Author: ajohnstone

Lockdown also means locked out

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With schools across the UK closed to all students apart from those from families of key workers, parents are suddenly having to provide extra food for their youngsters who are now at home all day. The prospect of facing weeks, possibly months, with children off school due to the coronavirus outbreak is daunting for most parents. But for those struggling financially, the future looks particularly stark. Before the outbreak of Covid-19, figures showed almost one in every three children in the UK to be living in poverty, but the escalating situation is forcing desperate families to choose between feeding their children and paying their bills. 
Single mum Hannah Graham was “staggered” by how much food her children managed to consume while being off school.
“I have already discovered how hard it is going to be to provide food for my children during lockdown.” she told HuffPost UK. “I knew we would get through a lot more food as there would be an extra 10 meals to provide during the week. But the sheer volume of what they had eaten by Tuesday was staggering. They emptied the cupboards and there was nothing left as they had eaten all the snacks and food.”  She says it made her realise how hard it would be to stay financially afloat during the outbreak. “I am also very worried about how I will afford to feed them. I am planning each week at a time and trying not to think beyond that as it is too overwhelming. When you are a single parent and struggling for money, you cannot afford to stockpile and buy a couple of weeks of food at a time.”

Helen Baker, 49, is a full-time carer for her seven-year-old son Sam who is autistic. She is concerned about their financial predicament and how they will afford to put food on the table as her husband Chris is a self employed taxi driver and the impact of coronavirus is already hitting their income hard.

“Now we are on lockdown, my husband is getting no taxi work at all,” she told HuffPost UK. “The measures in place for self employed people at the moment are abysmal as all they can access is Universal Credit. My husband is trying to look for other ways of earning but we live in an economically deprived area and everyone is in the same position. I am worried about buying food and putting gas and electricity on the meter. We’re literally living hand-to-mouth and I am worried about running out of money and not being able to put food on the table or how long it will be before we get Universal Credit. I am struggling mentally and trying not to panic. But it’s difficult when you get up in the morning and worry about whether we’ll be able to buy bread or milk.” 

Migrant Volunteers

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The coronavirus epidemic means medics of all backgrounds are in demand.
In Saxony, the heartland of the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), the regional medical board is advertising for migrant doctors to help tackle an expected rise in cases.
“Foreign doctors who are in Saxony but do not yet have a license to practice medicine can help with coronavirus care,” read a Facebook appeal.



300 volunteers had responded to its appeal for help, including “many foreign doctors whose licensing procedures are not yet completed, whose help is very welcome.”



Shadi Shahda, 29, once an ENT (ear, nose, throat) medical resident in Syria, is ready to help. He jumped at the medical board’s Facebook post and says, “ I was very happy when I saw that I could do something in the country where I am living.” 

Remembering Polio

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Up until now, smallpox is the only infectious disease we have ever eliminated. But the world is well on its way of eradicating polio. On Oct. 24, 2019, World Polio Day, WHO announced there were only 94 cases of wild polio in the world. Unfortunately due to the security problems and conflicts, progress has stalled in ending the disease.



 Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the polio virus arrived each summer, striking without warning. No one knew how polio was transmitted or what caused it. There was no known cure or vaccine. Before a vaccine was available, polio caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis a year in the U.S. It was the most feared disease of the 20th century. In 1952, the number of polio cases in the U.S. peaked at 57,879, resulting in 3,145 deaths. Those who survived this highly infectious disease could end up with some form of paralysis, forcing them to use crutches, wheelchairs or to be put into an iron lung, a large tank respirator that would pull air in and out of the lungs, allowing them to breathe.



 Ultimately, poliomyelitis was conquered in 1955 by a vaccine developed by Jonas Salk and his team at the University of Pittsburgh. Jonas Salk became one of the most celebrated scientists in the world.

He refused a patent for his work, saying the vaccine belonged to the people and that to patent it would be like “patenting the Sun.” Leading drug manufacturers made the vaccine available, and more than 400 million doses were distributed between 1955 and 1962, reducing the cases of polio by 90 percent. By the end of the century, the polio scare had become a faint memory.

