What if the current, and global, wave of protests of Israel’s slaughter of the innocents in Palestine is a symptom of something deeper, a systemic malaise afflicting the West’s<
Consider the following from Gareth Fearn, a British academic whose research includes a deep focus on the politics of of austerity and the transition to cleaner energy sources, writing in the London Review of Books:
There is a refusal by liberals to accept accountability for the world they have created, through their support for wars in the Middle East, their acceptance of growing inequality and poverty, cuts to public services, glacial action on climate change and failure to create secure and meaningful jobs.
This could be a moment for significant reform, but it would require a challenge to at least some sections of capital. Changing university funding models means taking on Wall Street. Arms companies rely on US defence spending and its military interventions or proxy wars. Action on climate change means losses for fossil fuel companies, whose owners often fund the conservative right.
Liberals in the US and across Europe have decided they do not want to take on this challenge. Their latest wheeze is to de-risk investment in the hope that it will revitalise stagnating economies, while doing what they can to see off any challenge from the more progressive left. That means heavily policing and demonising protests, working with the right to undermine candidates and parties that do seek to challenge capital (and the status of liberal parties), and more generally polluting the political sphere with bullshit to blur the lines of accountability – as when the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, insinuated that the protests at Columbia were instigated by ‘external actors’, or a Princeton administrator allegedly fabricated stories about threats made to staff.
Liberalism has two core components: the protection of property rights and a notion of negative freedom grounded in human rights and political checks and balances. What we are now seeing in the US (and the UK, and elsewhere in Europe) is the defence of the former at the expense of the latter. Political leaders and university managers are undermining not only free expression but the role of the academy in holding political decisions to account. Large sections of the news media are engaged in holding the public to account rather than politicians. And, perhaps most fundamentally, the ballot box offers a choice only between the degree of authoritarianism and economic dysfunction available to voters. If this situation persists, not only in the US but across the world, then occupying a university building will seem like a picnic when compared with what may be coming down the road.
Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again.
But what he wants is to make America great again for the plutocratic elite, while stripping the rest of us of any opportunity for the rest of us to live a peaceful, harmonious life of tolerance, free from the avaricious intrusiveness of always-tracking, all-hearing, ever-nudging mind-colonizing apparat of the corporate/state panopticon.
Note the headline omits the “again” part of his slogan, because the world he envisages is that of the county the way it was when he was born, at the very start of the post-World War II Baby Boom generation and before the modern Civil Rights, voting rights, and women’s rights movements caught fire.
It happens that I know that world quite well. Trump was born 16 June 1946, five week before I was born. Two other Presidents were born with weeks of Trump, George W. Bush on 6 July 1946, and William Jefferson Clinton 19 August 1946.
The world we arrived in saw an America at its peak, the world’s only nuclear power [the first Soviet nuke was detonated 25 August 1949] and the only major industrial nation with factories and other infrastructure untouched by the crisis, save for Pearl Harbor and Alaska’s Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska [yes, there actually was an invasion and occupation of American soil between 11 May 1942 and 19 August 1943, a fact often neglected from American history classes].
My, how things gave changed.
Let’s begin with a look at changes in taxes
In 1946, the richest Americans paid nominal maximum tax rate of 91 percent, enabling the federal government to launch major spending programs of education, infrastructure and other public benefit programs.
Rates remained high throughout the administration of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and plunged during the Republican Ronald Reagan years,
So what was the net effect of this drive to spare the poor rich? The uber-wealthy, the folks so envied by mere tyros like the Man Who Would Be President Again, are now paying taxes at a lower rate than a school teacher. a janitor, or a cocktail waitress.
Take a look at this, from the New York Times via Common Dreams:
In addition, in the Boomer world in which our three Presidents were raised the U.S. also taxed large inheritances at a healthy rate, a policy now hedged by vastly expanded exemptions:
Another major sector experiencing a major fiscal blessing has been the corporation, with taxes on earnings slashed dramatically since those days of the :great America worshipped by Trumpeteers:
The benefits to corporations were predictable:
The net result of all this high stakes tax jiggering is a massive shift in the tax burden from corporations to individuals:
And who has befitted most from all this Congressional largess?
We bet you can guess:
The net impact of cuts and to corresponding CEO pay packets has become so severe that in many cases XCEOs pocket more money than their firms make in profits.
Here are some examples, captured graphically by Inequality.org:
CBS News reported in 2019 that “CEO compensation rose 940% from 1978 to 2018, compared with a 12% rise in pay for the average American worker during the same period, according to the Economic Policy Institute.”
And when in the following year some corporations, acting in part over public outrage over reports of the pay disparity chasm, announce CEO salary cuts, the measures often turned out to be a bit of cosmetic bait-and-switch, as the Institute for Policy Studies noted in a 15 March 2021 analysis: presented to the Senate Budget Committee:
More than 500 publicly held U.S. companies announced cuts to their CEO’s base salary in 2020. These moves garnered considerable positive press coverage, but they had a negligible impact on pay levels since straight salary makes up on average only 10 percent of executive compensation packages.15 Some of the early proxy filings make this clear. A.O. Smith CEO Kevin J. Wheeler, for example, took a 25 percent salary cut while enjoying a 36 percent increase in his overall compensation. At Whirlpool, CEO Mark Bitzer accepted a 25 percent trim on his base salary.
