Paradise regained then lost: Med mammals mourn lockdown end

Issued on: 14/07/2020 -

Aquatic creatures such as these common dolphins swimming off the southern French coast benefited from less sound pollution from pleasure craft during lockdown Christophe SIMON AFP

La Ciotat (France) (AFP)

When Europeans retreated into their homes to observe strict stay-at-home rules to contain the coronavirus, dolphins and whales on the Mediterranean coast basked and thrived in a hitherto unknown calm.

But the return of tourists, noisy boats and heavy sea transport with the end of lockdowns in France and other Mediterranean littoral countries has signalled the return of danger and harm caused by human activity for underwater creatures.

Nowhere is this more true then in the crystalline waters outside France's second biggest city of Marseille, a nature reserve important for wildlife but also thronged with day-trippers in the summer season.


"As soon as the pleasure boaters came back, we saw footage that really annoyed us," said Marion Leclerc from the conservationist organisation Souffleurs d'Ecume (Sea Foam Blowers).

In one video, three teenagers jump from a boat close to a finback whale while wearing snorkelling masks, which is dangerous for both animal and human, said Leclerc.

"We're speaking of an animal that weighs 70 tons," she lamented.

"Many forget that the Mediterranean is also a home, where animals rest, feed and reproduce," Leclerc said.

The Mediterranean Sea is home to more than 10,000 species, despite only amounting to 1 percent of the Earth's oceans.

But the sea which separates Africa from Europe draws 25 percent of marine traffic.

Heavy traffic increases the risk of fatal collision with the sea mammals.

"It's the first cause of non-natural mortality for big cetaceans," said Leclerc.

- Reduce speed -

Out of the 87 marine mammals in the world registered by the UN, 21 have been spotted in the Mediterranean. Most of them are considered at risk of extinction.

On a bright summer's morning, a group of fifty striped dolphins splash around an inflatable blue speedboat off La Ciotat bay a short boat ride from Marseille.

"We need to reduce our speed and place ourselves parallel to their trajectory to avoid cutting their path. They come and play if they want to," said Laurene Trudelle, at the helm of the boat belonging to the scientific research group GIS3M.

The lockdown brought maritime traffic to an almost complete standstill, giving dolphins and whales the opportunity to explore areas from which they are normally kept at bay by tourists.

All scientific studies were put on hold in the Mediterranean during lockdown, but marine drone manufacturer Sea Proven got the necessary authorisation and funds from Prince Albert II of Monaco to continue observations in the Pelagos Sanctuary, a marine area protected by Italy, Monaco and France.

- 'Reversible pollution' -

Bioacoustics researchers from a Toulon University team who analysed Sea Proven's data, observed a 30 decibel decrease in noise on the coastal areas as a result of the total lack of pleasure boaters.

And the silence allowed the aquatic creatures to interact in areas between two and six times as large, said researcher Herve Glotin.

"The lockdown period showed that we really are responsible for the noise in the bays and that this pollution is completely reversible," Glotin said.

"When you think that reducing boats' speed by 10 percent in areas highly populated with marine mammals would be enough to significantly decrease sound pollution and the risk of collision" Glotin added.

The Quiet Sea research project also saw the amount of hydrocarbon -– the principal component of petrol –- halve during lockdown.

"It's really good for biodiversity, so indirectly for all of the food chain," said Glotin.

No binding international law obliges ship-owners to preserve marine mammals' natural habitat.

But since 2017, France requires boats that are over 24 metres (78 feet) in the Pelagos Sanctuary to have onboard equipment which detects the animals.

© 2020 AFP

Mystery as Argentine sailors infected with virus after 35 days at sea
Issued on: 14/07/2020

The Echizen Maru fishing trawler returned to port in Ushuaia after some of its crew began exhibiting symptoms typical of COVID-19 EITAN ABRAMOVICH AFP/File
Buenos Aires (AFP)

Argentina is trying to solve a medical mystery after 57 sailors were infected with the coronavirus after 35 days at sea, despite the entire crew testing negative before leaving port.

The Echizen Maru fishing trawler returned to port after some of its crew began exhibiting symptoms typical of COVID-19, the health ministry for the southern Tierra del Fuego province said Monday.

According to the ministry, 57 sailors, out of 61 crew members, were diagnosed with the virus after undergoing a new test.


However, all of the crew members had undergone 14 days of mandatory quarantine at a hotel in the city of Ushuaia. Prior to that, they had negative results, the ministry said in a statement.

Two of the other sailors have tested negative, and two others are awaiting test results, the province's emergency operations committee said.

Two sailors were hospitalized.

"It's hard to establish how this crew was infected, considering that for 35 days, they had no contact with dry land and that supplies were only brought in from the port of Ushuaia," said Alejandra Alfaro, the director of primary health care in Tierra del Fuego.

A team was examining "the chronology of symptoms in the crew to establish the chronology of contagion," she said.

The head of the infectious diseases department at Ushuaia Regional Hospital, Leandro Ballatore, said he believed this is a "case that escapes all description in publications, because an incubation period this long has not been described anywhere."

"We cannot yet explain how the symptoms appeared," said Ballatore.

