20 March 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
FOCUS: Medicare for All Just Got a Massive Boost
Ryan Grim, The Intercept
Excerpt: "This week New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the chair of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, gave the legislative push for single-payer health care a major boost by announcing that he would be co-sponsoring the proposed Medicare for All bill and holding a hearing on it sometime in the current term."
READ MORE
21 March 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
FOCUS: Drug Companies Defend Vaccine Monopolies in Face of Global Outcry
ALSO SEE: Drugmakers Promise Investors They'll
Soon Hike COVID-19 Vaccine Prices
ALSO SEE: Rich Countries Signed Away
a Chance to Vaccinate the World
Christopher Rowland, Emily Rauhala and Miriam Berger, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Billions of people are left with an uncertain wait, with most of Africa and parts of South America and Asia not expected to achieve widespread vaccination coverage until 2023, according to some estimates."
As immunization gap widens between rich and poor countries, the industry faces a battle over patents and know-how
bdul Muktadir, the chief executive of Bangladeshi pharmaceutical maker Incepta, has emailed executives of Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax offering his company’s help. He said he has enough capacity to fill vials for 600 million to 800 million doses of coronavirus vaccine a year to distribute throughout Asia.
He never heard back from any of them. The lack of interest has left Muktadir worried about prolonged coronavirus exposure for millions of citizens of Bangladesh and other low-income nations throughout Asia and Africa who are at the back of the global queue for shots.
“Now is the time to use every single opportunity in every single corner of the world,” Muktadir, whose company is being promoted by the Bangladesh government for emergency vaccine production, said in a Zoom interview. “These companies should make deals with as many countries as possible.”
The drug companies that developed and won authorization for coronavirus vaccines in record time have agreed to sell most of the first doses coming off production lines to the United States, European countries and a few other wealthy nations.
The slow pace of ramping up production and shortages of raw materials have exacerbated the disadvantages for countries unable to afford the large outlays to reserve early supplies. Billions of people are left with an uncertain wait, with most of Africa and parts of South America and Asia not expected to achieve widespread vaccination coverage until 2023, according to some estimates.
But drug companies have rebuffed entreaties to face the emergency by sharing their proprietary technology more freely with companies in developing nations. They cite the rapid development of new vaccines as evidence that the drug industry’s traditional business model, based on exclusive patents and know-how, is working. The companies are lobbying the Biden administration and other members of the World Trade Organization against any erosion of their monopolies on individual coronavirus vaccines that are worth billions of dollars in annual sales.
The debate about how to immunize more people overseas is picking up greater steam in the United States now that President Biden has promised that most Americans will be vaccinated by July. Some Democrats in Congress, fresh off approving Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic rescue package, are determined to make sure Americans don’t forget about the rest of the world as they potentially celebrate Independence Day with a semblance of normalcy.
“We’re spending lots of money to save the hospitality industry, the airlines, travel. It will all come to naught if the rest of the world is not protected,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who questioned drug executives at a recent House hearing over their refusal to share vaccine patents openly.
The fights over vaccine supply are not just over a moral duty of Western nations to prevent deaths and illness overseas. Lack of supply and lopsided distribution threaten to leave entire continents open as breeding grounds for coronavirus mutations. Those variants, if they prove resistant to vaccines, could spread anywhere in the world, including in Western countries that have been vaccinated first.
“It doesn’t make any sense for rich countries to think they can vaccinate their own and let the rest of the world live off dribs and drabs,” said Brook Baker, a Northeastern University law professor.
Baker advised the World Health Organization last year in creating a technology-sharing pool to help developing countries make coronavirus vaccines.
But no coronavirus vaccine manufacturer has agreed to participate in the program, called the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, the WHO said. Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer, last year called the concept “nonsense.”
“Unfortunately, only limited, exclusive and often non-transparent voluntary licensing is the preferred approach of some companies, and this is proven to be insufficient to address the needs of the current COVID-19 pandemic,” the WHO said in response to questions from The Washington Post. “The entire population and the global economy are in crisis because of that approach and vaccines nationalism.”
Last month, United Nations chief António Guterres warned that 10 countries had administered 75 percent of all doses by then and 130 countries had not received a single dose. The WHO-linked vaccine purchasing push, known as Covax, has since delivered some doses to low- and middle- income countries — but dozens of countries remain without a single dose, or with a small quantity that falls woefully short of checking the pandemic.
Of the potential 10 billion to 14 billion vaccine doses the industry hopes to produce in 2021 — a range that relies on optimistic projections — more than two-thirds have been claimed by wealthy and middle-income countries, according to a joint report released by the drug industry and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations earlier this month.
