Elderly going hungry

Uncategorised No Comments
There has been a dramatic increase in the number of older people malnourished or at risk of malnutrition since the coronavirus crisis began, according to Age UK and the Malnutrition Task Force.



Age UK has reported a rise in numbers without food or the support to plan, to cook and eat by themselves.



 Dianne Jeffrey, the chair of the Malnutrition Task Force, said: “We are extremely worried that the number of those suffering malnutrition is rising. Many of these people will eventually be admitted to hospital.”



“We know there are older people living on their own in the community who are running out of food and struggling to replenish their supplies because they are too frightened to go out, confused by the guidance or because their usual support networks have collapsed as a result of a pandemic,” said Caroline Abrahams, the charity director of Age UK. “These people are not on anyone’s list,” she added. “Typically they are not online. However, the pandemic has pulled the rug out from under them, so that their usual strategies for getting by are no longer working.”

Abrahams said she had a conversation recently with an elderly man called Nigel. “He has no food in his house but he is scared to leave it because of coronavirus,” she said. “Nigel isn’t online. He was recently discharged from hospital but no longer gets any support at home. Nigel was told that food parcels would be delivered but has only received one some time ago. He is now out of food and has no family or friends who can help him.”



79-year-old Betty, relies on her friend to top up her gas meter. “She doesn’t have funds to do it herself and is unable to go out. She has emphysema but is just using a blanket to keep warm,” said Abrahams. “She hasn’t got any food, only some bread and bacon that a neighbour gave her. She is worried and lonely, with no support. She is unable to contact her GP because she does not have much phone credit or enough money to top it up,” she said.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/13/charities-report-rise-in-older-people-struggling-for-food-in-lockdown

Deporting Migrants

Uncategorised No Comments
Young migrants and asylum seekers as young as 10 and would normally be allowed to live with relatives while their cases wind through immigration courts are quickly being deported  under an emergency declaration citing the coronavirus pandemic.
 600 minors expelled in April alone.
Border agencies say they have to restrict asylum claims and border crossings during the pandemic to prevent the virus’s spread. Migrants’ advocates call that a pretext to dispense with federal protections for children. The expulsions are the latest administration measure aimed at preventing the entry of migrant children, following other programs such as the since-rescinded “zero-tolerance” policy that resulted in thousands of family separations.
Brenda, 16, left Guatemala in hopes of reaching the US to eventually work and help her family. Her father works on a farm, but it’s not enough. “We barely eat,” she said.



Under a 2008 anti-trafficking law and a federal court settlement known as the Flores agreement, children from countries other than Canada and Mexico must have access to legal counsel and cannot be immediately deported.

They are also supposed to be released to family in the US or otherwise held in the least restrictive setting possible. The rules are intended to prevent children from being mistreated or falling into the hands of criminals.





American Inequality and the Pandemic

Uncategorised No Comments
More evidence of how the coronavirus pandemic is widening income inequality has emerged after the Federal Reserve announced 40% of households earning less than $40,000 included someone who has lost a job since February.



Latinos posted the highest unemployment rate in April, 18.9%, while unemployment for African Americans rose from 6.7% to 16.7%, wiping out the gains made since the last recession. Those without a college education have been particularly damaged. The unemployment rate for teenagers hit 31.9% in April, up from 14.3% in March.



https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/13/federal-reserve-coronavirus-jerome-powell-inequality

Nukes Comes First

Uncategorised No Comments

The world’s nuclear-armed nations spent a record $73bn on their weapons last year, with the US spending almost as much as the eight other states combined, according to a new report.



The new spending figures, reflecting the highest expenditure on nuclear arms since the height of the cold war, have been estimated by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican), which argues that the coronavirus pandemic underlines the wastefulness of the nuclear arms race.



The nine nuclear weapons states spent a total of $72.9bn in 2019, a 10% increase on the year before. Of that, $35.4bn was spent by the United States, which accelerated the modernisation of the US arsenal while cutting expenditure on pandemic prevention.



“It’s clear now more than ever that nuclear weapons do not provide security for the world in the midst of a global pandemic, and not even for the nine countries that have nuclear weapons, particularly when there are documented deficits of healthcare supplies and exhausted medical professionals,” Alicia Sanders-Zakre, the lead author of the report, said.