The crew was placed in isolation on board the ship and returned to the port of Ushuaia.

Argentina exceeded 100,000 total cases on Sunday, and the death toll rose to 1,859. The majority of infections are in the Buenos Aires area.

© 2020 AFP

Denmark's German refugees remember forgotten WWII chapter

Issued on: 14/07/2020 -
   

In a largely forgotten chapter of the dying days of World War II, some 250,000 German refugees were interned in refugee camps across Denmark -- still then occupied by the Nazis -- where they were not made to feel welcome Erik PETERSEN Ritzau Scanpix/AFP

Copenhagen (AFP)

Barbed wire and tunneling beneath it to go and pick flowers outside his refugee camp in Denmark are what Jorg Baden remembers most clearly 75 years on from World War II.

Baden's experience -- a largely forgotten chapter of history -- was one shared by some 250,000 fellow Germans interned in neighbouring Denmark following the conflict.

Between the ages of five and eight, Baden -- now a cheerful German pensioner -- was a refugee in Denmark, after his family and tens of thousands of his compatriots fled Germany as the Red Army advanced towards Berlin.

From February 1945 Denmark, then occupied by the Nazis, was forced to take those refugees, the majority consisting of old people, women and children, as well as wounded soldiers.

Mostly spared the fighting, the Scandinavian nation was Berlin's favoured destination for exiles.

The lion's share of the refugees arrived by boat, some of which were torpedoed by the Allies, across the Baltic Sea. They initially ended up in makeshift camps around the country.

After the May 5 "liberation of Denmark by the Allies, the Danish resistance realised that there were about 250.000 German refugees all over Denmark," accounting for five percent of the population, John Jensen, historian at Varde Museum, told AFP.

Fearing the establishment of a German minority with too much influence, the refugees were gathered up into new larger camps or re-purposed military camps.

- Curtailed Hippocratic oath -

Exhausted from the journey and plagued by various illnesses, many refugees died shortly after arriving.

Some never received medical assistance as the Danish Medical Association recommended that its members should refrain from intervening.

"The common thought was if Danish doctors helped a refugee they were indirectly helping the German war machine," Sine Vinther, historian at Roskilde University, said.

Between 1945 and 1949, when the last refugees left the country, 17,000 died, with 13,000 of those in 1945 alone -- 60 percent of whom were children under the age of five.

According to Vinther that is more than the number of Danes killed during the occupation.

But even after the end of the occupation, Danish doctors remained hesitant to offer help.

"They could not get rid of their enemy image of Germans... Danish doctors failed their oaths in this period of Danish history," Vinther told AFP at the Vestre Kierkegaard cemetery in Copenhagen, where more than 5,000 German refugees were laid to rest.

Jorg Baden was one of the lucky ones to receive help. At five years old he came down with diphtheria, but was hospitalised and treated.

"It was a critical time for many children, but I made it through," the former English and history teacher said.

He recalled his family's hasty escape from Warnemunde in north Germany and the perilous journey across the Baltic to Haderslev in Denmark.

- Not welcome -

At the end of September 1945, they were transferred the Oksbol camp -- which would come to house up to 37,000 people, becoming the de facto sixth largest town in Denmark.

"We were first accommodated in horse stables which was very primitive... we had very little privacy," Baden said.

"But my father was asked to teach mathematics... because of that we were allowed to move to a stone house where we had a room for ourselves, running water and flushing toilets which was a great step forward," Baden, who is now 80, explained.

That was a luxury at the camp which allowed the family to live a "quite unspectacular and normal" life.

The camps were set up on the fringes of Danish society with the authorities aiming to "de-Nazify" the refugees.

"The general idea was to re-educate them to a more democratic way of thinking," Jensen noted.

According to Vinther, the "refugees were almost prisoners."

"Danes were not allowed to interact with German refugees, the German refugees were not allowed to learn Danish or to talk to Danes because they were not supposed to get the feeling that they were wanted," she said.

However, leaving Denmark took longer than expected.

"The Germans wanted to go back but they weren't welcome in the areas they came from, so the Danes had to negotiate with the Allied powers to repatriate them," Jensen explained.

Jorg Baden and his family left Denmark for his father's hometown of Duisburg, where he had found work with the British army, in September 1947.

© 2020 AFP

SUNNI DAESH WAR ON THE SUFI
Malian jihadist on trial at ICC over Timbuktu destruction, crimes against humanity
Issued on: 14/07/2020 

Malian Muslim militant Al-Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud arrives for his trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, The Netherlands. He is accused of demolishing Timbuktu's fabled shrines, as well as for rape, torture and sex slavery. AFP - EVA PLEVIER

Text by:NEWS WIRES

The trial of a Malian jihadist accused of demolishing Timbuktu's fabled shrines and unleashing a reign of terror begins at the International Criminal Court on Tuesday.

Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud, 42, has been charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, rape and sexual slavery.

The charges cover a period when Islamic fundamentalists exploited an ethnic Tuareg uprising in 2012 to take over cities in Mali's volatile north.

Prosecutors at the tribunal in The Hague will give their opening statement against the man they described in pre-trial hearings as having "terrorised" local residents.