The remaining doses would cover as little as 28 percent of the populations of 92 of the world’s most impoverished nations, according to the report.
The dire international situation contrasts sharply with the optimism spreading in the United States.
The United States has committed nearly $20 billion in subsidies for vaccine development and advance purchase agreements of hundreds of millions of doses, mostly spread across six private companies. The upfront investment was intended to reduce the private-sector financial risk of rapidly developing the vaccines. It worked. Emergency FDA authorization of three vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson — arrived in record time.
Two more are in the near-term pipeline for Food and Drug Administration review: shots made by AstraZeneca and Novavax. A sixth vaccine candidate supported with U.S. funds, from Sanofi, has been delayed for further clinical trials after it did not trigger a sufficient immune response in elderly people.
These exclusive franchises are on track to generate billions of dollars in revenue for the companies. The Moderna vaccine, which was co-developed with the United States government and supported with $483 million in taxpayer backing, is expected to bring in $18.5 billion for the company this year, Moderna said in February.
Pfizer, which partnered with Germany’s BioNTech, a company that received German subsidies, has predicted it will get $15 billion from sales of its vaccine, an estimate that is considered conservative. Pfizer did not accept U.S. government funding.
Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are based on novel messenger RNA technology that holds potential for other vaccines and drugs against an array of diseases. That makes the technology especially valuable.
Drug companies are lobbying the Biden administration to block a push at the WTO by India, South Africa and about 80 other countries for a temporary waiver on patent protections for the new vaccines. The pharmaceutical industry argues that innovation as well as vaccine quality and safety depend on maintaining exclusive intellectual property rights.
“Eliminating those protections would undermine the global response to the pandemic,” industry executives and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, their powerful lobbying group, warned President Biden in a letter this month. Biden has sided with the drug companies so far. The United States on March 10 joined Britain, the E.U. and Switzerland in blocking the push for waivers.
The United States, which initially declined to join Covax under President Donald Trump, last month pledged $4 billion to help pay for vaccine purchases. But there is just not enough supply in the pipeline for Covax to satisfy demand in developing countries, say experts on global health.
“The starting point is that we need to make more vaccine,” said Mara Pillinger, an associate in global health policy and governance at Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “Any conversation about allocating the limited supply we have now will never get us where we need to be.”
The companies say they are working furiously to produce more vaccine doses, using their own factories and licensing agreements with contract manufacturers with the highest degree of expertise and the most capacity, most of them in North America, Europe and India.
Step-by-step manufacturing instructions are just as important as intellectual property rights, because vaccines require multiple complex steps to produce. It takes highly specialized equipment and workers trained in biopharmaceutical manufacturing.
“WHO criticism of industry is showing a lack of understanding for the complexity of vaccine manufacturing and global supply chain and a disrespect for the daunting challenge of literally trebling global vaccine capacity for one single disease almost overnight,” Thomas Cueni, director general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, said in an email.
“COVID-19 vaccine makers have been making agreements with other vaccine makers, wherever they are in the world,” he said. “Speed is of the essence; and for these relationships to be established quickly, you need trust, as well as a total shared commitment to the quality and safety of COVID-19 vaccines produced.”
Most of the companies have announced plans to sell vaccine to Covax or directly to poorer nations.
AstraZeneca has been the most aggressive about creating technology transfer deals and has priced its vaccine the lowest, for as little as $2.15 per dose in Europe. But European countries have created a crisis atmosphere around the vaccine by suspending doses after blood clots appeared in a tiny number of individuals who received the shots.
Biden earlier this month announced an initiative to produce 1 billion doses of Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine in India, at the company’s manufacturing partner there, Biological E, by the end of 2022. Those doses would be targeted to the developing world and could help boost total production as high as 3 billion in 2022, a company executive told Reuters. The company’s vaccine is produced by a network of nine contractor companies, most in North America and Europe. It said in a statement that “we continue to seek out new partnerships.”
Pfizer, which says it plans to produce 2 billion doses of vaccine in 2021, has begun selling its vaccine directly to countries. The company said 36 percent of its production will be reserved for middle- and low-income countries, with nonprofit pricing baked in for the poorest nations.
“We are firmly committed to equitable and affordable access of coronavirus vaccines for people around the world,” Pfizer spokeswoman Amy Rose said in an email.
Moderna has said it will make nearly 1 billion doses in 2021. It has only a few commitments outside of the United States and Europe. It has been criticized for not yet agreeing to supply doses to Covax.
