IMPERIALISM; EVEN & UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT
Why the biggest global boom since World War II won't be good for everyone, according to the World Bank

Shoppers at Sarojini Nagar Market on June 7, 2021 in New Delhi, India. Sanjeev Verma/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

The global economy will grow 5.6% - the most in 80 years - in 2021, the World Bank said Tuesday.

Yet emerging economies will largely fall behind due to debt pressures and slow vaccination.

Advanced economies must help with vaccination and policy support to avoid worsening inequalities, the World Bank said.

The strongest economic rebound in eight decades will still leave much of the world struggling with the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Bank said Tuesday.

The global economy is expected to grow 5.6% through 2021, the institution said in a semiannual report published Tuesday. The forecast is up from a prior estimate of 4.1% growth and calls for the largest one-year expansion of the postwar era.

Yet the world will still be far from retaking the economic highs of early 2020. Global economic output will sit 2% below its pre-pandemic projections at the end of this year, the World Bank said. And in two-thirds of emerging economies, per-capita income will remain below pre-crisis levels through 2022.

The recovery has been and will continue to be uneven, David Malpass, president of the World Bank Group, said. Economic superpowers must support low-income countries with vaccination efforts and economic support if they hope to combat inequities through the rebound.

"While there are welcome signs of global recovery, the pandemic continues to inflict poverty and inequality on people in developing countries around the world," Malpass said.

The US is projected to grow 6.8% through the year due to its leveraging of unprecedented fiscal and monetary support. That's up from a January estimate of 3.5%. China's economy is expected to grow 8.5%, up from a prior forecast of 7.9%.

Excluding China, emerging market and developing economies will lag the broader recovery with growth of 4.4%, the World Bank said. The countries' recoveries were likely to widen gaps in health, education, and living standards, all while advanced economies ride a wave of outsize demand to new eras of economic health.
Developing nations face slow vaccination and fast inflation

The cause of such countries' underperformance is fairly predictable. While the US, UK, and much of the Eurozone charge forward with vaccinations, developing countries are falling behind, and many are in the midst of their worst infection surges yet. Unless vaccination picks up in the embattled regions, persistent lockdowns risk slower growth and long-term scarring, the World Bank said.

Small, tourism-dependent economies are also set to fall behind, according to the report. Although advanced economies are steadily reopening, global travel will likely take longer to return to pre-pandemic norms as some restrictions stay in place. A lack of tourist income will hinder countries' ability to pay for economic relief and public-health measures.

Looming inflation concerns also threaten to hold emerging economies back, Ayhan Kose, director of the World Bank Prospects Group, said. Many emerging market and developing economies relied on fiscal support to bridge the pandemic downturn, but such aid left countries saddled with record debt piles. Now, as inflation surges in advanced economies, developing countries are stuck without additional stimulus and huge financial concerns.

"Unless risks from record-high debt are addressed, these economies remain vulnerable to financial market stress should investor risk sentiment deteriorate as a result of inflation pressures in advanced economies," Kose said.

When stronger inflation does slam emerging economies, it's likely to show up in soaring food prices, the World Bank added. The trend stands to further inflame food insecurity in low-income countries. Policymakers should look to keep inflation expectations in check and improve social safety nets to ensure the inflation overshoot doesn't turn into a prolonged upward spiral, the institution said.

A Highly Controversial Alzheimer’s Treatment Won FDA Approval. Scientists Say We Don’t Know If It Actually Works.

In one sense, aducanumab is a historic drug — but many scientists say its approval is a triumph of business interests over public health.

Stephanie M. LeeBuzzFeed News Reporter
Last updated on June 8, 2021

Branimir76 / Getty Images

Two years ago, an experimental drug was pronounced yet another failure in the long and fruitless search for an Alzheimer’s treatment.

On Monday, the FDA approved it.

The highly controversial drug, aducanumab, is now the first FDA-endorsed treatment that targets the purported cause of the debilitating and devastating condition. But many scientists say the data on the drug’s efficacy is contradictory and inconclusive. In a nearly unanimous vote in November, an FDA advisory panel declined to endorse aducanumab. Nevertheless, it was championed by patient advocacy groups — including some funded by the pharmaceutical companies that make it.

With the approval, the FDA rejected the panel’s recommendation, an unusual move that critics say prioritizes business interests over public health and gives patients and their families false hope.

“The FDA’s decision to approve aducanumab shows a stunning disregard for science and eviscerates the agency’s standards for approving new drugs,” Michael Carome, who tracks the pharmaceutical industry for the watchdog group Public Citizen, told BuzzFeed News. “Because of this reckless action, the agency’s credibility has been irreparably damaged.”

The more than 6 million Alzheimer’s patients in the US are desperate for new treatment options. While dementia and other cognitive side effects related to Alzheimer’s can be temporarily improved by a handful of existing drugs, the most recent of which was approved nearly 20 years ago, aducanumab targets what is believed to be the underlying cause for the disease.

The demand is expected to translate into a huge windfall for Biogen and Eisai, the biotech companies that developed the drug, which will have a list price of $56,000 a year per patient. Biogen’s stock had been climbing in anticipation of an approval; on Monday, it soared 38% to $395.85.

