Memorial Day is a holiday in the United States for honouring and mourning the military personnel who have died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. It should be a time for reflection, a time to reconsider priorities, to halt the drift into another conflict and instead contemplate on finding ways to cooperate.
There are 5,800 nuclear warheads in the United States. The United States already has the largest military arsenal and the widest military footprint in the world. According to the most recent data, the U.S. government spent at least $732 billion in 2019 on its military; we say “at least” because there are secret disbursements of funds to the massive intelligence wings that are not publicly available. From 2018 to 2019, the United States increased its military budget by 5.3 percent, the amount of which is the same as the total German military budget. Almost 40 percent of global military spending is done by the United States. The United States has a combined total of more than 500 military bases in almost every country on the planet. The United States Navy has 20 of the world’s 44 active aircraft carriers, while other U.S. allies have 21 of them; this means that the U.S. and its allied states have 41 of the 44 aircraft carriers (China has two and Russia has one). There is no question about the overwhelming superiority of US military force.
The United States is now using its full ability to expand its nuclear and conventional domination into space and into cyber warfare with its Space Command (re-established in 2019) and Cyber Command (created in 2009). The United States has developed an interceptor ballistic missile (SM-3) that it has tested in space, and it is testing such fanciful weapons as particle-beam weaponry, plasma-based weaponry, and kinetic bombardment. In 2017, Trump announced his government’s commitment to such new weaponry. The U.S. government will spend at least $481 billion between 2018 and 2024 to develop new advanced weapons systems, including autonomous vehicles, counter-drones, cyber-weapons, and robotics. The U.S. Army has already tested its Advanced Hypersonic Weapon, which can travel at Mach 5 (roughly 3,800 miles per hour, five times the speed of sound), so that it can reach any place on earth within an hour; this weapon is part of the U.S. military’s Conventional Prompt Global Strike program.
The U.S. military complex has advanced its hybrid war program. This program includes a range of techniques to undermine governments and political projects, including the mobilisation of United States power over international institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the SWIFT wire service) to prevent governments from managing basic economic activity, as well as the use of U.S. diplomatic power to isolate governments, the use of sanctions methods to prevent private companies from doing business with certain governments, the use of information warfare to render governments and political forces to be criminals or terrorists, and so on. This powerful complex of instruments is able – in the plain light of day – to destabilize governments and to justify regime change.
The U.S. government, along with its NATO partners as well as U.S. and European weapons manufacturers, continue to flood the world with the deadliest weapons. The top five arms exporters (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics) are located in the United States. These five firms alone account for 35 percent of the top 100 of the world’s arms dealer sales in 2018 (the most recent figures); the total U.S. arms sales account for 59 percent of all arms sales that year. This was an increase of 7.2 percent over the U.S. sales in 2017. These weapons are sold to countries that should instead spend their precious surplus on education, health, and food programs. For example, in West Asia and North Africa, the greatest threat to the people is not only the terrorist in his Toyota Hilux, but it is also the arms dealer in an air-conditioned hotel room.
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/05/25/covid-19-a-new-appeal-against-preparations-for-war/
Locust Plague Spreads
Further to the article in the current issue of the Socialist Standard concerning the plague of locusts, the situation has now worsened. Heavy rains on the Arabian peninsula in 2019 triggered explosive growth in the locust population, and they began causing problems in India, Pakistan and a number of African countries last year.
Farmers across Pakistan are suffering the worst plague of locusts in recent history, which has caused billions of dollars in damage and led to fears of long-term food shortages. The Pakistani government declared a national emergency this year after the locusts began to decimate winter crops. The first swarm came from the United Arab Emirates in mid-2019, and in the next few weeks time a new infestation is expected to arrive from Iran. Pakistan will incur losses of about £2bn in winter crops, such as wheat, and a further £2.3bn in the summer crops being planted now, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Mir Gul Muhammad, a farmer in Balochistan province, was blunt. “The worst that we have ever seen, ever, in our whole life,” he said of the swarms of locusts that descended on his village of Gharok. “I cultivated around 50 acres of cotton crops and all of them have been eaten and destroyed by locusts,” he said. “Besides cotton, my other crops – onion, chilli and tomato – have been affected badly too. It is a loss of around 10m rupees [£51,000]. As a farmer, it will take years to recover from this loss.”
Farmers across Pakistan are suffering the worst plague of locusts in recent history, which has caused billions of dollars in damage and led to fears of long-term food shortages. The Pakistani government declared a national emergency this year after the locusts began to decimate winter crops. The first swarm came from the United Arab Emirates in mid-2019, and in the next few weeks time a new infestation is expected to arrive from Iran. Pakistan will incur losses of about £2bn in winter crops, such as wheat, and a further £2.3bn in the summer crops being planted now, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Mir Gul Muhammad, a farmer in Balochistan province, was blunt. “The worst that we have ever seen, ever, in our whole life,” he said of the swarms of locusts that descended on his village of Gharok. “I cultivated around 50 acres of cotton crops and all of them have been eaten and destroyed by locusts,” he said. “Besides cotton, my other crops – onion, chilli and tomato – have been affected badly too. It is a loss of around 10m rupees [£51,000]. As a farmer, it will take years to recover from this loss.”
