CANADA

Standards group calls for sweeping post-pandemic changes to how long-term care homes operate

Karina Roman

 - Friday-cbc.ca

A national standards association is calling for profound changes to the way Canada's long-term care facilities are run after the pandemic exposed serious weaknesses that contributed to thousands of deaths.

The package released today by the Canadian Standards Association runs to 338 draft recommendations for new long-term care standards.

Among other things, the CSA is calling for single rooms with private bathrooms for long-term care residents, dedicated hand-hygiene sinks and better contingency plans for staffing shortages when "catastrophic" events occur.

In the first few months of the pandemic, more than 80 per cent of Canada's known COVID-19 deaths happened in long-term care and retirement homes — the highest such rate among nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

According to the National Institute on Ageing's latest numbers, more than 16,000 residents of long-term care homes in Canada have died because of COVID-19. Thousands of staff members in long-term care facilities have been infected as well, and more than two dozen of them have died as a result.

"We really took a different approach in the development of these standards," said Alex Mihailidis, chair of the CSA Group technical subcommittee that developed the draft standards. He said the advisory group that came up with the standards included long-term care residents and family members.

"The hope here is that they all now have skin in the game … The hope is that they will lead the charge to see change from within," he said.

The CSA draft standards released today are part of a larger package of standards requested by the federal government last spring. The first part of that package, released at the end of January by the Health Standards Organization (HSO), proposed standards for the quality of direct care that covered things like staffing and residents' rights.
Infection control, private bathrooms

The CSA draft standards are comprehensive and include detailed infection control measures covering such things as PPE supplies, laundry and waste management and rules for cleaning a room after an outbreak or death.

They also cover aspects of day-to-day functions — such as helping residents eat, bathe and go outside — and visitation policies. They include a section on staff training and education as well.

The CSA document proposes new standards for the design of long-term care facilities themselves. It calls for single-occupancy rooms with private bathrooms and improvements to ventilation and medical gas systems.


© Evan Mitsui/CBC

Crosses representing residents who died of COVID-19 on the lawn of Camilla Care Community in Mississauga, Ont. on Jan. 13, 2020. The long-term care home was among those in Ontario hardest-hit by the pandemic.

Mihailidis said CSA drafted the standards with the goal of keeping residents safe while giving them more control over their lives.

"We kept in mind throughout … even though it's quite technical in some places, that these are people's homes," he said.

"We are not developing a standard for a hospital or medical facility. These are most likely the last homes that many individuals would be living in."

A right to privacy

Which is why the CSA document includes a section on respecting the rights of residents with the capacity to "consent to sexual and intimate acts" and to "engage in such activity as long as it is not illegal." The CSA also calls on long-term care facilities to offer residents privacy for "intimate acts" and "conversation."

But these standards won't automatically become binding when they're finally published in the fall because they're not in legislation yet.

The federal government has promised a new long-term care act that it insists will respect provincial jurisdiction over the long-term care sector. It's not clear whether provinces would be compelled to adopt and enforce the standards in that law, or whether they'd have the option of drafting their own revised standards.

And adopting and enforcing the CSA's recommended standards — especially the ones dealing with physical infrastructure and staffing — would be expensive.

"You can't meet a standard if you don't have the money," Michele Lowe, executive director for the Nursing Homes of Nova Scotia Association, told CBC News before the draft standards were made public.

"There's been this narrative that long-term care facilities and operators should have done better and they chose not to do better. But the reality in many of these cases is they didn't receive the funding from the department of health in those provinces."
The pandemic and the profit model

Larry Baillie's father Glenn Baillie died during a particularly dire long-term care home outbreak in Winnipeg in 2020. He said he agrees that funding is a big problem — but so is the industry's for-profit model.

"One year before (the pandemic), the physical therapist told me, 'We don't have enough money to provide care, but they had enough money to pay the shareholders,'" he said, adding he strongly supports the idea of national standards.

"Do not be fooled. For-profit means for-profit."

The Liberals promised $9 billion for long-term care during the last election, in addition to the $3 billion over five years already provided in the last budget.

"What price do we put on folks living in long-term care? These are our parents, our grandparents, as well as the workers that … are exposed as a result of going to work in the morning," said Mark Hancock, national president of CUPE, a union representing about 90,000 long-term care workers across the country.
New standards will be costly

The CSA is proposing different standards depending on whether a facility is an existing structure or a new build. For example, it calls on existing long-term care homes with rooms housing multiple residents to convert them into rooms for a maximum of two residents.

It says existing facilities should ensure they have a single room available to manage communicable infections or palliative care, and should provide private roll-in showers if resident washrooms don't have individual shower enclosures.

Mihailidis concedes that not all long-term care homes will have the resources to do everything the CSA recommends.

"We tried to provide as many different options and clauses and approaches so that if a home needs to pick and choose, they can do so," he said.

Hancock said he hopes to see the promised funds in the upcoming federal budget. He said he wants to see that funding linked to improved standards in the sector, even though health care is a provincial responsibility.

"We've seen in many cases that provinces are paying lip service to the federal government," he said. "So I think there's some real need to have teeth in these standards."

