Protect the Vulnerable

Home Office immigration policies are “compounding” health inequalities during the coronavirus pandemic, creating destitution and encouraging discrimination against non-British communities, London mayor, Sadiq Khan, has said.

He calls on the department to lift certain restrictions on migrants in response to the virus outbreak, saying he is “deeply concerned” that some policies are risking Londoners’ public health.

“I am concerned that health inequalities are being compounded by immigration policies that can create destitution and perversely encourage discrimination against BAME and migrant Londoners,” he warns.  Khan urged Priti Patel to suspend NHS charging regulations and data sharing with the Home Office, which he said were “undermining” efforts to stop the spread of Covid-19 and leaving many key workers and their families exposed and unable to afford the treatment and care they need. “We are now seeing evidence that they are failing Londoners who are fearful of coming forward for support during a global pandemic and hearing devastating reports of people dying in their homes or suffering in silence,” the letter states.

He also calls on the Home Office to extend all non-UK national visas for those working in the frontline and offer full citizenship rights to NHS and care workers, who he said had ”risked — and continue to risk on a daily basis — their lives during the COVID-19 crisis”. The London mayor said he was “extremely concerned” to hear that there had already been confirmed cases of Covid-19 in immigration removal centres, and called on Ms Patel to consider that those held in detention who aren’t any danger to the public should be released “without delay”.

Khan also urged the department to suspend both the habitual residence test and the no recourse to public funds (NRPF) condition — which prevents people on certain visas from accessing state benefits — to enable people to get the support they need and to help stop the spread of the virus by those who feel they have no choice but to go out to work.

He adds in the letter: “I recognise and welcome some of the changes your department has already made to meet the needs of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, however, I remain deeply concerned that some policies are risking Londoners’ public health and I am writing today to ask you to go further.”

It comes after the Home Office was accused last week of causing foreign doctors and nurses in the NHS “unnecessary distress” after declaring they would have their visas extended free of charge — only to apparently narrow the group that would benefit to just those on Tier 2 visas. 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-sadiq-khan-home-office-immigration-policies-a9488966.html

Racial Disparity in the USA

In February 2020 when the overall unemployment rate was 3.5%, a 50-year-low, the black unemployment rate was 5.8%. The white unemployment rate was 3.1%. William Rodgers, former chief economist at the US Department of Labor, has estimated that the real unemployment rate for African Americans may have reached 19% in March. 

“The reason why African Americans bear the brunt of downturns more is that when firing decisions start to occur the least educated and those with the least experience tend to be let go first. There is also continued discrimination in the workplace,” Rodgers said.

Economists who focus on race have long said that this “last hired, first fired” phenomenon dramatically affects black Americans more than any other group in the US due to the country’s history of racism and segregation of black Americans in the work sector.

Workers of color, particularly black Americans, have long been over-represented in the lowest-paying service and domestic occupations, such as taxi drivers and restaurant servers. Working in these fields leads to lower wages – black Americans have the lowest median wage of any racial group in the US – and the jobs are often seen as the most expendable during an economic downturn.

Those who got to keep their jobs during the last recession saw little relief even after the recession’s recovery period. Even with a low unemployment rate, wage growth for low-wage workers, especially for black workers, has been slow. Black Americans have seen the slowest wage growth compared with other groups of Americans, reaching a growth rate that was four times slower at certain wage distribution levels, according to a 2018 Economic Policy Institute report.

“Even though overall on aggregate we were in a better position, many of the underlying weaknesses of our economy were still there – inequality both on class and race,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity and the economy.

Low wages have a ripple effect on a family’s ability to save money and build wealth. 

Black families are especially vulnerable to economic downturns because they lack the savings that can act as a buffer against unexpected layoffs or lost wages. And during the last recovery they lost ground against their white peers.

The median net worth of black families is $17,600, compared with $171,000 for white families. A white family is likely to have $10 for every $1 a black family has. The percentage of black families that have a net worth at or below zero dollars is 10 points higher than the percentage of white families in the same financial situation – 19% compared with 9%, respectively. And the black homeownership rate is the lowest of any racial group in the US and has consistently been about 30% lower than the white homeownership rate over the years, even as the economy was getting stronger.

“Wealth allows you to respond to that unexpected health emergency, that broken hole in the tire you have to replace. It also allows you to buy a home, put your kids through school,” said Danyelle Solomon, vice-president of the race and ethnicity program at the Center for American Progress.

Having less wealth also has some dire health consequences. Experts agree that being poor has costly effects on a person’s health: for adults living in extreme poverty, being poor can cost up to 15 years of life expectancy. 

