HIDING COVID-19: HOW THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SUPPRESSES PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE PANDEMIC

The U.S. government has reinforced media restrictions at hospitals, reducing the flow of disturbing images of the pandemic.

A health care worker wears personal protective equipment as she speaks to a patient at a mobile testing location for Covid-19 in Auburn, Maine, on Dec. 8, 2020. Photo: Robert F. Bukaty/AP


Peter Maass
December 27 2020

AS COVID-19 TORE through the United States in the spring, a senior official in the Trump administration quietly reinforced a set of guidelines that prevented journalists from getting inside all but a handful of hospitals at the front line of the pandemic. The guidelines, citing the medical privacy law known as HIPAA, suggested a nearly impossible standard: Before letting journalists inside Covid-19 wards, hospitals needed prior permission from not only the specific patients the journalists would interview, but also other patients whose names or identities would be accessible.

The onerous guidelines were issued on May 5 by Roger Severino, who worked at the conservative Heritage Foundation before Donald Trump appointed him to direct the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS. The guidelines made it extremely difficult for hospitals to give photographers the opportunity to collect visual evidence of the pandemic’s severity. By tightening the circulation of disturbing images, the guidelines fulfilled, intentionally or not, a key Trump administration goal: keeping public attention away from the death toll, which has surpassed 300,000 souls.

“The last thing hospital patients need to worry about during the Covid-19 crisis is a film crew walking around their bed shooting B-roll,” Severino said dismissively in a short press release accompanying the guidelines.

Severino speaks at a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 18, 2018.
Photo: Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

In the pandemic’s early days, when hospitals were first inundated with media requests, the prevailing HIPAA guidelines were quite restrictive, even on matters that had nothing to do with media access. Those guidelines predated the Trump administration and were not written for a pandemic. But the scale of the Covid-19 crisis quickly forced the Trump administration to loosen a wide range of privacy restrictions on medical providers — except, as it turned out, the ones that kept Americans from viscerally seeing the ailing and the dying.

For instance, HHS allowed hospitals to share Covid-19 information with first responders and with organizations involved in Covid-19 testing. Hospitals were told that they would not face sanctions for sharing information with the families or friends of Covid-19 patients. Doctors were freed to discuss or transfer patient information with technologies that were not secure, such as email, FaceTime, and Skype. As it relaxed these restrictions, the agency said that medical providers would not be punished for breaches of patient confidentiality if they acted in good faith during the pandemic.

The government’s permissiveness did not extend to journalists. The media guidelines announced by Severino in May reinforced HIPAA’s restrictions and warned hospitals that violations could bring fines in the millions of dollars. The announcement was not reported by general-interest publications, but news outlets for the health care industry noticed what had happened. The headline of one of those industry stories was blunt: “Patient Privacy Prevails Over Covid-19 Media Coverage.”

Severino’s guidance, little known outside the health care industry, may help solve one of the mysteries of the pandemic: Why have Americans seen relatively little imagery of people suffering from Covid-19? While there is a long-running debate over the influence of disturbing images of death and dying — whether they actually move public opinion — the relative paucity of videos and photographs of the pandemic’s victims might help explain why Covid-19 skepticism has thrived as the death toll in America reaches the level of a 9/11 every day.

“For society to respond in ways commensurate with the importance of this pandemic, we have to see it,” wrote art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. “For us to be transformed by it, it has to penetrate our hearts as well as our minds. Images force us to contend with the unspeakable. They help humanize clinical statistics, to make them comprehensible.”

Nurses tend to a Covid-19 patient in a Stamford Hospital intensive care unit in Stamford, Conn., on April 24, 2020.
Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

FROM THE MOMENT Covid-19 took hold, journalists in the United States experienced immense difficulty getting access to what amounts to ground zero of the emergency. This was not because they were not trying — they deluged hospitals with requests to document what was happening. Nor was it because doctors and nurses resisted — they clamored for more attention to the agonies endured by their patients. With infrequent exceptions, hospitals said no to the requests from journalists, often without explanation.

Lucas Jackson, a senior photographer for Reuters, recalls that at the start of the pandemic in March, he worked with a team at Reuters that called nearly every hospital and trauma ward in New York City. They created a spreadsheet of the hospitals and whether they had been contacted and what their response was. Only a few responded, and none granted access, even though Reuters offered Guantánamo levels of control to hospital staff, agreeing to get releases from patients and allowing hospital staff to look at all photographs to make sure no names or identities were disclosed. “If that’s what it takes, we were willing to do it,” Jackson told The Intercept.

“Photography has played such a key role in the civil rights movement, in ending the Vietnam War, and any number of key moments in American history — and it just seems missing in action on this crisis.”


Michael Kamber, a former war photographer who directs the Bronx Documentary Center in New York City, recalls security guards shooing him off the sidewalks in front of Lincoln Medical Center. “This is the greatest loss of life on the American continent in such a concentrated time, and we’re seeing almost no images that really convey the devastation and the death,” Kamber said. “Photography has played such a key role in the civil rights movement, in ending the Vietnam War, and any number of key moments in American history — and it just seems missing in action on this crisis.”

Kamber, like other photographers, accepts that safety and privacy concerns need to be upheld, but he believes that those concerns are used as excuses for the repression of journalism that is manifestly in the public interest. In the cases in which hospitals have allowed journalists inside during the pandemic, there have been no privacy breaches — which proves that reporters can work at the medical front line without violating patient privacy. “The government and nearly all health care facilities have banded together in the name of protecting the privacy of the sick and have done an excellent job of keeping photographers as far away from the grief and devastation as possible,” Kamber said.

There have been exceptions, of course. John Moore, an award-winning photographer for Getty Images, got inside a Connecticut hospital in the early days of the pandemic. A contact with connections to the hospital vouched for Moore, removing the obstacles that were keeping others out. Even so, Moore had just one visit to the intensive care unit, working in a hurry with a communications official carrying a stack of releases that everyone he came into contact with had to sign. Moore did not take pictures of patients’ faces. “We established ground rules ahead of time, and I stuck to those,” he said.

Getty Images is a major photo agency that has worked hard to get its photographers into hospitals, with only rare success. “For every thousand calls or emails, you maybe get three yeses,” said Sandy Ciric, the agency’s director of photography. “Sometimes we even had the CEO say, ‘This is great, yes, we want coverage,’ and then someone tells them no and they change their mind.”

The exceptions demonstrate that not all the blame can be placed on the government. There is enough wiggle room in the regulations for determined hospitals to let journalists inside and trust them to follow the rules. Journalists who spoke with The Intercept noted a similarity to embeds with the U.S. military: Just as embedded war reporters were privy to sensitive information that they were trusted to keep to themselves, journalists in hospitals can be counted on to not publish patient information that they are not supposed to publish.