In Sindh province, Moti Lal said his livelihood was destroyed last week in one fell swoop.
“All my green crops, such as wheat and mustard, were attacked and ruined by locusts,” he said. “We had borrowed 40,000 rupees [£400] through micro-financing schemes to invest in farming. Now, all that amount is gone.”
This is economically devastating for a country where agriculture accounts for 20% of GDP and 65% of the population live and work in agricultural areas. Pakistan is already suffering from crippling inflation, which is now at a 12-year high, and the unprecedented economic burden imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. The cost of flour and vegetables had already risen 15% this year, and the locust infestation could make even basic food staples unaffordable.
Ismail Rahoo, state minister of agriculture for Sindh, described the plague as a “dangerous and catastrophic threat to the economy, agriculture and food security in Pakistan”.
“This year it will be ten times worse than last year. They are attacking from three sides,” he said. “The locusts and their eggs have now covered 50,000 square kilometres of farmland. We are expecting them to infest more than 5m hectares. And they are not just attacking Sindh province, but also the agricultural areas of Punjab and Balochistan.”
Muhammad Akram Dashti, a senator from Balochistan, says, it is too late. ‘“Many people will starve,” he said.
Big Pharma Failures
A global lack of preparedness for the coronavirus pandemic has already led to accusations in recent weeks that the pharmaceutical industry has failed to prioritise treatments for infectious diseases because they are less profitable than chronic medical conditions. The world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical companies undertook around 400 new research projects in the past year, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Around half were focused on treating cancer, compared with 65 on infectious diseases.
A 2017 plan to speed up the development and approval of vaccines was put forward by European commission representatives sitting on the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) – a public-private partnership whose function is to back cutting-edge research in Europe – but it was rejected by industry partners on the body. The revelation is contained in a report published by the Corporate Observatory Europe (COE), a Brussels-based research centre.
The IMI’s governing board is made up of commission officials and representatives of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries (EFPIA), whose members include some of the biggest names in the sector, among them GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Pfizer, Lilly and Johnson & Johnson. The IMI decided against funding projects with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a foundation seeking to tackle so-called blueprint priority diseases such as Mers and Sars, both of them coronaviruses.
The COE report says that rather than “compensating for market failures” by speeding up the development of innovative medicines, as per its remit, the IMI has been “more about business-as-usual market priorities”. The COE report says the directing influence of big pharma on the IMI’s research agenda has led it to becoming dominated by industry priorities, and side-lining poverty-related and neglected diseases, including coronaviruses. The COE also says that as a result of the industry’s domination of the IMI, there are significant gaps in funding for diseases pinpointed by the World Health Organization (WHO) Report on Priority Medicines for Europe and the World as of public health importance, for which pharmaceutical treatments either do not exist or are inadequate.
A 2017 plan to speed up the development and approval of vaccines was put forward by European commission representatives sitting on the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) – a public-private partnership whose function is to back cutting-edge research in Europe – but it was rejected by industry partners on the body. The revelation is contained in a report published by the Corporate Observatory Europe (COE), a Brussels-based research centre.
The IMI’s governing board is made up of commission officials and representatives of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries (EFPIA), whose members include some of the biggest names in the sector, among them GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Pfizer, Lilly and Johnson & Johnson. The IMI decided against funding projects with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a foundation seeking to tackle so-called blueprint priority diseases such as Mers and Sars, both of them coronaviruses.
The COE report says that rather than “compensating for market failures” by speeding up the development of innovative medicines, as per its remit, the IMI has been “more about business-as-usual market priorities”. The COE report says the directing influence of big pharma on the IMI’s research agenda has led it to becoming dominated by industry priorities, and side-lining poverty-related and neglected diseases, including coronaviruses. The COE also says that as a result of the industry’s domination of the IMI, there are significant gaps in funding for diseases pinpointed by the World Health Organization (WHO) Report on Priority Medicines for Europe and the World as of public health importance, for which pharmaceutical treatments either do not exist or are inadequate.
Seven of the 25 priority areas the WHO identified have no IMI projects, including neonatal conditions and postpartum haemorrhage, according to the report. Seventeen IMI projects relate to Alzheimer’s disease, 12 to diabetes and 10 to cancer. As important as these diseases are, there is no lack of wider interest in providing treatments, leading the report to question whether EU money has been appropriately spent.