The defence and the legal representatives of alleged victims will deliver their statements at a later date when evidence is presented to the court.


Because of the coronavirus pandemic some participants in the trial will take part remotely, and it was unclear whether Al Hassan would personally be in court.

Jihadists who swept into Timbuktu, dubbed the "Pearl of the Desert", considered the shrines there to be idolatrous and wrecked them with pickaxes and bulldozers.

Built between the fifth and the 12th centuries by Tuareg tribes, Timbuktu has also been dubbed "The City of 333 Saints" who were buried there during the golden age of Islam.

'Essential, undeniable role'

ICC prosecutors said there were "substantial grounds" to convict Al Hassan for "crimes against humanity... torture, rape, sexual slavery (and) other inhumane acts including, inter alia, forced marriages, persecution and war crimes."

"Al Hassan played an essential and undeniable role in the system of persecution established by the armed groups... in Timbuktu," ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said last year.

The jihadist police imposed draconian measures on the city's residents who lived in constant fear of "despicable" violence and repression, prosecutors said.

They cited an example in which a man had his hand amputated after he was accused of petty theft.

Al Hassan is the second Islamist extremist to face trial at the ICC for the destruction of the Timbuktu shrines, following a 2016 landmark ruling at the world's only permanent war crimes court.

In the court's first case to focus on cultural destruction, the ICC judges found Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi guilty of directing attacks on the UNESCO World Heritage site in 2012.

He was sentenced to nine years in jail.

Timbuktu's tombs were rebuilt after the jihadists were thrown out, but the city remains in the grip of insecurity and tourists who once flocked there are no

Arctic spill fuels calls for shakeup at Russia mining giant



Issued on: 14/07/2020 - 10:20Modified: 14/07/2020 - 10:19

  

A massive clean up effort involved trapping floating diesel with booms on crucial water ways to prevent it flowing into fresh water lakes Irina YARINSKAYA AFP/File

Moscow (AFP)

Russian mining giant Norilsk Nickel faced pressure from a key shareholder on Tuesday to overhaul management after disasters including a massive Arctic fuel spill that sparked a state of emergency.

Aluminium producer Rusal, which owns 28 percent in Norilsk Nickel, said it was "seriously concerned" over recent environmental accidents in the Russian Arctic and called for a shakeup in management.

"What is currently happening at Nornickel invites to seriously question the competence of the company's management as well as their suitability to be in charge of running the business," Rusal said in a statement.


It also criticised the management's "collective inertia" that it said was likely to lead to "damaging criticism from the environmental and investment communities".

President Vladimir Putin declared a state of emergency after 21,000 tonnes of diesel leaked from a fuel storage tank at one of Norilsk Nickel's subsidiary plants in the Arctic in late May.

A massive clean up effort involved trapping floating diesel with booms on crucial waterways to prevent it flowing into freshwater lakes.

Putin has said he expected Norilsk Nickel to fully restore the environment.

Rusal said it was calling on Norilsk Nickel to move its headquarters from Moscow to the Arctic city of Norilsk -- the site of several recent environmental accidents including the fuel spill.

In the statement, the aluminium producer appealed to Norilsk Nickel to overhaul "corporate policies towards environmental and safety issues".

Russia's environmental watchdog Rosprirodnadzor fined a Norilsk Nickel subsidiary 147.8 billion rubles ($2.05 billion) over the spill, but the company is contesting the sum.

© 2020 AFP

"ORC'S ON THE HORIZON" GANDALF  
Astronomers perplexed by "Odd Radio Circles," a newly discovered, very rare space phenomenon
"I AM PERPLEXED" ALEISTER CROWLEY
Invisible except in the radio wave portion of the spectrum, only four Odd Radio Circles have been discovered
CROP CIRCLES IN SPACE

The Australian Square Kilometre Array (ESO/CSIRO)


NICOLE KARLIS
JULY 13, 2020 

Astronomers believe they have discovered a new, bizarre type of cosmic object that is invisible to all wavelengths of light except radio.

The strange circular objects in question have been unofficially dubbed "Odd Radio Circles" (ORCs); three of them were discovered in a recent data accumulated during a preliminary survey by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, a radio telescope array in Western Australia. A fourth Odd Radio Circle was discovered when researchers sifted through old data from 2013.

The new phenomenon is the focus of a new paper published on the preprint website arXiv, which was submitted to Nature Astronomy by a group of international astronomers. It is yet to be peer-reviewed.

"Here we report the discovery of a class of circular feature in radio images that do not seem to correspond to any of these known types of object or artefact, but rather appear to be a new class of astronomical object," the authors of the paper write.

The ORCs are mostly circular in shape, with the exception of one shaped like a disc, and they cannot be seen with infrared, optical, or X-ray telescopes. Three of them are brighter around the edges.

The circular nature of the ORCs has led to some curiosity over their true nature. "Circular features are well-known in radio astronomical images, and usually represent a spherical object such as a supernova remnant, a planetary nebula, a circumstellar shell, or a face-on disc such as a protoplanetary disc or a star-forming galaxy," the researchers write.

