Author: ajohnstone

The Rich get Richer

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 Jeff Bezos now has a fortune of $138bn.



The boss of Amazon has seen his wealth swell by $24bn (£19bn) after soaring demand for online shopping sent the firm’s share price to a new high.



The Waltons, owners of Walmart and Asda saw their net worth rise 5% this year to $169bn, making them the world’s richest family.



 “The wealth gap, it’s only going to get wider with what’s going on now,” said Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak + Co. “The really wealthy people haven’t had to worry. Yes, they’re less wealthy, but you haven’t had to worry about putting food on the table or keeping a roof over your head. The unfairness of it all is who is going to benefit from it most,” Maley said. “Money makes money.”

The volume of transactions in beaten-down industries, from travel to health care to gaming, suggests executives and directors are more bullish than they’ve been at most other points in the past decade, according to Sundial Capital Research.
Carnival Corp. board member Randall Weisenburger bought $10 million of stock in the beleaguered cruise-line operator last week.

UBS Group AG is seeing ultra-wealthy clients ramp up borrowing to place more wagers in what they see as a cheap market. 



 Mortgage brokers to the rich have said more clients are seeking loans backed by real estate to help them invest in businesses and snap up other assets.

A world on life support

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Private interests, many of whom have been making lucrative profits in the recent past, have been busy lobbying for government bailouts while tens of millions of working people are losing their livelihoods. Businesses are in receipt of financial hand-outs in amounts that have not been seen since the Second World War, often with little oversight. It is a transfer of wealth and power to the super rich unprecedented in peacetime. 



 Meanwhile, there is no critical reporting in ‘mainstream’ media about the destructive nature of the global system of profit maximisation and endless ‘economic growth’. 

As Chomsky says: “What our leaders are good at, and have been very good at for the last 40 years, is pouring money into the pockets of the rich and the corporate executives while everything else crashes.”



The core problem for society is that we have been subjected to a system of fairy-tale propaganda that tells us repeatedly that capitalism, despite a few ‘failures’ or ‘flaws’, has been primarily responsible for huge progress in the human condition since the Industrial Revolution. In reality, it has been people at the bottom of the social order – working for centuries to extend the voting franchise, setting up trade unions, improving healthcare and education – who have been primarily responsible for advancements in living standards.



Working people feel powerless. We are ignored by politicians. Our future is uncertain.



Capitalism assumes people are fundamentally selfish. Socialists understands people are primarily collectively-creative. This is demonstrated when workers are given the opportunity to operate cooperatives, create workers councils in revolutionary situations or even during natural disasters. Selfishness is a product of capitalism and not the primary way human beings operate. Capitalist divide-and-conquer strategies create racism on the job by giving privileges to white workers to keep them from uniting with minorities for better pay. Capitalists expect loyalty to sports teams even when the owners sell the players to the highest bidder. Capitalists expect working-class loyalty to a nation and for them to fight wars, while capitalists exercise no loyalty to workers when they relocate in another nation where the costs of labour and land are cheaper.



But the brighter, safer, saner future can still be attained, if we remember that together we have more power than the destructive forces of capitalism. Mankind has the capacity to abandon the disaster path of capitalism, and instead embark upon a journey of solidarity and compassion. A whole new ball–game may emerge.



Quote of the Day

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“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.” – The US intelligence community, in its January 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment

The Coronavirus Commons

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The Guardian columnist George Monbiot is always makes for interesting reading even if sometime we may differ with him. In this article of his we find a lot to agree with, although not everything.



“All over the world, communities have mobilised where governments have failed. The horror films got it wrong. Instead of turning us into flesh-eating zombies, the pandemic has turned millions of people into good neighbours.

In India, young people have self-organised on a massive scale to provide aid packages for “daily wagers”: people without savings or stores, who rely entirely on cash flow that has now been cut off. In Wuhan, in China, as soon as public transport was suspended, volunteer drivers created a community fleet, transporting medical workers between their homes and hospitals.