And as the report notes:
We can and must do better, as a nation, than accept a corporate business model that creates prosperity for the few and precarity for the many. And we can’t afford to wait for corporations and their shareholders to solve this problem. Corporate boards have shown us — over a decade ago in the financial crash and over the last year with the pandemic — that we cannot rely on them to do the right thing when it comes to CEO pay.
Most Americans agree, according to an April 2022 SRSS survey of a cross section of the American public which asked “Do you think most CEOs of America’s largest companies are compensated too much, too little, or about the right amount?”
Too much, declared most folks allegiant to both the red and the blue [;And just how the hell did the Grand Old Party become the red party?; Marx must be spinning in his grave.
As federal funding for states shrinks with the impact of tax “reforms,” states and local governments are forced to resort to so-called regressive taxes, such as the sales tax, to make up for the shortfall.
A regressive tax is one exacted at the same rate for all, as opposed to, say, an income tax, where rates increase as earnings in crease. Therefore, the regressive tax hits hardest on the poor, as illustrated in this chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:
So let’s make America great for people who aren’t trust fund tycoons, Harvard graduates, and trust fund nepo babies,and start be re-instituting taxes on the wealthiest.
The arrival of COVID in all its varieties has laid bare another pandemic, one far more dangerous than a mere virus. It is, of course, the pandemic of raptor capitalism, that virulent plague of hyperconcentration of wealth that has infected the entire planet with wealth inequalities never before seen in the history of Homo sapiens.
While the COVID virus may be indiscriminate in its choice of human hosts, the vast majority face massive hurdles its victims face, ranging from lack of access to health care, lost income, and the collapse of the middle class to increased spousal abuse.
But one group has fared very well indeed during pandemic time, as the report notes:
In July 2021, the world’s richest man launched himself and his friends into space in his luxury rocket while millions were dying needlessly below him because they could not access vaccines or afford food. Jeff Bezos’ own iconic Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake” moment will forever be more accurately quoted: “I want to thank every Amazon employee and customer because you guys paid for all of this.” The increase in Bezos’ fortune alone during the pandemic could pay for everyone on earth to be safely vaccinated.
The world’s small elite of 2,755 billionaires has seen its fortunes grow more during COVID-19 than they have in the whole of the last fourteen years—fourteen years that themselves were a bonanza for billionaire wealth.
This is the biggest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began. It is taking place on every continent. It is enabled by skyrocketing stock market prices, a boom in unregulated entities, a surge in monopoly power, and privatization, alongside the erosion of individual corporate tax rates and regulations, and workers’ rights and wages — all aided by the weaponization of racism.
Consider this graphic from the report:
More from the report:
The gap between rich and poor nations is now expected to rise for the first time in a generation. People who live in low- and middle-income countries are around twice as likely to die from COVID-19 infection as people who live in rich countries.
That at least 73 countries face the prospect of IMF-backed austerity risks worsening inequality between countries, and every type of inequality within countries. Women’s rights and progress toward gender equality will be hit hard by these austerity measures, amid a crisis that has already set back the goal of achieving gender parity by a whole generation to 135 years, when previously it was. What makes this situation even harsher is that women in many countries face a second pandemic of increased gender-based violence — while, as with every crisis, having to absorb the shock of a mountain of unpaid care work that keeps them trapped at the bottom of the global economy.
The cost of the profound inequality we face is in human lives. As this paper shows, based on conservative estimates, inequality contributes to the deaths of at least 21,300 people each day. Every four seconds, inequality contributes to the death of at least one person.
We’ve polluted the air, water, land, and seas so deeply that our very futures are in grave danger, and unless we act soon, the cumulative impacts of our chemical addictions may reach a tipping point beyond which lies a very bleak future indeed, warns a stunning new report from an international panel of scientists.
And we continue to invent new compounds, many of them so-called “forever chemicals,” creations immune to breakdown and certain to remain in our environment for millennia to come.
Central to the crisis confronting us is the usual suspect, rampant, rapacious capitalism, eager to wring new profits from creating patented compounds unleashed on an unsuspecting world without rigorous and costly testing, thanks to connivance of government officials swayed by lavish corporate campaign funding.
In 1935, America’s premiere chemical company began a major advertising push that would continue for for 47 years, a campaign we well remember thanks to thousands of advertising exposures in magazines and newspapers and on radio and television while we were growing up in the 1950s:
[Former company president Irénée du Pont, coincidentally, was named by retired MarineCorps Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler as a leader of a foiled 1933 fascist-inspired, business-led coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt.]
There can be no doubt that chemical corporations have a long history of environmental pollution, and we spent several years during our time at the Berkeley Daily Planet documenting the sad historyof chemical pollution by Big Chemistry on the shores of San Francisco Bay.
In a global economy dominated by fossil fuel corporations, Big Tech and all its highly toxic compnents, and Big Agra [now largely owned by chemical companies], mountains of cash are funneled to politicians who fight regulatory efforts, the road ahead is fraught with peril.
But unless we gain control of these corporate monsters, the world our children and grandchildren will inherit will be a grim and ravaged place.
Safe planetary boundary for pollutants, including plastics, exceeded, say researchers
OUT OF CONTROL: For the first time, an international team of researchers has assessed the impact on the stability of the Earth system of the cocktail of synthetic chemicals and other “novel entities” flooding the environment.
