Mammals are getting hit by airplanes at greater rates than ever before


In Britain, rabbits are the most common mammals hit by airplanes, according to a new study that shows an annual 68% global increase in mammals struck by aircraft. Photo by Samantha Ball


Feb. 3 (UPI) -- Pursued by poachers and pushed out by development and deforestation, many of the planet's terrestrial mammal species are increasingly threatened by human activities -- including air travel.

According to a new study, published Wednesday in the journal Mammal Review, mammals are being killed and maimed by aircraft at greater rates than ever before.

Every year, planes strike thousands of animals. Most of the animals are birds, but according to a newly analyzed strike data from national aviation authorities in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Britain and the United States, mammals are also getting hit at prodigious rates.

Over the last decade, mammal strikes by aircraft have increased annually by an average of 68 percent.

"Mammals are incredibly diverse and those involved in strike events are no exception," lead study author Samantha Ball said in a press release.

"As we identified 47 countries which have reported strikes with mammals, the species involved ranged from some of the world's smallest mammals, such as voles, all the way up to the mighty giraffe and included mammals of all sizes in between," said Ball, a doctoral student in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University College Cork in Ireland.

Bats and deer are the mammals most threatened by aircraft in the United States. Bats are also the most common mammals threatened by airplane collisions in Australia.

In Canada, Germany and Britain, rabbits and dog-like carnivores (CAYOTES) are the mammals most frequently struck by aircraft.

Airports work hard to keep birds away from runways, but the increase in aircraft-mammal collisions may require new strategies for warding away animals.

Over the last three decades, mammal strikes caused more than $103 million worth of damage in the United States.

"As strike events can affect everything from passenger safety, airline economics and local conservation, understanding the species composition and ecology of the local fauna at an airfield is paramount for effective strike mitigation," Ball said.

#LEGALIZEALLDRUGS

Study: One-third of U.S. teens, young adults misuse prescription drugs


   

Almost 33% of teens misuse prescription psychoactive drugs they take for behavioral and mental health disorders, a new study has found. Photo by rawpixel/Pixabay

Feb. 2 (UPI) -- Almost one in three teens and young adults who take prescription stimulants or tranquilizers misuses the drugs for recreational purposes, according to a study published Tuesday by Family Medicine & Community Health.

This inappropriate use of these medications, known as psychoactive drugs and prescribed to address mental health or behavioral disorders, is even higher among older teens and young adults, the data showed.

"It is important to monitor the diversity of medication misuse behaviors among youth and young adults, given their potential for abuse liability," the researchers wrote.

"[Our findings] underscore the need for comprehensive approaches toward health promotion among youth and young adults," they said.

RELATED Oregon becomes 1st state to decriminalize cocaine, heroin, meth, other drugs

Psychoactive drugs can alter the consciousness, mood and thoughts of those who use them, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Examples of these drugs include prescription stimulants like methylphenidate, also known as Ritalin, pain relievers such as oxycodone and tranquilizers such as diazepam.

Commercial products including tobacco, alcohol and cannabis and illegal drugs including ecstasy, cocaine and heroin also are considered psychoactives.

Each year, more than 33% of teens and young adults in the United States are prescribed a psychoactive drug to treat conditions that range from anxiety, depression and ADHD to pain and bipolar disorder, among others, researchers said.

For this study, they analyzed data on 110,556 U.S. residents aged 12 to 25 years who participated in the National Survey of Drug Use and Health Sampling, a federal government-led study.

Of these participants, 35% said they had taken a prescribed psychoactive drug in the past year and 31% reported that they had misused that drug, the data showed.

RELATED U.S. sees 5-fold increase in methamphetamine overdose deaths

Opioid prescription drugs were used by 19% of teens, while stimulants, tranquilizers and sedatives were taken by 7%, 4% and 2% of teens, respectively.

One in 10 respondents indicated that they took at least two prescribed psychoactive drugs, while 58% said they misused at least one of them, the researchers said.

Forty-five percent of those taking prescribed stimulants and tranquilizers admitted to misusing these drugs, compared with18% of those on prescription opioids and 14% in sedatives.

In addition, 87% admitted to misusing another substance, such as alcohol, cigarettes, cigars, marijuana, cocaine or heroin.

While one in four teens age 12 to 17 reported taking a prescription psychoactive drug over the past year, 41% of those age 18 to 25 used these drugs, the researchers said.

Among 18- to 25-year-olds, 35% reported misusing the drugs, the data showed.

