The fox is in the henhouse

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Progressive critics characterized the Senate’s coronavirus stimulus plan as an attempt by both Republican and Democratic political parties to use trillions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out and further enrich large corporations while tossing mere crumbs to the most vulnerable.




“This is a robbery in progress,” wrote David Dayen, executive editor at The American Prospect. “And it’s not a bailout for the coronavirus. It’s a bailout for twelve years of corporate irresponsibility that made these companies so fragile that a few weeks of disruption would destroy them.”


While progressives applauded some provisions in the massive package—including the significant expansion of unemployment benefits and protections for airline workers—Dayen said the stimulus package as a whole is an “outrageous betrayal” of the U.S. public and “a rubber-stamp on an unequal system that has brought terrible hardship to the majority of America.”


“The people get a one-time $1,200 means-tested payment and a little wage insurance for four months,” Dayen wrote. “Corporations get a transformative amount of play money to sustain their system and wipe out the competition.”


Dayen wrote, the “enormity of this bailout is being under-reported.”


“The other $425 billion helps capitalize a $4.25 trillion, with a T, leveraged lending facility at the Federal Reserve,” Dayen said. “So it’s not a $2 trillion bill, it’s closer to $6 trillion, and $4.3 trillion of it comes in the form of a bazooka aimed at CEOs and shareholders, with almost no conditions attached.”


The stimulus package includes a little-noticed $17 billion federal loan program that was inserted largely for the benefit of aerospace giant Boeing.



Zephyr Teachout, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law and an anti-corruption expert, tweeted Wednesday that “it is super hard to speak up against this because of the big great things in the bill.”



“But it is irresponsible not to,” Teachout said. “We are talking about something so huge and radical and lacking in oversight that we cannot cheer it on. Truly outrageous.”


https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/25/senate-corporate-bailout-package-robbery-progress-warn-critics

TB is still out there killing the innocent

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As the coronavirus death toll mounts and not wishing to take anything away from the seriousness of the present situation, global health authorities are reminding that tuberculosis is deadliest infectious disease in the world. 

1.5 million people died from the bacterial infection in 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported. Over 4,000 people die of tuberculosis every day.



Approximately 10 million people are infected with tuberculosis every year. Only a small portion of global cases receive the necessary life-saving medicine. 
In Asia and Africa, it is tuberculosis patients who are most likely to be killed by the coronavirus.



“For millions of people with tuberculosis, the coronavirus represents a significant danger because their lungs are already weakened by tuberculosis, their general health is low due poverty, and they don’t have access to adequate healthcare,” explained Burkard Kömm, director of the agency German Leprosy and Tuberculosis Relief (DAHW) 
Tuberculosis can be cured if treated over six months with a cocktail of four different antibiotics. However, many patients end their treatment early or develop a resistance to the medication that complicates and prolongs treatment. A lack of medicine is a common reason why patients end their treatment early.

Slavery Today

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Slavery isn’t a thing of the past, but a reality for more than 40 million people. We have to be very clear that no country is free from modern slavery. In the UK, there are estimates of as many as 138,000 people who are trapped in modern slavery. Every country in Europe has that problem and in many different forms. The most prevalent is probably forced labor. People are trafficked for being exploited in agriculture, construction, hospitality. There is trafficking for sexual exploitation and increasingly trafficking for criminal activities such as running drugs or being forced to steal.



 Anti-Slavery International, was founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce in 1839. It’s been fighting slavery for more than 180 years.



Jakub Sobik from Anti-Slavery International explains the difference between the traditional forms of slavery we saw in the 19th century and now the modern forms of slavery is that slavery, understood historically, is about people literally owning other people. While these forms of slavery still exist in places (for example, in West Africa), modern slavery is about exploiting people, about trapping them for labor or for some kind of service such as sexual exploitation. There are always people who are more vulnerable than others: people who are in poverty, people who are discriminated against and people who are not protected very well by law.







For example, in India, a group of Dalits — who are essentially a lower caste — they don’t enjoy any rights. They are discriminated against. They don’t have many opportunities for good jobs and they’re not protected by law because that caste is seen as a lesser one. Hundreds of thousands of Dalit people are being exploited in the brick industry — in brick factories across India — and in other industries too. It happens often through debt bondage and other forms of exploitation.

Debt bondage is quite widespread across Southeast Asia. In terms of bonded labor, a whole generation of people, whole families can be indebted to someone for generations. Inevitably they lose control over that debt. The employer keeps control over the debt, adds interest on top of that all the time and they’re trapped in this cycle of exploitation that they’re unable to get out of.



Even though in India debt bondage and bonded labor is outlawed, the law is not implemented. We see that all the time when people (especially those from castes that are discriminated against, such as Dalits) go to the police, they’re simply not being listened to.



