Pfizer has said it expects $15bn (£11bn) of sales this year of the coronavirus vaccine it developed with German firm BioNTech. The vaccine sales represent a quarter of its expected revenue for this year.
An Unequal World
The U.S. is a failed state, one that is negligent of the health needs of millions of people during a deadly pandemic, unable or unwilling to address the basic needs of tens of millions of its working people, and valuing their labor for its role in creating wealth, but not their lives.
By the end of 2019, total global wealth stood at $399.2 trillion, but just a mere 0.1% of the global population, totaling 175,000 ultra-wealthy people, owned 25% of global wealth.
Together with another 52 million millionaires, making up the top 1%, they owned 43.3% of all personal wealth.
Meanwhile billions of people who make up the bottom half of humanity have no personal wealth at all with a pitiful share of just 1% of the global wealth, with the bottom 90% holding only 19%.
Furthermore, the share of North America and Europe of this wealth in 2019 was 55%, despite those regions comprising just 17% of the global population. That leaves the ‘poor south,’ where 83% of all people reside, with only 45% of total global wealth.
Between the years 1975 and 2018 an astounding, but still conservatively estimated, $47 trillion shifted upwards from the working people in the bottom 90 percentile to the top 1%.
Considered on a more acute level, the combined income of a household of two full-time workers in 2018 is barely more than what a single worker would have earned had inequalities remained at the 1975 level.
By 2020, this financial strip-mining of the bottom 90% had exceeded $50 trillion, or the equivalent of paying every working person in the bottom 90% an additional $13,728 annually.
In the US, the median male worker had to work 33 weeks in 1985 to pay for healthcare, housing, transportation and family educational expenses and 53 weeks by 2018.
This is organized theft. The U.S. is perhaps the richest society ever in history, yet you wouldn’t know it. The U.S. has been suffering from “deaths of despair” caused by opioids, alcoholism, depression, and suicides taking the lives of tens of thousands of white middle-aged working people and causing consecutive declines in their life expectancy.
Personal debt exceeds $14 trillion.
Some 87 million people lacked adequate healthcare coverage before the pandemic hit.
62% of personal bankruptcies have been linked to illness.
40% of the people could not afford $400 in emergency cash, again before the pandemic and the economic depression of 2020.
Half of all workers lived paycheck to paycheck.
Student debt went from zero in 1960 to $1.7 trillion by 2020.
On average, U.S. citizens die holding $62,000 worth of debt.
The Covid-19 pandemic and capitalist logic combined to further exacerbate inequalities and cause suffering.
Between March and November of 2020 in the U.S. the 650 U.S. billionaires grew their wealth by $1 trillion and now own nearly $4 trillion in total, or 3.5% of the estimated $112 trillion of all privately held household wealth in the U.S.
The top 1% owned $34.23 trillion (30.5%) of this wealth, the top 10% owned $77.32 trillion (69.04%), while the bottom half of the population owned just $2.08 trillion (1.86%).
Therefore, just 650 people, the billionaires, owned twice as much as the bottom 165 million people combined.
Jeff Bezos added $70 billion to his wealth (a 61.4% increase), making his wealth stand at $182.4 billion by November.
Elon Musk’s wealth surged by a whopping 413% to a total of $126.2 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg saw 85.9% growth in his wealth reaching a total of $101.7 billion.
Bill Gates increased his net worth by 21.8% to a total sum of $98 billion.
And Warren Buffett’s worth reached $88.3 billion, a 30.8% increase during the same period.
The media often talk about the ups and downs of the stock market as if it reflects the general economic conditions of ordinary workers, however:
(1) the bottom 50% in the U.S. own just $0.16 trillion in stocks while the top 1% own $14.04 trillion, and
(2) the top 10% own more than 88% of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares. Such assets comprised about 41% of their overall wealth in the 2nd quarter of 2020.
Consequently, the rise in the stock market during the pandemic – fueled by the Fed injecting trillions of dollars into the financial markets and slashing interest rates – massively benefited the top 10% and helped further widen the wealth gap.