In the mandate letter Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos received when he took over the portfolio, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tasked him with introducing new legislation to improve the state of long-term care. The government has said such legislation would respect provincial and territorial jurisdiction but has not said when it will be tabled.

Larry Baillie said that what happened to his father and others in long-term care could have been prevented if Canada's health care policy valued seniors.

"We should … not look at them as an older person laying in a bed, but look at him as Glenn Baillie, owner of Spoke & Edge (ski shop) and president of Rotary," said Baillie. "We need to cherish them."

The proposed standards are subject to public input for the next 60 days.

Draft standards for LTC building design, infection prevention publicly released

The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — Experts have released a new set of draft standards for long-term care, this time focused on building design, materials and infection prevention and control.

CSA Group, formerly the Canadian Standards Association, developed the draft in parallel with care-giving standards from the Health Standards Organization, released two weeks ago.

Alex Mihailidis, chair of CSA Group’s technical subcommittee, says his organization's standards are more prescriptive and look at everything from the heating and ventilation systems to the types of technology that should be available to residents.

He likens HSO's standards to the software of long-term care, whereas CSA Group has looked at the hardware.

"If we can take any type of silver lining over the past two years when it comes to long-term care homes, it really taught us a significant lesson across many of the aspects in operations," Mihailidis said.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted serious systemic problems with infection prevention and control as well as other issues inside long-term care residences across the country.

Data gathered by The National Institute on Aging finds 16,345 long-term care residents had died of COVID-19, as of Feb. 8, since the pandemic began.

Throughout the process of developing the new standards, Mihailidis said, there has been a focus on improving the operations and safety of the residences while balancing the notion that people live in the spaces and deserve the comforts of home.

"They are not acute-care settings, they're not hospitals. How do we design long-term care homes, having that balance of quality of life versus infection prevention, control and safety?" he said.

The draft draws on best practices from around the world where increasingly long-term care is being designed as a cluster of neighbourhoods, with separate dining and multi-purpose rooms to help balance safety and quality of life. In the event of an outbreak, neighbourhoods can be contained without affecting the entire residence.

The standards also spell out specific requirements for such things as plumbing, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and security, he said.

While some of those requirements might sound most helpful for the development of new homes, Mihailidis said the goal is to make the new standards applicable to the more than 2,000 homes that already operate in Canada.

"The way we tried to do that really is by providing options or different approaches that homes can take and try to get as close to the standard as possible," he said.

The draft has been released for public review, with CSA group accepting feedback until April 11. The experts plan to then refine the standards and release a final version at the end of the year.

It is not yet clear how they will be implemented and enforced.

The HSO's standards for care are expected to be adopted by Accreditation Canada, which sanctions nearly 70 per cent of such homes in Canada.

That will not necessarily be the case for the CSA Group's more prescriptive look at what needs to be done to improve the residences themselves.

The federal government has promised to develop legislation related to the safety of long-term care, which could enshrine the standards in law. That would require the co-operation of provinces, which have jurisdiction over the homes.

"Where the enforcement's going to come, though, is from the residents, the families of the residents, the staff who work in these homes, and hopefully the operators themselves," Mihailidis said.

"This is really going to be a groundswell of bottom-up support from all these different stakeholders."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 11, 2022.

Laura Osman, The Canadian Press

US judge strikes down Biden climate damage cost estimate

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Friday blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to put greater emphasis on potential damage from greenhouse gas emissions when creating rules for polluting industries.

U.S. District Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana sided with Republican attorneys general from energy producing states who said the administration's action to raise the cost estimate of carbon emissions threatened to drive up energy costs while decreasing state revenues from energy production.

The judge issued an injunction that bars the Biden administration from using the higher cost estimate, which puts a dollar value on damages caused by every additional ton of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.

President Joe Biden on his first day in office restored the climate cost estimate to about $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions after the Trump administration had reduced the figure to about $7 or less per ton. Former President Donald Trump's estimate included only damages felt in the U.S. versus the global damages captured in higher estimates that were previously used under the Obama administration.

The estimate would be used to shape future rules for oil and gas drilling, automobiles, and other industries. Using a higher cost estimate would help justify reductions in planet-warming emissions, by making the benefits more likely to outweigh the expenses of complying with new rules.

Known as the social cost of carbon, the damage figure uses economic models to capture impacts from rising sea levels, recurring droughts and other consequences of climate change. The $51 estimate was first established in 2016 and used to justify major rules such as the Clean Power Plan — former President Barack Obama's signature effort to address climate change by tightening emissions standards from coal-fired power plants — and separate rules imposing tougher vehicle emission standards.

The Supreme Court blocked the Clean Power Plan before it ever took effect, and a more lenient rule imposed by the Trump administration was later thrown out by a federal appeals court.

The carbon cost estimate had not yet been used very much under Biden, but is being considered in a pending environmental review of oil and gas lease sales in western states.

In Friday's ruling, Cain wrote that using the climate damage figure in oil and gas lease reviews would “artificially increase the cost estimates of lease sales" and cause direct harm to energy producing states.

