The coronavirus pandemic threatens a crisis for human rights too
 

Afua Hirsch

People could soon be arrested for a sweeping range of new offences, sparking troubling scenes in the UK
Thu 19 Mar 2020
Spanish police and soldiers deployed at Atocha railway station in Madrid to fight against the spread of Covid-19. Photograph: Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP via Getty Images


You can learn a lot about someone’s perspective from what they find reassuring at a time like this. This week I saw a private briefing from a bank, soothingly reassuring its clients that “this feels more like 9/11 than 2008”. I think the point was to let investors know that this crisis is not systemic. It felt a bit like updating the old wartime spirit for today’s hyper-capitalist economy: “Keep well-capitalised, and carry on.”

I can think of a host of reasons why 9/11 does not bring calming thoughts to mind, but one is the long-term impact it had on human rights. Back then I was in the early stages of becoming a human rights lawyer. My very first day in court was with the team defending a victim of extraordinary rendition, where Britain had helped facilitate his torture. By the time I was practising, the 7 July London bombings had happened, and so had draconian new laws – 90-day detention without trial, plus sweeping surveillance and monitoring. Many Muslims remember this as the time that racial profiling and state harassment – in airports, on the tube, in the street – became the new normal.

This might sound like a strange issue to raise when the national priority is – understandably – how to stop the spread of coronavirus, treat the sick and tackle the hit to the economy. But since last month, when the government drafted emergency regulations to grant police new powers – and more far-reaching laws are expected this week – the potential has been building for a clash between liberty, privacy and public health measures. The authorities now have the power to arrest and detain someone they believe is infectious for up to 14 days, to move that person around from custody facilities including secure hospitals, and to take blood or saliva from them by force, even if they are a child.

All schools to close from Friday; GCSE and A-level exams cancelled – UK Covid-19, as it happened

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The legislation set to come before parliament is likely to ban public gatherings, to widen police and immigration officer powers of detention and restraint, to give doctors powers to sign death certificates without seeing the deceased person’s body, to allow fast-tracked burial and cremation, and to strip back services in care homes. People who refuse to self-isolate could be made to do so using the always contested “reasonable force”.

Our human rights protections – long maligned by many of the politicians now running our pandemic-stricken nation – were designed for moments such as this. They contain specific exemptions for situations in which the state needs to contain the spread of infectious disease. And the continuing shutdown caused by coronavirus doesn’t make them less relevant, it makes them more important than ever.

The proposed measures will contain safeguards – as they are constitutionally required to do so – especially rights to appeal. But this being a government that has decimated legal aid, brought our court system to its knees and repeatedly attacked the judiciary, a key element of trust is already compromised.

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1:18 Coronavirus: renters to be protected from eviction says Johnson – video

Trust is one of those ingredients in a democratic process that is hard to notice until it is gone. But this government’s cavalier approach to applying the rule of law at the best of times – let’s remember the prime minister misled the Queen and illegally prorogued parliament – does not inspire confidence at a time of crisis.


Lawyers who focus on the right to human dignity in the care of vulnerable or elderly people were appalled to hear Boris Johnson suggest that the deaths of vast numbers of British people would be an acceptable price to pay for so-called “herd immunity”. One QC compared the idea to Germany’s post-9/11 attempt to permit hijacked passenger planes to be shot down, as if the lives of those on board were expendable. Similarly, he suggests, the very idea of herd immunity would have “subordinated human dignity by treating it as a quantifiable entity that can be measured and weighed in the balance.”

There’s the potential for a kind of tyranny of the majority – one of the reasons we need human rights in the first place – and then there are the new, established but upgraded, tyrannies of the state. China has developed an app of remarkably intrusive proportions, using facial recognition to track both your movements and those of everyone in your proximity, so that they can be tested in the event you become infectious.

Israel is ditching superfluous apps altogether and simply allowing security services to hack infected people’s phones to monitor their movements.

Donald Trump has insisted on a project of deliberate racial demonisation by calling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus” – inflaming what we already know to be harmful prejudice against east Asian people, including those who have suffered shameful abuse in Britain. In one of the most surreal responses to the pandemic, commentators who are usually allergic to this form of social justice have belatedly discovered the concept of reparations – not for the genocidal abuses committed by Europeans over the centuries, but for Europeans from the allegedly guilty Chinese.

The truth is that China has been remarkably effective at stemming the spread of Covid-19, but has done so through a heady concoction of human rights abuses and authoritarian rule, of which no one should be envious. Human Rights Watch has reported censorship; dissenters put “under quarantine”; a disabled child left to die when his parent was forced into isolation; and a leukaemia sufferer turned away from hospital.

That doesn’t justify racism against Chinese people any more than the British should be stigmatised for the uniquely dodgy leadership we currently endure. This pandemic has exposed what many of us said about the Tories’ long boast of “record high” numbers of people in employment – namely, insecure workers with no rights and no safety net. Likewise, we warned about starving the NHS so that its resilience is shot, creating a generation of renters with no savings, and allowing homelessness and destitution to mushroom.

These casualties had already become the new normal. But once we see newly troubling scenes – people arrested for resisting isolation or treatment – we will be reminded why this could become a crisis of rights, as much as it is one of disease.

• Afua Hirsch is a Guardian columnist

CRIMINAL CAPITALISM
Former London bankers convicted after Germany's 'greatest tax robbery'

First case of its kind sheds light on complex fraud known as cum-ex trading

A British banker at the trial at a regional court in Bonn, Germany. 

Photograph: Thilo Schmülgen/Reuters


Philip Oltermann in Berlin THE GUARDIAN Published on Thu 19 Mar 2020

Two former London bankers were handed suspended jail terms and one a €14m fine for tax fraud in a landmark trial that is likely to unleash dozens of similar cases across Germany.

The ruling is the first criminal conviction for what the judge, Roland Zickler, called “a collective case of thievery from state coffers”.

