The pro-democracy campaigns in Hong Kong may have fallen out of the media headlines and been replaced by the struggles against the Myanmar military coup but they are very closely related. Both governments have deprived people of their political and labour rights and are acting more and more ruthlessly. 

The Chinese state are  suppressing and persecuting trade union officials. The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions is appealing for support and solidarity. This video has been posted to explain the situation. 

  UN envoy said US and EU sanctions on Venezuela were worsening a humanitarian crisis and recommended that the United States relax the measures.

 Alena Douhan, a UN special rapporteur focusing on sanctions, recommended in a preliminary report that the sanctions be lifted, and the Venezuelan government be granted access to funds frozen in the US, United Kingdom and Portugal.

“Unilateral sanctions increasingly imposed by the United States, the European Union and other countries have exacerbated the abovementioned calamities,” Douhan told reporters.

Maduro’s government blames the sanctions for Venezuela’s economic woes.  Once a prosperous OPEC nation,  the economic decline started in 2014 before the imposition of economic sanctions with the downturn in oil prices and that mismanagement and corruption also contributed.

UN envoy draws rebuke for bid to relax Venezuela sanctions | Politics News | Al Jazeera

Some background reading on sanctions

Sanctions: Waging war without bullets – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)

 The humanitarian crisis in Yemen has been repeatedly featured in the media headlines for quite some time and still little has been done to alleviate the suffering.

According to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Acute Malnutrition report (pdf), 2,254,663 Yemeni children under five years old are so malnourished that they require medical treatment. 

Of these, 395,195 suffer from severe acute malnutrition, which is potentially fatal,  an increase of 22 percent over 2020.

Additionally, 1,155,653 pregnant and breastfeeding women are “acutely malnourished.”

“These numbers are yet another cry for help from Yemen, where each malnourished child also means a family struggling to survive,” said David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, which prepared the report with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), UNICEF, and the World Health Organization. “The crisis in Yemen is a toxic mix of conflict, economic collapse, and a severe shortage of funding.”

Henrietta Fore, executive director of UNICEF, said that “the increasing number of children going hungry in Yemen should shock us all into action. More children will die with every day that passes without action.”

Qu Dongyu, who heads the FAO, added that “families in Yemen have been in the grip of conflict for too long, and more recent threats such as Covid-19 have only been adding to their relentless plight.”

 Meeting held online via Discord – Glenn Morris, 11th December 2020

Why are socialists so few in number?

 The British medical journal The Lancet after undertaking a comprehensive assessment of the health and environment impacts of Donald Trump’s presidency, estimated that rollbacks of environmental and workplace protections led to 22,000 excess deaths in 2019 alone. The 22,000 additional 2019 deaths occurred largely in states that voted for Trump, while Democratic states such as California and New York had their own laws that acted as a safety net. They also found that 40% of U.S. deaths during 2020 from Covid-19 would have been avoided if the country’s death rate had been closer to that of its G7 peers. 

The report noted that Trump rolled back 84 vital regulations covering everything from toxins in water to the way scientific research gets used by the federal government, with 20 more rule changes still in progress by the end of his term. The resulting increase in airborne particulate matter was the primary cause of the excess deaths, the authors concluded. 

The authors note, for example, that American life expectancy rates have been declining compared to other high-income nations since the 1980s. But instead of moving to solve this decline, the report argues that the former president specifically exploited low- and middle-income White people’s anger over their deteriorating prospects to mobilize the racial animus and xenophobia that propelled his political success. 

The report also emphasizes the racial disparities in health that grew under Trump, including the fact that most of the 2.3 million Americans who lost health insurance while he was in office were minorities.

Trump’s environment policies killed thousands, scientists say | Climate Change News | Al Jazeera

 Salmon farming is wreaking ruin on marine ecosystems, through pollution, parasites and high fish mortality rates which are causing billions of pounds a year in damage, a new assessment of the global salmon farming industry has found. Taken together, these costs amounted to about $50bn globally from 2013 to 2019, according to a new report. Scotland is one of the biggest producers of farmed salmon in the world, with the industry worth an estimated £2bn a year to the Scottish economy. But the costs in environmental terms alone were reckoned to be £1.4bn from 2013 to 2019, by Just Economics, which carried out the research for the report, entitled Dead Loss.

Fish mortality has more than quadrupled, from 3% in 2002 to about 13.5% in 2019, in Scottish salmon farms alone. About a fifth of these deaths are recorded as being due to sea lice infestations, but about two thirds are unaccounted for so the real mortality owing to sea lice – which feed on salmon skin and mucus, effectively eating the fish alive – could be much higher. Mowi, a Norwegian company, produces a fifth of the world’s farmed Atlantic salmon, and is named in the report as showing 50m premature fish deaths from 2010 to 2019, at a cost of about $1.7bn.

The sheer quantity of wild fish used in salmon farms is also a growing concern. About a fifth of the world’s annual wild fish catch, amounting to about 18m tonnes of wild fish a year, is used to make fishmeal and fish oil, of which about 70% goes to fish farms. This is causing problems for fishers in developing countries, who are seeing their stocks depleted in order to feed western consumption of farmed fish, according to the report. Key species such as sardines in west Africa are now heavily overfished for this purpose, and this situation is likely to deteriorate further as fish farmers plan substantial expansion in the coming years. Scotland alone plans to double its farming capacity by 2030, while Norway expects a fivefold increase by 2050, according to the report.