Economist Michael Greenstone, who helped establish the social cost of carbon while working in the Obama administration, said if the ruling stands, it would signal the U.S. is again unwilling to confront climate change.

“The social cost of carbon guides the stringency of climate policy,” said the University of Chicago professor. “Setting it to near-zero Trump administration levels effectively removes all the teeth from climate regulations.”

Republican attorneys general led by Louisiana's Jeff Landry said the Biden administration's revival of the higher estimate was illegal and exceeded its authority by basing the figure on global considerations. The other states whose officials sued are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Landry's office issued a statement calling Cain’s ruling “a major win for nearly every aspect of Louisiana’s economy and culture.”

“Biden’s executive order was an attempt by the government to take over and tax the people based on winners and losers chosen by the government,” the statement said.

The White House referred questions to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.

Federal officials began developing climate damage cost estimates more than a decade ago after environmentalists successfully sued the government for not taking greenhouse gas emissions into account when setting vehicle mileage standards, said Max Sarinsky, a professor at the New York University School of Law.

Not fully accounting for carbon damages would skew any cost-benefit analysis of a proposed rule in favor of industry, he said, adding that the social cost of carbon had been “instrumental” in allowing agencies to accurately judge how their rules affect the climate.

“Without a proper valuation of climate impact, it would complicate agencies’ good faith efforts to make reasoned conclusions,” Sarinsky said.

A federal judge in Missouri last year had sided with the administration in a similar challenge from another group of Republican states. In that case, the judge said the Republicans lacked standing to bring their lawsuit because they had yet to suffer any harm under Biden’s order.

Friday's ruling by Cain, a Trump appointee, follows a ruling by another Louisiana judge last summer that struck down a separate Biden attempt to address greenhouse gas emissions by suspending new oil and gas leases on federal lands and water. The judge in that case, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, is also a Trump appointee.

In a sign of the shifting politics on the issue, a federal judge in Washington rejected a lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico conducted largely in response to Doughty's ruling.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, an Obama appointee, threw out the lease sale, saying the administration did not adequately take into account its effect on greenhouse gas emissions.

____

Brown reported from Billings, Montana, and McGill from New Orleans.

Matthew Brown, Matthew Daly And Kevin Mcgill, The Associated Press

Trump-appointed judge bars Biden administration from using climate cost estimate

By Ella Nilsen, CNN - Friday

A Trump-appointed judge dealt another blow to Biden's climate agenda on Friday, barring the administration from using a metric that estimates the societal cost of carbon emissions.

US District Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana issued an injunction on Friday that prevents the Biden administration from using what's known as the "social cost of carbon" in decisions around oil and gas drilling on public land or in rules that govern fossil fuel emissions.

The metric uses economic models to put a value on each ton of carbon dioxide emissions, to help quantify the economic harm caused by the climate crisis: sea level rise, more destructive hurricanes, extreme wildfire seasons and flooding, for example.

Agencies then weigh that economic harm in decisions that involve things like emissions regulations or fossil fuel drilling approvals.

It was first implemented during the Obama administration and substantially weakened by the Trump administration. Biden revived the social cost of carbon on his first day in office, setting it at $51 per ton of CO2 emissions -- the same level as set by the Obama administration.

The Biden administration had not yet used the metric in many decisions, but was expected to release an updated figure later this month.

Ten Republican-led states brought the lawsuit against the Biden administration. In his ruling, Cain sided with the states, saying the administration's carbon cost estimate "will significantly drive up costs" while decreasing state revenue.

Cain added that his home state of Louisiana "will be directly harmed by the reduction of funds necessary to maintain the state's coastal lands."

The Department of Justice did not immediately return a request for comment.

Earthjustice attorney Hana Vizcarra, whose organization is not involved in the case, said she'd be surprised if the government's attorneys didn't appeal.

"I can't imagine not appealing this, if I were the Justice Department," Vizcarra said.

Vizcarra added there's not much legal precedent to support Cain's ruling, as a similar lawsuit brought by Republican states was tossed by an Obama-appointed federal judge in Missouri last year.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry praised the decision in a statement.

"Biden's attempt to control the activities of the American people and the activities of every business from Main Street to Wall Street has been halted today," Landry said. "Biden's executive order was an attempt by the government to take over and tax the people based on winners and losers chosen by the government."

This is not the first time a Trump-appointed judge has dealt a blow to the Biden administration's climate goals. In June, another federal judge in Louisiana blocked Biden's temporary pause on new oil and gas leasing on federal lands -- saying Biden had exceeded his authority.

That decision paved the way for the Department of Interior to hold a November auction for oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Even though administration officials insisted at the time it ran counter to their climate goals, they maintained they had to follow the law. A federal judge in DC District Court later invalidated the sale.

Biden's administration will face perhaps the most serious legal challenge to climate policies later this month in a US Supreme Court case that could limit the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

This story has been updated with additional information.

