the real world
exposing how greed, corruption, injustice, and imperialism impacts the world
and exposes the leaders who benefit
may 30, 2020
*Boris Johnson referred to police watchdog over alleged relationship with American businesswoman The prime minister of Great Britain may be facing an investigation as impeachment grips America.
Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men
Mahatma Gandhi
articles
*Global report: new clues about role of pangolins in Covid-19 as US severs ties with WHO(excerpt BELOW)
*Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu professes innocence at start of corruption trial
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*COVID-19: Neglected by government, Amazon tribes turn to traditional medicine
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Hungary Voters choose to end legal recognition of trans people
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*QUEENSLAND CRITICISED FOR HOLDING BACK RAPID COVID-19 TESTING IN REMOTE ABORIGINAL COMMUNITIES(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Spraying disinfectants does not work — and can be ‘harmful’: World Health Organization(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Commemorating the abolition of slavery in France: "This is our history"
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Crisis lays bare poverty in Geneva, Switzerland as thousands queue for food
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*‘Not the World’s Number One’: Chinese Social Media Piles On the U.S.
(excerpt BELOW)
*This State in India Shows Us Why Fighting COVID-19 Requires Working-Class Power
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Boris Johnson’s Coronavirus Lies Are Killing Britons
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*US stays away as world leaders agree action on Covid-19 vaccine
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*So much for entitled millennials – it’s billionaires such as Richard Branson who are begging for loans(ARTICLE BELOW)
*117 million children face measles risk from COVID-19 response: UN
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*ERIK PRINCE OFFERED LETHAL SERVICES TO SANCTIONED RUSSIAN MERCENARY FIRM WAGNER
(excerpt BELOW)
*Coronavirus pandemic exacerbates inequalities for women, UN warns
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Syrian air force carried out 2017 chemical attack, investigators find
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*In first, US brands white supremacists as foreign terrorists
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Brazil minister offends China with ‘racist’ virus tweet
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*5G coronavirus conspiracy theory is dangerous fake nonsense, UK says
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*CORONAVIRUS STARTED IN CHINA, BUT EUROPE BECAME THE HUB FOR ITS GLOBAL SPREAD
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Gender equality: Most people are biased against women, UN says
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The super-rich: another 31,000 people join the ultra-wealthy elite
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*DELHI PROTESTS: DEATH TOLL CLIMBS AMID WORST RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE FOR DECADES
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*UK to close door to non-English speakers and unskilled workers
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*No 10 refuses to comment on PM's views of racial IQ
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Germany Sees Political Fallout From Chancellor Merkel’s Alliance With Far Right
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Vietnam accused of teaching young people that being gay is a ‘disease’
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Canada: thousands of travelers affected as Indigenous-led rail blockade continues
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Illegal Chinese Chef Charged for Caning Black Employee In Kenya
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Abbas blasts Trump’s ‘Swiss cheese’ plan for Palestine in UN speech
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Botswana Selling Licenses To Kill Elephants At $39,000 A Head
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Women Perform 12.5 Billion Hours of Unpaid Labor Every Day
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Here’s What Workers of the Global South Endure to Create Corporate Wealth
(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
*World Highlights*
*USAID FACES MOUNTING PRESSURE TO REMOVE LATEST TRUMP APPOINTEE WITH HISTORY OF ISLAMOPHOBIC REMARKS
“IT IS CLEAR THAT ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTRY HAS A HOME IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.”
The appointee to the USAID position is Mark Kevin Lloyd, a little-known former tea party activist, the Washington Post reported earlier this week.
*JAIR BOLSONARO LET CORONAVIRUS RAVAGE BRAZIL. A FAVELA IS TAKING MATTERS INTO ITS OWN HANDS.
A NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION IN BRAZIL’S MOST DENSELY POPULATED FAVELA SET UP AN INFORMAL EMERGENCY-CARE SYSTEM TO REDUCE THE HARM CAUSED BY THE CORONAVIRUS.
Coronavirus outbreak
Global report: new clues about role of pangolins in Covid-19 as US severs ties with WHO
Experts condemn Trump’s actions; India records worst daily rise in infections; surges in Russia and Brazil; Australia tests sewage water
Chris Michael and Guardian staff
the guardian
Sat 30 May 2020 01.39 EDT
Scientists claim to have found more clues about how the new coronavirus could have spread from bats through pangolins and into humans, as India reported its worst single-day rise in new cases, and the number of Covid-19 infections worldwide neared 6 million.
Writing in the journal Covid-19 Science Advances, researchers said an examination of the closest relative of the virus found that it was circulating in bats but lacked the protein needed to bind to human cells. They said this ability could have been acquired from a virus found in pangolins – a scaly mammal that is one of the most illegally trafficked animals in the world.
Dr Elena Giorgi, of Los Alamos national laboratory, one of the study’s lead authors, said people had already looked at the pangolin link but scientists were still divided about their role in the evolution of Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
“In our study, we demonstrated that indeed Sars-Cov-2 has a rich evolutionary history that included a reshuffling of genetic material between bat and pangolin coronavirus before it acquired its ability to jump to humans,” she said, adding that “close proximity of animals of different species in a wet market setting may increase the potential for cross-species spillover infections”.
The study still doesn’t confirm the pangolin as the animal that passed the virus to humans, but it adds weight to previous studies that have suggested it may have been involved.
However, Prof Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney, in Australia, said more work on the subject was needed. “There is a clear evolutionary gap between Sars-Cov-2 and its closest relatives found to date in bats and pangolins,” he said. “The only way this gap will be filled is through more wildlife sampling.”
The findings came as Donald Trump announced that the United States was severing its ties with the World Health Organization because it had “failed to reform”.
The US is the biggest funder of the WHO, paying about $450m (£365m) in membership dues and voluntary contributions for specific programmes.
Trump’s declaration was condemned in the US and around the world, with Australian experts joining counterparts in the UK and elsewhere in voicing their support for the WHO. Prof Peter Doherty, a Nobel laureate and patron of the Doherty Institute, which is part of global efforts to find a Covid-19 vaccine, said the WHO had the “full support of the scientific community”.
Deaths in the US have climbed to more than 102,000, with 1,747,000 infections. It is by far the biggest total in the world. On Friday it emerged that one person who attended the controversial pool parties in the Ozarks last weekend had tested positive for the virus.[...]
Writing in the journal Covid-19 Science Advances, researchers said an examination of the closest relative of the virus found that it was circulating in bats but lacked the protein needed to bind to human cells. They said this ability could have been acquired from a virus found in pangolins – a scaly mammal that is one of the most illegally trafficked animals in the world.
Dr Elena Giorgi, of Los Alamos national laboratory, one of the study’s lead authors, said people had already looked at the pangolin link but scientists were still divided about their role in the evolution of Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
“In our study, we demonstrated that indeed Sars-Cov-2 has a rich evolutionary history that included a reshuffling of genetic material between bat and pangolin coronavirus before it acquired its ability to jump to humans,” she said, adding that “close proximity of animals of different species in a wet market setting may increase the potential for cross-species spillover infections”.
The study still doesn’t confirm the pangolin as the animal that passed the virus to humans, but it adds weight to previous studies that have suggested it may have been involved.
However, Prof Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney, in Australia, said more work on the subject was needed. “There is a clear evolutionary gap between Sars-Cov-2 and its closest relatives found to date in bats and pangolins,” he said. “The only way this gap will be filled is through more wildlife sampling.”
The findings came as Donald Trump announced that the United States was severing its ties with the World Health Organization because it had “failed to reform”.
The US is the biggest funder of the WHO, paying about $450m (£365m) in membership dues and voluntary contributions for specific programmes.
Trump’s declaration was condemned in the US and around the world, with Australian experts joining counterparts in the UK and elsewhere in voicing their support for the WHO. Prof Peter Doherty, a Nobel laureate and patron of the Doherty Institute, which is part of global efforts to find a Covid-19 vaccine, said the WHO had the “full support of the scientific community”.
Deaths in the US have climbed to more than 102,000, with 1,747,000 infections. It is by far the biggest total in the world. On Friday it emerged that one person who attended the controversial pool parties in the Ozarks last weekend had tested positive for the virus.[...]
Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu professes innocence at start of corruption trial
france24
24/05/2020 - 07:13
Benjamin Netanyahu professed his innocence at the start of his corruption trial on Sunday, saying he was being framed in the first criminal prosecution of a serving Israeli prime minister.
Flanked by a clutch of cabinet ministers from his right-wing Likud party, and speaking forcefully, Netanyahu appealed to public opinion, addressing television cameras in the courthouse hallway before taking his seat on the defendants' bench.
"These investigations were tainted and stitched-up from the first moment," Netanyahu said about charges of bribery, breach of trust and fraud at the centre of three graft cases against him.
Outside the courthouse, and separated by metal barriers and police, hundreds of his supporters and opponents held noisy demonstrations. Chants of "Bibi, king of Israel" from Netanyahu faithful using his nickname echoed through the court building.
Netanyahu, 70, was indicted in November in cases involving gifts from millionaire friends and for allegedly seeking regulatory favours for media tycoons in return for favourable coverage.
He drove in a motorcade to court after attending the first working session of his new "unity" cabinet, sworn in a week ago after a surprise power-sharing deal with his main opponent Benny Gantz. Its inauguration ended more than a year of political deadlock in the wake of three inconclusive elections.
In his hallway appearance, Netanyahu dubbed prosecutors and police the "Just Not Bibi Gang", reasserting that he was a victim of a political witch-hunt abetted by a left-wing media to drive him from office.
"I am appearing here today, as your prime minister, standing tall and with head high," Netanyahu said, vowing to beat the charges and continue to lead Israel in his current fifth term.
He is Israel's longest-serving leader, now in office for more than 11 straight years, plus three years in the 1990s.
On the street, a supporter's sign read: "Netanyahu, you'll never walk alone".
"Crime Minister," countered a banner draped over a barrier in the other camp's protest area.
In the courtroom, one of the judges asked Netanyahu whether he had read and understood the indictment.
The prime minister then stood up and replied: "Yes, your Honour."
Flanked by a clutch of cabinet ministers from his right-wing Likud party, and speaking forcefully, Netanyahu appealed to public opinion, addressing television cameras in the courthouse hallway before taking his seat on the defendants' bench.
"These investigations were tainted and stitched-up from the first moment," Netanyahu said about charges of bribery, breach of trust and fraud at the centre of three graft cases against him.
Outside the courthouse, and separated by metal barriers and police, hundreds of his supporters and opponents held noisy demonstrations. Chants of "Bibi, king of Israel" from Netanyahu faithful using his nickname echoed through the court building.
Netanyahu, 70, was indicted in November in cases involving gifts from millionaire friends and for allegedly seeking regulatory favours for media tycoons in return for favourable coverage.
He drove in a motorcade to court after attending the first working session of his new "unity" cabinet, sworn in a week ago after a surprise power-sharing deal with his main opponent Benny Gantz. Its inauguration ended more than a year of political deadlock in the wake of three inconclusive elections.
In his hallway appearance, Netanyahu dubbed prosecutors and police the "Just Not Bibi Gang", reasserting that he was a victim of a political witch-hunt abetted by a left-wing media to drive him from office.
"I am appearing here today, as your prime minister, standing tall and with head high," Netanyahu said, vowing to beat the charges and continue to lead Israel in his current fifth term.
He is Israel's longest-serving leader, now in office for more than 11 straight years, plus three years in the 1990s.
On the street, a supporter's sign read: "Netanyahu, you'll never walk alone".
"Crime Minister," countered a banner draped over a barrier in the other camp's protest area.
In the courtroom, one of the judges asked Netanyahu whether he had read and understood the indictment.
The prime minister then stood up and replied: "Yes, your Honour."
brazil
COVID-19: Neglected by government, Amazon tribes turn to traditional medicine
May 21, 2020
By Agence France-Presse
With the Covid-19 pandemic taking a heavy toll on Brazil’s Amazonas state, some Amazon tribes are turning to traditional medicine to treat the illness amid what they say is a lack of help from the country’s government.
Using ingredients including tree bark, mango peel mint and honey, as well as knowledge passed down through generations, members of the Sateré Mawé say their concoctions are effective against the virus.
“We have treated all the symptoms we have been experiencing with homemade remedies,” community leader André Sateré Mawé told AFP.
“Thanks to knowledge passed over generations, each member of the community has gathered an understanding of remedies. We have been experimenting, each remedy fights a symptom of the disease.”
But they also say they have little choice but to turn to traditional medicine.
“It seems that the government chooses who to attend to and they leave us without attention. We have learnt to manage ourselves. We have learnt to fight alone,” said the community leader.
Amazonas is one of the states most affected by the pandemic in Brazil with 22,132 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 1,491 deaths, according to official figures, overwhelming hospitals in the state’s capital Manaus.
Local officials and NGOs have warned that indigenous tribes are particularly at risk due to a lack of health services in remote areas, while the government of Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of doing little to help.
On Tuesday the mayor of Manaus, Arthur Virgilio Neto, warned of an impending “genocide” of indigenous people as a result of government inaction.
“I fear genocide and I want to denounce this thing to the whole world. We have here a government that does not care about the lives of indigenous people,” he said.
Using ingredients including tree bark, mango peel mint and honey, as well as knowledge passed down through generations, members of the Sateré Mawé say their concoctions are effective against the virus.
“We have treated all the symptoms we have been experiencing with homemade remedies,” community leader André Sateré Mawé told AFP.
“Thanks to knowledge passed over generations, each member of the community has gathered an understanding of remedies. We have been experimenting, each remedy fights a symptom of the disease.”
But they also say they have little choice but to turn to traditional medicine.
“It seems that the government chooses who to attend to and they leave us without attention. We have learnt to manage ourselves. We have learnt to fight alone,” said the community leader.
Amazonas is one of the states most affected by the pandemic in Brazil with 22,132 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 1,491 deaths, according to official figures, overwhelming hospitals in the state’s capital Manaus.
Local officials and NGOs have warned that indigenous tribes are particularly at risk due to a lack of health services in remote areas, while the government of Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of doing little to help.
On Tuesday the mayor of Manaus, Arthur Virgilio Neto, warned of an impending “genocide” of indigenous people as a result of government inaction.
“I fear genocide and I want to denounce this thing to the whole world. We have here a government that does not care about the lives of indigenous people,” he said.
Hungary
Hungary votes to end legal recognition of trans people
Activists say new law will increase discrimination, especially as Hungarians must often display their ID cards
Shaun Walker in Budapest
the guardian
Tue 19 May 2020 11.37 EDT
Hungary’s parliament has voted to end legal recognition for trans people, passing a bill that rights activists say pushes the country “back towards the dark ages”.
The new law defines gender as based on chromosomes at birth, meaning previous provisions whereby trans people could alter their gender and name on official documents will no longer be available.
The votes of rightwing prime minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party pushed the legislation through by 134 to 56, with four abstentions. It is likely to be signed into law by President János Áder, a close ally of Orbán.
Although Orbán passed a bill during the coronavirus pandemic to allow him to rule indefinitely by decree, the transgender bill was part of a larger package of legislation that went through parliament in the normal way. It was proposed by the deputy prime minister on 31 March, International Transgender Day of Visibility, and amendments submitted by opposition parties were discarded one by one on Tuesday.
The law has been roundly condemned both at home and abroad. Bernadett Szél, an opposition MP who spoke out strongly against the bill in parliament, described it as evil.
Trans people and advocates say the bill will lead to increased discrimination against the community, especially as Hungarian daily life requires people to show their identity cards frequently. It also means that trans people will not be able to choose a name that fits with their identified gender, as Hungarian law requires first names to be chosen from a list kept by the country’s Academy of Sciences, which is sorted according to gender.
“It basically means coming out as trans to complete strangers, all the time,” Ivett Ördög, a 39-year-old trans woman living in Budapest, told the Guardian last month.
The Háttér Society, a Hungarian trans rights group, said on Tuesday that the law violated international human rights norms and went against the case law of the European court of human rights, as well as previous rulings of the Hungarian constitutional court.
Since 2017, legal gender changes in the country have effectively been frozen, and now the backlog of people waiting for the legal procedure will all be rejected, along with any new applicants. Because the new category will list “sex at birth”, there are also fears it could be used to target trans people who have already legally changed their gender.
Krisztina Tamás-Sáróy of Amnesty International said: “This decision pushes Hungary back towards the dark ages and tramples the rights of transgender and intersex people. It will not only expose them to further discrimination but will also deepen an already intolerant and hostile environment faced by the LGBTI community.”
Orbán’s government has increasingly used anti-LGBT rhetoric as part of a perceived culture war, and has made “traditional family values” a mainstay of many of its policies. The speaker of parliament, an Orbán ally, last year compared gay couples that adopt to paedophiles.
The new law defines gender as based on chromosomes at birth, meaning previous provisions whereby trans people could alter their gender and name on official documents will no longer be available.
The votes of rightwing prime minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party pushed the legislation through by 134 to 56, with four abstentions. It is likely to be signed into law by President János Áder, a close ally of Orbán.
Although Orbán passed a bill during the coronavirus pandemic to allow him to rule indefinitely by decree, the transgender bill was part of a larger package of legislation that went through parliament in the normal way. It was proposed by the deputy prime minister on 31 March, International Transgender Day of Visibility, and amendments submitted by opposition parties were discarded one by one on Tuesday.
The law has been roundly condemned both at home and abroad. Bernadett Szél, an opposition MP who spoke out strongly against the bill in parliament, described it as evil.
Trans people and advocates say the bill will lead to increased discrimination against the community, especially as Hungarian daily life requires people to show their identity cards frequently. It also means that trans people will not be able to choose a name that fits with their identified gender, as Hungarian law requires first names to be chosen from a list kept by the country’s Academy of Sciences, which is sorted according to gender.
“It basically means coming out as trans to complete strangers, all the time,” Ivett Ördög, a 39-year-old trans woman living in Budapest, told the Guardian last month.
The Háttér Society, a Hungarian trans rights group, said on Tuesday that the law violated international human rights norms and went against the case law of the European court of human rights, as well as previous rulings of the Hungarian constitutional court.
Since 2017, legal gender changes in the country have effectively been frozen, and now the backlog of people waiting for the legal procedure will all be rejected, along with any new applicants. Because the new category will list “sex at birth”, there are also fears it could be used to target trans people who have already legally changed their gender.
Krisztina Tamás-Sáróy of Amnesty International said: “This decision pushes Hungary back towards the dark ages and tramples the rights of transgender and intersex people. It will not only expose them to further discrimination but will also deepen an already intolerant and hostile environment faced by the LGBTI community.”
Orbán’s government has increasingly used anti-LGBT rhetoric as part of a perceived culture war, and has made “traditional family values” a mainstay of many of its policies. The speaker of parliament, an Orbán ally, last year compared gay couples that adopt to paedophiles.
racism again!!!
Queensland criticised for holding back rapid Covid-19 testing in remote Aboriginal communities
Test funded by federal government cuts wait times to 45 minutes, but Queensland Health has vetoed the rollout
Lorena Allam
the guardian
Mon 18 May 2020 05.42 EDT
Aboriginal health organisations say the Queensland government is holding back a $3.3m national rollout of rapid Covid-19 testing in remote Aboriginal communities, putting concerns for health worker safety ahead of conducting what they say is a “gold standard” test endorsed by the World Health Organization and already being used in other states and territories.
In April, the federal government announced funding for a rapid-testing program in Aboriginal communities which cuts wait times to 45 minutes, calling it “a game-changing improvement” for people in remote areas who are currently waiting several days to receive their results.
Eight-three sites were nominated nationally, around 20 of them in Queensland. The Kirby Institute has been training Aboriginal healthcare workers in how to conduct the tests and has supplied personal protective equipment. Testing in some sites is already up and running.
But Queensland Health has vetoed the rollout.
“The chief health officer wants to ensure any use of rapid-point-of-care testing for coronavirus in remote communities is conducted to the same high level of safety standards that apply in metropolitan locations,” a health department spokesperson said.
“The safety of health workers and residents of remote communities should not be compromised.”
Queensland Health said it has established a network of 35 pathology laboratories, 29 of which can undertake rapid-point-of-care testing, and is talking to the federal government about an expansion of testing in remote locations.
But the public health medical officer at Apunipima Cape York Health Council, Dr Mark Wenitong, said the decision “doesn’t make a lot of sense to us”.
“This is one of the safest tests I’ve ever seen. And it’s point of care so it’s not meant to be done in a laboratory.
“And if you’re taking the same precautions that you would anyway around infection control, then that risk’s completely minimised.
“We have the right training, Kirby Institute supply that and the PPE as well. So if you’ve got all the right training, there are no problems around infection issues for the operator.
Wenitong said when he was tested in Cairns, the results took three days to arrive and he’s concerned by how quickly the virus can spread in that timeframe, especially now that restrictions are easing.
“We can’t control what people do for three or four days, especially when there are no isolation or quarantine facilities. In many communities there’s very little infrastructure. And we will be looking at a lot larger percentage of community transmission.”
Wenitong said the test is a “gold standard”, endorsed by WHO for these conditions.
“It’s important to have a fast turnaround time so that’s kind of part of what the WHO principles for removing restrictions is around,” he said. “If you have everything else shored up and the ability to assess fast and respond fast, then it’s easier to release restrictions but if you don’t, you’re leaving communities vulnerable.
“It’s a very, very important tool in being able to respond quickly. And to be honest, we’ve been lucky.
“We just need to be on guard and this [test] just makes it easier.”
The program is an initiative of the Kirby Institute, in partnership with Flinders University, and has been developed in consultation with Aboriginal community-controlled health services.
The GeneXpert device can detect Covid-19 directly and “has close to 100% sensitivity and specificity”, Kirby Institute’s Rebecca Guy said.
“The test is the only one approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) for point-of-care use.
“The steps involved are simple and have been deemed low or minimal risk by state governments and the World Health Organization.”
Sites were selected to ensure no community is more than two to three hours’ drive from a testing facility.
In April, the federal government announced funding for a rapid-testing program in Aboriginal communities which cuts wait times to 45 minutes, calling it “a game-changing improvement” for people in remote areas who are currently waiting several days to receive their results.
Eight-three sites were nominated nationally, around 20 of them in Queensland. The Kirby Institute has been training Aboriginal healthcare workers in how to conduct the tests and has supplied personal protective equipment. Testing in some sites is already up and running.
But Queensland Health has vetoed the rollout.
“The chief health officer wants to ensure any use of rapid-point-of-care testing for coronavirus in remote communities is conducted to the same high level of safety standards that apply in metropolitan locations,” a health department spokesperson said.
“The safety of health workers and residents of remote communities should not be compromised.”
Queensland Health said it has established a network of 35 pathology laboratories, 29 of which can undertake rapid-point-of-care testing, and is talking to the federal government about an expansion of testing in remote locations.
But the public health medical officer at Apunipima Cape York Health Council, Dr Mark Wenitong, said the decision “doesn’t make a lot of sense to us”.
“This is one of the safest tests I’ve ever seen. And it’s point of care so it’s not meant to be done in a laboratory.
“And if you’re taking the same precautions that you would anyway around infection control, then that risk’s completely minimised.
“We have the right training, Kirby Institute supply that and the PPE as well. So if you’ve got all the right training, there are no problems around infection issues for the operator.
Wenitong said when he was tested in Cairns, the results took three days to arrive and he’s concerned by how quickly the virus can spread in that timeframe, especially now that restrictions are easing.