In South Africa, communities in Johannesburg have made survival packs for people in informal settlements: hand sanitiser, toilet paper, bottled water and food. In Cape Town, a local group has GIS mapped all the district’s households, surveyed the occupants, and assembled local people with medical expertise, ready to step in if the hospitals are overwhelmed. Another community in the city has built washstands in the train station and is working to turn a pottery studio into a factory making sanitiser.



In the US, HospitalHero connects healthcare workers who don’t have time to meet their own needs with people who can offer meals and accommodation. A group called WePals, created by an eight-year-old, sets up virtual play dates for children. A new website, schoolclosures.org, finds teaching, meals and emergency childcare for overstretched parents. A network called Money During Corona texts news of job opportunities to people looking for work.



In Norway, a group of people who have recovered from Covid-19 provide services that would be dangerous for non-immune people to offer. In Belgrade volunteers organise virtual coffee mornings and crisis counselling. Students in Prague are babysitting the children of doctors and nurses. Estates in Dublin have invented balcony bingo: the caller sits in the square between the blocks of flats with a large speaker, while the players sit on their balconies, taking down the numbers.

In the UK, thousands of mutual aid groups have been picking up shopping and prescriptions, installing digital equipment for elderly people and setting up telephone friendship teams. A mothers’ running group in Bristol have restyled themselves “drug runners”, keeping fit by delivering medicines from chemists’ shops to people who can’t leave their homes. 

Around the world, self-organised groups of doctors, technicians, engineers and hackers are crowdsourcing missing equipment and expertise. In Latvia, programmers organised a 48-hour hackathon to design the lightest face shield components that could be produced with a 3D printer. A number of UK groups are encouraging companies with protective equipment in their storerooms to give it to frontline health workers. In the Philippines, fashion designers have repurposed their workshops to produce protective suits. Sharing techniques through the website PatternReview, home sewers have been mass-producing masks and scrubs.



In just one week, a group of doctors, technicians and other experts organised themselves to design a crowdsourced ventilator, the OxVent, which can be produced from widely available parts for under £1,000. Another design, VentilatorPAL, can be manufactured for $370, according to the community of technicians that created it. The Coronavirus Tech Handbook is an open-source library pooling technologies and new organisational models for beating the pandemic. In the US, self-organised expert groups are filling some of the catastrophic gaps in public health provision, carrying out testing and tracking projects, creating directories of vulnerable people and speed-matching medical specialists with the hospitals that need them.



I have the sense that something is taking root now, something we have been missing: the unexpectedly thrilling and transformative force of mutual aid. “

The Coronavirus Crisis – Who is going to Pay?

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Due to the economic costs of Covid-19 the Low Pay Commission, the independent body which advises ministers on legal wage floors, said the government target to increase the national living wage to two-thirds of average earnings by 2024 could be in danger.
The chair of the Low Pay Commission, Bryan Sanderson, warned that an “emergency break” included in the target may need to be deployed if the outbreak causes sufficient damage to the economy.
“The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic clearly represents a very challenging set of circumstances for workers and employers alike, and will require us to review whether the emergency brake is required when we next provide our advice to the government,” he said.
Isn’t it a wonder that those now classed as key essential workers, necessary for the smooth running of society are among the lowest paid and are now being stopped from gaining a few quid more for their sacrifices and the risks they have been taking.
Almost 3 million workers across Britain will receive a pay rise on Wednesday as the legal minimum wage rises more than 6%, which brought calls for a delay to protect jobs as the coronavirus outbreak escalates.



The Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation – had urged the government to stage an eleventh hour U-turn, saying that postponing the rise would stop struggling businesses from laying off workers. Retailers are understood to have privately lobbied for a delay, while the British Beer and Pub Association urged the government to hold back to “prevent mass job losses and permanent pub closures.”
Tej Parikh, chief economist at the Institute of Directors, which represents business leaders, said that the legal wage floor must be set in tune with economic circumstances. “Should firms continue to struggle in the medium to long term, government may have to take another look at the current trajectory,” he said.
Once the coronavirus crisis has been overcome, the government could come under greater pressure to soften its targets.
Frances O’Grady, general secretary of trade union body the TUC, said wage rises were needed to support millions of low-paid workers struggling to make ends meet as the pandemic spreads.