Moderna last year said it did not intend to enforce its patents against any companies making coronavirus vaccines. The announcement generated positive headlines. But as a practical matter, it is unlikely to have an impact on the supply of vaccine in the developing world.
In a Zoom call on Feb. 3, John Lepore, Moderna’s senior vice president for government engagement, told vaccine advocates the company is reluctant to share details about how to make its vaccine, according to advocates who participated in the call and were interviewed by The Washington Post. Lepore said Moderna sees its mRNA vaccine delivery system as a proprietary platform for other drugs and vaccines in the future, the participants said.
“He saw this as fundamental to them maintaining proprietary technology,” said one of the people on the call, James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit advocacy group that is critical of many monopolistic practices in the drug industry. “Can they really keep the genie in the bottle that long?”
Moderna did not comment on the conversation but referred to the October patent pledge. “Our patent pledge stated that, while the pandemic persists, Moderna will not use its patents to block others from making a coronavirus vaccine intended to combat the pandemic. There was no mention of a commitment to transfer our know-how beyond our chosen partners,” Moderna spokesman Ray Jordan said in an email.
Pakistan has received a small trickle of vaccine doses from China and none from Western drug companies, even though it is the world’s fifth-largest country, with about 220 million people.
Wajiha Javed, head of public health and research at Pakistani drug company Getz Pharma, sees a prolonged crisis on the horizon under the current vaccination plan.
She said she has sent proposals to multiple coronavirus vaccine manufacturers to accelerate vaccine supply to Pakistanis and other customers in the developing world. Getz also has been met with silence, she said in an interview.
“We say we are ready to do tech transfer, import licensing, fill-finish,” she said. “We offer everything. We are desperate. Nobody even bothers to answer back.”
Experts on global health and pandemics are looking for ways to break through the logjam and create more supply.
“Basically, you need a global version of Operation Warp Speed,” said Thomas J. Bollyky, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of its Global Health Program, referring to the Trump administration’s effort to develop vaccines in the United States. “Operation Warp Speed did not just spend money. It coordinated, it aligned all the inputs involved, it played a general-contractor role.”
Bollyky ventured that the WHO may have lacked the money or clout to take on big pharma. He envisioned a diplomatic push, perhaps led by the Group of 20.
The high cost of HIV medications, protected by drug industry patents, prevented the treatments from reaching Africa in the late 1990s and created enormous pressure for distribution of low-cost pills. In 2001, the World Trade Organization carved out an exemption to international patent protections for public health emergencies. For vaccines, the industry has said it has scrambled to build new manufacturing capacity fast enough.
Some argue that drug companies have already proved they can transfer the new vaccine production to contract manufacturers and licensees in a matter of months, so there is no reason they can’t continue to expand to a wider roster of companies.
“This idea that it would take too long to stand up is a dodge,” said Pillinger, at Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute. “They are sharing the IP where they see that it is in their financial interest to do so to make the effort worthwhile.”
Muktadir, the pharmaceutical chief executive in Bangladesh, already makes and sells a number of vaccines and other drugs throughout the developing world. Even after his appeal to help in the global pandemic response was reported by the Associated Press, he said he has heard nothing from the vaccine companies.
Bangladesh qualifies as a “least developed country” under WTO rules, which gives it an automatic intellectual property waiver until 2033. But Muktadir said he is not interested in attempting to break any of the vaccine patents. He wants to work with the industry for tech transfer, not against it.
“Incepta is a very, very large, capable, high-quality manufacturing place,” he said, ”and we are left out because we are in Bangladesh.”
21 March 21
The Only Way We Ever Get Into Financial Trouble
Super Low Donor Response. That’s it, that’s only thing that can bring RSN down. Anything even approaching a reasonable degree of responsiveness from our donors and RSN does fine.
So far for today 9,503 readers have visited RSN 8 have donated. That has to cause a crisis. And it is.
In earnest.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
21 March 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Charles Pierce | A Federal Judge Went Full Hannity. Never Go Full Hannity.
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes:
Apparently, everyone but Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page is in the tank for Democrats, so the whole press freedom thing is overrated.
hose of us who have followed the underground conservative campaign against the Clintons—which may never end, by the way—are familiar with Laurence Silberman, a judge on the federal appeals court in Washington. Back in the day, before David Brock came to Jesus, Silberman was one of his mentors among the “elves,” the cabal of right-wing lawyers dedicated to destroying the Clinton presidency. (And hello to you, too, George Conway.) In 2004, writing in Salon, Michelle Goldberg gave us the rundown on him.