Debt is probably the most common way of entrapping people in these kind of exploitative situations. We see that in trafficking, when someone wants a job and goes abroad to find a job, they have to pay for travel and recruitment costs. Often, they have to borrow this money from the traffickers. In this way, the traffickers have gained control over these vulnerable people and they can exploit them at the destination.

Some trafficking will be implemented by organized criminal gangs. But some of them could be a farm owner who just exploits people and sees some kind of vulnerability in migrants who are illegally in a country and don’t speak the language, so they don’t know where to turn to for help. I think it’s just about certain people finding that vulnerability in people to exploit them. That’s why it’s so difficult to spot, because a lot of people in modern slavery look like they’re in normal jobs, but there is something more troubling behind the surface.https://www.dw.com/en/why-modern-slavery-and-human-trafficking-still-exist-world/a-52853992

Remembering Polio

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Up until now, smallpox is the only infectious disease we have ever eliminated. But the world is well on its way of eradicating polio. On Oct. 24, 2019, World Polio Day, WHO announced there were only 94 cases of wild polio in the world. Unfortunately due to the security problems and conflicts, progress has stalled in ending the disease.



 Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the polio virus arrived each summer, striking without warning. No one knew how polio was transmitted or what caused it. There was no known cure or vaccine. Before a vaccine was available, polio caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis a year in the U.S. It was the most feared disease of the 20th century. In 1952, the number of polio cases in the U.S. peaked at 57,879, resulting in 3,145 deaths. Those who survived this highly infectious disease could end up with some form of paralysis, forcing them to use crutches, wheelchairs or to be put into an iron lung, a large tank respirator that would pull air in and out of the lungs, allowing them to breathe.



 Ultimately, poliomyelitis was conquered in 1955 by a vaccine developed by Jonas Salk and his team at the University of Pittsburgh. Jonas Salk became one of the most celebrated scientists in the world.

He refused a patent for his work, saying the vaccine belonged to the people and that to patent it would be like “patenting the Sun.” Leading drug manufacturers made the vaccine available, and more than 400 million doses were distributed between 1955 and 1962, reducing the cases of polio by 90 percent. By the end of the century, the polio scare had become a faint memory.

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/25/covid-19-the-deadly-polio-epidemic-and-why-it-matters-for-coronavirus/



Migrant Volunteers

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The coronavirus epidemic means medics of all backgrounds are in demand.
In Saxony, the heartland of the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), the regional medical board is advertising for migrant doctors to help tackle an expected rise in cases.
“Foreign doctors who are in Saxony but do not yet have a license to practice medicine can help with coronavirus care,” read a Facebook appeal.



300 volunteers had responded to its appeal for help, including “many foreign doctors whose licensing procedures are not yet completed, whose help is very welcome.”



Shadi Shahda, 29, once an ENT (ear, nose, throat) medical resident in Syria, is ready to help. He jumped at the medical board’s Facebook post and says, “ I was very happy when I saw that I could do something in the country where I am living.” 

Lockdown also means locked out

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With schools across the UK closed to all students apart from those from families of key workers, parents are suddenly having to provide extra food for their youngsters who are now at home all day. The prospect of facing weeks, possibly months, with children off school due to the coronavirus outbreak is daunting for most parents. But for those struggling financially, the future looks particularly stark. Before the outbreak of Covid-19, figures showed almost one in every three children in the UK to be living in poverty, but the escalating situation is forcing desperate families to choose between feeding their children and paying their bills. 
Single mum Hannah Graham was “staggered” by how much food her children managed to consume while being off school.
“I have already discovered how hard it is going to be to provide food for my children during lockdown.” she told HuffPost UK. “I knew we would get through a lot more food as there would be an extra 10 meals to provide during the week. But the sheer volume of what they had eaten by Tuesday was staggering. They emptied the cupboards and there was nothing left as they had eaten all the snacks and food.”  She says it made her realise how hard it would be to stay financially afloat during the outbreak. “I am also very worried about how I will afford to feed them. I am planning each week at a time and trying not to think beyond that as it is too overwhelming. When you are a single parent and struggling for money, you cannot afford to stockpile and buy a couple of weeks of food at a time.”

Helen Baker, 49, is a full-time carer for her seven-year-old son Sam who is autistic. She is concerned about their financial predicament and how they will afford to put food on the table as her husband Chris is a self employed taxi driver and the impact of coronavirus is already hitting their income hard.

“Now we are on lockdown, my husband is getting no taxi work at all,” she told HuffPost UK. “The measures in place for self employed people at the moment are abysmal as all they can access is Universal Credit. My husband is trying to look for other ways of earning but we live in an economically deprived area and everyone is in the same position. I am worried about buying food and putting gas and electricity on the meter. We’re literally living hand-to-mouth and I am worried about running out of money and not being able to put food on the table or how long it will be before we get Universal Credit. I am struggling mentally and trying not to panic. But it’s difficult when you get up in the morning and worry about whether we’ll be able to buy bread or milk.” 