Outgoing chief archivist at center of ERA fight and Trump documents controversy

By Devan Cole, CNN - Friday

Recent controversies over the certification of the Equal Rights Amendment and improper record-keeping of Trump-era documents have pushed the nation's chief archivist, whose typical pro forma responsibilities render him unknown to all but the most knowledgeable Washingtonians, into the middle of several high-profile political dramas.

David Ferriero, who's set to retire in April, has been the head of the National Archives and Records Administration since 2009, where his duties typically entail overseeing the agency's three dozen facilities around the US that hold more than 13 billion pages of documents. His role is also to formally add amendments to the US Constitution -- which hasn't been put to use during his tenure, as the Constitution hasn't been amended since 1992.

Still, he's become a key figure for many progressives who are leaning on Ferriero to take the drastic step of interpreting a dispute — and thus directly contradict legal guidance issued by the Justice Department and a federal judge's opinion that the deadline for ratifying the ERA expired — about the status of the ERA and add it as the nation's 28th Amendment. Ferriero has made no public indication that he is willing to do so.

Ferriero and his agency, which maintain the US' vast trove of presidential records, have also become tangled up in former President Donald Trump's dubious handling of records from his time in office. The top archivist stressed earlier this week that the Presidential Records Act is "critical to our democracy" after CNN and other outlets reported that Trump would routinely rip up documents and that he took several boxes to his Florida residence after leaving the White House.

The push for Ferriero to certify the ERA represents perhaps the biggest test he's faced during his 12 years running NARA, and it forces the little known civil servant and Obama appointee into the center of a decades-long fight to enshrine equal rights for women in the Constitution.

US code places the power to actually amend the Constitution in the hands of the nation's top archivist, with federal law stating in part that the "Archivist of the United States shall forthwith cause the amendment to be published, with his certificate, specifying the states by which the same may have been adopted, and that the same has become valid, to all intents and purposes, as a part of the Constitution of the United States."

But the archivist "has delegated many of the ministerial duties associated with this function to the Director of the Federal Register," according to the National Archives' website, which says that when the Office of the Federal Register "verifies that it has received the required number of authenticated ratification documents, it drafts a formal proclamation for the Archivist to certify that the amendment is valid and has become part of the Constitution."

"This certification is published in the Federal Register and U.S. Statutes at Large and serves as official notice to the Congress and to the Nation that the amendment process has been completed," according to NARA.

Ferriero must now decide whether he's going to either side with backers of the ERA, who have been asking him to publish the ERA as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution as part of his ministerial duties, arguing that it has satisfied all the necessary constitutional requirements and in fact took effect last month, or a trio of Republican senators and others who are raising concerns over the legitimacy of the ratification process.

"In light of the calls for you to disregard your duty and certify the ERA, we write to ask for your commitment that you, and the acting Archivist who will take over in April, will not certify or publish the ERA," Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Mitt Romney of Utah wrote to Ferriero, arguing that the ERA has "failed to achieve ratification by the states and is no longer pending before them."

Opponents have argued that three states that ratified the ERA in recent years are invalid because they occurred years after a deadline set by Congress passed, and they've pointed to five states' past rescissions of their ratifications as part of why the ERA is not ratified.

They've also pointed to Justice Department legal guidance, issued under the Trump administration in 2020, that said the deadline to ratify the ERA expired and that the archivist cannot certify it. They've also cited litigation surrounding the matter as another reason why the archivist cannot act on it.

In 2020, Virginia, Illinois and Nevada, the three latest states to ratify the ERA, sued Ferriero in an effort to force him to certify the amendment. A federal judge ruled in the case last March that the deadline for ratifying the ERA had expired.

"Plaintiffs' ratifications came after both the original and extended deadlines that Congress attached to the ERA, so the Archivist is not bound to record them as valid," Judge Rudolph Contreras wrote in his decision. The case is being appealed.

NARA declined CNN's request for comment on Thursday, saying it won't comment on the issue while the case is pending.
Democrats probe NARA over Trump records

As Ferriero grapples with how to handle the ERA issue, he is also weighing in on Trump's handling of records from his time in office, emphasizing that the federal law governing how presidential records are preserved must be adhered to by all presidents.

"The Presidential Records Act mandates that all presidential records must be properly preserved by each administration so that a complete set of presidential records is transferred to the National Archives at the end of the administration," Ferriero said in a statement this week. "NARA pursues the return of records whenever we learn that records have been improperly removed or have not been appropriately transferred to official accounts."

Congressional Democrats have launched a probe into the matter, with House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat, asking Ferriero to provide information on 15 boxes from the White House that needed to be recovered by the NARA from Trump's Florida resort last month, as well as "the actions taken by President Trump to destroy or attempt to destroy (presidential records), and any actions NARA has taken to recover or preserve these documents."

Ferriero said in his statement that "the Presidential Records Act is critical to our democracy, in which the government is held accountable by the people," adding: "Records matter."
Longtime record-keeper

Ferriero announced in January that he would retire in mid-April after serving in the post under three US presidents.

He said in a statement that under his leadership, the agency has "become a leader in the government's transition to a digital future, electronic records management, and the principles of Open Government," adding that it's served customers by "increasing public access and engagement through the online catalog and social media; streamlining how we serve veterans; expanding access to museums, exhibits, and public programs in person and virtually; and establishing civic literacy initiatives."

