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Eastern European farm workers are being flown to the UK on charter flights to pick fruit and vegetable crops.British farmers recently warned that crops could be left to rot in the field because of a shortage of seasonal workers from Eastern Europe.The National Farmers’ Union said up to 70,000 fruit and vegetable pickers were needed.

Travel restrictions due to the coronavirus lockdown have meant most workers have stayed at home. Farmers have already arranged flights for seasonal workers in other countries. It flew 1,000 farm workers to Germany from Bulgaria and Romania in recent weeks.Germany alone needs 300,000 seasonal workers to harvest its crops.

But this begs the question about what east Europeans will expect when the workers take the virus back home with them and the burden of any treatment falls on the Romanian and Bulgarian health system, already weakened by the migration of its nurses and doctors.

A Bit of Humour

16 April 2020

ajohnstone

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Donald Trump goes on a fact-finding visit to Israel. While he is on a tour of Jerusalem he suffers a heart attack and dies.

The undertaker tells the American diplomats accompanying him,

“You can have him shipped home for $50,000, or you can bury him here, in the Holy Land, for just $100.”

The American diplomats go into a corner to discuss for a few minutes.

They return with their answer to the undertaker and tell him they want Donald Trump shipped home.

The American diplomats reply, “Long ago a man died here, was buried here, and three days later he rose from the dead. We just can’t take the risk.”

The Rich get Richer

15 April 2020

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Jeff Bezos now has a fortune of $138bn.

The boss of Amazon has seen his wealth swell by $24bn (£19bn) after soaring demand for online shopping sent the firm’s share price to a new high.

The Waltons, owners of Walmart and Asda saw their net worth rise 5% this year to $169bn, making them the world’s richest family.

“The wealth gap, it’s only going to get wider with what’s going on now,” said Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak + Co. “The really wealthy people haven’t had to worry. Yes, they’re less wealthy, but you haven’t had to worry about putting food on the table or keeping a roof over your head. The unfairness of it all is who is going to benefit from it most,” Maley said. “Money makes money.”

The volume of transactions in beaten-down industries, from travel to health care to gaming, suggests executives and directors are more bullish than they’ve been at most other points in the past decade, according to Sundial Capital Research.

Carnival Corp. board member Randall Weisenburger bought $10 million of stock in the beleaguered cruise-line operator last week.

UBS Group AG is seeing ultra-wealthy clients ramp up borrowing to place more wagers in what they see as a cheap market.

Mortgage brokers to the rich have said more clients are seeking loans backed by real estate to help them invest in businesses and snap up other assets.

The Rich get Richer

15 April 2020

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Carnival Corp. board member Randall Weisenburger bought $10 million of stock in the beleaguered cruise-line operator last week.

The Cracks in Capitalism are Showing

15 April 2020

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The social fallout of the virus is receiving less attention. The women locked in with abusive partners. The vulnerable children, invisible to social workers now that schools are closed. We might call them the hidden casualties of coronavirus: the ones who are unable to find safety within the four walls of home.

Recent days have seen blatant attempts to depoliticise coronavirus, as if the pandemic exists in a vacuum devoid of economic or social factors. Boris Johnson falling ill seemed to confirm the idea that coronavirus is a great leveller – after all, not even an Eton-educated prime minister was immune from the effects of the disease. In reality, Britain is experiencing a public health crisis defined by inequality. There were already cracks in our society, and we should have known that given the slightest pressure they would cause it to shatter.

Research conducted by the Food Foundation has revealed that 3 million people in Britain are living in households where someone has been forced to skip some meals, and 1.5 million people have gone without food for a whole day because they had no money or access to food. Almost 2 million people were already undernourished before coronavirus hit, with one in five under-15s living with an adult experiencing food insecurity after a decade of austerity. Hunger, much like insecure housing or domestic abuse, is not a new phenomenon.

The causation is clear enough: a cocktail of rising food bills, unemployment and reduced wages from the pandemic, the paucity of the social security system, and isolation of those for whom even a trip to Tesco is now a luxury.

