Tens of thousands of nurses, technicians and other healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente in Northern California staged a walkout Thursday in sympathy with about 700 engineers who have been on strike for two months, calling on the company to offer the employees a fair contract and to demonstrate the power of labor unions and solidarity between workers.

The company “is putting its drive for profits over people, hurting our patients and union co-workers,” Ethan Ruskin, who works at Kaiser San Jose, told The Mercury News.

‘Solidarity Forever’: 40,000 Kaiser Workers Set to Strike to Defend 700 Fellow Union Members (commondreams.org)

 In Lebanon, in the past year, poverty has tripled, and one in every four children in the country are skipping meals. 

The Lebanese pound (LP) has witnessed a devaluation exceeding 90%, dropping from 1,500 LP to the dollar to over 22,000 LP to the US dollar. 

At least half of the population is suffering in extreme ways because of this situation, experts say.

In Beirut, the UNICEF office reported that three out of 10 children go to bed hungry or skip meals.

The World Food Programme (WFP) estimated that food prices have gone up by 628 percent in just two years. According to Nassib Ghobril, chief economist for Lebanese Byblos Bank, the CPI rose by 144% in September 2021 compared with the same month in 2020, while it registered its 15th consecutive triple-digit increase since July 2020.

The prices of fresh or frozen cattle meat in Lebanon jumped by 118.6% in the period, constituting the highest increase in the price of this item in the region, reported Ghobril. In parallel, the price of bread and other manufactured articles sold went up by 32.8%, representing the third-highest increase in bread prices among MENA countries.

“The cumulative surge in inflation is due, in part, to the inability of authorities to monitor and contain retail prices, as well as to the deterioration of the Lebanese pound’s exchange rate on the parallel market, which has encouraged opportunistic wholesalers and retailers to raise the prices of consumer goods disproportionately,” Ghobril says. He adds that the smuggling of subsidised imported goods has resulted in shortages of these products locally, which also contributed to price increases. “Further, the emergence of an active black market for gasoline during the summer has put upward pressure on prices and inflation.”

Economist Kamal Hamal Hamdan explains that while there are no credible governmental statistics, at least 55% of the Lebanese population live under the poverty line.

“However, estimates actually point to 75% of the Lebanese population falling under the poverty line. This number goes up to 85% in extremely poor areas such as North Lebanon or the Baalback Hermel area,” points out Adib Nehme, a Lebanese development and poverty consultant.

Before the crisis, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population owned almost 70 percent of total wealth. Nehme underlines that around 73% of the Lebanese population earned 2.4 million LP per month before the crisis.

“If these people managed to keep their jobs despite Lebanon’s meltdown, this means that around three-quarters of the population earns around $120,” says Nehme. “One has to keep in mind that around 963 depositors own $23billion, that is not considering these people’s wealth in land and investments. There is growing polarisation because of concentration of wealth, with Lebanon’s economic collapse,” says Nehme.

Additionally, Hamdan underlines that around 60% of wage earners in the pre-crisis era contributed to 25% of the Lebanese GDP, which has worsened.

The financial crisis plaguing Lebanon has created further inequality. The richest and politically connected have been able to transfer their funds despite the unofficial capital control imposed by Lebanese banks.

Hunger, Desperation in Lebanon as Food Prices Rocket | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Thursday put out a report, titled Tax Dodgers: How Billionaire Corporations Avoid Paying Taxes and How to Fix It,  that shows how 70 of the richest corporations in the U.S. “have rigged the tax code in their favor, employing armies of lobbyists and accountants to write and abuse the rules so they can avoid paying their fair share of taxes.”

FedEx paid $483 million in taxes last year—a 7.2% tax rate

DISH $0 in tax but instead collected a $223 million tax refund from the federal government despite raking in $2.6 billion in profits in 2020.

Amazon paid $2.8 billion in federal and foreign income taxes in 2020, its effective tax rate was just 11.5% on global profits totalling $24.3 billion, while the company handed out $118 million in executive bonuses.