Astronomers initially believed the ORCs may have been a telescope glitch — which is why the discovery of the fourth ORC, from data that was gathered in 2013 by the Giant MetreWave Radio Telescope in India, was key to the finding. That observation ruled out the possibility that the phenomenon was merely an artifact of the specific Australian radiotelescope array.

So what could these strange, circular radio objects be? In the paper, the researchers suggest a list of scenarios. First, they rule out that ORCs could be remnants of a supernova, mainly because of how rare ORCs are. Galactic planetary nebulas are ruled out, too, for the same reason. "[I]f the ORCs are [supernova remnants], which they strongly resemble, then this implies a population of SNRs [supernova remnants] in the Galaxy some 50 times larger than the currently accepted figure, or else a new class of SNR which has not previously been reported," the researchers explain.

The circular nature of the ORCs has led to some curiosity over their true nature. "Circular features are well-known in radio astronomical images, and usually represent a spherical object such as a supernova remnant, a planetary nebula, a circumstellar shell, or a face-on disc such as a protoplanetary disc or a star-forming galaxy," the researchers write.

Astronomers initially believed the ORCs may have been a telescope glitch — which is why the discovery of the fourth ORC, from data that was gathered in 2013 by the Giant MetreWave Radio Telescope in India, was key to the finding. That observation ruled out the possibility that the phenomenon was merely an artifact of the specific Australian radiotelescope array.

So what could these strange, circular radio objects be? In the paper, the researchers suggest a list of scenarios. First, they rule out that ORCs could be remnants of a supernova, mainly because of how rare ORCs are. Galactic planetary nebulas are ruled out, too, for the same reason. "[I]f the ORCs are [supernova remnants], which they strongly resemble, then this implies a population of SNRs [supernova remnants] in the Galaxy some 50 times larger than the currently accepted figure, or else a new class of SNR which has not previously been reported," the researchers explain.

Instead, they suspect the ORCs are a circular wave that appeared after some sort of extra-galactic "transient" event—like fast-radio bursts, another mysterious but far better documented astronomical phenomena.

"The edge-brightening in some ORCs suggests that this circular image may represent a spherical object, which in turn suggests a spherical wave from some transient event," the researchers write. "Several such classes of transient events, capable of producing a spherical shock wave, have recently been discovered, such as fast radio bursts, gamma-ray bursts, and neutron star mergers."

The researchers add that because of the "large angular size" the transient event in question "would have taken place in the distant past."

Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard's astronomy department, told Salon via email that he thinks the ORCs are "likely the result of radio emission from a spherical shock that resulted from an energy source at their center."

"They have a characteristic diameter of about an arcminute, corresponding to a physical length of ten light years (a few parsec) at our distance from most stars in the Milky Way or ten million light years (a few mega-parsecs) at our distance from most galaxies in the visible universe," Loeb said. "The former is a reasonable length scale for a supernova remnant, whereas the latter is a reasonable scale for the reach of the jets produced by the most powerful quasars."

However, since the distance to the source of the event is unknown, it remains unclear which interpretation is more likely.

Loeb added that the most likely explanation is that the ORCs are "the result of outflows from galaxies."

"We know that galaxies have powerful winds, driven by supernova explosions and quasar activity in their cores," Loeb said. "The collision of these outflows with the intergalactic medium is predicted to produce radio shells on the scale of the distance between galaxies, which is a few million light years, exactly as needed at a cosmological distance."
Advertisement:

Two decades ago, Loeb co-authored two papers theoretically predicting these "radio halos."
"Perhaps this is an indication that they exist," he added.

NICOLE KARLIS
Nicole Karlis is a news writer at Salon. She covers health, science, tech and gender politics. Tweet her @nicolekarlis.

The affluent are consuming the planet to death: study

1500 BILLIONAIRES OWN OUR COMMONWEALTH 

ALL 8 BILLION OF US!!!

A study argues that it is not enough to invest in green technologies; the world's affluent must stop overconsuming 

Jeff Bezos, laughing at the world (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

MATTHEW ROZSA
JUNE 23, 2020

A new study published this month in the academic journal Nature Communications argues that, despite all of the talk about using green technology to address man-made environmental problems, the only way for human consumption to become sustainable is if we rein in the affluent.

"The key conclusion from our review is that we cannot rely on technology alone to solve existential environmental problems – like climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution – but that we also have to change our affluent lifestyles and reduce overconsumption, in combination with structural change," Professor Tommy Wiedmann from the University of New South Wales Engineering told that college's newspaper regarding the study.

The paper itself argued that "the affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions." The authors added that "existing societies, economies and cultures incite consumption expansion and the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibits necessary societal change" and advocated "a global and rapid decoupling of detrimental impacts from economic activity," pointing out that the efforts made by global North countries to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are "highly unlikely" to occur rapidly enough on a global scale to stave off catastrophic environmental impacts.

"This is because renewable energy, electrification, carbon-capturing technologies and even services all have resource requirements, mostly in the form of metals, concrete and land," the authors point out. "Rising energy demand and costs of resource extraction, technical limitations and rebound effects aggravate the problem."

