NATIONALIZE UI BENEFITS

The US job market is about to turn into a giant science experiment - with millions of Americans as guinea pigs

george@bespokeinvest.com (George Pearkes) 

© Joe Raedle/Getty Images Carlos Ponce joins a protest in in Miami Springs, Florida, asking senators to continue unemployment benefits past July 31, 2020. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Half of US states are cutting off enhanced unemployment benefits over the next few weeks.

This is going to throw millions of Americans into a real-world economic experiment that could hurt many people.

Biden and the federal government could step in, but America's misguided tradition of a hands of federal government is stopping them.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

Partisan politics, Congress' legislative language, and interest group lobbying are about to turn America's 160 million workers into guinea pigs. We're all about to be part of a huge study on whether unemployment insurance keeps people out of the labor market.

The biggest variable in this 50-state experiment is the new unemployment benefits created during the pandemic. Republican governors in nearly two dozen states are rolling back key benefits that helped people through the downturn: expansions in unemployment insurance to workers not previously covered, increased length of coverage for unemployed workers, and topped-up weekly payments are some of the initiatives

These GOP lawmakers argue that the benefits are no longer needed now that the pandemic is receding and ending them will push Americans back to the labor market. On the other hand, some economists and progressive Democrats argue that the benefits are not generous enough to discourage people from finding work, and that removing them is needlessly cruel to beneficiaries.

While experimentation within states can generate superior solutions, it can also have its downsides in states that eschew equity. In these cases, federal power is the last line of defense for marginalized people, but Washington has a long history of abandoning them instead of taking a stand.

50 laboratories: a Brandeis legacy

In 1932, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted "It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."

This notion that policy experimentation at the state level could land on the right answer faster than top-down public policymaking from Washington has been a popular justification for a light touch from the federal government. The "50 laboratories" theory has also helped social scientists study the effects of policy change by observing the differences between states.

Brandeis' famous quote came in a dissent to a Supreme Court decision which effectively rolled back a state's effort to forge its own path, in this case Oklahoma was attempting to set new regulations on businesses operating in the state. Brandeis disagreed with the majority, which said Oklahoma could not impose its own rules on an ice manufacturer.

Brandeis was the son of an abolitionist Kentucky family and a progressive Boston lawyer, arguably the father of the legal concept of "right to privacy" in the United States and a key anti-corporate voice who supported government intervention against concentrated monopoly power. He played a role in the development of the Federal Reserve and defended workplace and labor law in court.

Brandeis supported the idea that Oklahoma be allowed to regulate an ice manufacturer, but argued for it in a language more consistent with conservative ideals of state sovereignty or business supremacy that has since been co-opted in the popular imagination. No need for federal intervention if a state enacts harmful policy - they'll eventually see the light! This attitude was also visible late in Brandeis' career in several decisions that took teeth out of The New Deal during the Roosevelt Administration.
Progressive passivism in policy

The American system is generally loath to enforce national standards on states. One good example is Medicaid, the country's low-income healthcare system. Instead of being run by the federal government, Medicaid is technically voluntary and administered by states. The federal government only encourages participation in its various programs through substantial funding incentives.

This has left some states to ignore Medicaid programs that could be a huge help to their citizens. As recently as 1981, Arizona did not participate in Medicaid at all and 13 GOP-run states have refused to implement a huge expansion of the program passed in 2010 as part of the Affordable Care Act.

A similar situation is now playing out with the stepped-up funding for unemployment insurance programs administered by states. These new efforts expanded eligibility for unemployment insurance to gig workers, raised payouts, and extended the number of weeks that workers would be eligible for income support.

With labor markets still sorting through the giant shock of COVID, these benefits have been the target of businesses who rely on large pools of low cost labor. Restaurants especially have railed against the payouts, arguing that the benefits are causing a "labor shortage" and raising their labor costs. Service industry groups have lobbied aggressively to kick people out of the UI system so they can get back to their preferred labor market - one where there is a large pool of people who are willing to accept low wages.

Evidence from the JP Morgan Institute and Indeed.com show little evidence that cutting off expanded UI is likely to fuel large increases in labor supply. But that hasn't stopped more than half of the governors in the country from refusing free money from Washington and halting payments to the unemployed in a brutal form of economic shock therapy.