The 14 scientists conclude in the scientific journal Environmental Science and Technology that humanity has exceeded a planetary boundary related to environmental pollutants including plastics.
“There has been a 50-fold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950. This is projected to triple again by 2050,” says co-author Patricia Villarubia-Gómez from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Plastic production alone increased 79% between 2000 and 2015, the team reports.
The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals and other novel entities into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.
Fills important gap in research
There are an estimated 350,000 different types of manufactured chemicals on the global market. These include plastics, pesticides, industrial chemicals, chemicals in consumer products, antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals. These are all wholly novel entities, created by human activities with largely unknown effects on the Earth system. Significant volumes of these novel entities enter the environment each year.
“The rate at which these pollutants are appearing in the environment far exceeds the capacity of governments to assess global and regional risks, let alone control any potential problems,” says co-author Bethanie Carney Almroth from the University of Gothenburg.
The research fills an important gap in analysis of “planetary boundaries”.
In 2009, an international team of researchers identified nine planetary boundaries that demarcate the remarkably stable state Earth has remained within for 10,000 years – since the dawn of civilization. These boundaries include greenhouse gas emissions, the ozone layer, forests, freshwater and biodiversity. The researchers quantified the boundaries that influence Earth’s stability, and concluded in 2015 that four boundaries have been breached. But the boundary for novel entities was one of two boundaries that remained unquantified.
This new research takes this a step further.
Overwhelming evidence
The researchers say there are many ways that chemicals and plastics have negative effects on planetary health, from mining, fracking and drilling to extract raw materials to production and waste management.
“Some of these pollutants can be found globally, from the Arctic to Antarctica, and can be extremely persistent. We have overwhelming evidence of negative impacts on Earth systems, including biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles,” says Carney Almroth.
Global production and consumption of novel entities is set to continue to grow. The total mass of plastics on the planet is now over twice the mass of all living mammals, and roughly 80% of all plastics ever produced remain in the environment.
Plastics contain over 10,000 other chemicals, so their environmental degradation creates new combinations of materials – and unprecedented environmental hazards. Production of plastics is set to increase and predictions indicate that the release of plastic pollution to the environment will rise too, despite huge efforts in many countries to reduce waste.
Shifting to circular economy
The researchers conclude that current increasing trends of chemical production and release put the health of the Earth system at risk. The authors call for actions to reduce the production and release of pollutants.
“We need to be working towards implementing a fixed cap on chemical production and release,” says Carney Almroth.
“And shifting to a circular economy is really important. That means changing materials and products so they can be reused not wasted, designing chemicals and products for recycling, and much better screening of chemicals for their safety and sustainability along their whole impact pathway in the Earth system”, adds Sarah Cornell from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
As COVID burns its way through the world, there’s more bad news: Food prices are soaring
From the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, two charts the trends.
First up, trends across food categories compared with years past:
Nest, a look at specific categories and their recent price trends:
More from the FAO report [emphasis added], with the greatest rise in the price of cereals [and they’re not what you might think]:
The FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) averaged 113.3 points in January 2021, 4.7 points (4.3 percent) higher than in December 2020, not only marking the eighth month of consecutive rise but also registering its highest monthly average since July 2014. The latest increase reflected strong gains in the sugar, cereals and vegetable oils sub-indices, while meat and dairy values were also up but to a lesser extent.
The FAO Cereal Price Index averaged 124.2 points in January, marking a sharp increase of 8.3 points (7.1 percent) from December and the seventh consecutive monthly rise. International maize prices increased significantly, surging by 11.2 percent in January, up 42.3 percent above their January 2020 level, reflecting increasingly tight global supply with lower-than-earlier-expected production and stock estimates in the United States of America and substantial purchases by China. Concerns over dryness in South America and a temporary suspension of maize export registrations in Argentina added support, pushing international maize prices up to their highest level since mid-2013. Among other coarse grains, barley prices also increased in January, by 6.9 percent, supported by firmer demand and price rises for maize, wheat and soybeans, while sorghum prices remained stable. Wheat prices also registered strong increases in January, up by 6.8 percent, influenced by the strength in maize prices as well as strong global demand and expectations of reduced sales by the Russian Federation from March 2021, when the wheat export duty will double. As for rice, robust demand from Asian and African buyers, combined with tight supplies in Thailand and Viet Nam, continued to underpin export prices in January.
The spike in cereal prices is especially troublesome, given that cereals are the basis of diets of most of the world’s poorest.
Donald Trump’s favorite South American buddy, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, took the same stand on the coronavirus pandemic as did his American counterpart, first denigrating the disease, refusing to mask up and implement public health measures, then ignoring the plight of his people as body counts soared.
Like Trump, Bolsonaro followed a liberal president, immediately implementing measures to benefit his plutocratic backers, opening public lands to greedy corporations, and casting his opponents as traitors to the nationalist dream.
And just as in the U.S., jobs collapsed.
But the greatest impact of Bolsonaro’s version of disaster capitalism may be the huge spike in harmlessness accompanying the pandemic disaster.
Even before the corona crisis, the economy in South America’s largest country was struggling. The middle class was shrinking, and the number of homeless people was continually ticking upward.
But ever since the beginning of the pandemic and the half-hearted lockdown early on, the country has slid into a deep economic crisis. The number of unemployed has skyrocketed, as has the number of people living on the streets of the country’s largest cities.