Martin Shields and Nicholas Diable managed to avoid jail by closely cooperating with German prosecutors and shedding light on a complex fraud scheme that siphoned €400m out of German state coffers.



'The men who plundered Europe': bankers on trial for defrauding €447m

Known as “cum-ex”, the scheme involved trading shares at high speed on or just before the dividend record date – the day the company checks its records to identify shareholders – and then claiming two or more refunds for capital gains tax which had in fact only been paid to the state once.

On Wednesday the judge stated that the trades were illegal rather than merely exploiting loopholes in the law.

“Do we all want to live in a world where everyone is ripping each other off?” Zickler said, addressing the defendants at the regional court in Bonn.

Cum-ex trade flourished on an “industrial scale” in the years after the financial crash, as banks across Europe were bailed out by the state. Shields started his career in investment banking as a junior trader for Merrill Lynch, before moving to the London branch of Germany’s fourth-largest bank, HypoVereinsbank, where he met Diable.

The chief prosecutor, Anne Brorhilker, said a harsher sentence would have “covered up the fact that the greatest tax robbery in German history was not conducted by two individuals but hundreds of people”.

The Bonn court also seized €176m from MM Warburg, a Hamburg-based private bank that had links to most of the transactions under review in the trial. A spokesman for the bank said it would appeal the decision.

State prosecutors across Germany are currently investigating at least 600 individuals, including bankers, traders, advisers and lawyers, for having practised similar schemes. At least 130 banks are under suspicion of having taken part in cum-ex trades.

“There will be further trials,” said Zickler.

Estimates of the cum-ex scandal’s total financial damage to the German state range from €5bn to €55bn.

In his closing statement, the former investment banker Shields said he had set off on a journey that “began in a bubble and remained in a bubble”.

“Many things were taken for granted and – unfortunately – were not questioned sufficiently,” said the 42-year-old, whom the Bonn court ordered to pay €14m to compensate for the personal profits he had made. “Whatever was taken for granted back then, I now see turned out to have been the wrong path.”

With more and more parts of Europe under lockdown to curb the spread of the Covid-19 virus, the verdict in the 44-day trial was moved forward to ensure the two UK-based bankers could still attend the court in person.

Tulsi Gabbard quits 2020 Democratic presidential race
ENDORSES BIDEN

Hawaii congresswoman who assembled eclectic group of 
supporters backs Joe Biden and thanks Bernie Sanders

Tulsi Gabbard during a Democratic presidential primary debate 

on 20 November 2019. Photograph: Derek White/Rex/Shutterstock

Adam Gabbatt in New York THE GUARDIAN

Published on Thu 19 Mar 2020

The controversial Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has dropped out of the Democratic presidential race. She had been the last woman in the contest – albeit a very long shot from the start – after Elizabeth Warren decided to quit within two days of a poor showing on Super Tuesday.

Gabbard, who won two Democratic delegates, both in American Samoa, endorsed Joe Biden as she suspended her campaign, a surprise move given she was one of few Democrats in Congress to back Bernie Sanders in 2016.

“Although I may not agree with the vice-president on every issue, I know that he has a good heart, and he’s motivated by his love for our country and the American people,” Gabbard said.

“I’m confident that he will lead our country guided by the spirit of aloha, respect and compassion, and thus help heal the divisiveness that has been tearing our country apart.”

Gabbard, 38, had assembled an eclectic coalition of anti-war Democrats, independent voters, libertarians and disaffected Republicans, but never drew sufficient support to trouble the better-known candidates.

She finished with just 16 votes in Iowa, the first state to vote. In New Hampshire, where Gabbard spent months campaigning, she came in seventh.



Important announcement.
From Oahu, Hawaiʻi. #StandWithTulsi pic.twitter.com/XcHshtgVYA— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) March 19, 2020

On Super Tuesday, 3 March, when 14 states voted, she came nowhere in any of them as Joe Biden charged to the front of the field. The only prize of the night for Gabbard was earning two out of six pledged delegates in American Samoa, the US Pacific island territory where the billionaire former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg won his only contest in the Democratic primary, before dropping out of the race the following day.

The exit of Gabbard, who was born in American Samoa and is of mixed ethnicity, leaves a 2020 field of candidates that began as the most diverse in American history but narrowed inexorably to Biden and Bernie Sanders fighting it out to compete with Donald Trump, all straight white men in their 70s.

Gabbard ran as a progressive, anti-war candidate, frequently stressing her experience as a member of the Hawaii national guard. Her campaign speeches largely focused on the ills of American wars overseas, with Gabbard promising to redirect money from the military budget to social programs.

As her campaign failed to gain momentum, however, Gabbard and her supporters increasingly criticized the media for failing to provide her with enough airtime – although the congresswoman never approached double figures in national polls.

Gabbard was seen as a rising star in the Democratic party when she became a member of Congress in 2013, and was appointed a vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee.

She resigned that position, however, to endorse Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and continued to chaff against her party when she met with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in 2017, later questioning the consensus that Assad was behind a chemical attack that killed dozens of people.

Despite backing Biden over Sanders, Gabbard thanked the Vermont senator in her announcement.

“I want to extend my best wishes to my friends Bernie Sanders, his wife Jane, Nina Turner and their many supporters for the work that they’ve done,” Gabbard said. Turner is the national co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 campaign.

She continued: “I have such a great appreciation for Senator Sanders’ love for our country and the American people and his sincere desire to improve the lives of all Americans.”

Gabbard’s moves became increasingly unorthodox in recent months as she strived for exposure.

In January Gabbard sued Clinton for $50m in retaliation for Clinton suggesting the Hawaiian was a Russian asset, months after Gabbard filed a $50m lawsuit against Google for allegedly suspending her campaign’s advertising.

Ahead of the New Hampshire primary, Gabbard held a Fox News interview where she defended Donald Trump’s decision to fire the key impeachment investigation witnesses Lt Col Alexander Vindman and EU ambassador Gordon Sondland.