Ferriero has found himself in national controversy before, having claimed "full responsibility" in 2020 for an altered photograph from the 2017 Women's March that censored signs referencing women's anatomy and Trump's name.

The altered photograph sparked outrage among Trump critics and historians, prompting the agency to issue an apology and later replace it with an unaltered one.

A veteran of the Vietnam War, Ferriero previously served as director of the New York Public Libraries, and had also worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke University, according to his official biography.

CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to provide additional context about the legal arguments surrounding the archivist's role in certifying the Equal Rights Amendment.

Turkey demands 11 years behind bars for senior journalist

ANKARA (Reuters) - A Turkish prosecutor's office demanded 11 years in jail for a prominent journalist on charges of insulting President Tayyip Erdogan and two ministers in his cabinet, Turkish news agencies reported on Friday.


© Reuters/Murad SezerFILE PHOTO: Turkish President Erdogan is pictured with Turkish Justice Minister Bozdag during the International Istanbul Law Congress in Istanbul

Last month, a court ordered Sedef Kabas, a 52-year-old television journalist who mainly covers Turkish politics, to be jailed pending trial on a charge of insulting Erdogan, which carries a jail sentence of between one and four years.

The prosecutor also asked Kabas to be charged with insulting Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu and Transportation Minister Adil Karaismailoglu, for a combined jail term of 11 years.

Kabas was jailed pending trial over a proverb she cited during a political discussion on opposition TV channel Tele 1 and repeated on Twitter, which Erdogan's communications head and the justice minister condemned as a swipe at the president.

Earlier on Friday, The Coalition For Women In Journalism (CFWIJ) and 37 press freedom organizations and journalists called on Turkey to release Kabas.

"The unfounded imprisonment of the noted journalist was met with widespread condemnation from local and international press freedom organizations as well as rights organizations and press freedom defenders," the joint statement said.

"Yet, the Turkish government and judiciary appear relentless and Sedef remains behind bars," it added.

Tens of thousands have been charged and convicted over the crime of insulting the president since Erdogan took office in 2014 after serving as prime minister for 11 years.

Between 2014 and the end of 2020, 160,169 such investigations were launched, 35,507 cases were filed and there were 12,881 convictions, official data shows.

(Reporting by Ece Toksabay; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)

PANDEMIC PROFITEERING
It's not just inflation — corporate greed is also partially to blame for the rising prices you're paying

insider@insider.com (Paul Constant) -


© Provided by Business InsiderMeat prices have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Wang Ying/Xinhua via Getty Images

Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures and the cohost of the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast.

He said inflation is measured using a "market basket" of goods and services.
The CPI can't fully explain inflation's rise — some price increases go to corporate profits, he says.

The media often reports on a single monthly "inflation rate," as though prices always rise by a uniform number across the board.

But when inflation rose by 7% in December, that didn't mean that every item in your grocery basket — to say nothing of haircuts, movie tickets, lawnmowers, and paperclips — increased by exactly 7% over the past year.

The federal government tracks and reports the inflation rate through something called the Consumer Price Index, which builds a "market basket" from a wide variety of goods and services in locations around the country and then runs the numbers through a complex weighting process to come up with the monthly average. Drew Desilver at Pew Research Center wrote a great deep dive explaining this process last month.

Our own experience as consumers informs us that prices on various goods and services are rising, and the inflation rate, derived from the CPI, confirms that our experience is true. But what the CPI can't explain — at least, not fully — is how and why inflation is rising.
The first thing to note is that inflation isn't just a problem in the United States

Virtually every nation in the world is struggling with skyrocketing inflation rates, though the rate is increasing higher in the US than in most nations. The United Kingdom, for example, reported a 5.4% inflation rate in December.

The reason for this universal price hike is relatively simple: The pandemic shut down the global supply chain, which then caused a worldwide traffic jam for goods ranging from auto parts to semiconductors at the exact same time that demand for goods like electronics and home-improvement items increased for hundreds of millions of locked-down consumers around the world.

Chad Stone at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, among others, believes that inflation is largely the result of global consumer demand switching almost overnight from services to goods during the pandemic.
The second thing is that even if supply-chain problems were completely smoothed out over the next few months, inflation is still likely to be a big problem in the US for at least the next year

That's because rents and shelter costs, which make up a third of the CPI's "market basket," are soaring right now.

As Zach Silk writes in the most recent issue of The Pitch, the sister newsletter to the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast, "The average rent in the United States is nearly $1,900 a month, an increase of nearly $300 over this time last year — and that's the average, remember, while some cities like Miami have seen a 40% year-over-year increase of rents."

Economists warn that due to a variety of complex CPI aggregation issues, even if every price in America magically stopped rising tomorrow, rising rents alone would continue to drive up the overall inflation rate for the next year or so.