Nearly 12% of the study participants in this age group indicated they were dealing with serious psychological distress, which was consistently associated with misuse of psychoactive drugs, the researchers said.

"Mental health and medical providers would benefit from using a team approach and having open communication with other health providers to ensure evidence-based guidelines are used when assessing for, and treating, mental health and substance use difficulties," they wrote.

WHO team visits Wuhan Institute of Virology, meets bat researcher

The World Health Organization team probing the origins of the coronavirus visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology on Wednesday. File Photo by Roman Pilipey/EPA-EFE

Feb. 3 (UPI) -- The World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the novel coronavirus visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology on Wednesday, a day after China called for similar investigations in countries like the United States.

The WHO team including Peter Daszak and Thea Fischer met with scientists at the Wuhan research lab and agreed to international scientific cooperation and exchange, Taiwan's Central News Agency reported. Chinese state media claimed the WHO team was "impressed" by the professionalism of the scientists at the Wuhan Institute

The international team did not disclose their findings after their visit, but the lab has been at the center of speculation about the origins of the novel coronavirus.

China has claimed the first COVID-19 outbreak occurred at a wet market in Wuhan and rejected theories about the lab's role in the epidemic. But the virology institute was known for conducting studies of deadly diseases.

Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance in New York, tweeted he had met with key figures at the lab, including Shi Zhengli, the Chinese scientist nicknamed "Bat Woman" for her research into bat coronaviruses. Shi has denied SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, leaked from the lab.

As the WHO team continues its two-week investigation into the origins of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 2 million people globally, China claimed it has "maintained close communication and cooperation with WHO on global origin-tracing in an open and transparent manner."

Beijing's foreign ministry spokesman has continued to deny COVID-19 originated solely from China.

"According to a U.S. CDC report, COVID-19 antibodies were detected in blood donations collected in December 2019, which means that the virus may have already been spreading in the United States by then, earlier than January 21," Wang Wenbin said Tuesday at a regular press briefing.

"More and more clues, reports and studies have indicated that the infections broke out in multiple places in the world in the latter half of the year 2019."

Analysts are divided about the theory the virus first leaked from the lab in Wuhan.

RELATED COVID-19: WHO investigators visit 2 hospitals in Wuhan

Looking Back at Maoism and the Global Left


January 31, 2021Length:2672 words

As against nearly a century of debates over Stalinism, the international left has never come to terms with Maoism, especially its global impact. Disillusionment with Stalinism is marked by clear, indeed tragic, dates in international politics: the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 that launched World War II, the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. These events are well remembered and sometimes debated, in this journal and elsewhere. With Maoism, the following dates also mark tragic events for the global left, yet they have not gotten the attention they deserve: the collapse of the Maoist Indonesian Communist Party in 1965 due to murderous repression by the military with the help of the CIA, China’s rapprochement with U.S. imperialism in 1971-1972 as Nixon was carpet-bombing Vietnam and embarking upon his reelection campaign, the Maoist Khmer Rouge’s autogenocide, or Mao’s lean toward South Africa and Mobutu’s Zaire against African revolutionaries in 1975-1976. To be sure, the fact that these Maoist-impacted events took place in the Global South rather than Western and Central Europe goes some distance toward explaining the relative lack of attention. But that is no reason to continue such a marginalization today.

Maoism became a pole of attraction in the 1960s for the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society in the United States, for a number of African revolutionaries and nationalists, and for the French far left, among others. Many saw Maoist China as the product of a successful socialist revolution carried out by people of color. And while it gradually lost its sheen as an international phenomenon, this came not so much with a bang as a whimper, without the furious debates that marked 1939, 1956, and 1968. The fact that there was no clear reckoning has helped the ideological influence of Maoism to persist to this day, often indirectly.

One example can be found in the structuralist and post-structuralist theories that have impacted so many academic fields. These theories pushed for a concentration on what orthodox Marxists termed the superstructure, especially its cultural and ideological dimensions. Here the affinity with Maoism lies not merely in the fact that some of the intellectuals associated with structuralism and post-structuralism were influenced by Maoism, people like Louis Althusser, or Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida early on. Their affinity with Maoism also lies in an indisputable theoretical point, that Maoist thought sought to displace structure with superstructure, most famously with the Cultural Revolution.

