At the Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference on December 9, 2020, Blackstone’s billionaire CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, boasted that after the 2008 financial crisis, his firm was able to cash in on the mortgage crisis. At the time, the company was able to buy up foreclosed homes and convert them into rental properties subsequently plagued by accusations of dilapidation and excessive fees — all while it received a big financial boost from the government.  The firm is also now the world’s largest commercial landlord. 

Schwarzman indicated his firm is positioning itself for a similar jackpot from the pandemic economic pain. Schwarzman seemed to insinuate that his firm may buy up even more residential real estate to try to squeeze even more revenue out of renters in the pandemic-ravaged economy.

“You always have winners and losers — Blackstone was a huge winner coming out of the global financial crisis, and I think something similar is going to happen,” he said. 

Blackstone has also been evicting residents during the pandemic, according to court filings compiled by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. And Blackstone has faced a legal showdown with New York tenants at one of the city’s largest rental complexes, which it owns. There, the company has been trying to exempt thousands of units from rent regulation laws. The company has reportedly even kept Manhattan units empty rather than face rent control regulations.

“About half of the firm’s earnings are from a real estate business. Just to give you some idea how this breaks, we pick the good neighborhoods, if you will. Real estate has a lot of different sub-asset classes. And we’ve concentrated in logistics. It’s about 36 percent of all the real estate we own,” he said. “We’re the largest owner of real estate in the private world. And that asset class has boomed with huge increases in rents, almost no occupancies, rent collections from almost everyone.”

In 2018 and 2020, it gave millions to political groups that successfully fought to defeat rent control ballot initiatives in California, where Blackstone has significant real estate investments.

In Britain, Blackstone has become UK’s small businesses’ largest landlord — and the company has been accused of jeopardizing the viability of those businesses by refusing to waive rent when they were forced to shut down during the pandemic.

Blackstone CEO Celebrates “Huge Increases in Rents” as Millions Face Eviction (jacobinmag.com)

 More than half a million people from ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang have been coerced into picking cotton, on a scale far greater than previously thought.

The Xinjiang region produces more than 20% of the world’s cotton and 84% of China’s, but according to a new report  by the Center for Global Policy there is significant evidence that it is “tainted” by human rights abuses, including  forced labour of Uighur and other Turkic Muslim minority people. 

The revelations came as the international criminal court (ICC) said it did not have the jurisdiction to investigate allegations of crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang. China’s treatment of the minority populations – including the mass internment of people in re-education camps, enforced sterilisation of women, technological and human surveillance – has been labelled cultural genocide by analysts. In July, exiled Uighurs delivered a dossier of evidence to the ICC asking it to investigate crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang. On Monday, the office of prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said it was unable to do so because the alleged crimes happened inside China, which was outside the ICC’s jurisdiction.

 China’s labour transfer scheme is purported to be part of the government’s massive poverty alleviation campaign, but growing evidence indicates it targets Uighur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and coerces participation. Areas in the south of Xinjiang – which produce a far larger share of the cotton – remain heavily reliant on manual picking. And while the number of workers brought in from other provinces for the harvest season had dropped, the report found the proportion of local ethnic minority labourers had increased dramatically.  570,000 people came through three minority-heavy prefectures alone – Aksu, Hotan, and Kashgar – and that labor programs in other ethnic minority regions as well as prison labor would probably add hundreds of thousands to the figure.

In September research which was corroborated by Reuters, found authorities in Tibet were massively expanding the labour transfer program, setting quotas to move hundreds of thousands of people off their land and into military-style work training facilities.

Xinjiang: more than half a million forced to pick cotton, report suggests | Xinjiang | The Guardian

Already Americans, Britons and Canadians are receiving coronavirus vaccines. Coronavirus has exposed vast inequities between countries.

“The whole call for global solidarity has mostly been lost,” said Dr. Katherine O’Brien, WHO’s vaccines chief.

Kate Elder, vaccines policy adviser at Doctors Without Borders, said “it’s increasingly looking like the ship has sailed on equitable vaccine distribution”

As more countries in the West authorize the vaccine, “the difference between people in rich countries getting vaccinated and the lack of any vaccines for the developing world will become quite stark,” said Anna Marriott, health policy manager at Oxfam. “And it will only prolong the pandemic.”