As the various phase-outs of expanded UI roll in over the next few months, we will be able to compare labor market outcomes in states that do or don't phase out benefits. The 50 laboratories will be working away to the benefit of greater labor market understanding. But the small gain of having a few real-world experiments for academics to be able to write papers about pales in comparison to the human cost of culling unemployment insurance.

Biden and Brandeis: birds of a feather

Allowing this sort of experiment - with American workers as the subject - isn't set in stone. The Biden Administration could at least be pitching a fight against this outcome but has so far not stepped into the fray. As noted by Senator Bernie Sanders in May, the text of the CARES Act -which the UI expansion is built on - says the Department of Labor "shall provide" benefits to individuals, which could be interpreted as mandating payments regardless of what states want. But nobody in the administration has tried to force this issue with states refusing payouts.

Both Brandeis and Biden share a belief that the right argument will win out eventually, and that outright exercise of power by the federal government should be used carefully. Their cautious and light touch approach has direct costs that must be acknowledged in an era where exercise of political power on behalf of those without it is a forgotten habit.
Read the original article on Business Insider

Chipotle gave huge payouts to its CEO and shareholders, then blamed workers for price increases - here's what's really going on
insider@insider.com (Paul Constant) 

© Provided by Business Insider Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures and cohost of the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast with Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein.

In the latest episode, they spoke about Chipotle's announcement to increase menu prices by about 4% to cover increased employee wages.

Constant points out, however, the price increase could be to cover the $24 million raise recently given to CEO Brian Niccol.

Last week, the "New York Times" ran a story about a small menu price increase at a fast-casual food chain. Written by Julie Creswell, the piece began, "Executives at Chipotle said on Tuesday that the fast-food chain had raised menu prices by about 4% to cover the cost of the increased employee wages."


Headlined "Chipotle will increase its menu prices as labor costs rise," this story is confusing for a few reasons.

Price increases and wages

Firstly, the New York Times is not traditionally in the business of reporting on price increases in restaurants. And a 4% increase doesn't seem newsworthy at all - Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol admits in the last paragraph of the piece that the increase amounts to "quarters and dimes that we're layering in" to existing prices.

So the only reason this story could possibly be considered worthy of the Times's world-famous "All the News That's Fit to Print" slogan is Chipotle's claim that the price increases were directly caused by increased worker pay. The chain recently raised its starting wages to an average of $15 per hour - but only in a fraction of its restaurants. Creswell writes that the "pay increases apply only to [Chipotle's] 650 company-owned restaurants; the vast majority of its nearly 14,000 restaurants in the United States are independently owned."

So with all that information in mind, the hook of this New York Times story seems to be that Chipotle's executives are blaming a tiny menu price-bump on a starting-wage increase that's been enacted in roughly one out of 20 of its restaurants.

Video: Why Chipotle raising prices may be a good thing for its stock (Yahoo! Finance)

What's disappointing is that Creswell seems to be repeating Niccol's claims without doing any investigation into Chipotle's finances. Chipotle never supports its claims that the price increase is due to wage increases, and Creswell never mentioned that Chipotle paid Niccol $38 million last year - an all-time high.

Joanna Fantozzi at Nation's Restaurant News reports that Niccol's 2020 salary was "set to be just $14.8 million but financial targets were waived in light of the company's stellar performance during the pandemic." So Chipotle's executives gave its CEO a $24 million dollar raise, which means that Niccol earned "2,898 times more than the median Chipotle worker's salary of $13,127."

Why didn't Chipotle's board mention Niccol's $24 million raise as a possible reason for its menu price increases? Creswell doesn't say. She also doesn't note that as of the first quarter of 2021, Chipotle was sitting on $1.2 billion in cash and equivalents.

The Times story also doesn't mention that the company is now in the middle of a huge stock buyback campaign. Sakshi Agarwalla writes at Seeking Alpha that "In an effort to enhance shareholders' value, [Chipotle] restarted its stock repurchase plans and have announced additional $100 million for stock buyback, bringing to a total $153.8 million repurchase plan. At the end of the first quarter, [Chipotle] repurchased 61.2 million shares worth $87.2 million."

Stock buybacks and wealth transfer

You can learn more about stock buybacks in this week's episode of "Pitchfork Economics" with special guest Senator Cory Booker, but the shorthand is this: Stock buybacks, which were illegal before 1982, have proven to be one of the most efficient mechanisms of wealth transferral from workers to the wealthy over the last 40 years.