“We can’t control what people do for three or four days, especially when there are no isolation or quarantine facilities. In many communities there’s very little infrastructure. And we will be looking at a lot larger percentage of community transmission.”
Wenitong said the test is a “gold standard”, endorsed by WHO for these conditions.
“It’s important to have a fast turnaround time so that’s kind of part of what the WHO principles for removing restrictions is around,” he said. “If you have everything else shored up and the ability to assess fast and respond fast, then it’s easier to release restrictions but if you don’t, you’re leaving communities vulnerable.
“It’s a very, very important tool in being able to respond quickly. And to be honest, we’ve been lucky.
“We just need to be on guard and this [test] just makes it easier.”
The program is an initiative of the Kirby Institute, in partnership with Flinders University, and has been developed in consultation with Aboriginal community-controlled health services.
The GeneXpert device can detect Covid-19 directly and “has close to 100% sensitivity and specificity”, Kirby Institute’s Rebecca Guy said.
“The test is the only one approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) for point-of-care use.
“The steps involved are simple and have been deemed low or minimal risk by state governments and the World Health Organization.”
Sites were selected to ensure no community is more than two to three hours’ drive from a testing facility.
Spraying disinfectants does not work — and can be ‘harmful’: World Health Organization
May 16, 2020
By Agence France-Presse - raw story
Spraying disinfectant on the streets, as practised in some countries, does not eliminate the new coronavirus and even poses a health risk, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Saturday.
In a document on cleaning and disinfecting surfaces as part of the response to the virus, the WHO says spraying can be ineffective.
“Spraying or fumigation of outdoor spaces, such as streets or marketplaces, is… not recommended to kill the COVID-19 virus or other pathogens because disinfectant is inactivated by dirt and debris,” explains the WHO.
“Even in the absence of organic matter, chemical spraying is unlikely to adequately cover all surfaces for the duration of the required contact time needed to inactivate pathogens.”
The WHO said that streets and pavements are not considered as “reservoirs of infection” of COVID-19, adding that spraying disinfectants, even outside, can be “dangerous for human health”.
The document also stresses that spraying individuals with disinfectants is “not recommended under any circumstances”.
“This could be physically and psychologically harmful and would not reduce an infected person’s ability to spread the virus through droplets or contact,” said the document.
Spraying chlorine or other toxic chemicals on people can cause eye and skin irritation, bronchospasm and gastrointestinal effects, it adds.
The organisation is also warning against the systematic spraying and fumigating of disinfectants on to surfaces in indoor spaces, citing a study that has shown it to be ineffective outside direct spraying areas.
“If disinfectants are to be applied, this should be done with a cloth or wipe that has been soaked in disinfectant,” it says.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus, the cause of the pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 people worldwide since its appearance in late December in China, can attach itself to surfaces and objects.
However, no precise information is currently available for the period during which the viruses remain infectious on the various surfaces.
Studies have shown that the virus can stay on several types of surfaces for several days. However, these maximum durations are only theoretical because they are recorded under laboratory conditions and should be “interpreted with caution” in the real-world environment.
In a document on cleaning and disinfecting surfaces as part of the response to the virus, the WHO says spraying can be ineffective.
“Spraying or fumigation of outdoor spaces, such as streets or marketplaces, is… not recommended to kill the COVID-19 virus or other pathogens because disinfectant is inactivated by dirt and debris,” explains the WHO.
“Even in the absence of organic matter, chemical spraying is unlikely to adequately cover all surfaces for the duration of the required contact time needed to inactivate pathogens.”
The WHO said that streets and pavements are not considered as “reservoirs of infection” of COVID-19, adding that spraying disinfectants, even outside, can be “dangerous for human health”.
The document also stresses that spraying individuals with disinfectants is “not recommended under any circumstances”.
“This could be physically and psychologically harmful and would not reduce an infected person’s ability to spread the virus through droplets or contact,” said the document.
Spraying chlorine or other toxic chemicals on people can cause eye and skin irritation, bronchospasm and gastrointestinal effects, it adds.
The organisation is also warning against the systematic spraying and fumigating of disinfectants on to surfaces in indoor spaces, citing a study that has shown it to be ineffective outside direct spraying areas.
“If disinfectants are to be applied, this should be done with a cloth or wipe that has been soaked in disinfectant,” it says.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus, the cause of the pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 people worldwide since its appearance in late December in China, can attach itself to surfaces and objects.
However, no precise information is currently available for the period during which the viruses remain infectious on the various surfaces.
Studies have shown that the virus can stay on several types of surfaces for several days. However, these maximum durations are only theoretical because they are recorded under laboratory conditions and should be “interpreted with caution” in the real-world environment.
Commemorating the abolition of slavery in France: "This is our history"
france 24
10/05/2020 - 17:12
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, celebration of the National Day of Remembrance of the Slave Trade, Slavery and Its Abolition, held every year in France on May 10, has been disrupted.
A ceremony presided over by Prime Minister Édouard Philippe was held on Sunday, but on a small scale. "We will not put this commemoration on hold, despite the health requirements," former prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, now president of the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery, told FRANCE 24.
Ayrault’s foundation was charged with overseeing the remembrances this year. In addition, regional prefects were asked by the Prime Minister to organise commemorative ceremonies for the public in each department, while respecting the rules of social distancing.
"There will be modest national ceremonies, in Paris with the Prime Minister, but also in provincial and overseas communes with the help of associations," Ayrault said. "A lot of things are going to happen on May 10, including the organisation of a live broadcast on Facebook."
The live broadcast, in partnership with FRANCE 24, will bring together politicians, artists and historians for discussion.
"This is not about creating division"
The theme of this year's commemorations is 'The Missing Page'.
"We don't know how the existing framework was established. We know that there was slavery and abolition, but we know less about the fact that it took three revolutions to achieve abolition," Ayrault said.
For the former mayor of the city of Nantes, a hub in the slave trade, the occasion provides an opportunity to recall the place that slavery occupies in our national history. "It leaves deep traces and wounds. They must be repaired. It is not a question of creating division nor of setting memories against each other," Ayrault stressed, referring to critics, who complain of an excess of repentance. "This is our history. And for us to share it, we must make it known.
"The aim is not to make people feel guilty, but to provide keys to understanding and to a way of living together based on justice, equality, the fight against all forms of discrimination and racism, but also fraternity," Ayrault said, adding that it was "a contemporary struggle".
An estimated 12 to 18 million slaves were taken from sub-Saharan Africa to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. Under the impetus of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, a critique of slavery and the slave trade began to emerge in France in the 18th century. In his 1748 book "The Spirit of the Laws ", Charles de Montesquieu is sarcastic about "those who call themselves Christians and who practice slavery". In 1788, the Society of Friends of Blacks was created in Paris and campaigned for abolition.
A long road to abolition
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 abolished slavery but had no impact in the French West Indies. It was not until February 1794 that the Society of Friends of Blacks succeeded in winning abolition. Napoléon Bonaparte, however, very quickly re-established slavery and the slave trade in 1802.
It was not until 27 April 1848 that a decree by the provisional government of the Second Republic definitively abolished slavery in all the French colonies. The abolition of slavery was enshrined in the Constitution on November 4, 1848.
A ceremony presided over by Prime Minister Édouard Philippe was held on Sunday, but on a small scale. "We will not put this commemoration on hold, despite the health requirements," former prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, now president of the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery, told FRANCE 24.
Ayrault’s foundation was charged with overseeing the remembrances this year. In addition, regional prefects were asked by the Prime Minister to organise commemorative ceremonies for the public in each department, while respecting the rules of social distancing.
"There will be modest national ceremonies, in Paris with the Prime Minister, but also in provincial and overseas communes with the help of associations," Ayrault said. "A lot of things are going to happen on May 10, including the organisation of a live broadcast on Facebook."
The live broadcast, in partnership with FRANCE 24, will bring together politicians, artists and historians for discussion.
"This is not about creating division"
The theme of this year's commemorations is 'The Missing Page'.
"We don't know how the existing framework was established. We know that there was slavery and abolition, but we know less about the fact that it took three revolutions to achieve abolition," Ayrault said.
For the former mayor of the city of Nantes, a hub in the slave trade, the occasion provides an opportunity to recall the place that slavery occupies in our national history. "It leaves deep traces and wounds. They must be repaired. It is not a question of creating division nor of setting memories against each other," Ayrault stressed, referring to critics, who complain of an excess of repentance. "This is our history. And for us to share it, we must make it known.
"The aim is not to make people feel guilty, but to provide keys to understanding and to a way of living together based on justice, equality, the fight against all forms of discrimination and racism, but also fraternity," Ayrault said, adding that it was "a contemporary struggle".
An estimated 12 to 18 million slaves were taken from sub-Saharan Africa to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. Under the impetus of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, a critique of slavery and the slave trade began to emerge in France in the 18th century. In his 1748 book "The Spirit of the Laws ", Charles de Montesquieu is sarcastic about "those who call themselves Christians and who practice slavery". In 1788, the Society of Friends of Blacks was created in Paris and campaigned for abolition.
A long road to abolition
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 abolished slavery but had no impact in the French West Indies. It was not until February 1794 that the Society of Friends of Blacks succeeded in winning abolition. Napoléon Bonaparte, however, very quickly re-established slavery and the slave trade in 1802.
It was not until 27 April 1848 that a decree by the provisional government of the Second Republic definitively abolished slavery in all the French colonies. The abolition of slavery was enshrined in the Constitution on November 4, 1848.
Crisis lays bare poverty in Geneva, Switzerland as thousands queue for food
May 9, 2020
By Agence France-Presse - raw story
In one of the world’s most expensive cities, thousands of people lined up Saturday for free food, as the COVID-19 crisis casts a spotlight on Geneva’s usually invisible poor.
In the Swiss city famous for its private banks, luxury watchmakers and fancy boutiques, people began lining up at 5:00 am (0300 GMT) Saturday, according to the association Caravane de Solidarite, the main organizer of the event.
By the time the distribution at Geneva’s Vernet hockey stadium began four hours later, the queue of people, most wearing masks and standing two meters (six feet) apart, stretched and wound for about 1.5 kilometers (1 mile).
Organizers said they believed at least as many people had showed up as a week earlier, when well over 2,000 took part.
“We’re in a bit of a crescendo,” Silvana Mastromatteo, head of Caravane de Solidarite, told AFP, adding that Saturday’s distribution was the sixth the organization had set up since the crisis began, with more and more people showing up each time.
“We need food,” Silvia Mango, a 64-year-old from the Philippines, said after waiting for three hours under a hot spring sun.
“Everything is just so much more difficult since the crisis began,” she said, adjusting the scarf draped over her mouth and nose, and acknowledged this is her second time accepting a hand-out.
– ‘Immediately fragilized’ –
Switzerland introduced a range of emergency measures in mid-March, including closing restaurants and most other businesses, to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, which to date has killed more than 1,500 people out of more than 30,000 infected in the Alpine nation.
While the country has begun gradually lifting measures, the nearly two-month shutdown has had particularly dire consequences for undocumented workers and other vulnerable groups already living on the edge.
According to Switzerland’s Federal Statistics Office, around eight percent of the Swiss population, or some 660,000 people, are considered to live in poverty, out of around one million living in a precarious situation.
“We know this population exists,” said Isabelle Widmer, who is in charge of coordinating the City of Geneva’s response to the crisis and who on Saturday was providing support to the food drive.
“But it has been astonishing to see how this population was so immediately fragilized by this crisis,” she said, as volunteers donning fluorescent yellow and orange vests stacked bags of food behind tables topped with bottles of disinfectant.
– COVID-19 tests –
Around 1,500 large shopping bags filled with rice, pasta instant coffee, cereal and other goods have been prepared and line the walls of the large entrance hall and fill a nearby hall.
In addition, a large pile of reserves tower in one corner next to mountains of empty bags, ready to be filled if needed.
And if the food supplies run out, 20-franc coupons will be handed out, said Patrick Wieland of the Doctor Without Borders charity, a co-organizer of Saturday’s event that goes by its French acronym MSF.
In addition to food, MSF is offering free COVID-19 tests to people showing symptoms, said Wieland, who is in charge of MSF’s COVID-19 response in Switzerland.
Mastromatteo said there was no requirement for recipients to prove they were in need.
“It is not easy to stand in this line and ask for help,” she said, insisting that “anyone who is here is here because they are in need.”
Miguel Martinez, a 27-year-old undocumented restaurant worker from Colombia in the queue, lamented that “the virus has upended everything. There is no work. Nothing.”
He said it was frustrating to have to accept handouts, but said he had no choice.
“The restaurants have received assistance, but not me. I have nothing to eat.”
– ‘We have nothing’ –
Odmaa Myagmarjavzanlkham, a 27-year-old undocumented migrant from Mongolia, also said she had nowhere else to turn, since she could no longer find work cleaning houses, and all of her husband’s gardening jobs had also disappeared.
“There is no work. We can’t find the food,” she said.
Usually the couple sends most of the money they make back to Mongolia where their five-year-old son still lives with his grandmother, but now they cannot even cover their rent, she said.
“It is so expensive here, and we have nothing.”
A survey conducted of some 550 of those queueing for food a week ago showed that more than half were undocumented, but nearly a third had a residence permit and nearly four percent were Swiss nationals.
That survey also showed that 3.4 percent of those questioned said they had already tested positive for COVID-19, said Wieland, pointing out that that is three times the percentage seen in Geneva overall.
He pointed out that many of those hardest-hit by the crisis live in cramped quarters, sometimes with a dozen family members squeezed into a small apartment, making them more vulnerable to infection.
“There is poverty in Geneva that usually is quite hidden, under the radar,” he said.
“Obviously, with the coronavirus crisis, everything just becomes a lot more visible.”
In the Swiss city famous for its private banks, luxury watchmakers and fancy boutiques, people began lining up at 5:00 am (0300 GMT) Saturday, according to the association Caravane de Solidarite, the main organizer of the event.
By the time the distribution at Geneva’s Vernet hockey stadium began four hours later, the queue of people, most wearing masks and standing two meters (six feet) apart, stretched and wound for about 1.5 kilometers (1 mile).
Organizers said they believed at least as many people had showed up as a week earlier, when well over 2,000 took part.
“We’re in a bit of a crescendo,” Silvana Mastromatteo, head of Caravane de Solidarite, told AFP, adding that Saturday’s distribution was the sixth the organization had set up since the crisis began, with more and more people showing up each time.
“We need food,” Silvia Mango, a 64-year-old from the Philippines, said after waiting for three hours under a hot spring sun.
“Everything is just so much more difficult since the crisis began,” she said, adjusting the scarf draped over her mouth and nose, and acknowledged this is her second time accepting a hand-out.
– ‘Immediately fragilized’ –
Switzerland introduced a range of emergency measures in mid-March, including closing restaurants and most other businesses, to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, which to date has killed more than 1,500 people out of more than 30,000 infected in the Alpine nation.
While the country has begun gradually lifting measures, the nearly two-month shutdown has had particularly dire consequences for undocumented workers and other vulnerable groups already living on the edge.
According to Switzerland’s Federal Statistics Office, around eight percent of the Swiss population, or some 660,000 people, are considered to live in poverty, out of around one million living in a precarious situation.
“We know this population exists,” said Isabelle Widmer, who is in charge of coordinating the City of Geneva’s response to the crisis and who on Saturday was providing support to the food drive.
“But it has been astonishing to see how this population was so immediately fragilized by this crisis,” she said, as volunteers donning fluorescent yellow and orange vests stacked bags of food behind tables topped with bottles of disinfectant.
– COVID-19 tests –
Around 1,500 large shopping bags filled with rice, pasta instant coffee, cereal and other goods have been prepared and line the walls of the large entrance hall and fill a nearby hall.
In addition, a large pile of reserves tower in one corner next to mountains of empty bags, ready to be filled if needed.
And if the food supplies run out, 20-franc coupons will be handed out, said Patrick Wieland of the Doctor Without Borders charity, a co-organizer of Saturday’s event that goes by its French acronym MSF.
In addition to food, MSF is offering free COVID-19 tests to people showing symptoms, said Wieland, who is in charge of MSF’s COVID-19 response in Switzerland.
Mastromatteo said there was no requirement for recipients to prove they were in need.
“It is not easy to stand in this line and ask for help,” she said, insisting that “anyone who is here is here because they are in need.”
Miguel Martinez, a 27-year-old undocumented restaurant worker from Colombia in the queue, lamented that “the virus has upended everything. There is no work. Nothing.”
He said it was frustrating to have to accept handouts, but said he had no choice.
“The restaurants have received assistance, but not me. I have nothing to eat.”
– ‘We have nothing’ –
Odmaa Myagmarjavzanlkham, a 27-year-old undocumented migrant from Mongolia, also said she had nowhere else to turn, since she could no longer find work cleaning houses, and all of her husband’s gardening jobs had also disappeared.
“There is no work. We can’t find the food,” she said.
Usually the couple sends most of the money they make back to Mongolia where their five-year-old son still lives with his grandmother, but now they cannot even cover their rent, she said.
“It is so expensive here, and we have nothing.”
A survey conducted of some 550 of those queueing for food a week ago showed that more than half were undocumented, but nearly a third had a residence permit and nearly four percent were Swiss nationals.
That survey also showed that 3.4 percent of those questioned said they had already tested positive for COVID-19, said Wieland, pointing out that that is three times the percentage seen in Geneva overall.
He pointed out that many of those hardest-hit by the crisis live in cramped quarters, sometimes with a dozen family members squeezed into a small apartment, making them more vulnerable to infection.
“There is poverty in Geneva that usually is quite hidden, under the radar,” he said.
“Obviously, with the coronavirus crisis, everything just becomes a lot more visible.”
the fool trump has diminished usa standing, everywhere!!!
‘Not the World’s Number One’: Chinese Social Media Piles On the U.S.
The verdict is in: China has outperformed, while the once-respected American system has disastrously faltered.
By DAVID WERTIME - politico
05/04/2020 04:30 AM EDT
On March 29, President Donald Trump stood in the Rose Garden and offered a coronavirus forecast: “If we have between 100,000 and 200,000 [deaths],” he told a reporter, “we all, together, have done a very good job.”
The president meant it as self-congratulation; he’d been shown a projected American death toll as high as 2.2 million. But in China, the statement landed very differently. On Weibo, the country’s equivalent of Twitter, Trump’s declaration sounded like an astonishing statement of defeat by China’s major geopolitical rival.
“Trump says reducing death toll to 100,000 people is ‘not bad’” quickly became a top trending hashtag. Commenters on Weibo called the Rose Garden appearance “preparation for a funeral,” labeled Trump a “joker” and a “blowhard,” and sarcastically predicted, “I’m sure God will protect the United States.” If a similar death toll had been reported in China, one popular comment speculated, “how many people here would be saying that [we are] a dying country?” Another noted, bluntly: “[F]rom here onward, the world order will never be the same.”
As coronavirus has spread outward from its Wuhan origins, the Chinese government has worked hard to spin an initial embarrassment into a win for its international image, with mixed success. But to Chinese authorities, the audience at home is the one that really matters, and among that vast cohort, the verdict is unsparing: China has outperformed, while America has disastrously faltered. It’s a sentiment shared by even educated, internationalized Chinese observers — the very group once inclined to look to America as an exemplar.
Since Trump’s late March declaration, each day has brought a fresh batch of horrific news seemingly tailor-made to highlight American weakness. Thousands online marked the grim and growing U.S. infection and death tolls, billionaire Jack Ma’s pledged donation of 500,000 testing kits, the number of New York City police officers who have called in sick during the lockdown, and New York state’s purchase of over 1,000 ventilators from China. On April 28, after the number of confirmed U.S. coronavirus cases topped 1 million, the Weibo account of state-run China Central Television trumpeted the news with an eye-grabbing graphic.
One popular comment professed “astonishment” at seeing America as “narrow, self-interested, buck-passing; not the world’s number one.” Another declared the U.S. response “the disaster flick of 2020.” And those ventilators? “Jack up the price,” went one popular response. “Then make sure they pay before delivery.”
Chinese social media is a highly imperfect lens into widespread public sentiment, full of hot tempers, trolls, and the ever-present specter of censorship, particularly given the ruling Communist Party’s power and proclivity to punish dissenting voices. It is emphatically not real life; American visitors to China generally describe encountering warmth, or at least respect, even during times of high tension between the countries.
Yet Chinese social media is also a crucial indicator of sentiment among the ultra plugged-in young, as well as a battlefield on which Chinese citizens — within strict limits, and often in code — air out differing views of the Party and the world. As recently as February 7, Chinese social media heaved with resentment at Chinese authorities following the death of doctor Li Wenliang, who had endured police harassment for sharing early news of the new virus. That outcry, too broad and too deep to censor, appeared then to herald one of the most frontal challenges to Party legitimacy since the 1989 Tiananmen uprising.
Now, however, a scant two months later, a new narrative predominates inside China. Yingyi Ma, an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University and author of a recent book on Chinese students in the United States, described an about-face among that relatively affluent group. Now, “Chinese international students in the U.S overwhelmingly consider China a safer place, with [their] government more competently handling the crisis than the American government. That is why so many Chinese students have returned home,” Ma told POLITICO, “despite the high risk of international travel and the enormous difficulty in buying airplane tickets.”
---
The coronavirus response — now playing out on Weibo, within the private discussion rooms on mobile social behemoth WeChat, and in private conversations — telegraphs a wound to America’s image even deeper and wider than the one sustained after the 2008 financial crisis, which convinced many Beijing policymakers that the United States was more paper than tiger. China’s intellectuals have respected power and wealth for more than a century, says Zhang; they favored the American model because “they naturally gravitated to the most economically and militarily powerful state.” As China rises and America fumbles, that dynamic is changing.
Chinese nationalism has never lurked terribly far below the surface, rearing its head repeatedly during times of heightened bilateral tension, particularly in the wake of the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese jet in 2001. But resentment toward the United States has long commingled with admiration, or at least the grudging recognition of an American hegemony that looked set to continue indefinitely. At the turn of this century, many Chinese felt certain their country would not catch up with the United States until the next one.
---
Amid China’s dynamic rise, America has nonetheless held out the distinct promise of clean air and clean water, first-rate universities, competent governance, and a best-in-class public health system.
Now, Chinese propagandists and nationalists can state, truthfully, that U.S. representatives, governors and hospitals have purchased ventilators, gloves and masks from China in a time of desperate need, often without any help from Washington. The fact that U.S. institutions are buying the supplies at market prices, not begging for alms, or the reality that some of the Chinese-made goods have proven defective, have not diluted domestic perceptions of a fundamental rebalancing. “The current crisis highlights the importance of international bench-marking in the formation of Chinese public opinion,” Haifeng Huang, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Merced, told POLITICO. Insulated within an information bubble, many “may not be aware that the crisis has actually worsened international opinion toward China.”
The shift in grassroots sentiment is far more profound than mere dislike of President Donald Trump, a figure whom many Chinese commenters and policymakers originally considered a refreshing outsider and no-nonsense businessman with whom Beijing could deal. George W. Bush was labeled “little Bush” and subject to widespread derision. Barack Obama, while more popular, was subjected to a series of subtle, but unmistakable, diplomatic snubs. Whoever eventually succeeds Trump will confront a changed landscape in which intellectuals and reformists — erstwhile advocates for U.S.-style governance within China — are far more skeptical of American capabilities than they were a generation ago.