COVAX was created to ensure the entire world has access to COVID-19 vaccines. COVAX was set up by the World Health Organization, vaccines alliance GAVI and CEPI, a global coalition to fight epidemics, to avoid the international stampede for vaccines that has accompanied past outbreaks and would reinforce those imbalances.

 But COVAX has secured only a fraction of the 2 billion doses it hopes to buy over the next year, has yet to confirm any actual deals to ship out vaccines and is short on cash.  Some experts say the chances that coronavirus shots will be shared fairly between rich nations and the rest are fading fast. With vaccine supplies currently limited, developed countries, some of which helped fund the research with taxpayer money, are under tremendous pressure to protect their own populations and are buying up shots. Meanwhile, some poorer countries that signed up to the initiative are looking for alternatives because of fears it won’t deliver.

“It’s simple math,” said Arnaud Bernaert, head of global health at the World Economic Forum. Of the approximately 12 billion doses the pharmaceutical industry is expected to produce next year, about 9 billion shots have already been reserved by rich countries. “COVAX has not secured enough doses, and the way the situation may unfold is they will probably only get these doses fairly late.”

COVAX’s only confirmed, legally binding agreement is for up to 200 million doses, though that includes an option to order several times that number of additional doses, GAVI spokesman James Fulker said. It has agreements for another 500 million vaccines, but those are not legally binding. The 200 million doses will come from the Serum Institute of India, the company that will likely make a large portion of the coronavirus shots destined for the developing world. CEO Adar Poonawalla says it has a confirmed order for 100 million doses each of a vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca and one from Novovax.

“We don’t have anything beyond that in writing,” he told The Associated Press. “If they want more, they’ll have to place more orders.”

He said the lack of commitment from COVAX will mean a much longer wait for people in developing countries. 

Even with vaccines in hand, the rollouts will take many months, even in rich countries, and many developing ones are facing serious logistical challenges that will add to delays, noted Dr. Gagandeep Kang, an infectious diseases expert at the Christian Medical College at Vellore in southern India.

According to a report GAVI, the alliance itself concluded that the risk COVAX will fail is “very high,” saying it was “established in record time and has to navigate unchartered territory.”

Amid fears COVAX can’t deliver, some developing countries are pulling out entirely or seeking their own private deals. Earlier this month, the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau announced it was abandoning the initiative and would get donated vaccines from the U.S. instead. Other low and middle-income countries, including Malaysia, Peru, and Bangladesh, have stayed in the initiative but also recently inked their own deals with drug-makers as a Plan B.

Anban Pillay of the South African Ministry of Health said that joining COVAX was just a stop-gap measure before signing bilateral deals with pharmaceutical companies.

South Africa and India have asked the World Trade Organization to waive some provisions regulating intellectual property rights to make it easier for manufacturers in poor countries to make COVID-19 drugs and vaccines. But many rich countries are reluctant to do that.

Poor countries face long wait for vaccines despite promises (apnews.com)

More than half of furloughed jobs in the UK are at the highest risk of automation as the Covid crisis accelerates workplace technology change, driving up redundancies and inequality across the country, according to a two-year commission on workers and technology,  organised by the Fabian Society and the Community trade union, found.

As many as 61% of jobs furloughed in the first half of this year were in sectors where automation is most likely to lead to job losses. 5.9 million of the 9.6 million furloughed workers were in the third of sectors with jobs at highest risk of automation, according to analysis of Office for National Statistics figures.

Rapid adoption of technology during the coronavirus pandemic has helped protect jobs as millions of employees work from home. But while employers have used new technologies to survive, the commission said many furloughed jobs would not return as a result. Physical-distancing requirements, remote working and online shopping have driven consumers and firms to make permanent changes to the way they use technology this year, with the pandemic likely to have a lasting impact on business and society. While spending in some physical shops has collapsed, resulting in thousands of job cuts by well-known high street employers, online spending has boomed – benefiting firms with fewer staff and highly automated operations.

The low-paid and disadvantaged workers were more likely to work in jobs at high risk of automation, with women, younger and older workers, people from minority ethnic backgrounds and disabled staff most likely to lose out.