“Clearly, these disease areas are not suffering from a market failure, as the global pharmaceutical industry is investing heavily in them already, which is not surprising, given the large market potential for new treatments,” the CEO writes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/25/exclusive-big-pharma-rejected-eu-plan-to-fast-track-vaccines-in-2017
COVID-19 and Hunger
Economies around the world are slowly reopening from their coronavirus-induced lockdowns, but parts of the global food supply chain may have suffered permanent damage.
In the time it takes for the world to re-adjust, more than 130 million people could go hungry, predicts the World Bank. The so-called hunger pandemic could affect far more people than those who contracted the actual virus. At the heart of this dire vision of the near future is a food system that was already wasteful and never designed to withstand the type of powerful shock brought on by COVID-19.
“I hope this is a wake-up call for the world that we cannot let the financial markets drive the global food supply chain,” Christopher Tang, UCLA distinguished professor of business administration told Al Jazeera. The food supply chain consists of seven types of actors: Seed and chemical sellers, farmers, traders, food companies, retailers, restaurants/cafeterias and finally, consumers. All of them need to be paid for their efforts, or they will start reducing capacity “because it is a free market, it is not just about food it is about finance – how are actors within the free market being compensated for their efforts”, said Professor Tang.
The need for food – actual hunger – is not a determining factor in food supply chains.
Getting food to your table is a race against rot; delays along the chain increase the risk of spoilage or loss. Under normal circumstances, the problem is so bad that the Boston Consulting Group estimates by 2030 $1.5 trillion worth of food around the world could be lost or wasted.
“Whether through rising food prices, falling incomes, or both, people will have less real income to pay for their food,” Johan Swinnen, director general at the International Food Policy Research Institute told Al Jazeera.
In the time it takes for the world to re-adjust, more than 130 million people could go hungry, predicts the World Bank. The so-called hunger pandemic could affect far more people than those who contracted the actual virus. At the heart of this dire vision of the near future is a food system that was already wasteful and never designed to withstand the type of powerful shock brought on by COVID-19.
“I hope this is a wake-up call for the world that we cannot let the financial markets drive the global food supply chain,” Christopher Tang, UCLA distinguished professor of business administration told Al Jazeera. The food supply chain consists of seven types of actors: Seed and chemical sellers, farmers, traders, food companies, retailers, restaurants/cafeterias and finally, consumers. All of them need to be paid for their efforts, or they will start reducing capacity “because it is a free market, it is not just about food it is about finance – how are actors within the free market being compensated for their efforts”, said Professor Tang.
The need for food – actual hunger – is not a determining factor in food supply chains.
Getting food to your table is a race against rot; delays along the chain increase the risk of spoilage or loss. Under normal circumstances, the problem is so bad that the Boston Consulting Group estimates by 2030 $1.5 trillion worth of food around the world could be lost or wasted.
“Whether through rising food prices, falling incomes, or both, people will have less real income to pay for their food,” Johan Swinnen, director general at the International Food Policy Research Institute told Al Jazeera.
“Every hand that touches food along the supply chain will need safety measures, and there is a cost for all of those measures: Truckers need safety measures; Farmers need safety measures, and shops will limit the number people they allow in at one time,” said Tang. “Every single link on the chain costs money so vendors must charge higher prices.”
They will likely charge higher prices, even if people cannot pay. And that may be one of COVID-19’s most painful and deadly consequences: You could survive the virus, but be crippled by hunger.
Big Brother meets COVID-19
Well worth re-publishing for a wider audience
COVID-19 has triggered a global economic crisis.
The world economy was limping along before pandemic-related workplace closures pushed it over the edge. Production is disrupted, lives are torn apart, and governments are sinking into debt. The UK and German economies are officially in recession. According to the chair of the US Federal Reserve, “The scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent.”
This is a revolutionary situation. The ruling class can no longer rule in the old way, and the ruled are unwilling to be ruled in the old way.
There are two possible outcomes to this crisis: the ruling class (temporarily) stabilize their social order; or the ruled organize themselves to take power.
Capitalists understand this. Their media warn, “This Pandemic Will Lead to Social Revolutions” and “The Revolution Is Under Way Already.” The wealthy owner of Cartier luxury jewelry reports being unable to sleep for fear that the poor will rise up and bring down the rich.
Their fears are justified.
Before COVID-19, mass political protests had reached an historic high. The Carnegie global protest tracker reports more than 100 major anti-government protests and 30 governments or leaders being overthrown since 2017. Now millions more workers face job loss and uncertain futures.
The capitalist economy can be revived only by increasing worker productivity (more output per worker per hour), and workers resist being forced to work harder for less. It will not be easy to raise profits while keeping workers down. Nevertheless, capitalists have done it before.
Factory society
Capitalists cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. – Marx and Engels, 1848.
Capitalism is a dynamic system. Competition for capital forced the transition from individual hand labor to industrial mass production. Turning farms into cities radically changed how people live.
The 20th century computer revolution promised to boost productivity, creating more leisure time and a higher standard of living for all.