A photographer who got access to several hospitals in the early months of the pandemic expressed quiet fury that most medical facilities in the country chose to keep their doors closed. “I was not happy that I had a scoop,” said the photographer, who asked that their name not be used in order to protect their ability and their employer’s ability to continue to work inside hospitals. “I was not happy that I had exclusive access. I felt that all my colleagues should have had the same access I had. … The dearth of images of death and dying directly contributed to the disinformation [about Covid-19] and the ongoing disbelief in our country, full stop. And the hospitals have to answer for that. The hospitals bear some responsibility.”



A Covid-19 patient lays in bed in the intensive care unit of Roseland Community Hospital in Chicago, Ill., on April 22, 2020.
Photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters


THE WAR METAPHOR sheds light on why 300,000 coronavirus deaths have elicited a shallower national response than the loss of life in previous catastrophes. Domestic opposition to the war in Vietnam was shaped by imagery of U.S. soldiers as well as Vietnamese civilians in agonizing moments of injury or death. Americans were horrified to see the true face of war. Having learned its lesson, the U.S. government suppressed imagery of American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan: The embed program aimed at preventing journalists from roaming around battlefields on their own, taking pictures of whatever they wanted.

Eerily, the embed guidelines used by the Pentagon included a prior-consent clause similar to what HIPAA, or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, demands. The guidelines prohibited war journalists from publishing pictures or videos of wounded soldiers unless they had prior written permission from the soldiers (a practical impossibility on the battlefield): “Names, video, identifiable written/oral descriptions or identifiable photographs of wounded service members will not be released without service member’s prior written consent.” The guidelines also enforced a ban on photography of the dead: “Images clearly identifying individuals ‘killed in action’ will not be released.”

The unifying principle between repressing photography of a war and photography of a pandemic is that a population that cannot see human carnage will not object as strongly to its perpetuation and will not care as much about the incompetence that brought it on. Hospitals and nursing homes may not have the mendacious intent of the U.S. military, but their actions have a similar effect of making it nearly impossible for ordinary Americans to be confronted with visual evidence of the true cost of the calamity that’s unfolding.

The Intercept reached out to a number of hospitals to ask about their media polices, including Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, Mount Sinai in New York City, and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The only one that responded was Massachusetts General in Boston, which provided the following statement:


MGH has been restricting outside photographers from working in areas of the hospital where staff care for COVID patients. This is for both for the privacy of our patients and also their safety and that of our staff. Throughout the pandemic, the hospital has taken careful steps to minimize the amount of people coming to campus to ensure that only those essential for patient care and hospital operations are working in the building. While we recognize the importance of telling the story of how this pandemic has affected our patients and staff, our top priorities must always be privacy and safety. Our team has taken additional steps to make our experts, caregivers and consenting patients available to journalists remotely, as well as images and videos captured by our staff photographers.

As the daily death toll reaches shocking new highs, there continues to be relatively little photography of patients in hospitals. The Intercept reviewed the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times for the past month and found no photos of hospital patients on all but a few days. When there is photography from inside hospitals, it is almost always of doctors and nurses. The pandemic certainly gets its share of visual coverage, but the pictures tend to be surrogates of suffering, such as people wearing masks as they wait for Covid-19 tests or go about their daily routines. Because it doesn’t happen often, when a powerful photo from inside a hospital happens to emerge — such as Go Nakamura’s photo of a doctor embracing a Covid-19 patient last month — it gets an enormous amount of attention.

Dr. Joseph Varon hugs a patient in the Covid-19 intensive care unit during Thanksgiving at the United Memorial Medical Center in Houston on Nov. 26, 2020.
Photo: Go Nakamura/Getty Images

“Events on this scale are understood through abstractions, which is necessary and likely helpful in terms of psychological defenses, but also results in a disconnect between people who experience it firsthand, and those who do not,” noted Dr. Elizabeth May, a psychiatry resident at a hospital in New York City. “As a physician, I wish that those close to me could really picture and see what I have seen, that I could know that they have seen this, and not feel like I need to protect their abstractions when what I really need is their support and empathy.”

Willingly or not, some hospitals have turned themselves into apparatuses of silence — and staff inside them are upset.

In April, when the first surge of the pandemic decimated New York City, a nurse at Lincoln Hospital shared video footage of herself and other staff describing the difficulty of treating Covid-19 patients without adequate protective gear or lifesaving supplies. The video was published by The Intercept, and shortly afterward, the nurse, Lillian Udel, was informed by the hospital that she was being investigated for HIPAA violations. That prompted another nurse at the hospital, Kelley Cabrera, to speak out. “HIPAA is kind of being used to gag people,” she told The Intercept’s Akela Lacy. “We’re all experiencing the most difficult working conditions we’ve ever faced. And everybody who is speaking out is doing so to advocate for patients, ultimately. It looks like hospital administrations tend to run to HIPAA for their protection, not so much patient protection.”

May, the psychiatry resident, noted how some hospitals, even in a pandemic, are reluctant to show what happens behind their doors.

“Hospitals, as businesses, as profit-driven entities, do not want to be associated with death and suffering — it is very off-brand for them, I think,” said May. “So emerges an unfortunate dovetailing of HIPAA as a safeguard for civil rights and HIPAA as a vehicle for hiding off-brand aspects of medicine. … As a psychiatrist, I find myself thinking about shame and what role institutional shame has to play in the hiding of death and suffering.”

Dr. Elisabeth Poorman, a physician in Seattle, was particularly blunt on social media. “Americans do not respond to statistics,” she wrote on Twitter in June. “They respond to stories. Every hospital needs to let cameras in and show what dying of Covid looks like. Instead, PR depts silence us.” Responding to a commenter who said HIPAA was silencing the hospitals, Poorman shot back, “No, HIPAA is the excuse.” Earlier this month she told The Intercept, “I don’t really see things changing, because people don’t want to think creatively about this.”

Patient Michael Wright lies in bed in the prone position to increase oxygenation while in the intensive care unit at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minn., on Nov. 19, 2020.
Photo: Leila Navidi/Star Tribune/Getty Images

WHEN HIPAA WAS passed in 1996, the law did not include media guidelines. That changed after hospitals, seeking to increase their profiles and their revenues, opened their doors to reality TV shows. In 2012, one of those shows, “NY Med,” which starred Dr. Mehmet Oz, broadcasted an episode that featured a blurred-out patient in the emergency room who had been hit by a sanitation truck. The patient died, and when the episode aired, his widow happened to be watching and recognized her late husband’s voice. She was shocked. Neither she nor anyone in her family had given permission for her husband’s last moments to be filmed.

Four years later, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital agreed to pay a $2.2 million fine. HHS also announced strict new guidelines that required, before journalists could enter any patient area, “prior written authorization from each individual who is or will be in the area or whose PHI [protected health information] otherwise will be accessible to the media.” These guidelines in 2016 spelled the end of reality TV shows about hospitals and unfortunately turned them into no-go zones for reporters who, unlike reality TV crews, could be trusted to behave responsibly.