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/25/covid-19-the-deadly-polio-epidemic-and-why-it-matters-for-coronavirus/



Slavery Today

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Slavery isn’t a thing of the past, but a reality for more than 40 million people. We have to be very clear that no country is free from modern slavery. In the UK, there are estimates of as many as 138,000 people who are trapped in modern slavery. Every country in Europe has that problem and in many different forms. The most prevalent is probably forced labor. People are trafficked for being exploited in agriculture, construction, hospitality. There is trafficking for sexual exploitation and increasingly trafficking for criminal activities such as running drugs or being forced to steal.



 Anti-Slavery International, was founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce in 1839. It’s been fighting slavery for more than 180 years.



Jakub Sobik from Anti-Slavery International explains the difference between the traditional forms of slavery we saw in the 19th century and now the modern forms of slavery is that slavery, understood historically, is about people literally owning other people. While these forms of slavery still exist in places (for example, in West Africa), modern slavery is about exploiting people, about trapping them for labor or for some kind of service such as sexual exploitation. There are always people who are more vulnerable than others: people who are in poverty, people who are discriminated against and people who are not protected very well by law.







For example, in India, a group of Dalits — who are essentially a lower caste — they don’t enjoy any rights. They are discriminated against. They don’t have many opportunities for good jobs and they’re not protected by law because that caste is seen as a lesser one. Hundreds of thousands of Dalit people are being exploited in the brick industry — in brick factories across India — and in other industries too. It happens often through debt bondage and other forms of exploitation.

Debt bondage is quite widespread across Southeast Asia. In terms of bonded labor, a whole generation of people, whole families can be indebted to someone for generations. Inevitably they lose control over that debt. The employer keeps control over the debt, adds interest on top of that all the time and they’re trapped in this cycle of exploitation that they’re unable to get out of.



Even though in India debt bondage and bonded labor is outlawed, the law is not implemented. We see that all the time when people (especially those from castes that are discriminated against, such as Dalits) go to the police, they’re simply not being listened to.



Debt is probably the most common way of entrapping people in these kind of exploitative situations. We see that in trafficking, when someone wants a job and goes abroad to find a job, they have to pay for travel and recruitment costs. Often, they have to borrow this money from the traffickers. In this way, the traffickers have gained control over these vulnerable people and they can exploit them at the destination.

Some trafficking will be implemented by organized criminal gangs. But some of them could be a farm owner who just exploits people and sees some kind of vulnerability in migrants who are illegally in a country and don’t speak the language, so they don’t know where to turn to for help. I think it’s just about certain people finding that vulnerability in people to exploit them. That’s why it’s so difficult to spot, because a lot of people in modern slavery look like they’re in normal jobs, but there is something more troubling behind the surface.https://www.dw.com/en/why-modern-slavery-and-human-trafficking-still-exist-world/a-52853992

TB is still out there killing the innocent

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As the coronavirus death toll mounts and not wishing to take anything away from the seriousness of the present situation, global health authorities are reminding that tuberculosis is deadliest infectious disease in the world. 

1.5 million people died from the bacterial infection in 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported. Over 4,000 people die of tuberculosis every day.



Approximately 10 million people are infected with tuberculosis every year. Only a small portion of global cases receive the necessary life-saving medicine. 
In Asia and Africa, it is tuberculosis patients who are most likely to be killed by the coronavirus.



“For millions of people with tuberculosis, the coronavirus represents a significant danger because their lungs are already weakened by tuberculosis, their general health is low due poverty, and they don’t have access to adequate healthcare,” explained Burkard Kömm, director of the agency German Leprosy and Tuberculosis Relief (DAHW) 
Tuberculosis can be cured if treated over six months with a cocktail of four different antibiotics. However, many patients end their treatment early or develop a resistance to the medication that complicates and prolongs treatment. A lack of medicine is a common reason why patients end their treatment early.

The fox is in the henhouse

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Progressive critics characterized the Senate’s coronavirus stimulus plan as an attempt by both Republican and Democratic political parties to use trillions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out and further enrich large corporations while tossing mere crumbs to the most vulnerable.




“This is a robbery in progress,” wrote David Dayen, executive editor at The American Prospect. “And it’s not a bailout for the coronavirus. It’s a bailout for twelve years of corporate irresponsibility that made these companies so fragile that a few weeks of disruption would destroy them.”