Russia, which has announced the development of an array of new weapons – including nuclear-powered, long-distance cruise missiles, underwater long-distance nuclear torpedoes and a new heavy intercontinental ballistic missile – spent $8.5bn on its arsenal in 2019, according to Ican’s estimates. China, which has a much smaller nuclear force than the US and Russia but is seeking to expand, spent $10.4bn.




Those expenditures were far overshadowed by the US nuclear weapons budget, which is part of a major upgrade also involving new weapons, including a low-yield submarine-launched missile, which has already been deployed. The cost of the US programme over the coming decade will be $500bn, an increase of nearly $100bn, about 23%, over projections from the end of the Obama administration

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/nuclear-weapons-world-record-spending

Child Mortality to Rise

Uncategorised No Comments
As many as 6,000 children around the world could die every day from preventable causes over the next six months due to the impact of coronavirus on routine health services, the UN has warned.



Global disruption of essential maternal and child health interventions – such as family planning, birth and postnatal care, and vaccinations – could lead to an additional 1.2 million deaths of under fives in just six months, according to analysis by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, published in the Lancet Global Health Journal.  Visits to healthcare centres are declining due to lockdowns, curfews and transport disruptions, and fear of infection, it says.



This projected figure threatens to reverse nearly a decade of progress on ending preventable child deaths, said the UN’s children’s agency, Unicef

“Children’s lives are being upended across the globe – their support systems ripped away, their borders closed, their educations lost, their food supply cut off. Even in the UK, children face the threat of a measles outbreak and school closures are putting vulnerable children at increased risk.” said Unicef UK’s executive director Sacha Deshmukh.



https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/13/unicef-6000-children-could-die-every-day-due-to-impact-of-coronavirus

Shareholders in Clover

Uncategorised No Comments
What we see around the world is mostly good and decent with great acts of kindness and solidarity, and people yearning for something better. It is that which gives the Socialist Party hope. But all that business cares about is the primacy of the shareholders.



361 of the 421 S&P 500 companies that pay dividends have shelled out dividend dollars to shareholders “since the onset of the virus.” Ninety-eight of these corporations have actually increasedtheir dividend payout since the coronavirus hit. Only 35 have decreased their payout to shareholders.



On March 26, Caterpillar CEO D. James Umpleby the third— who took home $34.5 million in 2019 — announced a shutdown of two major plants. Just two weeks later, Caterpillar began paying shareholders half a billion dollars in dividends. Caterpillar’s Umpleby has assured Wall Street that his company remains “committed to returning substantially all our free cash flow to shareholders.” And that commitment will mean plenty of cash for Umpleby, both as a major shareholder himself and as a Caterpillar exec whose personal compensation will remain lofty only so long as he keeps Caterpillar shares attractive to investors. Dividends, particularly in times of economic crisis, make shares attractive.



James Loree, the CEO of Stanley Black and Decker on April 2 announced plans to furlough and lay off workers and shorten the work–weeks of many of the employees still working. Loree, who last year pocketed $18.7 million in executive compensation, justified these job and hour cuts as “necessary actions” that would “protect our employees” and position “the company to thrive into the future.”
Stanley Black and Decker shareholders, in the meantime, will thrive right now. Two weeks after the worker squeeze announcement, Stanley issued these shareholders nearly $106 million in dividends.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/12/last-year-americas-ceos-said-they-cared-about-us-they-lied/



Pharmaceutical Profits and the Pandemic

Uncategorised No Comments

Pharmaceutical companies often defend their pricing by claiming that their costs are incredibly high. However, when calculating the price of a generic version of the drug, the researchers factored in export costs, taxes and even a 10% profit margin. In some cases, pharmaceutical companies have minimised their costs by receiving government subsidies. 



A study published this month in the Journal of Virus Eradication looked at nine of the drugs that have been identified as possible Covid-19 treatments and are in various stages of clinical trials globally. The team of researchers looked at how much each of the drugs is sold for in countries where data was available. Then they calculated what a generic version of these drugs might cost.


One of the study’s authors, Dr Jacob Levi, explained: “There has been a long history of big pharmaceutical companies charging unnecessary and unwarranted high prices for medications, even if they actually spent very little on research and development for that medication.” Levi added: “That’s been extremely common with infectious disease medications in the past, like hepatitis and HIV, and we can’t let it happen with medications for Covid-19. Otherwise, hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths would occur and healthcare inequality amongst the poor will worsen.”