Read Our Complete CoverageThe Coronavirus Crisis


Severino, choosing to reinforce rather than relax the 2016 guidelines, was unequivocal in May. “The Covid-19 public health emergency does not alter the HIPAA Privacy Rule’s existing restrictions on disclosures of protected health information (PHI) to the media,” his guidelines stated. “As explained in prior guidance, HIPAA does not permit covered health care providers to give the media, including film crews, access to any areas of their facilities where patients’ PHI will be accessible in any form (e.g. written, electronic, oral, or other visual or audio form) without first obtaining a written HIPAA authorization form from each patient whose PHI would be accessible to the media.” (The italics are in Severino’s guidance.)

Severino declined an interview request from The Intercept, but his office released a short statement in his name that said his decision to relax some HIPAA guidelines “can help save lives during the pandemic.” His statement justified the reinforced media restrictions by saying that “hospitals allowing camera crews to film Covid-19 patients in distress without their permission is a breach of trust that violates patients’ privacy rights.” But this ignores the fact that the lessons of 2012 have been learned; nobody is proposing to broadcast videos or photos of non-consenting patients. In essence, Severino is all but barring journalists from hospitals because he says they will do something that they pledge they will not do and that hospitals would not permit them to do.

Adam Greene, an expert on HIPAA and a partner at the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, said it comes down to the amount of legal risk a hospital is willing to assume and the amount of time it is willing to devote to figuring that out. A hospital has to wade through a lot of regulatory questions before deciding to let a journalist inside, and that means tapping into legal resources that might be scarce or expensive. And if a decision is made to grant access, there’s always a chance that something could go wrong and a privacy breach could happen. “When you look at the incentives for hospitals, it is much easier to decline the request and avoid any risk of penalty,” Greene said. “There is not much in it for them to spend the time and resources to navigate HIPAA to find a way to do this.”

BLESSED BE

U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden's wife shares photos of their new son

2019 Right Livelihood Awards

Sat, December 26, 2020, 5:45 AM MST

MOSCOW (Reuters) - U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden's wife has given birth to a son, photographs posted on her social media page on Saturday showed.

"Happy Holidays from our newly expanded family," Lindsay Mills wrote, sharing photographs on Instagram of the couple holding the newborn.

Snowden, 37, who fled the United States after leaking secret National Security Agency files in 2013 and was given asylum in Russia, said last month that he would be seeking Russian citizenship together with his wife for the sake of their future family.

The couple said they feared being separated from their son, in an era of pandemics and closed borders, if they did not become dual U.S.-Russian citizens.

Russia has already granted Snowden permanent residency rights, lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said earlier this year, a vital step towards Russian citizenship.

U.S. authorities have for years wanted Snowden returned to face a criminal trial on espionage charges brought in 2013.

"As we expected, there is a new addition to his family. Edward and Lindsay have had a son. The mother and baby are in excellent health," Russia's Interfax news agency reported on Saturday, citing Kucherena.

(Reporting by Polina Ivanova; Editing by Mike Harrison)

Snowden Puzzled by Bitcoin's Lack of Scaling and Privacy, Says Devs 'Had Years to Do It'


Just recently, the film producer and well known Youtuber, Naomi Brockwell, sat down with Edward Snowden and the two discussed a number of subjects including privacy and bitcoin. When Snowden talked about bitcoin, he delved into the protocol’s lack of progressive scaling and privacy. The famous whistleblower said that the biggest question he has is why are developers taking so long to resolve the issues cryptocurrencies have today.

The whistleblower and former NSA and CIA contractor, Edward Snowden is well known for his stance toward privacy and freedoms. Snowden recently had a conversation with Naomi Brockwell and he told her his thoughts about bitcoin (BTC), and digital currencies in general. At one point during the interview, Snowden said he was puzzled about the fact that developers have had years to scale bitcoin and add privacy, but have yet to produce any solutions.
Naomi Brockwell and Edward Snowden discuss bitcoin scaling and privacy.

When it comes to the transformation from our current monetary standpoint into the digital age, Snowden thinks digital currencies are “inevitable.”

“In fact, we’ve already seen states recognize that digital currency will be the next stage of money,” Snowden said to Brockwell. “They are trying to create competitors now effectively to bitcoin. I think they are not really hiding the fact. They are creating so-called central bank digital currencies which is just a rebranded version of fiat currencies. They don’t really have any desirable properties for the public at large beyond the government being able to more effectively disperse stimulus payments.”

Snowden added:

But that unfortunately means, and I don’t think a lot of people have the financial understanding to realize, that it actually means they are simply taxing you in a new way. Because a stimulus payment is a debasement of the currency at large.

Snowden further stated that cryptocurrency, in the general sense, does not solve the problem of inflation and hidden tax in that way. He added that the Bitcoin network, in a large way, makes it more predictable, as “it has a predictable rate of inflation which is constantly decreasing,” the whistleblower stressed.

“But the problem with everybody moving to digital currencies is that we know the Bitcoin network does not support throughput. Unfortunately, the Bitcoin network as it exists does not provide the privacy protections really necessary for these kinds of transactions,” Snowden added.

The privacy advocate insisted:


I think it should, and it could. It’s clear to me that the developers have realized this should be done— [Developers] haven’t actually moved to do this, which is puzzling to me because now they’ve had years to do it.

Snowden continued by adding that when he is discussing the subject of the inevitability of this transformation toward digital currency, he’s “not picking winners and losers.”

“I don’t have a horse, care, or concern, as to who wins this beyond [what] I think what the world needs is a truly independent means of enabling private transactions,” Snowden told Brockwell. “If that’s bitcoin, great— fabulous. I use bitcoin, I’ve used bitcoin before, I’ll continue to use bitcoin. But it’s very difficult for me to use bitcoin and yet that is a huge improvement to credit cards, which I cannot use because those networks are not even pseudonymous, in the way that a bitcoin transaction would be.”

Snowden concluded that the cryptocurrency community has some pretty well-understood flaws, but he doesn’t see any reason to say that they cannot be resolved. He can see that there are a lot of groups working on both offchain and onchain throughput. But at the end of the video, Snowden begged the question: “Why are you [developers] taking so long?”

THIRD WORLD USA

Millions face eviction, poverty as unemployment benefits expire with COVID-19 relief bill in limbo
Jessica Menton
USA TODAY

Jo Marie Hernandez doesn’t know how she and her four-year-old daughter will survive after her unemployment aid lapsed this weekend.

Hernandez, who lives in Olean, New York, is on the brink of losing her home in days after she lost her job as a customer service associate at a gas station in the spring. Following prolonged unemployment, she's struggled to make ends meet and has nothing left in savings to keep her afloat.

“I only have $100 left to my name. My whole world is shattered,” says Hernandez, 32, who has been forced to put her car up for sale. “We can’t wait a few weeks for help. We’re starving and will be out on the street soon.”

