Author: ajohnstone

Malnutrition and Obesity

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One in nine people is hungry, or 820 million people worldwide.

One in three is overweight or obese.



 Malnutrition leading cause of death and ill health worldwide. The Global Nutrition Report 2020 found that most people across the world cannot access or afford healthy food, due to agricultural systems that favour calories over nutrition as well as the ubiquity and low cost of highly processed foods. Inequalities exist across and within countries, it says.



 Venkatesh Mannar, a special adviser on nutrition to the Tata Trusts and the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition, said: “Poor diet and malnutrition is not a matter of personal choice. Most people are not able to do this because of inequality of food systems. They not have access to a range of healthy food. The interface between the food supply chain and consumers is inequitable.”



Cynthia Rosenzweig, a climate expert at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the author of the food security chapter in the IPCC’s report on land and climate change, highlighted the inequality in food prices across the world, where the cost of an egg in Burkina Faso is 15 times more in comparison with grain and rice, compared with just twice the cost of such staples in the US.

An increasing number of countries have the “double burden” of malnutrition, obesity and other diet-related diseases such as diabetes.



https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/12/malnutrition-leading-cause-of-death-and-ill-health-worldwide-report

Overly Optimistic Oil Corporations

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Claims by oil and gas companies that they are curbing their carbon emissions in line with net zero targets are overstated, according to a new review. Going net zero means removing as many emissions as are produced.
The independent analysis of six large European corporations say none of the companies are yet aligned with the 1.5C temperature goal.
Scientists argue that the global temperature must not rise by more than 1.5C by the end of the century if the world is to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
The research has been carried out by the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI), an investor-led group which investigates how companies are preparing for the move to a low-carbon economy. 
Despite Shell’s stated commitment to having a net-zero energy business by 2050, TPI says that “the claim that it will be aligned with a 1.5C climate scenario is not consistent with our analysis.”
According to the authors, a genuine net zero strategy for the average European oil and gas company would require 100% emissions cuts between now and 2050. TPI point out that all of the plans they have assessed are, to some degree, dependent on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology and nature-based solutions such as planting trees.
“There are very significant assumptions that need further probing,” said Adam Matthews.
None of the dozens of American fossil fuel corporations have public disclosures on climate change comparable to Europe, which TPI says is a concern.
“We simply don’t know what their intentions are on this issue…” said Adam Matthews,  co-chair of TPI.

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



Shareholders in Clover

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What we see around the world is mostly good and decent with great acts of kindness and solidarity, and people yearning for something better. It is that which gives the Socialist Party hope. But all that business cares about is the primacy of the shareholders.



361 of the 421 S&P 500 companies that pay dividends have shelled out dividend dollars to shareholders “since the onset of the virus.” Ninety-eight of these corporations have actually increasedtheir dividend payout since the coronavirus hit. Only 35 have decreased their payout to shareholders.



On March 26, Caterpillar CEO D. James Umpleby the third— who took home $34.5 million in 2019 — announced a shutdown of two major plants. Just two weeks later, Caterpillar began paying shareholders half a billion dollars in dividends. Caterpillar’s Umpleby has assured Wall Street that his company remains “committed to returning substantially all our free cash flow to shareholders.” And that commitment will mean plenty of cash for Umpleby, both as a major shareholder himself and as a Caterpillar exec whose personal compensation will remain lofty only so long as he keeps Caterpillar shares attractive to investors. Dividends, particularly in times of economic crisis, make shares attractive.



James Loree, the CEO of Stanley Black and Decker on April 2 announced plans to furlough and lay off workers and shorten the work–weeks of many of the employees still working. Loree, who last year pocketed $18.7 million in executive compensation, justified these job and hour cuts as “necessary actions” that would “protect our employees” and position “the company to thrive into the future.”
Stanley Black and Decker shareholders, in the meantime, will thrive right now. Two weeks after the worker squeeze announcement, Stanley issued these shareholders nearly $106 million in dividends.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/12/last-year-americas-ceos-said-they-cared-about-us-they-lied/



A social revolution is still to come

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 The Socialist Party keeps promoting a revolution that no one else seems to be interested in having. And since we need many more to be in favour, all we can do is persist in our campaigns of socialist education and wait. It does seem strange to us that with inequality reaching extreme heights and the wealthy can no longer to hide away behind their mansions in gated communities that a revolution would be inevitable. Alas, no. The vast majority of the population still do not consider a revolution worth having even though the planet is in a state of an emergency with a pandemic and a climate crisis. The majority don’t seek to be free, they merely struggle to be better treated slaves. The ruling class has created a cultural belief system that claims that their interests are for the good of the people, but strangely it always result in making them richer and  more powerful.  The whole world is forced into total dependency upon their system. Ahh, well. But the Socialist Party remember it will be their revolution, not ours. So we wait and agitate.



Once it was coercion that kept people in line. Now it is manipulated minds. John Keracher, a Marxist from the 20s and 30s, called the mass media the “head-fixing industry”. 