It is no surprise, then, that black Americans – who are less likely to be insured and more likely to have existing health conditions than their white counterparts – have seen higher death rates due to Covid-19 compared with any other group in the US. Black Americans made up 25% of deaths from Covid-19 in the US though they make up a little under 13% of the US population.

“National emergencies, pandemics, epidemics, what they do is they spotlight inequality,” Solomon said. “What we see in Covid-19 is no different. It’s highlighting racial disparities at every single level that have been with our society for a very long time.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/28/african-americans-unemployment-covid-19-economic-impact

Planet of the Humans Interview

A 17-minute interview with the makers of "Planet of the Humans" on The Hill Rising website responding to their green critics and those corporate interests sponsoring the environmentalist movement. Very insightful

Lebanon Unrest Mounts

The crash of Lebanon’s national currency that sent food prices soaring has boiled over into street violence in the northern city of Tripoli  where a man wounded in clashes between protesters and security forces is now dead.

Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, has soaring unemployment and poverty, and protesters hurled petrol bombs at several banks and caused wide damage. Protests also erupted elsewhere in Lebanon. In Beirut,  cash machines were set on fire.  Anti-government protests resumed as authorities began easing the weeks-long lockdown to limit the spread of the coronavirus pandemic in Lebanon, which has reported 710 cases and 24 deaths so far.

Over the weekend, the Lebanese pound hit a record low, with 4,000 pounds to the dollar on the black market, while the official price remained at 1,507 pounds.  The Central Bank of Lebanon instructed currency exchange shops not to sell the dollar for more than 3,200 pounds. On Monday, most exchange shops were not selling dollars, saying clients who have dollars are refusing to exchange their currency at such a low price. The dollar surged on the black market to 4,300 pounds on Tuesday.

Can Capitalism Deliver the Vaccines?

Nobel laureate and immunologist Professor Peter Doherty said the world needed to change its funding model for vaccine development.

“There is just not enough profit margin in it for pharma companies," he said. "They live by profits and the rules of capitalism. And capitalism has no interest in human beings other than as consumers.”

Professor Mark Sullivan, managing director of Medicines Development for Global Health, a vaccine development company based in Melbourne, described the vaccine development landscape as a “market failure”.

“The problem is this market failure is our only method of developing medicines,” he said. 

The final study needed for a vaccine to be approved is much more expensive than a similar study for a drug because the study needs to be huge to definitively show prevention of a disease – “tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of participants”, said Professor Sullivan. Three SARS vaccine projects, which may have yielded important insights for a COVID-19 vaccine as the viruses are closely related, stalled at this stage.

And manufacturing a vaccine is much more expensive than making a drug because it often involves modifying yeast or bacteria to produce a vaccine – a difficult and costly process.

Because of all those factors, the enthusiasm of the pharmaceutical industry to invest in vaccines has dropped dramatically in the last 20 years.

Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi which works to distribute vaccines to the poor, said it was very difficult to get funding for research on vaccines for viruses that have not yet become pandemics. “We have enough land-based nuclear missiles to destroy the world. And in case that does not work, we keep air-based missiles and submarines. And that’s to prevent something much less likely than the evolutionary certainty that is a pandemic virus.”

"Without immediate additional financial contributions the vaccine programmes we have begun will not be able to progress and ultimately will not deliver the vaccines that the world needs," Dr Richard Hatchett,  Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation's CEO, said in a statement.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-development-is-a-case-of-market-failure-here-s-why-20200413-p54jez.html

The IDPs

In its annual report, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) warns a record 50.8 million people worldwide are internally displaced due to conflict or disaster, with coronavirus posing a new threat. The IDMC says Covid-19 may add further risks to millions of already vulnerable people.

 Over 45 million have been forced to abandon their homes due to violence. A further five million have been displaced by natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, the IDMC says.

It adds that the number of people internally displaced - those who flee conflict or disaster but remain in their own countries - has now reached a record high. 

The new coronavirus is likely to make the lives of many of these people - some already living in cramped, unsanitary conditions such as makeshift emergency shelters, informal settlements and urban slums - more difficult. Such overcrowded conditions make it hard to implement the physical distancing and hygiene measures required to prevent the spread of the deadly Covid-19 virus. The pandemic also compromises their "precarious living conditions by further limiting their access to essential services and humanitarian aid," the director of the IDMC, Alexandra Bilak, said.

But even without the pandemic, the number of internally displaced people across the globe is a sign, the new report says, of collective failure.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52450031

Will COVID-19 Change the World?