Elizabeth Warren Releases Blueprint to End ‘Free Ride’ for Tax-Dodging US Billionaires (commondreams.org)

COP which stands for ‘Conference of the Parties’ intended to bring together almost every country for global climate summits. Others suggest that COP  really refers to the “Conference of Polluters” and “Conference of Profiteers.

COP1 was held in Berlin in 1995 in Berlin in recognition that issues related to the climate could not be addressed by an individual county and that it required an international response. 

Now, a quarter-century later, carbon dioxide emissions are 14 billion tons higher and the giant oil companies – e.g., Shell, BP, Chevron and Exxon — have made profits totalling nearly $2 trillion.

 A 2017 study from Carbon Majors Report revealed that only 100 companies were responsible for 71 percent of worldwide industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.

At Glasgow’s COP26 over 100 fossil fuel companies were represented with 30 trade associations and membership organizations. 

At least 503 (some estimates said 600-plus) fossil fuel lobbyists attended. 

 In addition, 27 official country delegations were registered fossil fuel lobbyists, including from Shell, Gazprom and BP.

Capitalism turns everything – everything! – into a commodity.  In the same process that it turns human work into labor power, of enabling people to sell themselves as they would sell any other object, capitalism turns nature into yet another commodity.

One can only wonder how many more COPs we will have to suffer through until the corporations executives, government bureaucrats and their lobbyists and lackies give up short-term profit for long-term viability … if not for themselves but their children and grandchildren. 

Without addressing the capitalism’s core value of the commodity – one reproduced for centuries and in every current transaction – the global environmental crisis will not be addressed let alone solved.

Taken from here 

COP26: Capitalism = Death – CounterPunch.org

 Millions of people in poorer countries, where the risk of drug-resistant infections is highest, are still missing out on key antibiotics. 5.7 million people, mainly in low- and middle-income countries, die from treatable infectious diseases, owing to a lack of access to antibiotics.

 Access to Medicine Foundation, an Amsterdam-based non-profit group, shows that only 54 of 166 medicines and vaccines assessed are covered by an access strategy to make them available to low- and middle-income countries.

Jayasree Iyer, the foundation’s executive director, said: “Those facing the highest risk of infection and the highest rates of drug resistance have the hardest time getting the antibiotics they need.”

Poorer nations still lack access to world’s key antibiotics | Pharmaceuticals industry | The Guardian

 Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech—the makers of the two most successful coronavirus vaccines—are raking in a combined $65,000 in profits every minute as they refuse to share their manufacturing recipes with developing countries, where billions of people still lack access to lifesaving shots.

According to a new People’s Vaccine Alliance analysis of recent earnings reports, the three pharmaceutical giants have made a total of $34 billion in profits this year, which amounts to roughly $1,083 per second, $64,961 per minute, or $3.9 million per hour.

“It is obscene that just a few companies are making millions of dollars in profit every single hour while just two percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus,” said Maaza Seyoum of the People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa. “Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna have used their monopolies to prioritize the most profitable contracts with the richest governments, leaving low-income countries out in the cold.”

Moderna has delivered just 0.2% of its total vaccine supply to low-income countries.

Pfizer and its Germany-based partner BioNTech haven’t done much better than their competitor, sending less than 1% of their supply to poor nations while profiting hugely from sales to rich countries.

“Contrary to what Pfizer’s CEO says, the real nonsense is claiming the experience and expertise to develop and manufacture lifesaving medicines and vaccines does not exist in developing countries,” Anna Marriott, health policy manager at Oxfam International, said in a statement Tuesday. “This is just a false excuse that pharmaceutical companies are hiding behind to protect their astronomical profits.”

“It is also a complete failure of government to allow these companies to maintain monopoly control and artificially constrain supply in the midst of a pandemic while so many people in the world are yet to be vaccinated,” she added.

 Moderna on Tuesday announced a deal that will allow the European Union and European Economic Area countries to donate coronavirus vaccine doses that they purchased from the company to COVAX, the World Health Organization-backed vaccination initiative.