Silberman's sojourn in the world of political scandal began during the run-up to the 1980 presidential election when, as a member of Ronald Reagan's campaign staff, he, along with Robert C. McFarlane, a former staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Richard V. Allen, Reagan's chief foreign policy representative, met with a man claiming to be an Iranian government emissary. The Iranian offered to delay the release of the 52 American hostages being held in Tehran until after the election — thus contributing to Carter's defeat — in exchange for arms. A controversy continues to rage over whether the Reagan team made a bargain with the Iranians, as alleged by Gary Sick, a former National Security Council aide in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations who now teaches at Columbia University. Yet no one denies that the meeting Silberman was at took place, and although Silberman has said the Iranian's offer was immediately rejected, none of the three Reagan operatives ever told the Carter administration what had happened. McFarlane, Allen and Silberman have all since insisted that they don't know the name of the Iranian man they met with.
The man has been a dedicated…er…activist for decades. And, on Friday, in a dissent in the case of Tah and McClain v. Global Witness, Silberman simply went full Hannity. You never go full Hannity, people. The case was a run-of-the-mill defamation suit brought by a couple of Liberian citizens against a human-rights group called Global Witness. Employing the standards set in the 1964 landmark Sullivan v. New York Times decision of the Supreme Court, by a 2-1 vote, the Appeals Court determined that Global Witness had not acted with “actual malice” when it accused the two Liberian officials of corruption. Silberman was the lone vote against Global Witness, and his dissenting opinion was a true banana farm.
First of all, Silberman wants Sullivan overturned—by any standard, a radical position in the area of press freedom.
Nevertheless, I recognize how difficult it will be to persuade the Supreme Court to overrule such a “landmark” decision. After all, doing so would incur the wrath of press and media. See Martin Tolchin, Press is Condemned by a Federal Judge for Court Coverage, New York Times A13 (June 15, 1992) (discussing the “Greenhouse effect”). But new considerations have arisen over the last 50 years that make the New York Times decision (which I believe I have faithfully applied in my dissent) a threat to American Democracy. It must go…I recognized, however, that convincing the Court to overrule these precedents would be an uphill battle. As I wrote, the Court has committed itself to a constitutional Brezhnev doctrine.
Oh, good. Nice analogy. Respect for precedent is the same thing as keeping Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia. Gotcha. But the real gold in Silberman’s defense is to be found in why he thinks Sullivan must go. Gaze in awe.
Although the bias against the Republican Party—not just controversial individuals—is rather shocking today, this is not new; it is a long-term, secular trend going back at least to the ’70s…Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction. The orientation of these three papers is followed by The Associated Press and most large papers across the country (such as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe). Nearly all television—network and cable—is a Democratic Party trumpet. Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along.
As has become apparent, Silicon Valley also has an enormous influence over the distribution of news. And it similarly filters news delivery in ways favorable to the Democratic Party. See Kaitlyn Tiffany, Twitter Goofed It, The Atlantic (2020) (“Within a few hours, Facebook announced that it would limit [a New York Post] story’s spread on its platform while its third-party fact-checkers somehow investigated the information.
As Learned Hand once put it, holy crap, this is nuts. In a footnote, Silberman moans about Candy Crowley’s moderation of one of the presidential debates in 2012. But he’s not done. He goes on to shill for right-wing outlets.
To be sure, there are a few notable exceptions to Democratic Party ideological control: Fox News, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. It should be sobering for those concerned about news bias that these institutions are controlled by a single man and his son. Will a lone holdout remain in what is otherwise a frighteningly orthodox media culture? After all, there are serious efforts to muzzle Fox News. And although upstart (mainly online) conservative networks have emerged in recent years, their visibility has been decidedly curtailed by Social Media, either by direct bans or content-based censorship.
Because they are run by crazy people whose “news coverage” might as well be written by semi-literate Martians. Silberman is 85. He’s done enough damage in his life. Sullivan shouldn’t go. He should leave the bench.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “It’s Your Voodoo Working” (Samantha Fish): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1929, are some women playing basketball on ice. Now that’s some madness. History is so cool.
Annnnnnnnd, scene. From the Colorado Times Recorder:
So anyone who tries to tell you that this is a fringe newspaper/media don’t listen to them. I have very good sources to say this is really good information. Is it a hundred percent? I don’t know. But it’s really good information. And we all know that there was information that was declassified just a few days before President Trump left office. And I know someone who is involved in declassifying that. And this person is getting very tired of waiting on the DOJ to do something about it. And we will be hearing about it very, very soon. And this is my opinion with that information that I have, I believe we will see resignations begin to take place. And I think we can take back the majority in the House and the Senate before 2022 when all of this is ended.