The decision was also a victory for patient advocacy groups like the Alzheimer’s Association, which made public pleas to the FDA to approve aducanumab. But the influential organization’s statements contributed to the controversy around the drug, since the group did not disclose that it has received at least $1.4 million in funding from Biogen and Eisai since 2018.

The Alzheimer’s Association says that the donations make up a small slice of its revenue and do not influence its decisions. However, some scientists are speculating that its apparent conflicts of interest, plus pressure from patients and their families, played a role in its endorsement, given that the evidence for aducanumab is so murky.

In explaining why the FDA approved the drug, Patrizia Cavazzoni, who leads its Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, cited how “devastating” Alzheimer’s is and acknowledged the “considerable public debate” over the drug’s fate. She said that aducanumab ultimately met the criteria for an expedited review. For serious diseases without other treatment options, the FDA can speed up approval of therapies that are expected to be beneficial, even if there is “some residual uncertainty regarding that benefit.” In the case of aducanumab, the agency concluded that the benefits outweighed the risks, though it is requiring the companies to submit more trial data to demonstrate that the drug works as expected.

But others didn’t buy this explanation. Public Citizen has accused the FDA of working too closely with Biogen, forming a relationship that “dangerously compromised the integrity of the agency’s review,” and has asked the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general to investigate.

And Jason Karlawish, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and codirector of the Penn Memory Center, said he anticipates aducanumab to cause, not solve, problems for millions of people and their physicians.

“My patients and their family members are eager to have a treatment we say with confidence is slowing down the progression of disabling cognitive impairments,” he said. “It’s sad, though, that this is the drug that’s going to assuage that need.”



The Washington Post via Getty Images

B. Smith, who had early onset Alzheimer's, with her daughter, Dana Gasby, in their home in Long Island, New York, in January 2019. Smith died in 2020.

Aducanumab is a lab-made antibody targeted at amyloid, a protein that is believed to be the main cause of Alzheimer’s. The proteins clump together in the brain, damaging brain cells. For decades, the theory has been that this brain damage leads to the long-term degradation of memory and cognition that are the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s.

A 2016 study showed that aducanumab reduced the amount of the protein in the brain and suggested that it could slow down cognitive declines.

So Biogen and Eisai — based in Massachusetts and Tokyo, respectively — started testing the drug in two large, identically designed clinical trials. But before they finished, an independent committee conducted a prescheduled analysis of the data produced by that point. The analysis found that neither trial was likely to meet its main goal, which was to reduce memory loss and other signs of cognitive decline among patients with mild early Alzheimer’s. So in March 2019, the companies said they were discontinuing the trials.

But aducanumab wasn’t dead yet. In October 2019, Biogen and Eisai dropped the bombshell news that they’d run a new analysis — and would now be applying for FDA approval.

Using a larger dataset over more weeks than that of the original analysis, the companies argued that one of the trials had succeeded. Compared to patients given a placebo, those who took high doses of aducanumab had better performance in cognition and function.

The second trial, however, still didn’t meet its goals. But Biogen argued that the drug had appeared to work in a subset of Alzheimer’s patients in this group — those who’d had “significant exposure” to high doses. In its submission to the FDA, Biogen selected that data and combined it with the promising results from the other trial, along with that of a smaller, earlier study.

These results divided regulators and scientists. The FDA granted aducanumab an expedited review. And when Biogen presented at a November meeting with the federal health agency, staff agreed with its interpretation that the data, pooled and analyzed as it was, showed that the drug worked. Except for one FDA statistician: “There is no compelling substantial evidence of treatment effect or disease slowing,” he wrote, arguing that another study should be done to resolve the dispute.

Those arguments resonated with the committee that advises the FDA on neurological drug candidates. In an unusually sweeping rejection, members voted 10–0, with one abstention, against recommending aducanumab.

Even so, the FDA asked Biogen for more data at the beginning of 2021 and pushed back the deadline for its decision from March to June.

Some experts have questioned whether the FDA was a little too eager to see aducanumab succeed. The agency worked with Biogen on the reanalysis as part of what it called a “‘working group’ collaboration.” Given the enormous need for Alzheimer’s treatments, the FDA explained in summer 2019 that it was “imperative” to use “extensive resources” to reach “a maximum understanding of the existing data.” Public Citizen called this partnership “unprecedented and inappropriate.”

FDA spokesperson Courtney Rhodes told BuzzFeed News that the dataset for the drug “was very complex, and our review has been thorough.” She added that the health agency would be “holding the company accountable for conducting an additional study.”

While Biogen sought approval, patient advocacy groups publicly pushed for it.

One group, UsAgainstAlzheimer’s, asked the FDA to approve aducanumab but did not mention in its letter that it has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Biogen and Eisai. It disclosed it elsewhere, such as in an op-ed on the biomedical news website Stat, where the group’s cofounder and a neurologist (who is also a Biogen consultant) defended the company’s working relationship with the FDA. “This partnership was not only appropriate but is expected by the FDA as defined in its recommended best practices for communication,” they wrote.