A day later Gabbard appeared on the conservative Fox News network with Sean Hannity, a friend and informal adviser to the president who has promoted conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the dead DNC staffer Seth Rich.

UK
Windrush report: call for inquiry into extent of racism in Home Office

Alliance of 16 anti-racism groups says report on scandal proves ‘institutional failures to understand racism’

Windrush report: what the Home Office needs to act on

Amelia Gentleman and Owen Bowcott THE GUARDIAN Thu 19 Mar 2020

An investigation into the extent of institutional racism within the Home Office must be launched in response to a damning report on the Windrush scandal, an alliance of anti-racism groups has urged.

The call came after the long-awaited publication of the independent inquiry into the government’s handling of the scandal, which saw British citizens wrongly deported, dismissed from their jobs and deprived of services such as NHS care.

The inquiry – which prompted an official apology from the home secretary, Priti Patel – concluded that the Home Office demonstrated “institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race”. It was commissioned after the Guardian’s reporting on the government’s “hostile environment” immigration policy led to the exposure of the scandal and eventually the resignation of the then home secretary, Amber Rudd.

In response to the findings, a consortium of 16 pressure groups called on Thursday for the Home Office’s immigration policies to be scrutinised to assess whether they are discriminatory.

While the report stopped short of describing the Home Office as institutionally racist, the government now needed to analyse why “Home Office culture, attitudes, immigrations and citizenship policies have repeatedly discriminated against black and ethnic minority British citizens,” deputy director of the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust, Zubaida Haque, said.

She added that the report made it “very clear that the injustice was not an accident, but a result of institutional failures to understand race and racism”.

In the report, the Home Office is blamed for operating a “culture of disbelief and carelessness”. It concludes that the failings are “consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism”.

Patel gave an official apology in the House of Commons on Thursday, saying: “There is nothing I can say today that will undo the suffering … On behalf of this and successive governments I am truly sorry.”

But Michael Braithwaite, 68, who was sacked in 2017 from his job as a special-needs teaching assistant at the London primary school where he had worked for more than 15 years (despite the fact that he had lived in the country for half a century) said he was frustrated to hear Patel make a new apology almost two years after the government first did so.

“It’s the same expression of empathy, and more promises like last time. It’s there to make us feel better, but things haven’t changed,” he said, adding that he wanted the government to dismantle its hostile environment policies.

His remarks were echoed by Elwaldo Romeo, 65, who was sent a letter by the Home Office in 2018 telling him that he was liable to be detained, and offering him “support on returning home” (despite the fact he had moved to the UK from Antigua 59 years earlier, aged four). “Two years on, why have we still got Windrush people living in dustbins and airports?”

Responding on behalf of Labour, the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, said: “The verdict that there are elements of institutional racism at the Home Office is damning, and means there must be a root-and-branch overhaul and change of culture.”


The review, prompted by months of Guardian reporting on the consequences of the Home Office’s “hostile environment” policy, says the scandal was “foreseeable and avoidable”. It says warning signs of problems caused by the immigration policy – such as “racially insensitive” billboards telling people to “go home or face arrest” – were ignored.

There was a tendency to blame individuals caught up in the immigration regulations, the report says. They found themselves criticised for failing to obtain evidence of their status, even though when they tried to do so they were not provided with the right documentation.

The report’s author, Wendy Williams, an inspector of constabulary, said at its launch: “The Windrush generation has been poorly served by this country, a country to which they contributed so much and in which they had every right to make their lives. The many stories of injustice and hardships are heartbreaking, with jobs lost, lives uprooted and untold damage done to so many individuals and families.”

Williams said she met about 800 people, and many of the interviews had been extremely upsetting. She said one man had been in tears when he told her how he had lost his job and his home “in tragic circumstances”. He told her: “I can’t believe I have been treated like this by my beloved England.”

Williams said: “There were a number of examples that were equally as upsetting. There was an overwhelming sense of bewilderment. They couldn’t understand how this had been allowed to happen.”

The 275-page report said the roots of the problem could be traced back to racially motivated legislation during the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

Williams wrote: “While I am unable to make a definitive finding of institutional racism with the department, I have serious concerns that these failings demonstrate an institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation within the department, which are consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism.”

She said many people “felt a strong sense of Britishness and had no reason to doubt their status or that they belonged in the UK. They could not have been expected to know the complexity of the law as it changed around them.”

Q&A

What is the Windrush deportation crisis?


Who are the Windrush generation?

They are people who arrived in the UK after the second world war from Caribbean countries at the invitation of the British government. The first group arrived on the ship MV Empire Windrush in June 1948.

What happened to them?

An estimated 50,000 people faced the risk of deportation if they had never formalised their residency status and did not have the required documentation to prove it.

Why now?

It stems from a policy, set out by Theresa May when she was home secretary, to make the UK 'a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants'. It requires employers, NHS staff, private landlords and other bodies to demand evidence of people’s citizenship or immigration status.

Why do they not have the correct paperwork and status?

Some children, often travelling on their parents’ passports, were never formally naturalised and many moved to the UK before the countries in which they were born became independent, so they assumed they were British. In some cases, they did not apply for passports. The Home Office did not keep a record of people entering the country and granted leave to remain, which was conferred on anyone living continuously in the country since before 1 January 1973.

What did the government try and do to resolve the problem?

A Home Office team was set up to ensure Commonwealth-born long-term UK residents would no longer find themselves classified as being in the UK illegally. But a month after one minister promised the cases would be resolved within two weeks, many remained destitute. In November 2018 home secretary Sajid Javid revealed that at least 11 Britons who had been wrongly deported had died. In April 2019 the government agreed to pay up to £200m in compensation.
Photograph: Douglas Miller/Hulton Archive
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The report, which examined 69,000 official documents, noted that the Home Office does not have a large black and minority-ethnic workforce at senior level. “I think it is unfortunate that most of the policymakers were white and most of the people involved were black,” a senior official is quoted as saying in the report.