This person is an elected member of Congress.
That’s it. That’s all I have.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, New Scientist? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
The bones of the ankylosaurid show that it had heavily built forelimbs and forefeet suited for digging.The fusion of several vertebrae and ribs may have helped keep the dinosaur’s trunk rigid, stabilising the body while it dug using its forelimbs. “These armoured dinosaurs, especially the Asian species, lived in arid to semiarid environments. They may have been able to dig out roots for food, and dig wells to reach subsurface water as modern African elephants do today,” says Lee. Digging dinosaurs are relatively rare, although some small dinosaurs are known to have dug burrows.
I dispute the so-called “experts.” I dig dinosaurs and I always have, because they lived then to make us happy now.
I’ll be back on Monday as an actual Infrastructure Week may break out in Congress. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, wear the damn mask, and take the damn shots.
Protesters clashing with members of the Chicago Police Department in August. (photo: Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/AP)
In City After City, Police Completely Mishandled Black Lives Matter Protests
Kim Barker, Mike Baker and Ali Watkins, The New York Times
Excerpt:
Inquiries into law enforcement’s handling of the George Floyd protests last summer found insufficient training and militarized responses — a widespread failure in policing nationwide.
or many long weeks last summer, protesters in American cities faced off against their own police forces in what proved to be, for major law enforcement agencies across the country, a startling display of violence and disarray.
In Philadelphia, police sprayed tear gas on a crowd of mainly peaceful protesters trapped on an interstate who had nowhere to go and no way to breathe. In Chicago, officers were given arrest kits so old that the plastic handcuffs were decayed or broken. Los Angeles officers were issued highly technical foam-projectile launchers for crowd control, but many of them had only two hours of training; one of the projectiles bloodied the eye of a homeless man in a wheelchair. Nationally, at least eight people were blinded after being hit with police projectiles.
Now, months after the demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in May, the full scope of the country’s policing response is becoming clearer. More than a dozen after-action evaluations have been completed, looking at how police departments responded to the demonstrations — some of them chaotic and violent, most peaceful — that broke out in hundreds of cities between late May and the end of August.
Joyce Barnes. (photo: Joyce Barnes/he Cut)
Working Two Jobs, and Barely Surviving: The Abject Inhumanity of America's Minimum Wage
Bridget Read, The Cut
Read writes:
oyce Barnes has been a home-care worker in Virginia for 30 years, and she loves what she does; she left a full-time job in a hospital because she preferred working with patients one-on-one. “In home health care, I can be people’s eyes and ears for their family,” she says. “I can tell you about your mom, your parents, the things that you don’t even know because you’re not around as much as I am.”
She is also exhausted. Barnes works part time for two home-care agencies, where she makes $8.25 an hour with one employer and $9.98 an hour with the second. She cannot afford her employer’s health insurance. She does not receive paid sick days or vacation benefits. In the long hours of her work days, Barnes is responsible for nearly every aspect of her clients’ well-being: feeding them, bathing them, administering medications, taking them to doctor’s appointments, and shopping for necessities. She works with severely disabled, elderly clients, including a double amputee whom she helped coach through physical therapy. Even with long, draining hours, making rent and paying bills is always a struggle. “I’ll go to the grocery store and see people with baskets full of food and think, Man, I wish I could buy food like that,” she says. Her grocery budget is $80 a month; when she applied for food stamps, she was told she makes too much to qualify.
Barnes has thought about leaving the industry many times — most recently in 2016, when her teenage grandson came home from his first job, a janitorial position, and showed her his paycheck. Barnes recalls, “He said, ‘Nanny, look, I make $10.50 an hour!’ I said, ‘Baby, he gave you all that?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, Nanny, don’t you get that much?’ I just smiled. I didn’t want my grandson to know how low I get paid.”
Instead of quitting that day, Barnes joined a union. A representative from the SEIU, the largest health-care union in the country, happened to come over a few hours after that conversation with her grandson to try and convince Barnes to become a member of her local. “I was trying to get rid of her,” Barnes says. “She said, ‘You have a voice.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to give you a chance.’ It was the best day of my life.”
Barnes was one of hundreds of domestic, home-care, and fast-food workers in 15 cities who took action last week with the Fight for $15 and a Union campaign in what feels like a do-or-die moment for the movement. Their demands are simple: They want to be paid enough to actually survive on what they make. President Joe Biden has been a vocal supporter of raising the federal minimum wage to $15 since his very first campaign speech in Pittsburgh. He helped carry states in the general election with support from union and Fight for 15 volunteers in Nevada, Arizona, and elsewhere. Organizers and advocates were thrilled when the measure was included in his administration’s $1.2 trillion relief plan unveiled in January. They were finally getting a return on their investment.