Doing “one big shop” to avoid going out only works if you happen to have £150 in your bank account. When panic buying reduces stock, low-income families who are usually able to shop around for cheaper products are forced to buy whatever’s left. Couple this with a fall or drop in income, and meagre universal credit provision, and it’s clear why some food banks are seeing as much as a 300% increase in footfall compared with this time last year, according to the Independent Food Aid Network. All this while donations of basic supplies plummet.

New research shows that a fifth of private renters had to choose between paying for food and bills and paying their landlords this month. The government has introduced a temporary ban on evictions but a quarter surveyed have already lost their home. Unable to pay the rent, they had to voluntarily move in with friends or parents.

The lockdown has forced some, such as the self-employed, into contact with the UK’s decimated welfare system for the first time.

There are millions who will be preoccupied tending to more pressing material concerns: is there food in the cupboard? How will they pay rent? Are their children safe? This is a national crisis – just not the one we’re hearing about.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/britain-coronavirus-crisis-inequality-hungry-domestic-violence

Pandemic? Alright for some (7)

15 April 2020

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Amazon customers are spending almost $11,000 a second on its products and services.

Its owner, Jeff Bezos, reinforcing his position as the world’s richest person with a fortune of $138bn.

While most businesses have been hit hard by the impact of the pandemic and the looming recession, shares in Amazon have risen to a record high as hundreds of millions people stuck in lockdown conditions turn to the delivery giant to keep them fed and entertained. The shares continued to climb on Wednesday and were changing hands at $2,295. One month ago they were changing hands at $1,689.

Joshua Warner, an analyst at the London-based online trading firm IG Index, said:

“Amazon stock has rocketed to a new record high,” he added. “Of all the firms that might stand to benefit, Amazon is a clear winner.”

The US investment bank Cowen likened the impact of the lockdown to the Black Friday shopping frenzy in November.

“Covid-19 surge led to ‘Prime Day in March’,” the analyst said in a note to clients. “Amazon has seen an ‘enormous increase in demand’ as shoppers are forced to stay home, essentially creating an extended Prime Day/Black Friday type of situation.

Analysts expect Amazon to increase its annual sales by nearly 20% to reach $335bn.

While many companies across the world have been forced to make staff redundant or place them on government-funded furlough schemes, Amazon is hiring tens of thousands of staff. The additional workers will take Amazon’s global workforce to nearly 1 million.

BeZos has so far handed $100m (£80m) to the food bank charity Feeding America which represents less than 0.1% of his fortune.

Amazon has also been accused of not doing enough to protect its workers from the virus. The company this week fired two employees who criticised Amazon over allegedly unsafe conditions at some of its warehouses.

Other expanding fortunes

Reed Hastings

The founder and chief executive of Netflix has seen his estimated fortune rise by $195m so far this year to $5.1bn as shares in the entertainment service rose by 40% from the market nadir last month. Hastings owns 2.5% of the shares. Analysts said they expected more people stuck at home to sign up to the streaming service. Analysts at Pivotal Research Group said: “We believe the unfortunate Covid-19 situation is cementing Netflix’s global dominance .”

Tim SteinerThe co-founder and chief executive of Ocado has seen his the value of his stake jump 40% over the past month as shoppers flock to online supermarkets. Steiner owns about 4% of the shares, which are worth more than £400m at current prices. He is also in line for a £59m pay package to be voted on at Ocado’s AGM next month.

The WaltonsThe family behind Walmart, which also owns Asda in the UK, have seen their combined net worth rise 5% this year to $169bn. Shares in the US supermarket group have risen 23% from a low on 12 March. The Walton family own 51% of the shares.

Disease, death and deprivation

15 April 2020

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The reality is harsh and inescapable. Working people are more likely to live lives of greater stress and the result is a lower life expectancy even before the pandemic hit. This inequality is systemic and structural, and it is not accidental. These realities are pre-existing conditions that make us more vulnerable to the virus. They aren’t a secret, even though they are seldom discussed. Now the virus is bringing them to public attention once more. The question as always is whether anything will be done this time. After centuries of capitalism and in its continual carnage —we must make sure people’s views swiftly turns toward a more equitable future and a better society for all. Catastrophes and disasters have brought people together across race, class and geography to demand a better world, one prepared to respond collectively to threats of all kinds. Our goal is worker solidarity. We are more educated. We have history to inform us. What we need now is a fundamental transformation that addresses the flaws and fissures of the profit system. The capitalist world, finds ways to exploit disasters while failing to meet human needs.