“Britain is indebted to its army of minimum wage heroes. Many – including care workers and supermarket staff – are currently on the frontline of the battle against coronavirus. They deserve every penny of this increase, and more,” she said.
Economists expect the fallout from Covid-19 to trigger a drop in average pay, eroding living standards across Britain.
 Thomas Pugh, of the consultancy Capital Economics, said average pay packets could fall by 2% in the coming months before recovering slightly later in the year. He said earnings growth for 2020 as a whole is expected to be less than 1%, a sharp drop from 3.5% last year, adding: “If we are wrong it will be because we have underestimated the impact rather than overestimated.”

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/mar/31/uk-minimum-wage-rise-of-6-to-go-ahead-despite-coronavirus-pay-freeze-call

The Falling Number of American Hospitals

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Since 1975, while the U.S. population has risen from 216 million people to 331 million, the total number of hospital beds has declined from 1.5 million to 925,000. 



The United States currently has only 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 residents, just a little over half the average of 5.4 beds per 1,000 residents in other wealthy countries.



 In 2018, the American Hospital Association estimated that 30 hospitals will close each year and the number is expected to rise over time.



Rural hospitals are closing the fastest. Over 120 have closed down since 2010. A report by the Chartis Center for Rural Health found another 453 of the 1,844 that remain are at risk of closing. Failing rural hospitals are preyed upon by large corporations that take them over, extract their revenues and then allow them to lapse into bankruptcy and the land sold as valuable real estate. The highest number of rural hospital closures, 19, occurred in 2019. Six rural hospitals have already been shut down this year. Roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population lives in a rural area. Residents of rural areas tend to be older, sicker and poorer than in other areas. They require more care and often can’t pay for it, placing a greater financial burden on local hospitals than populations that are healthier and wealthier.  In general, the Pew Research Center found people living in rural areas travel twice as far as people living in urban and suburban areas to get to the hospital. According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, mortality rates rise by 5.9 percent when hospitals disappear, especially for people with emergencies such as strokes and heart attacks that require immediate attention. 



 Hospital closures in cities also tend to occur in areas that serve poor communities and often populations of color. Like rural hospitals, they may be bought by a large corporate hospital system when they are failing and then allowed to go bankrupt. It is often more profitable to redevelop them in a gentrifying area than to keep them open.



When hospitals are located in communities with high numbers of uninsured residents, they are particularly vulnerable to closures. According to the University of North Carolina’s Rural Health Research Program, the 17 states that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act had the highest number of hospital closures. Texas lost the most hospitals, followed by Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and North Carolina. Over half of the remaining rural hospitals in Texas and Tennessee and more than a third of hospitals in Oklahoma and Georgia are at risk of closing due to their weak financial position.



 In other cities, hospitals may stay open but close down essential services to make way for more lucrative fields such as orthopedics and cardiovascular disease. MedStar, a Washington, D.C.-based corporation that owns 10 hospitals in Maryland as well as physician practices, laboratories, long-term care centers and other health facilities, abruptly closed whole departments that provided obstetric, pediatric and psychiatric care in recent years.



 Epidemiologist David Fisman of Toronto, Canada, says, “having a healthcare system that’s a public strategic asset rather than a business run for profit allows for a degree of coordination and optimal use of resources.”

https://truthout.org/articles/the-uss-wave-of-hospital-closures-left-us-ill-equipped-for-covid-19/

Who Pays the Price for COVID-19

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Dick Kovacevich, former CEO of Wells Fargo bank, thinks most Americans should return to work in April, urging that we “gradually bring those people back and see what happens”.




Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, whose net worth is $1.1bn, recommends “those with a lower risk of the diseases return to work” within a “very few weeks”.




Tom Galisano, founder of Paychex, whose net worth is $2.8bn, believes “the damages of keeping the economy closed could be worse than losing a few more people … You’re picking the better of two evils.”