Between 1973 and 2000, the output per worker per hour nearly doubled in the US. In other words, all the goods and services produced in 1973 could be produced in half the time by 2000. In The Overworked American (1991), Juliet Schor explained that if the benefits of computer technology had been shared,
We actually could have chosen the four-hour day. Or a working year of six months. Or every worker in the United States could be taking every other year off from work — with pay.
As with all technology, the benefits of automation went exclusively to the capitalist class. Bosses became fabulously wealthy, while workers suffered mass layoffs, lower wages, and more dehumanizing, routinized, and precarious jobs.
Amazon has “patented designs for a wristband that can precisely track where warehouse employees are placing their hands and use vibrations to nudge them in a different direction.”
In China, “businesses and the military are fitting workers with headgear that monitors their brain waves and emotions to increase productivity and profits.”
The computerized factory model was quickly adopted throughout society, including the social service sector:
Hospitals now function like factories, with different departments attending to different parts of the body in assembly-line fashion, moving patients through the system within predetermined time limits. The use of health information technology (HIT), tracking badges, standardized procedures, and ‘just-in-time’ staffing contribute to making ‘medical error’ the third leading cause of death in the US.
Public schools operate like mini-factories. Quality control is imposed in the form of zero tolerance, standardized testing, directed learning to raise test scores, and scripted teaching programs that aim to control “everything that happens in the classroom, right down to instructions on the appropriate hand gestures to make while teaching.”
Big Tech
The computer revolution gave rise to trillion-dollar tech corporations: Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, Google, Amazon, Alibaba, etc. Big Tech is now bigger than Big Oil, and they are teaming up for mutual benefit. Their continued growth and the preservation of capitalism have become inseparable.
Whatever the problem, technology offers ‘solutions’ that raise profits and increase capitalist control.
Why worry about people starving, when you can reduce their numbers with mass sterilization? Why invest in a healthful environment when you can simply (and profitably) vaccinate people instead?
Tech solutions can be worse than the problems they promise to solve. Nuclear power is still promoted as a clean and sustainable energy source, despite the fact that nuclear power plants produce plutonium for nuclear weapons and highly toxic radioactive waste.
After 9/11, the US Patriot Act was quickly passed under the pretext of keeping Americans safe. The State was given unprecedented powers to spy on anyone for any reason, while reducing judicial oversight, public accountability, and the legal right to challenge government searches.
Capitalists do not use mass surveillance to keep us safe. They don’t care about threats to working people; they only care about threats to their wealth and power. Introduced as emergency measures, surveillance technologies continue to be used to secure capitalist control.
Criminal risk assessment algorithms (computer formulas) that claim to identify who is dangerous amplify social bias. Heavily policed populations have more contact with the legal system, so algorithms are more likely to target individuals from these groups as criminal, increasing their oppression.
Technological ‘solutions’ do not address the systemic roots of social problems. Life-changing decisions are removed from human beings and assigned to computer programmers. These secret algorithms can be adjusted to deliver any desired result, and the victims of their decisions have no recourse.
COVID-19
Capitalists are pushing surveillance and tracking technology as the solution to this pandemic, and tech companies are salivating at the opportunity.
Facial recognition software identifies people who are not wearing masks, thermal cameras monitor body temperatures, and phones track where people go and who they meet. This technology is prone to errors, identifying infection where there is none (false positives) and failing to detect infections in people with no symptoms (false negatives).
More reliable information can be gathered by training ordinary people to conduct repeated surveys in their own neighborhoods, where those they question are more likely to know and trust them.
COVID-19 could be eradicated with widespread adoption of door-to-door testing and contact tracing. This approach has proved effective at lowering infection rates. However, there are only 2,200 contact tracers in the entire United States, when more than 100,000 are needed.
Capitalists are afraid to let workers play an active role in ending this pandemic. They prefer technological solutions, however ineffective, that keep them in control. One example is using computer-based models to calculate when the cost of keeping people off work outweighs the number of deaths from infection.
Digital dystopia
Prolonged social isolation has increased reliance on computer technology for remote work, remote learning, and remote delivery of goods and services. Seizing the opportunity, tech companies are pushing governments to make this trend permanent. Naomi Klein calls this the “Screen New Deal.”
Anticipating a major shortfall in New York’s education budget, the governor has partnered with tech giants to build a “smarter education system” based on remote learning that requires no buildings, no classrooms, and fewer troublesome teachers.
Teachers and parents oppose making remote learning permanent. They point to the limits of screen-based instruction, the importance of learning in a social setting, the risk of exploiting students for commercial gain, and the need for children to be in school so parents can work.
While wealthy families can accommodate home schooling, it places an intolerable burden on working-class families and especially on women who must also work outside the home. Even before COVID-19, working-class families were staggering under the weight of care-giving tasks that cost-cutting governments no longer provide.
Children cannot develop socially and emotionally in isolation, and they cannot feel safe when trapped at home with frustrated adults who are overwhelmed with responsibilities and stressed over making ends meet.