The Windrush scandal unfolded after it became clear that the Home Office had wrongly designated thousands of legal UK residents as being in the country illegally.

Some were wrongly deported to countries they had left as children half a century earlier, and others were mistakenly detained in immigration detention centres.

The scandal led to the resignation in April 2018 of the then home secretary Amber Rudd and put Theresa May’s drive to create a “really hostile environment for illegal migration” under the spotlight.

In the past two years the government’s Windrush taskforce, set up to assist those affected, has given documentation to more than 8,000 people confirming that they have the right to remain in the UK.

'Lambs to the slaughter': 50 lives ruined by the Windrush scandal

Pregnant cow who swam four miles after hurricane gives birth to 'sea calf'

Mother cow swam to shore after being swept away by Hurricane Dorian in September


Associated Press Thu 19 Mar 2020
 

The Outer Banks are seen the morning after

 Hurricane Dorian struck Kill Devil Hills, 

North Carolina, in September. 

Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA


A pregnant cow who swam four miles to shore after being swept away by Hurricane Dorian in September has given birth to a “miracle” calf.

A photo of the “sea calf” was posted on Monday on Facebook by Ranch Solutions, a group hired to return the pregnant cow home to North Carolina’s Cedar Island, 350 miles east of Charlotte. The cow, Dori, was one of three swept away by Dorian that were found in the state’s Outer Banks, the Charlotte Observer reported.

The calf has one brown and one blue eye, Ranch Solutions said. Having differently colored eyes is a rare condition shared by various animals, including some wild horses.

Getting close to the mother and calf for a photo has been difficult, because they run at the sight of humans, a Cedar Island resident, Woody Hancock, told McClatchy News group. “The wild cattle that lived on Cedar Island were not used to seeing humans or having them approach them,” the state’s National Park Service said.

When Hurricane Dorian generated an 8ft (2-meter) “mini tsunami”, it washed the calf’s mother and dozens of other animals away, including 28 wild horses that died.

Garment workers face destitution as Covid-19 closes factories

Campaigners call for fashion brands to protect workers in their supply chains globally as coronavirus causes orders to dry up

A woman sits near sewing machines as workers occupy a recently closed garment factory in Myanmar to demand their salaries. Photograph: Lynn Bo Bo/EPA

Annie Kelly THE GUARDIAN Published on Thu 19 Mar 2020

The fashion industry is facing calls to step in and protect the wages of the 40 million garment workers in their supply chains around the world who face destitution as factories close and orders dry up in the wake of the Covid-19 epidemic.

Many factories in garment-producing countries including Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam are already closing due to a shortage of raw materials from China and declining orders from western clothing brands.

Quarantine and self-isolation measures being rapidly imposed by governments across the world are likely to see the wide-scale closure of thousands more factories in the days and week to come.

Campaigners are demanding that brands take responsibility for the millions of workers in their supply chains who are likely to fall into crippling poverty as they lose their jobs and struggle to provide for their families.


Major western brands pay Indian garment workers 11p an hour
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The Clean Clothes Campaign, a coalition of campaigning groups, is also calling on brands to ensure that workers who contract the virus are allowed to take sick leave without repercussions from the factories and continue to receive their wages throughout their period of self-isolation.


Scott Nova, executive director at the Worker Rights Consortium, part of the Clean Clothes Campaign, said that poverty wages, unsafe and unsanitary workplaces and poor health already makes the garment workforce highly vulnerable to the worst effects of the Covid-19 virus

“The fashion industry has evolved in a way that makes it hard in normal times for the people who actually make the clothes we all wear every day to survive on the poverty wages they are paid,” he said.

“While it is understandable that companies are focusing on the needs of their local staff, clothing retailers must accept that if they choose a business model that relies on the labour of millions of garment workers overseas, then these people are their workers as well.”

Nova says it is impossible that garment workers would be able to save enough from their salaries to have funds to fall back on if they lose their jobs or are unable to go into work.

“Many of these workers live in countries where labour laws and protections are not upheld,” he says. “The track record of how governments in garment-producing countries and the retailers who profit from cheap labour treat workers in this industry does not bode well for the weeks to come.”

The Clean Clothes Campaign is warning that factories are closing in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Albania and across Central America

The situation for garment workers in Cambodia and Myanmar is already dire as local media reports suggest up to 10% of factories in the Yangon region of Myanmar are already closed, with workers not being paid their salaries.

In Cambodia tens of thousands of garment workers could also lose their jobs in the coming weeks if the flow of raw materials into the country does not pick up.

Under Cambodian law, employers must seek government authorisation before suspending workers and pay them 40% of the $190 (£161) monthly minimum wage for up to six months. Yet local campaigners are saying that some factories have already sacked workers without pay. Many workers cannot afford to live on their normal salaries and are therefore in high levels of debt; they are now likely to default on their loans.

Tola Moeun, executive director of the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights said: “Apparel brands have been profiting from the labour of Cambodian workers. These brands now need to step up in this time of crisis.”

80 years of Robin: the forgotten history of the most iconic sidekick
Comics and graphic novels

They were bold, badass – and brief. But Batman’s short-lived female sidekicks give us hope that women in comics are good for more than just sticking in a fridge

Julia Savoca Gibson THE GUARDIAN Wed 18 Mar 2020
 

To mark the 80th anniversary, several artists have 

produced variant covers for DC Comics including 

this one by Julian Totino Tedesco.

Eighty years ago, Robin – perhaps the most iconic sidekick of all time, the “boy wonder”, the cheery presence at Batman’s brooding side – literally burst onto the scene on the cover of Detective Comics #38.