Tax policies have also contributed to the runaway inequality in the U.S. To give just two examples: The recently deceased Casino magnet, Sheldon Adelson, whose net worth was at least $34 billion, received $560 million in tax breaks from the Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017,
And Charles Koch, with a net worth of $113 billion, received a $1.4 billion tax break.
Meanwhile, in the other America, in 2020, 8 million people slipped into poverty between May and November when the initial aid to mitigate the pandemic suffering and the effects of business closures ran its course without renewal by the governing class.
A survey of U.S. households released by the US Census Bureau on Dec. 2, 2020 showed that 31% of households had difficulty paying for the usual household expenses; 35.3% worried that an “eviction or foreclosure in the next two months is either very likely or somewhat likely”; 12.7% say “there was either sometimes or often not enough to eat in the last 7 days”; and 31% of adults expected “someone in their household to have a loss in employment income in the next 4 weeks.”
All this in a year in which from mid-March to mid-October more than 84 million claims were filed for unemployment compensation – that’s more than half the civilian labor force – indicating devastating conditions for the working people.
As of January 29, 2021, there were 25.8 million cases of coronavirus reported in the U.S. with the number of deaths standing at 434,783.
To help visualize this insurmountable loss, consider the following. There were on average 1.7 deaths per minute from Covid-19 in the month of Dec. 2020 alone. The nation’s life expectancy at birth is expected to drop by a year for the first time since WWII from 78.8 to 77.7. Each person who has died from Covid-19 was on average deprived of about 13 years of life amounting to more than 5.65 million years of life lost in total (given the number of deaths as of this writing).
Already more than 3.1 million people have lost a close relative. And these deaths are not evenly distributed, for 1 in 800 blacks have died compared to 1 in 1325 whites.
Biden promises a return to a pre-Trump normality bear in mind that a return to the pre-neoliberal period still poses two serious problems.
(1) Leaving capital with all its powers and resources intact only guarantees that it will find ways to rollback whatever gains we are able to make, as it in fact has done since the late 1970s.
(2) Capitalism’s very existence depends on an endless process of the accumulation of capital.
Late Capitalism and Its Runaway Inequality Problem | Dissident Voice
Regimenting Asylum Seekers in Barracks
The Home Office placed hundreds of asylum seekers in controversial military barracks following fears that better accommodation would “undermine confidence” in the system. Critics say ministers were “pandering to prejudice” and jeopardising health for “political ends”.
Conditions in two Ministry of Defence (MoD) sites – known as Napier Barracks, in Folkestone, Kent, and Penally Barracks, in Pembrokeshire – since they were were repurposed for housing asylum seekers last September prompted campaigners, lawyers and humanitarian groups to report poor access to healthcare and legal advice, as well as concerns over coronavirus safety.
Bridget Chapman, of local charity Kent Refugee Action Network, said the Home Office’s decision to use “inappropriate and isolated” buildings as asylum seeker accommodation was a “deliberate choice to create a narrative of being deliberately tough on those seeking sanctuary”.
An official document states that destitute asylum seekers are “not analogous” to British citizens and other permanent residents who are in need of state welfare assistance, and that the “less generous” support provided to this group is “justified by the need to control immigration. Any provision of support over and beyond what is necessary to enable the individuals to meet their housing and subsistence needs could undermine public confidence in the asylum system and hamper wider efforts to tackle prejudice and promote understanding within the general community and amongst other migrant groups.”
Sophie Lucas, solicitor at Duncan Lewis, a law firm that has represented a number of asylum seekers who have subsequently been moved out of the barracks, said the document insinuated that a less generous system for asylum seekers was a “legitimate response” to outcry from extremist groups.
“Instead of attempting to combat bigotry and hostility towards asylum seekers, the Home Office have pandered to prejudice. Penalising an already extremely vulnerable group of people in this way is unlawful,” she said.
Chai Patel, legal director at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), said: “The government implied these cramped and disused barracks were being used as temporary housing because there was no alternative. But this document reveals that Home Office has been jeopardising people’s health for partly political ends – prioritising playing ‘tough’ on migration over the lives of extremely vulnerable people, who’ve been placed in conditions reminiscent of those they were fleeing.”