The capitalists’ deity – profit – always inflicts a toll upon the working class. The price and form vary but it still enslaves us to the accumulation of capital. Capitalism is at the root of this pandemic. The spread of global agribusiness, the destruction of forests, the development of complex global supply chains that link the nations set the stage for this pandemic and others to come. We must end the capitalist economic system, sooner rather than later. Nothing less will bring good health and a better well-being for all.

Only world socialism has any chance at all to halting the multiple social ills we face. We require to travel upon a radically new path and take revolutionary action. What we must see is not social distancing but people coming together.

Who Pays the Price for COVID-19

1 April 2020

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Dick Kovacevich, former CEO of Wells Fargo bank, thinks most Americans should return to work in April, urging that we “gradually bring those people back and see what happens”.

Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, whose net worth is $1.1bn, recommends “those with a lower risk of the diseases return to work” within a “very few weeks”.

Tom Galisano, founder of Paychex, whose net worth is $2.8bn, believes “the damages of keeping the economy closed could be worse than losing a few more people … You’re picking the better of two evils.”

The “economy” that the bankers and billionaires are eager to restart had been growing rapidly before the pandemic. But most of its gains had gone into corporate profits, as shown by the meteoric rise of the stock market until a few weeks ago.

The bankers and billionaires now urging Americans get back to work own a huge share of that stock market. The richest 1 percent of the population owns roughly half of the value of all shares of stock. (The richest 10 percent own more than 80%.) So when they recommend Americans get back to work for the sake of the “economy,” they’re really urging that other people risk their lives for the sake of restoring the bankers’ and billionaires’ stock portfolios.

Stephen Moore, who is advising the White House, warns: “You can’t have a policy that says we’re going to save every human life at any cost, no matter how many trillions of dollars you’re talking about.”

While it’s true that we can’t save every human life at any cost we need to keep in mind which Americans we are talking about.

The trade-off average Americans might make between getting back to work and exposing themselves to the virus is likely to be quite different from the trade-off bankers and billionaires make

Workers bear the biggest burdens during economic downturns, especially if they lose their jobs and don’t have enough money to pay the bills. Eighty percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

Late last week, lawmakers made an important step to prevent such hardships. The $2.2 trillion coronavirus bill provides jobless Americans an extra $600 in unemployment benefits per week for four months, and includes contract and gig workers. The bill was almost scuttled when Republican lawmakers objected that this would boost incomes of some job losers higher than their pay when they worked. Apparently, these lawmakers hadn’t noticed that the pay of the typical working American has stagnated for decades. Even four months of extra unemployment benefits may not be enough. The richest nation in the world surely has enough resources to keep its people safe at home for as long as it takes.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/31/name-profit-and-greed-billionaire-class-declares-back-work

The Falling Number of American Hospitals

1 April 2020

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Since 1975, while the U.S. population has risen from 216 million people to 331 million, the total number of hospital beds has declined from 1.5 million to 925,000.

The United States currently has only 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 residents, just a little over half the average of 5.4 beds per 1,000 residents in other wealthy countries.

In 2018, the American Hospital Association estimated that 30 hospitals will close each year and the number is expected to rise over time.

Rural hospitals are closing the fastest. Over 120 have closed down since 2010. A report by the Chartis Center for Rural Health found another 453 of the 1,844 that remain are at risk of closing. Failing rural hospitals are preyed upon by large corporations that take them over, extract their revenues and then allow them to lapse into bankruptcy and the land sold as valuable real estate. The highest number of rural hospital closures, 19, occurred in 2019. Six rural hospitals have already been shut down this year. Roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population lives in a rural area. Residents of rural areas tend to be older, sicker and poorer than in other areas. They require more care and often can’t pay for it, placing a greater financial burden on local hospitals than populations that are healthier and wealthier. In general, the Pew Research Center found people living in rural areas travel twice as far as people living in urban and suburban areas to get to the hospital. According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, mortality rates rise by 5.9 percent when hospitals disappear, especially for people with emergencies such as strokes and heart attacks that require immediate attention.