In October, the Alzheimer’s Association endorsed aducanumab in a letter to the FDA advisory committee ahead of its meeting. Biogen and Eisen had donated $1.4 million to the group between 2018 and 2020, which the group did not disclose. A spokesperson for the Alzheimer’s Association defended the group, noting that the funding from Biogen and Eisen comprised only 1.09% of all donations it had received from pharmaceutical companies during that time.

In 2020 alone, Biogen gave $275,000 and Eisai $250,000. In the prior year, those amounts were $380,000 and $361,250, respectively, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. Biogen and Eisai have also sponsored conferences that the association has hosted or plans to host. A spokesperson for the group said the fact that donors are listed on its website and accessible to “anyone with even the slightest curiosity” meant it was sufficiently transparent about such contributions.

But Carome of Public Citizen believes those ties can’t be overlooked. “Those companies ultimately expect something from that investment,” he said. “And that type of financial support can’t help but influence the positions that those organizations take.”

The question of whether the Alzheimer’s Association has conflicts of interest with its sponsors also arose in connection with a paper published in a scientific journal that it owns. In the paper, a trio of researchers wrote that there was no evidence that aducanumab worked. After one of them tweeted a link to a not-yet-final version of their paper, the journal, Alzheimer’s & Dementia, put the scientists on a two-year publishing probation and sent letters notifying their bosses.

One of the researchers, Stanford neurologist Michael Greicius, said at the time that he felt the move was retaliation for heavily criticizing aducanumab. In February, the executive editor of Alzheimer’s & Dementia told Stat that the journal “took a path that we believed addressed this serious matter.” A spokesperson for the Alzheimer’s Association told BuzzFeed News that it had zero involvement in the decision.

In an interview, Greicius said that the Alzheimer’s Association’s lobbying for the drug created “the illusion of progress in a setting where there isn’t actually any objective progress.” He added, “The stakes are too high to base a decision like this on severely insufficient data that doesn’t support efficacy.”

Aducanumab has rare but serious side effects, which, in Greicius’s view, make the drug even less worth taking. In clinical trials, 1.3% of patients taking high doses experienced brain swelling (compared to less than 0.1% of the placebo group), and less than 1% had brain bleeding (compared to 0%).

Harry Johns, the president and CEO of the Alzheimer’s Association, told BuzzFeed News that “no donation from anyone, any company, has any effect” on the organization’s decisions. And while he acknowledged that aducanumab “is not a cure,” he said, “it is an improvement for people to gain some cognitive time, some functional time, that makes a real difference for those individuals and their families.”

Johns was optimistic that aducanumab’s approval would stimulate investment in other, better medications, pointing to how cancer drugs have improved over the decades. “First treatments are not perfect,” he said. “We should not let the pursuit of perfection be the enemy of the good for so many people who can benefit by a treatment.”

He is not alone in that belief in the scientific community. But other researchers worry that aducanumab will stifle, not stoke, development. Once an FDA-approved drug is available, patients may be less willing to enroll in clinical trials where they could receive a placebo instead of the experimental treatment.

Until now, the field of amyloid-targeting treatments has been strewn with failed candidates. While there are reasons why each didn’t make it, and other promising amyloid-targeting drugs are making their way through the pipeline, some scientists believe it may be time to rethink the strategy altogether. For Karlawish, the University of Pennsylvania physician, the amyloid theory may still hold the key to promising Alzheimer’s therapeutics. “I think that that approach still remains viable and needs to be studied,” he said.

In any case, aducanumab is now here. Will anyone pay for it?

A monthly infusion of the therapy will come with a list price of $4,312 per patient on average, Biogen announced Monday, which would total about $56,000 annually. But the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review had previously concluded that, based on the “insufficient” evidence for its benefits, the drug is worth a fraction of that amount: $2,560 to $8,290 annually. Given that stinging assessment, it’s uncertain whether insurers will agree that the bill is worth footing. That, in turn, will affect who gets access to the drug in the first place.

“This is a great day for Biogen and its shareholders,” Greicius said, “but a bleak day for the field of Alzheimer’s research.”

Stephanie M. Lee is a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.

Pandemic workplace transformation ‘as significant as invention of agriculture’

AUGUST GRAHAM, PA CITY REPORTER

8 June 2021



The change in people’s work patterns during the pandemic has accelerated a transformation that is as revolutionary as the development of agriculture several millennia ago, an expert has said.

James Suzman, an anthropologist who wrote a book on the history of work, said the spread of digital technology had transformed the workplace in a way comparable to the industrial revolution.

It had also been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which had seen people work from home more and move further away from their offices.

“We’re at a big point in history and this is a big point in the digital revolution,” he said.

“Before this there was one great revolution in the history of work, and that was the invention of agriculture, which effectively changed everything. But that was a very slow-moving revolution,” he said.

“This transformation will be as hugely significant, although on a much more rapid time scale than agriculture.”

Data from broadband provider TalkTalk, released on Wednesday, showed that market towns across the UK had seen a surge in internet use over the pandemic.

Kingston, Guildford and Enfield had all seen a rise of 50% or more in data usage between January 2020 and April 2021.

“I don’t think it shows us anything particularly new, I think what it does is it confirms what a lot of us were thinking, and confirms what a lot of more anecdotal data was suggesting,” Mr Suzman, who worked on the TalkTalk data, said.