Volunteers estimate that the number of homeless people in São Paulo, the largest and economically most powerful city in South America, has jumped by 60 to 70 percent. Official numbers are not yet available, but anecdotal evidence can be seen at soup kitchens for the homeless, where the number of people waiting for a meal has more than tripled in some cases. One NGO employee calls it a “horror scenario.” Another says: “We are now constantly being asked basic questions, with people wanting to know what corners are safe for sleeping or whether they can show up again tomorrow for a meal.”
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Many jobs in the informal economy have disappeared, but millions of others in the formal sector have also lost their employment, with waiters, shop assistants and factory workers having been laid off. The result has been a collapsing lower-middle class. The government forecasts that unemployment could climb over 18 percent this year. And the worst is still to come.
A primary reason for such fears is that the government in Brasília ceased paying out an emergency allowance for the poor struck by the crisis as of January. Fully 67 million Brazilians – almost a third of the population – had been relying on the 600 real (around 90 euros) each month.
Back when we started working in the 1960s, most jobs were limited to eight hours of work perday, with overtime for paid for any additional hours, good health insurance, and company-paid pensions.
But these days, increasing numbers of jobs contain no guaranteed working hours, little or no overtime, no company pensions, and if there’s health insurance at all, much of the costs are borne by workers.
This new vision of work, while rewarding to employers, leaves workers in a state of precarity, with no assurances of a steady income and few, if any, benefits.
So-called precarious employment was once to the province of piece workers and low-end workers, but a new study reveals that precarity is now rising fastest among those once exempt from the angst that forms the constant undertone of lives of those whose hold on economic security is tenuous at bvest.
Study reveals precarious employment on the rise long before COVID-19
A study led by a University of Illinois Chicago researcher uses a new approach to measure precarious, or low-quality, employment in the United States. And, according to those findings, precarious employment has increased 9% between 1988 and 2016.
Precarious employment, or P.E., is defined as low-quality employment, which is often characterized by low wages, job insecurity and irregular hours, making employment risky and stressful for the worker.
In her study, Changes in precarious employment in the United States: A longitudinal analysis [open access], Vanessa Oddo, assistant professor in UIC’s School of Applied Health Sciences, sought to create a multidimensional and continuous measure of P.E. in the U.S. She also set out to describe changes in precarious employment over time, both overall and within subgroups. The paper is published in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health.
A better understanding of long-term trends is a critical first step for informing future policies aimed at improving P.E. and population health in the U.S., Oddo said.
Previously, the focus for measuring P.E. was on wages, hours and union membership. For this longitudinal study, she expanded the measurement criteria to add P.E. indicators including:
● Material rewards — the wage and non-wage benefits afforded by employment.
● Working-time arrangements — the length and intensity of working hours, underemployment and schedule predictability.
● Workers’ rights — describes welfare state provisions associated with employment, such as access to health insurance or pensions.
● Collective organization — the possibilities (or lack thereof) for employee representation, most commonly measured through union representation.
● Interpersonal relations — employees’ power relative to management (e.g., their ability to make decisions or control their schedule) and can include exposure to discrimination.
● Training opportunities — opportunities for promotion or to enhance skills.
Characterizing trends in P.E. using a multidimensional indicator is critical given that employment quality is increasingly recognized as a social determinant of health, according to Oddo.
P.E. can result in insufficient income, which compromises access to food and other necessities; greater exposure to adverse physical working conditions, such as toxic exposure, and limited control over both personal and professional lives, leading to stress.
“Importantly, poor employment quality may be contributing to widening health inequities, as women, people with lower education levels, and minorities have a higher prevalence of P.E.,” Oddo said.
The research revealed P.E. score was significantly higher among people of color, women, people with lower levels of education and people with lower income. Between 1988 and 2016, the overall P.E. scores significantly increased indicating worsening employment quality over time.
However, the study showed the largest increases in P.E. among males, people with a college education, and higher-income individuals.
“These results suggest long-term decreases in employment quality are widespread in the U.S., rather than just confined to marginalized segments of the labor market,” Oddo said.
According to the study, the largest change over time in employment precarity among males and college-educated and higher-income individuals could be because their P.E. score was lower at the study’s beginning in 1988, leaving a greater opportunity for declines. Additionally, the large increase in P.E. among males may also be due to the declining rate of union membership in the U.S., as union membership is associated with better employment quality and, historically, was more common among males.
Oddo said P.E. has been studied more broadly after the 2008 recession when employment quality worsened and there was a notable shift toward contract work and the emergence of the gig economy. She added that there is speculation as to how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect P.E., both during the pandemic and after when work from home measures are lifted.
A holistic approach to studying P.E. is important in the future as data can inform employment policy decisions. For example, a better understanding of P.E. in the U.S. may be helpful for informing future policies around secure scheduling (i.e. advanced notice of schedules) or gig work, like California’s Assembly Bill 5, which changed the rules employers must use to determine whether workers are employees or independent. The distinction is important because independent contractors are not entitled to most of the protections and benefits that employees get, Oddo explained.
Also, precarious employment could slow our ability to get back to work after COVID-19, as precariously employed individuals could face additional barriers to COVID-19 vaccination; for example, if they are undocumented workers or independent contractors.
