The International Monetary Fund has called on governments to close the income gap between the richest and poorest that has worsened during the Covid pandemic, by spending more and taxing wealthy households.

 The organisation said surveys showed governments would have the support of the public if they shifted the burden of taxation away from low and middle earners to better-off members of society,  warning that the economic shock triggered by the pandemic could undermine public attitudes to the fairness of taxation and welfare systems and lead to social unrest.

It called for governments “to provide everyone with a fair shot”. The IMF said despite government finances coming under pressure from health and welfare spending during the pandemic, ministers needed to “enable all individuals to reach their potential – and to strengthen vulnerable households’ resilience, preserving social stability” and, in turn, broader economic stability.

The IMF said trends during the pandemic that have accelerated a move to digital services would damage the job prospects of unskilled workers and lead to higher rates of long-term unemployment.

“Against this backdrop, societies may experience rising polarisation, erosion of trust in government, or social unrest. These factors complicate sound economic policymaking and pose risks to macroeconomic stability and the functioning of society,” it said.

The IMF added, “The pandemic has confirmed the merits of equal access to basic services – healthcare, quality education, and digital infrastructure – and of inclusive labour markets and effective social safety nets. Better performance in these areas has enhanced resilience to the pandemic and is key for the economic recovery to benefit all and to strengthen trust in government.”

More than 100 countries have approached the IMF about receiving help since the pandemic led to the biggest contraction of the global economy since the 1930s. A package of loans worth $500bn (£360bn), mostly for poorer countries, is due to be announced next week at the IMF and World Bank spring meetings. The expansion of the IMF’s special drawing rights, extra funds to help developing countries cope with the economic effects of Covid-19, is expected to go ahead after the US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said the US would reverse its previous opposition.

“With limited fiscal space, governments will need to prioritise efficiency gains toward those most affected by the Covid-19 crisis before scaling up spending. At the same time, governments should plan medium-term policies for better basic services and better protection from income shocks while fostering a job-rich and inclusive recovery. If governments are unable to meet the challenge, the erosion of trust could lead to more polarised politics in which some call for a smaller government, while those affected by illness or job loss would urge for more government services.”

IMF calls for tax hikes on wealthy to reduce income gap | International Monetary Fund (IMF) | The Guardian

Countries are legally obliged to treat sewage before it is released into waterways. Discharges of untreated human waste are permitted only in exceptional circumstances.

New figures show the scale of untreated human effluent discharged in England into rivers and seas increased from 292,864 incidents in 2019 to 403,171 in 2020 – a 37% rise.

Hugo Tagholm, of Surfers Against Sewage, said: “Water companies making rampant profits at the expense the health of our rivers, ocean and people has to stop.”

The Rivers Trust’s deputy technical director, Michelle Walker, said: “The 2020 data indicates that, appallingly, almost one in five overflows across England are discharging more than 60 times per year, a number which is supposed to trigger an EA investigation. This is a staggering statistic.”

Raw sewage discharges into seas and rivers by water companies

Anglian Water – spill events: 17,428; duration in hours: 170,547

Welsh Water – spill events: 3,969; duration in hours: 21,300

Northumbrian – spill events: 32,497; duration in hours: 178,229

Severn Trent – spill events: 60,982; duration in hours: 558,699

Southwest Water – spill events: 42,053; duration in hours: 375,37

Southern Water – spill events: 19,782; duration in hours: 197,213

Thames Water – spill events: 18,443; duration in hours: 215,886

United Utilities – spill events: 113,940; duration in hours: 726,450

Wessex Water – spill events: 28,994; duration in hours: 237,035

Yorkshire Water – spill events: 65,083; duration in hours: 420,419

Water firms discharged raw sewage into English waters 400,000 times last year | Water | The Guardian

While in the United States a study has found potable drinking water to be polluted and contaminated.

Testing of the samples showed:

More than 35% of the samples had PFAS, potentially toxic “forever chemicals”, at levels above CR’s recommended maximum. 

Almost every sample tested had measurable levels of PFAS, a group of compounds found in hundreds of household products. These chemicals are linked to learning delays in children, cancer, and other health problems. 

About 8% of samples had arsenic, at levels above CR’s recommended maximum. E

xposure to even low levels of arsenic can pose health risks over the long term. A 2014 study  found an association between water with arsenic of 5 ppb or greater and a five- to six-point IQ reduction in children.

In total, 118 out of 120 samples had detectable levels of lead. 