---
The Communist Party’s mouthpieces depict President Xi Jinping lecturing Trump and the G-20 on coronavirus prevention, evincing a confident, technocratic, well-oiled Chinese state. The gritty, uncensored reality of a fractious and angry America whose flaws and debates play out in painful public view can scarcely compete.
If many Chinese are susceptible to triumphal propaganda, it’s partly because, for an increasingly large share of the population, nothing in their lived experience contradicts it. For all the doubt about the veracity of Chinese GDP growth numbers, the improvement in the quality of life for countless millions of Chinese citizens in recent decades is real, palpable and impressive. Younger Chinese “are accustomed to the Olympics, high-speed rail and mobile payments, and have no direct personal memories of poverty, hunger, or turmoil,” Huang says. They have been raised to believe their government can deliver the goods; now, they are being taught that America’s government cannot.
“One month ago they told me the U.S. had developed testing,” began a popular comment on Weibo, posted in early April. “One month ago, they told me the U.S. could take care of its own health; one month ago they told me the U.S. would stabilize as soon as it mobilized; one month ago they said U.S. industry was developed enough to produce the needed ventilators. Now I finally understand; it was all just talk.”
The president meant it as self-congratulation; he’d been shown a projected American death toll as high as 2.2 million. But in China, the statement landed very differently. On Weibo, the country’s equivalent of Twitter, Trump’s declaration sounded like an astonishing statement of defeat by China’s major geopolitical rival.
“Trump says reducing death toll to 100,000 people is ‘not bad’” quickly became a top trending hashtag. Commenters on Weibo called the Rose Garden appearance “preparation for a funeral,” labeled Trump a “joker” and a “blowhard,” and sarcastically predicted, “I’m sure God will protect the United States.” If a similar death toll had been reported in China, one popular comment speculated, “how many people here would be saying that [we are] a dying country?” Another noted, bluntly: “[F]rom here onward, the world order will never be the same.”
As coronavirus has spread outward from its Wuhan origins, the Chinese government has worked hard to spin an initial embarrassment into a win for its international image, with mixed success. But to Chinese authorities, the audience at home is the one that really matters, and among that vast cohort, the verdict is unsparing: China has outperformed, while America has disastrously faltered. It’s a sentiment shared by even educated, internationalized Chinese observers — the very group once inclined to look to America as an exemplar.
Since Trump’s late March declaration, each day has brought a fresh batch of horrific news seemingly tailor-made to highlight American weakness. Thousands online marked the grim and growing U.S. infection and death tolls, billionaire Jack Ma’s pledged donation of 500,000 testing kits, the number of New York City police officers who have called in sick during the lockdown, and New York state’s purchase of over 1,000 ventilators from China. On April 28, after the number of confirmed U.S. coronavirus cases topped 1 million, the Weibo account of state-run China Central Television trumpeted the news with an eye-grabbing graphic.
One popular comment professed “astonishment” at seeing America as “narrow, self-interested, buck-passing; not the world’s number one.” Another declared the U.S. response “the disaster flick of 2020.” And those ventilators? “Jack up the price,” went one popular response. “Then make sure they pay before delivery.”
Chinese social media is a highly imperfect lens into widespread public sentiment, full of hot tempers, trolls, and the ever-present specter of censorship, particularly given the ruling Communist Party’s power and proclivity to punish dissenting voices. It is emphatically not real life; American visitors to China generally describe encountering warmth, or at least respect, even during times of high tension between the countries.
Yet Chinese social media is also a crucial indicator of sentiment among the ultra plugged-in young, as well as a battlefield on which Chinese citizens — within strict limits, and often in code — air out differing views of the Party and the world. As recently as February 7, Chinese social media heaved with resentment at Chinese authorities following the death of doctor Li Wenliang, who had endured police harassment for sharing early news of the new virus. That outcry, too broad and too deep to censor, appeared then to herald one of the most frontal challenges to Party legitimacy since the 1989 Tiananmen uprising.
Now, however, a scant two months later, a new narrative predominates inside China. Yingyi Ma, an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University and author of a recent book on Chinese students in the United States, described an about-face among that relatively affluent group. Now, “Chinese international students in the U.S overwhelmingly consider China a safer place, with [their] government more competently handling the crisis than the American government. That is why so many Chinese students have returned home,” Ma told POLITICO, “despite the high risk of international travel and the enormous difficulty in buying airplane tickets.”
---
The coronavirus response — now playing out on Weibo, within the private discussion rooms on mobile social behemoth WeChat, and in private conversations — telegraphs a wound to America’s image even deeper and wider than the one sustained after the 2008 financial crisis, which convinced many Beijing policymakers that the United States was more paper than tiger. China’s intellectuals have respected power and wealth for more than a century, says Zhang; they favored the American model because “they naturally gravitated to the most economically and militarily powerful state.” As China rises and America fumbles, that dynamic is changing.
Chinese nationalism has never lurked terribly far below the surface, rearing its head repeatedly during times of heightened bilateral tension, particularly in the wake of the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese jet in 2001. But resentment toward the United States has long commingled with admiration, or at least the grudging recognition of an American hegemony that looked set to continue indefinitely. At the turn of this century, many Chinese felt certain their country would not catch up with the United States until the next one.
---
Amid China’s dynamic rise, America has nonetheless held out the distinct promise of clean air and clean water, first-rate universities, competent governance, and a best-in-class public health system.
Now, Chinese propagandists and nationalists can state, truthfully, that U.S. representatives, governors and hospitals have purchased ventilators, gloves and masks from China in a time of desperate need, often without any help from Washington. The fact that U.S. institutions are buying the supplies at market prices, not begging for alms, or the reality that some of the Chinese-made goods have proven defective, have not diluted domestic perceptions of a fundamental rebalancing. “The current crisis highlights the importance of international bench-marking in the formation of Chinese public opinion,” Haifeng Huang, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Merced, told POLITICO. Insulated within an information bubble, many “may not be aware that the crisis has actually worsened international opinion toward China.”
The shift in grassroots sentiment is far more profound than mere dislike of President Donald Trump, a figure whom many Chinese commenters and policymakers originally considered a refreshing outsider and no-nonsense businessman with whom Beijing could deal. George W. Bush was labeled “little Bush” and subject to widespread derision. Barack Obama, while more popular, was subjected to a series of subtle, but unmistakable, diplomatic snubs. Whoever eventually succeeds Trump will confront a changed landscape in which intellectuals and reformists — erstwhile advocates for U.S.-style governance within China — are far more skeptical of American capabilities than they were a generation ago.
---
The Communist Party’s mouthpieces depict President Xi Jinping lecturing Trump and the G-20 on coronavirus prevention, evincing a confident, technocratic, well-oiled Chinese state. The gritty, uncensored reality of a fractious and angry America whose flaws and debates play out in painful public view can scarcely compete.
If many Chinese are susceptible to triumphal propaganda, it’s partly because, for an increasingly large share of the population, nothing in their lived experience contradicts it. For all the doubt about the veracity of Chinese GDP growth numbers, the improvement in the quality of life for countless millions of Chinese citizens in recent decades is real, palpable and impressive. Younger Chinese “are accustomed to the Olympics, high-speed rail and mobile payments, and have no direct personal memories of poverty, hunger, or turmoil,” Huang says. They have been raised to believe their government can deliver the goods; now, they are being taught that America’s government cannot.
“One month ago they told me the U.S. had developed testing,” began a popular comment on Weibo, posted in early April. “One month ago, they told me the U.S. could take care of its own health; one month ago they told me the U.S. would stabilize as soon as it mobilized; one month ago they said U.S. industry was developed enough to produce the needed ventilators. Now I finally understand; it was all just talk.”
This State in India Shows Us Why Fighting COVID-19 Requires Working-Class Power
BY Samantha Agarwal, Truthout
PUBLISHED May 2, 2020
Even as the death toll in the U.S. from COVID-19 climbs to 63,583 and increasing numbers of Americans are forced to decide whether to forgo potentially life-saving treatment or face bankruptcy, we are bombarded daily with pro-corporate rhetoric opposed to universal health care systems. We are told that the market is the most efficient mechanism for distributing goods and services, including health care, and that social democratic policies like Medicare for All are a fiscal “fantasy” that would leave us with inferior quality care.
But the COVID-19 crisis has thrown up a stubborn challenge to this pro-market logic. Despite high levels of private sector health care spending, the U.S. not only has fewer hospital beds per capita than other wealthy nations but also has huge regional disparities in how those beds are distributed. Doctors find themselves turning to the black market for personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators and crucial medications as supplies dwindle. In the chance that an effective vaccine is developed in the next year or so, private pharmaceutical companies pose a serious threat to affordable access.
This story is eerily familiar to other nations ravaged by neoliberal economic policy, like Italy and the U.K. As one analyst put it, the U.K. is scrambling to rebuild a “safety net after destroying it for a decade.”
Yet there is one ray of hope in this disaster: The neoliberal consensus is slowly but surely unraveling. Social democratic policy interventions are also becoming more appealing to the masses. While the typical media coverage of the topic does not reflect it, recent polls show that a majority of U.S. Democratic Party voters, for example, prefer a government-run universal health care system to private insurance.
The insurgent campaign of Democratic Party presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, which has foregrounded Medicare for All, has played no small part in this radical shift in public opinion. Similarly, in the U.K., former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has aggressively advocated for the restoration of a fully public National Health Service. But, while these high-level endorsements of universal health care are extremely important, they are not enough to get us on the pathway to health care as a universal right. That effort will require a sustained and militant mass movement, with widespread participation from the working classes.
In building this movement, it will benefit the left to examine the successes and failures of various movements for universal health care across the world. In this regard, the history of the communist party rule in the South Indian state of Kerala should be part of our curriculum. It is an example of how a territory with the population of California squeezed into a land mass the size of Vermont and New Hampshire can achieve remarkable health outcomes despite low industrial capacity.
At the same time, as Patrick Heller pointed out in his pioneering work on communist rule in Kerala, the key to these successes lies not only in a people-centric policy approach which has been shaped since the late 1950s by a coalition of left parties known as the “Left Front” led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), but it is also, crucially, defined by the degree of grassroots participation in the everyday affairs of the state. This has led to impressive public health outcomes in Kerala, including, most recently, in its response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Since the moment the state detected its first case of COVID-19 at the end of January, it has been leading the way in the national battle against the pandemic. Kerala’s approach to pandemic relief offers valuable lessons not only for India but also — perhaps especially — for advanced capitalist countries which have been hit the hardest by the outbreak.
Kerala’s Response to the Outbreak
Given the large number of Keralans who work or study internationally, it is unsurprising that India’s first cases of COVID-19 were detected there. It has, so far, experienced two waves of infection. The first was at the end of January, when a handful of students from Kerala who had been studying in Wuhan’s Hubei province returned home and tested positive. The second began a month later, when a couple returned from Venice to the district of Panthanamthitta and failed to alert the authorities of their travel history.
Thinking on its feet, the district administration culled data from the family’s phones and from CCTV cameras in the area. Based on that, it developed a detailed flow chart of all of the exact locations visited by the patients along with approximate dates and times. The flow chart was then widely circulated on social media along with a hotline for those who may have come into contact with the family. The hundreds of calls the administration received in the days that followed helped it plug the gaps in the flow chart.
Such epic contact tracing initiatives, though tedious, have been at the heart of the state’s “people-intensive” pandemic response. People who are identified in contact tracing are — depending on their situation — sent for testing and kept in hospital isolation wards or monitored at home for 28 days. On April 13, the state also announced a new policy of “reverse quarantine” where the most vulnerable sections of the population, such as elderly people or patients with respiratory illness, are isolated at home.
But surveilling so many people for long periods of time has not been easy. It has required, in addition to the usual frontline labor force, a veritable army of 235,000 health care volunteers and the help of various local governance bodies — including (but not limited to) the flagship poverty eradication and women’s empowerment scheme known as the “Kudumbashree,” which has over 277,000 neighborhood units across the state. This force of civil society activists and volunteers has carried out essential activities ranging from manufacturing over 145,000 masks and 2,000 liters of hand sanitizers to delivering books, medicines and groceries to people in home quarantine. They also staff the new state-run call centers which check up on the mental health of those who are home-quarantined.
The state has also taken a number of important macro-level measures to curb the economic and mental hardships faced by the general population. A 20,000 crore ($2.6 billion) stimulus package announced on March 19 is enabling the early distribution of elder pensions, midday meals for low-income children and food grain rations for everyone respective of their economic status. It is also funneling 2,000 crore ($261.4 million) into a fund controlled by the Kudumbashree Mission to distribute low-interest loans, and 1,000 crore ($130.7 million) to bolster the state-run Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. And while the state is not undeserving of criticism for its treatment of the most precarious section of its workers — migrant laborers — it has, still, outperformed the rest of the country. Data recently obtained from the Home Ministry showed that Kerala, which constitutes merely 2.76 percent of the Indian population, has set up has set up 69 percent (over 4,000) of the nation’s relief camps and shelters for migrant workers.
Finally, despite facing the near-universal challenges of possessing an insufficient quantity of PPE and ventilators, Kerala has astoundingly displayed one of the highest rates of patient recovery anywhere. Out of its 497 total recorded cases, 383 people have recovered so far and only 4 have died. More Keralans have succumbed to the coronavirus in New York than in Kerala. This stunning fact can partially be explained by the generally above-average quality of care in Kerala, but more so because the state was able to keep the health care system from being overwhelmed through its two-pronged approach: rigorous contact tracing and strict isolation measures.
The state’s impressive response to the pandemic is only the most recent move in a long line of development achievements by the communist-led state, including land reforms, a literacy rate of over 90 percent by 1990 (when the all-India rate was only 52.2 percent), infant mortality at a fifth of the national average, life expectancy at least 10 years higher than the national average and numerous effective interventions targeting reproductive health. The remarkable feat of attaining social development indices comparable to the Global North at a low cost has been dubbed the “Kerala Model” of development.
Movements Are Essential to Kerala’s Success in Fighting the Pandemic
It is widely recognized that without collective action this model — even with radical and committed action by the state — would have failed. Popular movements have often held the state’s feet to the fire and enforced accountability. For example, most recently, the Kerala Sathra Sahithya Parishad (KSSP), which describes itself as a revolutionary people’s science movement, has been scrutinizing the governments’ pandemic response. On April 11 it issued a statement against “sanitizer tunnels” installed in some localities in the state, arguing that the tunnels were unscientific and warned that the hypochlorite solution being sprayed is not meant for use on the human body.
Historically KSSP has also authored numerous important reports, including a landmark study on the morbidity load across the state and its “relationship to socio-economic variables,” as well as an extensive household survey on the health impacts of aerial spraying endosulfan, a chemical pesticide, on cashew plantations. Groups like KSSP don’t just act as a pressure mechanism — without them the state may not have achieved many of its development goals; for instance, KSSP alone mobilized over 20,000 volunteer teachers for the mass literacy campaign mentioned above.
Movements have long been part of the fabric of Keralan society, even predating the communist rule in the state. In the late 19th century, massive numbers of marginalized people — particularly women and Dalits, members of the formerly “untouchable” caste — waged highly militant successful struggles against the hundreds of esoteric and caste-based practices upholding regional feudal power relations. Some have called this period Kerala’s renaissance for its democratization of education, eradication of irrational thought and expansion of personal freedoms. The communists’ strength came from the fact that they built their base among these very movements of the downtrodden, developing a vast network of trained cadre who could deliver the party’s message to every village.
But, being a social democracy in the context of a capitalist country is not without contradictions. Most problematically, the state entered into a prolonged fiscal and economic crisis starting in the 1980s, from which it has not fully recovered. Kerala was pressured to liberalize its economy in line with the rest of the country, although Kerala never fully embraced it in the full-fledged way that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) did in West Bengal. Social inequality still expanded dramatically, which has also been reflected in the health care sector. In the period from 1986 to 1996, for example, the number of beds in public hospitals increased by 5.5 percent (to 38,000), whereas the number in private hospitals rose 40 percent (to 67,500). Today, as much as 70 percent of the poor rely on the private sector and are forced to spend as much as 40 percent of their income on health care as against 2.4 percent by the rich.
Perhaps sensing the need to put forth an alternative to bourgeoning neoliberal doctrine, the Left Front introduced the People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning (or PPC for short) in 1996. The PPC aimed at building up local self-government bodies, which would carry out projects and programs formulated through people’s participation. Initially, 35-40 percent of the state’s budget was allocated for these local deliberative bodies, and they involved over 1.8 million people in the first two years. Here, the KSSP also played a central role in helping to identify local resources and capacities to carry out activities ranging from the production of eggs and vegetables to the revitalization of public health. This was a major feat; unfortunately, as various kinks arose in implementation in the following years, the PPC’s effectiveness has diminished. Such efforts like the PPC need to be revisited and revived. One hopes that the coronavirus containment effort, dependent as it is on these existing networks, will be a major impetus to do so.
There are many other concerns with Left Front rule that can’t be ignored, including the way it has failed to address the oppression of marginalized groups like Dalits, Adivasis (Indigenous people) and women, and has sidelined serious environmental issues. These are concerns that the left in the U.S. must take seriously while drawing on the best achievements of Kerala’s social democratic movement.
In the U.S., we are at a crossroads in our history of social struggle. In the past 10 years we have seen an unprecedented growth of movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Red for Ed, the Climate Strike and Standing Rock. These struggles — and the tremendous racial, gender and economic inequality which has generated them — paved the way for an open socialist, Senator Sanders, to run a highly energetic presidential bid. Yet in the wake of the suspension of Sanders’s campaign, there are a number of left-wing thinkers who are cautioning against a “return to movementism” and elevating elections as the only arena of “mass politics.”
The Kerala experience offers a valuable lesson to the U.S. left: Medicare for All — let alone a Sanders-type presidency — would be tremendously limited without militant working-class participation at all levels of society. Kerala’s impressive social-democratic achievements including its battle against COVID-19 were undergirded by the robust participation of ordinary people. As we assess the post-Sanders landscape, the correct strategic question is not how to avoid descent into movementism at the expense of electoralism, but how can we build up independent movements which can act as levers for progressive electoral candidates, so that the best of Sanders’s policies may succeed.
In the time of COVID-19, and the much bigger looming threat of climate catastrophe, the survival of humanity depends on the power of the people.
But the COVID-19 crisis has thrown up a stubborn challenge to this pro-market logic. Despite high levels of private sector health care spending, the U.S. not only has fewer hospital beds per capita than other wealthy nations but also has huge regional disparities in how those beds are distributed. Doctors find themselves turning to the black market for personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators and crucial medications as supplies dwindle. In the chance that an effective vaccine is developed in the next year or so, private pharmaceutical companies pose a serious threat to affordable access.
This story is eerily familiar to other nations ravaged by neoliberal economic policy, like Italy and the U.K. As one analyst put it, the U.K. is scrambling to rebuild a “safety net after destroying it for a decade.”
Yet there is one ray of hope in this disaster: The neoliberal consensus is slowly but surely unraveling. Social democratic policy interventions are also becoming more appealing to the masses. While the typical media coverage of the topic does not reflect it, recent polls show that a majority of U.S. Democratic Party voters, for example, prefer a government-run universal health care system to private insurance.
The insurgent campaign of Democratic Party presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, which has foregrounded Medicare for All, has played no small part in this radical shift in public opinion. Similarly, in the U.K., former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has aggressively advocated for the restoration of a fully public National Health Service. But, while these high-level endorsements of universal health care are extremely important, they are not enough to get us on the pathway to health care as a universal right. That effort will require a sustained and militant mass movement, with widespread participation from the working classes.
In building this movement, it will benefit the left to examine the successes and failures of various movements for universal health care across the world. In this regard, the history of the communist party rule in the South Indian state of Kerala should be part of our curriculum. It is an example of how a territory with the population of California squeezed into a land mass the size of Vermont and New Hampshire can achieve remarkable health outcomes despite low industrial capacity.
At the same time, as Patrick Heller pointed out in his pioneering work on communist rule in Kerala, the key to these successes lies not only in a people-centric policy approach which has been shaped since the late 1950s by a coalition of left parties known as the “Left Front” led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), but it is also, crucially, defined by the degree of grassroots participation in the everyday affairs of the state. This has led to impressive public health outcomes in Kerala, including, most recently, in its response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Since the moment the state detected its first case of COVID-19 at the end of January, it has been leading the way in the national battle against the pandemic. Kerala’s approach to pandemic relief offers valuable lessons not only for India but also — perhaps especially — for advanced capitalist countries which have been hit the hardest by the outbreak.
Kerala’s Response to the Outbreak
Given the large number of Keralans who work or study internationally, it is unsurprising that India’s first cases of COVID-19 were detected there. It has, so far, experienced two waves of infection. The first was at the end of January, when a handful of students from Kerala who had been studying in Wuhan’s Hubei province returned home and tested positive. The second began a month later, when a couple returned from Venice to the district of Panthanamthitta and failed to alert the authorities of their travel history.
Thinking on its feet, the district administration culled data from the family’s phones and from CCTV cameras in the area. Based on that, it developed a detailed flow chart of all of the exact locations visited by the patients along with approximate dates and times. The flow chart was then widely circulated on social media along with a hotline for those who may have come into contact with the family. The hundreds of calls the administration received in the days that followed helped it plug the gaps in the flow chart.
Such epic contact tracing initiatives, though tedious, have been at the heart of the state’s “people-intensive” pandemic response. People who are identified in contact tracing are — depending on their situation — sent for testing and kept in hospital isolation wards or monitored at home for 28 days. On April 13, the state also announced a new policy of “reverse quarantine” where the most vulnerable sections of the population, such as elderly people or patients with respiratory illness, are isolated at home.
But surveilling so many people for long periods of time has not been easy. It has required, in addition to the usual frontline labor force, a veritable army of 235,000 health care volunteers and the help of various local governance bodies — including (but not limited to) the flagship poverty eradication and women’s empowerment scheme known as the “Kudumbashree,” which has over 277,000 neighborhood units across the state. This force of civil society activists and volunteers has carried out essential activities ranging from manufacturing over 145,000 masks and 2,000 liters of hand sanitizers to delivering books, medicines and groceries to people in home quarantine. They also staff the new state-run call centers which check up on the mental health of those who are home-quarantined.
The state has also taken a number of important macro-level measures to curb the economic and mental hardships faced by the general population. A 20,000 crore ($2.6 billion) stimulus package announced on March 19 is enabling the early distribution of elder pensions, midday meals for low-income children and food grain rations for everyone respective of their economic status. It is also funneling 2,000 crore ($261.4 million) into a fund controlled by the Kudumbashree Mission to distribute low-interest loans, and 1,000 crore ($130.7 million) to bolster the state-run Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. And while the state is not undeserving of criticism for its treatment of the most precarious section of its workers — migrant laborers — it has, still, outperformed the rest of the country. Data recently obtained from the Home Ministry showed that Kerala, which constitutes merely 2.76 percent of the Indian population, has set up has set up 69 percent (over 4,000) of the nation’s relief camps and shelters for migrant workers.
Finally, despite facing the near-universal challenges of possessing an insufficient quantity of PPE and ventilators, Kerala has astoundingly displayed one of the highest rates of patient recovery anywhere. Out of its 497 total recorded cases, 383 people have recovered so far and only 4 have died. More Keralans have succumbed to the coronavirus in New York than in Kerala. This stunning fact can partially be explained by the generally above-average quality of care in Kerala, but more so because the state was able to keep the health care system from being overwhelmed through its two-pronged approach: rigorous contact tracing and strict isolation measures.