San Precario: A new patron saint for the American worker
Seventeen years ago, European temporary workers found themselves with a new saint, San Precario.
And as we’ve noted before, Marcel van der Linden, Senior Researcher of International Institute of Social History, described his/her origins in a March 2014 essay in the academic journal Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas:
On February 29, 2004, the Chainworkers of Milan, an Italian anarcho-syndicalist collective seeking to subvert commercial advertising, chose a new saint: San Precario, the patron saint of casual, temporary, freelance, and intermittent workers. San Precario was initially envisaged as a man but has evolved into a rather androgynous being. He or she can appear anywhere and everywhere: on streets and squares, but also in McDonald’s outlets, supermarkets, and bookstores.
Prayers are directed to the new saint, such as:
Oh, Saint Precarious, protector of us all, precarious of the earth Give us paid maternity leave Protect chain store workers, call center angels, and all flexible employees, hanging by a thread Give us paid leave, and pension contributions, income and free services, keep us from being red Saint Precarious, defend us from the bottom of the network, pray for us temporary and cognitive workers Extend to all the others our humble supplication Remember those souls whose contracts are coming to an end, tortured by the pagan divinities: the Free Market and Flexibility those wandering uncertain, without futures or homes with no pensions or dignity Grant hope to undocumented workers and bestow upon them joy and glory Until the end of time
While the androgynous San Precario has largely faded into recesses of cultural history, the ersatz saint perfectly embodies the new American angst as corporations slash workers from their payrolls and reinvent them as “associates,” temps, and “independent contractors,” thereby freeing their corporate masters from costly pensions and health insurance, pesky unions, and labor regulations.
As a global pandemic rages and new, even deadlier strains of the coronavirus emerge, a new report from Oxfam reals that billionaires have gained wealth during the siege, while the world’s poor will take at least a decade to recover to their pre-pandemic levels.
Their survey, based on interview with the world’s leading economists, paints a picture of a world in which class divisions deepen and women bear the harshest effects of income losses.
Mega-rich recoup COVID-losses in record-time yet billions will live in poverty for at least a decade
The 1,000 richest people on the planet recouped their COVID-19 losses within just nine months, but it could take more than a decade for the world’s poorest to recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic, reveals a new Oxfam report today. ‘The Inequality Virus’ [open access] is being published on the opening day of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Davos Agenda’.
The report shows that COVID-19 has the potential to increase economic inequality in almost every country at once, the first time this has happened since records began over a century ago. Rising inequality means it could take at least 14 times longer for the number of people living in poverty to return to pre-pandemic levels than it took for the fortunes of the top 1,000, mostly White male, billionaires to bounce back.
A new global survey of 295 economists from 79 countries, commissioned by Oxfam, reveals that 87 percent of respondents, including Jeffrey Sachs, Jayati Ghosh and Gabriel Zucman, expect an ‘increase’ or a ‘major increase’ in income inequality in their country as a result of the pandemic.
Oxfam’s report shows how the rigged economic system is enabling a super-rich elite to amass wealth in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression while billions of people are struggling to make ends meet. It reveals how the pandemic is deepening long-standing economic, racial and gender divides.
The recession is over for the richest. The world’s ten richest men have seen their combined wealth increase by half a trillion dollars since the pandemic began —more than enough to pay for a COVID-19 vaccine for everyone and to ensure no one is pushed into poverty by the pandemic. At the same time, the pandemic has ushered in the worst job crisis in over 90 years with hundreds of millions of people now underemployed or out of work.
Women are hardest hit, yet again. Globally, women are overrepresented in the low-paid precarious professions that have been hardest hit by the pandemic. If women were represented at the same rate as men in these sectors, 112 million women would no longer be at high risk of losing their incomes or jobs. Women also make up roughly 70 percent of the global health and social care workforce − essential but often poorly paid jobs that put them at greater risk from COVID-19.
Inequality is costing lives. Afro-descendants in Brazil are 40 percent more likely to die of COVID-19 than White people, while nearly 22,000 Black and Hispanic people in the United States would still be alive if they experienced the same COVID-19 mortality rates as their White counterparts. Infection and mortality rates are higher in poorer areas of countries such as France, India, and Spain while England’s poorest regions experience mortality rates double that of the richest areas.
Fairer economies are the key to a rapid economic recovery from COVID-19. A temporary tax on excess profits made by the 32 global corporations that have gained the most during the pandemic could have raised $104 billion in 2020. This is enough to provide unemployment benefits for all workers and financial support for all children and elderly people in low- and middle-income countries.
Gabriela Bucher, Executive Director of Oxfam International, said: “We stand to witness the greatest rise in inequality since records began. The deep divide between the rich and poor is proving as deadly as the virus.”
“Rigged economies are funnelling wealth to a rich elite who are riding out the pandemic in luxury, while those on the frontline of the pandemic —shop assistants, healthcare workers, and market vendors— are struggling to pay the bills and put food on the table.
“Women and marginalized racial and ethnic groups are bearing the brunt of this crisis. They are more likely to be pushed into poverty, more likely to go hungry, and more likely to be excluded from healthcare.”
Billionaires fortunes rebounded as stock markets recovered despite continued recession in the real economy. Their total wealth hit $11.95 trillion in December 2020, equivalent to G20 governments’ total COVID-19 recovery spending. The road to recovery will be much longer for people who were already struggling pre-COVID-19. When the virus struck over half of workers in poor countries were living in poverty, and three-quarters of workers globally had no access to social protections like sick pay or unemployment benefits.