The report also examined the salmon farming industry in Canada, Norway and Chile, the other biggest global producers. It found that of the costs associated with fish farming, about 60% were borne by the producers, especially in the form of fish mortality and the cost of treating sea lice, but about 40% of the costs were borne by wider society, for instance in pollution, loss of fish populations and the impacts on the climate crisis.

Salmon farmers could use oils from algae as a source of Omega 3 for their farmed fish, to replace fish oil from wild fish, but few do so, according to the report. Natasha Hurley, campaigns manager at the Changing Markets Foundation, told the Guardian: “Moving away from using wild caught fish in food would make salmon farming more sustainable, as it is having a huge impact on wild fish.

Global salmon farming harming marine life and costing billions in damage | Marine life | The Guardian

 Trading Places

Europe is an estranged and foreign land,

Its Union designed to deprive the free

British of their glorious sovereignty:

But then the moment came to make a stand.

A simple vote is all that was involved,

Plus four years of vitriol and rancour,

Until Britannia finally upped anchor

And the ties that bind were, at last, dissolved.

Now with power firmly in the national grip,

New economic arrangements are planned,

Tying trade to the Comprehensive and

Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Although the furniture’s been rearranged,

For all the bluster and bile, nothing’s changed.

D. A.

 Yet another report that polluted air risks around six million people aged over 65 in England lung damage and asthma attacks because of toxic air.

 Further to the previous post on Trump’s death toll the commission emphasized that the country entered the pandemic with an already degraded public health infrastructure. Between 2002 and 2019, US public health spending fell from 3.21% to 2.45% – approximately half the share of spending in Canada and the UK.

The commission found if US life expectancy was equivalent to the average in the other G7 countries, 461,000 fewer Americans would have died in 2018.

Between 2017 and 2018, the health insurance coverage rate decreased by 1.6 percentage points for Latinos – roughly 1.5 million people – and by 2.8 percentage points for Native American and Alaska native people, while remaining stable for the white population.

US could have averted 40% of Covid deaths, says panel examining Trump’s policies | US news | The Guardian

Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, insisted that it remain patent free. Asked who owned the patent 65 years ago, he replied, “The people I would say. There is no patent. You might as well ask, could you patent the sun?”

Making life-saving vaccines, medicines and equipment available, freely or affordably, has been crucial for containing the spread of many infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS, polio and smallpox. Refusal to temporarily suspend several World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property (IP) provisions to enable much faster and broader progress in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic is resulting in the deaths of many and some experts say should be grounds for a International Criminal Court prosecution. Enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRs) is relatively recent. The 1994 WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) greatly strengthened and extended IP transnationally. IPRs have effectively denied access to patented formulas and processes except to the highest bidders.

Vaccine developers expect to be very profitable, thanks to national and transnational IP laws. Thus, IP has distorted research priorities and discouraged cooperation and knowledge sharing, so essential to progress. Wealthier nations are falling out among themselves, fighting for access to vaccine supplies, as IP profits take precedence over lives and livelihoods. ‘Vaccine nationalism’ involves cut-throat contests responding to scarcity due to limited output. Vaccine nationalism has also meant that among the rich, the powerful come first. Consequently, most developing countries and most of their people will have to wait longer than necessary for vaccines, while the powerful and better off secure prior access, regardless of need or urgency.

Although TRIPS now allows such government public health efforts, developing countries remain constrained by compulsory licensing’s complex rules, procedures and conditions. Threats and inducements by transnational corporations and their governments limit its use. Hence, use of compulsory licensing by developing countries has been largely limited to several more independent middle-income countries and HIV/AIDS medicines.

 The combination of IP and vaccine warfare is responsible for more avoidable losses of both lives and livelihoods. Developing nations, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, have been left far behind in most programmes for COVID-19 prevention, containment, treatment and vaccination.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General (DG) Tedros warns “the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure…the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries”. He explains that “the international community cannot allow a handful of companies to dictate the terms or the timeframe for ending the pandemic”; “vaccine nationalism combined with a restrictive approach to vaccine production is in fact more likely to prolong the pandemic … tantamount to medical malpractice on a global scale”

At current rates, more than 85 poor countries will not have significant access before the end of 2023! In 70 lower income countries, only one in ten will be vaccinated. Of the 7.2 billion confirmed sales of COVID-19 vaccine doses, 4.2 billion have gone to the wealthiest nations. With only 16% of the world’s population, high income countries have secured 60% of available doses. Meanwhile, the African Union has only procured 670 million for the continent’s 1.3 billion people.

The IP system discourages, rather than encourages cooperation and sharing, both essential for accelerating progress. Although IP requires sharing research results, no vaccine developer has done so yet. Vaccine developers do not expect to profit much from the poor, so there exists little commercial incentive to provide them with adequate supply.  Many people die needlessly for profit.

Intellectual Property Cause of Death, Genocide | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)