European Union & Vaccine Rollout: Disaster Unfolding

For a long time now, the creation of the euro, a dangerous experiment that placed political fantasy over economic reality, has been the most damaging example of just how far, and just how incompetently, those running the EU would go in the name of “ever-closer union.” That dismal precedent may now have been eclipsed by Brussels’s involvement in securing supplies of the COVID-19 vaccine for those who live within the EU’s borders, a lethal experiment that placed political dogma over medical need.

Supported by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, the EU Commission (its administrative arm) took over the negotiations with vaccine manufacturers on behalf of all EU member-states last June. This was designed both as a declaration of EU “solidarity” and because of the belief that bargaining on behalf of the whole bloc could secure the vaccine at a cheaper price, a calculation that appeared to take little account of the economic costs of any delays, and delay was what — for a variety of reasons — Brussels delivered.

The U.K. came to its deal with AstraZeneca (the manufacturer of the Oxford vaccine) three months earlier than the EU, and its contract came with sharper teeth. The EU also took four months longer than the U.K. and U.S. to sign up with Pfizer.

Readmore at: European Union & Vaccine Rollout: Disaster Unfolding | National Review

The Rich and Poor Gap: Societies Are Headed Toward Revolution, Suggests Inequality Study

There’s a common thread tying together the most disruptive revolutions of human history, and it has some scientists worried about the United States. In those revolutions, conflict largely boiled down to pervasive economic inequality. On Wednesday, a study in Nature, showing how and when those first divisions between rich and poor began, suggests not only that history has always repeated itself but also that it’s bound to do so again — and perhaps sooner than we think.

In the largest study of its kind, a team of scientists from Washington State University and 13 other institutions examined the factors leading to economic inequality throughout all of human history and noticed some worrying trends. Using a well-established score of inequality called the Gini coefficient, which gives perfect, egalitarian societies a score of 0 and high-inequality societies a 1, they showed that civilization tends to move toward inequality as some people gain the means to make others relatively poor — and employ it. Coupled with what researchers already know about inequality leading to social instability, the study does not bode well for the state of the world today.

“We could be concerned in the United States, that if Ginis get too high, we could be inviting revolution, or we could be inviting state collapse. There’s only a few things that are going to decrease our Ginis dramatically,” said Tim Kohler, Ph.D., the study’s lead author and a professor of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology in a statement.

Currently, the United States Gini score is around .81, one of the highest in the world, according to the 2016 Allianz Global Wealth Report.

Kohler and his team had their work cut out for them, as studying inequality before the age of global wealth reports is not a straightforward task. It’s one thing to measure modern day economic inequality using measures of individual net worth, but those kind of metrics aren’t available for, say, hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo during the Paleolithic. To surmount this obstacle, the researchers decided to use house size as a catch-all proxy for wealth, then examined the makeup of societies from prehistoric times to modern day using data from 63 archaeological digs

Overall, they found that human societies started off fairly equal, with the hunter-gatherer societies consistently getting Gini scores around .17. The divide between rich and poor really began once humans started to domesticate plants and animals and switch to farming-based societies. Learning to till the land meant introducing the concept of land ownership, and inevitably, some people ended up as landless peasants. Furthermore, because these societies no longer lived as nomads, it became easier to accumulate wealth (like land) and pass it down from generation to generation.

The Gini scores got higher as farming societies got bigger. The small scale “horticultural” farmers had a median Gini of .27, and larger-scale “agricultural” societies moved up to .35. This pattern continued until, oddly, humans moved into the New World — the Americas. Then, over time, the researchers saw that Gini scores kept rising in Old World Eurasia but actually hit a plateau in the Americas. The researchers think this plateau happened because there were fewer draft animals, like horse and water buffalo, in the New World, making it harder for new agricultural societies to expand and cultivate more land.

Overall, the highest-ever historical Gini the researchers found was that of the ancient Old World (think Patrician Rome), which got a score of .59. While the degrees of inequality experienced by historical societies are quite high, the researchers note, they’re nowhere near as high as the Gini scores we’re seeing now.  

A global report from Credit Suisse showed that modern humans are continuing the trends set by our predecessors: Now, the report showed, half of the world’s wealth really does belong to a super-rich one percent, and the gap is only growing. Historically, Kohler says in his statement, there’s only so much inequality a society can sustain before it reaches a tipping point. Among the many known effects of inequality on a society are social unrest, a decrease in health, increased violence, and decreased solidarity. Unfortunately, Kohler points out, humans have never been especially good at decreasing inequality peacefully — historically, the only effective methods for doing so are plague, massive warfare, or revolution.

Read more: Societies Are Headed Toward Revolution, Suggests Inequality Study | Inver

Kleptocracy Rules: The Panama Papers & Capitalism-Today:Neo-liberalism’s World of Corruption

TTIP: legalizing Kleptocracy

Of course corruption has always existed in capitalism. But neo-liberalism, the ‘free market’ system that started in the 1980s, promoted it on a vast scale for two reasons:

1. Neo-liberal deregulation and privatisation promoted the dominance of financial capital and the expense of industry and the state. Financialisation and low capital gains taxes have turned big companies and utilities into cash cows, virtual banks with huge wealth, looking to maximise the interest on their money and minimise their tax. Finance capital is, after all, basically about swindling. In the middle ages they called it usury.