The first character to become Robin, Dick Grayson, defined the sidekick as we know him now, in his 44 years in the role: the endless puns and exclamations of “Holy … !”; the red, green and yellow tunic with a scaly speedo and pixie boots; the dependable pluckiness. His successor, Jason Todd, brought an edge to Robin when he took over in 1983: openly rebellious against Batman, he became the first Robin to die on the job. The third, Tim Drake, brought the character into the modern age in the 90s, with a new and bold “R” on his chest, hacking skills, and, at long last, some trousers; Drake was popular enough to land a solo series. In 2006, the fourth and current Robin, Damian Wayne, flipped the Dynamic Duo’s dynamic: after his father Bruce died (sort of), Damian became a dark and angry sidekick to a lighter, jokey Batman as Dick Grayson – the original Robin – wore the cowl. Damian would also later die – but, like Jason, his father and so many superheroes, he was resurrected.

But there are two more Robins, whose lives and legacies have been largely forgotten or ignored: the girl wonders Carrie Kelley and Stephanie Brown.

Carrie appeared as Robin in one comic, 1986’s The Dark Knight Returns, which is regarded as the most influential Batman comic in history. If you’ve encountered any version of the caped crusader since 1986, you’ve likely seen its legacy: a brutal and hardened Batman who fights Superman in a bulky exoskeleton and drives a tank-like Batmobile. But one element of the comic had very little impact: the first female Robin.

Carrie was similar to the other Robins in some ways: she wore the same suit, the pixieish boots, and, at 13 years old, was as sharp as she was witty. And in others, she was utterly different: a ginger girl – not a black-haired, blue-eyed boy – who was often absolutely terrified. Where the boy wonders were defined by their confidence (“Holy cocky teenage boy, Batman!”), Kelley’s fear powered her story. She was bold and badass, like the other Robins, but, unlike them, she could be afraid. In one scene in the Batcave, Carrie stares at the memorial casket for Jason, the dead Robin; when she learns that her predecessor died in the role, she is scared – but not discouraged.

These days, Carrie only exists in its sequels (which sit outside of DC’s main continuity), and in brief cameos across various Batman media. While The Dark Knight Returns will always be remembered, she is forgotten all the time.

Nearly 20 years later, in 2004, the second female Robin appeared. Stephanie Brown was a supporting character and love interest in the Robin series, which featured Tim Drake in the role. When Tim quits, Stephanie offers to take his place and Batman accepts. Stephanie was fired just two issues later for disobeying Batman’s orders, which, as anyone familiar with Robin will know, is one of the defining traits of the character. In the following story arc, War Games, while trying to prove herself to Batman, Stephanie is captured and brutally tortured in a highly sexualised manner by the villain Black Mask. She dies shortly after.

Stephanie was not the first Robin to die, nor the last. But unlike Jason Todd, she got no memorial. In 2008, four years after War Games, Stephanie was revealed to have faked her death and brought back into the batfamily. In one scene, Batman explains to Tim, who reclaimed the Robin mantle after Stephanie’s death, that he hadn’t made her a memorial because he had suspected she was alive. Tim seems unsatisfied with that excuse – as were many fans. 

All the official iterations of Robin, by Yasmine Putri. 

Photograph: Yasmine Putri/DC Comics

Why we’ve not had more female Robins – or better served ones – is a symptom of a much wider problem. Of the 11 writers announced as contributing to DC’s anniversary issue for Robin, only two are women: Devin Grayson and Amy Wolfram. Between January and March last year, women accounted for 16% of the credits on comics released by DC; of writers, only 13% were women. The studio celebrated 80 years of Batman last year, but in that time not a single woman has been at the helm of Batman or Detective Comics. Aside from Grayson’s work on Nightwing and Gotham Knights, no female writer has ever written a Batman series. Given how many women are working on Batgirl, Catwoman and Batwoman, it would seem they are restricted to writing female heroes.


In her final moments, Stephanie asks Batman: “Was any of it real? Was I ever really Robin?” He responds: “Of course you were.” But in 2007, when DC’s then executive editor Dan DiDio was asked about her not getting a memorial, he said: “She was never really a Robin.” By 2011, DC officially erased Stephanie’s time as Robin from the canon. That same year, Batgirl writer Dylan Horrocks revealed that Stephanie’s death was decided long before War Games, and that her time as Robin had been “planned purely as a trick to play on the readers”. Despite the objections of Horrocks and Grayson, Stephanie’s excruciating torture and death proceeded.


Few superheroes have so much potential to be more inclusive as Robin, since very few mantles are passed on as often

Violence against women in comics has long been prominent. In 1999, future DC Comics writer Gail Simone, along with other feminist fans, compiled the now famous list of Women in Refrigerators, a plot cliche named after the fate of Alexandra DeWitt, a girlfriend of Green Lantern who was murdered and stuffed into a fridge. Women in comics get “fridged” when they are raped, killed, maimed, tortured, or otherwise injured for the sake of a male character’s arc. Batman comics are particularly infamous for fridging Barbara Gordon in Alan Moore’s 1988 The Killing Joke. Barbara is shot and paralysed from the waist down by the Joker, in an act that serves to torment her father, Commissioner Gordon, and Batman. The comic does not explore the impact this had on Barbara. When Moore asked his editors if it was okay to paralyse Barbara, editor Len Wein reportedly responded: “Yeah, OK, cripple the bitch.”

So is there space for a girl wonder outside of fridges? Recent developments suggest that she isn’t out of reach. We Are … Robin followed a group of Gotham teenagers who take up the mantle to fight crime. The lead character, a black teenager named Duke Thomas, eventually made the leap into the batfamily proper as a new hero, The Signal, supported by an incredibly diverse cast of supporting characters – including women. However, these Robins haven’t appeared in comics since 2018. Still, We Are … Robin was a genuine way to show what Robin has come to symbolise: any kid, from anywhere, can be the most iconic sidekick in history.

But in the main story, that’s not the case. The first three Robins were white, blue-eyed, black-haired boys. Carrie, a white girl, doesn’t officially count; the fourth, Stephanie, was also white. Damian is of mixed Arab, Chinese and Caucasian descent – but he is often whitewashed, drawn no differently than the previous Robins and rarely written with heed to his identity. A casual reader could understandably mistake Damian for yet another white, blue-eyed, black-haired boy. They could also fairly assume Robin has been an exclusively male role.