“Extreme inequality is not inevitable, but a policy choice. Governments around the world must seize this opportunity to build more equal, more inclusive economies that end poverty and protect the planet,” added Bucher.
“The fight against inequality must be at the heart of economic rescue and recovery efforts. Governments must ensure everyone has access to a COVID-19 vaccine and financial support if they lose their job. They must invest in public services and low carbon sectors to create millions of new jobs and ensure everyone has access to a decent education, health, and social care, and they must ensure the richest individuals and corporations contribute their fair share of tax to pay for it.
“These measures must not be band-aid solutions for desperate times but a ‘new normal’ in economies that work for the benefit of all people, not just the privileged few.”
A year ago, a rare thing happened to American women.
For three months, they held more jobs than men in the US economy — something that had only occurred one other time in history, during a short period in 2009 and early 2010. Sure, there were still many other gender gaps: women were more likely than men to work part-time, for example, because of caregiving responsibilities at home, and even among full-time workers, they earned on average only 81 cents for every dollar of their male peers.
Nevertheless, women were making gradual gains.
The pandemic quickly changed that story. And now, it just got worse.
According to new data released Friday, employers cut 140,000 jobs in December, signaling that the economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic is backtracking. Digging deeper into the data also reveals a shocking gender gap: Women accounted for all the job losses, losing 156,000 jobs, while men gained 16,000.
Scots, angry over the impact of the U.K.’s department from the European Union, are calling for aa vote to leave the United Kingdom, a move the nation’s First Minister has long favored.
With the United Kingdom having fully stepped out of the European Union’s door on Jan 1, a cacophony of criticism in Scotland about Brexit has led to a ramping-up of calls for another referendum to be held on Scottish independence－a demand that Prime Minister Boris Johnson is sure to resist with all his might.
The referendum calls are based on the fact that the Scottish people overwhelmingly voted in the 2016 referendum for the UK to remain a part of the bloc it had joined in 1973.
But, with other parts of the UK voting to leave－most gallingly for the Scots none more enthusiastically than huge swathes of rural England－the resulting vote of 52 percent in favor of an exit to 48 percent in favor of staying meant the people of Scotland were in effect outvoted.
Many north of the border are now saying an independent Scotland would be free to make up its own mind about the EU, and rejoin if it chooses to.
Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who is a committed advocate of an independent Scotland, tweeted on Dec 31 in the final minutes of the post-Brexit transition period that Europe should “keep a light on” for Scotland because it would be “back soon”, during which the UK and EU had continued to behave as if the nation was still a member of the bloc.
Born Down Under in Melbourne, Stephen Pascoe is a history and urbanist and a Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow at the University of California, Irvine.
As an Australian native, he has a particular interest in the steadfast refusal of Australia’s government to make any significant moves towards climate mitigation.
So what’s the problem?
He walks us through it in an essay for Aljazeera, of which the following is a key excerpt:
Australia’s seemingly suicidal posture towards climate change often puzzles foreign observers. Indeed, the Australian state’s persistent reluctance to take meaningful action as the country wilts from the worst effects of climate change defies rational explanation. Noting that “Australia is already having to deal with some of the most extreme manifestations of climate change”, renowned British conservationist David Attenborough once described the Australian government’s disinterest in responding to the climate emergency as “extraordinary”.
Australia’s apparent indifference towards this global emergency is not so much a case of climate change denialism as it is exceptionalism. There are some climate change deniers on the far right who exercise an inordinate amount of political power relative to the size of their support base. However, more fundamentally, what guides the Australian state’s problematic stance on climate change is a form of exceptionalism.
Australia’s climate change exceptionalism rests on several pillars.
First, the conviction on the part of successive Australian governments that our national consumption patterns have no material effect on climate change and the resulting belief that we can extract ourselves from the global effort to combat it without this causing much harm.
Second, a purposeful downplaying of the contributions of Australian extractive industries to carbon supply chains, which paints the country as an incidental intermediary in the production of global emissions, encourages Australians to view climate change as somebody else’s problem. This, despite Australia now being the third-largest exporter of carbon dioxide in fossil fuels, behind Russia and Saudi Arabia.
These convenient fictions allow Australian governments to ignore the scientific consensus on climate change when politically and economically convenient and opt in an out of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures as they see fit.
The Washington Post today has an excellent report on how U.S. government scientists thwarted the President’s efforts to rewrite a critical report on climate change.
Here’s the intro:
The National Climate Assessment, America’s premier contribution to climate knowledge, stands out for many reasons: Hundreds of scientists across the federal government and academia join forces to compile the best insights available on climate change. The results, released just twice a decade or so, shape years of government decisions.
Now, as the clock runs down on President Trump’s time in office, the climate assessment has gained a new distinction: It is one of the few major U.S. climate initiatives that his administration tried, yet largely failed, to undermine.
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In November, the administration removed the person responsible for the next edition of the report and replaced him with someone who has downplayed climate science, though at this point it seems to be too little, too late. But the efforts started back in 2018, when officials pushed out a top official and leaned on scientists to soften their conclusions — the scientists refused — and then later tried to bury the report, which didn’t work either.