Relief in doubt as shutdown looms

President Donald Trump delayed signing the $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill this weekend and demanded that lawmakers more than triple the size of stimulus checks, leaving 14 million unemployed Americans like Hernandez without an economic lifeline for rent and food. That has particularly hit minority workers hard, who face further household financial distress, eviction and hunger as stimulus aid dries up following months of deadlock in Congress.

“Politicians keep giving us false hope, but they are out of touch with the American people,” says Hernandez. “It’s not easy being poor. No one sees us.”

'Devastating consequences': Biden blasts Trump for not signing COVID relief bill before unemployment aid lapses

Democrats and Republicans each blamed the other for their inability to come to an agreement until this month. While unemployment benefits have remained a point of contention, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi railed against Republicans and the Trump administration for their demands that companies be shielded from coronavirus-related lawsuits. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opposed Democratic requests that state and local governments be given more funds to offset their budgets after the pandemic. Neither liability protections nor state and local aid ended up in the final bill.


The stalled measure also raises concern about other critical aid for small businesses and an eviction moratorium that is set to expire at the end of the month.

The fate of the stimulus package is uncertain – along with the $1.4 trillion spending bill attached to the relief measure that would keep the government open past Monday – which Trump signaled he may veto if stimulus payments aren't increased to $2,000 from $600.


Now congressional leaders are scrambling to avoid a government shutdown Tuesday. The House plans to vote Monday on whether to substitute the $2,000 checks in the bill.

But that is too little, too late for millions on unemployment, experts warn. The economic repercussions will be dire for struggling Americans as layoffs remain historically high and the pandemic forces further business closures following a spike in COVID-19 cases.
Your stories live here.

“Without those unemployment checks, people won’t take their insulin. There will be foreclosures and evictions. People will sell their car. People won’t eat. The human toll can’t be overstated,” says Michele Evermore, senior researcher and policy analyst for the National Employment Law Project.

So far, the nation has recovered 56% of the 22.2 million jobs wiped out in the health crisis. The total number of COVID-19 cases worldwide has topped 80 million, while the death toll in the U.S. has surpassed 330,000, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Small businesses on the brink

The bill would also replenish the Payroll Protection Program, a rescue plan that provided loans for struggling small businesses to keep their workers on the payroll.

Renard Beaty, owner of Kick Start Martial Arts in Atlanta, Georgia, was a small business owner who received a loan in the spring, which helped sustain his business after he was forced to lay off employees.

But he fears he’ll have to cut his staff again without additional relief for his mixed martial arts studio.

“It’s a scary time. If I have to close my doors because I can’t pay my rent, it will lead to bankruptcy, which means I may lose my house,” says Beaty, 58. "This is all I have. No one will hire me at my age. Washington is playing politics in the worst way with people’s lives.”

Millions face poverty without more aid

Nearly 5 million people, including 1.3 million children, will fall into poverty in January if Congress fails to extend temporary pandemic unemployment programs that expired Saturday, according to a recent study by Columbia University.

An extension of those unemployment benefits and a weekly $300 federal supplement would keep 7.6 million Americans out of poverty in January, including 2.3 million children, Columbia University researchers found.

The delay in the measure becoming law threatens to create financial ruin for struggling Americans who will lose their last economic lifeline, according to Andrew Stettner, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a think tank.

“How do people end up in long-term poverty? They typically lose their job and their unemployment benefits run out before they can find anot

her one,” says Stettner. “It’s a spiral that they can’t get out of that leads to mental health problems.”
COVID-19 relief package:$600 stimulus checks, $300 bonus for federal unemployment benefits in new deal

“That’s what we’re trying to prevent," adds Stettner. "We don’t need to make this pandemic so much worse than it already is by not dealing with the economic consequences.”
Disparity in jobless rates grow

The loss of unemployment payments hits minorities, especially Black workers, the hardest. They typically have higher rates of unemployment and longer durations of joblessness, according to Evermore.

The duration of unemployment has historically been significantly longer for Black and Asian workers than for whites. Unemployment for Black and Asian workers typically lasted an average of about 26 weeks before the pandemic, compared with 20 weeks for white and Latino workers, Evermore said.

The pandemic has widened the historic income inequality for Black, Latino and Asian workers, experts say, following a growing divide between the haves and have-nots. Wall Street, for instance, has roared back to record heights after the fastest crash in history in the spring, but much of the economy continues to struggle and many Americans who don’t own stocks or retirement accounts have missed out.

“For months, people have been living below the poverty level. They don’t have any savings,” Evermore said. "This falls on workers of color, especially Black workers, and their communities."

Which unemployment aid will end?

In March, the CARES Act created two programs to help keep jobless workers afloat after the pandemic battered the global economy and led to a historic wave of unemployment. The two programs ended Saturday.

The first was the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which provides aid to self-employed, temporary workers and gig workers. It had included a $600 weekly supplement for jobless workers through late July.

The second program was the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, which provides an additional 13 weeks of benefits beyond the typical 26 weeks states provide to jobless workers. Many out-of-work Americans had already used up their state unemployment aid, which typically expires after six months, and had transitioned to PEUC

About 9.2 million workers saw their PUA benefits expire Saturday, and roughly 4.8 million workers lost their PEUC benefits, according to Stettner.

Now that the aid has lapsed, those on PUA such as gig workers aren’t eligible for regular unemployment programs and will lose their benefits. Just under 4 million PEUC recipients could transition to extended benefits, which vary by state and last an additional 13 to 20 weeks. But states will have to pick up half of the cost at a time when their trust funds are depleted Stettner adds.

That means 10.5 million workers in total will have lost CARES Act benefits by year’s end.
Workers lose a week of benefits

Even if the measure becomes law next week, there will be a temporary lapse in unemployment benefits until the first week of January, according to Evermore. Because the aid lapsed Saturday, the $300-a-week jobless supplement will now last for 10 weeks instead of the 11 weeks originally in the package, unless Congress amends the bill, she added.

Once an extension of the programs is signed into law, states will have to wait for the Labor Department to issue guidance before sending out payments.

The week ended Dec. 26 is the last one that benefits can be paid since unemployment is paid out weekly, according to experts, unless the legislation becomes law.

Even if Trump signs the legislation next week, it will take at least two to three weeks on average for most state unemployment agencies to reprogram their computers, Evermore estimates.

"State agencies are freaking out," says Evermore. "In theory, Congress could make this retroactive, but it will take states weeks before they get things up and running. Not only will people not get a check for next week, but the following few weeks will be delayed as well."

COVID-19 relief deal: Jobless aid expires as Trump stalls on bill (portclintonnewsherald.com)

State Papers 1990: Joe Biden motion on Birmingham Six added to growing pressure on UK

President-elect Joe Biden speaks at The Queen Theater in Wilmington, Del., Tuesday, Dec 22, 2020. Picture: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

SUN, 27 DEC, 2020 - 
SEAN MCCARTHAIGH
IRISH EXAMINER

A resolution proposed by US president-elect, Joe Biden, in March 1990 on the Birmingham Six while a US senator added to growing pressure on the British government to re-examine the group’s conviction for the largest ever IRA bomb attack in Britain.