After observing that "the world's top 10% of income earners are responsible for between 25 and 43% of environmental impact" while "the world's bottom 10% income earners exert only around 3–5% of environmental impact," the authors that environmental damage is largely caused by the world's "affluent" and therefore needs to be confronted by demanding lifestyle changes among the wealthy.



In other words, the world's poorest have a negligible effect on overall environmental devastation; focusing on their consumption or behavior is a fool's errand when it comes to environmental policy. 

"Considering that the lifestyles of wealthy citizens are characterised by an abundance of choice, convenience and comfort, we argue that the determinant and driver we have referred to in previous sections as consumption, is more aptly labelled as affluence," the authors point out. They advocate reducing avoiding or reducing consumption "until the remaining consumption level falls within planetary boundaries, while fulfilling human needs," with the wealthy abstain from purchasing overly large homes and secondary residences, large vehicles, excessive quantities of food, and engaging in leisure activities that require a great deal of flying and driving.

The authors also argue for consumption patterns "to be shifted away from resource and carbon-intensive goods and services, e.g. mobility from cars and airplanes to public buses and trains, biking or walking, heating from oil heating to heat pumps, nutrition — where possible — from animal to seasonal plant-based products." In addition, they call for "the adoption of less affluent, simpler and sufficiency-oriented lifestyles to address overconsumption — consuming better but less." This approach would need to include "addressing socially unsustainable underconsumption in impoverished communities in both less affluent and affluent countries, where enough and better is needed to achieve a more equal distribution of wealth and guarantee a minimum level of prosperity to overcome poverty."

 The authors acknowledged that there are several schools of thought regarding how to best meet these goals.

"The reformist group consists of heterogeneous approaches such as a-growth, precautionary/pragmatic post-growth, prosperity and managing without growth as well as steady-state economics," the authors write. "These approaches have in common that they aim to achieve the required socio-ecological transformation through and within today's dominant institutions, such as centralised democratic states and market economies." By contrast the second group, which is "more radical," posits that "the needed socio-ecological transformation will necessarily entail a shift beyond capitalism and/or current centralised states. Although comprising considerable heterogeneity, it can be divided into eco-socialist approaches, viewing the democratic state as an important means to achieve the socio-ecological transformation and eco-anarchist approaches, aiming instead at participatory democracy without a state, thus minimising hierarchies."



Salon interviewed several scientists and scholars earlier this month about how the coronavirus pandemic has illustrated many of the sustainability problems inherent in capitalism. One problem with capitalist economic systems is that they rely on constantly increasing consumption in order to maintain periods of prosperity. If unexpected disasters interrupt that consumption — such as the pandemic requiring an economic shutdown — the whole system grinds to a halt.

"Going with the structural metaphor concept, there always huge cracks underneath the facades of capitalism, and the huge weight of this pandemic has widened those cracks," Norman Solomon, co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org and a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, told Salon. After pointing out how the poor wind up being hurt the most, he added that "the entire political economy is geared to overproduction and over-consumption to maximize corporate profits."

Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, told Salon that "I think that there are larger lessons and messages here about the sustainability of a global population of nearly 8 billion and growing people on a planet with finite resources."



He added, "And what COVID-19 has laid bare is the fragility of this massive infrastructure which we've created to artificially maintain consumption far beyond the natural carrying capacity of the planet. And continued exploitation of fossil fuels, obviously, is inconsistent with a sustainable human society.

CONSPIRACISTS RAVE ABOUT THE SECRET RULING CLASS OUT TO KILL US FOR OUR EXCHANGE VALUE
(OUR PROPERTY ON THE CHEAP, END OF LEGACY PAYMENTS TO US ETC. ETC.SOYLENT GREEN ETC. ETC.)


THEY ARE HALF RIGHT, BY IGNORING OUR PLIGHT THIS TINY RULING CLASS OF BILLIONAIRES IS ALLOWING THE COVID-19 TO DO THEIR DIRTY WORK FOR THEM

The affluent are in denial about their class privilege, research says

To maintain their sense of self-worth, elites tend to exaggerate their own hardships, studies show

MATTHEW ROZSA
JULY 13, 2020 

Income is correlated with right-wing politics, meaning wealthier people tend to be slightly more conservative. While there is no singular reason for this, both history and observational anecdotes suggest that those with wealth and privilege tend to distort the reason they were so successful, chalking up their success to right-wing ideological canards like "hard work" — rather than admit they were helped by other social factors. (President Trump is a great case study, as he exaggerates the degree to which his father helped him build his empire: during the first 2016 presidential debate, Trump bragged that his father gave him "a very small loan in 1975," which he built "into a company that's worth many, many billions of dollars." That "small loan" was actually $60.7 million.)

Now, a new social psychology study has uncovered the extent to which this tendency appears to be pathological among the moneyed elite. Titled "I ain't no fortunate one: On the motivated denial of class privilege," the new study, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that those who were posed questions about their class privilege responded by "increasing their claims of personal hardships and hard work, to cover [their] privilege in a veneer of meritocracy." 