The state’s impressive response to the pandemic is only the most recent move in a long line of development achievements by the communist-led state, including land reforms, a literacy rate of over 90 percent by 1990 (when the all-India rate was only 52.2 percent), infant mortality at a fifth of the national average, life expectancy at least 10 years higher than the national average and numerous effective interventions targeting reproductive health. The remarkable feat of attaining social development indices comparable to the Global North at a low cost has been dubbed the “Kerala Model” of development.
Movements Are Essential to Kerala’s Success in Fighting the Pandemic
It is widely recognized that without collective action this model — even with radical and committed action by the state — would have failed. Popular movements have often held the state’s feet to the fire and enforced accountability. For example, most recently, the Kerala Sathra Sahithya Parishad (KSSP), which describes itself as a revolutionary people’s science movement, has been scrutinizing the governments’ pandemic response. On April 11 it issued a statement against “sanitizer tunnels” installed in some localities in the state, arguing that the tunnels were unscientific and warned that the hypochlorite solution being sprayed is not meant for use on the human body.
Historically KSSP has also authored numerous important reports, including a landmark study on the morbidity load across the state and its “relationship to socio-economic variables,” as well as an extensive household survey on the health impacts of aerial spraying endosulfan, a chemical pesticide, on cashew plantations. Groups like KSSP don’t just act as a pressure mechanism — without them the state may not have achieved many of its development goals; for instance, KSSP alone mobilized over 20,000 volunteer teachers for the mass literacy campaign mentioned above.
Movements have long been part of the fabric of Keralan society, even predating the communist rule in the state. In the late 19th century, massive numbers of marginalized people — particularly women and Dalits, members of the formerly “untouchable” caste — waged highly militant successful struggles against the hundreds of esoteric and caste-based practices upholding regional feudal power relations. Some have called this period Kerala’s renaissance for its democratization of education, eradication of irrational thought and expansion of personal freedoms. The communists’ strength came from the fact that they built their base among these very movements of the downtrodden, developing a vast network of trained cadre who could deliver the party’s message to every village.
But, being a social democracy in the context of a capitalist country is not without contradictions. Most problematically, the state entered into a prolonged fiscal and economic crisis starting in the 1980s, from which it has not fully recovered. Kerala was pressured to liberalize its economy in line with the rest of the country, although Kerala never fully embraced it in the full-fledged way that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) did in West Bengal. Social inequality still expanded dramatically, which has also been reflected in the health care sector. In the period from 1986 to 1996, for example, the number of beds in public hospitals increased by 5.5 percent (to 38,000), whereas the number in private hospitals rose 40 percent (to 67,500). Today, as much as 70 percent of the poor rely on the private sector and are forced to spend as much as 40 percent of their income on health care as against 2.4 percent by the rich.
Perhaps sensing the need to put forth an alternative to bourgeoning neoliberal doctrine, the Left Front introduced the People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning (or PPC for short) in 1996. The PPC aimed at building up local self-government bodies, which would carry out projects and programs formulated through people’s participation. Initially, 35-40 percent of the state’s budget was allocated for these local deliberative bodies, and they involved over 1.8 million people in the first two years. Here, the KSSP also played a central role in helping to identify local resources and capacities to carry out activities ranging from the production of eggs and vegetables to the revitalization of public health. This was a major feat; unfortunately, as various kinks arose in implementation in the following years, the PPC’s effectiveness has diminished. Such efforts like the PPC need to be revisited and revived. One hopes that the coronavirus containment effort, dependent as it is on these existing networks, will be a major impetus to do so.
There are many other concerns with Left Front rule that can’t be ignored, including the way it has failed to address the oppression of marginalized groups like Dalits, Adivasis (Indigenous people) and women, and has sidelined serious environmental issues. These are concerns that the left in the U.S. must take seriously while drawing on the best achievements of Kerala’s social democratic movement.
In the U.S., we are at a crossroads in our history of social struggle. In the past 10 years we have seen an unprecedented growth of movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Red for Ed, the Climate Strike and Standing Rock. These struggles — and the tremendous racial, gender and economic inequality which has generated them — paved the way for an open socialist, Senator Sanders, to run a highly energetic presidential bid. Yet in the wake of the suspension of Sanders’s campaign, there are a number of left-wing thinkers who are cautioning against a “return to movementism” and elevating elections as the only arena of “mass politics.”
The Kerala experience offers a valuable lesson to the U.S. left: Medicare for All — let alone a Sanders-type presidency — would be tremendously limited without militant working-class participation at all levels of society. Kerala’s impressive social-democratic achievements including its battle against COVID-19 were undergirded by the robust participation of ordinary people. As we assess the post-Sanders landscape, the correct strategic question is not how to avoid descent into movementism at the expense of electoralism, but how can we build up independent movements which can act as levers for progressive electoral candidates, so that the best of Sanders’s policies may succeed.
In the time of COVID-19, and the much bigger looming threat of climate catastrophe, the survival of humanity depends on the power of the people.
euro - trump!!!
Boris Johnson’s Coronavirus Lies Are Killing Britons
Sonia Faleiro - the intercept
April 30 2020, 12:02 p.m.
“THE NHS SAVED my life, no question,” Boris Johnson said earlier this month, publicly thanking Britain’s beloved National Health Service for successfully treating him for Covid-19 over a seven-day period in early April. “It’s hard to find words to express my debt,” the prime minister said, naming several nurses, and thanking two in particular for standing by his bedside for 48 hours when “things could’ve gone either way.”
Johnson’s speech, which he might have hoped would be lauded for its graciousness, served instead as a reminder that the NHS is a success despite him. When the first cases of Covid-19 in the U.K. were confirmed in late January, Johnson’s Conservative Party government claimed that it was prepared for any eventuality.
That turns out to have been a lie. The government’s failure to provide sufficient protective gear, which has so far contributed to the deaths of at least 114 health care workers in Britain, was preventable. Moreover, two separate investigations have now revealed high-level attempts to cover it up.
Earlier this week, the BBC’s Panorama showed that the British government’s pandemic stockpile lacked key equipment, such as gowns, visors, swabs, and body bags. The government was of course aware of this deficit and yet, even after the pandemic hit the country’s shores, U.K. leaders refused multiple opportunities to bulk-buy PPE. When the lack of supplies became obvious to the public, the government tried to hide the problem by inflating PPE numbers, counting one pair of gloves as two items of PPE.
Another investigation, by the Sunday Times, a decidedly right-leaning newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch that has previously swooned over Johnson, calling him a “rockstar,” showed just how casually the prime minister confronted the pandemic. Johnson had skipped five high-level emergency meetings to discuss the virus, the newspaper reported. He insisted, in a manner reminiscent of U.S. President Donald Trump, that briefing reports be as short as possible. He went on holiday to a country estate, refused to work weekends, and attended a fundraising ball.
After his thank-you speech, Johnson retired to Chequers, the lavish 16th century, 1,500-acre manor house used by British prime ministers, where he was photographed strolling the grounds with his pregnant fiancée and their Jack Russell terrier. (The couple’s baby boy was born on Wednesday.) The world was in the grip of an unprecedented crisis, but the U.K. was without a leader.
Johnson’s NHS caregivers, meanwhile, returned to work immediately, and every day, reports stream in of front-line health workers like them who are forced to combat the highly contagious virus in clinical waste bags and plastic aprons. They are asking schools to donate science goggles. They are adapting snorkels as respirator masks. When UNISON, the U.K.’s largest public services union, opened a PPE alert hotline, it was flooded with calls from health care workers who talked about having to buy their own equipment.
Of the health care providers who have died so far, one, Abdul Mabud Chowdhury, a consultant urologist in London, had written a Facebook post appealing to Johnson to protect him and his co-workers. “I hope we are by default entitled to get this minimal support,” he wrote on March 18, five days before he was hospitalized.
Johnson is responsible for his death, and for the death of every other health care worker in the country.
THE FIRST SIGNS that Johnson was out of his depth emerged early on in the pandemic. While repeating that the government was “led by science,” the newly elected prime minister seemed to be pushing a dubious “herd immunity” strategy, hoping that exposure would build immunity among the British public, an outcome that, happily for Johnson, would require no action from his government. The meetings of the prime minister’s scientific advisory board, which strives to impartially inform the government’s response based on science, were attended by his chief adviser. The adviser is said to have actively participated, thereby undermining the neutrality of the process, and raising public concerns that decisions were made to suit political objectives rather than scientific ones.
While Johnson talked about science, his actions were those of a man convinced that he, and by extension, the country he led, possessed the magical ability to escape a disease that had brought much of the world, including neighbors like France, Spain, and Italy, to its knees.
In February, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control had warned that for the most serious cases of Covid-19, health workers would need around 20 sets of PPE per patient per day. The Johnson government was given as many as three opportunities to participate in an EU scheme to bulk-buy PPE. It chose not to. In fact, British officials shipped more than 200,000 units of PPE to China, then lied about choosing not to participate in the EU scheme, claiming they had “missed the emails” despite having attended meetings about the acquisition. In a TV interview, Johnson spoke of how one strategy for confronting the novel coronavirus could be to “take it on the chin.”
In early March, Johnson and his fiancée attended a rugby match. Later, he met with hospital patients, some of whom, he said, may have had Covid-19. He bragged about shaking their hands.
In March, South Korea, Taiwan, and even small Indian states like Kerala had showed how democratic societies, working doggedly, could use a dedicated World Health Organization-approved program of contact tracing, testing, and isolation to contain the virus. Some experts said that given how long it might take to develop a vaccine — as long as five years, perhaps — such a program was the only realistic way forward. New Zealand’s Jacinda Arden and Germany’s Angela Merkel also employed these tools early on; by acting quickly, they saved lives.
These countries’ successful actions were presented to Johnson on a platter. The U.K. had a head start over many others — as much as nine weeks, according to one expert, or the time between human to human virus transmission being confirmed in China and the U.K.’s first known case of local transmission on February 29. But busy with Britain’s departure from the EU on January 31, Johnson ignored every warning and squandered every opportunity to protect his country. Born and bred into the idea that he was exceptional, he endangered himself along with millions of Britons, many of whom imbibed his magical thinking.
On March 16, organizers of the four-day Cheltenham Festival, a horse racing event, cited Johnson’s presence at the rugby match earlier that month as the reason to go ahead with their event, noting that “the government guidance is for the business of the country to continue as usual.” The races attracted some 250,000 people over four days, many of whom have since tested positive for the virus. The hospitals in Gloucestershire, the county where Cheltenham is located, are now among the hardest-hit in the country.
The government also left borders open, allowing flights from Italy, China, and the U.S. without any quarantine restrictions until late this month, long after most other countries had begun to quarantine arrivals. On Johnson’s watch, the U.K. is a staggering example of what not to do.
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THE CURRENT CRISIS has been a decade in the making. Johnson and his Tory colleagues have spent years undermining the NHS, using the excuse of austerity measures to cut salaries and reduce benefits, when in reality they appear to have been trying to push the country toward a U.S.-style private health care system.
In 2011, five Tory members of parliament, three of whom are now ministers in Johnson’s government, published a pamphlet advocating for privatization. According to a Guardian investigation, private firms were given contracts worth £15 billion, about $18 billion, a jump of 89 percent since 2015. In the years that followed, Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, scrapped nursing grants, which help nurses with study and living costs, and rejected salary increases, voting to keep nurses’ salaries below the rate of inflation. Johnson, and virtually every other member of the Conservative Party, voted with May and cheered after the votes were announced. May explained the decision to a nurse’s face, saying in her typically bloodless way: “There isn’t a magic money tree we can shake.”
In 2016, the Tory-led Brexit referendum poisoned the atmosphere for EU citizens in the U.K. so much that more than 11,000 immigrant NHS workers, including 4,763 nurses, went back home. “It’s the National Health Service, not the International Health Service,” Matt Hancock, Johnson’s health minister, sneered on Twitter at the time. The outcome of Hancock’s shortsightedness was revealed last month, when he was reduced to begging retired health workers, including those in their 70s and 80s who are most vulnerable to the virus, to return to work to boost staff numbers. (Hancock contracted the coronavirus in March.) One of the emergency hospitals he helped set up to deal with Covid-19 has remained largely empty for lack of nursing staff.
Johnson, for his part, went out of his way to praise the two immigrant nurses who cared for him while he was ill, one from New Zealand and the other from Portugal. A new scheme aimed at boosting staff numbers during the crisis allows foreign doctors, some of whom are living as refugees in the U.K., to join the NHS, but only as support staff, not as doctors, even though they are fully qualified back home.
And all this time, the Tories were steadily undercutting the national medical stockpile, reducing its value by almost 40 percent in three years while also privatizing its management. The last rehearsal for a pandemic, in 2016, had predicted the health service would collapse, according to the Sunday Times investigation. In the years that followed, the newspaper reported, “preparations for a no-deal Brexit sucked all the blood out of pandemic planning.”
THE DEATH TOLL in the U.K. stands at 26,771 as of April 30, according to the government. (The official figures now take into account deaths in private homes and nursing homes rather than only in hospitals.) A Financial Times analysis of data from the Office of National Statistics showed that earlier figures didn’t account for these additional numbers and that as of last week, according to the paper, the true number of deaths was closer to 41,000.
It is tempting to believe that Johnson’s brush with the virus has taught him humility or that the investigations have shamed him into doing his job. But some NHS workers weren’t impressed by his expressions of gratitude.
“This outpouring of emotion helps the government gloss over the shortages,” one health worker told the BBC. “Calling us heroes just makes it OK when we die.”
On Monday, after three weeks away, Johnson returned to work. At a press conference outside 10 Downing Street, he was in a self-congratulatory mood, speaking of “real signs now that we are passing through the peak.” The numbers suggest otherwise, and there was only a passing mention of PPE.
As the U.K.’s death toll threatens to be the worst in Europe, there really is just one choice. Boris Johnson must apologize, resign, and let a real leader take charge.
Johnson’s speech, which he might have hoped would be lauded for its graciousness, served instead as a reminder that the NHS is a success despite him. When the first cases of Covid-19 in the U.K. were confirmed in late January, Johnson’s Conservative Party government claimed that it was prepared for any eventuality.
That turns out to have been a lie. The government’s failure to provide sufficient protective gear, which has so far contributed to the deaths of at least 114 health care workers in Britain, was preventable. Moreover, two separate investigations have now revealed high-level attempts to cover it up.
Earlier this week, the BBC’s Panorama showed that the British government’s pandemic stockpile lacked key equipment, such as gowns, visors, swabs, and body bags. The government was of course aware of this deficit and yet, even after the pandemic hit the country’s shores, U.K. leaders refused multiple opportunities to bulk-buy PPE. When the lack of supplies became obvious to the public, the government tried to hide the problem by inflating PPE numbers, counting one pair of gloves as two items of PPE.
Another investigation, by the Sunday Times, a decidedly right-leaning newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch that has previously swooned over Johnson, calling him a “rockstar,” showed just how casually the prime minister confronted the pandemic. Johnson had skipped five high-level emergency meetings to discuss the virus, the newspaper reported. He insisted, in a manner reminiscent of U.S. President Donald Trump, that briefing reports be as short as possible. He went on holiday to a country estate, refused to work weekends, and attended a fundraising ball.
After his thank-you speech, Johnson retired to Chequers, the lavish 16th century, 1,500-acre manor house used by British prime ministers, where he was photographed strolling the grounds with his pregnant fiancée and their Jack Russell terrier. (The couple’s baby boy was born on Wednesday.) The world was in the grip of an unprecedented crisis, but the U.K. was without a leader.
Johnson’s NHS caregivers, meanwhile, returned to work immediately, and every day, reports stream in of front-line health workers like them who are forced to combat the highly contagious virus in clinical waste bags and plastic aprons. They are asking schools to donate science goggles. They are adapting snorkels as respirator masks. When UNISON, the U.K.’s largest public services union, opened a PPE alert hotline, it was flooded with calls from health care workers who talked about having to buy their own equipment.
Of the health care providers who have died so far, one, Abdul Mabud Chowdhury, a consultant urologist in London, had written a Facebook post appealing to Johnson to protect him and his co-workers. “I hope we are by default entitled to get this minimal support,” he wrote on March 18, five days before he was hospitalized.
Johnson is responsible for his death, and for the death of every other health care worker in the country.
THE FIRST SIGNS that Johnson was out of his depth emerged early on in the pandemic. While repeating that the government was “led by science,” the newly elected prime minister seemed to be pushing a dubious “herd immunity” strategy, hoping that exposure would build immunity among the British public, an outcome that, happily for Johnson, would require no action from his government. The meetings of the prime minister’s scientific advisory board, which strives to impartially inform the government’s response based on science, were attended by his chief adviser. The adviser is said to have actively participated, thereby undermining the neutrality of the process, and raising public concerns that decisions were made to suit political objectives rather than scientific ones.
While Johnson talked about science, his actions were those of a man convinced that he, and by extension, the country he led, possessed the magical ability to escape a disease that had brought much of the world, including neighbors like France, Spain, and Italy, to its knees.
In February, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control had warned that for the most serious cases of Covid-19, health workers would need around 20 sets of PPE per patient per day. The Johnson government was given as many as three opportunities to participate in an EU scheme to bulk-buy PPE. It chose not to. In fact, British officials shipped more than 200,000 units of PPE to China, then lied about choosing not to participate in the EU scheme, claiming they had “missed the emails” despite having attended meetings about the acquisition. In a TV interview, Johnson spoke of how one strategy for confronting the novel coronavirus could be to “take it on the chin.”
In early March, Johnson and his fiancée attended a rugby match. Later, he met with hospital patients, some of whom, he said, may have had Covid-19. He bragged about shaking their hands.
In March, South Korea, Taiwan, and even small Indian states like Kerala had showed how democratic societies, working doggedly, could use a dedicated World Health Organization-approved program of contact tracing, testing, and isolation to contain the virus. Some experts said that given how long it might take to develop a vaccine — as long as five years, perhaps — such a program was the only realistic way forward. New Zealand’s Jacinda Arden and Germany’s Angela Merkel also employed these tools early on; by acting quickly, they saved lives.
These countries’ successful actions were presented to Johnson on a platter. The U.K. had a head start over many others — as much as nine weeks, according to one expert, or the time between human to human virus transmission being confirmed in China and the U.K.’s first known case of local transmission on February 29. But busy with Britain’s departure from the EU on January 31, Johnson ignored every warning and squandered every opportunity to protect his country. Born and bred into the idea that he was exceptional, he endangered himself along with millions of Britons, many of whom imbibed his magical thinking.
On March 16, organizers of the four-day Cheltenham Festival, a horse racing event, cited Johnson’s presence at the rugby match earlier that month as the reason to go ahead with their event, noting that “the government guidance is for the business of the country to continue as usual.” The races attracted some 250,000 people over four days, many of whom have since tested positive for the virus. The hospitals in Gloucestershire, the county where Cheltenham is located, are now among the hardest-hit in the country.
The government also left borders open, allowing flights from Italy, China, and the U.S. without any quarantine restrictions until late this month, long after most other countries had begun to quarantine arrivals. On Johnson’s watch, the U.K. is a staggering example of what not to do.
---
THE CURRENT CRISIS has been a decade in the making. Johnson and his Tory colleagues have spent years undermining the NHS, using the excuse of austerity measures to cut salaries and reduce benefits, when in reality they appear to have been trying to push the country toward a U.S.-style private health care system.
In 2011, five Tory members of parliament, three of whom are now ministers in Johnson’s government, published a pamphlet advocating for privatization. According to a Guardian investigation, private firms were given contracts worth £15 billion, about $18 billion, a jump of 89 percent since 2015. In the years that followed, Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, scrapped nursing grants, which help nurses with study and living costs, and rejected salary increases, voting to keep nurses’ salaries below the rate of inflation. Johnson, and virtually every other member of the Conservative Party, voted with May and cheered after the votes were announced. May explained the decision to a nurse’s face, saying in her typically bloodless way: “There isn’t a magic money tree we can shake.”
In 2016, the Tory-led Brexit referendum poisoned the atmosphere for EU citizens in the U.K. so much that more than 11,000 immigrant NHS workers, including 4,763 nurses, went back home. “It’s the National Health Service, not the International Health Service,” Matt Hancock, Johnson’s health minister, sneered on Twitter at the time. The outcome of Hancock’s shortsightedness was revealed last month, when he was reduced to begging retired health workers, including those in their 70s and 80s who are most vulnerable to the virus, to return to work to boost staff numbers. (Hancock contracted the coronavirus in March.) One of the emergency hospitals he helped set up to deal with Covid-19 has remained largely empty for lack of nursing staff.
Johnson, for his part, went out of his way to praise the two immigrant nurses who cared for him while he was ill, one from New Zealand and the other from Portugal. A new scheme aimed at boosting staff numbers during the crisis allows foreign doctors, some of whom are living as refugees in the U.K., to join the NHS, but only as support staff, not as doctors, even though they are fully qualified back home.
And all this time, the Tories were steadily undercutting the national medical stockpile, reducing its value by almost 40 percent in three years while also privatizing its management. The last rehearsal for a pandemic, in 2016, had predicted the health service would collapse, according to the Sunday Times investigation. In the years that followed, the newspaper reported, “preparations for a no-deal Brexit sucked all the blood out of pandemic planning.”
THE DEATH TOLL in the U.K. stands at 26,771 as of April 30, according to the government. (The official figures now take into account deaths in private homes and nursing homes rather than only in hospitals.) A Financial Times analysis of data from the Office of National Statistics showed that earlier figures didn’t account for these additional numbers and that as of last week, according to the paper, the true number of deaths was closer to 41,000.
It is tempting to believe that Johnson’s brush with the virus has taught him humility or that the investigations have shamed him into doing his job. But some NHS workers weren’t impressed by his expressions of gratitude.
“This outpouring of emotion helps the government gloss over the shortages,” one health worker told the BBC. “Calling us heroes just makes it OK when we die.”
On Monday, after three weeks away, Johnson returned to work. At a press conference outside 10 Downing Street, he was in a self-congratulatory mood, speaking of “real signs now that we are passing through the peak.” The numbers suggest otherwise, and there was only a passing mention of PPE.
As the U.K.’s death toll threatens to be the worst in Europe, there really is just one choice. Boris Johnson must apologize, resign, and let a real leader take charge.
fuck off trump!!!
Coronavirus outbreak
US stays away as world leaders agree action on Covid-19 vaccine
Video meeting seen as global endorsement of WHO and sign of Trump’s isolation on world stage
Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor
the guardian
Fri 24 Apr 2020 12.55 EDT
Global leaders have pledged to accelerate cooperation on a coronavirus vaccine and to share research, treatment and medicines across the globe. But the United States did not take part in the World Health Organization initiative, in a sign of Donald Trump’s increasing isolation on the global stage.
The cooperation pledge, made at a virtual meeting, was designed to show that wealthy countries will not keep the results of research from developing countries.
The meeting also represented a symbolic endorsement of the United Nations body in the face of Trump’s decision to suspend US payments and condemn its leaders as subordinates of the Chinese Communist party. China and the US have accused each other of bullying and disinformation over the coronavirus outbreak, damaging efforts to secure cooperation at the G20, the natural international institution to handle global health outside the UN.