State papers released under the 30-year rule by the National Archives show a Department of Foreign Affairs memo listing Biden’s intervention as one example of mounting international action seeking a fresh inquiry on the case.

Biden, who had unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination to contest the 1988 US presidential election two years earlier, was the second-ranking Democrat on the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee at the time.

The resolution proposed by Biden on March 9, 1990, which secured 13 co-sponsors including other leading Irish-American politicians, Senators Edward Kennedy and Patrick Moynihan, called for a re-opening of the case and for US president, George Bush, to raise it with the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher
.
The Birmingham Six outside the Old bailey in London, after their convictions were quashed.
Left-right: John Walker, Paddy Hill. Hugh Callaghan, Chris Mullen MP, Richard McIlkenny,
Gerry Hunter and William Power.

It was similar to a motion that had been tabled by US Congressman and chairman of the Friends of Ireland, Brian Donnelly, two months earlier which also called for the quashing of the convictions.

The Department of Foreign Affairs said it understood that the British Embassy in Washington had actively lobbied against the motion.

The Birmingham Six – Hugh Callaghan, Gerard Hunter, Paddy Hill, John Walker, Richard McIlkenny and William Power – were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 for two IRA bomb attacks on pubs in Birmingham on November 21, 1974 which killed 21 people.

Their convictions were based on forensic evidence and confessions that were contested from the outset of the case.

A newsletter published by the Birmingham Six Committee in April 1990 noted that Donnelly’s motion was “more radical” than Biden’s


.
Staff photographer Denis Minihane's picture of the Birmingham Six
following their release at the Old Bailey in London.

However, Paddy McIlkenny, Richard’s brother, who had campaigned for the group’s release, said the support of leading US politicians in early 1990 had given an important boost to their campaign and said the two resolutions by Biden and Donnelly would generate more publicity when they were debated in the US Congress and Senate.

“That will be very embarrassing for the British Government,” McIlkenny said.

A short time later, the British Home Office ordered a fresh police inquiry into the case following the submission of new evidence by the men’s solicitor, Gareth Peirce, which subsequently led to it being referred to the Court of Appeal for a second full hearing.

McIlkenny admitted being sceptical about the outcome of the police review as he believed its announcement was timed to defuse mounting pressure from the US.

The convictions of the Birmingham Six were finally declared unsafe and quashed by the Court of Appeal in March 1991.

Opinion
Editorial

Sliding into isolation: Russia and the world

Published: Dec 26,2020


‘A letter to Russia’s enemies’. — Open Democracy

While losing leverage on its neighbours, Putinist Russia has adopted a means of exerting influence and exercising control that is more characteristic of the secret police than diplomats. Only if Russia transforms into a genuine social democracy at home will we see change in its external actions, writes Kirill Kobrin

SINCE Peter the Great, Russia has had two types of foreign policy. The first type is ideological, the other is pragmatic or realpolitik, as it was called in the 19th century.


Naturally, neither one nor the other has ever existed in its purest form. In practice, ideologically driven policies have often proven to be quite down to earth, while pursuing practical tasks has sometimes led the state into the ideological wilds. But still, as tendencies — or rather, as intentions — these two types of foreign policy can be found in any period of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet history.

The following discussion about the foreign policy features of Putin’s Russia will be conducted with an eye to the middle of the 19th century and the reign of Nicholas I.

The sense of stability

THERE is a great temptation to think in terms of so-called historical analogies. In this case, the temptation is especially strong. Here are just a few points of comparison between Putin and Nicholas I. A Russian ruler who has been in power for more than 20 years. A regime propped up by official censorship, criminal prosecution of political dissenters, and an ideology of state conservatism. (After all, it was under Nicholas I that count Uvarov coined the famous triune formula ‘orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality’.) Wars in the Caucasus. The stupid sadism of the sentences handed out to alleged radicals, as in the New Greatness case today, and 170 years earlier, in the case of the Petrashevsky Circle, among others. Finally (and here the Russian liberal nourishes a faint hope) there is Crimea, imagined as a symbol of ultimate collapse. Some people think nowadays that Crimea will one day be the end of Putin, as it was for Nicholas I, who died of pneumonia at the end of the Crimean War.

Of course, historical analogies are a way of deceiving ourselves, nothing more. ‘History is a metaphor for our consciousness,’ said the philosopher Alexander Pyatigorsky. He was right. On the other hand, the metaphor does exist in our public consciousness, and it is exceptionally strong: all of us — society and the authorities — act out our hypotheses about reality, which are shaped, in particular, by ideas about history. In terms of historical metaphors that have become ideological fads, influences, and sometimes even constructs, our comparison of the first 20 years of the 21st century with the middle of the 19th century does makes sense when it comes to what is happening now with the Putin regime’s international policy, and what may happen to all these things soon.

The historical comparison is especially apt if we note the oscillation between ‘ideology’ (lofty) and ‘realpolitik’ (pragmatic) in Putin’s foreign policy. Nicholas I considered himself the sovereign heir of Peter the Great and the successor to the ‘chivalric’ principles of Paul I. He adopted an expansionist approach towards the Ottoman empire, passing it off as a commitment to the sacred cause of protecting Orthodox Christians. In Europe, Russia played the role of a distant, not very pleasant relative from whom you never knew what to expect.

Despite seemingly decent relations with Prussia, Austria, and (before the 1830 July Revolution) France, and its defence of the legitimist values of the conservative Holy Alliance, which, after 1825, seemingly no one had any use for except the Russian emperor himself, Russia slowly withdrew from the system of international relations, from the ‘concert of continental powers,’ and it did so of its own free will. Relations with Great Britain were altogether strained over the ‘Eastern question.’ This is not to mention France: first the overthrow of its Bourbon monarchy and then, in 1848, the overthrow of the monarchy as such turned the country into a personal nemesis of Nicholas I. The French retaliated by supporting the rebellious Poles in 1831 and taking in Russian political exiles.

The more powerful self-isolating Russia seemed, the worse it fared in the international arena. The situation was not saved even in 1849, when the Russian army aided Austria in quelling an uprising in Hungary. The European revolutions of 1848–1849 played a fatal role in Russian history. On the one hand, Nicholas I tightened the screws inside the country, finally alienating the educated class with his senselessly cruel persecution of ‘malcontents.’ On the other, Russia earned itself the nickname ‘the gendarme of Europe.’ At the first opportunity, European countries and the Ottoman empire organised an anti-Russian coalition, which, given Austria and Prussia’s hostile neutrality towards the Russian tsar, brought Russia to disaster in the Crimean War. The ‘Don Quixote of autocracy,’ Nicholas I either died or committed suicide in the finale of his infamous Crimean campaign.