"Flying in the face of meritocratic prescriptions, evidence of privilege threatens recipients' self-regard by calling into question whether they deserve their successes." Dr. L. Taylor Phillips, a professor of management and organizations at New York University Business School, and co-author Dr. Brian S. Lowery, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, wrote in their study. "Evidence of class privilege demonstrates that many life outcomes are determined by factors not attributable to individuals' efforts alone, but are caused in part by systemic inequities that privilege some over others."

The authors emphasized that, in the United States, people are conditioned to believe that we live in a meritocracy and to attribute success or failure primarily to one's talent and hard work. When members of the upper-middle or upper class are confronted with evidence that class privilege plays a major role in determining socioeconomic status, their self-regard is challenged. To maintain their sense of self-worth, they will exaggerate their own hardships or focus on the amount of work they do — even though class privilege does not preclude the reality of non-class related hardships and many people work very hard without achieving socioeconomic mobility.

The authors arrived at these conclusions after conducting a series of experiments. They asked hundreds of adult American citizens with upper-middle or upper class incomes from an elite West Coast university to read statements on general inequity or class privilege and how those are connected to opportunities in education. Others were asked to read about the more general advantages that accrue from people with high incomes. In an expansion on the original study, participants were exposed to information about personal hardships and class privilege. All of the studies found that, when participants who came from class privilege were confronted with that fact, they tended to focus on their personal hardships and work ethic in order to protect their self-regard from facing the reality that much of what they owned was given to them through luck and systems of oppression rather than individual merit.


"The main takeaway is really that people who are benefiting from inequity — that's how we define privilege — people who are benefiting from inequity do a lot of psychological work to cover up that benefit," Dr. Phillips told Salon. "They do things like claim that their lives has been harder overall as compared to when the privileges not been exposed and no one's really aware of it, but once we make it exposed, they start saying life has been harder."

She said that the individuals studied will specifically claim that they work harder at their jobs and will point to struggles from their lives to make the claim, "'Oh, you say I have this privilege and that's unfair, but actually look at these other things in my life, they kind of counteract or they kind of balance it out. It's all a wash.'"

Dr. Phillips also connected this mindset to a tendency toward classist and racist beliefs.

"It certainly supports the likelihood — or kind of creates a likelihood — that people start claiming racist, classist, and other inherently different sort of beliefs," Dr. Phillips explained, summarizing the mentality as arguing that "'I'm here in this position, someone else's in this different position. Rather than because the system is unfair or because I've benefited from something unfair, which would then threaten my self regard, instead it's easier for me to claim that there's actually some sort of difference between us that makes this all fair. . . . It's actually because this group is worse in some way, or this individual person is worse in some way.'"

In the study, Phillips and Lowery emphasize the importance of the meritocracy myth in creating these delusions.

"The ideology of meritocracy is woven deeply into the cultural fabric of American society," the authors write. "The very 'American dream' that attracts and attaches so many to America suggests that if one works hard enough, they can succeed, no matter their class or background. As a result, systemic inequity is a tricky subject for American psyches: while most Americans subscribe to meritocratic ideologies that abhor such inequity, many also benefit from inequities. To resolve this tension, we find that the class privileged specifically claim hardship and effort because these are symbols of merit: they help cover privilege in a cloak of meritocracy."



MATTHEW ROZSA
 is a staff writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

Contracts show Trump giving Big Pharma free rein to price gouge taxpayer-funded coronavirus drugs

"The amount of money the government is throwing at companies is unprecedented."


JAKE JOHNSON
JULY 5, 2020 5:30PM
This article originally appeared at Common Dreams. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

Government contracts obtained by consumer advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International show that the Trump administration is giving pharmaceutical companies a green light to charge exorbitant prices for potential coronavirus treatments developed with taxpayer money by refusing to exercise federal authority to constrain costs.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) last week got hold of a number of heavily redacted agreements between the Trump administration and major pharmaceutical companies like Johnson & Johnson, Regeneron, and Genentech.

Five of the seven documents reviewed by KEI are classified as "other transaction agreements," which allow federal agencies to loosen regulations designed to protect the public in order to help companies streamline the product development process.

In the case of four contracts for potential Covid-19 treatments or vaccines with Johnson & Johnson, Genentech, Regeneron, and Roche issued by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the Pentagon, the Trump administration omitted a standard condition requiring that products developed with taxpayer money be made available to the public "on reasonable terms."

"This means that the government has limited its ability to intervene if the pharmaceutical companies (which are party to the agreements and are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct the research) charge unreasonable prices for the resulting Covid-19 vaccines or treatments," KEI noted in a press release.

KEI also found that federal contracts with Genentech and Regeneron for coronavirus treatments contain passages restricting the government's ability to "have generic manufacturers make and distribute through pharmacies and other commercial outlets an effective diagnostic test, drug, or vaccine for Covid-19."

The details of the contracts come just days after the Trump administration faced backlash from consumer groups for refusing to require Gilead to charge a reasonable price for its Covid-19 treatment remdesivir. On Monday, as Common Dreams reported, Gilead announced it will charge U.S. hospitals around $3,120 per privately insured patient for a treatment course of remdesivir, which was developed with the help of at least $70.5 million in taxpayer funding.