Since the lock-down began, hospitals report a rise in severe child abuse injuries and deaths. One sex-abuse hotline reported an unprecedented increase in calls from minors who cannot escape their abusers.
The digital dystopia our rulers are planning will deepen inequality between the better-off who can work at home with health-preserving technologies, and the rest of us who will be abandoned to suffer deprived and disease-spreading conditions.
Stockpile ventilators, not bombs
We are not “at war” with COVID-19. Part of the reason we’re in this predicament is that we hollowed out America’s public health system in favor of military spending.
Homeland ‘security’ and national ‘defense’ do not keep people safe; they secure the power of the ruling class.
While many Americans were anxiously awaiting their $1,200 payments from that congressional aid and relief package, the Department of Defense was expediting contract payments to the arms industry.
Between 2001 and 2020, the US spent an average $700 billion per year on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Compare this with the less than $8 billion allocated in 2020 to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The US budget for 2021 cut funding for the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency while giving the Pentagon $1.2 trillion, boosting military spending 50 percent higher than it was before Trump took office.
Next to nothing is invested in basic infection-control measures such as housing relief to prevent thousands more workers being made homeless, forced to crowd into the homes of friends and relatives, or warehoused in shelters, all of which encourage the spread of infection.
Never satisfied, US politicians want half a billion dollars to buy more Lockheed Martin F-35 jet fighters. Over 90,000 ventilators could be purchased for the same price. Meanwhile, American laboratories warn of insufficient funding to increase virus testing to the level needed to reopen the economy safely.
This pandemic cannot be stopped by military means. On the contrary, the more societies invest in war, the less they invest in public health.
Punitive economic sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and other nations block their ability to obtain medicines and medical equipment to manage the pandemic.
Deporting thousands of sick refugees to Central America and the Caribbean has made the US the “Wuhan of the Americas.” And the spread of COVID-19 through the armed forces will transmit the virus to America’s 883 military bases in 183 countries.
Conclusion
The capitalist class are primarily concerned with accumulating wealth and power. Their concern for human health has always been limited to protecting themselves from contagion, ensuring that workers are fit enough to exploit, and reducing liability for sickness, injury, or death.
It is not possible to end this pandemic, or prevent future ones, and also preserve the capitalist system.
by Susan Rosenthal
Press the Re-set Button
The way capitalism does business has effectively been free–loading on the bounty that nature contributes to people, taking for granted the natural resources, describing it as “natural capital”, well beyond what nature can replenish. We are part of nature, but our choices and behaviours have pushed the rest of the natural world to the brink of disaster. Hunger, disease, loss of livelihoods and rising levels of insecurity are the direct result of capitalism’s actions. Capitalism has always sacrificed the safety of people and the health of the planet to boost profits. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the surface the many underlying and inherent flaws within and capitalism and the world now has the chance to see very directly the importance of changing values, approaches and behaviours, and to better understand the vital connection between peoples and with nature. The pandemic has brought to light the extreme inequalities of wealth and income and worsen them all. Hopefully this will be a watershed moment. Humanity stands at a crossroads.
When we fail to act as responsible stewards of the environment, it is our future that we jeopardise. When we harm nature, we directly hurt ourselves. It clear that post-pandemic, going back to ‘business as usual’ would be a great mistake. Restoring damaged ecosystems and to shift to a more sustainable production methods is vital to humanity’s future. we need transformative social change to reset our fundamental relationship with our environment. Any further delay places people at increased peril. System change means a world-wide reorganisation across technological, economic and political elements. It means addressing the direct and most visible threats to biodiversity – such as land-use abuse, overfishing, pollution, and climate change by tackling the drivers of capitalist production and consumption. Coordinated local, national, regional, and global action is needed.
No more negotiating, no more working within the system, no more trying to be rational and appeasing those that are in power. You cannot go to bed knowing that your neighbours are hungry. We can no longer be bystanders, sitting on the fence. You cannot go to bed knowing that there’s someone somewhere that needs help. The Socialist Party has principles and we stick to them. It re–imagines the re-shaping of our society and proposes collectively organising social action to change our world. Once again we see society’s need for transition to a socialist steady-state economy. There is, after all, one renewable energy available and that is human labour power, both physical and mental. We have the capacity and ability to build a new World.
The Pandemic Profiteers
According to a new analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) titled “Tale of Two Crises: Billionaires Gain as Workers Feel Pandemic Pain, “America’s billionaires saw their combined net worth soar by $434 billion between March 18 and May 19 while the coronavirus pandemic killed tens of thousands of people and forced more than 30 million out of work.
The five wealthiest billionaires in the U.S.—Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, and Larry Ellison of Oracle—saw their collective wealth grow by a total of $75.5 billion between March 18 and May 19, a 19% jump.