The last point to keep in mind with inflation is that, like everything else to do with the economy, those rising prices aren't established by some objective, all-seeing, all-knowing "free market" that assesses every aspect of the economy and sets prices accordingly.
In fact, a good number of the rising prices we're paying weren't strictly necessary at all

During the last quarter of 2021, for example, Starbucks reported an eye-popping 31% increase in profits, and revenue increased for the quarter by almost 20% to just over $8 billion. On the same call that Starbucks announced those terrific numbers, the corporation also announced that it would raise its prices over the next year — probably more than once.

The company blamed "supply-chain disruptions" and higher costs for labor for the price hikes, but Jake Johnson at media nonprofit Common Dreams said that they didn't mention one raise in particular: Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson's pay increased by almost 40% last year to more than $20 million.

It's not just Starbucks: Many American corporations see inflationary panic as an opportunity to boost their profits. The Wall Street Journal reported that Todd Kahn, the CEO of luxury fashion brand Coach, even admitted that his company's "rise in [prices] isn't really about inflation … it's about reducing discounting."

Journalist Matt Stoller estimated that 60% of the price increases that ordinary Americans are paying are going directly to corporate profits, not to compensate for global supply issues or compensate for higher-priced goods.
Of course, none of this context about inflation helps the ordinary American consumer, who's paying more for everyday items

All those wage increases that have happened since the labor market turned in favor of workers last year weren't enough to keep up with inflation, which took a 2.4% bite out of the average American paycheck.

These inflationary stresses are a complicated global problem, and it's going to take a suite of policies — from using government muscle to help smooth out lingering supply-chain snags to combating shameless corporate price gouging and exploitative rent hikes — to push inflation back down to healthy levels.

But you shouldn't buy finger-pointing that tries to pin inflation solely on lockdowns, stimulus checks, or other policies that were passed to help keep Americans safe and supported through the worst of pandemic.

That's the worst kind of trickle-down fear-mongering — meant to keep workers angry with workers and everyone's eyes off the real profiteers.

Honduran supreme court orders release of six anti-mining protesters

Nina Lakhani - The Guardian


The Honduran supreme court has ordered the release of six anti-mining protesters, ruling that they should never have been put on trial.

The environmentalists, who have been held on remand for two and half years for trying to protect a river in a national park, faced up to 14 years in prison after being convicted on Wednesday of criminal damage and illegal detention. Two others were absolved of the same charges.

Wednesday’s verdict, which cemented Honduras’ ranking as the most dangerous country in the world for environmentalists and land rights defenders, was condemned as “appalling” by the UN special rapporteur for human rights defenders.

Amnesty International described the verdict as “outrageous” and said the Guapinol activists were prisoners of conscience.

Related: UN rapporteur ‘appalled’ by convictions for Honduran environmentalists who opposed open-pit mine

But in a dramatic move, the supreme court accepted an appeal filed months earlier that challenged the constitutionality of the charges and the refusal to grant bail.

The court found that the case should never have gone to trial because the judge who sanctioned the indictment against the defenders – and later ordered pre-trial detention – was not authorised to do so. The charges must be annulled and the men freed, as the judge violated due process by presiding on cases outside her jurisdiction.

The eight men, from a poor, semi-rural community called Guapinol, have been held in an overcrowded prison throughout the pandemic as a result of bail being denied – yet the conditions requiring pre-trial detention were never met, according to Thursday’s supreme-court decision.

“The rulings confirm that the case should never have proceeded and that the pre-trial detention was illegal,” said defence lawyer Edy Tabora. “The Guapinol defenders were arbitrarily detained.”

The case stems from a huge open-pit mine in Tocoa, owned by one of the country’s most powerful couples, which was sanctioned inside a protected national park without community consultation in a process mired by irregularities, according to international experts.

The Guapinol community set-up a peaceful protest camp after the mine polluted rivers relied upon by thousands of people. Security forces violently evicted the encampment and dozens of arrest warrants were issued against the protesters.

International legal and human rights experts widely condemned the criminalization of the activists and the subsequent militarization of the community, which has forced several people to flee and seek asylum in the US.

After a trial mired my delays, irregularities and accusations of judicial bias and falsified evidence, the criminal court ruled on Wednesday that José Márquez, Kelvin Romero Martínez, José Abelino Cedillo, Porfirio Sorto Cedillo, Orbín Nahúm Hernández, and Ewer Alexander Cedillo Cruz were guilty of criminal damage of the mining company’s property and illegal detention of its private security chief.

Arnold Alemán and Jeremías Martínez were absolved of the same charges and allowed to return home.

As a result of the supreme court rulings, defence lawyers will today petition the court to immediately release the six imprisoned men.

Juana Zuniga, partner of Jose Albino Cedillo was among the six found guilty, said: “We the families are in shock, but full of joy. We hope that our companions will be freed as soon as possible and allowed to return home as the defenders that they are and have always been.

“Our struggle will continue until the national park is free from mining and environmental destruction.”

Mexico on track for one of deadliest years for media

AFP - Yesterday 


Mexico is on course for one of its deadliest years yet for the press, with five journalists murdered already in 2022, prompting calls for authorities to end a culture of impunity.