For example, a course of sofosbuvir (a drug currently used to treat hepatitis C) costs around $5 to make but the current list price in the US is $18,610.


Pirfenidone, a drug used for lung fibrosis, costs around $31 for a 28-day treatment course. In the US, a course is priced at $9,606, or $6,513 if patients are able to access it through the Department of Veterans Affairs. Though the US tops the list, the list price of this drug is still expensive elsewhere – a course costs $2,561 in the UK and $2,344 in France.



Gilead Sciences, the company that makes Remdesivir, a drug which has been touted by the US government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, benefited from at least $79m in US government funding. Despite the fact that US taxpayers have helped to develop the drug, Gilead announced it would no longer provide emergency access to it. Then, after widespread criticism, the company back-tracked this week and said it would donate its entire stockpile of the drug to government. In late March, the Food and Drug Administration gave Gilead “orphan” drug status, meaning the company has the right to profit exclusively for seven years from the sale of remdesivir. Normally, this drug status is reserved for treating rare diseases, not ones such as as Covid-19, for which more than 1 million people in the US have tested positive (and many more have been infected but not tested). Gilead, which made $5bn in profit last year, has close ties to the US administration. Between 2011 and 2017, Joe Grogan lobbied for Gilead. He now serves on the White House coronavirus taskforce.



 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/11/soaring-drug-prices-could-bar-access-to-future-coronavirus-treatments



Pandemic? Who pays the price? Not shareholders

Uncategorised No Comments
P&O Ferries has announced plans to cut 1,100 jobs after reporting a severe downturn in demand.

The cuts, affecting more than a quarter of the group’s workforce, come after the firm’s owner, the Dubai-based DP World, had been seeking about £150m in UK government aid. The firm has also received some further government assistance via a freight scheme announced by the Department for Transport last month, although P&O would not reveal how much the support was worth.
 DP World said it would be paying its investors about £270m in dividends.



Overly Optimistic Oil Corporations

Uncategorised No Comments
Claims by oil and gas companies that they are curbing their carbon emissions in line with net zero targets are overstated, according to a new review. Going net zero means removing as many emissions as are produced.
The independent analysis of six large European corporations say none of the companies are yet aligned with the 1.5C temperature goal.
Scientists argue that the global temperature must not rise by more than 1.5C by the end of the century if the world is to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
The research has been carried out by the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI), an investor-led group which investigates how companies are preparing for the move to a low-carbon economy. 
Despite Shell’s stated commitment to having a net-zero energy business by 2050, TPI says that “the claim that it will be aligned with a 1.5C climate scenario is not consistent with our analysis.”
According to the authors, a genuine net zero strategy for the average European oil and gas company would require 100% emissions cuts between now and 2050. TPI point out that all of the plans they have assessed are, to some degree, dependent on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology and nature-based solutions such as planting trees.
“There are very significant assumptions that need further probing,” said Adam Matthews.
None of the dozens of American fossil fuel corporations have public disclosures on climate change comparable to Europe, which TPI says is a concern.
“We simply don’t know what their intentions are on this issue…” said Adam Matthews,  co-chair of TPI.

Malnutrition and Obesity

Uncategorised No Comments
One in nine people is hungry, or 820 million people worldwide.

One in three is overweight or obese.



 Malnutrition leading cause of death and ill health worldwide. The Global Nutrition Report 2020 found that most people across the world cannot access or afford healthy food, due to agricultural systems that favour calories over nutrition as well as the ubiquity and low cost of highly processed foods. Inequalities exist across and within countries, it says.



 Venkatesh Mannar, a special adviser on nutrition to the Tata Trusts and the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition, said: “Poor diet and malnutrition is not a matter of personal choice. Most people are not able to do this because of inequality of food systems. They not have access to a range of healthy food. The interface between the food supply chain and consumers is inequitable.”



Cynthia Rosenzweig, a climate expert at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the author of the food security chapter in the IPCC’s report on land and climate change, highlighted the inequality in food prices across the world, where the cost of an egg in Burkina Faso is 15 times more in comparison with grain and rice, compared with just twice the cost of such staples in the US.

An increasing number of countries have the “double burden” of malnutrition, obesity and other diet-related diseases such as diabetes.



https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/12/malnutrition-leading-cause-of-death-and-ill-health-worldwide-report

Promoted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.

All content on this website CC BY-ND 4.0 with additional translation permissions

MENU

Navigation