“The pandemic has revealed the deadly consequences of America’s yawning wealth gap, and billionaires are the glaring symbol of that economic inequality,” Frank Clemente, ATF’s executive director, said in a statement.
The five wealthiest billionaires in the U.S.—Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, and Larry Ellison of Oracle—saw their collective wealth grow by a total of $75.5 billion between March 18 and May 19, a 19% jump.
“The pandemic has revealed the deadly consequences of America’s yawning wealth gap, and billionaires are the glaring symbol of that economic inequality,” Frank Clemente, ATF’s executive director, said in a statement.
Bezos—the world’s richest man—saw his wealth jump by nearly $35 billion in the two-month period. Yet even as Bezos’ fortune continues to grow, Amazon announced last week that it will not extend $2-an-hour hazard pay for warehouse workers beyond the end of May.
Chuck Collins, director of the IPS Program on Inequality, said “the surge in billionaire wealth during a global pandemic underscores the grotesque nature of unequal sacrifice.”
“While millions risk their lives and livelihoods as first responders and front line workers,” said Collins, “these billionaires benefit from an economy and tax system that is wired to funnel wealth to the top.”
Remember the Romany
The Romani don’t exist in the collective conscience of America, and where we exist at all it’s in a caricature wrapped in medieval pejoratives.
“Regions more affected by the pandemic may have gravitated towards political parties aligned with anti-minority sentiment,” writes Kristian Blickle of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
What does that portend if you’re already hemmed inside a ghetto by a military cordon? Or walled off in a compound without running water? Tear gassed by paramilitaries to confine you to hovels made of refuse on a toxic landfill, or forced to “shelter in place” without any basic amenities in metal containers dumped next to a sewage plant?
These are realities for thousands of Romani people in Europe, where racism is omnipresent in their daily survival, but is only one of a litany of human rights abuses catalogued by Amnesty International.
“Regions more affected by the pandemic may have gravitated towards political parties aligned with anti-minority sentiment,” writes Kristian Blickle of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
What does that portend if you’re already hemmed inside a ghetto by a military cordon? Or walled off in a compound without running water? Tear gassed by paramilitaries to confine you to hovels made of refuse on a toxic landfill, or forced to “shelter in place” without any basic amenities in metal containers dumped next to a sewage plant?
These are realities for thousands of Romani people in Europe, where racism is omnipresent in their daily survival, but is only one of a litany of human rights abuses catalogued by Amnesty International.
Six months prior to COVID-19 devastating Italy, in the capacity of Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini was formulating a Romani “eviction plan.” Salvini’s political ascent was fueled by hate-laced press events with Romani settlements as a backdrop, his promise for “mass cleansing, street by street” undiminished by high office. When criticized for waking the specter of Benito Mussolini he welcomed the comparison, and in 2018 vowed to complete a registry of all Romani in Italy, something his extremist counterpart and predecessor, Roberto Maroni, began in 2008, when even Romani children were fingerprinted, solely because of their ethnicity. Salvini remains president of Lega Nord, the third largest party in the Italian parliament, and the country’s largest in the European Parliament.
Should Salvini successfully navigate kidnapping charges brought against him for denying asylum-seekers permission to disembark from a coast guard vessel, if past is prelude, it is clear which stigmatized minority Lega Nord will persecute for the pandemic and its economic aftermath. Years before coronavirus emerged to foment it, The Independent in the UK reportedthat this “anti-Roma fury” had “echoes of Mussolini.”
“We will bring parasites in settlements and thieves in neckties to order,” said Marian Kotleba, leader of the Kotlebovci-People’s Party Our Slovakia (L’SNS), of the Romani. Kotleba, a pro-Putin neo-Nazi, either didn’t need or couldn’t find an escalator to come down to unleash his xenophobic bile as a political platform, and instead mass-produced leaflets promising measures to target “gypsy parasites” and eradicate “gypsy criminality.” Slovakia’s Supreme Court subsequently ruled that “gypsy parasites” was not “racial defamation,” which further emboldened Kotleba as he eyed a presidential campaign. Now the head of the fourth largest party in Slovakia’s National Council, Kotleba continues to blame “immigrants” and the Romani for “running around Europe, many of them totally unchecked, bringing coronavirus here.” The fact that the Romani have been surrounded by Slovak military units to restrict their movements hasn’t stemmed Kotleba’s traction “where polls show more than half of people believe conspiracy theories.”
“The truth is that we need to undertake a complete program for a solution to the gypsy problem,” is a common refrain from Bulgaria’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, Krassimir Karakachanov. Let’s pause for a second: “solution to the gypsy problem.” Does that rhetoric sound familiar? Like December 8, 1938, familiar? Karakachanov’s “program” and “solution” includes the suspension of all benefits to the Romani who endure nightmarish conditions in derelict Soviet-era wastelands like Stolipinovo where, states Amnesty International, “adequate access to water, sanitation, food, hygiene products and health care” is lacking. According to Karakachanov, severing assistance would “eliminate the profession of the ‘socially weak.’”