The anthropologist said the link between work and offices had been broken during the pandemic, which had opened up opportunities to change the way people work.

But he also warned that while humans were adaptable, they could be fearful of change, even when it was the right thing to do. There would also be vested economic interests to get people back to work.

Yet, he said, “it seems that we have reached the point now where we will grasp this opportunity to change”.

He added: “I think partially it’s to do with popular pressure, because people have worked out that they actually can perform their jobs in many cases as well from home.”

Workers started to shift to offices in the 1950s, as a new phase of the industrial revolution pivoted away from manufacturing, and reached a strong point in the 1970s.

But over the past 20 years, pressure from both men and women who wanted to have a work life and manage their family had changed some of the ways we work.

“We’ve had this technology bubbling around in the background that’s given us this capability to make the change, and yet we haven’t grasped the nettle, I think largely because of habit,” he said.

'Primed for pain': New report shows Amazon workers injured more than twice industry average

Common Dreams

Amazon warehouse worker AFP/File

A new report out Tuesday accuses Amazon of having an "abysmal health and safety record" as a result of its obsession with production speed, pointing to worker injury rates that are far higher than those across the warehouse and shipping industry.

The analysis, Primed for Pain: Amazon's Epidemic of Workplace Injuries, was released by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a collection of four labor unions, and comes amid sustained scrutiny over the company's mistreatment of workers amid soaring profits.

The report is based on data Amazon provided to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and covers the four-year period 2017-2020.

"Every day is just go, go, go," said Safiyo Muhamed, a former worker at an Amazon fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota for two and a half years who suffered a slipped disc in her back while lifting a heavy tote.

"Amazon wants you to work like a robot, like a machine," she said in a statement. "Every week they rank you, they monitor you through the computer. You have to be so fast. Humans aren't able to do it."

Muhamed's assessment is unsurprising given the report's assertion that "Amazon's obsession with speed in every part of its business has been a key element of its growth strategy."

"But the company's obsession with speed has come at a huge cost for Amazon's workforce," the report states.

Amazon's workforce grew from 208,764 workers in 2017 to 581,624 in 2020. There were injuries at 191 facilities in 2017, and at 658 facilities in 2020.

The data showed "substantially higher rates of workplace injuries" for Amazon workers compared to those in the same industry at other companies, the analysis found.


In 2017, Amazon had 11,883 recordable injuries—about 87% of which were injuries that made workers unable to perform their regular job functions (light duty) or forced them to miss work (lost time).

In 2020, there were 27,178 recordable injuries, 90% of which forced workers into light duty or lost time. That rate is more notable, the report said, because the coronavirus pandemic forced Amazon to make "massive operational changes" in 2020 that likely lessened speed.

While the warehouse industry is notoriously dangerous, the report says that Amazon's injury rate was still well above those of other warehouse employers.

"In all four years for which data are available, Amazon's rate of injuries per 100 warehouse workers is substantially higher than it is for non-Amazon employers in the general warehouse industry," the report states.

In 2020, for example, there were 6.5 injuries per 100 Amazon warehouse workers and just 4.0 injuries per 100 at all other warehouses.

What's more, the injuries suffered by Amazon workers are more severe. Singling out 2020 again, the report says there were 5.9 serious injuries per 100 Amazon workers—a rate that's about 80% higher than those of other warehousing industry employers.

The analysis also compared Amazon with retail e-commerce competitor Walmart. "In 2020, Amazon's overall warehouse injury rate (6.5/100 FTEs) was over twice that of Walmart (3.0), while Amazon's severe injury rate (2.6) was more than two-and-a-half times Walmart's."

SOS gathered further data from a February 2021 survey of 996 Amazon workers across 42 states. Forty-two percent of those queried said a workplace injury caused them to miss work, and roughly 80% of those attributed their injury to production pressure or speed.

Another finding from that survey: 52% said that since the pandemic broke out, Amazon has either terminated, disciplined, or threatened workers who don't keep up with the work pace.

"Workers' accounts of extreme production pressure in 2021 suggest that Amazon's reduced injury rates during Covid may not be sustained as the company returns to its previous practices," the report warns.

That wouldn't be unpredictable, according to the analysis.

"Amazon's abysmal health and safety record is not an accident," the report states. "Rather, it is the predictable outcome of a company that prioritizes speed, growth, and profits over the health and safety of its employees."

"Unfortunately," the publication continues, "this alarming rate of serious workplace injuries is likely to continue unless Amazon is forced by workers and others to take long-term meaningful action to make its workplaces safer."

Eric Frumin, SOC's director of health and safety, didn't mince words in his assessment of Amazon's duty to workers.

"By effectively ignoring the obvious consequences of their own decisions," said Frumin, "Amazon's leaders have failed in their legal, ethical, and moral responsibility to protect their own employees from serious hazards and the very real danger of career-threatening injuries."

Six US tech giants paid almost $100 billion less in taxes from 2011 to 2020 than reported: analysis

Common Dreams

Tim Cook (AFP)

Bolstering demands for a global minimum tax to rein in corporations' evasive tactics, a new analysis released Monday showed that a half dozen companies based in the United States paid almost $100 billion less in taxes over the past decade than stated in their annual reports.