Who is Robin for, then? Sidekicks are a way for younger people to tap into superhero fantasy. While young heroes such as Spider-Man also serve a younger audience, there is something special about sidekicks, and there’s something even more special about Robin. To be part of an 80-year history, to be chosen and trained by the Batman, one of the most recognisable figures in pop culture, and become instantly recognisable in his own right … few characters come close to Robin’s legacy. Few superheroes have so much potential to be more inclusive, too, since very few mantles are passed on as often.

Though Robin remains so very male, perhaps girls won’t always have to look backwards to find a girl wonder. When Damian moves on, there’ll be a new Robin. She might stand where Carrie once stared down at Jason’s memorial. (And maybe there will be one for Stephanie, too.) She’ll be scared, but not discouraged. She’ll don the red, green and yellow costume, and she will be Robin. Perhaps, one day. Until then, we’ll be waiting for her.

• The Robin 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular #1 is published today by DC Comics.

Deaths of despair: why America’s medical industry explains working-class suicides

A system based on corporate pursuit of profit sets the US apart from other countries, fleecing the poor to give to the rich

Chris McGreal Thu 19 Mar 2020 THE GUARDIAN
 

A dorm room for clients recovering from drug addiction is seen at Recovery Point in Huntington, West Virginia. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

The US healthcare system is helping to kill people in staggering numbers. And when it isn’t driving Americans to an early grave, the medical industry is bleeding the rest of the country of resources at the expense of decent jobs, crucial infrastructure and schools, according to a new book by two of the country’s leading economists.

As America’s health system faces its greatest challenge of recent times in the coronavirus, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who won the 2015 Nobel prize for economics, say the pursuit of profit by medical corporations has played a leading role in the surge of “deaths of despair” since the 1990s, led by opioid overdoses, alcoholism and suicide.


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The Princeton economists were the first to reveal the phenomenon which by 2017 was claiming the lives of 158,000 Americans every year – a number they liken to three 737s’ worth of passengers falling out of the sky every day. Case and Deaton, who are married, also discovered that the surge in deaths of despair was overwhelmingly among white working-class Americans without a university degree, and that it was forcing down life expectancy in the US.

Now their new book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, explores why this tragedy is an unusually American phenomenon and concludes that the greed of the US’s medical corporations was both an important driver in creating the conditions for the rise in deaths of despair and in providing the means for many to kill themselves.


There is something going on in America that is different, and that is particularly toxic for the working class

“There is something going on in America that is different, and that is particularly toxic for the working class,” they write.

The book springs from Case and Deaton’s shocking revelations five years ago about the causes of so many Americans dying in middle age and younger, a phenomenon not seen in any other industrialised country. Life expectancy rose sharply in the US through the 20th century but over the past two decades fell by 25% for white Americans without a university degree even as it continued to rise for the better educated and for other races. The geography of this tragedy – people dying younger in West Virginia and Mississippi and living longer in New York and California – reflects the country’s deepening class divide.

]A memorial in Huntington, West Virginia. 

The city has been portrayed as the epicenter 

of the opioid crisis. Photograph: 

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images


The couple concluded that the medical industry is at the heart of two key drivers in making those deaths an American phenomenon.

“One fact is that they unleashed these extremely powerful opioids on to the general public as if they were jelly beans at an Easter parade and that has not happened in Europe,” said Case. “The second is the way that we organise our healthcare system. We have the most expensive healthcare in the world and how do we pay for that? We pay for that per person.”

That has created a system Case and Deaton described as “Sheriff of Nottingham redistribution” in the fleecing of the poor to give to rich corporations while the high cost of healthcare forces companies to shed jobs and drives firms to bankruptcy.

“The American healthcare system is a leading example of an institution that, under political protection, redistributes income upwards to hospitals, physicians, device-makers, and pharmaceutical companies while delivering among the worst health outcomes of any rich country,” the economists write.

That in turn has contributed to the retreat of steady, decently paid work in working-class communities at the cost of social cohesion and helped drive the retreat to drugs and alcohol, and an increase in suicides.


“The pillars that held communities together are a job with meaning, a family life that was stable, getting to know and raise your kids, and hope for them for the future,” said Case. “Attachment to traditional churches fell dramatically as well. In the US, organised religion is an incredibly important institution and gave people a place of comfort during difficult times.”

The economists say that while globalisation and technical change, particularly robots, are often blamed for destabilising communities, other industrialised countries facing similar challenges have not experienced a comparable rise in deaths of despair. They conclude that the greed of America’s medical industry played a central role, calling it “a cancer at the heart of the economy” that has resulted in a “uniquely American calamity that is undermining American lives”.

“Unlike the countries of Europe, we have let the healthcare sector just run totally free. Totally, in that it was 5% of GDP in 1960 and it’s 18% of GDP today. It’s eating the economy from the inside out,” said Case.

In other industrialised countries medical treatment is covered at least to some degree by public funds. The structure of US healthcare passes the cost to the individual or their employer through private insurance. As the medical industry has grown more rapacious, so insurance premiums have surged and patients have been required to make ever larger out-of-pocket payments that can amount to thousands of dollars a year.

US drugmakers charge up to 10 times as much for insulin in a country where diabetes is rampant as they do across the border in Canada. For many Americans, the extra hundreds of dollars a month are not covered by insurance.


“The cost of healthcare is like a tribute that Americans have to pay to a foreign power,” the economists write. 

The sometimes staggering cost of healthcare means that Americans in need of everyday items such as insulin to treat diabetes resort to the black market. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Case and Deaton said that has taken a toll on employers too over the past two decades and contributed to the decline of working-class communities.

“Firms used to be able to afford to be the providers of social insurance, both healthcare and defined benefit plans for pensions. But we don’t live in that world any more. So that as healthcare becomes more and more expensive, these firms can’t afford to keep on workers that aren’t worth to them what they have to pay for their healthcare,” said Case.