While progressives applauded some provisions in the massive package—including the significant expansion of unemployment benefits and protections for airline workers—Dayen said the stimulus package as a whole is an “outrageous betrayal” of the U.S. public and “a rubber-stamp on an unequal system that has brought terrible hardship to the majority of America.”


“The people get a one-time $1,200 means-tested payment and a little wage insurance for four months,” Dayen wrote. “Corporations get a transformative amount of play money to sustain their system and wipe out the competition.”


Dayen wrote, the “enormity of this bailout is being under-reported.”


“The other $425 billion helps capitalize a $4.25 trillion, with a T, leveraged lending facility at the Federal Reserve,” Dayen said. “So it’s not a $2 trillion bill, it’s closer to $6 trillion, and $4.3 trillion of it comes in the form of a bazooka aimed at CEOs and shareholders, with almost no conditions attached.”


The stimulus package includes a little-noticed $17 billion federal loan program that was inserted largely for the benefit of aerospace giant Boeing.



Zephyr Teachout, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law and an anti-corruption expert, tweeted Wednesday that “it is super hard to speak up against this because of the big great things in the bill.”



“But it is irresponsible not to,” Teachout said. “We are talking about something so huge and radical and lacking in oversight that we cannot cheer it on. Truly outrageous.”


https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/25/senate-corporate-bailout-package-robbery-progress-warn-critics

The Pain of Coronavirus

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The COVID-19 pandemic has shut down countries and led financial markets to crash, bringing losses for businesses and investors. But it has left millions of poor people around the world particularly exposed.  31% of people in finance, insurance and business are able to work from home, fewer than one in ten in the bottom half of the earnings table can. So far no provision for the nearly seven million workers who do not qualify for statutory sick pay because they are self-employed or don’t meet the earnings threshold of 118 pounds per week.



 Melissa Preston has a choice: go to work for the money to pay her rent or stay at home to keep her family safe from the coronavirus outbreak. Before the pandemic, Preston earned around 250 pounds a week as a cleaner. Now she is worried about putting herself and her family at risk by going in and out of other people’s homes. 



Like some 5 million Britons, she is self-employed, so does not get sick pay. Government benefits alone would not be enough to pay the 800 pounds monthly rent for her house where she lives with her two daughters. 



“It’s a choice between: do I go and put myself at risk and then bring that in to my children? … Or do I just, you know, bite the bullet?” Melissa, who is 42, told Reuters. 



 She has bought protective clothing and even goggles to wear while she cleans. Melissa has spent hours calling government phone numbers and looking online for answers. She watches the government’s daily news conferences on TV to see if any measures to help people like her will be announced. 



 “I’ve been watching that every day. I’m glued to it … watching it, just sort of waiting.” 







The Plight of the Undocumented

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Some 10 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants are believed to live in the US. Many earn their living as domestic workers, or in the restaurant, service or construction industries – sectors of the economy that have ground to a halt as mandatory stay-at-home orders have taken effect. It is unclear what, if any, government support tax-paying undocumented immigrants might receive to help them cope with the fallout from coronavirus.
Since coming to the United States from Bolivia 20 years ago, Ingrid has eked out a living cleaning houses in the Washington DC area to support herself and her son and to send money to her mother back home. The 57-year-old usually earns around $1,500 per month. Even in a good month, Ingrid has very little money to spend on food, utilities and remittances to her family. So when she suffers a health setback, the blow is both physical and financial. Ingrid said eight of her 12 regular clients have cancelled her cleaning services for the month of March without paying her. Nor did they say if they will hire her back in April. 

“We, more than anything, fear this because we don’t have health insurance, we don’t have paid sick days as domestic workers,” Ingrid, who asked to use only her first name because she is undocumented, told Al Jazeera. “Like any human being, we count on having our pay to survive.”
For undocumented people like Ingrid, that means contracting coronavirus could be financially ruinous.
“Because we don’t have health insurance, we take care of ourselves at home with the medicines we can buy in the pharmacy without a prescription,” she said. “Or we have to go to medical centres that charge us a lot. I wish people would have a little more consideration for us, because we are the people, in reality, who help them with their children, with their older people, with their homes,” she said. “We are the people who help them live their lives.” 