Reporters in the Latin American country are killed "because it's cheap," Juan Vazquez, spokesman for media rights group Article 19, told AFP.

"Those who run the greatest risk are the journalists with their pen, computer, recorder or microphone. In the end those who run the least risk are those who pull the trigger," he said.


© PEDRO PARDOA man holds a sign reading

 "Do Not Shoot. The Truth Does Not Kill" 

at a protest against the murders of journalists outside

 the interior ministry in Mexico City

The latest victim was Heber Lopez Vazquez, the 39-year-old manager of news website Noticias Web in the southern state of Oaxaca who was shot dead on Thursday.

Two suspects were arrested as they tried to flee the scene of the crime, according to prosecutors.

Lopez had previously received threats that he believed were linked to allegations of corruption against a local mayor, said Balbina Flores, representative for media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF).


© Guillermo AriasA protester holds a candle with a photo of

 Lourdes Maldonado, one of five journalists murdered already in 2022 in Mexico

Even so, he was not part of a government program providing protection for around 500 journalists.

His murder puts Mexico on course to surpass the toll of seven journalists killed in 2021.

"The first six weeks of 2022 have been the deadliest for the Mexican press in over a decade," said Jan-Albert Hootsen, representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The media rights group said it "urges Mexican authorities to immediately and transparently investigate all murders and bring the perpetrators to justice."

Mexican authorities said Wednesday that three men had been arrested over the murder of journalist Lourdes Maldonado last month in Tijuana.

Her death came in the wake of the shooting of photographer Margarito Martinez in the same northwestern border city.

Roberto Toledo, who worked with a news site in the central state of Michoacan, as well as Jose Luis Gamboa, a journalist and social media activist in eastern Veracruz state, were also killed in January.

- 'Zero impunity'

Around 150 journalists have been murdered since 2000 in Mexico, and only a fraction of the crimes have resulted in convictions, according to RSF.

Around 100 of them were killed under presidents Felipe Calderon (2006-2012) and Enrique Pena Nieto (2012-2018), whose terms were marked by a bloody war on drug trafficking.

Another 29 murders have been registered since President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office in 2018 championing a "hugs not bullets" strategy to tackle violent crime at its roots by fighting poverty and inequality.

"This six-year term (of Lopez Obrador) will be classified as one of the bloodiest" for the press, Flores predicted.

Mexico's president on Friday promised "zero impunity" for the latest murder.

His critics argue that his outspoken attacks against a media that he calls "mercenary" and accuses of serving the interests of his opponents only add to the difficulties facing journalists.

The fact that more than 90 percent of the murders of media workers go unpunished in Mexico is a major driver of the violence, according to activists.

If the authorities had taken tougher action to prevent such crimes, relatives would not be burying more victims, said Vazquez.

Mexico was failing to comply with its obligations in terms of protection and prevention of deadly attacks against journalists, he said.

This country of 126 million people plagued by drug cartel-related violence, ranks 143rd out of 180 nations in RSF's World Press Freedom Index.

Most of the crimes against Mexican media involve small outlets whose journalists are "very vulnerable" and sometimes unaware of the protection mechanisms available to them, Flores said.

Given the poor pay this kind of work offers, they often combine journalism with other jobs.

This means authorities can sometimes be quick to separate the crimes from the victims' media activities and not to investigate them as violations of press freedom.

Journalism is a "very precarious" way of eking out a living in Mexico, said Flores.

jla-axm-dr/mdl/dw

Push for global treaty to cut ocean plastic pollution

Pamela Falk - Yesterday 

© Rich Carey/Shutterstock.comocean-pollutioncropped620x350.jpg

United Nations – The United Nations, the U.S. and France have set their sights on forging an ambitious U.N. treaty to reduce the amount of plastic pollution in the world's oceans. They're hoping to get other nations to sign onto a deal modeled on the 2015 Paris climate pact.

"Plastic waste is choking the seas," U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a video message delivered Friday to a global summit in France on the state of the world's oceans.

National delegations will start negotiating to establish staffing and the agenda for a plastics treaty at the U.N.'s Environment Assembly in Nairobi from February 28-March 2, but the U.S. and France lost no time, announcing on Friday at the three-day "One Oceans Summit" in Brest, on France's coast, their intention to cut plastic pollution.

More than 57 million pounds of pandemic waste polluting oceans

"With rising waters, coastal landfills are threatening to release their waste into the sea," French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday.

The White House said in a statement the two nations "are committed to protecting our environment for future generations," announcing negotiations with France to promote a "global agreement to address the full lifecycle of plastics."

"The agreement should include binding and non-binding commitments, call on countries to develop and implement ambitious national action plans, and foster robust engagement of stakeholders to contribute toward the agreement's objectives while complementing national government contributions," the White House said.

Other aspects of ocean protection were being discussed at the One Oceans Summit, as well as at other upcoming conferences. The U.N. will meet June 27-July 1 in Lisbon, Portugal, and coral reefs will be the focus of the "Our Ocean" conference, sponsored by the U.S. and the Republic of Palau from April 13-14.