So jobs get outsourced to contract workers who, if they have health insurance through their employers at all, find that it comes with requirements to pay thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs before their insurance kicks in. Many low-income families deal with this by not going to the doctor except in an emergency, or taking only take half their prescription pills each day to minimise costs, and so compounding the social crisis as their health fails.

The burden of extortionate medical costs is also felt by state governments forced to divert funds from crucial infrastructure maintenance, education and other public work projects to fund the public Medicaid scheme for very low-income families.


It’s not a free market at all. It’s a giant swamp


The economists attribute this to a failure of capitalism, arguing that healthcare and the free market are incompatible. But Deaton, a Scot who is now also a US citizen, scoffs at the idea that this is the free market at work when medical corporations pour vast amounts of money into buying politicians and laws to protect what he goes so far as to suggest is a corrupt health system.

“It’s not a free market at all. It’s a swamp. It’s a giant swamp that’s killing people in large numbers and making a lot of providers very rich,” said Deaton.

Case hopes their research will “help people connect the dots between what’s happened in the healthcare industry and what’s happening to low-wage workers in America.

“If enough people understood that the reason that these once great state universities have to increase their tuition to the point where in-state kids can’t go any more because the state can’t afford to fund them, because their Medicaid bills are so expensive; or if people understood that the reason that infrastructure is decaying is because the states don’t have the money because they’re paying their Medicaid bills; or if people understood that the reason that they’re being outsourced is because of the cost of healthcare premiums, maybe there might be enough of a push for cost control to actually see real change,” she said.

That may become even more evident if the toll of the coronavirus includes bankrupting medical bills for weeks of treatment for large numbers of Americans. But Deaton does not underestimate the forces arrayed against change.

“This is a system that was designed by an immensely clever team of devils who programmed it in a way that is self-protecting and really difficult to change,” he said.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Princeton University Press, $29.95 / £25

Disinformation and blame: how America's far right is capitalizing on coronavirus

The pandemic, a situation in which people are panic-buying supplies, is ideal for a movement powered by fear and lies
 

Conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones has used the outbreak to step up his aggressive pitching for bulk food products and other survival goods sold on his website. Photograph: Jonathan Drake/Reuters

Jason Wilson THE GUARDIAN Thu 19 Mar 2020

The far right in America has received the coronavirus pandemic in much the same manner as any other event: with disinformation, conspiracies and scapegoating. Many seem to see it as a significant opportunity, whether it is for financial gain, recruiting new followers, or both.

The delayed and much criticized response to coronavirus by the Trump administration has helped them, leaving many Americans confused, bereft of information and looking for answers. A situation in which people are panic-buying supplies is ideal for a movement powered by fear and lies.


Trump says 'keep politics out' of coronavirus then picks fight with Democrats

Apocalyptic narratives – whether of societal collapse, biblical rapture, or race war – are the central way that the a spectrum of far-right movements draw in followers and resources. These narratives use fear to draw followers closer, allowing leaders to direct their followers’ actions, and maybe fleece them blind.

For the survivalist elements of the far right, the coronavirus provides an opportunity to say that they told us so, win hearts and minds and make money. If they’re lucky, they might even get a hearing by the mainstream media.

The conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones, for example, who has been warning of imminent cataclysms for more than 20 years, has used the outbreak to step up his aggressive pitching for bulk food products and other survival goods sold on his website.

Others have been assisted by mainstream media outlets in making the case that they are reasonable people who have been making reasonable preparations all along.

James Wesley Rawles, the reclusive founder of the separatist and survivalist American Redoubt movement, was interviewed by Dow Jones website, MarketWatch, about his approach to prepping.

They asked him about food storage and the pandemic. They did not ask Rawles about his position as the ideological godfather of a movement which promotes “political migration” by rightwing Christians to the interior of the Pacific north-west.

In a time of crisis, far-right figures are hoping for exactly this kind of wider exposure.

Farther out on the neo-Nazi right, in the Telegram channels where “accelerationists” – who seek to hasten the end of liberal democracy in order to build a white ethnostate – overlap with “ecofascists” – who propose genocidal solutions to ecological problems – groups are openly talking about how to use the crisis to recruit people to terroristic white supremacy.

One group posted a text that suggested “narratives that should be pushed”, including that “our current system is inadequate for modern issues”, and “everything that is bad that is happening is the fault of the system and its failings, not pandemics or markets.”

They also suggest forming “civil support groups” to fill the gaps left by the state, but only for recruitment purposes. They have no interest in restoring calm. “The more things destabilize the easier they are to continue to keep in flux”, the post continues, “now is the time to push when things are already teetering on the edge”.

Like many on the far right, these groups gleefully anticipate societal collapse, and what they might gain from it.

The other way in which various far-right groups and believers hope to gain ground is by proposing conspiracy theories about the causes and origins of the virus, and to use these narratives to scapegoat groups like immigrants, or minorities or liberals.

However, some are still following the lead set by Donald Trump in the earlier part of the crisis, and remain in denial. On Telegram, the has-been alt-right internet personality Milo Yiannopoulos asked his followers in a poll which was the “biggest hoax of our lifetime: Acid Rain, Climate Change, Satanic Ritual Abuse, Coronavirus”.

Others have more elaborate theories with which to focus their followers’ rage.

Along with his cash-in supplies, Jones has managed to slot coronavirus into his overarching conspiracy theories. Jones – an unwavering Trump supporter – has a neat solution to the problem of taking advantage of the commercial opportunities presented by virus without criticizing Trump’s lackadaisical response. He claims that Covid-19 is a human-made bioweapon, produced by the Chinese government to bring Trump down.

A similar conspiracy theory has made its way into the brains of more mainstream figures. This posits the idea that software mogul Bill Gates and financier and philanthropist George Soros were involved in concocting the virus with the Chinese Communist party.

In a now-deleted tweet on 27 February, the Republican California congressional candidate Joanne Wright wrote: “The Corona virus is a man made virus created in a Wuhan laboratory. Ask @BillGates who financed it.” In another disappeared tweet, she added: “Doesn’t @BillGates finance research at the Wuhan lab where the Corona virus was being created? Isn’t @georgesoros a good friend of Gates?”