Naomi Phillips, director of policy and advocacy at British Red Cross, said the sites were “completely inappropriate and inhumane” as housing for refugees, and called for them to be close “urgently”.
Chagos Islanders – Another betrayal
Less than £12,000 of a £40m fund set up to compensate Chagos islanders who were forcibly evicted from their homeland by the British government has reached those living in the UK.
Four years after it was announced, the Foreign Office fund has distributed less than 1% of its budget in direct support to islanders forced from their homes in the Indian Ocean.
The limited Foreign Office funding used so far has been spent on interpretation services for Chagossians, many of whom depend on French creole translation, and modest support for community groups.
Money was also spent on scoping visits to the islands by government officials, with several hundred thousand pounds used for “heritage trips”, granting Chagossians short stays on the islands, often to tend to relatives’ graves. Chagossian charity groups have, however, described this use of the support fund as “disingenuous”.
Chagossian charities have been handing out crisis grants of £50 to families who are struggling to buy food or pay for funeral costs but have expressed frustration that the multi-million pound support fund is not being utilised.
The Conservative MP Henry Smith, whose constituency of Crawley in West Sussex is home to most of Britain’s 3,000-plus Chagossian population, said: “The £40m support fund was announced almost five years ago and it has been tortuous to extract money from it ever since…it’s outrageous that next to none of this funding has actually been utilised. The fact that this sort of funding hasn’t been deployed is another failure of Foreign Office promises over half a century to the Chagossian community.”
Just £12,000 of £40m fund for displaced Chagos islanders has been spent | World news | The Guardian
Britain’s Exclusive Education
Bursaries for poorer children to attend private fee-paying schools have been far too scarce to significantly open up access to them to the less affluent. According to new research on social mobility found that the bursaries could not “account for more than a minor share of the participation” of families with lower incomes.
Bursaries and grants “are relatively low in value and distributed to only one in five of families” outside the top 10% richest families, according to the research by University College London’s institute of education.
Bursary programmes have often been cited in response to criticisms that high fees continue to make the schools the preserve of the rich. The findings challenge the idea that such schemes have made a major dent in the exclusivity of private schools. The team also found a link between middle- and lower-income families with children in private education and housing wealth, suggesting booming house prices have helped them get access to private schooling despite higher fees.
“Though income progressive and related to need, bursaries and grants are relatively low in value and distributed to only one in five of families outside the top decile; they cannot, therefore, account for more than a minor share of the participation of these non-income-rich families,” the team concluded. “However, among homeowners, non-rich families with privately educated children have much greater housing wealth than families with children in state schools.
Britain remained “distinctive” in the significant social and economic divide between private and state school pupils, describing it as “among the highest in the developed world”. While about 9% of adults have been to an independent school, private schooling remained “a significant pathway through which some families obtain long-term advantages for their children”.
The proportion of pupils helped with financial support has not significantly increased, despite the costs of private schooling rising considerably. By 2018, the average annual basic fee was £14,280 for day schools and £33,684 for boarding schools – a 60% real-terms increase from 2000 and three times the 1980 fees.
Since 1997, they found that throughout the period, around 15 out of every 100 pupils received direct financial support. The value of financial support was around £4,900 in 2011–2018, little changed from earlier periods and “thus accounting for a smaller fraction of the fees: 35% compared with 57% in the first period”.
The paper concludes: “The data could not conclusively support claims that the private school sector has widened access for students from low-income families through more generous financial support.”
Private school bursaries ‘still too scarce’ to tackle inequality | Private schools | The Guardian
Unequal before the law
The founders of the US Constitution accepted social inequality in many spheres, but they did insist on equality in one sphere. All citizens must be equal before the law. That is, the law must apply equally to all. No one must enjoy legal immunity, not even – indeed, especially not — those chosen to govern the country. For otherwise the new republic would have a government of men instead of a government of laws – the fundamental principle cherished by the founders.
No doubt legal equality was always something of a myth. Rarely has effective legal protection been available to non-whites or to strikers, for instance. Nevertheless, until recent decades the powerful could not be sure of immunity. The boss of a big city political machine could be struck down by the courts and end up in jail. But this is no longer so. Legal immunity for the political and corporate elite is now deeply entrenched.