A second example is the extreme voluntarism of Maoism, from slogans like “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win” or “U.S. Imperialism Is a Paper Tiger” to adventurism or worse in the sphere of revolutionary politics: the Indonesian Communist Party, Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Again, while few on the activist left today identify with Maoism, aside from groups like the Naxalites in India, the Maoist parties in Nepal, or the Communist Party of the Philippines, its voluntaristic spirit persists in more subtle and indirect ways in some of the far reaches of Antifa and anarchism. This continuity makes Julia Lovell’s brilliant book important for the left, and not just in historical terms.

While there are countless histories of international Communism focusing on the parties, groups, and intellectuals associated with Stalinism from the 1920s onward, Lovell’s book fills an important gap as the first comprehensive history of Maoism as a global phenomenon. It is the product of archival research, of participant interviews, and of a careful synthesis of previous scholarship. Lovell is not part of the radical left but an academic historian whose book is nonetheless of paramount importance for us. And some of her findings are eye-opening.

One of these concerns the gestation of Edgar Snow’s hagiographic 1937 account of Maoism just after the Long March, Red Star over China. Lovell shows that Snow’s book was choreographed and closely edited by Mao and other party officials: “Snow’s English transcript of the translator’s version of Mao’s words” was “translated into Chinese, corrected by Mao, then translated back into English” (76). As the book progressed, party representatives continued to shape its narrative: “As Snow toiled on turning notes into copy through the winter of 1936, his interviewees continued to send him a stream of amendments: telling him to remove any trace of dissent with Comintern policy, to expunge any praise for out-of-favor Chinese intellectuals, to tone down criticism of political enemies turned allies, to talk up anti-Japanese patriotism” (76-77). This was the first, but not the last, romanticization of Maoism on the part of the global left.

Another key juncture Lovell elucidates is the massacre of half a million Indonesian leftists and suspected leftists in 1965 by the army and its Islamist allies, with considerable assistance from the CIA. How did this transpire? It was widely known by the early 1960s that Mao had formed an alliance with the left-leaning nationalist Sukarno, who had sponsored the 1954 Bandung conference of “Nonaligned” countries. Attended by Chinese but not Soviet representatives, Bandung was an important marker in the birth of the third world. It was also common currency on the left that the massive, legal Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), which after the Sino-Soviet split became the largest ally of China among the world’s Communist parties, was caught off guard by the ferocity of the repression in 1965-1966. Indonesia was also seen at the time as the greatest debacle of Maoism as an international movement by the independent revolutionary left, which noted that the PKI did not act substantially differently from the pro-Moscow Communist parties in opportunistically sidling up to a nationalist dictator without building up enough of an independent political or military capacity. But the truth turns out to be more complicated—and more damning to Mao.

The events leading up to the PKI-led abortive insurrection and the brutal repression that followed have long been shrouded in secrecy. Lovell does not succeed in fully cracking this secrecy, given the Chinese regime’s suppression of its own history. Nonetheless, she marshals enough evidence to confirm that the defeat of the Indonesian left lay at Mao’s doorstep as much as that of the PKI leadership and that the PKI’s disastrous miscalculations were impacted by Mao’s own voluntarism. To demonstrate this, Lovell reproduces a version of an August 1965 conversation between Mao and PKI leader D.N. Aidit, in which Mao calls upon Aidit to “act quickly” against the conservative army leaders at a time when Sukarno’s ailing health placed the PKI alliance with him in jeopardy (178). If this is true, Mao made a strategic miscalculation on a par with Stalin’s decision not to allow German Communists to ally with the Social Democrats as Hitler was coming to power. Be that as it may, the ideological influence of Maoism on the PKI was equally deleterious.

As Lovell recounts, alluding to Mao’s disastrous effort to transform the Chinese countryside via “People’s Communes,” which caused the mass famine of the late 1950s, “In the voluntarist style of the Great Leap Forward, Aidit began to eschew the kind of careful, patient mobilization that had taken place through the 1950s, in favor of statements that emphasized high Maoism’s ‘spirit, resolve, and enthusiasm’” (168). And while Aidit talked of organizing a paramilitary force to counter the regular army, and Sukarno did so as well, and China promised vast amounts of armaments, nothing substantial was actually done even as PKI rhetoric against the military escalated. Then, on September 30, 1965, the PKI, acting with apparent Chinese encouragement, moved to incapacitate the military leadership. They killed a number of generals, but the action quickly backfired due to lack of support on the streets or within the military, especially after the ailing Sukarno refused to join their cause. All this allowed the remaining Indonesian generals to orchestrate one of the greatest political massacres in history and to set up a conservative, anti-labor regime that persists today in modified form in a somewhat more democratic polity.