Between 2011 and 2020, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet (the owner of Google), Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft—known as the "Silicon Six"—paid roughly $219 billion in income taxes, which amounts to just 3.6% of their more than $6 trillion in total revenue, according to the Fair Tax Foundation. Income tax is paid on profits, not total revenue, and researchers said these tech giants are adept at reducing their tax liabilities by shifting profits to offshore tax havens.

Had the "Silicon Six" paid the prevailing tax rates in the countries in which they operate, they would have given global tax authorities over $149 billion more than they did over the past decade, researchers said. Moreover, not only did these corporate behemoths fork over nearly $150 billion less than would be expected under a stronger international taxation regime, but they also inflated the value of the tax payments they did make

According to the Fair Tax Foundation, these six companies reported paying approximately $315 billion in income taxes between 2011 and 2020, which is 23.2% on nearly $1.4 trillion in profits. That's significantly higher than the 16.1% rate the companies actually paid over the past decade, however, resulting in a gap of more than $96 billion between tax figures cited in annual financial reports and real contributions to public revenues.

Paul Monaghan, chief executive of the United Kingdom-based nonprofit, said the study provided "solid evidence that substantive tax avoidance is still embedded within many large multinationals and nothing less than a root-and-branch reform of international tax rules will remedy the situation."

None of the six corporations "is an exemplar of responsible tax conduct," the report noted. "However, the degree of irresponsibility and the relative tax contribution made does vary. Amazon has paid just $5.9 billion in income taxes this decade, whilst Apple has paid $100.6 billion and Microsoft has paid $55.3 billion."

Source: Fair Tax Foundation

The Fair Tax Foundation identified Amazon and Facebook as the worst offenders, prompting responses from the two tech giants.

As The Guardian reported:
An Amazon spokesperson disputed the calculations as "extremely misleading."
"Amazon is primarily a retailer where profit margins are low, so comparisons to technology companies with operating profit margins of closer to 50% is not rational," the company said. "Governments write the tax laws and Amazon is doing the very thing they encourage companies to do—paying all taxes due while also investing many billions in creating jobs and infrastructure. Coupled with low margins, this investment will naturally result in a lower cash tax rate."

A Facebook spokesman said: "All companies pay tax on their profits, not revenues. Last year we paid $4.23 billion in corporate income taxes globally, and our average effective tax rate over the last 10 years was 20.71%, which is roughly in line with the OECD average."

In response to the corporations' complaints, the Fair Tax Foundation said that the majority of Amazon's profits in the last three years were derived not from retail but from cloud services, where profit margins are between 25-30%. The Fair Tax Foundation also noted that over the past decade, Facebook paid an income tax rate of just 12.7%, resulting in substantially lower contributions than would be expected according to prevailing corporate tax rates as well as the company's effective tax rate.

The Fair Tax Foundation's new analysis comes just weeks after Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rettig admitted that tax dodging is depriving the U.S. government of as much as $1 trillion or more per year.

Monaghan said that U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's recent push for a global minimum tax on corporations "[lit] a fire beneath the multilateral discussions that have been slowly progressing under the auspices of the OECD."

According to Monaghan, the Biden administration's proposals for global tax reform "would see many of the incentives underpinning profit-shifting to tax havens removed, and would see the very largest multinationals taxed not just on where subsidiary profits are booked, but where real economic value is derived."

"This would have a seismic impact on the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft (who have tax dodging hard-wired into their organizational structure), with billions of additional taxes paid across the world," Monaghan continued.

"We could be on the cusp of a once-in-a-generation moment," he added, "but world leaders at the forthcoming G7 and G20 world leader summits need to grasp the nettle, step up, and engage with the agenda much more positively—the benefit to public services across the world could be immense."

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Many of the uber-rich pay next to no income tax, ProPublica claims


PAUL WISEMAN AND MACY GORDON, ASSOCIATED PRESS8 June 2021

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid no income tax in 2007 and 2011, while Tesla founder Elon Musk’s income tax bill was zero in 2018, according to a report from the non-profit investigative journalism organisation ProPublica.

Overall, the richest 25 Americans pay less in tax — an average of 15.8% of adjusted gross income — than many ordinary workers do, once you include taxes for Social Security and Medicare, ProPublica found.

Its findings are likely to heighten a national debate over the vast and widening inequality between the very wealthiest Americans and everyone else.

Elon Musk (Brian Lawless/PA)

An anonymous source delivered to ProPublica reams of Internal Revenue Service data on the country’s wealthiest people, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg.

ProPublica compared the tax data it received with information available from other sources. It reported that “in every instance we were able to check — involving tax filings by more than 50 separate people — the details provided to ProPublica matched the information from other sources”.

Using perfectly legal tax strategies, many of the uber-rich are able to shrink their federal tax bills to nothing or close to it.

A spokesman for financier George Soros, who has supported higher taxes on the rich, told ProPublica that the billionaire had lost money on his investments from 2016 to 2018 and so did not owe federal income tax for those years.

Mr Musk responded to ProPublica’s initial request for comment with a punctuation mark — “?” — and did not answer detailed follow-up questions.