Now, as the relief package actually makes its way through Congress, the outlook is less sunny. Democrats are attempting to pass stimulus legislation through a process called budget reconciliation, which requires a slim majority in the Senate; it is unclear whether the $15 minimum wage would have enough support among Democratic senators to make it into the package. Senator Joe Manchin has said he would support an $11 minimum wage — just $1 more than a plan recently released by Republicans Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton. And reports circulated on February 18, just two days after Barnes and other Fight for 15–ers demonstrated on the state capitol steps in Richmond, that Biden’s own support is softening; he reportedly told a number of governors in a meeting that the $15 amount is “unlikely” to make it through. Even before it can be voted on, the $15 minimum wage faces a major procedural hurdle: getting past the Senate parliamentarian, who will determine whether it can even be included in budget reconciliation at all.
For minimum-wage workers, the debate is personal and agonizing. It is crushing to not just perform work that has been deemed essential by the government and struggle with essentials themselves — buying food, paying for shelter — but also to take the risk of speaking out and be told “Not yet.” Their demand for higher pay became desperate during the pandemic, when they were faced with the difficult choice of staying home and losing money or continuing to work at the risk of their lives. Home-care workers were especially vulnerable, even as states relied on them as hospitals strained to treat millions of COVID patients and nursing homes were thrown into crisis. Barnes says that when the pandemic hit, she received no instruction from her employer, “not even a pamphlet,” for how to continue her work safely. She bought her own gloves and hand sanitizer.
Barnes is anemic and says she is “doing the double mask and everything else” at work, “but it’s really scary. I’m afraid.” She’s unable to take days off for illness because she can’t afford to. The danger has persisted long before coronavirus. Barnes says a friend of hers once continued working through feeling unwell and died on the job. Barnes wasn’t even able to take time off to grieve her parents when they passed away in 2018.
“Those guys that make the decisions don’t know what home care is all about. They don’t know the work that we do,” Barnes said on a recent night at the end of her shift, sounding tired. She had little time to herself before getting on another Fight for 15 call. To her, the politicians haggling over this life-changing policy have no idea what it feels like to work tirelessly without the dignity of a solid, stable quality of life; they are far too willing to downplay the crisis for minimum-wage workers, who are largely women of color. Hearing a senator like Manchin say that $11 is a sufficient raise to their pay is “a slap in the face,” Barnes says. “When you’re older and you’ve been working so many years and you know you deserve better than this,” she said, “oh, it hurts.”
Between working with her home-care clients and attending union actions, Barnes is nervously watching the news. “It’s a lot of stress when you sit there and you’re wondering if it’s gonna pass. But I can’t turn away from it,” she says. Barnes is used to fighting; she stopped getting jobs at her old agency when she became vocal about being a member of the union. She was once kicked out of an orientation by another agency for talking too loudly about organizing. Still, Barnes is sick of telling family she can’t go on vacation with them, of taking care of other people without being taken care of herself. “If we could get $15 an hour, I could just work one job and live comfortable and be happy.”
Flowers, candles and signs lie at a makeshift memorial outside Young's Asian Massage in Acworth, Georgia. (photo: Bita Honarvar/Reuters)
Atlanta Spa Shootings: Georgia Hate Crimes Law Could See First Big Test
Lois Beckett, Guardian UK
Beckett writes:
hate crimes law passed in Georgia amid outrage over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery could get its first major test as part of the murder case against a white man charged with shooting and killing six women of Asian descent at Atlanta-area massage businesses this week.
Prosecutors in Georgia who will decide whether to pursue a hate crimes enhancement have declined to comment. But one said she was “acutely aware of the feelings of terror being experienced in the Asian American community”.
Until last year, Georgia was one of four states without a hate crimes law. But lawmakers moved quickly to pass stalled legislation in June, during national protests over racial violence against Black Americans including the killing of Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was pursued by several white men and fatally shot while out running in February 2020.
The new law allows an additional penalty for certain crimes if they are motivated by a victim’s race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender or mental or physical disability.
Governor Brian Kemp called the new legislation “a powerful step forward”, adding when signing it into law: “Georgians protested to demand action and state lawmakers … rose to the occasion.”
The killings of eight people in Georgia this week have prompted national mourning and a reckoning with racism and violence against Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. The attack also focused attention on the interplay of racism and misogyny, including hyper-sexualized portrayals of Asian women in US culture.
Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with the murders of six women of Asian descent and two other people. He told police the attacks at two spas in Atlanta and a massage business near suburban Woodstock were not racially motivated. He claimed to have a sex addiction.
Asian American lawmakers, activists and scholars argued that the race and gender of the victims were central to the attack.
“To think that someone targeted three Asian-owned businesses that were staffed by Asian American women … and didn’t have race or gender in mind is just absurd,” said Grace Pai, director of organizing at Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Chicago.
Elaine Kim, a professor emeritus in Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said: “I think it’s likely that the killer not only had a sex addiction but also an addiction to fantasies about Asian women as sex objects.”
Such sentiments were echoed on Saturday as a diverse, hundreds-strong crowd gathered in a park across from the Georgia state capitol to demand justice for the victims of the shootings.
Speakers included the US senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and the Georgia state representative Bee Nguyen, the first Vietnamese American in the Georgia House.
“I just wanted to drop by to say to my Asian sisters and brothers, we see you, and, more importantly, we are going to stand with you,” Warnock said to loud cheers. “We’re all in this thing together.”
Bernard Dong, a 24-year-old student from China at Georgia Tech, said he had come to the protest to demand rights not just for Asians but for all minorities.
“Many times Asian people are too silent, but times change,” he said, adding that he was “angry and disgusted” about the shootings and violence against Asians, minorities and women.
Otis Wilson, a 38-year-old photographer, said people needed to pay attention to discrimination against those of Asian descent.
“We went through this last year with the Black community, and we’re not the only ones who go through this,” he said.
The Cherokee county district attorney, Shannon Wallace, and Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, will decide whether to pursue the hate crime enhancement.
Wallace said she could not answer specific questions but said she was “acutely aware of the feelings of terror being experienced in the Asian-American community”. A representative for Willis did not respond to requests for comment.
The US Department of Justice could bring federal hate crime charges independently of state prosecutions. Federal investigators have not uncovered evidence to prove Long targeted the victims because of their race, two unnamed officials told the Associated Press.
A Georgia State University law professor, Tanya Washington, said it was important for the new hate crimes law to be used.
“Unless we test it with cases like this one, we won’t have a body of law around how do you prove bias motivated the behavior,” she said.
Given that someone convicted of multiple murders is unlikely to be released from prison, an argument could be made that it is not worth the effort, time and expense to pursue a hate crime designation that carries a relatively small additional penalty. But the Republican state representative Chuck Efstration, who sponsored the hate crimes bill, said it was not just about punishment.
“It is important that the law calls things what they are,” he said. “It’s important for victims and it’s important for society.”
The state senator Michelle Au, a Democrat, said the law needed to be used to give it teeth.
Au believes there has been resistance nationwide to charge attacks against Asian Americans as hate crimes because they are seen as “model minorities”, a stereotype that they are hard-working, educated and free of societal problems. She said she had heard from many constituents in the last year that Asian Americans – and people of Chinese descent in particular – were suffering from bias because the coronavirus emerged in China and Donald Trump used racial terms to describe it.
“People feel like they’re getting gaslighted because they see it happen every day,” she said. “They feel very clearly that it is racially motivated but it’s not pegged or labeled that way. And people feel frustrated by that lack of visibility and that aspect being ignored.”
Asylum-seeking mothers from Guatemala carry their children after they crossed the Rio Grande river into the United States from Mexico on a raft in Penitas, Texas. (photo: Adrees Latif/Reuters)
US to Place Some Migrant Families in Hotels in Move Away From Detention Centers
Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke, Reuters
Excerpt: "Some migrant families arriving in the United States will be housed in hotels under a new program managed by nonprofit organizations, according to two people familiar with the plans, a move away from for-profit detention centers that have been criticized by Democrats and health experts."