A second revelation on Lovell’s part concerns Mao’s relationship with Pol Pot and what is sometimes called the Cambodian autogenocide, when up to two million people—a quarter of the population—died from starvation, overwork, and executions during the years 1975-1979. The U.S. war in Vietnam, which Nixon extended to Cambodia in 1970, had led to massive bombings that killed a large number of civilians. As peasants fled the bombs raining down on rural areas, where the Khmer Rouge—essentially the Cambodian Communist Party—was based, the population of the cities swelled, making famine a real possibility.

When the U.S. war effort collapsed in 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge took power, entering the capital, Phnom Penh, and evacuating virtually the entire population at gunpoint. This was part of a harebrained scheme, inspired by Maoist projects like the Great Leap Forward, to empty the cities and build “socialism” in the countryside based upon a precipitous increase in the working day along with minimal food allowances. It all came crashing down as Vietnam invaded in 1979, overthrew the Khmer Rouge, and installed a more rational version of Stalinism closer to the Soviet version to which it was allied.

While the fact that the Khmer Rouge was inspired by Maoism has been known for decades, Lovell puts a point on it: “The evacuation of the cities was an extreme version of Cultural Revolution-era rustification. The creation of the mess halls and the abolition of family dining replicated the collectivization of the Great Leap Forward” (255). Moreover, she shows that Maoist China was deeply committed to the Pol Pot regime, awarding it the biggest aid package Beijing had ever offered, $1 billion in grants and interest-free loans. Even the black cloth for the pajama-like uniforms imposed by the regime was imported from China. In 1975, soon after the Khmer Rouge came to power, but after they had completely evacuated the cities at gunpoint, top leaders Pol Pot and Ieng Sary met privately with Mao. During their conversation, Mao reportedly said, “We approve of you! Many of your experiences are better than ours,” to which Pol Pot replied, “The works of Chairman Mao have led our entire party” (241). The aging and infirm Mao, who had only a year to live, seemingly felt thwarted by the way he had been forced to call off the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He also stated, “What we wanted to do but could not manage, you are achieving” (241). Pol Pot expressed similar sentiments three years later but with the suggestion that he had outdone even Mao: “Mao stopped his Cultural Revolution, but we have a Cultural Revolution every day” (259).

The horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime led to a rude awakening for many left-wing intellectuals who had embraced Maoism as a more militant and anti-bureaucratic alternative to Russian Stalinism, especially in France. Foucault and others now distanced themselves not only from Maoism, but also from Marxism altogether. In this era, the Parisian New Philosophers targeted “totalitarianism” in such a way that they were unable to support genuinely left-wing movements like the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, all the while taking inspiration from the gifted but very right-wing Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. All of this helped usher in something like neoconservatism in France.

The chapter on Africa chronicles a remarkable and sustained commitment on Maoist China’s part to support African nationalists and revolutionaries in the 1960s, almost always in competition with the Soviet Union. China gained substantial support via Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, one of the few African countries liberated in the first wave of independence movements to avoid either right-wing military-strongman rule (Congo-Kinshasa[Zaire], Ghana) or ostensibly left-wing authoritarianism (Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea). Nyerere, who espoused ujamaa, a form of rural socialism, and who supported liberation movements in southern Africa as the leader of the chief “front-line” African state in the struggle with apartheid South Africa, received considerable Chinese aid. So did Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union, an avowedly Marxist revolutionary party that later established a brutal left-wing dictatorship. Lovell highlights these relationships and paints a much more positive portrait of Maoist policy toward Africa than other regions. This has some validity, given accomplishments like the Tan-Zam railway, completed in 1975 at tremendous cost to the Chinese and which freed Zambian copper mines from economic dependence upon South Africa by creating a rail line through Tanzania.

But Lovell ignores completely Maoist China’s greatest failure in Africa, one that sullied its reputation within the global left almost as much as did the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. This was the Angola war of 1975, which took place as this mineral-rich southern African country was prying itself loose from Portuguese colonialism. Over the years, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) became the most left-wing and deeply rooted of the country’s African liberation movements. But because the MPLA was backed by the Soviet Union, China from the 1960s onward supported the more right-wing National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which based itself in Mobutu’s Zaire. Mobutu, one of Africa’s most reactionary and kleptocratic rulers, had come to power by orchestrating the assassination of renowned African liberation leader Patrice Lumumba. Portugal began to pull out of Angola and its other colonies in 1975, having experienced in 1974 its own left-wing revolution to overthrow a fascist regime in power since the 1920s. Portuguese revolutionary officers, who had themselves been radicalized by contact with African revolutionaries, sought to hand over power to the MPLA.