Instead an ad hoc grouping of 20 world leaders and global health figures were on the call, including the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the American philanthropist Bill Gates. Britain will co-chair a joint coronavirus global response summit on 4 May aimed at raising funds for vaccine research, treatments and tests.
Macron told the meeting: “We will continue now to mobilise all G7 and G20 countries so they get behind this initiative. And I hope we will be able to reconcile around this joint initiative both China and the US, because this is about saying the fight against Covid-19 is a common human good and there should be no division in order to win this battle.”
The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said: “We are facing a common threat that we can only defeat with a common approach. Experience has told us that even when tools are available they have not been equally available to all. We cannot allow that to happen.”
More than 100 potential vaccines are being developed, including six already in clinical trials, according to Seth Berkley, the chief executive of the Gavi vaccine alliance, a public-private partnership that leads immunisation campaigns in poor countries.
Berkley said it was critical that there was not a repeat of the experience in 2009, when the H1N1 vaccine did not reach developing countries until very late.
The US mission in Geneva confirmed there would be no official US participation, but said it looked forward to the outcome of the WHO meeting.
Five pledges were agreed on the call:
The heavily multilateral tone of the pledges contrasts with many countries’ immediate reaction to the outbreak, when countries banned the export of their medical equipment, closed borders and even tried to steal equipment from one another. The degree of cooperation over the vaccine research has also been patchy at best.
The meeting also agreed to appoint two new special envoys to lead global cooperation on vaccine research and to help ensure equal access to any successful vaccines. Sir Andrew Witty, the British former head of the global drugs giant GSK, was appointed alongside Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the chair of Gavi.
Britain has been one of the biggest supporters of the global effort to find a coronavirus vaccine, providing £250m for international research on the disease at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
The cooperation pledge, made at a virtual meeting, was designed to show that wealthy countries will not keep the results of research from developing countries.
The meeting also represented a symbolic endorsement of the United Nations body in the face of Trump’s decision to suspend US payments and condemn its leaders as subordinates of the Chinese Communist party. China and the US have accused each other of bullying and disinformation over the coronavirus outbreak, damaging efforts to secure cooperation at the G20, the natural international institution to handle global health outside the UN.
Instead an ad hoc grouping of 20 world leaders and global health figures were on the call, including the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the American philanthropist Bill Gates. Britain will co-chair a joint coronavirus global response summit on 4 May aimed at raising funds for vaccine research, treatments and tests.
Macron told the meeting: “We will continue now to mobilise all G7 and G20 countries so they get behind this initiative. And I hope we will be able to reconcile around this joint initiative both China and the US, because this is about saying the fight against Covid-19 is a common human good and there should be no division in order to win this battle.”
The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said: “We are facing a common threat that we can only defeat with a common approach. Experience has told us that even when tools are available they have not been equally available to all. We cannot allow that to happen.”
More than 100 potential vaccines are being developed, including six already in clinical trials, according to Seth Berkley, the chief executive of the Gavi vaccine alliance, a public-private partnership that leads immunisation campaigns in poor countries.
Berkley said it was critical that there was not a repeat of the experience in 2009, when the H1N1 vaccine did not reach developing countries until very late.
The US mission in Geneva confirmed there would be no official US participation, but said it looked forward to the outcome of the WHO meeting.
Five pledges were agreed on the call:
- Provide access to new treatments, technologies and vaccines across the world.
- Commit to an unprecedented level of international partnership on research and coordinate efforts to tackle the pandemic and reduce infections.
- Reach collective decisions on responding to the pandemic, recognising that the virus’s spread in one country can affect all countries.
- Learn from experience and adapt the global response.
- Be accountable, to the most vulnerable communities and the whole world.
The heavily multilateral tone of the pledges contrasts with many countries’ immediate reaction to the outbreak, when countries banned the export of their medical equipment, closed borders and even tried to steal equipment from one another. The degree of cooperation over the vaccine research has also been patchy at best.
The meeting also agreed to appoint two new special envoys to lead global cooperation on vaccine research and to help ensure equal access to any successful vaccines. Sir Andrew Witty, the British former head of the global drugs giant GSK, was appointed alongside Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the chair of Gavi.
Britain has been one of the biggest supporters of the global effort to find a coronavirus vaccine, providing £250m for international research on the disease at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
Richard Branson
So much for entitled millennials – it’s billionaires such as Richard Branson who are begging for loans
Arwa Mahdawi - the guardian
Tue 21 Apr 2020 07.57 EDT
Don’t fritter away your money on avocado toast. Stop buying frivolous flat whites. Live with 15 housemates. Subsist on beans and tap water so you can set aside money for retirement. Make sure you have three months of your salary saved in case of emergency.
We have all seen variations of this financial advice, which is normally written by a “sensible grownup” and directed at feckless millennials. Young people are entitled, we are told endlessly. They need to learn good financial habits instead of demanding freebies. They need to fend for themselves.
Well, look who is demanding freebies now. Look who thinks they are entitled to be bailed out with taxpayer money. Look who thinks free markets are not such a good idea when it means their company might fail. Look who thinks we should overlook their irresponsible financial habits. It is not impoverished millennials.
Sir Richard Branson, who is worth an estimated £4.7bn, is begging the UK government to give his Virgin Atlantic airline a £500m loan – and he is offering his private Caribbean island as collateral. Very generous of you, sir, but here is another idea: sell your damn island and bail out your company yourself.
While we are at it, if you want British income taxpayers to help you out, why not become one yourself? While Branson loves slapping union jack branding on his planes, the patriotism that he practises involves living in the tax-free British Virgin Islands and suing the NHS. (Branson, by the way, would prefer that we refer to Virgin Care’s legal battle as a “dispute” and would like you to know that the entire thing was the fault of NHS commissioners.)
I can understand why Branson thinks his aviation baby deserves a state bailout; many of the other airlines are getting one. “Airlines around the world need government support and many have already received it,” he said in a blogpost on Monday. He is right. In the US, the airline industry is getting $25bn (£20.2bn) from the government in grants and loans.
Why are all these enormous airlines, which charge us sky-high prices for every tiny add-on, so illiquid? Did they not read the advice about saving up an emergency fund as the rest of us did? Apparently not. As Bloomberg reported last month, the biggest US airlines spent 96% of their spare cash in the past decade on buying back their own shares. Share buybacks have become common in almost every industry in recent years. What is the point of this strategy? Well, it tends to inflate stock prices and make shareholders richer. Since a lot of big companies tie executive pay to earnings per share, boosting stock prices makes CEOs richer.
That said, the Virgin Group is a private company, so we cannot blame share buybacks for Virgin Atlantic’s monetary woes. Perhaps Branson just wasted all his spare cash on avocado toast and Caribbean islands.
It is not just the airline industry that is getting injections of cash, of course. Lots of bloated institutions are raking in taxpayer funds – even if they don’t need it. Harvard, for example, is getting nearly $9m in aid from the US government, despite having a $40.9bn endowment fund. Meanwhile, Americans who earn under $75,000 are getting a one-off stimulus cheque of up to $1,200, plus $500 for each child. The treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, a former investment banker worth about $400m, told a reporter that he thought the government’s relief package – including expanded unemployment coverage, bailouts and business loans – would be sufficient to last 10 weeks. Common folk do not need much to live on, you see.
In Britain, the government is being more generous to individuals. But make no mistake, we are on track to see a repeat of the massive wealth transfer that happened in 2008 after banks were bailed out and ordinary people had their savings wiped out. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” billionaires are fond of telling us. All while making us pay for their boots.
We have all seen variations of this financial advice, which is normally written by a “sensible grownup” and directed at feckless millennials. Young people are entitled, we are told endlessly. They need to learn good financial habits instead of demanding freebies. They need to fend for themselves.
Well, look who is demanding freebies now. Look who thinks they are entitled to be bailed out with taxpayer money. Look who thinks free markets are not such a good idea when it means their company might fail. Look who thinks we should overlook their irresponsible financial habits. It is not impoverished millennials.
Sir Richard Branson, who is worth an estimated £4.7bn, is begging the UK government to give his Virgin Atlantic airline a £500m loan – and he is offering his private Caribbean island as collateral. Very generous of you, sir, but here is another idea: sell your damn island and bail out your company yourself.
While we are at it, if you want British income taxpayers to help you out, why not become one yourself? While Branson loves slapping union jack branding on his planes, the patriotism that he practises involves living in the tax-free British Virgin Islands and suing the NHS. (Branson, by the way, would prefer that we refer to Virgin Care’s legal battle as a “dispute” and would like you to know that the entire thing was the fault of NHS commissioners.)
I can understand why Branson thinks his aviation baby deserves a state bailout; many of the other airlines are getting one. “Airlines around the world need government support and many have already received it,” he said in a blogpost on Monday. He is right. In the US, the airline industry is getting $25bn (£20.2bn) from the government in grants and loans.
Why are all these enormous airlines, which charge us sky-high prices for every tiny add-on, so illiquid? Did they not read the advice about saving up an emergency fund as the rest of us did? Apparently not. As Bloomberg reported last month, the biggest US airlines spent 96% of their spare cash in the past decade on buying back their own shares. Share buybacks have become common in almost every industry in recent years. What is the point of this strategy? Well, it tends to inflate stock prices and make shareholders richer. Since a lot of big companies tie executive pay to earnings per share, boosting stock prices makes CEOs richer.
That said, the Virgin Group is a private company, so we cannot blame share buybacks for Virgin Atlantic’s monetary woes. Perhaps Branson just wasted all his spare cash on avocado toast and Caribbean islands.
It is not just the airline industry that is getting injections of cash, of course. Lots of bloated institutions are raking in taxpayer funds – even if they don’t need it. Harvard, for example, is getting nearly $9m in aid from the US government, despite having a $40.9bn endowment fund. Meanwhile, Americans who earn under $75,000 are getting a one-off stimulus cheque of up to $1,200, plus $500 for each child. The treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, a former investment banker worth about $400m, told a reporter that he thought the government’s relief package – including expanded unemployment coverage, bailouts and business loans – would be sufficient to last 10 weeks. Common folk do not need much to live on, you see.
In Britain, the government is being more generous to individuals. But make no mistake, we are on track to see a repeat of the massive wealth transfer that happened in 2008 after banks were bailed out and ordinary people had their savings wiped out. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” billionaires are fond of telling us. All while making us pay for their boots.
117 million children face measles risk from COVID-19 response: UN
April 14, 2020
By Agence France-Presse
Around 117 million children worldwide risk contracting measles because dozens of countries are curtailing their vaccination programs as they battle COVID-19, the United Nations warned Tuesday.
Currently 24 countries, including several already dealing with large measles outbreaks, have suspended widespread vaccinations, the World Health Organization and the UN’s children’s fund UNICEF said.
An additional 13 countries have had their vaccination programs interrupted due to COVID-19.
In a joint statement, the Measles and Rubella Initiative (M&RI) said it was vital that immunization capacity was retained during and after the current pandemic.
“Together, more than 117 million children… could be impacted by the suspension of scheduled immunization activities,” it said.
“The M&RI supports the need to protect communities and health workers from COVID-19 through a pause of mass campaigns, where risks of the disease are high.”
“However, this should not mean that children permanently miss out.”
Measles, a highly contagious disease, effects around 20 million people every year, the majority of whom are aged under five.
Despite a cheap and readily available vaccine, measles cases have surged in recent years, largely in part to what the WHO terms “vaccine hesitancy”.
In 2018, 140,000 measles deaths, mostly among children and babies, were recorded — most were preventable, meaning that the countries they occurred in had a vaccination program.
Of the two dozen countries to have officially suspended measles vaccine programs — ostensibly to protect health workers and prioritize COVID-19 response — several have seen worrying rises in measles cases in recent years.
In particular, Bangladesh, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Nigeria, Ukraine and Kazakhstan are all battling large outbreaks.
DR Congo alone has had 6,000 measles deaths in its current epidemic.
The country last week also recorded a new case of Ebola — just days before the UN was due to announce an end to that outbreak.
– ‘Catch-up’ –
Robin Nandy, UNICEF’s chief of immunization, told AFP that COVID-19 was likely to place additional strain on already overburdened healthcare systems.
“We have to be mindful of the impact of COVID-19, threatening outbreaks of measles, an extremely contagious and potentially lethal disease for which there already exists a safe and effective vaccine,” he said.
“We are therefore urging countries to prepare and plan now for intensive catch-up vaccinations once physical distancing restrictions are lifted.”
Billions of people around the world face weeks of lockdown as governments figure out their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Experts have warned since the start of the outbreak that response programs to other infectious diseases — from polio to tuberculosis — are likely to suffer as health services triage workers to COVID-19 cases.
And while COVID-19 is overwhelmingly more serious in older patients, many communicable diseases, including measles, inordinately target children.
“Children younger than 12 months of age are more likely to die from measles complications, and if the circulation of measles virus is not stopped, their risk of exposure to measles will increase daily,” said the M&RI.
Currently 24 countries, including several already dealing with large measles outbreaks, have suspended widespread vaccinations, the World Health Organization and the UN’s children’s fund UNICEF said.
An additional 13 countries have had their vaccination programs interrupted due to COVID-19.
In a joint statement, the Measles and Rubella Initiative (M&RI) said it was vital that immunization capacity was retained during and after the current pandemic.
“Together, more than 117 million children… could be impacted by the suspension of scheduled immunization activities,” it said.
“The M&RI supports the need to protect communities and health workers from COVID-19 through a pause of mass campaigns, where risks of the disease are high.”
“However, this should not mean that children permanently miss out.”
Measles, a highly contagious disease, effects around 20 million people every year, the majority of whom are aged under five.
Despite a cheap and readily available vaccine, measles cases have surged in recent years, largely in part to what the WHO terms “vaccine hesitancy”.
In 2018, 140,000 measles deaths, mostly among children and babies, were recorded — most were preventable, meaning that the countries they occurred in had a vaccination program.
Of the two dozen countries to have officially suspended measles vaccine programs — ostensibly to protect health workers and prioritize COVID-19 response — several have seen worrying rises in measles cases in recent years.
In particular, Bangladesh, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Nigeria, Ukraine and Kazakhstan are all battling large outbreaks.
DR Congo alone has had 6,000 measles deaths in its current epidemic.
The country last week also recorded a new case of Ebola — just days before the UN was due to announce an end to that outbreak.
– ‘Catch-up’ –
Robin Nandy, UNICEF’s chief of immunization, told AFP that COVID-19 was likely to place additional strain on already overburdened healthcare systems.
“We have to be mindful of the impact of COVID-19, threatening outbreaks of measles, an extremely contagious and potentially lethal disease for which there already exists a safe and effective vaccine,” he said.
“We are therefore urging countries to prepare and plan now for intensive catch-up vaccinations once physical distancing restrictions are lifted.”
Billions of people around the world face weeks of lockdown as governments figure out their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Experts have warned since the start of the outbreak that response programs to other infectious diseases — from polio to tuberculosis — are likely to suffer as health services triage workers to COVID-19 cases.
And while COVID-19 is overwhelmingly more serious in older patients, many communicable diseases, including measles, inordinately target children.
“Children younger than 12 months of age are more likely to die from measles complications, and if the circulation of measles virus is not stopped, their risk of exposure to measles will increase daily,” said the M&RI.
murderer for hire!!!
ERIK PRINCE OFFERED LETHAL SERVICES TO SANCTIONED RUSSIAN MERCENARY FIRM WAGNER
Matthew Cole, Alex Emmons - the intercept
April 13 2020, 8:15 a.m
ERIK PRINCE, FOUNDER of the private security firm Blackwater and a Trump administration adviser, has sought in recent months to provide military services to a sanctioned Russian mercenary firm in at least two African conflicts, according to three people with knowledge of the efforts.
Prince, who is the brother of Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, met earlier this year with a top official of Russia’s Wagner Group and offered his mercenary forces to support the firm’s operations in Libya and Mozambique, according to two people familiar with Prince’s offer.
Wagner officials said they are not interested in working with Prince, three people familiar with their decision told The Intercept.
A lawyer for Prince denied that his client met anyone from Wagner.
The Wagner Group is a semi-private military force that operates in countries or conflicts where the Russian government seeks plausible deniability for its activities. It is often equipped and supported directly by the Russian Ministry of Defense, according to reports and experts who track Wagner’s activities. The U.S. State Department website also lists Wagner as an entity connected to the “Defense Sector of the Government of the Russian Federation.” Any business relationship between Prince and Wagner would, in effect, make the influential Trump administration adviser a subcontractor to the Russian military.
In recent years, the Russian government has deployed Wagner to several African countries, Ukraine, and Syria, where the U.S. military killed dozens of Wagner fighters in 2018 after the Russians and their Syrian allies attacked an oil facility that the United States was defending.
“Wagner Group is an instrument of Russian policy. It works under the GRU, which is the Russian military intelligence,” said Sean McFate, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former military contractor who has written about mercenaries.
In attempting to do business with Wagner, Prince may also have exposed himself to legal liability. In 2017, the Trump administration sanctioned Wagner, as well as its founder and head Dmitry Utkin, for having “recruited and sent soldiers to fight alongside [Russian-backed] separatists in eastern Ukraine” during the 2014 Russian invasion. The Russian government denied involvement in the invasion, even as its forces occupied and took control of Crimea, also in Ukrainian territory, in violation of international law.
The sanctions prohibit individuals or companies from providing “financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.” They also forbid anyone “to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf” of Wagner. The 2017 addition of Wagner to the sanctions list builds on a 2014 executive order signed by President Barack Obama.
“In my experience, the act of soliciting from a sanctioned party would indeed be an apparent violation,” said Brian O’Toole, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and former senior sanctions official at the Treasury Department. “Whether you make that [legal] case is an entirely separate matter,” he said, adding that pitching business to Wagner “would seem to be a fairly egregious thing to do.”
When Prince met with Wagner leadership, he was already under federal investigation for violating arms trafficking regulations. The proposal to the Russian firm also raises questions about whether Trump administration officials authorized the meeting or were aware of Prince’s efforts to work with the group.
A former Navy SEAL who rose to prominence and notoriety as head of the private security firm Blackwater, Prince has been a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, serving as an unofficial adviser on military and foreign policy issues in Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Prince was a Trump donor in 2016 and has worked to support the president politically while proposing private military solutions that would benefit his companies financially.
Early in the Trump administration, Prince proposed privatizing the war in Afghanistan and supplying Trump with a private spy service intended to circumvent the U.S. intelligence community. Neither proposal succeeded, despite having support for some of his ideas from senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
For years, Prince has tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to win military contracts with governments in Africa and the Middle East. Wagner has become an increasingly visible player in the region as Russia’s influence there has grown, allowing the country to operate under the radar at a time when “plausible deniability is more powerful than firepower,” according to McFate, the mercenary expert.
“The reason why groups like Wagner exist, and the reason why people like Erik Prince [are] succeeding, is that modern war is getting sneakier and mercenaries and groups like Wagner are a great way to get things done in the shadows,” McFate said.
Libya has been divided and in conflict since the U.S. and NATO allies removed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. The United Nations and most of the international community, including the U.S, recognize the Government of National Accord in the Libyan capital Tripoli as the country’s official leaders. But the eastern portion of the country is led by strongman Khalifa Hifter, who tried last year to take Tripoli. Both sides are backed by foreign powers that have continually violated a U.N. embargo on military support. Turkey and Qatar have supported the GNA, while Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt have backed Hifter.
Last spring, Hifter’s forces, the Libyan National Army, moved to take Tripoli, but were thwarted within days. Hifter turned to Moscow and Wagner. Americans are prohibited from aiding either side of the conflict without U.S. government authorization.
[...]
Prince, who is the brother of Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, met earlier this year with a top official of Russia’s Wagner Group and offered his mercenary forces to support the firm’s operations in Libya and Mozambique, according to two people familiar with Prince’s offer.
Wagner officials said they are not interested in working with Prince, three people familiar with their decision told The Intercept.
A lawyer for Prince denied that his client met anyone from Wagner.
The Wagner Group is a semi-private military force that operates in countries or conflicts where the Russian government seeks plausible deniability for its activities. It is often equipped and supported directly by the Russian Ministry of Defense, according to reports and experts who track Wagner’s activities. The U.S. State Department website also lists Wagner as an entity connected to the “Defense Sector of the Government of the Russian Federation.” Any business relationship between Prince and Wagner would, in effect, make the influential Trump administration adviser a subcontractor to the Russian military.
In recent years, the Russian government has deployed Wagner to several African countries, Ukraine, and Syria, where the U.S. military killed dozens of Wagner fighters in 2018 after the Russians and their Syrian allies attacked an oil facility that the United States was defending.
“Wagner Group is an instrument of Russian policy. It works under the GRU, which is the Russian military intelligence,” said Sean McFate, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former military contractor who has written about mercenaries.
In attempting to do business with Wagner, Prince may also have exposed himself to legal liability. In 2017, the Trump administration sanctioned Wagner, as well as its founder and head Dmitry Utkin, for having “recruited and sent soldiers to fight alongside [Russian-backed] separatists in eastern Ukraine” during the 2014 Russian invasion. The Russian government denied involvement in the invasion, even as its forces occupied and took control of Crimea, also in Ukrainian territory, in violation of international law.
The sanctions prohibit individuals or companies from providing “financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.” They also forbid anyone “to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf” of Wagner. The 2017 addition of Wagner to the sanctions list builds on a 2014 executive order signed by President Barack Obama.
“In my experience, the act of soliciting from a sanctioned party would indeed be an apparent violation,” said Brian O’Toole, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and former senior sanctions official at the Treasury Department. “Whether you make that [legal] case is an entirely separate matter,” he said, adding that pitching business to Wagner “would seem to be a fairly egregious thing to do.”
When Prince met with Wagner leadership, he was already under federal investigation for violating arms trafficking regulations. The proposal to the Russian firm also raises questions about whether Trump administration officials authorized the meeting or were aware of Prince’s efforts to work with the group.
A former Navy SEAL who rose to prominence and notoriety as head of the private security firm Blackwater, Prince has been a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, serving as an unofficial adviser on military and foreign policy issues in Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Prince was a Trump donor in 2016 and has worked to support the president politically while proposing private military solutions that would benefit his companies financially.
Early in the Trump administration, Prince proposed privatizing the war in Afghanistan and supplying Trump with a private spy service intended to circumvent the U.S. intelligence community. Neither proposal succeeded, despite having support for some of his ideas from senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
For years, Prince has tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to win military contracts with governments in Africa and the Middle East. Wagner has become an increasingly visible player in the region as Russia’s influence there has grown, allowing the country to operate under the radar at a time when “plausible deniability is more powerful than firepower,” according to McFate, the mercenary expert.
“The reason why groups like Wagner exist, and the reason why people like Erik Prince [are] succeeding, is that modern war is getting sneakier and mercenaries and groups like Wagner are a great way to get things done in the shadows,” McFate said.
Libya has been divided and in conflict since the U.S. and NATO allies removed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. The United Nations and most of the international community, including the U.S, recognize the Government of National Accord in the Libyan capital Tripoli as the country’s official leaders. But the eastern portion of the country is led by strongman Khalifa Hifter, who tried last year to take Tripoli. Both sides are backed by foreign powers that have continually violated a U.N. embargo on military support. Turkey and Qatar have supported the GNA, while Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt have backed Hifter.
Last spring, Hifter’s forces, the Libyan National Army, moved to take Tripoli, but were thwarted within days. Hifter turned to Moscow and Wagner. Americans are prohibited from aiding either side of the conflict without U.S. government authorization.