The federal tax code is meant to be progressive — that is, the rich pay a steadily higher tax rate on their income as it rises. And ProPublica found, in fact, that people earning between two million and five million dollars a year paid an average of 27.5%, the highest of any group of taxpayers.

Above five million dollars in income, though, tax rates fell: The top .001% of taxpayers — 1,400 people who reported income above 69 million dollars — paid 23%. And the 25 very richest people paid still less.

The wealthy can reduce their tax bills through the use of charitable donations or by avoiding wage income (which can be taxed at up to 37%) and benefiting instead mainly from investment income (usually taxed at 20%).

President Joe Biden, in seeking revenue to finance his spending plans, has proposed higher taxes on the wealthy.

Mr Biden wants to raise the top tax rate to 39.6% for people earning 400,000 dollars a year or more in taxable income, estimated to be fewer than 2% of US households. The top tax rate that workers pay on salaries and wages now is 37%.

Mr Biden is proposing to nearly double the tax rate that high-earning Americans pay on profits from stocks and other investments. In addition, under his proposals, inherited capital gains would no longer be tax-free.

The president, whose proposals must be approved by Congress, would also raise taxes on corporations, which would affect wealthy investors who own corporate stocks.

ProPublica reported that the tax bills of the rich are especially low when compared with their soaring wealth — the value of their investment portfolios, real estate and other assets.

People do not have to pay tax on an increase in their wealth until they cash in and, say, sell their stock or home and realise the gains.

Using calculations by Forbes magazine, ProPublica noted that the wealth of the 25 richest Americans collectively jumped by 401 billion dollars from 2014 to 2018. They paid 13.6 billion dollars in federal income taxes over those years — equal to just 3.4% of the increase in their wealth.

Fox News Guest: ‘The Poor, the Minorities, the Disenfranchised… Aren’t Worth $15 an Hour’

By Michael Luciano

MEDIAITE

Jun 8th, 2021

During a panel appearance with Austan Goolsbee on Tuesday about whether to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, conservative economist Art Laffer said that some workers just aren’t worth that much.

Fox News anchor Sandra Smith suggested that raising the minimum wage might cause companies to automate some of the jobs currently done by humans. She noted that there are currently 9.3 million job openings in the U.S., which has sparked fears of a worker shortage.

Smith cited the recent foray of McDonald’s into testing voice-ordering technology at 10 of its Chicago restaurants, where only one-fifth of orders need to be taken by humans, according to CEO Chris Kempczinski. He said the automated order-takers have an accuracy rate of about 85%.

Art Laffer Says Most Poor and Minority Workers 'Aren't Worth $15 an Hour 

Laffer responded by scoffing at the idea every worker should be making at least $15 an hour.

Yeah, for those people, Sandra, who are coming into the labor force brand fresh –not old-timers who’ve been around for awhile – the poor, the minorities the disenfranchised, those with less education, young people who haven’t had the job experience. These people aren’t worth $15 an hour in most cases.

And so therefore when you have a $15 an hour minimum wage, they don’t get that first job, they don’t get requisite the skills to earn above the minimum wage. And after a few years they become unemployable. And after becoming unemployable, they become hostile, and that what you’ll find is happening is this technology has created an underclass of people who are really just bid out of the labor market and will remain out of the labor market for most of their lives. And this I think is just a tragedy. I love the technology but the technology is replacing the jobs for these people. And it’s a killer. It’s a killer for just the people who need the help the most.

Working 40 hours a week for a year for $15 an hour translates to an income of $31,200 before withholdings.

Watch via Fox News.

Art Laffer Says Most Poor and Minority Workers 'Aren't Worth $15 an Hour (mediaite.com)

Jane Fonda Condemns Biden for Failing to be ‘Bold’ on Climate Change: He’s Not Acting ‘Fast Enough’

By Leia Idliby

MEDIAITE 

Jun 8th, 2021, 

Just days after protesting a pipeline project in Minnesota, Jane Fonda joined CNN’s Brianna Keilar to address President Joe Biden’s climate policies.

Fonda joined thousands of people in northern Minnesota this weekend for the Treaty People Gathering, an event meant to protest the advancement of the Enbridge Line 3 replacement project.


VIDEO Jane Fonda Condemns Joe Biden's Climate Change Reforms (mediaite.com)

“You have been incredibly outspoken on this issue of this pipeline project,” Keilar said to the activist on Tuesday’s New Day. “It’s a project that former President [Donald] Trump had approved during his last days in office, but still President Biden, the Biden administration, has remained silent on this issue, despite what is his clear position on climate.”

Fonda called for the Biden administration to ask the Army Corps of Engineers to halt construction on the pipeline, adding that Enbridge’s permit should be re-examined, as “it was rushed through.”

Fonda noted that a sufficient study on the pipeline’s environmental impact was never conducted, later explaining the negative impacts Enbridge’s project will have on the environment:

It’s bringing very destructive tar sands under 200 bodies of pristine water, but look at the big picture — we are barreling toward a true catastrophe, an existential catastrophe, which is the climate crisis. Climate scientists are universally telling us we have to cut our emissions in half and we can have absolutely no new development of fossil fuels. No new mining. No new fracking. No new drilling if we’re going to achieve this. We have to keep warming it 1.5 degrees celsius. No higher than that. We can’t even burn what we already develop, much less new, so this pipeline is threatening what science is saying. It’s threatening the climate crisis. This is going to affect everybody. Not just the tribal nations whose sovereign rights are being broken here in Minnesota but the whole world. We cannot afford this.