At this point UNITA (and another smaller right-wing nationalist group) made a bid for power, backed not only by Mobutu and the United States but also by apartheid South Africa, which dispatched troops into southern Angola. This placed China on the same side as South Africa. When UNITA, Zaire, and South Africa suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of some 36,000 Cuban troops sent over with Soviet aid, that humiliation was also China’s, as Mao now found himself exposed to the world as an ally of South Africa. For those on the left with the strongest commitments to African and Third World liberation, China’s betrayal of the African liberation movement in Angola became a point of no return. Tragically, the MPLA regime, hardened by the long decades of civil war with the U.S.-funded UNITA that followed, devolved into an authoritarian and kleptocratic state. Still, Mao’s support for forces allied with South Africa played a role in the disillusionment with Maoism across many sectors of the left, especially those involved in Black liberation. For some, this resulted in a disillusionment with Marxism, period.

It is not surprising that Lovell, a scholar of China, is on surer footing when analyzing Maoism’s impact on nearby countries like Indonesia or Cambodia than in discussing Africa. Still, she is to be commended for having written the first survey of Maoism as a global project. Overall, this is a work of deep scholarship and careful judgment. It contains a wealth of material indispensable for the twenty-first century left to consider if we are to avoid the terrible mistakes of the past. And given the fact that Maoism—or at least theoretical and political patterns similar to or derived from it—persists today, from some forms of academic radicalism to some tendencies in the activist left, this book also speaks to us today, if one is able to read it with an expansive frame of mind.

Summary: Review of Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell, emphasizing Southern Africa, Indonesia, and Cambodia. First appeared in New Politics, Winter 2021, here https://newpol.org/review/looking-back-at-maoism-%E2%80%A8and-the-global-left/ – Editors

Postscript: A personal note: I participated in some of the debates over the 1975 civil war in Angola as part of the New York left, when I saw some activists long sympathetic to Mao — and with whom I had sometimes had bitter arguments — express a sudden and sharp disillusionment. Angola was also the topic my first article on international politics, “U.S. Imperialism seeks new ways to stifle true Angolan revolution,” News & Letters, May 1976 https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/news-and-letters/1970s/1976-05.pdf , written under the pseudonym Kevin A. Barry with considerable advice and help from Raya Dunayevskaya.

Kevin B. Anderson

Kevin B. Anderson’s authored books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. Among his edited books are The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Peter Hudis), Karl Marx (with Bertell Ollman), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with P. Hudis), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell).

https://imhojournal.org/articles/looking-back-at-maoism-and-the-global-left/

THE GAMESTOP BUBBLE IS A LESSON IN THE ABSURDITY AND USELESSNESS OF THE STOCK MARKET

BY DOUG HENWOOD

The online pranksters behind the great GameStop bubble of 2021 are probably going to lose a lot of money. But they’ve done the world a service by reminding us of the utter uselessness of the stock market, an institution that serves no purpose besides making a small number of undeserving people rich.
This drama, like the seemingly endless rise in stock prices since 2009, interrupted briefly by the COVID-19 scare last March, is a sign of a financial system totally out of touch with economic reality. (Flickr)

Who knew GameStop would itself become such a game?

Last summer, the video game retailer was seen as a fading brick-and-mortar operation. It was losing money, sales had been shrinking for years, and the stock was trading for around $4 a share. As I’m writing this on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 27, its stock is trading at $339 a share. At the close of trading on Tuesday, it was a mere $148. Not a bad overnight return, 129 percent. Three days earlier, it was at $38. It was up nearly tenfold in less than a week. Why?

To answer that requires explaining the concept of short selling, which most civilians find nearly incomprehensible. A short sale is a bet that a stock (or any other speculative asset, like bonds or gold) is going to decline in price. But to make that bet, you have to sell something you don’t already own, which is not normal behavior. To accomplish this, you have to borrow the stock from somebody who does own it. As with any loan, you have to pay interest on the borrowed asset. And you also have to keep some collateral on deposit with your broker as an assurance you’re good for the money. The hope is that the price will fall, and you can buy the shares — cover the short, in the jargon — at a lower price. Your profit would be the difference between the original sale price and the closing purchase price, minus any interest paid on the borrowed asset.