The agreement was met with derision from vaccine equity campaigners. “Goodness, how generous,” responded Nick Dearden, director of the U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now. “Most people will simply be astounded that you were stopping them from doing this in the first place.”

“Why don’t you, instead, share your publicly funded vaccine recipe with the WHO?” he added. “That might actually help.”

In a letter to Moderna’s billionaire CEO Stéphane Bancel on Tuesday, a coalition of nearly 90 civil society organizations wrote that “we are in no doubt that most Covid-19 deaths in low-income countries are now avoidable deaths: lives that could be saved were effective vaccines, none more than Moderna’s, widely available to their populations.”

The groups called on Moderna to transfer its vaccine technology to qualified manufacturers through the WHO to ramp up global vaccine production and to commit to selling its shot to low-income countries at a not-for-profit price.

‘Obscene’: Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna Are Raking in $3.9 Million in Profits Per Hour (commondreams.org)

 Regardless of all the hype that with labour shortages it is a workers market right now, the average pay deal across the UK is worth just 2%, despite a rise in prices that pushed the retail prices index (RPI) – a widely used measure of inflation in pay bargaining – to 6% this month.

Inflation is causing a sharp decline in disposable incomes across much of the workforce, a survey of employers also found they were expecting to increase pay by only 2.5% over the next year.

Average pay deal in Britain worth just 2%, data shows | Business | The Guardian

 Tens of thousands of England’s poorest pensioners face paying the same for their old age care as wealthier people after the government published details of the new cap on home and care costs.

The move will save the government hundreds of millions of pounds but leave many poorer homeowners exposed to “catastrophic costs” including the need to sell their homes to cover long-term care, analysts said.

“The proposed amendments to the Care Act mean reforms will no longer protect those with lower wealth from catastrophic costs,” said Charles Tallack at the Health Foundation thinktank. “The changes seem motivated by the desire to save money but do so by taking protection away from poorer homeowners.”

A pensioner with a £90,000 home in Burnley who qualifies for council help could pay the same for their care out of their own pocket as someone with property worth £250,000 or more in Surrey who is too wealthy for means-tested assistance. Care bills could still eat into almost all of their assets, forcing the sale of the house.

Torsten Bell, director of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, said: “if you own a £1m house in the home counties, over 90% of your assets are protected. If you’ve got a terrace house in Hartlepool worth £70,000 you can lose almost everything.” He added: “I’m really not sure the government’s thought this through…”

Analysts said the move could save the government hundreds of millions of pounds from the estimated £3bn cost of the cap, but the savings were being taken from people with low to moderate wealth not richer people.

“These changes will mean that the people who need the most protection from catastrophically high care costs – those with low to moderate levels of wealth – will get less protection than wealthier people,” said Sally Warren, director of policy at the King’s Fund thinktank. “They may well wonder why the prime minister’s promise that no one need sell their house to pay for care will benefit wealthier people but doesn’t seem to apply to them. The government was brave in raising taxes to fund the long-overdue reform of social care but, having taken two steps forward, has now taken one step back.”

At any one time, tens of thousands of people receiving care have such limited assets that they get means-tested help and so will be affected directly by the proposals. Hundreds of thousands of people who may never need social care will nevertheless be worried about being caught by the new system if they eventually require help. It effectively means some people with lesser assets don’t benefit from the cap at all.

Social care cap could expose poorer homeowners to ‘catastrophic’ costs | Social care | The Guardian

 November 20th

11 – 4pm

​The Casa, 

29 Hope Street,

Liverpool L1 9BQ

See http://merseysidemarxistbookfair.uk/

The Party will have a stall at this event stocking a wide range of Party literature

 Oligarch Elon Musk suggested that he and other billionaires are powerless to help the tens of millions of people across the globe who are suffering from hunger—and dared experts to prove him wrong. 

David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program did just that, providing a detailed proposal for how Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and other billionaires could prevent 42 million people from starving with a tiny fraction of their vast wealth.