Fonda went on to praise Biden for stopping the Keystone XL Pipeline and putting an end to the drilling of arctic national wildlife, yet called on him to “raise a ruckus” regarding the Line 3 replacement project.

“Clearly you’re happy with some things, but how do you think that he is doing, and is it enough to make progressives like yourself feel that he is delivering for what you voted him in for?” Keilar asked Fonda of Biden.

“Well, it’s nice to be hopeful again, and it’s much better to push a moderate than to fight a fascist, right?” Fonda cracked. “We’re very, very grateful for what he’s been doing. He’s done a lot of very good things. But not enough. Not bold enough. And not fast enough. We’re up against time. The scientists say we have less than nine years to cut our emissions in half. Line 3 is going in the absolute opposite direction, and the news every day is telling us, emissions are going up, not down. So we have to put our bodies on the line and do whatever we can to get our administration to call a halt to these permits.”

World Oceans Day: The Caribbean Sea faces dual threat of climate change and overfishing

 

World Oceans Day: The Caribbean Sea faces dual threat of climate change and overfishing

The matters stressing out the Caribbean Sea are all connected

Written byEmma Lewis

Posted 8 June 2021 18:18 GMT 

Cleaning a fish at Old Harbour Bay, St. Catherine, Jamaica. Photo by Emma Lewis, used with permission.

Oceans cover approximately 71 percent of the earth’s surface, and contain 97 per cent of its water, so how is our “blue planet””—and specifically, the Caribbean Sea—faring? Is the blue economy, touted as a sustainable solution to the region’s concerns, little more than a catchphrase, or the Caribbean’s last hope?

The theme of World Oceans Day 2021 is “Life and Livelihoods.” Although the Caribbean Sea, with an area of just over one million square miles, represents only around one percent of the global ocean area, it is a critical resource for its people, just about 70 percent of whom live in coastal areas. Certainly, the Caribbean depends in some way on the sea and its coastlines for a living.

The region’s marine environment faces a long list of challenges, including pollution of all kinds: plastics and other forms of trash, as well as abandoned fishing gear and the runoff of pesticides and other chemicals used in agriculture, much of which is unregulated. Drastic changes to island coastlines to accommodate tourism developments, including hotels, marinas and cruise ship ports, have resulted in the removal of vital mangroves and other coastal habitats and impacted coral reefs and seagrass beds. Prospecting and drilling for oil is another growing concern for some Caribbean territories.

Another issue, not to be discounted, is the poaching and hunting of important marine and coastal species, including endangered sea turtles and marine mammals. The United Nations Caribbean Environment Programme (UN/CEP), headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica, will be focusing on this for one month beginning on World Oceans Day in order to raise awareness of the region's mammals, including whales, sharks, and the endangered West Indian manatee:

The UN agency is currently wrapping up its focus on yet another challenge, sargassum seaweed, which has afflicted some of the Caribbean's loveliest beaches—and its tourism trade—in recent years.

As the region marks World Oceans Day, however, two pressing and seemingly intractable issues stand out: the impacts of the climate crisis, and overfishing, including illegal and unregulated fishing by both local and overseas fishers. These concerns, among others, will be the focus of discussions throughout the day on June 8, as they are certainly not unique to the region.

After a series of devastating hurricanes in recent years—most recently, 2019's deadly Hurricane Dorian—the Caribbean has established itself as being exceedingly vulnerable to climate change. Its creeping impact on the marine environment is showing itself in various ways, including the extreme degradation of Caribbean coral reefs, which support over 60 species of corals and 1,500 species of fish, and on which much of the region's tourism industry through leisure activities. The drastic decline, due to higher sea surface temperatures and ocean acidification, makes the corals more fragile. Both coral reefs and mangroves, which act as protective barriers and breeding grounds for ocean life, have been damaged by an increased number of high-intensity storms. According to a 2020 National Environment and Planning Agency of Jamaica report, none of the island's coral reefs are in good shape, with 36 percent rated as being in critical condition.

Etoile Pinder, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Project Coordinator of the Hurricane Recovery Project in the Bahamas, in Green Turtle Cay, Abaco, with members of Friends of the Environment and IDEA Relief as they clear marine debris left by Hurricane Dorian. Photo courtesy the UNDP Bahamas Hurricane Recovery Project office, used with permission.

Local non-governmental organisations are seeking to redress the balance. In Jamaica, several community-based groups are painstakingly restoring corals using various “gardening” methods, and replanting their cultivated young corals on dead reefs. In Grenada, a “biorock” material is also being used to restore corals. The results of such innovative endeavours remain to be seen.

Meanwhile, Sustainable Grenadines (SusGren), a trans-boundary non-governmental organisation (NGO) focusing on the coastal and marine environment and sustainable livelihoods for the people in the Grenadines (located between Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines), has embarked on a sea moss cultivation project. One of its major undertakings was the restoration of Ashton Lagoon, a failed marina project that is now a successful eco-tourism coastal attraction.