But what if you’re wrong, and the price rises? Then you’re in trouble. When you buy a stock, your risk is that you could lose the entire purchase price — but no more. With short selling, if you’re wrong, there’s no predetermined limit to how much you can lose if the price keeps rising. And if the price keeps rising, your broker will demand more collateral in the form of real money. You have a choice between giving up — covering the short and taking the loss — or keep pouring more collateral into a losing position in the hope that things will finally turn your way.


Back to GameStop. Last August, the investor Ryan Cohen, who founded the online pet food merchant Chewy and sold it for a handsome profit, started buying GameStop shares. He told the company that it needed to get with the digital age, close a lot of stores, and move online. Investors, expecting a better future for the flailing retailer, snapped up shares, tripling their price by the end of November. That was unjustified optimism, perhaps, but not outlandish. But some hedge funds, notably Melvin Capital Management, began shorting GameStop, believing the tales of recovery were delusional.

Cue the habitués of the subreddit Wall Street Bets, with a user known as DeepFuckingValue among the ringleaders, who began talking up the stock and buying shares. They were motivated not merely by the prospect of making money, but also for the lulz of bankrupting some hedgies. They began buying the stock in size, as they say on Wall Street. The ensuing price rise forced the shorts like Melvin to cover. Their demand for the stock, plus the Redditors’, launched the share price on a moon shot.

GameStop has turned into one of the great bubbles of our time. On Tuesday, January 26, more stock in GameStop was traded than in Apple, the biggest stock of all, with a total market value 108 times the retailer’s. As James Mackintosh of the Wall Street Journal put it, the price action and trading volume together suggest “widespread disturbance to people’s judgment.”

Bubbles like this always end in a crash, and those Redditors who haven’t sold their shares will be left holding a very depleted bag. (Surprisingly, news that Melvin closed out its short position late on Tuesday seems not to have dampened the party. A bubble usually goes on far longer than mere rationalists can predict.) In the meanwhile, it’s funny to see some Wall Streeters complain that there’s something unfair about this action, since these are the sorts of games they play with each other and the general public all the time. They talk up stocks or talk them down, depending on their interests, and plot against what they see as weak or vulnerable players all the time. It’s just that the speculators with names like DeepFuckingValue who are savaging them for now are the wrong kind of people. They don’t live in Greenwich in houses with twenty-car garages.

Even more amusing are the earnest sorts who think these games somehow pervert the function of the stock market. As Business Insider columnist Josh Barro declared on Twitter: “I know people think this is fun but — why do we have a stock market? So productive firms can raise capital to do useful things. Detaching stock price from fundamental value (Gamestop is now worth almost as much as Best Buy) makes the markets serve the real economy worse.”

What’s funny about these comments, aside from their earnestness in the midst of low comedy, is that the stock market has almost nothing to do with raising money for productive investment. Almost all the stock that trades on the market, including GameStock, was issued years ago, meaning that companies don’t see a dime of the daily action. Firms do issue stock now and then, in so-called initial public offerings (IPOs), but over the last twenty years, according to finance professor Jay Ritter’s data, IPOs have raised a cumulative total of $657 billion, well under 2 percent of total business investment in things like buildings and equipment over the same period. In the real world, as opposed to Barro’s imagination, firms raise almost all their investment funds internally, through profits. Rather than raising money from shareholders, businesses shovel out vast buckets of money to them. Since 2000, the five hundred large companies that make up the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index have spent $8.3 trillion buying their own stock to boost its price — over half their profits over the period, and equal to almost 20 percent of business investment over the two decades. Stock buybacks not only make the shareholders happy, but they also fatten CEOs’ paychecks, since bosses these days are paid mainly in stock.

Lulz aside, this drama, like the seemingly endless rise in stock prices since 2009, interrupted briefly by the COVID-19 scare last March, is a sign of a financial system totally out of touch with economic reality. Trillions in government aid to business and Federal Reserve infusions into the financial markets have created a monstrous gusher of money with nowhere to go but speculative assets, at a time when ICUs are at capacity and 24 million people tell Census Bureau interviewers that they’re having trouble getting enough to eat. Barro would do better to worry about that.

Doug Henwood edits Left Business Observer and is the host of Behind the News. His latest book is My Turn.

INDUSTRI ALL GLOBAL UNION

 

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Kazakhstan must stop attacks on unions

3 February, 2021

Another independent union is under threat in Kazakhstan, a country notorious for its anti-union policies and persecution of union leaders. Sign our LabourStart campaign to demand an immediate end to the pressure on unions in Kazakhstan.

