Do what we say, not what we do
For the 29th year, the members of the UN General Assembly voted in favor of a resolution demanding an end to the 60-year U.S. economic blockade on Cuba.
184 nations voted for the resolution, while the U.S. and Israel voted against it. (Three nations — Brazil, Colombia, and Ukraine abstained.)
Biden newly declared foreign policy called “rules-based order” actually means the United States-based order.
Czech Republic’s Labour Shortage
There were not enough skilled workers in the Czech Republic.
Many businesses report that the labor shortages that blighted the Czech economy before the pandemic are already an issue again. Joblessness at the end of the first quarter stood at just 3.2%, the second-lowest in the EU after neighbouring Poland.
Despite the import of hundreds of thousands of workers from Ukraine and other selected source markets, the lack of factory hands, builders and drivers — as well as more skilled workers — had become a major brake on economic growth.
A dearth of foreign workers is an issue for other sectors. The supply of Ukrainians and other nationalities invited to Czechia under government visa schemes dried up during the pandemic as embassies and borders closed and those already in the country began to wend their way home. Construction has been particularly hard-hit. Further up the skills ladder, the IT sector’s heavy reliance on foreign workers meant that before the pandemic it could take up to two years to fill vacancies. Whether those foreign workers will soon start making their way back to Czechia is not yet clear. Border restrictions and limited transport links persist, while the government is only now discussing restarting its visa easing schemes.
One study by the Mendel University in Brno released in May called for politicians to stop offering the view that immigration is a security threat and instead explain that the country needs a long-term strategy to attract foreign workers. The rhetoric since the migrant crisis of 2015 “actually went hand in hand with the admission of a large number of migrants in the industries that required it,” the researchers noted with irony. However, the likelihood that the long-term needs of the economy can push ahead of politics just four months ahead of national elections in October is slim.
Although not Czech-born, Prime Minister Andrej Babis was not shy of using anti-migrant rhetoric to help win the last election in 2017. Now, with his ANO party trailing in polls, the populist billionaire is already beating a similar drum, warning voters that his opponents want to force them to share their houses with migrants.
The Insulin Rip-off
Americans pay around two and a half times as much for prescription drugs as people in other developed countries.
Prescriptions cost so much because the pharmaceutical industry wields monopoly control to set and keep drug prices high.
So while the U.S. makes up only 15 percent of the global insulin market, it accounts for nearly half of the revenue that these corporations bring in every year.
Insulin prices are on average eight times higher in the United States than in 32 other countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Turkey.
In one study, one in three Americans has skipped refilling a prescription. In another study, one in four Americans who rely on insulin also admitted to rationing it
Passing the Buck at Grenfell
Robert Black, the most senior executive at the Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation (TMO), told the public inquiry into the disaster that the obsolete plan showing no more than 12 vulnerable or disabled people was caused by staff not carrying out managers’ instructions allowing the block’s fire safety plan to become 15 years out of date so it failed to account for more than two dozen of the disabled people in the block.
Grenfell flats was in fact home to 37 disabled people and 15 of them died.
Counsel to the inquiry Richard Millett QC put it to Black: “In reality, as the chief executive you were ultimately responsible for a failure to keep these documents up to date lower down in your organisation”.
“Pass,” he replied. “It should have been updated. I’m not shying away from that, so that’s my situation.”
“Information should have been updated by staff,” Black told the inquiry. “The whole thing that I suffered throughout my career working with people is the ability to forget to fill in the paperwork.”
Black also said he had made a decision not to act on warnings that the landlord should draw up specific emergency evacuation plans for vulnerable and disabled people, claiming it was impractical and that the key policy was to tell residents to stay put in the event of a fire.
The inquiry heard how, in the preceding years, the TMO let the idea of producing personal emergency evacuation plans for vulnerable people “drop” despite warnings from safety consultants and the London fire brigade that its fire risk management was falling short. Seven years before the fire a consultancy hired by the TMO said it should develop “formal procedures to deal effectively with fire safety issues associated with disabled or vulnerable tenants and leaseholders … this should include a range of options from relocation in severe cases … and the provision of personal emergency evacuation plans in those less serious cases.”