“Thank God they didn’t know how to run a government,” said Thomas Armstrong, who during the Obama administration led the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which produces the assessment. “It could have been a lot worse.”
Donald Trump has consistently denied climate change, as Inside Climate News noted a year ago:
In almost every agency overseeing energy, the environment and health, Trump selected top officials who dispute the mainstream consensus on the urgency of climate action. People with little scientific background, or strong ties to industries they would be regulating, were appointed to scientific leadership positions. One of the administration’s first actions was to order scientists and other employees at EPA and other agencies to halt public communications. Several federal scientists working on climate change have said they were silenced, sidelined or demoted. At least three—a senior employee at the Department of Interior, one at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and another at the National Park Service—invoked whistleblower protections. Independent science advisors, such as members of the EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors, have also been sidelined. Scientific content on government websites has been altered and the public’s access to data reduced. Climate data from the government’s open portal website was removed. So was the EPA’s climate change website. The words “climate change” have been purged from government reports, and other reports have been buried, including by officials at the Department of Agriculture. The administration even edited a major Defense Department report to downplay its climate findings. Through speeches and tweets, the president has repeatedly spread misinformation to the public through his climate denial and denigration of renewable energy.
EPA, meanwhile, is working to finalize its proposal to suppress the types of scientific evidence the agency can use in writing its rules. This includes prohibiting the use of well-established, long-term scientific studies underpinning the nation’s air pollution rules, a change the fossil fuel industry had sought for years. Known as the “secret science” rule, it has been lambasted by scientists and health experts worldwide. Related, the White House issued a memo offering new ways for fossil fuel and other industries to challenge science-based policies.
Trump’s focus, instead, was on corporate profits, and his ceaseless gutting of environmental rules came with a promise that his efforts would launch an economic book.
That didn’t go so well, as the New York Times reported 3 December:
“Because global emissions in 2020 are so much higher than they were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, that means that a year wasted in the Trump administration on not acting on climate has much bigger consequences than a year wasted in Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton’s administration,” said Michael Wara, a climate and energy expert at Stanford University.
Analysts say that the past four years represented a closing window in which the world’s largest polluting economies, working together, could have charted a path toward slowing the rate of planet-warming emissions. To do that, a scientific report in 2018 found that the world’s economies would need to reduce emissions 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 — and the policies to do so should be implemented rapidly.
Instead, in the largest economy in the world, they began to fray.
We leave the last word, or rather burn to out favorite Swede [and note the face of the guard, too]:
Musk has quintupled his net worth since January, according to estimates put together by Bloomberg, adding $132 billion to his wealth and vaulting him to the No. 2 spot among the world’s richest with a fortune of about $159 billion. Bezos’s wealth has grown by roughly $70 billion over the same period, putting his net worth estimate at roughly $186 billion as the year came to an end.
Such a rapid accumulation of individual wealth hasn’t happened in the United States since the time of the Rockefellers and Carnegies a century ago, and we as a society are only just beginning to grapple with the ethical implications.
Since March, Black and Latina moms have stopped working, either voluntarily or due to layoffs, at higher rates than white moms. Many are single moms who need childcare but can’t access it during the pandemic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, single moms had higher rates of unemployment than their childless counterparts in the second and third quarters of 2020.
The COVID-19 recession has affected groups in different ways. Black moms have been more likely than Latina moms and white moms to quit their jobs. Higher rates of layoffs affected immigrant moms most severely in 2020. Meanwhile, Latina moms were more likely to be laid off than white and Black moms. This is in part because Latinas were more likely to work face-to-face service positions, such as in restaurants and hotels.
Experts forecast that loss of skills, tenure and income among women of color will shape the U.S. economy for years to come by making it more difficult for moms of color to re-enter the workforce, earn the same amount as their white counterparts and reach supervisor and management positions.
Without prompt federal action, the Biden administration could be faced with a wave of evictions unprecedented in the nation’s history, with as many as 40 million Americans, impoverished by the coronavirus pandemic, thrown out of their homes.
Millions [are] on the verge of being evicted with the federal eviction moratorium set to expire at the end of January, unleashing what advocates say could be a housing catastrophe of historic proportions: Without federal intervention, they fear, as many as 40 million people could be displaced amid an ongoing and still worsening pandemic.
“We’re facing potentially the worst housing and homelessness crisis in our country’s history,” said Diane Yentel, CEO and president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition in Washington, D.C.
The eviction moratorium approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was originally set to end Dec. 31. It was expected to be extended through January by Congress under a $900 billion COVID-19 relief package that also includes offering $25 billion in emergency rental assistance – the figure requested by the National Low Income Housing Coalition in a letter submitted last week to the CDC and co-signed by 1,500 housing advocacy organizations.
“The least the federal government can do during a once-in-a-century pandemic is assure each of us that we’re not going to lose our homes in the middle of it,” Yentel said. The $25 billion, she said, was not nearly enough to meet the actual need, but it was a step in the right direction.
Among the likely victims: Entertainers
Among the occupations where unemployment is pandemic, it’s the folks who’ve kept us entertained during the viral siege who have clocked up unprecedented levels of joblessness, reports the New York Times:
During the quarter ending in September, when the overall unemployment rate averaged 8.5 percent, 52 percent of actors, 55 percent of dancers and 27 percent of musicians were out of work, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. By comparison, the jobless rate was 27 percent for waiters; 19 percent for cooks; and about 13 percent for retail salespeople over the same period.