Shymkent local authorities have filed a lawsuit to suspend the Trade Union of the Fuel and Energy Industry Workers, with more than 4,000 members in the oil, metallurgical, energy and other industries in eight regions of Kazakhstan.

According to the lawsuit, the union has failed to make the necessary amendments to its statuary documents and violates current union legislation. However, legal experts consider these claims unreasonable and based on legal norms that no longer apply, or do not apply to this case.

According to the Central Asia Labour Rights Monitoring Mission, authorities filed this lawsuit on the initiative of a number of companies, including Oil Construction Company, West Oil and Bozashy Trans Kurylys, that belong to the state-owned KazMunayGaz.
In recent years, Kazakh authorities have intensified pressure on independent unions by prosecuting and sentencing union leaders on politically motivated charges. This pressure has seriously weakened the union movement in Kazakhstan.

In July 2019, the previous leader of the Trade Union of the Fuel and Energy Industry Workers Erlan Baltabay was sentenced to seven years in prison and handed a seven-year ban on conducting any public activity, such as trade union activities. He was later released following a massive solidarity campaign.

In 2017, the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Kazakhstan was forcefully dissolved and its leaders were prosecuted for their union activities.
Please sign and share the LabourStart campaign launched by IndustriALL and ITUC to send a message to Kazakh authorities, urging them to stop any pressure on unions and respect fundamental workers’ and trade union rights, in accordance to the ILO conventions ratified by Kazakhstan.

Related documents
Joint IndustriALL and ITUC letter to President Tokayev

Related links
Sign and share the LabourStart campaign on Kazakhstan

Unions push to ratify ILO Convention 190


4 February, 2021

Since the start of 2021, three countries have voted in favor of authorizing the ratification of Convention 190 on the elimination of violence and harassment in the world of work.

Latin American unions continue to work for the ratification of C190. On 17 January, Ecuador voted and approved the ratification of C190.

The Confederation of Free Trade Union Organizations (CEOSL) said that the campaign by its affiliate, the National Union of Domestic Workers and related workers, together with the National Council for Equality, UN Women Ecuador and the Simón Bolívar Andean University played a fundamental role.

On 26 January, Chile voted and approved a draft agreement requesting that steps be taken to ratify C190 and adopt ILO recommendation 206. It is a big step forward, following on CUT’s campaign, #TrabajoSinViolencia, with the participation of the International Trade Union Confederation and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES Chile).

More countries are in line to ratify C190. On 11 January, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa pledged to ratify the convention. Violence in the world of work affects a large part of women workers in the country. A study from 2018 estimated that 30 per cent of women were victims of unwanted sexual advances in their workplaces. IndustriALL affiliates are campaigning for the ratification of C190 and it has been taken up by the President and the parliament.

Data shows that domestic violence has exploded during the pandemic, with reports of a global increase of domestic violence. Social consequences of the outbreak and related confinements leading to a loss of social interaction may have increased tensions inherent to forced cohabitation and increased the risks of domestic violence.

Trade unions are reporting cases where women have been asked for sexual favours in return for equipment to protect against Covid-19. The past shows that women are at an elevated risk of abuse and quid-pro quo sexual harassment during an economic downturn and when jobs are fewer.


“With the current pandemic and its economic consequences it is even more urgent to fight against violence against women. Trade unions should continue their efforts for ratification of C190 in their countries. In the countries where the convention has been ratified, the unions and their campaigns made a difference,”
says Armelle Seby, IndustriALL gender coordinator.

IndustriALL Global Union and IndustriAll European Trade Union call for justice and solidarity in the fight against Covid-191 February, 2021

More than a year into the health, social and economic crisis brought about by Covid-19, the pandemic has become an existential crisis for humankind. The universal right of access to medical supplies, especially vaccines and potential medicines to treat Covid-19, should not depend on the purchasing power of governments and other market dynamics. We believe that there should not be first- and second-class citizens and no-one should be left behind.

After an unprecedented effort to develop, approve and roll out cures, medicines and vaccinations, several are available. The world has come closer to overcoming the pandemic. And the common global endeavour and public-private cooperation to find drugs and vaccines demonstrated the best internationalism.

It is crucial that we do not leave the path of cooperation, solidarity and justice.

No continent, no country, no economy, no person will be safe until the whole world is safe. Vaccine nationalism is a short-sighted response to this global problem. It will prolong the pandemic and the threat of new variants endangering us all. We stand for the right of universal access to vaccination.