It indicated this was a “high risk” issue, but asked whether this was done, Black said: “No, we didn’t have individual emergency plans per block.” He didn’t accept that specific fire evacuation plans needed to be made for disabled people, despite being warned that failing to do so would breach fire safety regulations.
Black also described how he gave the TMO’s director in charge of financial services and IT, Barbara Matthews, responsibility for fire safety, even though he did not check if she had any experience in fire safety.
“Can you account for having a head of health and safety who had no health and safety background?” asked Millett.
“I wouldn’t have had the income to have someone sitting on the executive specifically doing health and safety,” said Black. “Local authority funding across the country had been cut.”
Money Goes To Money
While many poor people became poorer, five million people became millionaires across the world in 2020 despite economic damage from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Because of recovering stock markets and soaring house prices helping to boost their wealth in 2020 more than 1% of adults worldwide were millionaires for the first time.
Total global wealth grew by 7.4%.
Wealth creation appeared to be “completely detached” from the economic woes of the pandemic, the researchers said.
Anthony Shorrocks, economist and author of the Global Wealth Report, said, “Global wealth not only held steady in the face of such turmoil but in fact rapidly increased in the second half of the year,”
Wealth differences between adults widened in 2020, and Shorrocks said if asset price increases, such as house price rises, were removed from the analysis, “then global household wealth may well have fallen”.
“In the lower wealth bands where financial assets are less prevalent, wealth has tended to stand still, or, in many cases, regressed,” he said.
Nannette Hechler-Fayd’herbe, chief investment officer at Credit Suisse, said: “The lowering of interest rates by central banks has probably had the greatest impact. It is a major reason why share prices and house prices have flourished, and these translate directly into our valuations of household wealth.”
Introducing the World Socialist Movement (video)
Hunger Haunts the Planet
41 million people in 43 countries are at imminent risk of famine, with nearly 600,000 others in four countries already experiencing famine-like conditions, the World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.
“I am heartbroken at what we’re facing in 2021,” said WFP’s Executive Director David Beasley. “It’s just tragic – these are real people with real names.”
Wars, climate change and economic shocks have been driving the increase in hunger while soaring prices for basic items compound existing pressures on food security this year. Currency depreciation in countries such as Lebanon, Nigeria, Sudan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe is adding to these pressures and driving prices even higher, stoking food insecurity.
World food prices rose in May to their highest levels in a decade, UN figures show, with basics like cereals, oilseeds, dairy products, meat and sugar up a combined 40 percent versus year-ago levels. Global maize prices have soared almost 90 percent year-on-year, while wheat prices are up almost 30 percent over the same period.
The WFP says about 690 million people, go to bed hungry each night.
UN World Food Programme says 41 million on verge of famine | Hunger News | Al Jazeera
Colombia’s Gender Violence
Verbal abuse, threats of sexual violence and discrimination have not been isolated incidents during the wave of anti-government protests that have been spreading through Colombia since 28 April. There have been at least 113 cases of gender-based violence, according to a report by the Office of the Ombudsman, an official government agency tasked with overseeing the protection of citizens’ human and civil rights.
“They started calling us bitches, whores, sluts,” Karla Cardoso says of the abuse police officers hurled at her and other women during an anti-government protest in Medellín on 20 May. “They asked us what we were doing out at night, threatening to kill us,” the 25-year-old student says.
During an anti-government demonstration in the capital, Bogotá, another female protester detailed how, “A group of roughly eight police officers surrounded me. One of them said: ‘This one is a good one to rape’.”
According to Temblores, an NGO which monitors police violence, it does not always stop at threats. It has received reports from 28 protesters who allege they were sexually abused by members of the security forces. They include allegations of having been forced to strip naked, being groped and being raped. The NGO says the evidence it has gathered suggests they were pre-meditated and routinely orchestrated by groups of officers inside enclosed spaces.
Seven allegations of sexual violence by security forces are currently being investigated by the attorney-general’s office. Among them is the case of a 17-year-old girl who was allegedly sexually abused by police in the city of Popayán. The girl killed herself the day after the alleged abuse.