Erasure of Romani identity would be achieved through “dismantling clans,” and “given the poor hygiene and low health culture of a large part of the Roma” vaccines should be mandatory. “In view of the indiscriminate birth rate in the ghettos” his plan calls to “limit the possibility” of multiple pregnancies, which implies sterilization, and advocates for abortion which he classifies as “free measures.” This is coming from the Deputy Prime Minister of a European Union member nation, circa now, not Heinrich Himmler or Robert Ritter in the 1930s.
“Roma are brazen, feral, human-like creatures,” maintains former Deputy Prime Minister, Valeri Simeonov, who with Karakachanov, was a co-leader of the now disbanded United Patriots coalition in Bulgaria’s Trump-embraced Borisov administration. Karakachanov and Simeonov remain aligned in government, Simeonov being elected Vice President of the Bulgarian National Assembly. Bulgaria’s Supreme Court buttressed Simeonov last year when it acquitted him on anti-Romani hate speech charges for an address to parliament in which he called Romani children “street pigs” and Romani women “street bitches.” Like Kotleba in Slovakia, the country’s highest court emboldened Simeonov and sanctioned bigotry.
In Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary, infant mortality among the Romani is twice that of each respective national average, but seemingly that wasn’t enough to impact the tribespeople’s birthrate for these self-proclaimed “conservative,” “Christian,” “family values oriented” movements in the Balkans, and so coercive sterilization was inflicted upon Romani women in all three countries until the early 2000s, with cases also cataloged in Romania and, unsurprisingly, Bulgaria.
“I would say that coercion is needed in certain situations, because we are obliged to protect the rest of the population,” said Interior Minister, Mladen Marinov, of the Bulgarian government’s approach to the Romani during COVID-19. But what happens in its wake? In Hungary, that “coercion” is embraced by the country’s leading opposition party in parliament, Jobbik – Movement for a Better Hungary. Another neo-Nazi rabble aligned with Putin, Jobbik established its vote-share on the basis of anti-Semitic, anti-Romani extremism. With a nod of deference to Third Reich collaborator, Miklós Horthy, Jobbik organized the Hungarian Guard to counter alleged “Gypsycrime.” Akin to Kotleba’s Hlinka Guard inspired unit in Slovakia, the Hungarian Guard parade in Horthy-era uniforms bearing the World War II Arrow Cross Nazi insignia. “What then is Gypsycrime? Let’s not deceive ourselves: a biological weapon in the hands of Zionism,” said Jobbik’s former Vice-President, József Tibor Bíber, after the formation of the paramilitary force.
Under the veneer of “a people’s party,” of late Jobbik has sought to present itself as the friendly face of neo-Nazism, choosing to define itself simply as “nationalist” while its former leaders organize more extreme splinter groups. “Viktor Orbán has adopted the style that we used to have years ago,” said Jobbik MEP, Márton Gyöngyösi, just before Prime Minister Orbán received “extraordinary powers” in Hungary’s “coronavirus bill.” Orbán claims he might relinquish the mandate at the end of May. The Atlantic ran the headline, “The EU Watches as Hungary Kills Democracy.” As Orbán’s anti-Romani incitement escalates, so does the humanitarian disaster. “People are chronically ill,” warned an aid-worker from the European Anti-Poverty Network, citing malnourishment, obesity and pre-existing respiratory conditions among Hungary’s Romani. “When the virus comes to the slums it will be brutal.”
In a statement on May 16, Romani Resistance Day, Željko Jovanović, director of the Open Society Roma Initiatives Office, reminded the global community that Orbán’s Fidesz Party “spreads racism and white supremacy across Europe without repercussion” as “the EU cannot uphold the rule of law in Hungary.” May 16th, 1944, was the day Himmler’s Auschwitz Decree was to be fulfilled. Approximately 6,500 Romani victims confined in the Zigeunerlager, the “Gypsy Camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, were to be “liquidated.” Surrounded by the SS, the Romani refused to exit the barracks that paid mute witness to 17,000 of their relatives who had already been murdered in the gas chambers or Mengele directed “medical” experiments, worked to death as slave laborers, slowly starved, or succumbed to disease.
On Romani Resistance Day 2020, sanctioned by the Croatian parliament Archbishop Vinko Puljic, the senior clergyman of the Catholic Church in Bosnia, led Mass in Sarajevo to commemorate the Ustaša Movement, Croatia’s Nazi-inspired World War II regime that condemned thousands of Romani and Jewish people to the death camps.
“Our struggle and resistance to oppression is continuous,” concluded Željko Jovanović. “We can recognize the same evil in its various incarnations as it hunts us today—ethnic violence and killings, forced sterilization, evictions, segregation, impoverishment, paternalism.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/21/a-vaccine-might-mitigate-covid-19-but-what-about-the-plague-in-its-wake-thats-not-novel-and-is-spreading/
Why are we hungry?