The “economy” that the bankers and billionaires are eager to restart had been growing rapidly before the pandemic. But most of its gains had gone into corporate profits, as shown by the meteoric rise of the stock market until a few weeks ago.


The bankers and billionaires now urging Americans get back to work own a huge share of that stock market. The richest 1 percent of the population owns roughly half of the value of all shares of stock. (The richest 10 percent own more than 80%.) So when they recommend Americans get back to work for the sake of the “economy,” they’re really urging that other people risk their lives for the sake of restoring the bankers’ and billionaires’ stock portfolios.


Stephen Moore, who is advising the White House, warns: “You can’t have a policy that says we’re going to save every human life at any cost, no matter how many trillions of dollars you’re talking about.”




While it’s true that we can’t save every human life at any cost we need to keep in mind which Americans we are talking about.


The trade-off average Americans might make between getting back to work and exposing themselves to the virus is likely to be quite different from the trade-off bankers and billionaires make


Workers  bear the biggest burdens during economic downturns, especially if they lose their jobs and don’t have enough money to pay the bills. Eighty percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.




Late last week, lawmakers made an important step to prevent such hardships. The $2.2 trillion coronavirus bill provides jobless Americans an extra $600 in unemployment benefits per week for four months, and includes contract and gig workers. The bill was almost scuttled when Republican lawmakers objected that this would boost incomes of some job losers higher than their pay when they worked. Apparently, these lawmakers hadn’t noticed that the pay of the typical working American has stagnated for decades. Even four months of extra unemployment benefits may not be enough. The richest nation in the world surely has enough resources to keep its people safe at home for as long as it takes.


https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/31/name-profit-and-greed-billionaire-class-declares-back-work



America’s Farm Workers and COVID-19

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America’s farmworkers have always done the essential work of feeding the nation for little reward and with few codified protections or benefits. Researchers and advocates estimate between 60% and 75% of California’s more than 400,000 agricultural workers are undocumented. The United Farm Workers of America estimates only about 10,000 are unionized. An additional 20,000 are in California on H2A visas, a visa category that has seen some processing delays amid coronavirus shutdown orders. With the more farming-intensive spring season about to set in, and a surge in Covid-19 cases expected state-wide, there’s a small and rapidly closing window to establish meaningful safety measures in the fields.



In California, which grows two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts and one-third of its vegetables, the pressure to shift and bolster that fast-changing food system is felt acutely. The state’s roughly 400,000 agricultural workers are exempt from shelter-in-place orders, and vital agriculture work is continuing to keep markets stocked nationwide. Growers and labor contractors say they are putting new practices and measures in place to keep workers socially distanced and maintain sanitized common facilities.



But workers and their advocates tell a different story: of vulnerable, low-wage workers operating in fear, without proper protections let alone information about the risks involved in their essential labor, and without hope of any share in expanded unemployment benefits should they fall ill or lose work.
“Nothing has changed at work,” Amadeo Sumano said . “The distance principle, 6 feet between people, does not work in agriculture.” He worries about getting sick, or having his hours cut as some growers contend with a loss in food service orders, and the financial pressure that would come with either scenario, made even more intense because of his undocumented status. “I have lived and worked in this country for many years and paid taxes, but cannot access benefits,” said Sumano. “If either working hours are cut or we contract the virus, we are likely to not be able to pay rent and would become homeless.”
Armando Elenes, secretary-treasurer of the United Farm Workers of America. “The last hands that touched that produce before the consumer puts it in their mouth is a farmworker’s hands, so we better care about what happens to these workers.” He laughed at the notion of growers voluntarily offering hazard pay to compensate for their new risks, as some front line workers in other sectors have demanded. “The ‘essential’ part doesn’t show up on their paycheck. They’re lucky to get minimum wage,” he said.