Hospital closures in cities also tend to occur in areas that serve poor communities and often populations of color. Like rural hospitals, they may be bought by a large corporate hospital system when they are failing and then allowed to go bankrupt. It is often more profitable to redevelop them in a gentrifying area than to keep them open.

When hospitals are located in communities with high numbers of uninsured residents, they are particularly vulnerable to closures. According to the University of North Carolina’s Rural Health Research Program, the 17 states that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act had the highest number of hospital closures. Texas lost the most hospitals, followed by Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and North Carolina. Over half of the remaining rural hospitals in Texas and Tennessee and more than a third of hospitals in Oklahoma and Georgia are at risk of closing due to their weak financial position.

In other cities, hospitals may stay open but close down essential services to make way for more lucrative fields such as orthopedics and cardiovascular disease. MedStar, a Washington, D.C.-based corporation that owns 10 hospitals in Maryland as well as physician practices, laboratories, long-term care centers and other health facilities, abruptly closed whole departments that provided obstetric, pediatric and psychiatric care in recent years.

Epidemiologist David Fisman of Toronto, Canada, says, “having a healthcare system that’s a public strategic asset rather than a business run for profit allows for a degree of coordination and optimal use of resources.”

https://truthout.org/articles/the-uss-wave-of-hospital-closures-left-us-ill-equipped-for-covid-19/

The Coronavirus Crisis – Who is going to Pay?

1 April 2020

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Due to the economic costs of Covid-19 the Low Pay Commission, the independent body which advises ministers on legal wage floors, said the government target to increase the national living wage to two-thirds of average earnings by 2024 could be in danger.

The chair of the Low Pay Commission, Bryan Sanderson, warned that an “emergency break” included in the target may need to be deployed if the outbreak causes sufficient damage to the economy.

“The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic clearly represents a very challenging set of circumstances for workers and employers alike, and will require us to review whether the emergency brake is required when we next provide our advice to the government,” he said.

Isn’t it a wonder that those now classed as key essential workers, necessary for the smooth running of society are among the lowest paid and are now being stopped from gaining a few quid more for their sacrifices and the risks they have been taking.

Almost 3 million workers across Britain will receive a pay rise on Wednesday as the legal minimum wage rises more than 6%, which brought calls for a delay to protect jobs as the coronavirus outbreak escalates.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation – had urged the government to stage an eleventh hour U-turn, saying that postponing the rise would stop struggling businesses from laying off workers. Retailers are understood to have privately lobbied for a delay, while the British Beer and Pub Association urged the government to hold back to “prevent mass job losses and permanent pub closures.”

Tej Parikh, chief economist at the Institute of Directors, which represents business leaders, said that the legal wage floor must be set in tune with economic circumstances. “Should firms continue to struggle in the medium to long term, government may have to take another look at the current trajectory,” he said.

Once the coronavirus crisis has been overcome, the government could come under greater pressure to soften its targets.

Frances O’Grady, general secretary of trade union body the TUC, said wage rises were needed to support millions of low-paid workers struggling to make ends meet as the pandemic spreads.

“Britain is indebted to its army of minimum wage heroes. Many – including care workers and supermarket staff – are currently on the frontline of the battle against coronavirus. They deserve every penny of this increase, and more,” she said.

Economists expect the fallout from Covid-19 to trigger a drop in average pay, eroding living standards across Britain.

Thomas Pugh, of the consultancy Capital Economics, said average pay packets could fall by 2% in the coming months before recovering slightly later in the year. He said earnings growth for 2020 as a whole is expected to be less than 1%, a sharp drop from 3.5% last year, adding: “If we are wrong it will be because we have underestimated the impact rather than overestimated.”

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/mar/31/uk-minimum-wage-rise-of-6-to-go-ahead-despite-coronavirus-pay-freeze-call

A solution for who?

A Bit of Humour

The Rich get Richer

The Rich get Richer

The Cracks in Capitalism are Showing

Pandemic? Alright for some (7)

Disease, death and deprivation

Who Pays the Price for COVID-19

The Falling Number of American Hospitals

The Coronavirus Crisis – Who is going to Pay?

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