UN talks the talk but will nations walk the walk?

Unless global leaders act now, the Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres painted a picture of hunger and famine at historic proportions, with some 60 million people pushed into extreme poverty and half the global workforce — 1.6 billion people — left without work, and $8.5 trillion in global output lost. 

“Many developing and even middle-income countries are highly vulnerable and already in debt distress – or will soon become so, due to the global recession,” Guterres said.

Dr Donald Kaberuka, Special Envoy from the African Union, warned against the world resorting to an individualistic approach as they reel from the economic collapse of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“After the global financial crisis, every country went back to address their own problems. Global solidarity declined very quickly,” Kaberuka said. “We can’t afford to let this happen this time.”

David Malpass, President of the World Bank Group, pointed out that the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown of developed economies will result in poverty for 60 million people, highlighting issues such as reduced incomes for migrant workers and a drop in remittance flows. 

“Wide spillover from the pandemic and the shutdown in advanced economies hit the poor and vulnerable, women, children, and healthcare workers hardest, deepening the inequality from the lack of development and making the health crisis even worse.” 

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said. “We know that jobs and businesses in each of our countries depend on the health and stability of economies elsewhere.”

http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/05/covid-19-un-urges-world-leaders-to-act-now-to-avert-unimaginable-devastation/

US Food Inflation

Inflation in the USA has led to a 2.6% jump in April food prices which was the largest monthly increase in 46 years. Prices for meats, poultry, fish and eggs increased the most, rising 4.3%. Although the 2.9% jump in cereals and bakery products wasn’t as steep, it was still the largest increase the agency has recorded.  Dairy and related products, and fruits and vegetables increased by 1.5 percent in April.

April retail prices for boneless pork chops and ham were nearly 6% higher than in March and retail prices for hamburger and sirloin steak were about 4% higher, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported. The price of whole fresh chickens rose by more than 12%. For garlic a 278% price increase from a year ago.

Trey Malone, an agriculture economist and professor at Michigan State University explained,  “ We’ve obviously seen this record increase in unemployment filings, and so there are more people who are at risk in that sense that they literally don’t have any employment to secure the money that they would need to buy the food that they traditionally purchase. For the people who are already operating on the margins, these price increases are non-trivial.”

https://apnews.com/54f1efe0afa71b0a939fda91cf917366

American Poverty

A poll released by the U.S. Census Bureau this week revealed that at least nine million American households that include children are unsure whether they'll be able to access enough food in the next four weeks and more than 18 million are only "somewhat confident" about their food security with millions more are experiencing housing insecurity during the coronavirus pandemic.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/29/least-9-million-us-households-children-are-not-all-confident-theyll-be-able-afford

The IMF on Climate Change

Equity markets have generally ignored the increasing number of natural disasters over the past 50 years and tougher rules are needed to make investors aware of the dangers posed by the climate crisis, the International Monetary Fund has said.

Companies should be forced to disclose their exposure to climate risk because a voluntary approach does not go far enough, the IMF said.

The IMF said global temperatures were currently 1.1C above their pre-industrial level and were on course to rise by a total of 3C unless stronger action was taken.

“Climate change induced by this level of warming is, in turn, expected to adversely impact the world’s stock of natural assets, lead to a significant rise in sea level, and increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather event,” the IMF said. “As the frequency and severity of climatic hazards rise, the resultant socioeconomic losses could be significantly higher than in recent history.”

Last year was also marked by a series of severe weather-related events, including flooding in the US and bushfires in Australia, but the IMF said this was part of a trend for the number of disasters to increase “considerably” in the past few decades, from slightly more than 50 in the early 1980s to about 200 since 2000. It noted that Hurricane Kartrin devastated New Orleans in 2005, and Dominica suffered damage amounting to more than twice its GDP when Hurricane Maria struck in 2017.

Even so there had been little indication that investors had become more aware of the potential losses they could face if global temperatures continued to rise, with only a modest impact on stock markets, shares in banks and insurance companies from large disasters. The IMF said. “This suggests that equity investors may not be paying sufficient attention to climate change risks.”

“Of course, strong policy actions to mitigate climate change would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and future physical risk in the first place, conferring benefits to mankind that extend well beyond the realm of financial stability. Yet, from a financial stability perspective, this transition to a lower-carbon economy needs to be carefully managed to avoid abrupt and unanticipated repricing of portfolios and economic dislocation.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/29/markets-not-paying-attention-to-climate-crisis-imf-warns

Brazil's Callous COVID-19 Attitude

Julio Croda, an epidemiologist who used to head Brazil's health ministry's department of immunization and transmissible diseases, said he encountered a lack of urgency from the government when his department predicted that the elderly would bear the brunt of the coronavirus.