It is unsafe at any levelWe sampled tap water across the US – and found arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals | US news | The Guardian

  A handful of wealthy nations are on track to deliver vaccines to all adults who want them in the coming months, while dozens of the world’s poorest countries have not inoculated a single person. As it stands, 30 countries have not received a single vaccine dose.

Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s access to medicine program said right now , “it’s not even clear the goal is to vaccinate the world”.

The disparity has been called “vaccine apartheid”.

Many have  called for the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies to share technical know-how in an effort to speed the global vaccination project beyond existing vaccine supply. Many see a bigger fight in patent laws, and are drawing on experience advocating for greater access to antiretroviral drugs for HIV.

“There’s no question poorer countries are having a hard time affording doses,” said Dr Howard Markel, a pandemic historian at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. “Even if they were at wholesale or cost there are a lot of different markups.”

“This is a classic case where you have an industry that has a very direct stake in protecting itself, and there’s very little understanding among the public how much is at issue,” said Dean Baker, an economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Activists argue pharmaceutical companies should share production know-how, and be appropriately compensated. One part of this fight centers on a provision of international trade law called the Trips agreement, or more formally, the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. Put in force in 1995, Trips requires all member states to recognize 20-year monopoly patents for pharmaceuticals, including vaccines.

“What Trips was about was imposing US-European style copyright on the whole world,” said Baker. “Most developing countries had very little idea what they were dealing with.”

Annual or booster Covid-19 shots appear increasingly likely – in part driven by the possibility variants could emerge in populations without vaccine access – and as pharmaceutical companies eye future profits.

Coronavirus: how wealthy nations are creating a ‘vaccine apartheid’ | Coronavirus | The Guardian

According to data from the University of Maryland and Global Forest Watch the rate at which the world’s forests are being destroyed increased sharply last year, with at least 42,000 sq km of tree cover lost in key tropical regions.

The loss was well above the average for the last 20 years, with 2020 the third worst year for forest destruction since 2002 when comparable monitoring began.

The losses were particularly severe in humid tropical primary forests, such as the Amazon, the Congo and south-east Asia. These forests are vital as carbon sinks in the regulating the global climate, as well as for their irreplaceable ecosystems. Losses from this type of forest alone amounted to 4.2m hectares (10.4m acres). Brazil’s forested areas fared the worst, with 1.7m hectares destroyed, an increase of about a quarter on the previous year. Altogether, 12.2m hectares of tree cover were lost in the tropics in 2020, an increase of 12% on 2019, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI). 

Destruction of world’s forests increased sharply in 2020 | Trees and forests | The Guardian

 Low-paid key workers would not be able to afford to buy the average priced home in 98% of Great Britain. Years of rising prices have put homeownership out of reach of many key workers, who have also experienced pay freezes and had to channel their wages into paying high private rents, rather than being able to save for a deposit.

Dan Wilson Craw, deputy director of campaign group Generation Rent, said: “Raising a deposit is just one half of the equation; you must also be able to afford the monthly repayments, and a 95% mortgage comes with a higher interest rate.”

The Guardian’s analysis, which was based on the sums needed for a 90% mortgage, found that a nurse on the median wage of £33,920 a year would not be able to raise a big enough mortgage to buy the median-priced property in almost three-quarters of local authorities nationwide. A nurse with a partner on the average wage would be locked out of the market in more than a fifth of areas.

 The median salary for a senior care worker in the UK stood at £21,243 in 2020. Based on these earnings, with a 10% deposit to put down, a senior care worker would be able to afford the average priced property in just six council areas in Great Britain, locking them out of 98% of areas. If this individual applied for a joint mortgage with a partner on the average UK salary of £31,461, the couple would be unable to afford the average property in four-in-10 local authorities across Britain.

A postal worker with a partner on the average wage would be priced out in more than one-third of local authorities. A postal worker earning the median income of £24,028 would be able to secure a mortgage on the average-priced home in just 13 local authorities

Bus drivers, even within a couple, they are unable to afford the average property in 31% of local authorities. A bus driver on a single wage of £27,191 would be priced out of nine-out-of-10 council areas.

  While a teacher could not afford a mortgage in 60% of areas across Britain. A secondary school teacher earning £40,881 – would be unable to afford a typical property in almost a fifth of council areas.