Linda Cabrera, the director of feminist organisation Sisma Mujer, says that the aim of gender-based violence is to spread fear among women to deter them from protesting. But many women have not been deterred. They say that, if anything, the violence has made them more determined to play a vital role in the demonstrations.
Some are organising vigils and sit-ins while others make a point of marching right out front at demonstrations. Many say they feel vulnerable at protests, though, especially when they are alone.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) earlier this month sent a team to Colombia to investigate the allegations of excessive use of force by police during the protests. The police fall under the jurisdiction of the defence ministry, meaning cases of abuse will continue to be judged by military tribunals, which they consider problematic.
‘The risk you run’: Colombia’s women protesters on sexual violence – BBC News
Claiming discrimination to compensate for discrimination
The US Department of Agriculture was scheduled to begin sending out payments to Black and minority farmers this month, as part of a $4bn loan forgiveness program. The money was intended as a way to address more than 100 years of discriminatory practices and policies that have historically and disproportionately disadvantaged Black owners of farmland.
But a lawsuit on behalf of white farmers is accusing the Biden administration of discrimination due to an injunction granted this month by a federal judge in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Around the country, there are other lawsuits against debt relief to Black and minority farmers with claims of discrimination against white farmers, including one in Texas backed by the ex-Trump adviser Stephen Miller.
According to Rodney Bradshaw, of Jetmore, Kansas “My feeling before [the injunction] was that we’re finally getting some justice that was due to us after the Pigford agreement [a discrimination settlement in the late 1990s]. Now, it’s that promises to Black farmers are always put on hold,” says Bradshaw. He is a descendant of Black settlers with a more than 100-year legacy of farming in Kansas, but that legacy is as threatened as ever today, he says, because of racism that has been allowed to run rampant, and in some cases been historically supported, by the USDA. “There’s higher concentrations of Black farmers in the south. We had four major Black settlements here in Kansas, and they’re basically all gone – wiped out through systemic racism and discrimination.”
Black farmers peaked in number in 1920 when there were 949,889; today there are only 48,697; they account for only 1.4% of the country’s 3.4 million farmers (95% of US farmers are white) and own 0.52% of America’s farmland.
Part of the reason was displacement of Black farmers due to New Deal legislation, whose purpose was to help farmers by paying them to reduce crop production, thereby forcing food prices to rise. But white farmers used the money to purchase mechanical farming equipment and pushed out Black sharecroppers whose work was no longer needed due to the decreased production. Disenfranchisement didn’t stop there. In 1965, the US Commission on Civil Rights found that the USDA discriminated against Black farmers when providing financial assistance payments and loans. In 1999, the Clinton administration admitted that the USDA’s loan practices were discriminatory, in what is now known as the Pigford settlement.
The Pigford settlement was named for the Black farmer Timothy Pigford of North Carolina, who was the lead plaintiff in a victorious 1997 class-action lawsuit – still the largest civil rights settlement ever won against the federal government. It was supposed to pay just over $1bn to Black farmers, but less than 16,000 payments were received, even though more than 22,000 claims were filed. There were also tens of thousands of denied claims due to late filings, which Black farmers and their legal representatives blame on mismanagement of USDA communication of deadlines.
Tracy Lloyd McCurty, executive director of the Black Belt Justice Center, which works to enhance what it calls restorative land justice through a community-controlled land and financial cooperative known as the Black Agrarian Fund, believes the USDA has previously engaged in deliberate obstructionism, and said in a statement to the Guardian that the Pigford settlement has had disastrous consequences in terms of denying Black families the ability to hold on to their farmlands. She wants more debts forgiven.
“According to USDA data, only 2,000 out of the 17,000 farmers of color with direct loans with USDA are Black/African American and less than 5% of all Black farmers will receive debt cancellation. We have been grappling with these devastating numbers and the theft of Black farmlands by USDA through the Pigford lawsuit,” McCurty says. On the recent injunction, she says: “A colleague reminded us, ‘It is always going to be all deliberate speed if it’s on white supremacy’s time.’”
Black US farmers dismayed as white farmers’ lawsuit halts relief payments | US news | The Guardian