As Trump has gradually moved towards an acknowledgment that the virus exists, he has also been leading the charge in scapegoating immigrants and foreigners for spreading the illness. He has repeatedly tweeted throughout early March that the US epidemic would be worse were it not for his administration’s border policies, and called it a “foreign virus”.

Trump sought to apportion blame, then, in a way that furthered his political agenda and has been amplified by his rightwing allies. In that spirit, the Liberty University president and evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr – a high-profile backer of Trump – last week aired the theory that coronavirus was a North Korean bioweapon.

The legal stuff is garbage': why Canada's cannabis black market keeps thriving

North America’s biggest companies have seen their market values lose billions, prompting comparisons to dotcom bust


William Turvill THE GUARDIAN Wed 18 Mar 2020
 

A customer sniffs a display sample of marijuana at a retail shop in Vancouver.

 Photograph: Elaine Thompson/AP

Cannabis may be legal in Vancouver but visitors looking to score are likely to run into a seemingly counterintuitive suggestion: try the black market.

Recreational marijuana was legalised across Canada in October 2018. And yet on Reddit, the specialist forum website used by millions every day, many of Vancouver’s cannabis connoisseurs still swear by their underground supply.

This is one of the major issues facing North America’s marijuana companies, which experts say are in the midst of a dotcom-style market crash.

On a high: Canada celebrates cannabis being legalised

Canada and 11 US states have legalised recreational use of the drug, and a little over a year ago companies that cultivate and sell cannabis were seen by investors as one of the hottest tickets in town. Now billions of dollars have been wiped off the market values of the industry’s largest companies.

The North American Marijuana Index, which tracks listed firms in the sector, has plummeted about 80% in the last year and is at its lowest value since 2016, before much legalisation had taken place.

The market capitalisation of Canopy Growth, the biggest firm in the sector by value, has fallen from $24bn in April last year to just over $6bn now, according to figures from the financial data firm Y Charts.

Around $2bn of that loss has come in the last week. Coronavirus fears, which have dragged down stocks across the globe, have not helped. But a large part of Canopy’s latest share price drop came after the firm was forced to admit that it was struggling in Canada.

The company announced last Wednesday that it would be closing two cultivation greenhouses in British Columbia – the western Canadian province where Vancouver is found – leading to 500 job losses. Canopy, which will be focusing on more cost-effective outdoor cultivation, also cancelled plans for a third greenhouse in Ontario.

Bosses blamed the cutbacks on Canada’s recreational market, which they said had “developed slower than anticipated”.

The consensus on Vancouver’s cannabis-focused Reddit feeds is that the legal market is struggling to attract buyers because its product is more expensive but lower in quality than the black market alternative.

“The government’s pot is too expensive. The government doesn’t show you a picture of what you’re buying before you buy it, so you cannot be informed as a consumer. The government weed has been full of bugs, mouldy or too dry in some cases, and often takes too long to get there,” one user said.

“The legal stuff is garbage,” said another Reddit user. A third said: “Friends don’t let friends smoke government weed.”

The sentiment is not confined to the realms of Reddit. Canadian government survey results released last month found that 40% of the country’s marijuana consumers admit to having obtained the drug illegally since legalisation.

Omar Yar Khan, national cannabis sector lead at the consultancy firm Hill & Knowlton, says legal sales have fallen short of expectations for a number of reasons. Legal prices – driven up by taxes – have been a factor in helping keep the black market “as rampant as ever”, he says.

But Khan, who advises several cannabis companies on public affairs, also believes firms have suffered in Canada at the hands of regulations that restrict their ability to develop brands.

There are strict rules around advertising for cannabis companies. Khan said: “It’s very hard to draw loyal consumers away from the illicit market to a legal market when there is very little brand identity amongst the consumer groups.”

Companies have also been held back in their efforts to open stores, often by local authorities that are against cannabis being sold in their areas.

“There just aren’t enough legal licensed points of sale across the country,” Khan said. “I think in Ontario now we’re up to about 30. But there are over a thousand beverage alcohol points of sale. So if it’s not convenient for consumers to access the product through the legal system, why would they ever leave the legacy illicit market?”

Malawi legalises cannabis amid hopes of fresh economic growth

Anthony Dutton, a co-founder and former chief executive of Cannex – a US-focused marijuana firm that is listed in Canada and was recently renamed 4Front following a takeover – believes share prices in the sector have been driven down by certain firms overpromising to investors. He believes some of these companies are likely to collapse or be taken over by stronger rivals in the future.

Dutton, who remains a shareholder in 4Front and still advises the firm, likens the current woes of listed cannabis companies to the dotcom crash of the early 2000s.

“The market got ahead of itself, started to drink its own Kool-Aid, and it was a classic example of any bubble,” he said. “So what we’re seeing now, thankfully, is a lot of the companies that probably should never have been financed – and probably should never have gone public in the first place – are slowly withering on the vine and they’ll just disappear.

“Now there will be a consolidation around half a dozen strong operating companies, including 4Front, and those will be the companies that will take it into the next cycle.”

He added: “It’s just like in the dotcom boom. Oracle, Microsoft and other big companies were all around then, and they were profitable. And when the little companies began to fail, Microsoft and Oracle and the others picked up the ones they wanted, and the others they just let die.”

Kevin Sabet, the head of Smart Approaches to Marijuana – a campaign group that opposes lifting laws on the drug – says the legalisation of cannabis has been a “boon” to the black market in many areas because it means consumers are less concerned about trying the product.

Sabet, who has advised White House administrations on drug policy, also believes cannabis companies have misled their investors and politicians about the societal and financial benefits of legalisation.

“The cannabis business has been oversold to investors as a sure thing to get a great return,” he said. “I think there was a big hype over cannabis that has ended up being a reputation it could never live up to.”