The richest 10%of American households own 84% of the stock in this country, and the top 1% holds about 38%. So Chipotle takes profits that could go to keeping menu prices low and employee wages high and instead hands them off to wealthy shareholders, no strings attached.

Despite the fact that Chipotle has dedicated nearly $200 million to executive and shareholder payouts in the last few months, the New York Times credulously reprinted the company's claims that an average $15/hour starting wage in 650 restaurants is the reason why the company is increasing menu prices by 4%. To be clear, I'm only singling the Times out as an example here because they're the gold standard of journalism - the truth is that a number of outlets repeated Chipotle's claims without investigating the numbers.

The complete failure of many legitimate news sources to interrogate these claims should be a learning moment for business journalists. If you're simply repeating the information given to you in a press release from a corporation's PR department, you're not in the news business - you're volunteering for the company's marketing campaign.

 Business Insider

First-of-a-kind study reveals Canada’s most vulnerable eco-regions
Nathan Howes 

WEATHER NETWORK

JUNE 19/2021

Embedded content: https://players.brightcove.net/1942203455001/B1CSR9sVf_default/index.html?videoId=6237786286001

Conservation isn't just about saving Canada's endangered species, it's also about restoring and protecting nature, so future generations can continue to reap the benefits it provides.

That's why the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) has conducted and released the first study of its kind in the country's most populated sector -- the Conservation Assessment for Southern Canada (CASC). The organization reviewed 77 ecological regions including nine crisis eco-regions, where wildlife and their habitats are the most diverse and under the greatest threats.

SEE ALSO: Canadians explore nature more to relieve COVID-19 pandemic stress

The analysis focused on endangered species and habitats, land use and wildlife corridors. Eco-regions were classified based on their biodiversity and threats compared to other eco-areas in Southern Canada. The regions cover many of the major cities, such as Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Edmonton and Vancouver, along with many smaller communities.

The study was published in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation. The full analysis and details of the eco-regions including nine crisis territories can be found here.

The eco-regions are a "great way of looking at our country through an ecosystem lens," said Dan Kraus, NCC's senior conservation biologist, who recently spoke to The Weather Network about the study.

© Provided by The Weather Network

Backus Woods nature preserve in Walsingham, Ont. Photo: Nature Conservancy of Canada.

"That way we’re able to rank these eco-regions in terms of what’s happening, what are some of the opportunities for conservation and identify places where maybe we need to accelerate our efforts to protect wildlife and wild spaces," said Kraus.

"Southern Canada is where most endangered species are and where most Canadians live. As a result, it’s where our wildlife and habitats are at the greatest risk.”

CRISIS REGIONS, AREAS WITH HIGHEST NUMBER OF THREATENED SPECIES

The nine crisis eco-regions identified represent less than five per cent of Canada. They are situated in Canada’s most heavily settled landscapes, where 70 per cent of people live, according to NCC. More than 60 per cent of Canada’s species at risk are found in these eco-regions, which generally have few existing protected areas or remaining natural areas.

Southwestern Ontario contains more than 130 of Canada’s most endangered species -- the highest of anywhere else in the country, according to the study. Other regions with a high number of species of national and global concern include parts of Vancouver Island, particularly the eastern sections, the Prairies and portions of the Maritimes including southwestern Nova Scotia and P.E.I.

© Provided by The Weather Network

Sharp-tailed snake. Photo: Marsgal Hedin.

Although the NCC began developing conservation assessments for broad areas in Canada 20 years ago, the group decided to examine the southern half of the country as a whole would help put its work into context and how it contributes to the protection of local and national biodiversity, Kraus said.

“It would also be great for the people if they can identify the ecological region they live in because ultimately the decisions about conservation, the decisions about the species we save and species we lose will be up to the people living in those regions,” said Kraus.

STUDY ALSO HIGHLIGHTS 'BRIGHT SPOTS' ACROSS CANADA

The study may paint a grim picture about the state of Canada's biodiversity in many regions, but it also has an optimistic tone to it -- to highlight "bright spots across the country where conservation is working and working well, including many Nature Conservancy of Canada projects," Kraus said.

© Provided by The Weather Network

Foxner Nature Reserve, N.B. Photo: Mike Dembeck.

"Our challenge now is to replicate some of those success stories and to amplify them, and to stop the loss of habitats and species in our country," said Kraus.

The next 10 years are going to be the “most exciting in Canada’s history for conservation,” Kraus said, as the federal government has some “ambitious” plans in terms of expanding the parks and protected areas.