In many areas, arts venues — theaters, clubs, performance spaces, concert halls, festivals — were the first businesses to close, and they are likely to be among the last to reopen.
“My fear is we’re not just losing jobs, we’re losing careers,” said Adam Krauthamer, president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians in New York. He said 95 percent of the local’s 7,000 members are not working on a regular basis because of the mandated shutdown. “It will create a great cultural depression,” he said.
The new $15 billion worth of stimulus aid for performance venues and cultural institutions that Congress approved this week — which was thrown into limbo after President Trump criticized the bill — will not end the mass unemployment for performers anytime soon. And it only extends federal unemployment aid through mid-March.
The irony, is, of course that folks like Jeff Bezos, people who’ve reaped vast rewards since the pandemic emerged, also make lots of their wealth on the backs of entertainers [think Amazon Prime video].
Why not simply add a pandemic profiteering surchagre to his his income taxe forms this year?
While the world reels under the impact one deadly, invisible, airborne pandemic, another invisible, airborne plague is killing its own millions, a plague spawned by the same forces that are making our word ever hotter and on track to making large parts of our planet uninhabitable.
That plague is air pollution spawned by the burning of fuel.
And now we have a body count for one country, the world’s second most-populous, as well as figures for economic damage.
New report reveals human, economic toll of air pollution in India
Air pollution in India resulted 1.67 million deaths in 2019 – the largest pollution-related death toll in any country in the world – and also accounted for $36.8 billion (US) in economic losses, according to a new study led by researchers from the Global Observatory on Pollution and Health at Boston College, the Indian Council of Medical Research, and the Public Health Foundation of India.
The 2019 death toll attributed to air pollution in India accounted for 17.8 percent of all deaths in the country in 2019, according to the study’s findings, published today in the journal Lancet Planetary Health.
The $36.8 billion in economic loss was 1.36 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the report, titled “The health and economic impact of air pollution in the states of India.”
Pollution-related losses “could impede India’s aspiration to be a $5-trillion economy by 2024,” the researchers concluded. “Successful reduction of air pollution in India would lead to substantial benefits for both the health of the population and the economy.”
“Pollution takes an enormous human toll in India,” said lead researcher Boston College Professor of Biology Philip J. Landrigan, MD, director of the Global Observatory on Pollution and Health. “It is causing 1.67 million premature deaths per year – many more than from COVID-19.”
The consequences will be long-lasting without efforts to reduce air pollution in the nation of 1.35 billion people, according to Landrigan, whose research was funded in part by UN Environment Programme.
“It is also having a profound effect on the next generation of Indians,” said Landrigan. “It increases future risk for heart disease, diabetes, and respiratory disease for today’s children when they become adults. It is reducing children’s IQ. It will be very difficult for India to move forward socially or economically if they don’t do something about the problem.”
From the study, a series of four maps reveals [clockwise from top left], [A] pollution exposures to airborne particulates, [B] Percentages of households relying on burning solid fuels for heat and cooking, [C] Population-weighted exposures to ozone, and [D] Air pollution economic losses as a percentage of GDP for each state.
Researchers also found rapidly changing patterns of air pollution and pollution-related disease in India, according to the report. The death rate from indoor air pollution, which is caused mainly by poorly ventilated home cook stoves, has decreased by 64.2 percent since 1990.
In the same time period, the death rate due to ambient (outdoor) particulate matter pollution increased by 115.3 percent and that due to ambient ozone pollution increased by 139.2 percent. These increases in deaths from ambient air pollution reflect increasing emissions from cars, trucks, and buses, as well as the widespread use of coal to generate electricity in India.
Among the many costs associated with increased mortality and illness caused by air pollutants, the researchers estimate the air pollution-related costs to India’s health care system at nearly $12 billion in 2019.
Climate change exacerbates pollution, the researchers noted, through atmospheric stagnation, temperature-driven increases in particulate matter, and ground-level ozone formation, which are likely to be particularly severe in India.
State-by-state analysis showed a more than three-fold variation in air pollution death rates across the states of India. Southern Indian states have put policies in place to reduce air pollution when compared to states in the north, where pollution and its consequences showed a greater impact in mortality and economic costs, said Landrigan.
Landrigan said there are ample solutions and examples of successful pollution reduction policies that can be developed to meet the specific needs of the country and its states. China, a country with a similar size population and equally ambitious economic goals, adopted pollution control targets in its most recent five-year plan and is making progress on pollution control, he said.
“We point to countries like the United States where we reduced air pollution by 70 percent since passage of the Clean Air Act in the 1970s,” said Landrigan. “At the same time, US GDP grew by 250 percent. There are similar statistics from Europe, Australia, and Japan. Pollution control does not stifle economic growth.”
While researchers report a decline in indoor air pollution produced primarily by cook stoves used in millions of homes throughout the country, further reductions will require additional strategies that address poverty as well as energy needs, said co-author Gautam Yadama, dean of the School of Social Work at Boston College.
“One of our challenges is to provide the poor with greater access to devices and clean fuels that can be sustainably used in a variety of real-world conditions,” said Yadama. “The more these are developed and tested in collaboration with communities — particularly the women, the devices’ end users — the more likely their uptake.”
eats shoots 'n leaves 