a course costs $2,561 in the UK and $2,344 in France.



Gilead Sciences, the company that makes Remdesivir, a drug which has been touted by the US government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, benefited from at least $79m in US government funding. Despite the fact that US taxpayers have helped to develop the drug, Gilead announced it would no longer provide emergency access to it. Then, after widespread criticism, the company back-tracked this week and said it would donate its entire stockpile of the drug to government. In late March, the Food and Drug Administration gave Gilead “orphan” drug status, meaning the company has the right to profit exclusively for seven years from the sale of remdesivir. Normally, this drug status is reserved for treating rare diseases, not ones such as as Covid-19, for which more than 1 million people in the US have tested positive (and many more have been infected but not tested). Gilead, which made $5bn in profit last year, has close ties to the US administration. Between 2011 and 2017, Joe Grogan lobbied for Gilead. He now serves on the White House coronavirus taskforce.



 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/11/soaring-drug-prices-could-bar-access-to-future-coronavirus-treatments



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