If the president does it, it cannot be illegal
In his book With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2011), Glenn Greenwald explains how this was achieved. The story begins with Richard Nixon, who first declared that ‘if the president does it, it cannot be illegal.’ A series of presidents established the practice by which each new occupant of the office thwarts any investigation or prosecution of crimes committed by his predecessor — even when this requires breaking campaign promises, as in the case of Obama’s refusal to do anything about the use of torture by the Bush administration.
Immunity was extended from the political to the corporate elite when plaintiffs sued telecommunications companies for illegally tapping their customers’ telephone conversations and e-mail messages and sharing them with the National Security Agency. Not only were the court actions blocked, but Congress was lobbied and bribed to legalize retroactively what the companies had done. (It is extremely rare for crimes to be legalized retroactively.)
No charges were ever filed against the banks whose abuses led to the financial crisis of 2008 – not even for the fraudulent foreclosures that dispossessed mortgage holders and evicted them from their homes.
Members of the elite have often been accused of sexually abusing minors. Greenwald does not deal with crimes of this sort. I have commented on the matter twice on my personal website: here and here.
Look to the future?
A favorite rationale is that ‘we should look forward to the future, not dwell on the past.’ As Greenwald points out, consistent application of this rationale would eliminate the whole system of criminal and civil justice, for reacting to what happened in the past is the business of all law enforcement and court procedure.
Such forgiveness, obviously, is not meant for ordinary people. Indeed,
the lack of accountability for elites goes hand-in-hand with a lack of mercy for everyone else. As our politicians increasingly claim the right to commit crimes with impunity, they impose increasingly severe punishments on ordinary Americans who have broken even minor laws (p. 222).
Laws have been passed setting ‘mandatory minimum’ sentences for specific crimes, depriving judges of much of their discretion and preventing them from taking due account of mitigating circumstances.
One way to highlight the contrast between ‘the law for the rich’ and ‘the law for the poor’ is to compare cases of similar crimes committed by individuals near the top and the bottom of our society. Take the following pair of cases of unarmed theft:
First case: Richard Lynn Scott
As CEO of the Hospital Corporation of America, Richard Lynn Scott masterminded schemes to defraud Medicare of an estimated $7 billion. Without admitting guilt, he settled all civil claims against him by coughing up $1.7 billion, about a quarter of the amount he had stolen. He was not charged with any crime.
In 2011 the voters of Florida rewarded Scott for his business acumen by electing him governor. This gave him the power to decide whether to pardon any of the small-time thieves languishing in the state’s jails.
In 2019 Scott was elected to the US Senate.
Second case: Roy Brown
Roy Brown, a homeless black man in Shreveport, Louisiana, walked into a bank, pointed his finger at a teller from inside his jacket, and told her it was a robbery. She handed him three stacks of bills, but he took only a single $100 bill and gave the rest back. Next day he turned himself in to the police and told them that he had needed the money for food and shelter. He pled guilty to first-degree robbery and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
To sum up. Brown stole $100, Scott $7 billion. Brown had mitigating circumstances: he stole much less than he could have; he turned himself in; he needed money for food and shelter. Scott had no mitigating circumstances. Brown was sentenced to 15 years. Scott was never even charged with a crime.
Now let us re-run the second case in our imagination to narrow the gap between the outcomes:
When Brown confessed his crime to the police officer, the response was: ‘Well, that’s no big deal. How much of the $100 do you have left?’ ‘Twenty-five.’ ‘OK, we’ll go and give that back to the bank. They’ll lose 75, but they can afford it.’ The bank manager agreed to write off the loss and no charges were filed. The next year Brown was elected mayor.
This, I remind you, is a daydream. When we reach the point at which it is a plausible outcome, socialism will not be far off.
Hit and run
There are degrees of legal immunity. Only a tiny elite enjoy complete immunity, but a larger group have partial immunity. The police and the courts treat them with special leniency in deference to their high social status.