Help the vulnerable

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 United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said, “COVID-19 is threatening the whole of humanity – and the whole of humanity must fight back. Global action and solidarity are crucial. Individual country responses are not going to be enough.”



In a Monday letter to the G20 group of leading economic powers, he pushed for a “war-time” stimulus bill “in the trillions of dollars” to help poor countries. The plan “aims to enable us to fight the virus in the world’s poorest countries, and address the needs of the most vulnerable people, especially women and children, older people, and those with disabilities or chronic illness. 



If fully funded, “it will save many lives and arm humanitarian agencies and NGOs with laboratory supplies for testing, and with medical equipment to treat the sick while protecting health care workers”, he added. 

The UN plan is designed to last from April to December – suggesting the world body does not see the health crisis abating any time soon. The plan foresees two general scenarios as to how the pandemic might evolve. Under the first, the pandemic is brought under control relatively quickly as its rate of spread slows over the course of three or four months. This, the UN said, would allow for a relatively swift recovery in terms of public health and the economy. But under the second model, the pandemic spreads quickly in countries that are poor or developing, mainly in Africa, Asia and parts of the Americas.
“This leads to longer periods of closed borders and limited freedom of movement, further contributing to a global slowdown that is already under way,” said the UN.

Money will be used for a variety of purposes: to set up handwashing facilities in refugee camps, launch public awareness campaigns, and establish humanitarian air shuttles with Africa, Asia and Latin America, the UN said. 
The plan names 20 or so nations as deserving top priority for aid, including some enduring war or some degree of conflict, including Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Yemen, Venezuela and Ukraine. But countries such as Iran and North Korea are also analysed. 

In parallel, humanitarian aid provided yearly by member states to help 100 million people around the world must continue. Otherwise, he said, the coronavirus pandemic could lead to rampant outbreaks of other diseases such as cholera and measles, as well as higher levels of malnutrition.
“This is the moment to step up for the vulnerable,” Guterres said.





Health Insurers don’t do healthcare

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Augie Lindmark, a resident physician at Yale University prepared for an onslaught of Covid-19 patients last week, he noticed something at his hospital: there were still patients without the virus, completely stable, in the beds.



These patients, many of whom should have been moved to a rehab facility or released, were stuck waiting until their private health insurance company authorized the next steps, which can take days.

“Any sort of slowing in the health system has dire consequences,” Lindmark said.



But with a history of restrictive and confusing policies, private health insurance companies have lagged behind: making incremental changes to plans even as health providers seek to change course. 
“They’re doing healthcare to make money, not to take care of people,” said Dr Judd Hollander, an emergency medicine physician and associate dean at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. “Insurance companies are not beholden to the patient, they are beholden to the shareholder,” Hollander said.
 Riddhi Shah, the director of operations at a mental health clinic in Michigan, said insurance companies are hard to contact right now, and while the plans have dropped the prior authorization restrictions, the clinic still has to navigate new billing codes and financial loss. 
Many private doctors, meanwhile, are burdened by the restrictions that insurance companies have placed in the past, said Shabana Khan, a child psychiatrist at NYU Langone.
With the bureaucracy standing in their way, some doctors are trying to work around private insurance altogether. 



The pandemic hasn’t stopped insurers from charging patients for other Covid-related charges. AHIP confirmed that out-of-pocket expenses for the treatment would not be waived, and could cost patients thousands of dollars. The average amount for someone admitted to the hospital with pneumonia, a respiratory condition that many coronavirus patients are facing, was $20,000 in 2018 for patients covered by private insurance, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Peterson. 

That could leave many people falling back on the age-old American dilemma: get healthcare or lose all financial security. And it could leave physicians finding loopholes and workarounds to stay afloat.







For the greater good

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The COVID-19 pandemic is now moving at a speed that the world had not anticipated. It is difficult to predict the likely course of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a completely new virus. This crisis has illustrated, so clearly and painfully, some of the weaknesses  in the fabric of our capitalist society that the Socialist Party has passionately trying to focus our fellow-workers’ attention on. To many socialist ideas do not look so bad now.



Wartime profiteering is has been as common as war itself. Merchants and traders line their pockets by controlling the supply and jacking up the prices of various goods. We now have a new breed of parasites, the pandemic profiteers. Corporate CEOs are shoving aside millions of workers, small businesses, poor people, students, the non–profits, farmers, cities and all other devastated victims of the COVID-19 crisis, for a massive government bailout rescue. Boeing, already disgraced for putting its profits before peoples safety, has its lobbyists pleading for $60 billion.