We should also note the following quite important historical circumstance. The west’s current nationalist right-wing populist wave is largely based on reviving the ideological principles of the mid-19 century. The ‘traditional values’ to which Orban and Kaczynski appeal today are an invention of the Romantic era, and the ‘national spirit’ hails from the same place, from the time of so-called national revivals. This is not to mention Russian ideological constructs that until recently looked like mouldy relics of pre-Soviet times, but suddenly seem relevant again. For example, the disputes between ‘westerners’ and ‘Slavophiles’ about Russia’s ‘special path,’ and, of course, ‘orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality.’ Naturally, the world today is completely different from the time of the opera ‘A Life for the Tsar’ and field marshal Radetzky. But the zeal with which our world dresses up in the uniforms and tailcoats of the 19th century is extremely curious.



Putin’s foreign policy has always been hostage to ‘stability,’ another echo of the Tsarist regime, although ‘stability’ is not even an ideological postulate, rather a sentiment. From the early 2000s, ‘stability’ was imagined both as post-Soviet Russia’s only worthy goal and its best means of conducting policy. But, here, in contrast to the century before last, Putin’s ‘stability’ was, as it were, uprooted from the ideological field. It was painted neither communist red, nor anti-communist white. ‘Stability’ was not supposed to have any positive content, only negative content.

Stability equals no instability, period. Or, rather, Russia’s 21st century stability is the opposite of the ‘reckless 1990s’. Hence the supposedly pragmatic nature of the country’s policies, both domestic and foreign, which have been focused on immediate problems and sometimes medium-term objectives, but not on long-term strategic goals. Such opportunism was especially palpable in Russia’s foreign policy in the noughties. All possibilities were probed, including joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, but none of them was perceived as absolute. Everything depended on the balance of power, first, within Russia, and on the propaganda campaigns triggered by those exigencies.

A lonely Doctor Evil

THAT was how things were, and they have remained this way. The Soviet Union collapsed, leaving behind two geopolitical layers in which the emergent Russian Federation found itself cocooned. The outer layer, consisting of the former Warsaw Pact countries, quickly defected almost en masse to the side of the Cold War’s winners. It was no longer possible to win them back in the late 1990s because Russian influence there was weak, mainly consisting of corrupt financial schemes.

The internal post-Soviet geopolitical layer (the former Soviet republics), in turn, was divided into two parts. With the west’s urgent help, the Baltic states quickly moved from the inner layer to the outer layer, although not completely, due to the neglected issue of their Russian-speaking populations, an issue that the ethnically-oriented ruling classes of these states did not want to solve, resulting in a profound and painful problem. Russia has exploited it to try to interfere in the affairs of the Baltic countries, but not very successfully. Russian policy towards the other countries in this internal geopolitical layer has been mostly ineffective. The Putin regime can only boast of a friendship with Armenia and several Central Asian states, which use Russia rather than support it.

As I write this, the Russian authorities are trying to make the most of the situation in Belarus, but they are doing it rather clumsily — both the Europeans and the Belarusians themselves are simply afraid of another episode of military aggression on Moscow’s part. If that happens, Minsk will be lost to Russia just as Kyiv and Tbilisi were lost. As for the so-called far abroad, Russia has almost no patrons, friends, or even clients there. Among the latter, one can name only the bloody Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. China has been pragmatically exploiting Moscow’s weakness, nothing more. The American ruling class and the new US president will never forgive the Putin regime for its interventions (even if they were of a hypothetical nature only) in the 2016 US elections and many other things. This is not to mention the EU countries, especially now, after Alexey Navalny’s poisoning.

In discussions of any truly global issue, from climate change to the US-China conflict, Russia’s opinion plays absolutely no role. The only global role left for president Putin is that of a universal scarecrow, a slightly comical but relatively dangerous Doctor Evil who dispatches clowns to sprinkle poison on doorknobs in quiet English towns, or to poison his own opponents at home. Or steal a COVID-19 vaccine from the west. Or hack into the computers of employees of the US state department. Or to organise a coup in tiny Montenegro for some reason. But, if you subtract the cinematic trappings, the truth is quite plain and sad.

When a country finds itself in such circumstances in international relations, it is usually called ‘isolation’.

The sea and the cliff

IN THE case of Putin’s Russia, it is mainly a matter of self-isolation, or more precisely, of isolation resulting from the mutation of a certain foreign policy direction. Embarked on as something absolutely practical, in the spirit of realpolitik, it eventually turned into a sinister ideological quixotism, an attempt to attain greatness using unsuitable means. Let us take a closer look at how cautious pragmatism transformed into great-power fanfare.

I would argue that the very nature of the concept of ‘stability’ has largely caused this transformation. While losing leverage on its neighbours — and on countries distant but important — Putinist Russia has adopted a means of exerting influence and exercising control that is more characteristic of the secret police than of diplomats. This method has involved maintaining hotbeds of instability in countries that Moscow wanted to keep in its sphere of influence. It has often artificially fuelled these conflicts for decades, thus getting the opportunity to act as an arbiter, as a guarantor of stability in particular zones of instability.

Back in the 1990s, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and Transnistria in Moldova were such hotspots. The 2008 Russo-Georgian War was the apotheosis of this policy: it transpired that by exploiting such hotbeds of instability, the Kremlin really could keep Russia’s neighbours on its hook, if not under its control. Then the Putin regime moved from maintaining such hotbeds to igniting them, thus launching the war in Donbas in 2014. Simultaneously, the regime moved from the concept of ‘protecting our borders from the enemy’ to direct aggression by occupying Crimea. From the viewpoint of realpolitik, these actions were completely senseless: they forever drove a wedge between Russia and Ukraine (or, at least, the current Russia and the current Ukraine), and Russia and the west, while generating intractable conflicts on Russia’s own borders. The Putin regime got its hands on its own Ulster and its own Palestine when it invaded Donbas.

Interestingly, these foreign policy mistakes, if not crimes, were made in obeisance to considerations that were anything but practical. Putin’s stability has ceased to be hollow. It has been filled with a Russian version of western right-wing conservatism, mixed with the ideological principles of Nicholas I’s foreign policy, especially in the last decade of his reign. The Putin regime fancies itself an indestructible cliff rising above the stormy waters of a radicalised west, as described in Fyodor Tyutchev’s famous 1848 poem ‘The Sea and the Cliff’:

Waves of violent surf,

Constantly rolling,

Roaring, whistling, screaming, howling,

Smash into the coastal cliff,

But calm and haughty,

Not driven mad by the waves’ whims,

Immobile, unchanging,

Coeval of the universe,

You stand, our giant!

This messianic embrace of stability and the reckless belief in the invincibility of their own political system gave the Russian leadership the illusion of their own impunity, which, of course, was facilitated by the weakening of the United States during the Trump presidency and the European Union around Brexit. Consequently, the Putin regime convinced itself of its own greatness and began acting accordingly. The rhetorical cover for the cautious foreign policy of a vulnerable and not very influential country eventually became that policy’s content.