There are now almost 8 billion people, and yet scientists tell us that more than enough food is produced to be able to feed everyone. Nonetheless, there is hunger. Why?
Hunger stalks the planet because so many people are dispossessed. If you do not have access to land, in the countryside or in the city, you cannot produce your own food. If you have land but no access to seed and fertilizer, your capacities as a farmer are constrained. If you have no land and do not have money to buy food, you starve.
That’s the root problem. It is simply not addressed by the bourgeois order according to which money is god, land – rural and urban – is allocated through the market, and food is just another commodity from which capital seeks to profit.
When modest food distribution programs are implemented to stave off widespread famine, they often function as state subsidies for a food system captured, from the corporate farm to the supermarket, by capital.
Farmers cannot simply take their produce to market; they must sell it into a system that processes, transports and then packages food for sale at a variety of retail outlets. Even this is not so simple, as the world of finance has enmeshed the farmer into speculation.
If there is any shock to the system, the entire chain collapses and farmers are often forced to burn or bury their food rather than allow it to be eaten. As Aime Williams writes in The Financial Times of the situation in the United States, these are “scenes out of the Great Depression: farmers destroying their products as Americans line up by the thousands outside food banks.”
The fact that so many people around the planet, including those living in the richest countries, were going hungry before this crisis is a profound indictment of the failures of capitalism. The fact that hunger is exploding exponentially during this crisis is a further indictment of capitalism.
The fact that so many people around the planet, including those living in the richest countries, were going hungry before this crisis is a profound indictment of the failures of capitalism. The fact that hunger is exploding exponentially during this crisis is a further indictment of capitalism.
Taken from this article
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/05/19/covid-19-hunger-gnaws-at-the-edges-of-the-world/
UK Income Inequality
The highest paid 1% of British earners received nearly 17% of all the country’s income, according to a study making allowance for the concentration of taxable capital gains among the better off.
Analysis by Warwick University, the London School of Economics and the Resolution Foundation of previously confidential HMRC data showed that the top 1% had a growing and much bigger slice of income than previously thought. The study said that some taxable capital gains were really sources of income and were heavily concentrated among the well off.
Official data showed that in 2017-18 there were £55bn of taxable capital gains recorded – a more than doubling of the figure five years earlier once inflation was taken into account. The majority of the taxable capital gains (£34bn) were received by 9,000 individuals, who each made gains of £1m or more. Once adjustment was made for taxable capital gains, the income share of the top 1% in 2017-18 was 16.8% rather than the 13.8% previously thought.
The top 0.1% received 8.1% rather than 5.6%.
Taxable capital gains often related to people’s work, and were more akin to earnings from employment than passive investment returns. They include the £24bn of gains eligible for entrepreneurs’ relief and £2bn of ‘carried interest’ – performance bonuses – for fund managers.
Dr Andrew Summers, assistant professor at the LSE, said: “Capital gains are taxed at much lower rates than regular income, but the legal line between these is very blurred. This means business managers have a big tax incentive to take their rewards as gains instead of salary or dividends. When we look at the types of gain going to people at the very top, that’s exactly what we find. A lot of capital gains are, in fact, just repackaged income going to the already-rich.”
Analysis by Warwick University, the London School of Economics and the Resolution Foundation of previously confidential HMRC data showed that the top 1% had a growing and much bigger slice of income than previously thought. The study said that some taxable capital gains were really sources of income and were heavily concentrated among the well off.
Official data showed that in 2017-18 there were £55bn of taxable capital gains recorded – a more than doubling of the figure five years earlier once inflation was taken into account. The majority of the taxable capital gains (£34bn) were received by 9,000 individuals, who each made gains of £1m or more. Once adjustment was made for taxable capital gains, the income share of the top 1% in 2017-18 was 16.8% rather than the 13.8% previously thought.
The top 0.1% received 8.1% rather than 5.6%.
Taxable capital gains often related to people’s work, and were more akin to earnings from employment than passive investment returns. They include the £24bn of gains eligible for entrepreneurs’ relief and £2bn of ‘carried interest’ – performance bonuses – for fund managers.
Dr Andrew Summers, assistant professor at the LSE, said: “Capital gains are taxed at much lower rates than regular income, but the legal line between these is very blurred. This means business managers have a big tax incentive to take their rewards as gains instead of salary or dividends. When we look at the types of gain going to people at the very top, that’s exactly what we find. A lot of capital gains are, in fact, just repackaged income going to the already-rich.”
Arun Advani, assistant professor at Warwick University said, “While the share of all income going to the top 1% has remained around 13% since 1997, once gains are included it rises to 17%, with the largest growth towards the very top,”
The report questioned whether capital gains should be taxed at a much lower rate than income given that the benefits went mainly to the rich and there was a pressing need for the government to raise revenue.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/may/21/top-1-of-british-earners-get-17-of-nations-income