[...]
Coronavirus outbreak
Coronavirus pandemic exacerbates inequalities for women, UN warns
‘Limited gains made in the past decades’ toward gender equality ‘are at risk of being rolled back’, UN policy brief said
Alexandra Villarreal in New York
the guardian
Sat 11 Apr 2020 10.00 EDT
A global economy in freefall, 1.52 billion students stuck at home, dramatic swells in domestic violence reports and healthcare systems overwhelmed by a single disease all portend vicious side-effects for women during the Covid-19 pandemic, the United Nations warns.
“There is no single society where we’ve achieved equality between men and women, and so this pandemic is being layered on top of existing inequalities, and it’s exacerbating those inequalities,” Nahla Valji, the UN’s senior gender adviser to the executive office of the secretary general, told the Guardian.
The current public health emergency will probably mean a disproportionate economic impact for women, who often work in service industries hit hard by Covid-19. They also tend to take on the bulk of unpaid family care at home, a burden that has become even more all-consuming amid physical distancing and self-isolation.
And, even as women represent 70% of the global health workforce, the critical resources they need to stay well – reproductive health services, maternal care – may fall by the wayside as the world’s hospitals go into crisis mode. That, in turn, could lead to more maternal mortalities, young pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, according to a UN policy brief published on Thursday.
Because of the pandemic, the report said, “even the limited gains made in the past decades” toward gender equality “are at risk of being rolled back”.
In the US, the country with by far the most confirmed coronavirus cases, Covid-19 has already laid siege to people’s health and livelihoods. At least 16 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past three weeks. Layoffs and furloughs will probably continue as businesses remain shuttered and workers stay home.
Women are suffering heavy losses, data from the Fuller Project suggest. The majority of unemployment applicants in states such as New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Minnesota in mid- to late March were women, an alarming surge compared with past years.
This flood of applications coincided with school closures and stay-at-home orders, as children required near-constant attention and restaurants and other services shut down.
“If we take, for instance, the great recession, that is an economic crisis driven by economic factors, whereas this is an economic crisis which is driven by health factors,” said Xanthe Scharff, co-founder and CEO of the Fuller Project. “And that really changes the nature of the economic fallout, because at the heart of this is a need for social distancing.”
The very notion of isolation has disrupted the hospitality, retail and tourism industries that many women rely on for their livelihoods, according to the UN. And even after the economy reopens, those workers may still find themselves in dire straits: the UN projects “a prolonged dip in women’s incomes and labor force participation” because of Covid-19.
With a depleted job market, men who were in other, more lucrative industries may compete for roles traditionally filled by women, said Toni Van Pelt, president of the National Organization for Women. Women, however, will have to wait to search for work until their kids are settled at school and any sick family members get well.
“I foresee that there’ll be a scarcity of job openings available for women to take because they’re gonna lag behind in being able to access those jobs,” Van Pelt said.
Women are also facing existential threats to their safety and freedoms right now as domestic violence victims are constantly confined with their abusers and the pandemic threatens access to reproductive health care, the UN warned.
Violence against women has increased by more than 25% in many places around the world, according to the UN, and helplines in the US are already getting coronavirus-related calls from domestic abuse victims. Meanwhile, states already cool on abortion rights are trying to temporarily bar such operations for the time being.
“They’re using this virus to end women’s constitutional rights across the country,” said Van Pelt.
If there were more female leaders, the world might have been able to anticipate some of the crises it is facing now, such as an increase in violence against women, Valji suggested.
“The fact that we do not have women in leadership roles decision-making on the response to this pandemic means that we are missing huge pieces of information, of experience,” she said. “And that affects everybody.”
A statement from the US mission to the UN read, in part: “The United States recognizes the disproportionate impact that conflict and crises often have on women and girls. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen women around the world serving on the frontlines as medical professionals, emergency workers, caregivers and other essential personnel who are courageously stepping up and responding to the needs of those affected by the pandemic.”
It also acknowledged that measures such as stay-at-home orders “may further endanger” women and girls.
“There is no single society where we’ve achieved equality between men and women, and so this pandemic is being layered on top of existing inequalities, and it’s exacerbating those inequalities,” Nahla Valji, the UN’s senior gender adviser to the executive office of the secretary general, told the Guardian.
The current public health emergency will probably mean a disproportionate economic impact for women, who often work in service industries hit hard by Covid-19. They also tend to take on the bulk of unpaid family care at home, a burden that has become even more all-consuming amid physical distancing and self-isolation.
And, even as women represent 70% of the global health workforce, the critical resources they need to stay well – reproductive health services, maternal care – may fall by the wayside as the world’s hospitals go into crisis mode. That, in turn, could lead to more maternal mortalities, young pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, according to a UN policy brief published on Thursday.
Because of the pandemic, the report said, “even the limited gains made in the past decades” toward gender equality “are at risk of being rolled back”.
In the US, the country with by far the most confirmed coronavirus cases, Covid-19 has already laid siege to people’s health and livelihoods. At least 16 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past three weeks. Layoffs and furloughs will probably continue as businesses remain shuttered and workers stay home.
Women are suffering heavy losses, data from the Fuller Project suggest. The majority of unemployment applicants in states such as New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Minnesota in mid- to late March were women, an alarming surge compared with past years.
This flood of applications coincided with school closures and stay-at-home orders, as children required near-constant attention and restaurants and other services shut down.
“If we take, for instance, the great recession, that is an economic crisis driven by economic factors, whereas this is an economic crisis which is driven by health factors,” said Xanthe Scharff, co-founder and CEO of the Fuller Project. “And that really changes the nature of the economic fallout, because at the heart of this is a need for social distancing.”
The very notion of isolation has disrupted the hospitality, retail and tourism industries that many women rely on for their livelihoods, according to the UN. And even after the economy reopens, those workers may still find themselves in dire straits: the UN projects “a prolonged dip in women’s incomes and labor force participation” because of Covid-19.
With a depleted job market, men who were in other, more lucrative industries may compete for roles traditionally filled by women, said Toni Van Pelt, president of the National Organization for Women. Women, however, will have to wait to search for work until their kids are settled at school and any sick family members get well.
“I foresee that there’ll be a scarcity of job openings available for women to take because they’re gonna lag behind in being able to access those jobs,” Van Pelt said.
Women are also facing existential threats to their safety and freedoms right now as domestic violence victims are constantly confined with their abusers and the pandemic threatens access to reproductive health care, the UN warned.
Violence against women has increased by more than 25% in many places around the world, according to the UN, and helplines in the US are already getting coronavirus-related calls from domestic abuse victims. Meanwhile, states already cool on abortion rights are trying to temporarily bar such operations for the time being.
“They’re using this virus to end women’s constitutional rights across the country,” said Van Pelt.
If there were more female leaders, the world might have been able to anticipate some of the crises it is facing now, such as an increase in violence against women, Valji suggested.
“The fact that we do not have women in leadership roles decision-making on the response to this pandemic means that we are missing huge pieces of information, of experience,” she said. “And that affects everybody.”
A statement from the US mission to the UN read, in part: “The United States recognizes the disproportionate impact that conflict and crises often have on women and girls. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen women around the world serving on the frontlines as medical professionals, emergency workers, caregivers and other essential personnel who are courageously stepping up and responding to the needs of those affected by the pandemic.”
It also acknowledged that measures such as stay-at-home orders “may further endanger” women and girls.
Syrian air force carried out 2017 chemical attack, investigators find
france24.com
Issued on: 08/04/2020 - 19:30
Syrian Arab Air Force pilots flying Sukhoi Su-22 military planes and a helicopter dropped bombs containing poisonous chlorine and sarin nerve gas on a village in the country's western Hama region in March 2017, a new team at the global chemical weapons watchdog concluded in its first report.
The special investigative unit was established by members of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in 2018 to identify perpetrators of illegal attacks. Until now the OPCW had only been authorised to say whether chemical attacks occurred, not who perpetrated them.
Officials in the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and its military backer Russia have repeatedly denied using chemical weapons and accuse insurgents of staging attacks to implicate Syrian forces.
Syria’s mission to the United Nations in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment and there was no immediate reaction from Damascus to the report. In Moscow the Russian Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The OPCW Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) said more than 100 people were affected by the attacks, carried out on March 24, 25 and 30 in 2017 in the town of Ltamenah.
According to the ITT report, the 50th Brigade of the 22nd Air Division of the Syrian Air Force dropped M4000 aerial bombs containing sarin on the town and a cylinder containing chlorine on a hospital. The raids were conducted from the Sharat and Hama air bases, it said.
"Military operations of such a strategic nature as these three attacks only occur pursuant to orders from the highest levels of the Syrian Arab Armed Forces," it said.
While individuals were identified by the OPCW investigators, their names have been redacted from the report, which was to be circulated to the OPCW's 193 member states on Wednesday.
"There are reasonable grounds to believe that the perpetrators ... were individuals belonging to the Syrian Arab Air Force," OPCW team leader Santiago Onate-Laborde said.
The OPCW's identification team is not a judicial body and it will be up to OPCW's members, the U.N. Secretary General and the international community to "take any further action they deem appropriate and necessary", OPCW chief Fernando Arias said.
An attack on the Syrian town of Douma led U.S. President Donald Trump to carry out missile strikes on Syrian government targets in April 2018 with the backing of France and Britain.
Created in 1997, the OPCW was initially a technical body to enforce a global non-proliferation treaty. It has become the focus of diplomatic conflict between Syria and Russia on one side and the United States, France and Britain on the other.
The special investigative unit was established by members of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in 2018 to identify perpetrators of illegal attacks. Until now the OPCW had only been authorised to say whether chemical attacks occurred, not who perpetrated them.
Officials in the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and its military backer Russia have repeatedly denied using chemical weapons and accuse insurgents of staging attacks to implicate Syrian forces.
Syria’s mission to the United Nations in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment and there was no immediate reaction from Damascus to the report. In Moscow the Russian Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The OPCW Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) said more than 100 people were affected by the attacks, carried out on March 24, 25 and 30 in 2017 in the town of Ltamenah.
According to the ITT report, the 50th Brigade of the 22nd Air Division of the Syrian Air Force dropped M4000 aerial bombs containing sarin on the town and a cylinder containing chlorine on a hospital. The raids were conducted from the Sharat and Hama air bases, it said.
"Military operations of such a strategic nature as these three attacks only occur pursuant to orders from the highest levels of the Syrian Arab Armed Forces," it said.
While individuals were identified by the OPCW investigators, their names have been redacted from the report, which was to be circulated to the OPCW's 193 member states on Wednesday.
"There are reasonable grounds to believe that the perpetrators ... were individuals belonging to the Syrian Arab Air Force," OPCW team leader Santiago Onate-Laborde said.
The OPCW's identification team is not a judicial body and it will be up to OPCW's members, the U.N. Secretary General and the international community to "take any further action they deem appropriate and necessary", OPCW chief Fernando Arias said.
An attack on the Syrian town of Douma led U.S. President Donald Trump to carry out missile strikes on Syrian government targets in April 2018 with the backing of France and Britain.
Created in 1997, the OPCW was initially a technical body to enforce a global non-proliferation treaty. It has become the focus of diplomatic conflict between Syria and Russia on one side and the United States, France and Britain on the other.
In first, US brands white supremacists as foreign terrorists
BY AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
06/04/2020
The United States on Monday branded a Russian far-right organization a terrorist group, the first time it has targeted purported white supremacists with action frequently used against jihadist groups.
The move comes after ambivalent messages about white supremacists by President Donald Trump, who notoriously defended participants in a neo-Nazi rally.
The State Department said the Russian Imperial Movement runs two paramilitary training camps in Saint Petersburg and has pulled in neo-Nazis from across the Western world, including Swedish militants who carried out violent attacks.
"This is the first time the United States has ever designated white supremacist terrorists, illustrating how seriously this administration takes the threat," said Nathan Sales, the State Department counterterrorism coordinator.
"We are prepared to target any foreign terrorist group, regardless of ideology, that threatens our citizens, our interests abroad or our allies," he said.
The Russian Imperial Movement and three of its leaders were blacklisted as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, meaning that they will not be admitted to the United States and that any US assets they hold will be blocked.
The designation also aims to have a chilling effect on banks and other institutions overseas unlikely to want to deal with a US-described terrorist group.
Sales said that two extremists from Sweden, known for its generosity toward refugees, traveled in August 2016 to Saint Petersburg to undergo 11 days of paramilitary training with the group.
They returned to Sweden and carried out a series of attacks including a bombing outside a migrant center in Gothenburg that gravely injured one person, the State Department said.
"This group has innocent blood on its hands," Sales said.
- 'Nonsense,' leader says -
The monarchist movement has deployed volunteers to fight in nationalist causes, including on behalf of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine.
"It's incredible. It's nonsense, of course," Denis Gariyev, one of three leaders put on the blacklist, told AFP of the designation.
"In the same way you could recognize tens of thousands of volunteers as terrorists. Yes, we took part as volunteers," he said of the group's participation in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.
He denied that the group promoted racial supremacism, saying: "We couldn't do so because we are an Orthodox organization."
"This is politics. Probably they want to use us as a bogeyman. They need an 'image of the enemy,' after all," he added.
The group's website says its militants train in martial arts and knife-fighting in the belief that "not being a warrior for a modern man in Russia is criminal weakness."
A Russian court in 2012 banned a group website as extremist, according to the justice ministry, but Moscow has not designated the group as a whole as terrorist.
- Globalized nationalists -
Sales said that white supremacists around the world have increasingly been interconnected.
Last year a gunman targeting Hispanics killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and said he was inspired by the white supremacist who massacred Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Sales said the State Department had seen reports that the Russian Imperial Movement "reached out to Americans or even travelled to the United States," although he did not draw a link to any incidents.
Trump himself has faced widespread criticism for his uncritical treatment of white supremacists as well as his rhetoric that demonizes non-white immigrants as criminals.
In 2017, Trump said that neo-Nazis whose march in Charlottesville, Virginia devolved into violence included "very fine people."
Violent hate crimes in the United States soared to a 16-year high in 2018, including a shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, according to the FBI.
Sales said that Monday's designation was made possible after an order by Trump that allows designation of terrorists based on their training activities, not necessarily participation in violence.
Despite the calls on Russia to act, the United States itself does not designate domestic groups as terrorists, owing largely to the US Constitution's broad guarantees of freedom of speech.
The move comes after ambivalent messages about white supremacists by President Donald Trump, who notoriously defended participants in a neo-Nazi rally.
The State Department said the Russian Imperial Movement runs two paramilitary training camps in Saint Petersburg and has pulled in neo-Nazis from across the Western world, including Swedish militants who carried out violent attacks.
"This is the first time the United States has ever designated white supremacist terrorists, illustrating how seriously this administration takes the threat," said Nathan Sales, the State Department counterterrorism coordinator.
"We are prepared to target any foreign terrorist group, regardless of ideology, that threatens our citizens, our interests abroad or our allies," he said.
The Russian Imperial Movement and three of its leaders were blacklisted as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, meaning that they will not be admitted to the United States and that any US assets they hold will be blocked.
The designation also aims to have a chilling effect on banks and other institutions overseas unlikely to want to deal with a US-described terrorist group.
Sales said that two extremists from Sweden, known for its generosity toward refugees, traveled in August 2016 to Saint Petersburg to undergo 11 days of paramilitary training with the group.
They returned to Sweden and carried out a series of attacks including a bombing outside a migrant center in Gothenburg that gravely injured one person, the State Department said.
"This group has innocent blood on its hands," Sales said.
- 'Nonsense,' leader says -
The monarchist movement has deployed volunteers to fight in nationalist causes, including on behalf of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine.
"It's incredible. It's nonsense, of course," Denis Gariyev, one of three leaders put on the blacklist, told AFP of the designation.
"In the same way you could recognize tens of thousands of volunteers as terrorists. Yes, we took part as volunteers," he said of the group's participation in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.
He denied that the group promoted racial supremacism, saying: "We couldn't do so because we are an Orthodox organization."
"This is politics. Probably they want to use us as a bogeyman. They need an 'image of the enemy,' after all," he added.
The group's website says its militants train in martial arts and knife-fighting in the belief that "not being a warrior for a modern man in Russia is criminal weakness."
A Russian court in 2012 banned a group website as extremist, according to the justice ministry, but Moscow has not designated the group as a whole as terrorist.
- Globalized nationalists -
Sales said that white supremacists around the world have increasingly been interconnected.
Last year a gunman targeting Hispanics killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and said he was inspired by the white supremacist who massacred Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Sales said the State Department had seen reports that the Russian Imperial Movement "reached out to Americans or even travelled to the United States," although he did not draw a link to any incidents.
Trump himself has faced widespread criticism for his uncritical treatment of white supremacists as well as his rhetoric that demonizes non-white immigrants as criminals.
In 2017, Trump said that neo-Nazis whose march in Charlottesville, Virginia devolved into violence included "very fine people."
Violent hate crimes in the United States soared to a 16-year high in 2018, including a shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, according to the FBI.
Sales said that Monday's designation was made possible after an order by Trump that allows designation of terrorists based on their training activities, not necessarily participation in violence.
Despite the calls on Russia to act, the United States itself does not designate domestic groups as terrorists, owing largely to the US Constitution's broad guarantees of freedom of speech.
Brazil minister offends China with ‘racist’ virus tweet
April 6, 2020
By Agence France-Presse - raw story
China demanded an explanation from Brazil Monday after the far-right government’s education minister linked the coronavirus pandemic to the Asian country’s “plan for world domination,” in a tweet imitating a Chinese accent.
In the latest incident to strain ties between Brasilia and Beijing, Education Minister Abraham Weintraub insinuated China was behind the global health crisis.
“Geopolitically, who will come out stronger from this global crisis?” he wrote on Twitter Saturday.
“Who in Brazil is allied with this infallible plan for world domination?”
In the original Portuguese, his tweet substituted the letter “r” with capital “L” — “BLazil” instead of “Brazil,” for example — in a style commonly used to mock a Chinese accent.
It was also a reference to a character from a popular Brazilian comic strip, “Monica’s Gang.”
The embassy condemned Weintraub’s “absurd and despicable” tweet, calling it “highly racist.”
“The Chinese government expects an official explanation from Brazil,” tweeted Ambassador Yang Wanming.
The row comes as Brazil, like many countries, is hoping to source more medical equipment from China to deal with COVID-19.
Weintraub said in an interview he stood by his tweet and called on China to do more to help fight the pandemic.
“If they (China) sell us 1,000 ventilators, I’ll get down on my knees in front of the embassy, apologize and say I was an idiot,” he told Radio Bandeirantes.
Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta said last week Brazil was struggling to source ventilators and other vital health supplies from China, saying some of its orders were canceled without explanation.
The issue erupted into a social media war Monday. The top trend on Twitter in Brazil was the hashtag TradeBlockadeOnChinaNow.
Brazil, whose biggest trading partner is China, is the Latin American country hit hardest by the new coronavirus, with nearly 500 deaths and more than 11,000 confirmed cases so far.
Since the pandemic emerged, Brazil-China ties have been strained, notably by a series of tweets by President Jair Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, a federal lawmaker.
Eduardo Bolsonaro criticized the Chinese “dictatorship” for its handling of the outbreak in March.
Last week, he tweeted about the “Chinese virus,” a phrase that infuriates Beijing. It has also been used by US President Donald Trump, whom his father admires.
That prompted China’s consul general in Rio de Janeiro, Li Yang, to ask Eduardo in an opinion column in Brazilian newspaper Globo: “Are you really that naive and ignorant?”
In the latest incident to strain ties between Brasilia and Beijing, Education Minister Abraham Weintraub insinuated China was behind the global health crisis.
“Geopolitically, who will come out stronger from this global crisis?” he wrote on Twitter Saturday.
“Who in Brazil is allied with this infallible plan for world domination?”
In the original Portuguese, his tweet substituted the letter “r” with capital “L” — “BLazil” instead of “Brazil,” for example — in a style commonly used to mock a Chinese accent.
It was also a reference to a character from a popular Brazilian comic strip, “Monica’s Gang.”
The embassy condemned Weintraub’s “absurd and despicable” tweet, calling it “highly racist.”
“The Chinese government expects an official explanation from Brazil,” tweeted Ambassador Yang Wanming.
The row comes as Brazil, like many countries, is hoping to source more medical equipment from China to deal with COVID-19.
Weintraub said in an interview he stood by his tweet and called on China to do more to help fight the pandemic.
“If they (China) sell us 1,000 ventilators, I’ll get down on my knees in front of the embassy, apologize and say I was an idiot,” he told Radio Bandeirantes.
Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta said last week Brazil was struggling to source ventilators and other vital health supplies from China, saying some of its orders were canceled without explanation.
The issue erupted into a social media war Monday. The top trend on Twitter in Brazil was the hashtag TradeBlockadeOnChinaNow.
Brazil, whose biggest trading partner is China, is the Latin American country hit hardest by the new coronavirus, with nearly 500 deaths and more than 11,000 confirmed cases so far.
Since the pandemic emerged, Brazil-China ties have been strained, notably by a series of tweets by President Jair Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, a federal lawmaker.
Eduardo Bolsonaro criticized the Chinese “dictatorship” for its handling of the outbreak in March.
Last week, he tweeted about the “Chinese virus,” a phrase that infuriates Beijing. It has also been used by US President Donald Trump, whom his father admires.
That prompted China’s consul general in Rio de Janeiro, Li Yang, to ask Eduardo in an opinion column in Brazilian newspaper Globo: “Are you really that naive and ignorant?”
stupidity knows no borders!!!
5G coronavirus conspiracy theory is dangerous fake nonsense, UK says
Guy Faulconbridge, Kate Holton - reuters
APRIL 4, 2020 / 9:00 AM
LONDON (Reuters) - A conspiracy theory that links 5G mobile telecommunications masts to the spread of the novel coronavirus is dangerous fake news and completely false, Britain said on Saturday after masts in several parts of the country were torched.
When asked by a reporter about the so called “theory” that 5G telecommunications masts could play a role in the spread of the disease, British Cabinet Officer Minister Michael Gove said: “That is just nonsense, dangerous nonsense as well.”
Mobile phone masts have in recent days been vandalised and telecoms staff abused in Birmingham in central England and Merseyside in northern England, damaging connectivity at a time when people are relying on it more than ever.
An arson attack at a tower in Birmingham owned by BT (BT.L), Britain’s biggest telecoms company, caused significant damage. It provided 2G, 3G and 4G services to thousands of people, but did not have 5G capability, the company said.
NHS England’s national medical director, Stephen Powis, said the 5G conspiracy idea was fake news with no scientific backing that risked damaging the emergency response to the outbreak.
“The 5G story is complete and utter rubbish, it’s nonsense, it’s the worst kind of fake news,” Powis said. “The reality is that the mobile phone networks are absolutely critical to all of us.”
“Those are also the phone networks that are used by our emergency services and our health workers and I’m absolutely outraged, absolutely disgusted that people would be taking action against the very infrastructure that we need to respond to this health emergency,” Powis said.
A lobby group for the United Kingdom’s mobile operators - including EE, O2, Vodafone and Three - said it was aware of the false rumours linking 5G to the outbreak, and that telecoms staff had been threatened.
Vodafone, the world’s second largest mobile operator, said the attacks were now a matter of national security.