Croda reported that when informed that older people would be more likely to die from the disease, Solange Vieira, who leads the Superintendence of Private Insurance, linked to the country's finance ministry and who helped reform the country's pensions, said:

 "It's good that deaths are concentrated among the old. That will improve our economic performance as it will reduce our pension deficit." 

The ‘Bolsonarization’ of Bolivia

Last November’s coup removed Bolivian President Evo Morales from power. Since then the world's media has fallen silent. 

Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party governed the country for 14 years. Certain negative actions and policies of the MAS government over these years in power contributed to its own crisis of legitimacy in the lead up to the October 2019 elections.  In the lead up to the October 20, 2019 election, the MAS and Morales were already mired in a crisis of legitimacy, making them an easier target for the right, which had been consolidating forces and capitalizing off of the errors of the MAS. The issue of fraud during the October 20^th elections, which indicated Morales won another term, has been widely debated and investigated. Following the election, protesters against Morales allied with right-wing leader Fernando Camacho and other racist figures, fomenting destabilization and violence in the country in an effort to force Morales out of office. These efforts ultimately created the pretext for a police and military intervention   Regardless of the extent or existence of fraud, the Organization of American States strategically threw gasoline on the fire during a critical moment of the October crisis with their early claims of fraud, pushing the country into violence. On November 8, police across the country mutinied against the government, and the military “suggested” Morales step down on November 10. Morales and other MAS leaders were forced to flee or go into hiding. Morales left the country for Mexico.

The Right, having planned for a seizure of the government, took advantage of the power vacuum and entered office with the crucial blessing of the Bolivian armed forces and the US embassy. 

Senator Jeanine Áñez declared herself president in front of an empty Congress on November 12.  State repression immediately following the coup left dozens dead of unarmed protesters and bystanders dead in Senkata and Sacaba, key areas of resistance to the coup regime. and the government has been throwing political enemies behind bars. 

Following Áñez’s seizure of power, Bolivia has endured the worst state violence and political persecution it has seen in decades.

“They’re criminalizing social protest…" Bolivian journalist Fernando Molina explained. “There’s a ‘Bolsonarization’ of Bolivia.”

The Áñez government threatens to roll back major progressive policies of the MAS, as well as victories won in the streets by Bolivia’s broad social, labor, and indigenous movements.

“The coup d’état is not just against the state, the government, but also the social movement organizations,” Aymara feminist activist Adriana Guzmán explained.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/05/28/bibles-barricades-how-right-seized-power-bolivia

Climate change is a killer

A new study has found "substantial underreporting" in the numbers of deaths caused by environmental crises.

Dr Arnagretta Hunter, of ANU Medical School who co-authored the study, said in a statement: "Climate change is a killer, but we don’t acknowledge it on death certificates. If you have an asthma attack and die during heavy smoke exposure from bushfires, the death certificate should include that information. We can make a diagnosis of disease like coronavirus, but we are less literate in environmental determinants like hot weather or bushfire smoke.”

The research, published in journal The Lancet Planetary Health this month, revealed that over the past 11 years, the number of deaths attributed to excessive natural heat is at least 50 times greater than is recorded on death certificates in Australia.

During that time some 340 deaths in Australia were recorded as excessive heat but experts from The Australian National University (ANU) found that 36,765 could be attributed to the environmental conditions, following statistical analysis. The study indicates that the heat-related mortality rate in Australia is actually around 2 per cent.

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-deaths-kill-records-wildfires-a9533536.html

Mutual Aid is there for the Asking

Many still cling to the hope that the COVID-19 crisis will transform the use of state power into an altruistic tool acting on behalf of the vulnerable and powerless, rather than view it as an opportunity for governments to harness the state’s intervention to advance the oligarchy’s interests and increase its privileges. Nationalist and populist political leaders are stoking prejudice and  xenophobia accusing cunning foreigners of nefarious scheming. Aspiring strongmen politicians are reinforcing divisions while at the same time rewarding their corporate sponsors and donors.

Our message to our fellow-workers is that those who do not own the means of production are nothing but the slaves of those who do. The forces of production long ago reached the point where they could produce the abundance necessary for the change from private ownership into social ownership. The interdependence of society has outgrown local and national bounds and is world wide. The workers of the world must organise politically to dispossess the capitalist class of the means of production and distribution and establish common ownership. The Socialist Party urges our fellow working men and women of all nations and races to join with the World Socialist Movement in order to free society from the tyranny of class rule. Socialism requires an economy developed to the point where production for need supersedes production for profit. Humanity will no longer produce goods to be exchanged for money on the market. It will produce use values distributed to all members of society in order to satisfy their needs

The only real way forward, in the end, is the world socialist cooperative commonwealth.