"The 'One Ocean Summit' in France is the first in a series of ocean action meetings in 2022 that we hope will stop the decline in the ocean's health this year … urgent action is required," Peter Thomson, U.N. Secretary General's Special Envoy for the Ocean, told CBS News.

The flurry of meetings on the human impact on the oceans is a result of the increasingly apparent urgency of the problem, and because the coronavirus pandemic has largely curbed international gatherings for the past two years.

Experts from the U.S. say that at least 8 million metric tons of plastic waste enters the world's oceans each year — the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck of plastic waste into the ocean every minute, according to the report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in December.

The National Academies report said that as far back as 2016, "the U.S. generated more plastic waste than any other country, exceeding that of all European Union member states combined."

The U.N. plan is to try to negotiate a plastics treaty in just two years, which would be record speed for any global accord, according to Inger Anderson, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme.

The U.N.'s estimate is even higher than the U.S.'s numbers: "We currently dump 11 million metric tons of plastic into the ocean each year, and this figure is projected to double by 2030 and nearly triple by 2040."

"Even people that don't live near a coast, they have seen pictures of sea turtles with plastic choking him… they've seen examples of the plastics that are in necks of seabirds," Susan Gardner, director of UNEP's Ecosystem Division, told CBS News.

"People really understand that when you see plastic on the beach of a remote desert island coming from far away, that we're all contributing to that problem."

The European Union's Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries said at a U.N. press conference last week COVID-19 had stalled talks needed to clean up the oceans. "This year must be the year of the oceans," said Virginijus Sinkevičius. "This year must be the year of biodiversity… it is essential to get plastics under control and the only way to do it is globally."

Bolsonaro allies allegedly pushing fake news effort, Brazil police document says

BRASILIA (Reuters) - A group of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's allies allegedly is coordinating a disinformation campaign and targeting of his political rivals ahead of the Oct. 2 presidential election, according to a public extract from a federal police probe.

The partial report, which became publicly accessible after it was sent to the Supreme Court on Thursday, is from the so-called "Digital Militias" investigation led by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a crusading justice who has headed previous high-profile probes into Bolsonaro and his supporters.

Moraes, accused by Bolsonaro of favoring leftist front-runner Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in this year's presidential election, is probing what lead police investigator Denisse Ribeiro has described as a "cabinet of hate" comprised of supporters of the far-right populist who are allegedly flooding social media with fake news and trashing Bolsonaro's enemies.

Ribeiro said in the partial report that there is evidence to suggest an "orchestrated action" to identify targets, and create and spread disinformation for "ideological, party-political and financial gains."

The partial report has not yet named any of the people allegedly engaged in the fake news effort. Bolsonaro's office did not respond to a request for comment.

The report is likely to worsen relations between Bolsonaro and the Supreme Court, and stoke growing institutional tensions ahead of a vote in which the incumbent faces an uphill re-election battle.

Moraes has become a key Bolsonaro antagonist and a lightning rod for the president's supporters.

In December, the justice ordered that a probe be opened after Bolsonaro said during a live broadcast on multiple social media platforms that COVID-19 vaccines might raise the chance of contracting AIDS.

Bolsonaro, however, faces little jeopardy from the probes while in office, experts say. Earlier this month, the federal police said the president committed a crime by revealing details about a sealed criminal probe, but chose not to recommend he be charged due to his immunity while in office. Bolsonaro's office did not respond to a request for comment when contacted earlier this month about the matter.

(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu; Writing by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Paul Simao)

Indonesia to urge G20 to establish global health fund


JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia will urge the Group of 20 leading economies to establish a global body that can dispense emergency funds during a health crisis, functioning in a similar way to international financial institutions, its health minister said on Friday.

Under the current system, countries are "basically on their own" if they need emergency funds, vaccines, therapeutics or diagnostics, and as G20 president this year, Indonesia will seek to change that, Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin told a news conference.

"There is no global health institution that has enough power or money to jump in and help, you are basically on your own," he said.

The idea adds to a proposal by Indonesia and the United States last year to create an international pandemic response system.

Budi likened the health fund proposal to the creation of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) following the Bretton Woods conference of 1944.

His remarks come a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) and other aid groups said a global health initiative to make COVID-19 vaccines and testing available to poorer countries had received just 5% of targeted donations for this year's aims.

Indonesia President Joko Widodo on Thursday urged support for that initiative from developed countries, saying all nations needed equal chance to prepare themselves for future pandemics.

Budi, a former banker, said he doubted the WHO would be up to the task of managing a global health fund of the scale Indonesia was proposing.

"Whether the WHO is equipped to raise a trillion USD like the IMF, to be honest, (after) 30 years in finance, I don't think so," he said. "The WHO is not built to do this job."

Indonesia's WHO chapter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Budi said organisations like the Global Fund, an international financing organisation, or GAVI, the global Vaccine Alliance, might be better suited.

Indonesia would also push for a global genomic data sharing platform, harmonised global health protocols and a global manufacturing and research hub, especially for developing countries, he added.

(Reporting by Stanley Widianto in Jakarta and Kate Lamb in Sydney; Editing by Martin Petty)