Covid frontline workers priced out of homeowning in 98% of Great Britain | UK news | The Guardian

 Financial corporations started administering the pensions of Argentinians in 1993 and of Bolivians in 1996. Argentina and Bolivia are among only 30 countries (of the world’s 192) that experimented with privatization of their pension systems. Today, the majority of these countries are reversing the privatization of pensions.  Private insurance corporations are suing Argentina and Bolivia for loss of potential profits as a result of the reversal of privatization of their pension programs. If Argentina and Bolivia lose the disputes, it means that impoverished citizens and elderly pensioners will have to compensate wealthy financial corporations. These cases affect the lives of millions of Argentinians and Bolivians.

Pension policy is not about securing profits for private insurance corporations. Pension systems exist to provide income security in old age—to ensure that older persons retire with adequate pensions.

 Pension privatization failed because of  inadequacies in the private pension system:

• Coverage rates decreased or stagnated under private pension systems.1

• Pension benefits deteriorated, making private pensions very unpopular.2

• Old-age poverty worsened due to low pensions.

• Gender and income inequality increased.3

• Private systems were expensive: The high transition costs of privatization created large fiscal pressures.4

• Private pension administrators incurred high administrative costs and extracted excessive profits through these extraordinary administrative fees.5

• Financial and demographic risks were transferred to individuals; pensioners had to suffer the loss of benefits when these risks occurred, such as during the global financial crisis.

• Social dialogue severely deteriorated.1 In Argentina, coverage rates for men fell from 46% (in 1993, prior to the reform) to 35% (in 2002) and for women to only 31%; in Bolivia, they stagnated.

2 In Bolivia, after privatization, the replacement rate fell to 20% of the average salary during working life; this is far below ILO international standards.

3 In Bolivia, the proportion of elderly women receiving a contributory pension fell from 23.7% in 1995 to 12.8% in 2007 as a result of privatization.

4 In Argentina, initial estimations put the cost at 0.2% of GDP; later the World Bank increased the cost estimate to 3.6% of GDP, 18 times the original estimate; in Bolivia, the actual transition costs of the reform were 2.5 times the initial projections.

5 In Argentina, administration costs jumped from 6.6% of contributions in 1990 before privatization to 50.8% in 2002; in Bolivia, from 8.6% in 1992 to 18.1% in 2002 after privatization.The corporations are using the World Bank’s business-friendly International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)

 Finland was recently rated Europe’s most resistant nation to fake news and it is where critical thinking has become a core, cross-subject component of the school national curriculum. The curriculum was devised by the Finnish government after 2014, when the country was first targeted with fake news stories by its Russian neighbour, and the government realised it had moved into the post-fact age.

Students learn how easy it is to lie with statistics. In art, they see how an image’s meaning can be manipulated. In history, they analyse notable propaganda campaigns, while Finnish language teachers show the many ways in which words can be used to confuse, mislead and deceive.

Kari Kivinen, head teacher, points out you can start when children are very young, “Fairytales work well. Take the wily fox who always cheats the other animals with his sly words. That’s not a bad metaphor for a certain kind of politician, is it?”

He wants his pupils to ask questions such as: who produced this information, and why? Where was it published? What does it really say? Who is it aimed at? What is it based on? Is there evidence for it, or is this just someone’s opinion? Is it verifiable elsewhere?

“The goal is active, responsible citizens and voters,” Kivinen said. “Thinking critically, fact-checking, interpreting and evaluating all the information you receive, wherever it appears, is crucial. We’ve made it a core part of what we teach, across all subjects.”

Fake news, Kivinen said, is not a great term, especially for children. Far more useful are three distinct categories: misinformation, or “mistakes”; disinformation, or “lies” and “hoaxes”, which are false and spread deliberately to deceive; and mal-information, or “gossip”, which may perhaps be correct but is intended to harm.

“Even quite young children can grasp this,” he said. “They love being detectives. If you also get them questioning real-life journalists and politicians about what matters to them, run mock debates and real school elections, ask them to write accurate and fake reports on them…democracy, and the threats to it, start to mean something.”

Priya, 16, said education was “the best way to fight it. The problem is, anyone can publish anything. There’s not much a government can do when they’re faced with big multinationals like Google or Facebook, and if it does too much it’s censorship. So yes, education is what’s most effective.”

How Finland starts its fight against fake news in primary schools | Finland | The Guardian

Most land does not belong to those who toil on it.

According to National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) data, 60% of the country’s population has right over only 5% of land; whereas 10% of the population has control over 55% of the land. 

The 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census shows that 56% of households in rural India do not own any agricultural land. The NSSO 2013 revealed that top 7.18% of households own more than 46.71% of the land.

