Thursday, April 01, 2021

"Hell On Earth"

SHORT TAKES: Inside The Amazon Union Ballot Count!; Biden Caves On Wealth Tax; Facts and Myths on Big PHARMA's Vaccine Monopoly

Jonathan Tasini

Mar 31

Everyone can point to a place on the planet that is her or his marker for an abysmal place for humans to try to survive.

For me, it’s Yemen. A United Nations official recently called Yemen “hell on earth.”

Consider:

Yemen is a country of 30 million people, 81 percent of whom make less than $5.50 a day.

It’s a country where famine is a regular ugly reality—and, in fact, the country is facing right now what could be the worst famine in human history.

It’s a place where in 2021, 2.3 million children will face malnutrition, and 40 percent of households have poor to borderline access to food.

It’s a country in which 20.5 million people, two-thirds of the entire country, are without safe water and almost as many are without adequate health care.

Even before COVID-19, cholera was rampant.

On top of that there is the vicious war that has displaced millions of people from their homes making every aspect of what I just recounted even worse. A war that has been fueled by outside powers with all sorts of economic and geo-political strategic interests—none of which matters to the people who are being bombed while they try to just find enough food for the day, people whose lives are now even more at risk because of the pandemic because poverty, and everything that comes with poverty, is the perfect breeding ground for a pandemic to explode and spread without any restraint.

So, why highlight Yemen? It’s a symbol of the decades long bankrupt bi-partisan foreign policy of the U.S. Because, after all, both parties have been avid supporters and suppliers of billions of dollars in military hardware to Saudi Arabia, which has been bombing the crap out of Yemen, partly because of its shared hatred with the U.S. of Iran. Sure, blame Donald Trump for the massive amount of arms he agreed to sell to the Saudis. But, the Clintons, to just highlight one example, have been courting the Saudis forever, in and out of government, banking millions of dollars in Saudi blood money into the Clinton Foundation—which is simply a legal form of bribery and pay-to-get-access gambit.

This carnage is a direct consequence of the permanent 9/11 “war on terror” mentality, which has fractured the entire world and led to millions of deaths.

Yemen is also a deeper symbol on a moral level, a wrenching example of depravity that we can’t turn our heads from, or shouldn’t turn our heads from even as we , in fact, turn our heads way: how is it possible that we, as human beings, can stand by and let millions of other human beings starve to death, to live in the deepest of deepest poverty, to not have access to clean water, and to be the victims of aggression and violence by state actors who pay no penalty for the massacring of thousands of human beings? Especially when there is plenty of money sloshing around the world—in the hands of rich countries and stupendously rich people—to stop this misery.

I write about Yemen at this moment because there *might* be a very tiny sliver of optimism at this moment in time to at least halt, temporarily, the endless war, and allow a ceasefire simply to bring aid to people to blunt the spread of COVID-19—Joe Biden announced recently that the U.S. would no longer support the Saudis offensive military actions in Yemen, including halting arms sales—though it’s very murky what the U.S. would do if the Saudis claimed new attacks launched against Yemen were “defensive”, and, frankly, the Saudis are already armed to the teeth thanks to billions of dollars in advanced weapons sales.

I talked more about the Yemen crisis in this week’s Working Life TV episode with Scott Paul, lead humanitarian policy expert with Oxfam America. Scott has a deep expertise in spearheading responses to global crises around the world including in Somalia, Nigeria, Myanmar, Bangladesh and, of course, Yemen (SUBSCRIBE!!!):

Short Takes

At this very moment, the ballots are being counted in the union organizing drive at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. After devoting a lot of time here and on my show, I was thinking about what I could add at this moment while we await the final result which could take a number of days; because of the pandemic, the balloting was done by mail and the counting of the ballots is also going to be slightly slower since the various parties—the National Labor Relations Board which oversees the whole process and administers the count, the union and workers, and, yes, the company—have lots of people and lawyers observing the count remotely.
And I thought, you know, people don’t really know two things about union campaigns: how the hell does the ballot count happen? What does it look like? And second what happens if the union wins? That second one is a doozy: as any veteran union organizer knows, the fight just begins even after a ballot victory because workers, then, have to travel a torturous road to get a first contract because a company like Amazon will try to fight tooth and nail to obstruct, delay and undercut the union every single step.
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So, to wrestle with these thoughts, I asked my union brother Dave Mertz to explore this with me: Dave is a vice president at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Stores Union and he joined me for a chat from Bessemer Alabama which took place late at night after he finished meeting with the core organizing committee. Here it is:
Distressing. Dumb. Foolish. Those are the words I can summon up to describe the news that Joe Biden is dumping the idea of a wealth tax. Consistently, poll after poll shows that the vast majority of the public thinks a wealth tax is a great idea. Foregoing this easy, populist idea to bring in a shit-ton of money is unfathomable—unless one considers how many Democratic Party donors might have squealed privately about giving up some wealth.
The error that way too many politicians make: not reminding people that every single fortune is made not because of the genius of one individual—even though Jeff Bezos and his ilk like to pretend that they are solely the source of a company’s wealth, a narcissism aided and abetted by a long history of media suck-up stories and profiles of “successful businessmen” (See: Donald Trump). These fortunes are made because of (a) OUR public investments in roads, schools and every other social good (b) the hard work of millions of workers and, alas, (c) really bad tax laws, passed by buying off politicians, that let the Waltons accumulate vast fortunes.
Truth is, abandoning the wealth tax is pretty much a sign post for the limits of Joe Biden’s willingness to change central parts of a corrupt system.
A month ago, I wrote about how Big PHARMA was poised to kill millions of people around the world because of its iron-monopoly grip on the patents for vaccines. So, the fight is still being waged to get a waiver for the really bad trade rules that let these blood-suckers profit off of peoples’ misery and life-and-death situations. As Global Trade Watch writes: “…pharmaceutical corporations control where and how much vaccine and other COVID-19 medicines are made. And, current production levels are not nearly enough to cover the world. Annual capacity is about 3.5 billion, according to the new World Trade Organization (WTO) Director General, while minimally 10 billion doses of vaccine are needed, assuming some vaccines will require two doses and 70% population coverage. In every region, there are existing firms that could gear up production and governments willing to invest in expanding supply…But WTO rules require countries to guarantee pharmaceutical corporations monopoly control.” GTW has a great “Facts vs Common Myths” on the topic for you’all to use and share.
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