The matters stressing out the Caribbean Sea are all connected. The Caribbean is one of the world's most over-fished regions. Over-exploitation of the sea's resources, in particular, the global issue of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, both within the region and from overseas fishing interests, in turn affects Caribbean coral reefs and, by extension, the lives and livelihoods of local fishing communities.

On World Oceans Day, at a webinar hosted by the Earth Journalism Network, regional experts will discuss the issue of fisheries subsidies, and whether ongoing treaty talks at the World Trade Organization (WTO) will make a difference.

Quite apart from the efforts of NGOs, which are often supported by grant funding from multilateral organisations, it is now up to regional governments to work closely with its citizenry to protect the sea and all the creatures that live in it. Some are doing better than others: Belize, for example, has expanded its Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) to protect its vibrant coral reefs.

Ratification and accession to key international agreements such as the SPAW Protocol, which countries like Jamaica have not ratified, and the Cartagena Convention on Biodiversity would also help provide training, technical assistance, grant funding and encourage the establishment of more MPAs.

Political will and action, informed and guided by local scientists such as climate change scholar Professor Michael Taylor and marine biologist Professor Mona Webber at the University of the West Indies, would help propel Caribbean leaders towards a workable and urgently needed plan to protect the sea. On a daily basis, strict enforcement of environmental regulations and greater vigilance against illegal fishing in and around coastal waters needs to be stepped up.

The beautiful, turquoise waters of the Caribbean, which have given so much of their bounty to its people and their economies, deserve nothing less.

'No evidence whatsoever': Left refutes right-wing candidate's election fraud claims -- in Peru

Common Dreams
June 08, 2021

Keiko Fujimori (AFP)

Progressives pushed back forcefully on Tuesday against right-wing Peruvian presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori's allegations of fraud in Sunday's election, saying there has been no evidence so support such claims.

"There is a clear intention to boycott the popular will," Fujimori asserted at a press conference Monday at which she pointed without evidence to "irregularities" and "signs of fraud."

"Through a tragic pandemic, a dizzying media campaign, and a severe economic crisis, the Peruvian people have mobilized to exercise their right to popular sovereignty. Our obligation now is to defend it." —Progressive International

The allegations of fraud from Keiko Fujimori, a former dictator's daughter, came as voting results showed leftist rival Pedro Castillo with a narrow lead.

A tally of about 95% of the votes showed Castillo with 50.3% of the vote compared to Fujimori's 49.7%.

Fujimori, whom Bloomberg described as a "market favorite," is the daughter of the nation's former dictator, ex-President Alberto Fujimori, currently serving a 25-year sentence in prison for his role in civilian massacres and graft. Keiko Fujimori has said she would pardon her father if elected.

According to The Associated Press:

Voters across Peru, where voting is mandatory, headed to the polls throughout Sunday under a set schedule meant to minimize long lines. No disturbances were reported at voting sites, which even opened in San Miguel del Ene, a remote village in a cocaine-producing area where two weeks ago a massacre ended with 16 people dead.
Pre-election polls indicated the candidates were virtually tied heading into the runoff. In the first round of voting, featuring 18 candidates, neither received more than 20% support and both were strongly opposed by sectors of Peruvian society.

Regional election observers did not report any voting irregularities, as the Guardian noted.

In a statement Tuesday, the Progressive International strongly rejected Fujimori's fraud accusations and urged "patience and vigilance as the final results are counted—especially in the face of fresh attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the democratic process."

"The delegation of the Progressive International has seen no evidence of systemic fraud in the course of the 2021 Peruvian presidential elections. Neither statistical models analyzing results in real time nor our time physical monitoring of this process have revealed any evidence of fraud," the group said.

The impacts of false accusations of election fraud are clear and dangerous, the Progressive International added. The group pointed to examples including U.S. President Donald Trump catalyzing the "revanchist attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to 'stop the steal'" and the 2019 U.S.-backed coup in Bolivia that ousted the democratically elected government of Evo Morales following unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud.

"Through a tragic pandemic, a dizzying media campaign, and a severe economic crisis, the Peruvian people have mobilized to exercise their right to popular sovereignty. Our obligation now is to defend it," the Progressive International said.

David Adler, General Coordinator of the Progressive International, added in a tweet Tuesday that as "Castillo's lead has grown, this grim prediction has come to pass: Keiko Fujimori is now making accusations of 'systematic fraud'—and bringing large parts of the mainstream press with her."

"Our team is clear," Adler wrote. "There is no evidence *whatsoever* to support Keiko's claim."

And, should Castillo emerge victorious, it would be historic, write CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin and Latin American policy expert Leonardo Flores.

His win would "be remarkable not only because he is a leftist teacher who is the son of illiterate peasants and his campaign was grossly outspent by Fujimori, but there was a relentless propaganda attack against him that touched on historical fears of Peru's middle class and elites," Benjamin and Flores wrote.

A Castillo victory would also "represent a huge blow to U.S. interests in the region and an important step towards reactivating Latin American integration. He has promised to withdraw Peru from the Lima Group, an ad hoc committee of countries dedicated to regime change in Venezuela," the pair wrote.