 By the end of 2019, at least 690 million people went hungry. Now millions more of people continue to suffer acute food insecurity as they face the consequences of the pandemic. Lockdown policies and quarantines have affected all stages of food supply, resulting in a steep rise in food prices and widespread food insecurity.

 As of October 2020, a staggering seven million people have died of hunger. Pandemic-related hunger also led to the deaths of 10,000 more children each month over the first year of the health crisis. 

Landlessness has been exacerbated by large-scale land deals and acquisitions – land grabs led by corporations have dispossessed and displaced farmers from the land they till. Millions of hectares of land planted with staples, grains, and other food crops, as well as indigenous lands, and public lands were land grabbed and converted into plantations, extractive mining projects, and farms devoted to export cash crops. 

Governments have become willing accomplices in these land grabs through public-private partnerships that take away land, water, and other natural resources from the people. Profits keep pouring into the pockets of the few as the majority of peasants and their families endure worsening landlessness and land grabs amid a pandemic. 

Land to the tillers for genuine food system change | Countercurrents

Big Pharma once more exposed itself as an industry filled by socio-paths who will overlook unnecessary deaths if they make sufficient profit and yet escape the full consequences of their criminal behaviour. 

A French court has fined, Servier,  one of the country’s biggest pharmaceutical firms €2.7m (£2.3m) after finding it guilty of deception and manslaughter over a pill linked to the deaths of up to 2,000 people and thousands more left with debilitating cardiovascular problems. Its former executive Jean-Philippe Seta was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence of four years. Magistrates accused Servier of having “knowingly concealed the medication’s true characteristics” from the 1970s and hidden medical studies unfavourable to the product, perpetrating a long-term fraud.

The French medicines agency, accused of failing to act quickly enough on warnings about the drug, was fined €303,000. The scandal, forced the resignation of the head of France’s public health agency and sparked outrage about the lobbying power of French pharmaceutical companies.

 Servier is accused of covering up fatal side-effects of the widely prescribed drug Mediator, an amphetamine derivative licensed as a diabetes treatment, but was widely prescribed as an appetite suppressant to help people lose weight.

“Despite knowing of the risks incurred for many years, … they [Servier] never took the necessary measures and thus were guilty of deceit,” said the president of the criminal court, Sylvie Daunis.

As many as 5 million people took the drug between 1976 and November 2009 when it was withdrawn in France, long after it was banned in Spain and Italy. It was never authourised in the UK or US.

French pharma firm found guilty over medical scandal in which up to 2,000 died | France | The Guardian

  Thousands of Syrians will no longer receive legal support, leaving many “in utter destitution” without documents they need to work, travel or return home, after the British government pulled £4m in funding from a charity programme, run by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), supporting refugees and internally displaced Syrians.

 Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the NRC, said: “This cut means we need to stop legal and protection assistance for 65,000 displaced people in Syria and Lebanon. Syrian children will no longer get help to get birth certificates, students and schoolchildren will no longer get help to get exam or training documents and we can no longer help people with housing, land and property rights.” It could also lead to people having to stay longer in camps, he said. “For some people, who hoped to be integrated into Lebanon, that hope has gone,” Egeland said. “It’s utter destitution when you are paperless.”

The cuts runs counter to the UK’s ideals and interests, he said. “The UK has been a champion of legal advice for refugees for many years, so that people can one day return to working life as productive citizens.”

Bahia Zrikem, of NRC, said staff had reported increased child labour, and families reduced to eating two meals a day. “Humanitarian needs are increasing, not falling” she said. A decade of conflict has left more than 90% of Syrians in poverty, 12.4 million facing food insecurity and 12.2 million without access to clean water.

One executive of a development charity said: “It’s no exaggeration to say there is an atmosphere of fear in the aid sector at the moment. The cuts are going to cost thousands of lives and yet we are being pressured by some quarters of the FCDO [Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office] to not discuss them publicly as it could compromise ongoing funding decisions. You can dress it up in legalese, but it feels as though the sector is being silenced in order that these cuts can be forced through with little or no scrutiny. The public have a right to know about the damage this decision will do, and the thousands of lives they will cost.”

Stephanie Draper, chief executive of Bond, the NGO network, described reports that people were being warned against speaking out as “very concerning”. “Policymakers and the public need to understand the serious implications of this political decision,” she said.

British aid cuts to leave tens of thousands of Syrians ‘paperless’ | Aid | The Guardian