Republican lawmakers claim there’s a portion of the bill that incentivizes Americans not to work since the relief package could potentially give them more money than their normal incomes. No such worries when it comes to Big Business lodging their claims for compensation. One reporter remarked “I apologize — I don’t know how to ask this without sounding like I’m being a smart ass, and I’m not. But do you understand how bad the optics are to have probably the wealthiest person in the Senate potentially holding up this bill for a couple hundreds bucks for some of the poorest people in this country?”



Wall Street and employers are crippled by employees’ staying home, so now their rallying call is “We have to get back to work” despite the medical advice of the experts. Let us risk and sacrifice our lives for the health of the stock-market and the well-being of the industrial barons and billionaires.



It has been reported that some companies are now charging $7 for protective masks that typically cost less than $1. None of this should be surprising coming from executives who question whether curing disease is a “sustainable business model,” nor should it be surprising within a system that continually seeks profit maximisation despite deadly circumstances. 



Capitalists’ consistent push for profits is now coming home to roost, as manifesting in staff shortages during this crisis caused by earlier austerity cuts. 



 Much concern has been shown about the shortage of ventilators to assist  patients breathing. Industry is organised to benefit a wealthy minority of capitalists and previously has been unable to respond to the needs of people. Yet it is now being demonstrated that manufacturers can re-tool their machinery and produce the necessary equipment.



The COVID-19 pandemic is magnifying capitalism’s complete inability to foster overall health and well being. We don’t just need a new healthcare system, but a new economic system altogether.We simply cannot accept these for-profit parasites producing the vaccines, surgical masks, ventilators, and disinfectants needed to battle this pandemic for any longer. We have an economic  system based on profits, but right now, we need to mobilize all of production and healthcare for the purposes of saving people’s lives. Even though it can achieve this capitalism has shown itself incapable of doing that. We need a healthcare system run democratically by doctors, nurses, employees, and patients. This would be drastically different from the current system in which wealthy capitalists make the major decisions in hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturing firms, and insurance companies. We need a system where healthcare is not a means to make money. 

 

We  need an economic system that puts health and survival over profit maximisation. Socialism would allow for all production to be organized in a planned economy under workers’ control, so that resources could be better allocated and the creative and scientific energy of people could be used productively for the benefit of all of us. Our healthcare system has revealed its failings. Capitalism will never give us what we need. We not only need a new healthcare system, but a new economic system that values life over profit. Let’s have courage, work together, and help each other get through this the best we can. But, when we are able, let us change our society and the way we are expected to live. We are experiencing a growing awareness of what it means to be a citizen of the world and at a little closer to home, being part of a community with our family, our friends, our neighbours and our co-workers. We are learning how to better conserve, to be more self-sufficient, to share. We are re–evaluating what really matters in our life. We have an opportunity to adopt new behaviours and learn and practice new skills, nurturing them. It can be argued that we better understand the urgency of what we are facing regarding the climate crisis.



Do we want our children, or our children’s children and beyond, to look back at this point in history and wonder why we all didn’t change our priorities and choose to act more responsibly. We need to dis-empower the looting class; stop their incessant propaganda, PR and advertising.



COVID-19 – Alright for some

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The hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has claimed his firm made $2.6bn (£2.2bn) betting that the coronavirus outbreak would cause a market crash, barely a week after warning that “hell is coming” for US companies.



Ackman took advantage of bond market turmoil to make almost 100 times his original outlay of $27m on bets on market movements, he said
The returns were made by buying “credit protection on various global investment grade and high-yield credit indices”, protecting his fund from steep stock market falls that were happening at the time. Ackman wrote: “On 23 March, we completed the exit of our hedges generating proceeds of $2.6bn for the Pershing Square funds, compared with premiums paid and commissions totaling $27m.”
On 18 March Ackman tweeted that Trump should “shut down the country for the next 30 days and close the borders”. In an interview with CNBC that day he said that US companies should halt share buybacks to preserve cash because “hell is coming” – although he also said that he was buying some stocks. “The hotel industry and the restaurant industry will go bankrupt first, Boeing is on the brink, Boeing will not survive without a government bailout,” Ackman said.  Ackman’s opinions appeared to change rapidly, after the US government started to move towards its $2tn stimulus deal. Pershing Square started to unwind its bets on the market falling on 23 March, only five days after he gave his warnings.
The fund used the money earned to buy shares in companies such as the Hilton hotel chain and coffee chain Starbucks, as well as in Warren Buffett’s investment vehicle Berkshire Hathaway.
 Ackman said: “We became increasingly positive on equity and credit markets last week, and began the process of unwinding our hedges and redeploying our capital in companies we love at bargain prices that are built to withstand this crisis, and which we believe will flourish long term.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/25/bill-ackman-claims-firm-made-26bn-betting-on-coronavirus-outbreak

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