“It beggars belief that some people should want to harm the very networks that are providing essential connectivity to the emergency services, the NHS, and rest of the country during this difficult lockdown period,” UK boss Nick Jeffery said.
He described his engineers as heroes and urged people not to spread the “utterly baseless” stories online.
When asked by a reporter about the so called “theory” that 5G telecommunications masts could play a role in the spread of the disease, British Cabinet Officer Minister Michael Gove said: “That is just nonsense, dangerous nonsense as well.”
Mobile phone masts have in recent days been vandalised and telecoms staff abused in Birmingham in central England and Merseyside in northern England, damaging connectivity at a time when people are relying on it more than ever.
An arson attack at a tower in Birmingham owned by BT (BT.L), Britain’s biggest telecoms company, caused significant damage. It provided 2G, 3G and 4G services to thousands of people, but did not have 5G capability, the company said.
NHS England’s national medical director, Stephen Powis, said the 5G conspiracy idea was fake news with no scientific backing that risked damaging the emergency response to the outbreak.
“The 5G story is complete and utter rubbish, it’s nonsense, it’s the worst kind of fake news,” Powis said. “The reality is that the mobile phone networks are absolutely critical to all of us.”
“Those are also the phone networks that are used by our emergency services and our health workers and I’m absolutely outraged, absolutely disgusted that people would be taking action against the very infrastructure that we need to respond to this health emergency,” Powis said.
A lobby group for the United Kingdom’s mobile operators - including EE, O2, Vodafone and Three - said it was aware of the false rumours linking 5G to the outbreak, and that telecoms staff had been threatened.
Vodafone, the world’s second largest mobile operator, said the attacks were now a matter of national security.
“It beggars belief that some people should want to harm the very networks that are providing essential connectivity to the emergency services, the NHS, and rest of the country during this difficult lockdown period,” UK boss Nick Jeffery said.
He described his engineers as heroes and urged people not to spread the “utterly baseless” stories online.
the failure of global capitalism!!!
CORONAVIRUS STARTED IN CHINA, BUT EUROPE BECAME THE HUB FOR ITS GLOBAL SPREAD
Joe Penney - the intercept
April 2, 2020, 2:00 a.m.
WHEN THE CORONAVIRUS began to spread, Mongolia took sensible precautions. It halted border crossings from China, with which it shares a 2,877-mile border. Mongolia also imposed travel bans on people from South Korea and Japan, the other epicenters of the pandemic at the time. Yet the virus nonetheless found its way to Mongolia, where the first infected person — known as the “index case” — was a Frenchman who had come to the country from France via Moscow.
The story is the same for many other countries that became part of the pandemic due to infected people carrying it from Europe. South Africa’s first coronavirus cases had gone to northern Italy for a skiing trip. South America’s first case was a Brazilian who had traveled to Italy’s Lombardy region, and Bangladesh’s first cases were Bangladeshis who had also come from Italy. Panama’s index case was imported from Spain, and Nigeria’s first experience with coronavirus was an Italian business traveler. Jordan’s was imported from Italy.
As Covid-19 cripples the U.S. and ravages many countries in the world, politicians are battling to craft a narrative of who is to blame for its damage. The virus started in China, of course, but narratives of how it went from epidemic to global pandemic often leave out a crucial element: the role of Europe.
European countries have been hit much harder than Asian nations and have spread the virus significantly more than other regions. The Intercept went through news reports of Covid-19 index cases across the world, and the results were startling. Travel from and within Europe preceded the first coronavirus cases in at least 93 countries across all five continents, accounting for more than half of the world’s index cases. Travel from Italy alone preceded index cases in at least 46 countries, compared to 27 countries associated with travel from China.
One of the reasons European travel facilitated the spread of the coronavirus was because those countries were late to close air links. Italy closed one terminal of Milan’s main airport on March 16, when the northern region of Lombardy already had 3,760 cases in a population of 10 million people. By contrast, China had shut down flights out of Hubei province on January 23, when there were 500 reported cases worldwide and 17 deaths in Hubei among a population of 58 million. London’s Heathrow and Paris’s Charles De Gaulle airports are still open as cases soar in both of those cities, while Spain’s air operators only closed major terminals in Madrid and Barcelona when air traffic had ground to a halt anyway.
The media has paid relatively little attention to the role of Europe as an accelerator of the virus’s spread. A popular New York Times data graphic, for example, tracks the spread of the virus but stops mapping the spread when China is no longer its main exporter. Other reports target China more bluntly, like a widely shared article in The Atlantic that stated, “Is this a time for blame? Yes, it is.”
To an extent, this makes sense: The outbreak began in Wuhan, China’s ninth most populous city, and Chinese authorities covered up its dangerous spread early on. Travel from China infected major countries like South Korea, Italy, Russia, Germany, India, and the U.S.
But as China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong were stabilizing their coronavirus rates through a combination of massive testing, rigorous contact tracing, and strict lockdown measures, infections in European countries were shooting up. Despite witnessing the devastation in China, and the rapid response put in place by its neighbors, European countries were flatfooted as the virus spread rapidly from Milan, Paris, and London to countries in Africa, Latin America, and its European neighbors.
“Did European countries ask for advice from Asian ones? I don’t think so,” said Dr. François Dabis, director of the Agency for Research on AIDS and Hepatitis in Bordeaux, France. “We saw the reactions of Asian countries, but at the time we didn’t think they would be a model because we didn’t believe we would have the same epidemic.” European public health officials were initially modeling their responses to coronavirus after the 2003 SARS epidemic, which was more locally contained in Asia, he added.
Many East Asian countries built up their screening and contact tracing capacity after SARS, though South Korea had learned its key lessons from its experience with the MERS outbreak in 2015, when testing production was delayed by regulations. Due to that, South Korea was ready to respond to the Covid-19 outbreak with fast and massive testing. “After 2015, they changed the law to allow, in the event of a public health crisis or infectious disease outbreak, that they could more much more rapidly approve and deploy new diagnostic tests,” using the World Health Organization’s test as a model, said Dr. Claire Standley, researcher at Georgetown University’s Department of International Health. The Food and Drug Administration, on the other hand, only allowed a specific Centers for Disease Control and Prevention test in the first few weeks, drastically damaging the U.S.’s ability to contain the pandemic.
Italy, France, Spain, and the U.K. all failed to scale up testing as well. “We had a lack of logistical capacity to test, and in France we are still suffering because from this,” Dabis explained. Within Europe, only Germany has the industrial capacity to mass-produce Covid-19 tests on short notice, he said, adding that France “didn’t source tests from Asia in large quantities.”
THE RESULT was considerable: Europe turned into a petri dish and travel from there impacted the world, with its most damaging effect in Africa and Latin America. “The colonial legacy lives in viral movements. I wasn’t surprised that Belgian travel preceded DRC’s first known case,” said Dr. Adia Benton, an anthropologist at Northwestern University, referring to the Democratic Republic of Congo. “The ‘knowing’ is also a colonial symptom. There may have very well been an earlier case, but we know about the traveler. Their sickness registers.” Senegal’s first case, for example, was imported from France, while the Gambia’s was the U.K., Angola’s was from Portgual, and Suriname’s was from the Netherlands. On Facebook and in WhatsApp groups, some commentators have used the term “coronized,” a play off “colonized,” to describe this phenomenon.
In Africa in particular, the spread of Covid-19 hit the political class first because of their frequent travel abroad. A single event in London attended by Prince Charles and Prince Albert II of Monaco, for example, created possible clusters in at least two African countries. Even though Mozambique’s index case was officially confirmed on March 20, some journalists have speculated that it actually could have been Eneas Comich, the mayor of Maputo, the southern African nation’s capital. Comich was likely infected when attending a WaterAid event on March 10 in London, where he sat at the same table as Prince Charles and Prince Albert, both of whom tested positive for Covid-19 shortly thereafter. Prince Charles is pictured coughing into his hand at the event.
Burkina Faso’s water and sanitation minister, Niouga Ambroise Ouédraogo, attended the meeting as well and is suspected of having contracted the virus there too. He is one of seven infected ministers in Burkina Faso’s cabinet, severely hampering the government as it struggles to contain a rapidly growing outbreak there.
The pandemic’s epicenter has now moved to the U.S. and is likely to remain a devastating global problem for months and even years to come. “There’s going to need to be a global accountability for how we manage pandemics,” said Standley. “I don’t think that it’s helpful at this point in time to use the pandemic to advance nationalistic discourses, or to point fingers and assign blame. But I think that there are opportunities to hold our systems and our governance accountable in terms of how they could have responded better.”
Dabis said that in the absence of a coherent strategy from WHO and the United Nations, Europeans had placed faith in their own institutions, but that faith was let down. “We thought maybe the political organizations that have cropped up over the past few years — the G7, the G20, the European Commission — could have brought solutions, but we see clearly they haven’t had a single one,” he said. “Every country does what it wants, when it wants. There is no global vision.”
The story is the same for many other countries that became part of the pandemic due to infected people carrying it from Europe. South Africa’s first coronavirus cases had gone to northern Italy for a skiing trip. South America’s first case was a Brazilian who had traveled to Italy’s Lombardy region, and Bangladesh’s first cases were Bangladeshis who had also come from Italy. Panama’s index case was imported from Spain, and Nigeria’s first experience with coronavirus was an Italian business traveler. Jordan’s was imported from Italy.
As Covid-19 cripples the U.S. and ravages many countries in the world, politicians are battling to craft a narrative of who is to blame for its damage. The virus started in China, of course, but narratives of how it went from epidemic to global pandemic often leave out a crucial element: the role of Europe.
European countries have been hit much harder than Asian nations and have spread the virus significantly more than other regions. The Intercept went through news reports of Covid-19 index cases across the world, and the results were startling. Travel from and within Europe preceded the first coronavirus cases in at least 93 countries across all five continents, accounting for more than half of the world’s index cases. Travel from Italy alone preceded index cases in at least 46 countries, compared to 27 countries associated with travel from China.
One of the reasons European travel facilitated the spread of the coronavirus was because those countries were late to close air links. Italy closed one terminal of Milan’s main airport on March 16, when the northern region of Lombardy already had 3,760 cases in a population of 10 million people. By contrast, China had shut down flights out of Hubei province on January 23, when there were 500 reported cases worldwide and 17 deaths in Hubei among a population of 58 million. London’s Heathrow and Paris’s Charles De Gaulle airports are still open as cases soar in both of those cities, while Spain’s air operators only closed major terminals in Madrid and Barcelona when air traffic had ground to a halt anyway.
The media has paid relatively little attention to the role of Europe as an accelerator of the virus’s spread. A popular New York Times data graphic, for example, tracks the spread of the virus but stops mapping the spread when China is no longer its main exporter. Other reports target China more bluntly, like a widely shared article in The Atlantic that stated, “Is this a time for blame? Yes, it is.”
To an extent, this makes sense: The outbreak began in Wuhan, China’s ninth most populous city, and Chinese authorities covered up its dangerous spread early on. Travel from China infected major countries like South Korea, Italy, Russia, Germany, India, and the U.S.
But as China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong were stabilizing their coronavirus rates through a combination of massive testing, rigorous contact tracing, and strict lockdown measures, infections in European countries were shooting up. Despite witnessing the devastation in China, and the rapid response put in place by its neighbors, European countries were flatfooted as the virus spread rapidly from Milan, Paris, and London to countries in Africa, Latin America, and its European neighbors.
“Did European countries ask for advice from Asian ones? I don’t think so,” said Dr. François Dabis, director of the Agency for Research on AIDS and Hepatitis in Bordeaux, France. “We saw the reactions of Asian countries, but at the time we didn’t think they would be a model because we didn’t believe we would have the same epidemic.” European public health officials were initially modeling their responses to coronavirus after the 2003 SARS epidemic, which was more locally contained in Asia, he added.
Many East Asian countries built up their screening and contact tracing capacity after SARS, though South Korea had learned its key lessons from its experience with the MERS outbreak in 2015, when testing production was delayed by regulations. Due to that, South Korea was ready to respond to the Covid-19 outbreak with fast and massive testing. “After 2015, they changed the law to allow, in the event of a public health crisis or infectious disease outbreak, that they could more much more rapidly approve and deploy new diagnostic tests,” using the World Health Organization’s test as a model, said Dr. Claire Standley, researcher at Georgetown University’s Department of International Health. The Food and Drug Administration, on the other hand, only allowed a specific Centers for Disease Control and Prevention test in the first few weeks, drastically damaging the U.S.’s ability to contain the pandemic.
Italy, France, Spain, and the U.K. all failed to scale up testing as well. “We had a lack of logistical capacity to test, and in France we are still suffering because from this,” Dabis explained. Within Europe, only Germany has the industrial capacity to mass-produce Covid-19 tests on short notice, he said, adding that France “didn’t source tests from Asia in large quantities.”
THE RESULT was considerable: Europe turned into a petri dish and travel from there impacted the world, with its most damaging effect in Africa and Latin America. “The colonial legacy lives in viral movements. I wasn’t surprised that Belgian travel preceded DRC’s first known case,” said Dr. Adia Benton, an anthropologist at Northwestern University, referring to the Democratic Republic of Congo. “The ‘knowing’ is also a colonial symptom. There may have very well been an earlier case, but we know about the traveler. Their sickness registers.” Senegal’s first case, for example, was imported from France, while the Gambia’s was the U.K., Angola’s was from Portgual, and Suriname’s was from the Netherlands. On Facebook and in WhatsApp groups, some commentators have used the term “coronized,” a play off “colonized,” to describe this phenomenon.
In Africa in particular, the spread of Covid-19 hit the political class first because of their frequent travel abroad. A single event in London attended by Prince Charles and Prince Albert II of Monaco, for example, created possible clusters in at least two African countries. Even though Mozambique’s index case was officially confirmed on March 20, some journalists have speculated that it actually could have been Eneas Comich, the mayor of Maputo, the southern African nation’s capital. Comich was likely infected when attending a WaterAid event on March 10 in London, where he sat at the same table as Prince Charles and Prince Albert, both of whom tested positive for Covid-19 shortly thereafter. Prince Charles is pictured coughing into his hand at the event.
Burkina Faso’s water and sanitation minister, Niouga Ambroise Ouédraogo, attended the meeting as well and is suspected of having contracted the virus there too. He is one of seven infected ministers in Burkina Faso’s cabinet, severely hampering the government as it struggles to contain a rapidly growing outbreak there.
The pandemic’s epicenter has now moved to the U.S. and is likely to remain a devastating global problem for months and even years to come. “There’s going to need to be a global accountability for how we manage pandemics,” said Standley. “I don’t think that it’s helpful at this point in time to use the pandemic to advance nationalistic discourses, or to point fingers and assign blame. But I think that there are opportunities to hold our systems and our governance accountable in terms of how they could have responded better.”
Dabis said that in the absence of a coherent strategy from WHO and the United Nations, Europeans had placed faith in their own institutions, but that faith was let down. “We thought maybe the political organizations that have cropped up over the past few years — the G7, the G20, the European Commission — could have brought solutions, but we see clearly they haven’t had a single one,” he said. “Every country does what it wants, when it wants. There is no global vision.”
Gender equality: Most people are biased against women, UN says
A new study shows that almost 90% of people worldwide are biased against women and around half perceive men to make better leaders. And nearly 30% of people think it's justified for a husband to beat his wife.
dw.com
3/5/2020
Women around the world still suffer from widespread gender bias, according to a newly-published report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The study measures how people's social beliefs inhibit gender equality in areas including education, politics and the work force. It contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80% of the world's population.
Pedro Conceicao, director of the Human Development Report Office at UNDP, said that while progress has been made in giving women the same access to basic needs as men in education and health, gender gaps remain in areas "that challenge power relations and are most influential in actually achieving true equality."
The UNDP analysis found that despite decades-long efforts to close the gender divide, around half of the world's population feel that men make better political leaders, while over 40% think men make better business executives and have more right to a job when work availability is limited. Almost 30% of people think it's justified for a husband to beat his wife.
Women hold only 24% of parliamentary seats globally and they make up less than 6% of chief executives in S&P 500 companies, the study showed.
Countries with the highest numbers of people showing any kind of bias against gender equality are Jordan, Qatar, Nigeria, Pakistan and Zimbabwe. The countries with the lowest levels of gender bias are Andorra, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.
The study measures how people's social beliefs inhibit gender equality in areas including education, politics and the work force. It contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80% of the world's population.
Pedro Conceicao, director of the Human Development Report Office at UNDP, said that while progress has been made in giving women the same access to basic needs as men in education and health, gender gaps remain in areas "that challenge power relations and are most influential in actually achieving true equality."
The UNDP analysis found that despite decades-long efforts to close the gender divide, around half of the world's population feel that men make better political leaders, while over 40% think men make better business executives and have more right to a job when work availability is limited. Almost 30% of people think it's justified for a husband to beat his wife.
Women hold only 24% of parliamentary seats globally and they make up less than 6% of chief executives in S&P 500 companies, the study showed.
Countries with the highest numbers of people showing any kind of bias against gender equality are Jordan, Qatar, Nigeria, Pakistan and Zimbabwe. The countries with the lowest levels of gender bias are Andorra, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.
Women Perform 12.5 Billion Hours of Unpaid Labor Every Day
BY Michelle Chen, Truthout
PUBLISHED January 24, 2020
The global economy is polarized on multiple dimensions. Even as the gap widens between the extremely poor and ultra-rich, a chronic economic divide persists between men and women. Millions of people subsist on an income of a few dollars a day, and billions of women work for nothing at all.
Oxfam’s new report on global inequality — which was released to coincide with the gathering of the ultra-wealthy at the World Economic Forum January 21-24 in Davos, Switzerland — lays out devastating but familiar, statistics: The world has 2,153 billionaires who collectively possess more wealth than 4.6 billion people at the bottom of the income scale. More than half the world’s population is estimated to survive on less than $5.50 a day, while the rate of poverty reduction slowed by half since 2013.
The latest analysis highlights how poverty is both gendered and also socially entrenched. According to the report, men collectively own 50 percent more wealth than women do, and at the top of that wealth gap, “the richest 22 men in the world own more wealth than all the women in Africa.”
The gender wealth gap isn’t entirely surprising — sexism predates industrial capitalism, after all. But the systematic economic subjugation of women reflects how patriarchy and poverty are mutually reinforcing. Due to social as well as cultural pressure, women perform vast amounts of unpaid labor — about 12.5 billion hours every day.
Women’s unwaged labor — which occupies up to 14 hours a day in rural and low-income regions — involves domestic duties, primarily the “care work” of looking after children or elders, cooking, cleaning and mending. It could also involve procuring water or gathering firewood, or tending subsistence crops on a family farm — tasks that will become increasingly challenging as climate change and other environmental stresses intensify.
One woman in rural India, who said she worked around the clock and would be beaten by her husband if she slipped up, told Oxfam researchers, “I have no time, not even time to die for they will all curse…. Who will look after them and bring money to the family when I’m gone?”
If women like her were paid the real value of their economic contributions to their families, they would be owed at least $10.8 trillion (more than half of the U.S. annual gross domestic product) — the estimated collective value of women’s unpaid care work worldwide.
“The care economy is very neglected,” said Gawain Kripke, director of policy and research at Oxfam America. “Most of it is unpaid. And what we pay [for] is treated very poorly. And this provides a subsidy to the more formal economy. All this work that gets done, society and the economy wouldn’t function without this work…. Businesses rely on it, families rely on it, society as a whole relies on it. And yet we don’t recognize it, and don’t compensate it, and don’t support it.”
This is not an accidental oversight, but institutionalized oppression. “This is what patriarchy is,” he added. “It ignores and makes invisible women, and exalts and elevates rich men.”
In the United States, the care gap for children and the elderly falls disproportionately on women, whether they are caring for their own, or paid as hired care workers. In 2018, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, about 16.2 million people, the majority of them women, provided unpaid informal care for individuals with dementia, contributing about 18.5 billion hours of feeding, bathing, providing medication and other tasks. If the unpaid care work in the U.S. was provided through government services instead, taxpayers would have paid an estimated $234 billion. Meanwhile, professional home health care aides who care for seniors — aides who are also mostly women — typically earn poverty wages, and about half receive public benefits.
Child care faces a similar crisis: it’s both extremely expensive for families — well over $1,000 per month in many areas — and chronically underpaid for child care providers. Across the country, the Center for American Progress reports that roughly half of families with children under the age of six (about 6.3 million households) face difficulty finding suitable child care, often because of cost barriers or a lack of open slots. Roughly 4 in 10 mothers (and an even higher percentage of Black and Latinx women) are especially vulnerable because they are the primary or sole income-earners for their families. Women who could not find a decent child care program were generally less likely to be employed (fathers’ workforce participation, unsurprisingly, did not change according to child care availability), indicating that many women opt out of work rather than have their earnings eaten up by daycare fees.
Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) Chief Operating Officer Cynthia Hess says that, since women tend to earn lower wages, “it often makes economic sense for the family for the woman to be the one to do that…. And without access to that affordable quality child care, a lot of working parents, particularly mothers, really don’t have a real choice about whether to participate in the paid labor force or not.”
According to Wendy Chun-Hoon, executive director of advocacy group Family Values @ Work, the marginalization of care work can drag down women’s lifetime economic prospects. “Devaluing women means care work is under-valued and unseen. That leads to lower pay and to job loss, which then cements women in jobs that pay less and have less opportunity for advancement, or boots women out of the workforce and labels them as ‘unreliable’ and ‘dependent’,” Chun-Hoon told Truthout via email.
Despite steady growth in women’s workforce participation over the past 50 years, the care gap between working men and women has barely budged. According to the Pew Research Center’s time-survey analysis from 1965 to 2011, “American mothers still spend about twice as much time with their children as fathers” — with women most recently clocking around 13.5 hours a week, compared to men’s 7.3 hours. According to a briefing paper co-authored by Oxfam America and IWPR, the care gap is wider among young people than older ones: Women aged 25 to 34 spend about twice as much time on unpaid household and care work (8 hours to 3.9 hours) than their male peers, compared to a gap of 5.6 hours per week versus 4.1 hours per week between women and men aged 45 to 54. The care gap is also wider between Black, Latinx and Asian men and women than between white ones.
The gender gap in wealth is undergirded by a gender gap in political power. The inequality report points out that fewer than one in four government ministers around the world is a woman, which might explain why the social welfare policies most crucial to women and families are often targeted by austerity measures. “Cutting these services is done as a budget savings,” Kripke said, “but they don’t see that the costs will be borne mainly by women, and many women will have to leave the paid workforce in order to pick up the care burdens.”
Although the intersection of gender and economic inequality is built into most modern social structures today, Oxfam and IWPR researchers note that both gender and economic justice can be tackled in tandem through the structural redistribution of wealth. For the U.S., gender-equality advocates recommend measures like paid family leave and paid sick days to allow working parents to meet their care needs without endangering their jobs. The gender wage gap, which hovers at roughly 19 percent between women’s and men’s weekly earnings, could be narrowed by boosting wages and working conditions and supporting collective bargaining. To help counter gender stereotypes, paid family leave policies should be structured to encourage men to use their leave time to spend more time caring for their kids.
In the U.S., child care has become a central issue for both liberal and conservative lawmakers. Democratic presidential contenders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have advocated for universal early childhood education funded through a wealth tax. Warren has proposed making child care free for households earning less than double the federal poverty line and cap overall costs at 7 percent of income; Sanders has not released a detailed plan, but has called for universal preschool, in line with legislation he previously sponsored. Sanders also commented broadly on the Oxfam report, stating that the global wealth gap had pointed to the need to “develop an international movement that takes on the greed of the billionaire class.”