“Nature Conservancy of Canada will use studies like this to help direct us to the places where conservation work is not just important, but urgent. The decisions we make in the next 10 years are going to have an effect on nature in our country forever,” said Kraus.

Thumbnail courtesy of Nature Conservancy of Canada, of the Clayoquot Island Preserve in British Columbia.

Nathan Howes can be followed on Twitter: @HowesNathan.

ATTENTION WOLF KILLERS

Culling cutlines, not wolves, key to preserving caribou herds: researcher

New research suggests wolves can be steered away from the endangered caribou herds they prey on by making the man-made trails they use to hunt harder to move along.

 Provided by The Canadian Press

The recently published study adds to the debate over whether governments should depend on shooting and poisoning wolves to protect caribou, said lead author Jonah Keim.

"It's probably one of the most challenging conservation issues in the Northern Hemisphere," said Keim, an independent researcher based in New York state.

Woodland caribou herds in Alberta and British Columbia have been declining for decades. Scientists blame habitat loss — since 2000, B.C. and Alberta have lost at least 33,000 square kilometres of old-growth forest — and increasing predation as wolves and bears follow roads and seismic lines into landscapes that once offered caribou refuge.

Governments, with scientific support, have turned to maternity pens, captive breeding and killing hundreds of wolves in an effort to keep caribou around.

Maybe there's another way, Keim thought. Maybe the problem isn't the wolves — it's the artificial trails they're taking advantage of.

"How do we get at movement?" he asked.

Keim and his colleagues set up motion detector cameras on logging roads, seismic lines and game trails throughout the Parker caribou range in northeast B.C. The team recorded movements of animals past those cameras for a year.

They measured which of those features were easiest to travel by timing themselves as they walked them. They considered which ones lead into the marshy wetlands that caribou like and which went to higher ground favoured by moose and deer.

Then, they made the easy trails into the best caribou habitat harder to move through.

"We hinged trees from the sides of the features into the seismic line," Keim said. "(We) did soil mounding to create hummocks. We tried to make the feature as difficult to move down as was the adjacent habitat beside it."

They sat for another year and let the cameras roll. Then they compared the incidence of wolves or bears and caribou using the same trail on the same day to what it was before the treatment as well as to an untreated control area.

"We were able to reduce the encounter rate between wolves and caribou by 85 per cent," said Keim.

Dave Hervieux, an Alberta Environment caribou specialist, said Keim's results are consistent with other studies but only address half the problem.

"Unnaturally high and unsustainable levels of wolf predation on caribou are due to both increases in wolf travel and increases in wolf numbers," he wrote in an email.

"Linear feature restoration is a key action. However, our conclusion is that it is unlikely that linear feature restoration, as a sole action, will provide sufficient protection in the near-term for endangered woodland caribou populations."

Hervieux said the government is working with industry to restore forest cover to seismic lines, pipelines and roads.

Still, Keim said focusing "encounter management" could go a long way to reducing Alberta's and B.C.'s dependence on the annual killing of wolves.

"We know that predator removal is socially and ethically controversial and it may not be solving the true problem."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 19, 2021.

Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

Experts urge caution as Canada’s COVID-19 waste washes up on coastlines

Twinkle Ghosh 

Each year, nearly eight million tonnes of plastic pollution enters the oceans from all over the world, but for the first time in 27 years, Canadians are witnessing an unusual clutter of masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE) kits washing up along the country's shorelines.

© EPA/DIEGO AZUBEL A protective mask lies next to cigarette butts on a street.

Play "Microscopic plastics polluting our waterways"

According to Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup’s annual “Dirty Dozen” 2020 report, some 15,000 volunteers removed over 41,000 kilograms of litter from Canadian coasts and listed finding discarded COVID-19-related supplies among them.

Read more: Plastic pollution crisis — How waste ends up in our oceans

"This is the first time that we've seen it recorded and sort of statistically significant numbers too," Laura Hardman, leader of plastic-free oceans at Ocean Wise, told Global News Thursday.

"We just need to remember that as a society, as a whole, that whatever we dispose, whatever leaks out into our environment has implications."

The organization didn’t have a category on its data cards last year to formally track the amount of PPE-related litter but has added one for 2021, given the situation.

Play "All-female crew sailing globe to raise plastics awareness"

"I would really, really be asking for people to think responsibly about their personal impacts and to think about not only how they are disposing of masks, but also how they are using them, how they are ensuring that they don't get lost, that they don't leak out into the world," Hardman said.