2. The shift to the right crashed ‘socialist’ command economies and undermined nationalist governments in the third world, replacing both with corrupt and usually highly authoritarian neoliberal regimes. Getting hold of the state apparatus has become a royal road to mega-wealth for dozens of dictators and their cronies through simple theft.

The core of it is the banking system. European and American banks receive (read: launder) billions of dollars every year from international mafias, and in particular from drug dealers. Sometimes by accident some of this comes to light. In 2006 Mexican soldiers intercepted a drug shipment in Ciudad del Carmen and found a cache of documents showing the Sinaloa drugs cartel had made payments of $378 billion to the American bank Wachovia, a subsidiary of the financial giant Welles Fargo.

Roberto Saviano, the author of the best-selling Gamorrah which exposed the workings of the Neapolitan crime organisation Camorra, claims that London is the centre of money laundering for Latin American drug money. Even the British National Crime Agency says:

“We assess that hundreds of billions of US dollars of criminal money almost certainly continue to be laundered through UK banks, including their subsidiaries, each year.”

Saviano says that Mexico is the ‘heart’ of the drugs trade and London its ‘head’. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Crime and Drugs Agency, says drug dealers invested $352 billion in Western banks in 2008, and this was key in keeping some major banks from collapse.

So corruption – receiving money from crime and drug cartels – is deeply ingrained in the culture of US and European banks. And this is not going to stop, given the vast profits involved.

The klepocratic state is an old story. It’s reckoned that no Mexican president leaves offices with less than $100m. Key Western allies from the 60s and 70s, like Mobutu, president of Zaire (DRC) from 1965-97 and Suharto, president of Indonesia from 1967-98, both established murderous regimes and systematically looted their respective peoples of billions of dollars.

Direct corruption by the state is one thing, influence is something else. In western democracies influence is stacked in favour of the rich and powerful. In the United States and increasingly in Britain it is professional lobbyists who fight their corner. The Atlantic magazine in the US points out:

“Corporations now spend about $2.6 billion a year on reported lobbying expenditures—more than the $2 billion we spend to fund the House ($1.18 billion) and Senate ($860 million). It’s a gap that has been widening since corporate lobbying began to regularly exceed the combined House-Senate budget in the early 2000s.

“Today, the biggest companies have upwards of 100 lobbyists representing them, allowing them to be everywhere, all the time. For every dollar spent on lobbying by labour unions and public-interest groups together, large corporations and their associations now spend $34. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 consistently represent business.”

The above account doesn’t include the direct payments and other gifts given to members of Congress by big companies, not least the health insurance and healthcare companies who have fought so long and so successfully against a universal US healthcare system.

Britain is going in the same direction. As in the United States, business and politics are often revolving doors with former minister joining the boards of companies they dealt with when in power. Seumas Milne says:
“…lobbying doesn’t begin to cover the extent of corporate influence. More than ever the Tory party is in thrall to the City, with over half its income from bankers and hedge fund and private equity financiers. Peers who have made six-figure donations have been rewarded with government jobs.

“But the real corruption that has eaten into the heart of British public life is the tightening corporate grip on government and public institutions – not just by lobbyists, but by the politicians, civil servants, bankers and corporate advisers who increasingly swap jobs, favors and insider information, and inevitably come to see their interests as mutual and interchangeable. The doors are no longer just revolving but spinning, and the people charged with protecting the public interest are bought and sold with barely a fig leaf of regulation.”

Corruption everywhere has the effect of transferring huge amounts of wealth from the poor to the rich. If poor individuals are not directly robbed, then their economic situation, their public services, their health service, their transport, their education – all these are robbed when taxes are avoided and government revenues robbed.

You can’t analyse corruption today by looking for illegal activity alone. Many of the practices that happen in rich and poor countries are legal or in a grey area where it’s difficult to tell criminal from the lawful.

For example, property dealing in Britain is profoundly corrupt. House prices in London (and thus in the whole country indirectly) are pressured by the huge amount of hot money from corrupt Russian oligarchs and assorted gangsters of various nationalities invested in the expensive end of the market. But nothing here is illegal, as far as the house purchases in Britain are concerned. It’s just that they are bought with corrupt money and force up the living costs of millions of ordinary British people.

Look at the purchase of rare earth minerals from the Congo, essential for computers and mobile phones. Much of this mineral wealth is controlled by war lord armies, guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The companies who buy the mineral products they control – the moral equivalent of blood diamonds – have no contact with them at all. Dealers act as a buffer and through their transactions – perfectly legal – wealth based on rape and murder is miraculously washed clean.

Finance capital is by definition corrupt. The investment banks typically do not disclose their fees to investors in advance (they call their charges ‘consideration’) by deduct self-decided amounts as they go along. Free charging professionals like lawyers, and in many countries doctors and dentists, make up their own huge fees. Isn’t this corrupt? But there’s nothing illegal about it.

The tax dodges by major companies like Amazon, Facebook and Starbucks, are perfectly legal. They pay all the tax they are required by law – or by agreement –in countries like Ireland and Luxemburg where they are registered. Whether these practices are illegal in the UK for example is a very grey area. But corruption it certainly is.

All these examples have the same effect: robbing the poor to further enrich the wealthy.

 Read more: CADTM - The Panama Papers & Capitalism Today: Neo-liberalism’s World of Corruption