“They’re getting paid the same, yet they’re exposing themselves to more dangers,” said Irene de Barraicua, spokesperson for Lideres Campesinas, an advocacy organization of and for California female farmworkers. “There is no standard for safety orientation. Sometimes we’re hearing they just get a five-minute talk – stay six feet apart, don’t do this, don’t do that – but they’re working in big crowds. It feels like it’s not being taken seriously because the money is more important.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/us-coronavirus-outbreak-california-farm-workers

COVID-19 Will Widen the Racial Divide

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In biological terms, pandemics are a leveller, attacking prince, prime minister and pauper without favour. In economic terms, they are much more hierarchical. 



 In the United States COVID-19 is likely to widen the country’s alarming racial wealth and income gap.  Black Americans are on average much poorer than whites, a divide that has widened in recent years. They more commonly occupy insecure jobs at risk from the forced shutdowns, and have less financial flexibility. A Fed study found almost 30% of college-educated black households couldn’t pay all their bills if confronted with an unexpected $400 expense – a proportion that doubles where the household lacks a bachelor’s degree. People tend to believe it has got much better in the past 50 years. It hasn’t. 



 While the wealth gap is large, it’s income that counts most during a public health crisis.  White households make roughly double the income of black households, a reality that hasn’t improved since 1962. 

That’s aside from the direct health risk. The same people often do jobs that cannot be performed from home and pose serious risk of infection such as retail, home help and nursing, according to the Center for American Progress. Moreover, if they get sick, the 16 states that are home to 65% of black Americans rank well below average on healthcare access, according to consultancy McKinsey. Death rates among African Americans are already higher than average for heart disease, asthma, cancer and pneumonia. 



Covid-19 could therefore leave black Americans a disproportionate legacy of death as well as financial disarray.



https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-breakingviews/breakingviews-racial-wealth-gap-weakens-u-s-virus-defenses-idUSKBN21H384

Food Nationalism

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Some countries are hoarding food items to ensure supplies for their population as the virus crisis deepens. The export curbs could prove especially harmful for poorer nations that survive on imports.



The export curbs take place against the backdrop of panic buying that has left supermarkets with aisles of empty shelves. The scarcity is not due to a shortage of supplies but to logistical hurdles created by measures to contain the pandemic.



Experts fear restrictions on the exports of wheat and wheat flour could lead to higher prices of essential items such as bread, proving lethal for many of the poorer countries in Africa that rely on imported food. High bread prices are known to have sparked riots and caused political instability, especially in Africa.



“Since most poor countries, many of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, are net food importers, sudden price hikes will almost inevitably raise poverty and hunger, because these countries have very limited capacities to respond to shortages and price rises e.g. by drawing down buffer stocks,” Rainer Thiele of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy told DW.
Russia



The world’s biggest wheat exporter wants to limit grain exports to protect domestic supplies as the fast spreading coronavirus pandemic disrupts supply chains globally. The Russian Agriculture Ministry has proposed to limit the exports of some grains, including wheat, to 7 million tons for April-June. 
Ukraine



In Russia’s neighbor, Ukraine, a major exporter of grain and vegetable oils, the government is monitoring wheat exports daily and has said it would take appropriate measures, if required. The government in Kyiv has been facing demands from bakers and millers to curb grain exports and prevent bread prices from soaring if the coronavirus crisis worsens.
Kazakhstan 



Kazakhstan has banned exports of wheat flour, buckwheat, sugar, sunflower oil and some vegetables, including carrots and potatoes, until at least April 15 as it seeks to build stockpiles to deal with the coronavirus emergency. The Central Asian country, one of the world’s biggest exporters of wheat flour, is a crucial supplier to nations such as Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. The ban on wheat flour could affect bread companies around the world.



Vietnam



The Southeast Asian country, which has so far succeeded in limiting the spread of the coronavirus, last week temporarily suspended new rice export contracts. The world’s third-largest rice exporter said it was ascertaining if it had sufficient domestic supplies to cope with the pandemic. The Philippines, China and countries in Africa are among the biggest buyers of Vietnam’s rice.
Serbia



The East European country has banned the export of sunflower oil and other goods as a precautionary move.



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