CAPITALISM'S CORONAVIRUS CRISIS

How is it possible that countries with the largest economies in the world can’t even organise enough protection to safeguard their nurses and doctors in the frontline? How have food manufacturers and retailers build food supply chains that are so fragile and inadequate that the slightest hint of panic-buying leaves supermarket shelves empty or diminished for weeks or months? How have we allowed ourselves to become so detached from reality and addicted to all sorts of superficial distractions such as Netflix?

Without transformative change humanity is at risk. Let's rebuild the new society that we need. Let us construct a fairer and less destructive world. We can build better and stronger. After coronavirus, there should be no return to ‘normal’. When we say no going back to business-as-usual this time, we must really mean it. Whatever happens, our future world must be profoundly different. Communities are helping each other out in this pandemic. At every level, neighbourhood and city, let's encourage and support this powerful spirit and create funding for communities to rebuild together. A plethora of hard-working community project groups have been created, unlocking stimulus and energy. Greedy capitalists and sociopathic politicians have all the power in the modern world. We can do more to publicise the capitalist and market-driven roots of these issues.Instead we can make life the central raison d’être. Socialists speak of the reinvention of society. Socialists want more equitable future to arrive and a more humane world for ourselves and for others.

It would be simplistic to assume that an outbreak of a pandemic in itself could automatically could propel and produce change but there is no denying that the current crisis has laid bare the numerous fault-lines within the capitalist system. The COVID crisis has magnified a reality of capitalism’s failures. For example, one of many examples of the failure of the profit driven system is health care.  COVID-19 exposes the fact that essential workers who provide food, healthcare, and deliveries to our homes are mistreated and underappreciated. Workers are underpaid and are not being provided with protective equipment or allowed sick leave. The COVID-19 rescue laws have given trillions in funding to investors and Big Business.

We must help mobilise people. When people are in the movement, a union, or an organisation, they are ready to be part of a mass action in achieving change. It’s a stupidity and arrogance that allows us to believe that we can continue to plunder our environment and devour non-renewable resources.

Workers are thrown to the wolves by politicians and an economic system. For those people who live in countries where there is no social security system whatever, the COVID-19 pandemic threatens consequences infinitely worse and condemns a whole families to deprivation, because wages are so low, that daily life is a relentless struggle to survive as it is without the added complications of COVID-19.

It is the poor who pay the price.

Britain’s lowest-paid workers, women and young adults have jobs with the biggest health and economic risks during the coronavirus lockdown, according to a report into the uneven impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Resolution Foundation thinktank said jobs in shutdown parts of the economy were lower paid than average, with as many as one in four of the lowest earners in society working in sectors forced into temporary closure, compared with less than one in 20 of the highest paid.

8.6 million key workers have been putting their health at risk to keep the country running, the study found women were more than twice as likely than men to occupy these roles. Dominated by almost 4 million health workers, as well as education, food and pharmaceutical retail staff, parents are also more likely to be key workers, including as many as two in five working mothers.

The thinktank said key workers, such as nurses, teachers and care workers, typically earn less than employees further away from the centre of the crisis, with the bottom 30% of earners in Britain more than twice as likely to be in such jobs than the top 10%.

As well as health risks facing women and low-income workers in sectors where staff are still going into work, the Resolution Foundation identified 6.3 million people in areas of the economy that have been ordered to shut down, including in hospitality, retail, arts, travel and leisure. It said jobs in sectors that have been effectively forced to close were typically lower paid than average, putting workers in these areas at greater risk of financial hardship as redundancies mount.

One in four of the lowest 10% of all UK earners work in sectors where activity has ground to a halt amid tight restrictions on social and business life across Britain, compared with less than one in 20 of the highest paid.

Young people are particularly likely to work in mothballed sectors, given the higher numbers of young adults in hospitality or retail, where their employers have been forced to close. As the generation to experience the toughest squeeze on pay following the 2008 financial crisis, the report warned that almost a quarter of millennials – born between 1981 and 2000 – currently work in shuttered sectors, compared with 16% of working baby boomers and other older adults born before them.

Although the government is providing billions of pounds of emergency financial support to companies and individuals, millions are still expected to fall through the safety net.

Maja Gustafsson, a researcher at the Resolution Foundation, said, “Women, young people and the low-paid are most likely to be bearing the biggest health and economic risks from the crisis, which has shone a spotlight on the vitality of work that has been undervalued and underpaid for far too long,” she added.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/28/uks-lowest-paid-most-at-risk-during-covid-19-crisis-report-finds