The commission chair, Labour MP Yvette Cooper, commented,  “There’s a real danger of widening inequality, long-term structural unemployment and low pay, as a result of people not being able to benefit from the economic recovery and improvements in technology that we all want to be able to benefit from.”

More than half of UK’s furloughed jobs at risk of automation – report | Business | The Guardian

END THE PANDEMIC – END CAPITALISM

Pre-existing social inequalities contributed to the UK recording the highest death rates from Covid in Europe, Sir Michael Marmot, a leading authority on public health,  said, and also warning that many children’s lives would be permanently blighted if the problem is not tackled.

In ‘Build Back Fairer’, Marmot argued in the new report that families at the bottom of the social and economic scale were missing out before the pandemic, and were now suffering even more, losing health, jobs, lives and educational opportunities. He said these social inequalities must be addressed whatever the cost and it was not enough to revert to how things before the pandemic. 

“We can’t afford not to do it,” he commented, “It is simply unacceptable that we say it’s OK for children to go to bed hungry … we’ve got some incorrect notions about the necessity of austerity … What is the society we want? We want to guarantee the health and wellbeing of all members and the fair distribution of health and well being. We simply can’t afford not to do it. The government debt is no excuse. We know that is incorrect understanding of economics.”

Marmot’s report painted a grim picture, underscored by statistics that showed the most-deprived families are worst hit. Men and women living in overcrowded conditions in the most deprived areas of the country are the most likely to die from Covid. Carers and those who work in the leisure and service industries have the highest death rates under the age of 64. People from black, Asian and ethnic minority groups who work as taxi drivers, bus drivers, security guards, carers and other low-paid occupations have a higher risk of death. High rates of unhappiness or depression, particularly among young people. Young people were also at greater risk of losing jobs in the pandemic.

Children and young people living in deprived areas had suffered disproportionately from lockdown, he found. “One of the effects of the pandemic was to increase the educational divide,” said Marmot. In the least deprived schools, few children were behind as a result of closures. In the most deprived, children were reported as four to six months behind. There had been “dramatic increases in food insecurity.” Marmot explained.

The government had already failed to act on his report in February showing austerity policies had already damaged health and cut life expectancy in England.

“Before the pandemic, life-expectancy increase had stalled, inequalities were increasing, and life expectancy for the poorest people was going down,” he said. “That was a measure that society wasn’t doing well. And then the high excess mortality during the pandemic is simply a measure of society not doing well.” The recommendations from his report addressed the reasons, he said, relating to governance and political culture as well as the widening gulf between those who have power, money and resources and those who do not. “We have to reverse the reduction in spending on public services – as I said we were ill prepared. We were unhealthy coming into the pandemic. Which means that we have to put the fair distribution of health and wellbeing at the heart of all government policy.”

Funding for public health had been slashed during the austerity years. “The budget for Public Health England was cut after its foundation in 2012 by 40% and the spending on public health in local government was cut by about £800m.

“So back in February/March, when we should have been setting up a national test, trace and isolate system, public health should have organised it,” he said.

But it did not happen that way. First of all, the policy was not to do it at all, he said, and then it was to hand it to a private company “and it doesn’t matter if the person running it doesn’t have any expertise, because we know private solutions are always better than public solutions so we’ll give it to the private sector to manage.

“Colossal error. We should have used public health, local public health – fund them properly, get them to do it.”

Jennifer Dixon, the chief executive of the Health Foundation, said there was no doubt the pandemic would be taking a toll for years to come. “Mitigating the damage caused by the pandemic to education, employment and income must be at the heart of the government’s plans for recovery and levelling up.

“It is absolutely unacceptable that in a country of such means there is such a strong divide between the richest and poorest in society.” she stated.

Pre-existing inequality led to record UK Covid death rate, says health chief | World news | The Guardian

 2.7 billion people have not received any public financial support to deal with the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Oxfam said

 The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown measures to contain it have hit millions of people hard, with poverty set to increase sharply in almost every country for the first time in decades unless action is taken now, according to a new report by Oxfam. o a new report by Oxfam. Hundreds of millions of people have lost their jobs and income.