Sunday Song: Pete Seeger | Hard Times in the Mill
Pete Seeger, YouTube
Seeger writes: "Every mornin' right at six. Don't that ol' bell make you sick. Hard times in the mill my love. Hard times in the mill"
Every mornin' at half-past four
You hear the cooks hop on the floor
It's hard times in the mill my love
Hard times in the mill
Every morning just at five
Gotta get up, dead or alive
It's hard times in the mill my love
Hard times in the mill
Every mornin' right at six
Don't that ol' bell make you sick
Hard times in the mill my love
Hard times in the mill
The pulley got hot, the belt jumped off
Knocked Mr Guyan's derby off
It's hard times in the mill my love
Hard times in the mill
And ol' Pat Goble thinks he's a Hun
He puts me in mind of a doodle in the sun
It's hard times in the mill my love
Hard times in the mill
Section hand he thinks he's a man
He ain't got sense to pay off his hands
It's hard times in the mill my love
Hard times in the mill
They steal his ring, they steal his knife
Steal everything but his big fat wife
It's hard times in the mill my love
Hard times in the mill
My bobbin's all out, my end's all down
The doffer's in my alley an' I can't get around
It's hard times in the mill my love
Hard times in the mill
The section hand, standin' at the door
Ordering the sweepers to sweep up the floor
It's hard times in the mill my love
Hard times in the mill
An' every night when I go home
A piece o' cornbread an' an ol' jawbone
It's hard times in the mill my love
Hard times in the mill
Ain't it enough to break your heart
Have to work all day, an' at night it's dark
It's hard times in the mill my love
Hard times in the mill
A man carries a bucket of plastic waste at an import plastic waste dump in Mojokerto, Indonesia, on December 4, 2018. (photo: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images)
US Continues to Ship Illegal Plastic Waste to Developing Countries
Tiffany Duong, EcoWatch
Duong writes:
he majority of the world is working together to reverse the massive plastic pollution problem. But, the world's leading producer of plastic waste, the U.S., hasn't signed on and isn't following the rules.
In 2019, 187 countries, except for the U.S. and Haiti, voted to amend the 1989 Basel Convention to include plastic waste in the definition of hazardous materials, and to strictly limit how that trash is traded internationally. The binding framework hoped to make globally traded plastic waste more transparent and better regulated. It went into effect on Jan. 1, 2021.
UN officials hoped the agreement would curb ocean plastic within five years. Supporters believed the convention would level the industry's global playing field by allowing developing nations such as Vietnam and Malaysia to refuse low-quality and hard-to-recycle plastics before they were shipped from developed nations, a UN transboundary waste chief told The Guardian.
At the start of the year, when the new rules were just being implemented, the fact remained that the U.S. had not agreed to the amendment despite producing most of the world's plastic waste. Proponents held that the amendment would still apply to the U.S. anytime it tried to trade plastic waste with any of the participating 187 countries, many of which are poor and developing nations, CNN reported.
According to the Basel Action Network (BAN), a nonprofit organization that lobbies against the plastic waste trade, participating nations are prohibited from trading waste with countries that have not ratified the Basel Convention, The Maritime Executive reported. This creates an effective ban on plastic waste trade between the U.S. and most of the world, and makes U.S. plastic export shipments "criminal traffic as soon as the ships get on the high seas," BAN told The Maritime Executive.
Despite these new rules, U.S. Customs data from January shows that optimism about the convention's effectiveness may have been premature. According to The New York Times, American exporters continue to ship plastic waste overseas, despite the fact that receiving countries have agreed, per the Basel Convention, not to accept it. In fact, the new report showed that American exports of plastic scrap to poorer countries have barely changed and that overall exports of scrap plastics even rose.
The Times reported that environmental watchdog groups viewed this as evidence that exporters are either ignoring the new rules or following their own interpretations. American companies are justifying waste shipments as being legal even though recipient countries legally can't accept it. The former is using the logic that because the U.S. never ratified the global ban, the rules don't apply to originating shipments.
The Maritime Executive also noted that America's plastic waste shipments will continue to be associated with "uncontrolled dumping" in developing countries, and that much of the plastic waste collected in the U.S. under the guise of recycling actually ends up in overseas landfills and the oceans. In fact, a new Woods Hole study found that the U.S. is likely the world's third-largest source of ocean plastic, not just because it is the world's largest producer of plastic waste, but also because recyclables being sent to the developing world are often mishandled and discarded into the ocean.
"This is our first hard evidence that nobody seems to be paying attention to the international law," Jim Puckett, BAN's executive director, told The Times regarding the new trade data. "As soon as the shipments get on the high seas, it's considered illegal trafficking."
Because of the U.S.' continued disregard for the rules, it continues to ship illegal plastic waste "[a]nd the rest of the world has to deal with it," Puckett told The Times.
"You're starting to see an outcry in countries being flooded with waste. And we are already seeing more countries starting to put their foot down," David Azoulay told The Times. Azoulay is a Geneva-based lawyer with the Center for International Environmental Law. He added that the more Americans "learn that their waste ends up in fields in Malaysia, or openly burned in Indonesia or Vietnam, it's not going to sit very well."
This year, MAGA GOP activists in Georgia attempted to disenfranchise hundreds of students by trying to kick them off the voter rolls. De...