"Allowing Gilead to set the terms during a pandemic represents a colossal failure of leadership by the Trump administration," Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen's Access to Medicines Program, said in a statement Monday. "The U.S. government has authority and a responsibility to steward the technology it helped develop."
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As the Washington Post reported Wednesday, "[Johnson & Johnson] has a $456 million contract with BARDA to develop a coronavirus vaccine and a $152 million contract to conduct screening of drug compounds that could be Covid-19 treatments."

"Regeneron has contracts worth up to $130 million to develop two therapies for the disease," the Post noted. "Roche's Genentech subsidiary has contracts worth $47 million to develop a pair of therapies."
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James Love, the director of KEI, told the Post that "the amount of money the government is throwing at companies is unprecedented."

"Normally when you write bigger checks," Love said, "you should have more leverage, not less leverage."

Don't be fooled by the "cancel culture" wars: Corporate power is the real force behind racism

Elite infighting about "free speech" and "diversity" won't end racism — or challenge corporate capitalism

Social media restricted speech and cancel culture censorship concept (Getty Images)
CHRIS HEDGES
JULY 13, 2020
This article was originally published by Scheerpost. Used by permission.

The "cancel culture" — the phenomenon of removing or canceling people, brands or shows from the public domain because of offensive statements or ideologies — is not a threat to the ruling class. Hundreds of corporations, nearly all in the hands of white executives and white board members, enthusiastically pumped out messages on social media condemning racism and demanding justice after George Floyd was choked to death by police in Minneapolis. Police, which along with the prison system are one of the primary instruments of social control over the poor, have taken the knee, along with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of the serially criminal JPMorgan Chase, where only 4 percent of the top executives are Black. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world whose corporation, Amazon, paid no federal income taxes last year and who fires workers that attempt to unionize and tracks warehouse laborers as if they were prisoners, put a "Black Lives Matter" banner on Amazon's home page.

The rush by the ruling elites to profess solidarity with the protesters and denounce racist rhetoric and racist symbols, supporting the toppling of Confederate statues and banning the Confederate flag, are symbolic assaults on white supremacy. Alone, these gestures will do nothing to reverse the institutional racism that is baked into the DNA of American society. The elites will discuss race. They will not discuss class.
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We must be wary of allowing those wielding the toxic charge of racism, no matter how well intentioned their motives, to decide who has a voice and who does not. Public shaming and denunciation, as any student of the Russian, French or Chinese revolutions knows, is one that leads to absurdism and finally despotism. Virulent racists, such as Richard Spencer, exist. They are dangerous. But racism will not end until we dismantle a class system that was created to empower oligarchic oppression and white supremacy. Racism will not end until we defund the police and abolish the world's largest system of mass incarceration. Racism will not end until we invest in people rather than systems of control. This means reparations for African Americans, the unionization of workers, massive government jobs programs, breaking up and nationalizing the big banks along with the for-profit health services, transportation sector, the internet, privatized utilities and the fossil fuel industry, as well as a Green New Deal and the slashing of our war expenditures by 75 percent.

The politically correct speech and symbols of inclusiveness, without a concerted assault on corporate power, will do nothing to change a system that by design casts the poor and working poor, often people of color, aside — Karl Marx called them "surplus labor" — and forces them into a life of misery and a brutal criminal caste system.

The cancel culture, with its public shaming on social media, is the boutique activism of the liberal elites. It allows faux student radicals to hound and attack those deemed to be racist or transphobic, before these "radicals" graduate to work for corporations such as Goldman Sachs, which last year paid $9 million in fines to settle federal allegations of racial and gender pay bias. Self-styled Marxists in the academy have been pushed out of economic departments and been reborn as irrelevant cultural and literary critics, employing jargon so obscure as to be unreadable. These "radical" theorists invest their energy in linguistic acrobatics and multiculturalism, with branches such as feminism studies, queer studies and African-American studies. The inclusion of voices often left out of the traditional academic canon certainly enriches the university. But multiculturalism, moral absolutism and the public denunciations of apostates, by themselves, too often offer escape routes from critiquing and attacking the class structures and systems of economic oppression that exclude and impoverish the poor and the marginal.

The hedge fund managers, oligarchs and corporate CEOs on college trustee boards don't care about Marxist critiques of Joseph Conrad. They do care if students are being taught to dissect the lies of the neoliberal ideology used as a cover to orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history.

The cancel culture, shorn of class politics, is the parlor game of the overeducated. If we do not examine, as Theodor Adorno wrote, the "societal play of forces that operate beneath the surface of political forms," we will be continually cursed with a more ruthless and sophisticated form of corporate control, albeit one that is linguistically sensitive and politically correct.