To own the vaccine or not?

The United States and the UK were the only two holdouts in the World Health Assembly from the declaration that vaccines and medicines for COVID-19 should be available as public goods, and not under exclusive patent rights. The United States explicitly disassociated itself from the patent pool call, talking instead of “the critical role that intellectual property plays”—in other words, patents for vaccines and medicines. 

All other countries agreed with the Costa Rican proposal in the World Health Assembly that there should be a patent pool for all COVID-19 vaccines and medicines. All countries supported this proposal, barring the United States and its loyal camp follower, the UK. The United States also entered its disagreement on the final WHA resolution, being the lone objector to patent pooling of COVID-19 medicines and vaccines, noting “the critical role that intellectual property plays in incentivizing the development of new and improved health products.”

China and the EU have already agreed that any vaccine developed by them will be regarded as a public good. Even without that, once a medicine or a vaccine is known to be successful, any country with a reasonable scientific infrastructure can replicate the medicine or the vaccine, and manufacture it locally. India in particular has one of the largest generic drug and vaccine manufacturing capacities in the world. What prevents India, or any country for that matter, from manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines or drugs once they are developed—only the empty threat of a failed hegemon on breaking patents?

Most countries have compulsory licensing provisions that will allow them to break patents in case of epidemics or health emergencies. Even the WTO, after a bitter fight, accepted in its Doha Declaration (2001) that countries, in a health emergency, have the right to allow any company to manufacture a patented drug without the patent holder’s permission, and even import it from other countries. Why is it, then, that countries are unable to break patents, even if there are provisions in their laws and in the TRIPS Agreement? The answer is their fear of U.S. sanctions against them. Every year, the U.S. Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issues a Special 301 Report that it has used to threaten trade sanctions against any country that tries to compulsorily license any patented product. 

 India figures prominently in this report year after year, for daring to issue a compulsory license in 2012 to Natco for nexavar, a cancer drug Bayer was selling for more than $65,000 a year. Marijn Dekkers, the CEO of Bayer, was quoted widely that this was “theft,” and “We did not develop this medicine for Indians… We developed it for Western patients who can afford it.” This leaves unanswered how many people even in the affluent West can afford a $65,000 bill for an illness. But there is no question that a bill of this magnitude is a death sentence for anybody but the super-rich in countries like India. Though a number of other drugs were under also consideration for compulsory licensing at that time, India has not exercised this provision again after receiving U.S. threats.

One issue is now looming large over the COVID-19 pandemic. If we do not address the intellectual property rights issue in this pandemic, we are likely to see a repeat of the AIDS tragedy. People died for 10 years (1994-2004) as patented AIDS medicine was priced at $10,000 to $15,000 for a year’s supply, far beyond their reach. Finally, patent laws in India allowed people to get AIDS medicine at less than a dollar a day, or $350 for a year’s supply. Today, 80 percent of the world’s AIDS medicine comes from India. For big pharma, profits trumped lives, and they will continue to do so, COVID or no COVID, unless we change the world.

It is unlikely that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 will provide a lifetime immunity like the smallpox vaccine. Unlike AIDS, where the patient numbers were smaller and were unfortunately stigmatized in different ways, COVID-19 is a visible threat for everyone. Any attempt to hold people and governments to ransom on COVID-19 vaccines or medicines could see the collapse of the entire patent edifice of TRIPS that big pharma backed by the United States and major EU countries have built. That is why the more clever in the capitalist world have moved toward a voluntary patent pool for potential COVID-19 medicines and vaccines. A voluntary patent pool means that companies or institutions holding patents on medicines—such as remdesivir—or vaccines would voluntarily hand them over to such a pool. The terms and conditions of such a handover, meaning at concessional rates, or for only for certain regions, are still not clear—leading to criticism that a voluntary patent pool is not a substitute for declaring that all such medicines and vaccines should be declared global public goods during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the anthrax scare in 2001, the U.S. Secretary of Health issued a threat to Bayer under “eminent domain for patents” for licensing the anthrax-treatment drug ciprofloxacin to other manufacturers. Bayer folded, and agreed to supply the quantity at a price that the U.S. government had set. And without a whimper. Yes, this is the same Bayer that considers India as a “thief” for issuing a compulsory license.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-u-s-is-declaring-a-vaccine-war-on-the-world/