In response to the Oxfam report, Mary Ignatius, statewide organizer of the California-based advocacy group Parent Voices, stated, “Fully funding a robust and comprehensive child care system that meets the needs of today’s working women will dramatically and immediately close the income inequality crisis in this country and liberate women to take greater control of their lives.”
At the same time, a robust national family care program would engage women both as beneficiaries and workers. Although care jobs are hugely in demand, they remain notoriously low-paying and underregulated. A sustainable care infrastructure — expanding on the model family welfare policies of Scandinavian countries — would guarantee living wage jobs in gender-segregated sectors of the economy — particularly child care and home care jobs that relegate millions of women to the lowest wage tiers of the education and health care systems. An analysis by the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment shows that aligning preschool teachers’ salaries with those of typical elementary and middle school teachers would more than double their pay, from $25,218 to $60,602 annually, which, multiplied by the early childhood education workforce nationwide, would boost their collective earnings by more than $80 billion. Similarly, the home health care workforce, with annual median wages stuck at just $13,000, would be massively boosted by raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, which would in turn raise their income by roughly 50 percent, and generate an economic ripple effect that would average $2,000 per worker.
The Oxfam report estimates that taxing just an additional half of 1 percent of the wealth of the richest people in the U.S. would, over a decade, generate the funds “needed to create 117 million care jobs in education, health and elderly care and other sectors, and to close care deficits.” Those jobs could form the foundation of a comprehensive care-labor infrastructure, providing working parents with universal access to child, elder and disability care, as well as the flexibility to take time off from work to tend to an ailing parent or bond with a newborn, without risking their families’ economic security.
Global inequality, of course, is not just a gender issue. But the current inequities in wealth around the world could not exist if patriarchy were not subordinating half the population to a hierarchy within a hierarchy. And to end inequality, a political transformation that dismantles sexism as a tool of economic oppression is a critical step toward total social emancipation.
Oxfam’s new report on global inequality — which was released to coincide with the gathering of the ultra-wealthy at the World Economic Forum January 21-24 in Davos, Switzerland — lays out devastating but familiar, statistics: The world has 2,153 billionaires who collectively possess more wealth than 4.6 billion people at the bottom of the income scale. More than half the world’s population is estimated to survive on less than $5.50 a day, while the rate of poverty reduction slowed by half since 2013.
The latest analysis highlights how poverty is both gendered and also socially entrenched. According to the report, men collectively own 50 percent more wealth than women do, and at the top of that wealth gap, “the richest 22 men in the world own more wealth than all the women in Africa.”
The gender wealth gap isn’t entirely surprising — sexism predates industrial capitalism, after all. But the systematic economic subjugation of women reflects how patriarchy and poverty are mutually reinforcing. Due to social as well as cultural pressure, women perform vast amounts of unpaid labor — about 12.5 billion hours every day.
Women’s unwaged labor — which occupies up to 14 hours a day in rural and low-income regions — involves domestic duties, primarily the “care work” of looking after children or elders, cooking, cleaning and mending. It could also involve procuring water or gathering firewood, or tending subsistence crops on a family farm — tasks that will become increasingly challenging as climate change and other environmental stresses intensify.
One woman in rural India, who said she worked around the clock and would be beaten by her husband if she slipped up, told Oxfam researchers, “I have no time, not even time to die for they will all curse…. Who will look after them and bring money to the family when I’m gone?”
If women like her were paid the real value of their economic contributions to their families, they would be owed at least $10.8 trillion (more than half of the U.S. annual gross domestic product) — the estimated collective value of women’s unpaid care work worldwide.
“The care economy is very neglected,” said Gawain Kripke, director of policy and research at Oxfam America. “Most of it is unpaid. And what we pay [for] is treated very poorly. And this provides a subsidy to the more formal economy. All this work that gets done, society and the economy wouldn’t function without this work…. Businesses rely on it, families rely on it, society as a whole relies on it. And yet we don’t recognize it, and don’t compensate it, and don’t support it.”
This is not an accidental oversight, but institutionalized oppression. “This is what patriarchy is,” he added. “It ignores and makes invisible women, and exalts and elevates rich men.”
In the United States, the care gap for children and the elderly falls disproportionately on women, whether they are caring for their own, or paid as hired care workers. In 2018, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, about 16.2 million people, the majority of them women, provided unpaid informal care for individuals with dementia, contributing about 18.5 billion hours of feeding, bathing, providing medication and other tasks. If the unpaid care work in the U.S. was provided through government services instead, taxpayers would have paid an estimated $234 billion. Meanwhile, professional home health care aides who care for seniors — aides who are also mostly women — typically earn poverty wages, and about half receive public benefits.
Child care faces a similar crisis: it’s both extremely expensive for families — well over $1,000 per month in many areas — and chronically underpaid for child care providers. Across the country, the Center for American Progress reports that roughly half of families with children under the age of six (about 6.3 million households) face difficulty finding suitable child care, often because of cost barriers or a lack of open slots. Roughly 4 in 10 mothers (and an even higher percentage of Black and Latinx women) are especially vulnerable because they are the primary or sole income-earners for their families. Women who could not find a decent child care program were generally less likely to be employed (fathers’ workforce participation, unsurprisingly, did not change according to child care availability), indicating that many women opt out of work rather than have their earnings eaten up by daycare fees.
Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) Chief Operating Officer Cynthia Hess says that, since women tend to earn lower wages, “it often makes economic sense for the family for the woman to be the one to do that…. And without access to that affordable quality child care, a lot of working parents, particularly mothers, really don’t have a real choice about whether to participate in the paid labor force or not.”
According to Wendy Chun-Hoon, executive director of advocacy group Family Values @ Work, the marginalization of care work can drag down women’s lifetime economic prospects. “Devaluing women means care work is under-valued and unseen. That leads to lower pay and to job loss, which then cements women in jobs that pay less and have less opportunity for advancement, or boots women out of the workforce and labels them as ‘unreliable’ and ‘dependent’,” Chun-Hoon told Truthout via email.
Despite steady growth in women’s workforce participation over the past 50 years, the care gap between working men and women has barely budged. According to the Pew Research Center’s time-survey analysis from 1965 to 2011, “American mothers still spend about twice as much time with their children as fathers” — with women most recently clocking around 13.5 hours a week, compared to men’s 7.3 hours. According to a briefing paper co-authored by Oxfam America and IWPR, the care gap is wider among young people than older ones: Women aged 25 to 34 spend about twice as much time on unpaid household and care work (8 hours to 3.9 hours) than their male peers, compared to a gap of 5.6 hours per week versus 4.1 hours per week between women and men aged 45 to 54. The care gap is also wider between Black, Latinx and Asian men and women than between white ones.
The gender gap in wealth is undergirded by a gender gap in political power. The inequality report points out that fewer than one in four government ministers around the world is a woman, which might explain why the social welfare policies most crucial to women and families are often targeted by austerity measures. “Cutting these services is done as a budget savings,” Kripke said, “but they don’t see that the costs will be borne mainly by women, and many women will have to leave the paid workforce in order to pick up the care burdens.”
Although the intersection of gender and economic inequality is built into most modern social structures today, Oxfam and IWPR researchers note that both gender and economic justice can be tackled in tandem through the structural redistribution of wealth. For the U.S., gender-equality advocates recommend measures like paid family leave and paid sick days to allow working parents to meet their care needs without endangering their jobs. The gender wage gap, which hovers at roughly 19 percent between women’s and men’s weekly earnings, could be narrowed by boosting wages and working conditions and supporting collective bargaining. To help counter gender stereotypes, paid family leave policies should be structured to encourage men to use their leave time to spend more time caring for their kids.
In the U.S., child care has become a central issue for both liberal and conservative lawmakers. Democratic presidential contenders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have advocated for universal early childhood education funded through a wealth tax. Warren has proposed making child care free for households earning less than double the federal poverty line and cap overall costs at 7 percent of income; Sanders has not released a detailed plan, but has called for universal preschool, in line with legislation he previously sponsored. Sanders also commented broadly on the Oxfam report, stating that the global wealth gap had pointed to the need to “develop an international movement that takes on the greed of the billionaire class.”
In response to the Oxfam report, Mary Ignatius, statewide organizer of the California-based advocacy group Parent Voices, stated, “Fully funding a robust and comprehensive child care system that meets the needs of today’s working women will dramatically and immediately close the income inequality crisis in this country and liberate women to take greater control of their lives.”
At the same time, a robust national family care program would engage women both as beneficiaries and workers. Although care jobs are hugely in demand, they remain notoriously low-paying and underregulated. A sustainable care infrastructure — expanding on the model family welfare policies of Scandinavian countries — would guarantee living wage jobs in gender-segregated sectors of the economy — particularly child care and home care jobs that relegate millions of women to the lowest wage tiers of the education and health care systems. An analysis by the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment shows that aligning preschool teachers’ salaries with those of typical elementary and middle school teachers would more than double their pay, from $25,218 to $60,602 annually, which, multiplied by the early childhood education workforce nationwide, would boost their collective earnings by more than $80 billion. Similarly, the home health care workforce, with annual median wages stuck at just $13,000, would be massively boosted by raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, which would in turn raise their income by roughly 50 percent, and generate an economic ripple effect that would average $2,000 per worker.
The Oxfam report estimates that taxing just an additional half of 1 percent of the wealth of the richest people in the U.S. would, over a decade, generate the funds “needed to create 117 million care jobs in education, health and elderly care and other sectors, and to close care deficits.” Those jobs could form the foundation of a comprehensive care-labor infrastructure, providing working parents with universal access to child, elder and disability care, as well as the flexibility to take time off from work to tend to an ailing parent or bond with a newborn, without risking their families’ economic security.
Global inequality, of course, is not just a gender issue. But the current inequities in wealth around the world could not exist if patriarchy were not subordinating half the population to a hierarchy within a hierarchy. And to end inequality, a political transformation that dismantles sexism as a tool of economic oppression is a critical step toward total social emancipation.
review
Here’s What Workers of the Global South Endure to Create Corporate Wealth
BY Eve Ottenberg, Truthout
PUBLISHED January 5, 2020
In recent decades, as U.S. corporations shipped millions of jobs overseas to save money on wages, GM, H&M, Apple and dozens of other companies established elaborate supply chains in Asia, Mexico and Latin America, where workers earn pennies per hour. These chains are geographically expansive networks organized by foreign companies to produce semi-finished goods in different places before final assembly for huge global corporations.
Abuses abound. One typical example: An Indonesian factory that supplied the Japanese multinational behind the clothing brand Uniqlo abruptly closed, leaving workers with unpaid wages and unpaid severance. Intan Suwandi, the author of the recently published book Value Chains, told Truthout that there have been similar cases involving Nike, Adidas, H&M and Walmart in Cambodia and Honduras. A Chinese factory that supplied PUMA abused its workers and paid starvation wages, while workers in India’s home garment sector are as young as 10 years old, working for companies that supply the U.S. and European Union.
Suwandi also cites, in an email, a Chinese factory that produces computer products, such as keyboards and printer cases, for Hewlitt-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM. The factory applied a “long list of draconian disciplinary measures, and fines were used to control every movement and almost every second of the workers’ lives.” She also mentions a Chinese factory that produces parts for Ford, where, among many violations, seriously injured workers were “fired after a year or two.”
And then there’s Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles iPhones for Apple and products for Dell, Nokia, Hewlitt-Packard and Sony. It employs roughly 400,000 people at its Shenzhen factory, paying 83 cents an hour, under conditions so deplorable that in one six-month period in 2010, 13 workers jumped from the factory building, at least 10 to their deaths, while later, 150 threatened to kill themselves thus. Meanwhile, in 2012, a fire in a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, that supplied Walmart and Sears, killed 112 workers.
Value Chains argues that economic imperialism is alive and well and being practiced in the Global South by corporations from the North. Although in recent years some leftists have argued that with the hollowing out of the Global North’s manufacturing base, economic imperialism ended, Suwandi disputes this. Her book mentions the GM commodity chain, which, as former GM director of sustainability David Tulauskas told Suwandi, includes “20,000 suppliers that provide us parts that go onto our vehicles. We buy from them approximately 200,000 individual items, spending about $100 billion. We operate in 30 countries. We sell those products in 125 countries.” Those suppliers, Suwandi explains, are scattered in Brazil, China and Mexico. Wages are kept low through direct investments and “arm’s lengths contracts.”
Value Chains devotes many pages to these contracts, which are a form of subcontracting without equity involvement. In these contracts, multinationals outsource production to suppliers mostly in the global South through contract relationships. As a result, the complex network of labor-value chains conceals how profits are extracted from workers by making it almost impossible to trace profits back to those workers. This is largely due to the arm’s length contracts.
Suwandi cites John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century in order to demonstrate how much wealth transnational western corporations extract from workers in the Global South: “Apple subcontracts the production of the component parts of its iPhones to a number of countries, with Foxconn subcontracting the final assembly in China. Due … to low-end wages … Apple’s gross profit margin on its iPhone 4 in 2010 was found to be 59 percent of the final sales price.” For each iPhone 4, retailing at $549, Smith writes, only $10 went to labor costs in China.
Cheap labor in the Global South means that multinational capital only has to pay a few cents an hour for work which creates much more value than that, Suwandi explains. Corporations disguise this value capture by attributing it to marketing, distribution and design activities in the Global North. Of course, it helps that that’s where the products are sold, with high markups on production cost. This obfuscates GDP. Take Apple’s iPhones:
Only 1.8 percent goes to labor costs in China, only that amount is recorded in China’s GDP, while a large percentage is recorded in the GDP of the country where Apple is headquartered — the United States — even when none of the production processes happened here…. The country where the iPhone was produced receives in its GDP only a small proportion of the final sales price. Meanwhile the larger part shows up in the GDP of the country where it is consumed…. So that’s why the profits that multinationals get are very difficult to trace back to the workers in the Global South.
Suwandi emails that global labor value chains (or “global commodity chains,” “global value chains,” or “global supply chains”) link people, tools and activities to deliver goods and services to the market. Her book argues that multinational corporations headquartered in the Global North control these chains completely, in every detail, even though they don’t own them. She explains that each chain consists of various nodes (each node signifies a specific production process) with different businesses involved in these different production processes. Take a pair of Nike sneakers: Several nodes are involved where semi-finished parts of the final product are made in various factories located in different countries. The raw materials are also acquired from different countries. If final assembly occurs in a factory in Vietnam, the sneakers will be labeled “made in Vietnam.”
The top three countries participating in labor value chains are China, India and Indonesia, where, according to Value Chains, wages are low and productivity is high. These labor value chains “are imperialistic in their characteristics,” because “capital accumulation processes are inseparable from the unequal relations among nation states.” The global labor force is concentrated in the South: With 541 million industrial workers there in 2010, compared to 145 million in the North, the idea that the commodity chain system is imperialist in nature makes sense. Indeed, Value Chains argues that globalized production is a new form of economic imperialism that transfers wealth from South to North. This does not preclude, however, the creation of local billionaires in China and India, who reap immense profits from their own transnational corporations. And where does all that profit go? “Huge quantities of this loot,” Value Chains reports, “captured from peripheral economies in the global South end up in the ‘treasure islands’ of the Caribbean, where trillions of dollars of money capital are now deposited.”
All this pelf, of course, comes directly out of workers’ hides. The cheaper the wages of the workers in the Global South, the greater the gross profit margins. Moreover, Suwandi explains, “Multinationals exercise a high degree of control within these labor-value chains, even when they only engage in contractual relationships with their suppliers.”
Value Chains examines two Indonesian firms, pseudonymously labeled Java Film and Star Inc., which often have the same customers for the plastic wrappers they produce. These firms do not use sweatshops, partly because they do not identify as “labor intensive.” But that’s one of Suwandi’s points: Exploitation does not necessarily involve blatantly abusive practices. She observes that multinationals control their suppliers’ production to the smallest detail, determining their suppliers’ profit margins, by increasing exploitation of the suppliers’ workers, usually through increased productivity, but also sometimes by depriving workers of their rights, or through violence, abuse and law-breaking.
Making production more economical and increasing productivity involve two processes, according to Value Chains – “systemic rationalization and flexible production.” Suwandi explains that capital wants production to be flexible enough to accommodate market fluctuations, “without paying the price … this burden is in the end placed upon workers through enhancing exploitation.” Engaging in arm’s length contracts itself exemplifies both processes. Systemic rationalization, according to Value Chains, refers “to the technological and organizational changes by corporations that began in the 1970s … [with] its focus on the rise of decentralized production throughout the globe.” (The ‘70s was the decade when neoliberalism and the union busting it entailed really got going. It’s when corporations “modernized.”) Flexible production — according to Lean and Mean by Bennett Harrison, which Value Chains quotes — involves “lean production, downsizing, outsourcing and the growing importance of spatially extensive production networks governed by powerful core firms and their strategic allies.”
Abuses abound. One typical example: An Indonesian factory that supplied the Japanese multinational behind the clothing brand Uniqlo abruptly closed, leaving workers with unpaid wages and unpaid severance. Intan Suwandi, the author of the recently published book Value Chains, told Truthout that there have been similar cases involving Nike, Adidas, H&M and Walmart in Cambodia and Honduras. A Chinese factory that supplied PUMA abused its workers and paid starvation wages, while workers in India’s home garment sector are as young as 10 years old, working for companies that supply the U.S. and European Union.
Suwandi also cites, in an email, a Chinese factory that produces computer products, such as keyboards and printer cases, for Hewlitt-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM. The factory applied a “long list of draconian disciplinary measures, and fines were used to control every movement and almost every second of the workers’ lives.” She also mentions a Chinese factory that produces parts for Ford, where, among many violations, seriously injured workers were “fired after a year or two.”
And then there’s Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles iPhones for Apple and products for Dell, Nokia, Hewlitt-Packard and Sony. It employs roughly 400,000 people at its Shenzhen factory, paying 83 cents an hour, under conditions so deplorable that in one six-month period in 2010, 13 workers jumped from the factory building, at least 10 to their deaths, while later, 150 threatened to kill themselves thus. Meanwhile, in 2012, a fire in a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, that supplied Walmart and Sears, killed 112 workers.
Value Chains argues that economic imperialism is alive and well and being practiced in the Global South by corporations from the North. Although in recent years some leftists have argued that with the hollowing out of the Global North’s manufacturing base, economic imperialism ended, Suwandi disputes this. Her book mentions the GM commodity chain, which, as former GM director of sustainability David Tulauskas told Suwandi, includes “20,000 suppliers that provide us parts that go onto our vehicles. We buy from them approximately 200,000 individual items, spending about $100 billion. We operate in 30 countries. We sell those products in 125 countries.” Those suppliers, Suwandi explains, are scattered in Brazil, China and Mexico. Wages are kept low through direct investments and “arm’s lengths contracts.”
Value Chains devotes many pages to these contracts, which are a form of subcontracting without equity involvement. In these contracts, multinationals outsource production to suppliers mostly in the global South through contract relationships. As a result, the complex network of labor-value chains conceals how profits are extracted from workers by making it almost impossible to trace profits back to those workers. This is largely due to the arm’s length contracts.
Suwandi cites John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century in order to demonstrate how much wealth transnational western corporations extract from workers in the Global South: “Apple subcontracts the production of the component parts of its iPhones to a number of countries, with Foxconn subcontracting the final assembly in China. Due … to low-end wages … Apple’s gross profit margin on its iPhone 4 in 2010 was found to be 59 percent of the final sales price.” For each iPhone 4, retailing at $549, Smith writes, only $10 went to labor costs in China.
Cheap labor in the Global South means that multinational capital only has to pay a few cents an hour for work which creates much more value than that, Suwandi explains. Corporations disguise this value capture by attributing it to marketing, distribution and design activities in the Global North. Of course, it helps that that’s where the products are sold, with high markups on production cost. This obfuscates GDP. Take Apple’s iPhones:
Only 1.8 percent goes to labor costs in China, only that amount is recorded in China’s GDP, while a large percentage is recorded in the GDP of the country where Apple is headquartered — the United States — even when none of the production processes happened here…. The country where the iPhone was produced receives in its GDP only a small proportion of the final sales price. Meanwhile the larger part shows up in the GDP of the country where it is consumed…. So that’s why the profits that multinationals get are very difficult to trace back to the workers in the Global South.
Suwandi emails that global labor value chains (or “global commodity chains,” “global value chains,” or “global supply chains”) link people, tools and activities to deliver goods and services to the market. Her book argues that multinational corporations headquartered in the Global North control these chains completely, in every detail, even though they don’t own them. She explains that each chain consists of various nodes (each node signifies a specific production process) with different businesses involved in these different production processes. Take a pair of Nike sneakers: Several nodes are involved where semi-finished parts of the final product are made in various factories located in different countries. The raw materials are also acquired from different countries. If final assembly occurs in a factory in Vietnam, the sneakers will be labeled “made in Vietnam.”
The top three countries participating in labor value chains are China, India and Indonesia, where, according to Value Chains, wages are low and productivity is high. These labor value chains “are imperialistic in their characteristics,” because “capital accumulation processes are inseparable from the unequal relations among nation states.” The global labor force is concentrated in the South: With 541 million industrial workers there in 2010, compared to 145 million in the North, the idea that the commodity chain system is imperialist in nature makes sense. Indeed, Value Chains argues that globalized production is a new form of economic imperialism that transfers wealth from South to North. This does not preclude, however, the creation of local billionaires in China and India, who reap immense profits from their own transnational corporations. And where does all that profit go? “Huge quantities of this loot,” Value Chains reports, “captured from peripheral economies in the global South end up in the ‘treasure islands’ of the Caribbean, where trillions of dollars of money capital are now deposited.”
All this pelf, of course, comes directly out of workers’ hides. The cheaper the wages of the workers in the Global South, the greater the gross profit margins. Moreover, Suwandi explains, “Multinationals exercise a high degree of control within these labor-value chains, even when they only engage in contractual relationships with their suppliers.”
Value Chains examines two Indonesian firms, pseudonymously labeled Java Film and Star Inc., which often have the same customers for the plastic wrappers they produce. These firms do not use sweatshops, partly because they do not identify as “labor intensive.” But that’s one of Suwandi’s points: Exploitation does not necessarily involve blatantly abusive practices. She observes that multinationals control their suppliers’ production to the smallest detail, determining their suppliers’ profit margins, by increasing exploitation of the suppliers’ workers, usually through increased productivity, but also sometimes by depriving workers of their rights, or through violence, abuse and law-breaking.
Making production more economical and increasing productivity involve two processes, according to Value Chains – “systemic rationalization and flexible production.” Suwandi explains that capital wants production to be flexible enough to accommodate market fluctuations, “without paying the price … this burden is in the end placed upon workers through enhancing exploitation.” Engaging in arm’s length contracts itself exemplifies both processes. Systemic rationalization, according to Value Chains, refers “to the technological and organizational changes by corporations that began in the 1970s … [with] its focus on the rise of decentralized production throughout the globe.” (The ‘70s was the decade when neoliberalism and the union busting it entailed really got going. It’s when corporations “modernized.”) Flexible production — according to Lean and Mean by Bennett Harrison, which Value Chains quotes — involves “lean production, downsizing, outsourcing and the growing importance of spatially extensive production networks governed by powerful core firms and their strategic allies.”
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