Eight out of 10 countries not having given any financial support to even half their population, “women workers in low- and middle-income countries in particular are suffering, as they work in the worst-affected sectors, such as garments, services and domestic work,” the report said.

“The income of informal women workers dropped by 60 percent during the first month of the pandemic. In almost every country, unless action is taken now, poverty is set to increase sharply for the first time in decades,” it added.

There is a vast discrepancy between what wealthy nations have managed to do for their population and what the poorer nations – with more limited resources – could spend, the report said.

In total, countries around the world have raised $11.7 trillion in additional spending this year to cope with the fallout of COVID-19. Of this amount, 83 percent has come from 36 rich countries while 39 lower-income nations have raised $42bn, 0.4 percent of the total.

 G20 countries have infused $9.8 trillion into their economies, including measures to support workers and the general population. For social protection programmes, 28 rich countries have spent at the rate of $695 per person in comparison to $4 to $28 per person spent by 42 low- or middle-income countries, the report said.

While the richest will bounce back from this crisis quickly and with no help, poorer families will take years to get back on their feet, the report said.

With many countries dealing with a second wave of the pandemic and continued economic hardships, there is an urgent need for governments to implement universal social protection measures to support their people including with unemployment benefits, payments to the elderly, financial support for children and families, measures that would provide a “vital lifeline,” the report said.

“To prevent a terrible increase in global inequality, a huge investment in universal social protection is needed,” it said.

It also urged rich nations to step up financial support to poorer countries through the urgent provision of more aid and the cancellation of debts.

2.7 billion people did not get state aid during pandemic: Oxfam | Coronavirus pandemic News | Al Jazeera

Protests broke out at Wistron Infocomm’s manufacturing facility, a Taiwanese-run iPhone factory near Bangalore, in India.  Workers claim that they have not been fully paid for four months and are being forced to do extra shifts.

 Leaked documents show the UK has bought supplies of personal protective equipment from firms accused of modern slavery during the coronavirus pandemic despite warnings. Insiders say that the rush for PPE – which saw prices rise by more than 1,000 per cent in some cases – led to confusion, miscommunication and panic within the government.

  Companies were suspected of forced labour as long ago as November 2019 – with further concerns about suppliers highlighted by a UK diplomat yet tens of millions of items were still purchased from these firms, the majority of which are based in Malaysia.

The Home Office produced a report on the glove-manufacturing industry in Malaysia that concluded “corruption is endemic in the recruitment systems of Malaysia and migrant worker source countries, and touches every part of the recruitment supply chain”.

The report said there was “strong evidence” to suggest that the majority of Malaysian glove manufacturers that supply the NHS “exhibit forced labour indicators”.

Charles Hay, the UK high commissioner to Malaysia, emailed the Department for International Trade (DIT) to highlight persistent labour concerns within the country’s glove industry, and warned that Britain’s audit framework used to assess companies was not fit for purpose. He wrote to the Department of Health’s most senior civil servant, to warn over links to five glove companies: WRP, Ansell, Supermax, Kossan and Hartalega. He again raised fears about the auditing of companies and urged the department to work alongside the Foreign Office and DIT to address the government’s reliance on the heavily criticised industry.

Malaysian factories have been linked to the illegal recruitment of impoverished migrants from Bangladesh and Nepal, with accusations they have been forced to live and work in squalid conditions. Some have been accused of confiscating workers’ passports, leaving them vulnerable to debt bondage, where they are forced to pay off a loan that can never be repaid. The Department of Health purchased an entire stock of 88.5 million gloves from Supermax’s UK subsidiary, which is based in Peterborough and largely sources supplies from the company’s Malaysian factories. Workers in its factories claimed in 2019 that they had been forced to work up to 12 hours a day, for as many as 30 days in a row. 

NHS Supply Chain also has an ongoing £85m deal with international suppliers including Ansell, an Australian firm that owns three Malaysian factories, for the provision of items such as PPE, patients’ gowns, linen and curtains. The contract is set to end next year. The company has repeatedly fallen under the spotlight for purchasing gloves from other companies facing claims of modern slavery.

Top Glove, the world’s largest manufacturer of gloves, and WRP. Both have faced accusations of mistreating staff and confiscating passports. But throughout the pandemic, medical staff have found these firms’ products in hospitals. 