While disposable masks may look like they are made of paper or natural fabric, they are manufactured using polymers that sometimes take decades or centuries to decompose.

Read more: Swirling pile of trash in Pacific Ocean is now 3 times the size of France

"That's an important consideration," Dr. Shoshanah Jacobs, associate professor in the department of integrative biology at the University of Guelph, told Global News Thursday. "These are new sorts of pollutants that are being introduced into the environment... So, we don't really know about how they'll kind of spread around quite, quite yet."

That does not, however, mean that public health should be compromised and people should give up on masks and PPEs Jacobs said.

"But surely we could have anticipated the need to provide proper disposal outlets and venues and also proper messaging to the public with respect to how we manage these important health-saving devices to ensure that it doesn't compromise the environment."

"If people are comfortable and able to use reusable masks, obviously that's a great thing," Jacobs said, but emphasized the need "to be supporting people" who are not, and guiding them on "proper disposal" of the single-use masks.

Hardman agreed.

Caught off guard

At the onset of the pandemic, Hardman said Canadians were caught off guard and were very "quick to react and we were put in a position where we had to change our behaviour."

As a result, she noted, a lot of single-use masks were given out initially. And whilst that was a great initiative, she said, "one of the things that we need to do as a society is to keep thinking about when single-use is necessary and when we can opt for a reusable alternative."

"I feel that, again, this is a message that continually needs to be, it should be, reinforced," Hardman said.

"It is for all of us to take responsibility for what we are, what we are purchasing and that we are handling it and we are disposing of it correctly, by making sure that we are putting the right things in recycling streams and are always doing it right."

"Canadian entrepreneur working to turn plastic waste into clean fuel"

For Jacobs, it's not really "a littering problem."

"It's a mask and PPE disposal problem. It may also be that people just really don't know how," she said.

The question we need to ask here, she said, is if "we need to have separate receptacles for PPEs, can they go in regular garbage or do we need to launch an education program" to make people aware of how to handle these products.

At this point, Jacobs said, it is of utmost importance that we follow "the guidelines or the advice of municipalities that are involved in waste management."

Video: Scientists find microplastics deep in Arctic ice

While recycling schemes differ between municipalities, Hardman said most of them are "very good" at keeping their websites updated.

"You can see very clearly what material can be recycled within a jurisdiction," she said. "So I think it is for the citizens to make sure that we are checking up on that. It is for municipalities to keep that information up to date, and it is for businesses to provide us with clear and transparent information about how a certain material can be handled."
How big is our plastic problem?

According to the United Nations, more than eight billion tons of plastic have been produced globally over the last 65 years, of which only a fraction has been recycled.

In 2020 alone, the proportion of single-use food packaging litter found on Canadian coastlines doubled. According to the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup report, single-use food and beverage litter jumped "from 15.3 per cent of all litter in 2019 to 26.6 per cent in 2020.”

Read more: Whale dies after 80 plastic bags found crammed in its stomach

Once plastic gets into the ocean, it can be hard to filter it back out. Instead of biodegrading, most plastics simply break into smaller fragments until they become known as micro-plastics, which are less than five millimetres in size.

By 2050, the World Economic Forum predicts that the oceans will hold more plastic than fish. The biggest polluting countries of the world so far are all in Asia, with China contributing the most.

Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka are among the top five. Canada and the United States not far behind.

Montreal police filmed kneeling on Black teen's neck

Duration: 01:41 

The video was filmed by a passerby in front of a bus stop in the city's Villeray district on June 10.

 cbc.ca

Families speak out against police violence at BLM Toronto Juneteenth event in Ottawa

Several Black and Indigenous families whose loved ones have been harmed and killed by police came together in Ottawa to mark Juneteenth and demand accountability and changes to the justice system.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Black Lives Matter Toronto organized the gathering on the steps of the prime minister's office, where 10 families from across the country shared their harrowing experiences and called for a defunding of the police system.

The event came on what's also known as Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. and has been declared a federal holiday south of the border.

Black Lives Matter Canada co-founder Syrus Marcus Ware says while Juneteenth is about celebrating liberation and justice, it's also a day to highlight activism and the struggle for freedom.

The visual artist, activist and scholar says the group wanted to come together on Juneteenth to show that they're still living with a lot of the same conditions and racism that the police force was built on.