 The elite divert our anger against their privileges by stoking fear against external “enemies”, another foreign power or immigrants from other lands. Even this pandemic is labelled the “invisible foe”, absolving the employing, owning class of any blame. They are not responsible for the spread of the pandemic, they tell us, and are similarly the victims, as their stock and share investments swell in price. They issue semi-plausible conspiracy theories to divert attention away from their own complicity and culpability.



We are living in strange times indeed.  This crises we face raises many questions about the type of society we live under and what our expectations are, or should be, about it. Capitalism is propelling people towards the ecological abyss and environmental activists have largely made peace with capitalism, advocating profitable techno-fixes rather than any change to the economic order. Capitalism is reducing our ability to survive on this planet. People are genuinely concerned about the approaching calamities civilisation is facing. The Socialist Party, too, feels afraid. But we are not frightened of the need for social change as a solution. People are tired of being told what to do by “leaders”. People are beginning to reject their top-down “solutions”. People want to be the decision-makers themselves, which means more than the periodic input of an election which is customary disregarded by the elected government. Working people can and must speak out in their own name. We cannot rely on those who claim to speak for us. There is an alternative. We can find new ways to come together and discuss new directions for our society and the economy.



A revolution of a real kind, one where our relationship are radically changed is the Socialist Party’s agenda. Change will come. When? We cannot predict or prophesise. But soon. Surely soon.



  In the middle of this pandemic and the threat of global warming we have learned to think and work cooperatively. People have come together in voluntary associations. We are not only curing ourselves of the COVID-19 virus but we are also in the process of curing ourselves of the cancer of capitalism. The Socialist Party may be a small voice but we are saying a radical change is required, not in the far-off future but right now if we want people to possess real choices over our lives. We patiently persevere with our case for socialism until fellow-workers listen and it is eventually heard. What happens next is vital for human survival. 



Changing Agriculture

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“If during the next sixty to seventy years the world farmer reaches the average yield of today’s US corn grower, the ten billion will need only half of today’s cropland while they eat today’s American calories,” concluded agronomist Paul Waggoner in his seminal 1996 article, “How Much Land Can Ten Billion People Spare for Nature?“



In their 2013 article, “Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing,” Waggoner and Rockefeller University researchers Jesse Ausubel and Iddo Wernick citing current global trends in yield increases and fertilizer deployment calculated if biofuel production could be reined in, that as much as 400 million hectares (1.5 million square miles) of current cropland could be returned to nature by 2060. That’s about 25 percent of the land currently devoted to growing crops. “Now we are confident that we stand on the peak of cropland use, gazing at a wide expanse of land that will be spared for nature,” the authors concluded.
Christian Folberth and his colleagues at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria reinforces the findings from these earlier reports.



In their article, “The global cropland-sparing potential of high-yield farming,” the researchers calculate a scenario that closes current global yield gaps, bringing the crop yields of farmers in poorer countries up to those in richer countries. Achieving that goal “would allow reduction of the cropland area required to maintain present production volumes by nearly 50% of its current extent.” That would mean that about 576 million hectares (2.2 million square miles) could be restored to nature.



The researchers also sketch out an alternative high crop yield scenario that specifically aims to protect and expand the habitats of threatened species. In that case, cropland use would still shrink by almost 40 percent.
Keep in mind that these scenarios are conservatively reckoning what would happen to global land use assuming that essentially all of the world’s farmers adopt modern high yield agriculture. They do not take into account technological improvements in farming over the coming decades.



In addition, possible shifts in consumption toward alternative protein sources such as plant-based “meats” or cultured meats are not considered. Since about 36 percent of cropland is used to produce animal feed and the vast majority of agricultural land is pasture, such changes in consumer tastes could result in hundreds of millions more hectares of land being spared for nature by the middle of this century.

https://reason.com/2020/04/17/its-possible-to-cut-cropland-use-in-half-and-produce-the-same-amount-of-food-says-new-study/?itm_source=parsely-api

Forward to a New Normal

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Capitalist relationships permeate the world. We cannot avoid them, we cannot run away from them. We cannot self-isolate from them. Capitalism turning everything possible into commodities, including people and nature. The profit motive directly the demonic hidden hand of the market threatens to degrade our planet. The Earth is sick and capitalism is to blame. People pay the price with lives. The current COVID-19 pandemic the world is facing now is without any precedent and its full implication is yet to be understood. It is not clear what society in the future will look like, whether the system’s indifference to the death of the weak and vulnerable will continue. 
Can ther be a return to “normal” when what was normal for many was never ever a good life. Sure there are grand rhetoric pronouncements from politicians that the world is united against the pandemic and the race to discover the vaccine to defeat this virus is not a competition but a collaboration between countries. Yet for the pharmaceutical industry there is a lucrative prize for the first at the finishing line. There is little cooperation or sharing between the rival corporations. The lawyers specialised in global patents and intellectual property have not been furloughed.
Socialists opt for hoperather than succumb to cynical pessimism fed by dystopian scenarios. capitalism expresses itself with its ceaseless destructive expansion, its endless profit and capital accumulation which blights our planet like a cancer. Socialists do not let this drop us into a state of despair and despondency. Socialists have pinpointed the problem – capitalism. We propose fixing what capitalism has created, providing the necessities of life for everyone and not just the few.