From isolation to a post-conservative international

THIS is how the current, extremely dangerous situation has come about. In a sense, the Putin regime today has moved from combating the import of democratic (‘colour’) revolutions (and thus imitating Nicholas I) to importing counter-revolution. The problem is that there is no need to import counter-revolution anywhere. No one invites Russian soldiers to quell their indignant subjects, not even Alyaksandr Lukashenka (at least not yet). Moreover, the countries neighbouring Russia are, for the most part, ideologically as conservative (ie, new-model right-wing populist conservative) as it is, or even more so.

Semi-official and official ethnic nationalism in Ukraine and Hungary, respectively, is much more viral than in Russia. Official support for ‘traditional values’ in Poland and Lithuania would give the ultra-conservative Russian member of parliament Yelena Mizulina a run for her money. At the same time, ideological kinship does not make today’s Russia a political ally of these countries. Suffice it to recall Poland, to which liberals like Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron are incomparably closer than Putin. The result of 20 years of foreign policy is that Russia is perceived as an outsider — often as an enemy — even by those who inhabit the same ideological landscape.

It is unclear how Russia can exit this impasse. Two possible options stand out. Either the country’s self-isolation becomes definitive, and Russia comes more to resemble North Korea than Tsarist Russia. Or, a new ideological consensus within the country (no matter whether it happens under a late-period Putin or without him) will enable it to blend a cautious, culturally conservative ‘liberal westernism’ with a rejection of everything truly revolutionary in the modern world, especially feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism, and socialism. Russia would then be able to build a bridge to similar forces in Europe and America, and be involved in establishing a cutting-edge post-conservative international.

Russia could thus regain some measure of international influence, but the price for it certainly would be many acquisitions of the last 10 years, including territorial ones. While it seems purely ideological, this course would sooner or later mutate into a realpolitik, however, depending on the new balance of power both in the world and in Russia itself. In any case, the rundown two-stroke engine of Russian foreign policy will continue to rattle on. It can only be stopped by a total reform of Russia’s socio-economic and political system, only by transforming the Russian state into a true social democracy — one that would express the real will and interests of society, including in foreign policy.

OpenDemocracy.net, December 23. Kirill Kobrin is a writer, historian and journalist. He is an editor of the Russian intellectual journal Neprikosnovennyi Zapas.

Is society collapsing?
....there’s still a few days left in a year that has exposed 

the weaknesses of the world system as never before

Kirkpatrick Sale | Published: 00:00, Dec 27,2020

Abandoned passenger train car, Astoria, Oregon. — Counter Punch/Jeffrey St Clair.

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, when the high-tech Second Industrial Revolution had just begun, I made a bet with an editor from Wired magazine that global society led by the United States would collapse in the year 2020 from a confluence of causes created by modern technology out of control.

It would be, I said, a mix of ecological disasters including earth overheating and polar ice melting, political disintegration including failed states worldwide and uprisings in major cities, and economic chaos including insurmountable debt and a stock-market crash and depression. He said, ‘We won’t even be close’, and slapped down a $1,000 check on my desk. Though a tidy sum in those days, I matched it and we settled on a mutual editor friend as the arbiter, to make the call when the time came.

That time, the end of the year 2020, has now indeed come. Who wins?

As to ecological disaster, the evidence is ample even though the response to it has been negligible. The ten hottest years on earth have been between 2005 and 2020, with 2019 the hottest ever recorded and 2020 very close. That means ice melting at a record rate, with significant loss at glaciers around the world, in Greenland, and at the poles, with ice going three times as fast in the last three years in the Antarctic as just ten years ago and the Arctic in what a scientist at the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University has called a ‘death spiral.’ The UN climate panel, which puts the blame for global warming on ‘greenhouse gasses’, says these must cease by 2030, a goal that not a single major country is capable of meeting.

Add to this the assault on the world’s oceans through acidification and overheating, including 60 per cent of the world’s fisheries fished to capacity and 33 per cent overfished, and the extinction of species at a rate that one scientific team in 2017 said offers ‘a dismal picture of the future of life’, and it may fairly be said that an ecological collapse is well underway if not yet quite complete.

As to political disintegration, take first the alarming state of the world where no less than 65 countries are now at war and there are said to be 638 other conflicts (involving separatist militias, armed drug bands, terrorist organizations, and the like) now raging. An annual index of ‘fragile states’ that came out earlier this year found 24 countries at a ‘high warning’ level, 22 at an ‘alert’ level, 5 at ‘high alert’, and 4 ‘very high’— amounting to 30 per cent of the world’s governments being equivalent to failed states. And that was before the pandemic hit, a catastrophe that has added almost all third-world and a few developed countries to that list.

But the really interesting case of political collapse is right here. The inability of our political institutions to cope with the coronavirus for a year, and the spread now at record levels, and then the inability of the nation to hold an election without at least the strong suspicion of fraud, has certainly undercut a confidence in national government that has grown increasingly meager in the last few decades anyway. In the Wall Street Journal recently Gerald Seib pointed out that ‘this year’s election can be seen as the culmination of a two-decade period of decline in faith in the basic building blocks of democracy’ — quite an obituary for a system once happy to proclaim its virtues around the world.

Add to that a general feeling that the Federal government just isn’t working, or as the Pew Research people put it, only 17 per cent of Americans trust the government ‘to do the right thing just about always.’ It seems clear that loyalty to a cause or a race or an ideology is far greater than loyalty to the state, no longer quite seen as legitimate, and many commentators these days suggest that some form of separation, even a civil war, is inevitable. Political collapse, then, if not here would seem to be just around the corner.

And lastly the underlying depression that we have been in since March — despite the frantic gyrations of a central bank-fueled stock market — is just one sign that the American economy, like those of most of the Western world, is foundering. And no wonder: it is straining under the weight of a national debt of at least $27 trillion and national unfunded liabilities of more than $100 trillion, with a GDP of just $21 trillion to manage it with. But we have plenty of company — the world’s debt was a staggering $258 trillion at the start of the pandemic, some 320 per cent bigger than the world’s GDP, meaning we’re all living in a pipe dream unable to pay the piper.

And there’s still a few days left in a year that has exposed the weaknesses of the world system as never before.


CounterPunch.org, December 25,2020. 

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of 12 books over fifty years and lives in Mt Pleasant, South Carolina.

https://www.newagebd.net/

Coronavirus pandemic has exposed inequality in Singapore and Hong Kong. To tackle it, start with wages


While Covid-19 pandemic has made clear the importance of essential workers, showing appreciation should translate into better pay and working conditions

Yew Chiew Ping
Published:  27 Dec, 2020

Street cleaners wait in line to receive free face masks in Hong Kong on February 14. Photo: EPA-EFE

Growing up in Singapore and perhaps other Asian societies, you would have heard your elders warn, “If you don’t study hard, you’ll grow up to be a road sweeper/garbage collector/labourer.”