Consider the case of Martin Erzinger, who was driving in Colorado in July 2010 when he swerved, hit a bicyclist from behind, and sped away. The bicyclist received serious injuries to the brain, spinal cord, and knee. A few minutes later Erzinger stopped in a parking lot and called an auto assistance service to report damage to his car and ask to be towed. He did not contact police or call an ambulance for the victim.
‘Hit and run’ is a felony in Colorado, but the district attorney charged Erzinger with a mere misdemeanor, which carries no jail time. He explained that he didn’t want to disrupt Erzinger’s professional work as a hedge fund manager ‘overseeing over $1 billion in assets for ultra-high net worth individuals’ (Greenwald, pp. 101-103).
When corporate crime gives rise to court proceedings, the severest possible penalty is a fine or damages to be paid by the corporation. A CEO or other corporate officer cannot be penalized as an individual, however great his role in decisions to commit crimes.
Stephen Shenfield
Unequal before the law | World Socialist Party of the US (wspus.org)
Unfair to workers
One in four workers in the UK lack basic employment protection.
The TUC found that 7.5 million employees have no protection from unfair dismissal because of the law which says workers must be employed for two years to qualify.
Nearly half of hospitality staff and a third of people working in the retail, wholesale and vehicle repair sector have not been in their jobs long enough to qualify for unfair dismissal rights. All employees should have unfair dismissal rights from day one in a job, urged the union.
7.5 million UK workers lack basic employment rights as jobless rate set to rise | The Independent
This Land is Your Land
‘Life’s pretty tough …you’re lucky if you live through it.’ – Woody Guthrie
At Biden’s inauguration Jennifer Lopez started off the festivities off with a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land…but, of course did not sing all the relevant and pertinent verses of the original
No
As I was walkin’ – I saw a sign there
And that sign said “No trespassin’”
But on the other side …. it didn’t say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!
No
In the squares of the city – In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office – I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me
This article by a biographer goes into more detail about Woody Guthrie and his song.
“…Once you have read the song’s lyrics in their entirety, the title phrase sheds all quasi-Kumbaya resonances and becomes what Guthrie meant it to be: a defiant, deeply radical statement of opposition to capitalist exploitation. The song’s words are critical and fierce, not cosy and reassuring: This land is your land, it declares to its listeners, not the land of the people who, according to market logic, own it, hold the deeds to it, exploit it for profit. Land is not a commodity. Those deeds are fictions, and the owners are, essentially, thieves…”
“… Initially written in 1940 as a retort to Irving Berlin’s jingoistic God Bless America, Guthrie’s song is a scathing condemnation of the very idea that land can be owned, treated as property. In a rarely aired verse of the original lyrics, a sign reading “private property” interrupts the wandering minstrel’s cross-continental stroll. But the disturbance is only momentary, for the singer quickly notes that “on the other side, it didn’t say nothing/That side was made for you and me”. And, in another little-known verse, the singer witnesses starving people lined up at a soup kitchen, leading him to shift the refrain to a question: “Is this land made for you and me?” …”
Further reading:
Woody Guthrie. Resonant Voice for the Downtrodden: Woolly-Eyed Lefty (worldsocialism.org)
Price of food goes up
In the last year, Covid-19 has undone the economic, health and food security of millions, pushing as many as 150 million people into extreme poverty. While the health and economic impacts of the pandemic have been devastating, the rise in hunger has been one of its most tangible symptoms.
Income losses have translated into less money in people’s pockets to buy food while market and supply disruptions due to movement restrictions have created local shortages and higher prices, especially for perishable food.
Global food prices, as measured by a World Bank food price index, rose 14% last year.
Covid crisis is fuelling food price rises for world’s poorest | Food security | The Guardian
Less Russians
Yet another story of falling populations.
Russia’s population shrank by about half a million last year.
There were 229,700 more deaths between January and November 2020 than in the same period the previous year.
Putin has long called for greater efforts towards population growth. Last year, he blamed the trend on low incomes.
Experts say further causes other than the pandemic are the migration of younger, well-educated people abroad and the low birth rate.
Russia: Population shrinks for first time in 15 years | Russia News | Al Jazeera