Gerrymandering the vote

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2018 referendum, approved by 62% of Missouri voters, put a non-partisan demographer in charge of drawing districts, limiting partisan influence on the process. It also makes partisan fairness one of the top criteria the mapmaker must follow. It would likely weaken Republican control of the legislature, according to an Associated Press analysis. Voters who embraced the changes sought to prevent excessive gerrymandering, a process of manipulating electoral maps that Republicans have used to gain advantages throughout the country this decade.



Now, Republicans are proposing a new ballot that would undo those protections. Their plan would eliminate the non-partisan demographer and return redistricting power to committees nominated by the political parties and selected by the governor. It makes partisan fairness the least important criteria to follow when drawing maps, instead prioritizing keeping communities compact. The proposal also makes it harder to get a gerrymandered map struck down in court. The measure has already passed the state senate, and is awaiting a vote in the full House. If approved by 15 May, voters across the state would then choose whether to support it later this year. It is likely the last chance Republicans, who control the state legislature, have to undo the referendum before the once-a-decade redistricting takes place in 2021.



If Republicans succeed, advocates worry it could serve as a model for weakening gerrymandering reform elsewhere. Voters in Michigan, Colorado and Utah all used ballot measures to pass gerrymandering reform in 2018. There is also deep concern the Republican proposal will open the door to redistricting in a way that will disadvantage minorities and non-citizens.


US districts must have roughly the same number of people in them, and states have long used the total population as the basis for drawing them. But the new proposal says the lines should be drawn on the basis of “one person, one vote”. It would allow Missouri Republicans to draw districts based only on those eligible to vote – US citizens aged 18 and over. It’s a standard Republicans have been pushing for, and one that would likely advantage white rural areas and hurt cities, where there are more likely to be non-citizens.
The language in the Republican proposal is “a little odd” and “disingenuous at best,” said Yurij Rudensky, redistricting counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. Missouri, he said, has long based representation on the total population, not just those eligible to vote.
“This is another example of a change that sets the redistricting process up to fail and to make it a mess,” he said. “And to potentially set up for a discriminatory scheme that disadvantages communities of color and would cut out certain constituencies out of the political calculus.”

“The substance of what they’re trying to do has already been outrageous, and it’s incredible that they’re trying to move this attempt to overturn the will of the voters, when voters literally can’t participate in the process,” said Sean Soendker Nicholson, the campaign manager for Clean Missouri, the group behind the gerrymandering reform measure.



 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/11/missouri-republicans-gutting-gerrymandering-reform



All in it Together?

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As the COVID-19 crisis intensifies, tens of millions of American families are falling into hunger. For single mothers with children under the age of 12, an astonishing 40 percent are now reporting that they are running out of food without the financial ability to purchase more.  Adults are missing meals to keep children fed. But many children are, nevertheless, going hungry. 
Food banks now routinely report miles-long lines of cars, with drivers waiting for hours to receive bags of produce to tide their families over. The charity Feeding America estimates that the number of food-insecure Americans who will access its food bank network will increase from 37 million at the start of the pandemic to upwards of 54 million over a six-month period. Meanwhile, private donations to food banks are drying up, and the number of Americans volunteering in their local food banks is also declining — a not unsurprising situation given many volunteers are themselves elderly and medically vulnerable.
At the same time, huge amounts of farm produce are going to waste: Farmers are literally destroying crops, meat and dairy supplies that they have no buyers for because schools, restaurants, hotels and other big commercial purchasers are no longer buying produce.

Millions of workers – especially low-wage retail, food service, hospitality, and care workers – have faced the terrible choice daily between going to work and risking their health, or staying home and risking their paychecks. As tens of millions have lost their jobs over the past two months, billionaire wealth soared by a whopping $282 billion between March 18 and April 10, according to a new study from the Institute for Policy Studies. Billionaires have been escaping to their second (or third, or fourth) homes to ride it out in luxury – all while they position themselves to further profit off of this crisis.  Rather than retreating behind the gates of private estates, some of the ultra-wealthy have taken to the high seas to weather the crisis on luxury yachts far away from the misery on the mainland.



 As many as 43 million Americans are expected to lose their health insurance due to the pandemic, according to a new report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the Urban Institute. The pandemic “exposes a lot of the inadequacies in our system,” RWJF senior policy analyst Katherine Hempstead told The Guardian, adding that healthcare is “tied to employment for no real reason.”

Last month, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that 12.7 million people had already lost their employer-based health insurance. 



 COVID-19 pandemic is not the “great equalizer” that some predicted.

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