Professor Mahmood Bhutta, co-founder of the Medical Fair and Ethical Trade Group at the British Medical Association, said the provision of medical gloves “should not be at the expense of human rights and the welfare of factory workers.”

One NHS source said that “the people who were responsible for sourcing PPE had little experience or knowledge of the products they were buying nor did they understand the complexities of the related supply chains and factories”, adding: “Officials went out and bought what they could get their hands on. They’re having to source from these problematic factories and turn a blind eye.

“They’re saying it’s our lives or their lives, so the lives of our citizens versus the citizens of a country we’ve probably never visited.”

Government ignored internal warnings over PPE suppliers accused of modern slavery | The Independent

  The UN reveal that there are now 741,000 women and girls in prison,  an increase in more than 100,000 in the past decade.  In every region except Europe, the numbers have risen.

“The number of women in prison globally is climbing at an alarming rate – even though they are typically convicted of low-level, nonviolent crime,” said Olivia Rope, executive director of Penal Reform International. “Shocking systemic cases of human rights violations, including violence and mistreatment, persist worldwide,” said Rope. “Many women are deprived of essential health and rehabilitation services and face physical or sexual violence in prison.”

The call to action highlights that many women are imprisoned as a result of discrimination or crimes committed in poverty. Women are also disproportionately affected by punitive drug policies, with 35% in prison for drug-related offences compared with 19% of men.

“A high proportion of women in prison have a history of abuse and violence, increasing the risk of mental health issues,” said Anand Grover, a member of the global commission on drug policy and former UN special rapporteur on the right to health. “Women’s specific needs are often ignored, revealing that gender inequality does not stop at the prison doors.”

‘Alarming’: female prison population rises by 100,000 in past decade – report | Women’s rights and gender equality | The Guardian

 Triggered by a new brand of misguided patriotism, vaccine nationalism, COVID-19 vaccines have been hi-jacked by the rich.  Everything in this world is stacked up against the poor and the downtrodden. The Covid-19 vaccine is no exception because some of world’s richest nations, including the US, Canada and UK, seem to have cornered most of the supplies — whilst marginalizing the world’s poorer nations. Vaccine nationalism is one facet of the widening economic inequalities between the developing and the developed world.

Rich countries with 14% of the world’s population have bought more than half of all the most promising vaccines. The deals made by rich countries mean they have “hoarded enough doses to vaccinate their entire populations nearly 3 times over.” Canada has reportedly bought enough doses to immunize its citizens five times over. 

Meanwhile, nine out of 10 people living in 67 poor countries will miss out on the vaccine in 2021. Covid-19 is being described as a disease of the haves and the have-nots.

“Unless something changes dramatically, billions of people around the world will not receive a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19 for years to come,” according to Anna Marriott, health policy manager for Oxfam.

 Vaccine nationalism will deprive citizens of low-income countries of COVID-19 vaccines for many months to come.

Asked about the “lip service” by rich countries on equitable access to vaccine while glaring inequalities persist in the distribution to Africa and other developing countries, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters December 9: “It’s true we are seeing vaccine nationalism moving with full speed. But the vaccines the African continent needs, and we all need… has to be properly supported. Or we will not be able to fight the pandemic anywhere effectively”.

 The scandal is not just that rich nations are marginalizing poor nations from scarce supplies but the bigger scandal is that there is only such scarcity of supplies because companies are being allowed to hoard licenses and know-how. Between 1996 and 2001, the prioritization of companies’ intellectual property over people’s health meant millions of people in poor countries died from AIDS when the treatment to HIV was known, and producible cheaply, but was kept by profit-driven policy deliberately too costly.

Ben Phillips, author of ‘How to Fight Inequality’, explained,  “it’s astonishingly mean-spirited, and utterly short-sighted, that the same approach is being pursued now with Covid-19… No one is safe until everyone is safe, and the world can’t recover till all countries can,” said Phillips.

Professor Kunal Sen, Director at the Helsinki-based UN University– World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), said, “The world needs a people’s vaccine which can be provided universally, and it is important for the international community to develop a vaccine which is compatible with universal access.”

A Vaccine That Was Hijacked by the Rich | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)