The anti-immigrant rhetoric and climate of fear created by Trump could make undocumented people less likely to seek testing or treatment for fear of being arrested or deported, potentially accelerating the virus’s spread.
“Immigrants who are undocumented are really scared, and rightfully so,” Julie Kashen, senior policy adviser for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told Al Jazeera. “That means that they are less likely to seek healthcare when they need it, and it means that they are less likely to be able to do what they would need to care for themselves and their family. The coronavirus is really hitting home the ways that we’re all so interconnected and living in such a community, no matter who we are – whether we’re somebody who moved to the United States with papers or without,” said Kashen. “Public health requires that we all care about each other to save lives.”

Even if there are provisions in place to make sure that they’re not supposed to be legally retaliated against or that  Immigration and Customs Enforcement isn’t supposed to be called, there’s no reason for them to trust that in this moment, when there’s been such an unfair and unsafe situation,” she added. 

ICE agents are still making arrests. Concerns are also growing about the health and safety of people being held in immigration detention facilities. Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First have urged government authorities to “release immigrants and asylum seekers held in administrative detention by ICE” due to the “documented inadequacies of medical care and basic hygiene in immigration detention facilities”. The groups also warned that infections in facilities could easily spread beyond them. 

The Rise of the Right

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The rise of far-right terrorism in Britain has been driven by years of austerity, the former head of MI5 has said.

He warned that organisations who have “explicitly decided that terrorism was part of the way forward” were on the rise, adding: “Partly I suspect it is a reflection of the social pressures on communities as a result of austerity measures. There seems to be a constituency of disaffected males who find extreme right-wing beliefs attractive, and they have started to get their acts together to organise into groups and plot.”

The number of white terror suspects being arrested in the UK has outstripped those of Asian appearance for two years in a row.

“There was a significant alienated and disenfranchised group out there who didn’t think the system was taking any notice of them,” Lord Evans said. “Attention still needs to be paid to this group, as it is not clear that they will feel entirely assuaged as a result of the fact that people are paying wider attention to them now. Terrorist problems emerge when you have a significant population who feel alienated and nobody takes notice of them, causing frustration and anger.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/far-right-terrorism-uk-austerity-cuts-mi5-a9424596.html



What’s happening elsewhere

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France
As the number of cases of the virus began to rise, the French government extended its system of chômage partiel, or partial unemployment. 
When a company is forced to reduce or suspend work, it can apply for state funding of 70 percent of an employee’s gross salary, to a maximum of €6,927 per month. 
As of March 24, 730,000 workers were being paid under this scheme. The finance ministry has already set aside €8.5 billion in funding but that amount is expected to rise. 
With schools and crèches (nurseries) closed, the French government is also giving paid leave to parents who cannot work from home and who are responsible for children younger than 16.
The annual winter embargo on evicting tenants from residential properties has also been extended to May 31.
Germany
Berlin has expanded its short-time allowance, or Kurzarbeitergeld, to include companies that cut working hours as a result of the coronavirus. 
It pays at the same level as unemployment benefits: Up to 67 percent of net wages lost due to shorter hours, to a maximum of €6,700 per month.
Tenants who are unable to pay their rent will be protected from eviction until September 30, although back rent will be owed when the economic situation improves.
Ireland
A new temporary wage subsidy will allow affected companies to recoup up to 70 percent of salaries from the Irish government to maintain current employment levels, with a maximum of €410 per week (€1,777 net per month).
Special arrangements have been made for the childcare sector, which include the state paying all the wages of crèche workers as well as contributing to other running costs. The aim is for parents to be able to stop paying fees and still be guaranteed a place when the crèche reopens.
Italy
As part of the economic package adopted on March 16, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s government extended a series of “social shock absorbers”.  
They include paying up to 80 percent of an employee’s salary for a period of nine weeks to a maximum of €1,130 net per month.
Self-employed people have also been awarded a one-off payment of €600.
Spain
The existing provision for temporary layoffs, known as ERTE, has been expanded to cover businesses affected by the virus. Up to 70 percent of salaries will be paid, with a maximum of €1,412 per month.
The Spanish government has also ordered utility companies to maintain services to all “vulnerable” households, even if they are unable to pay their bills.
Steven Bell, of BMO Global Asset Management, wrote in an economic update  that government measures “will do no more than blunt the blow to economies and families”.

https://www.france24.com/en/20200325-the-race-to-save-jobs-european-governments-step-in-to-pay-wages

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