In these societies, blue-collar jobs have traditionally been seen as undesirable and even a sign of failure in life. While we may be embarrassed to voice such thoughts aloud today, the bias against blue-collar jobs persists.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made clear the importance of essential workers. Grocery clerks had to work harder to replenish supplies after bouts of  panic buying, security personnel are doubling up as temperature screeners, and  cleaners have to disinfect public facilities more frequently. During lockdown, our creature comforts depended on  delivery workers who brought everything we need to our doorstep.


Thanks to these essential workers – whose modest earnings are grossly incommensurate with their contributions to society – the rest of us can carry on with our everyday life with little deprivation in these challenging times.


VIDEO 02:05
Disabled food delivery rider on front line of Malaysia’s fight against Covid-19 pandemic

But how have essential workers fared in this pandemic?

Covid-19 has thrown inequality into sharp relief. The risk of contracting the virus is uneven across society and so is its impact. And it is exactly these blue-collar and essential workers who are the most vulnerable.

Unlike professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMETs), most essential workers cannot work from home because their job requires their physical presence at the workplace. Yet they may not even be equipped with adequate protective gear.

At the onset of the pandemic when face masks were in  short supply, many cleaners were not provided with sufficient masks. Some could not even afford to buy disposable masks. This was the case in Hong Kong at the beginning of the year when a box of 50 surgical masks cost HK$200 (US$26), forcing the socially disadvantaged to resort to washing and reusing their face masks.

Quitting is not an option for many essential workers despite the job hazards and low pay. The salary of general cleaners in Singapore can be as little as HK$6,970 excluding allowances, in Hong Kong, cleaners are paid around HK$10,200 including allowances.


Hong Kong charity distributes hygiene kits to street cleaners to fight coronavirus
Social distancing is also tricky when you are poor and confined to small spaces. In Hong Kong, the July and August wave of Covid-19 was more severe in low socioeconomic districts and public housing estates, including Tsz Wan Shan in Wong Tai Sin district that has the highest poverty rate. In Singapore, migrant workers’ dormitories with poor living conditions became hotbeds of Covid-19 transmission.

Blue-collar workers also suffered sharper pay cuts and greater job cutbacks. In Singapore, lower-income earners with a monthly salary of under HK$17,435 were more likely to have suffered a pay cut of 10 per cent to over 50 per cent. Non-PMETs also faced a higher rate of job loss in the second quarter of 2020.

Similar trends have been observed in Hong Kong, where the unemployment rate of blue-collar and service workers from August to October was generally higher than that of PMETs.


VIDEO 01:53 Singapore migrant workers under quarantine as coronavirus hits dormitories

If the pandemic has laid bare to us the essentials for a decent life – food security, a clean and safe environment, adequate personal space – then we ought to reflect on how society has fallen short of ensuring that all have access to these essentials. We should accord greater value and respect to the members of society who enable us to live decently, because leading our own life with dignity should not be predicated on others living theirs with less dignity.

This means that we must seriously reconsider our approach towards poverty and inequality. The Singapore government has pledged to improve the living conditions of migrant workers. However, the proposal for a universal minimum wage of HK$7,538 was dismissed in Singapore’s parliament in October. In September, in Hong Kong, business leaders
rejected the call to increase the hourly minimum wage from HK$37.50 to HK$39.

Such resistance to very modest increases in the income of the lowest-paid workers is incongruous with society’s growing appreciation of workers – against the backdrop of Covid-19, eight in 10 Singaporeans have expressed a willingness to pay workers more for essential services.

The pandemic has shown us the importance of what we used to take for granted. As we transition to a post-pandemic world, we could either waste this opportunity for meaningful change, or seize the chance to forge a “new normal” that is more inclusive and compassionate, and less unequal.

Dr Yew Chiew Ping is head of Contemporary China Studies at the Singapore University of Social Sciences

THE BOURGEOIS CLAMOUR FOR THEIR ENTITLEMENTS

Rich people are offering huge sums of money to skip the queue for the coronavirus vaccines.

THE .01% LIKE RUPERT MURDOCH HAVE GOTTEN HIS, SO HAS TRUMP, JOHNSON, GUILIANI 

Wealthy Britons 'are offering private doctors up to £2,000 to jump Covid vaccine queue and get the jabs early'

Dr Roshan Ravindran has told clients they will have to wait their turn for vaccine

He owns private clinic in Wilmslow, Cheshire, and has been offered money 

Vaccine can only be obtained through NHS. More than 355m doses pre-ordered 

AYE AND THERE'S THE RUB, 

AMERICA IS A FREE MARKET WILD WEST FOR HEALTHCARE

By MAX AITCHISON FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

PUBLISHED: 26 December 2020

Rich people are offering huge sums of money to skip the queue for the coronavirus vaccines.

The jabs can currently only be obtained through the NHS, but several private British doctors say they have been bombarded with requests from wealthy individuals offering to pay to have theirs ahead of time.

Dr Roshan Ravindran, owner of Klnik, a private clinic in Wilmslow, Cheshire, claimed some clients had offered £2,000 for injections.


Rich people are offering huge sums of money to skip the queue for the coronavirus vaccines, which can currently only be obtained through the NHS

'People inquiring of it often have had a relative who has passed away – the virus hasn't been selective,' he told The Sunday Times.

'The poor and rich have all been affected and all lacked control. And so now what people are looking for is a degree of control.'

He added: 'It's priceless. I have people with almost infinite money, who would do anything because they've had relatives pass away with Covid.'

But Dr Ravindran has told such clients that they will have to wait their turn.

The Government's vaccines taskforce pre-ordered more than 355 million doses of seven of the most promising vaccine candidates.

Britain was the first country to approve the vaccine manufactured by Pfizer and BioNTech in early December.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine – of which the UK has bought 100 million doses – is expected to be approved in days.

However, Dr Ravindran predicted that private vaccines could arrive within months, with some companies charging as much as £20,000 for the jabs.


The Government's vaccines taskforce pre-ordered more than 355 million doses of seven of the most promising vaccine candidates

'We'll probably start getting a private supply from April. People will come up with a vaccine the Government won't buy – then flood the market. Every drug company is trying to come up with a vaccine.'

Dr Neil Haughton, president of the Independent Doctors' Federation, expressed horror at such a situation.

'We are in a national emergency. If some people were able to jump the queue by paying for it, there'd be a national outcry,' he said.

'We are being very clear that there's absolutely no way round the system – much to their annoyance, sometimes.'

Dr Mark Ali, medical director of the Private Harley Street Clinic, said he is also receiving regular calls from clients anxious to secure the vaccine, but believes the private sector could help the NHS to roll-out the vaccine.

'It is important that elderly and vulnerable people receive the vaccine first, but once that process is up and running, private practice may have a crucial part to play in mass roll-out,' he said.