The pharmaceutical industry will for the next decades be judged by its conduct during the pandemic. 2020 saw an improvement of the reputation and importance of this crucial sector, but image gains are easily lost.

IndustriALL Global Union and IndustriAll Europe appeal to the industry to show its best side:
Cooperate, even with competitors in order to increase production so that the vaccination process can speed up

Provide full transparency about production volumes, price calculations, purchasing contracts, etc
Put the public good and interests before profits, make medicines and vaccinations available for everyone

We have full understanding for the pressure on countries to secure medical products and bring relief to people. Bearing this in mind, IndustriALL Global Union and IndustriAll European Trade Union appeal to politicians:

Populism will not defeat Covid-19

We – our health, our economies and our jobs – will only recover if we recover globally

Work rationally and in solidarity for the best possible outcome for all globally with the universal value of solidarity and equality

Workers in the pharmaceutical industries around the globe, represented by IndustriALL Global Union and IndustriAll European Trade Union, are ready and eager to produce all the medication and vaccines needed and thus contribute to overcoming this crisis.

USPS

New Bill Aims to Scrap 'Ludicrous' Mandate Forcing Postal Service to Prefund Retiree Benefits Decades in Advance

"The unreasonable prefunding mandate has threatened the survival of the USPS and placed at risk vital services for the millions who rely on it."

by

Jake Johnson, staff writer

Published on

Wednesday, February 03, 2021

by

Common Dreams

A postal worker gives a thumbs-up to demonstrators protesting the Trump administration's

 sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service on August 22, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. 

(Photo: Rich Fury/Getty Images for MoveOn)

A bipartisan, bicameral group of lawmakers introduced legislation this week that would scrap an onerous 2006 mandate requiring the U.S. Postal Service to prefund retiree benefits decades in advance, an obligation that's been blamed for the beloved mail agency's financial woes—which Republicans have readily used to justify recent attacks on the institution.

"It's an unnecessary burden that is jeopardizing its financial health. This is an easy fix that will dramatically improve USPS's finances and ensure mail delivery can continue uninterrupted."
—Sen. Brian Schatz

The USPS Fairness Act, an earlier version of which cleared the House last February, would "repeal the requirement that the United States Postal Service prepay future retirement benefits," a rollback supported by the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union (APWU) and other organizations representing mail carriers.

"The bipartisan USPS Fairness Act is one of the first steps toward returning the Postal Service to solid financial footing, and I urge Congress to quickly pass this critical legislation," said APWU president Mark Dimondstein.

Approved by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by former President George W. Bush in 2006, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act "required the Postal Service to create a $72 billion fund that would pay for its employees' retirement health benefits for more than 50 years into the future," NBC News explained Tuesday.

"This is not required [of] any other federal agency," NBC noted.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), the lead House sponsor of the USPS Fairness Act, said in a statement Monday that "the unreasonable prefunding mandate has threatened the survival of the USPS and placed at risk vital services for the millions who rely on it."

"The prefunding mandate policy is based on the absurd notion of paying for the retirement funds of people who do not yet, and may not ever, work for the Postal Service," said DeFazio. "I'm hopeful that, under a Biden administration, we can finally repeal this ludicrous policy, provide the USPS with critical financial relief, and take the first step towards much-needed comprehensive reform."

The legislation's leading Democratic sponsor in the Senate, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, echoed that message, declaring that "there is no reason we should be requiring the USPS to prefund its future health and retirement benefits."

"It's an unnecessary burden that is jeopardizing its financial health," said Schatz. "This is an easy fix that will dramatically improve USPS's finances and ensure mail delivery can continue uninterrupted."

The renewed push for repeal of the prefunding mandate comes as President Joe Biden is facing growing calls to act quickly to stop Postmaster General Louis DeJoy from inflicting any more damage on the USPS, whose services slowed dramatically after the Republican megadonor took over and began implementing sweeping changes last year.

Two Democratic members of Congress—Reps. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) and Tim Ryan (D-Ohio)—are publicly urging Biden to terminate every member of the Postal Service Board of Governors and appoint replacements who are dedicated to preserving and strengthening the USPS as an essential public service.

"Through the devastating arson of the Trump regime, the USPS Board of Governors sat silent," Pascrell wrote in a letter to Biden last week. "Their dereliction cannot now be forgotten. Therefore, I urge you to fire the entire Board of Governors and nominate a new slate of leaders to begin the hard work of rebuilding our Postal Service for the next century."