"Stripped of a radical idiom, robbed of a utopian hope, liberals and leftists retreat in the name of progress to celebrate diversity," historian Russell Jacoby writes. "With few ideas on how a future should be shaped, they embrace all ideas. Pluralism becomes a catchall, the alpha and omega of political thinking. Dressed up as multicultural, it has become the opium of disillusioned intellectuals, the ideology of an era without an ideology."
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The cudgel of racism, as I have experienced, is an effective tool to shut down debate. Students for Justice in Palestine organizations, which almost always include Jewish students, are being banned on college campuses in the name of fighting racism. Activists in these outlawed groups are often barred from holding any student leadership positions on campus. Professors that dare to counter the Zionist narrative, such as the Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita, have had job offers rescinded, been fired or denied tenure and dismissed. Norman Finkelstein, one of the most important scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict, has been ruthlessly targeted by the Israel lobby throughout his career, making it impossible for him to get tenure or academic appointments. Never mind that he is not only Jewish but the son of Holocaust survivors. Jews, in this game, are branded as racists, and actual racists, such as Donald Trump, because they back Israel's refusal to recognize Palestinian rights, are held up as friends of the Jewish people.

I have long been a target of the Israeli lobby. The lobby, usually working through Hillel Houses on college campuses, which function as little more than outposts of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), does not attempt to address my enumeration of the war crimes committed by Israel, many of which I witnessed, the egregious flouting by Israel of international law, exacerbated by the plans to annex up to 30 percent of the West Bank, or the historical record ignored and distorted by the lobby to justify Jewish occupation of a country that from the 7th century until 1948 was Muslim. The lobby prefers not to deal in the world of facts. It misuses the trope of anti-Semitism to ensure that those who speak up for Palestinian rights and denounce Israeli occupation are not invited to events on the Israel-Palestine conflict, or are disinvited to speak after invitations have been sent out, as happened to me at the University of Pennsylvania, among other venues.

It does not matter that I spent seven years in the Middle East, or that I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, living for weeks at a time in the Israel-occupied territories. It does not matter that I speak Arabic. My voice and the voices of those, especially Palestinians, who document the violations of Palestinian civil rights are canceled out by the mendacious charge that we are racists. I doubt most of the college administrators who agree to block our appearances believe we are racists, but they don't also want the controversy. Zionism is the cancel culture on steroids.

The Israel lobby, whose interference in our electoral process dwarfs that of any other country, including Russia, is now attempting to criminalize the activities of those, such as myself, who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The lobby, with its huge financial clout, is pushing state legislatures, in the name of fighting anti-Semitism, to use anti-boycott laws and executive orders to punish companies and individuals that promote BDS. Twenty-seven states have so far enacted laws or policies that penalize businesses, organizations and individuals for supporting BDS.

The debate about the excesses of cancel culture was most recently ignited by a letter signed by 153 prominent and largely privileged writers and intellectuals in Harper's Magazine, a publication for educated, white liberals. Critics of the letter argue, correctly, that "nowhere in it do the signatories mention how marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing." These critics also point out, correctly, that signatories include those, such as New York Times columnist David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell, with access to huge media platforms and who face no danger of being silenced. They finally note that a few of the signatories are the most vicious proponents of the Zionist cancel culture, including New York Times editor Bari Weiss, who led campaigns while at Columbia University to destroy the careers of Arab professors; literary scholar Cary Nelson, who was one of those who denounced the Palestinian American scholar Salaita as a racist; and political scientist Yascha Mounk, who has attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar as an anti-Semite.

I find the cancel culture and its public denunciations as distasteful as those who signed the letter. But these critics are battling a monster of their own creation. The institutional and professional power of those targeted by the Harper's letter is insignificant, especially when set against that of the signatories or the Israel lobby. Those singled out for attack pose little threat to the systems of entrenched power, which the signatories ironically represent, and indeed are more often its victims. I suspect this is the reason for the widespread ire the letter provoked.

The most ominous threats to free speech and public debate do not come from the cancel culture of the left, which rarely succeeds in removing its targets from power, despite a few high-profile firings such as James Bennet, who oversaw a series of tone-deaf editorial decisions as the opinion page editor at the New York Times. These corporate forces, which assure us that Black Lives Matter, understand that the left's witch hunts are a harmless diversion.

Corporations have seized control of the news industry and turned it into burlesque. They have corrupted academic scholarship. They make war on science and the rule of law. They have used their wealth to destroy our democracy and replace it with a system of legalized bribery. They have created a world of masters and serfs who struggle at subsistence level and endure crippling debt peonage. The commodification of the natural world by corporations has triggered an ecocide that is pushing the human species closer and closer towards extinction. Anyone who attempts to state these truths and fight back was long ago driven from the mainstream and relegated to the margins of the internet by Silicon Valley algorithms. As cancel culture goes, corporate power makes the Israel lobby look like amateurs.

The current obsession with moral purity, devoid of a political vision and incubated by self-referential academics and educated elites, is easily co-opted by the ruling class who will say anything, as long as the mechanisms of corporate control remain untouched. We have enemies. They run Silicon Valley and sit on corporate boards. They make up the two ruling political parties. They manage the war industry. They chatter endlessly on corporate-owned airwaves about trivia and celebrity gossip. Our enemies are now showering us with politically correct messages. But until they are overthrown, until we wrest power back from our corporate masters, the most insidious forms of racism in America will continue to flourish.

CHRIS HEDGES
is the former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a columnist at Truthdig. He is the author of several books, including "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."MORE FROM CHRIS HEDGES