BLM dubbed the event as Canada's first gathering of Black and Indigenous families affected by police violence, and the group hopes to bring them back together on Juneteenth next year.

"Juneteenth is a day to come together and to continue our activism and to say, 'Until we are all free, the work is not done,'" Ware said in a phone interview after Saturday's gathering, which was livestreamed on the BLM Toronto Facebook page.

"Because Blackness has no borders, because Indigeneity has no borders, because the concept of U.S. and Canada was a colonial-created construct, we know that the celebration of emancipation is felt all throughout North America. So on Juneteenth, we are definitely in a moment of celebration and activism here in Canada, saying: 'What can we do to talk about the struggles here in Canada on Juneteenth?'"

While Juneteenth specifically commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, it's also a time to remember "there was slavery here in Canada, too," added Ware.

"This is part of why we mark August 1 as Emancipation Day, which was when the British Empire outlawed slavery. So these struggles are connected, our work is connected," he said. "And Juneteenth is a day here in Canada to talk about our colonial past, our history with slavery, and also to say, 'What is still happening for Black life? And how can we improve the conditions so that we're not living under these terrible situations where all of these families are losing their loved ones?'"

Saturday's news conference included the family of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a Toronto woman who fell to her death from a balcony while police were in her home on May 27, 2020.

Last summer the Ontario police oversight body known as the Special Investigations Unit cleared the six Toronto police officers who were in the apartment, saying their efforts to de-escalate the situation were unsuccessful but none of them broke the law.

The family's lawyer, Jason Bogle, said her relatives are still seeking accountability after the Office of the Independent Police Review Director rejected the family's application to file a complaint over the SIU findings.

"We are appealing to once again bring to the forefront that systemic racism exists in police forcing, that systemic racism has to be battled inside of police forcing, and that if the powers that be do not hold those accountable for these actions, that these situations will still occur again and again," Bogle told the gathering.

"We will not stand for it, we will continue to fight and we will find answers, whether it's by marching or by protesting or by lobbying the powers that be that change has to come."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 19, 2021.

Victoria Ahearn, The Canadian Press

Black Lives Matter marks Juneteenth in Ottawa with protest

Duration: 02:59 

Protesters in Ottawa are calling for police accountability and justice reform on the same day the U.S. is observing a new federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery

cbc.ca

Edmonton-raised Mahmud Jamal nominated as first person of colour to Supreme Court of Canada

ALSO THE FIRST OF THE BAHAI FAITH

Duration: 01:34

At a time when incidents of racism and hate keep making headlines in Alberta and across the country, news that Canada's highest court could welcome its first person of colour is inspiring people in Edmonton that knew him. Chris Chacon has more on the early life of Mahmud Jamal.

PHENOM

One-legged woman is a world class salsa dancer

Duration: 00:44

"On this occasion, I participated in a cultural activity with our academy @fbacklatino and its director @roberteran84, also my life partner and my dance partner who would never ever change for anything or anyone." "This activity was carried out in my community and I am very happy to have participated, and even more so knowing that many people like our work, what we do and project as an academy. In addition to also observing the happiness and motivation of people when seeing a person in my condition dance, and much more considering that just in that area was where that tree was that was the one that caused the loss of my lower left limb." "This loss was not an impediment at all. from the first moment I discovered that I could dance again. nothing stopped me. I'll keep doing what I like until the end of time!"

More from Rumble

Julian Assange fiancé calls his detention in UK ‘grotesque’

Stella Moris stands with her children Gabriel, four, left, and Max, two, as she speaks to the media, outside Belmarsh Prison, following a visit to her partner and their father Julian Assange in London, Saturday June 19, 2021. (Dominic Lipinski/PA via AP)

AFP
Published: 19 June ,2021

The fiance of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Saturday condemned his “grotesque” detention in Britain, after visiting him in jail for the first time in eight months.

Stella Moris, 38, went to Belmarsh prison in south London on Saturday with the couple’s two young sons. She said she had not seen Assange since he made a court appearance in January.

“The situation is utterly intolerable and grotesque, and it can’t go on,” Moris said after the visit, describing Assange as “struggling.”

For the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.

The UK authorities are “driving him to deep depression and into despair”, she added.

Assange, 49, was arrested in Britain in 2019 for jumping bail after spending seven years inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London to evade extradition to Sweden and the US.

Moris is a lawyer and worked on his legal team while he was in the embassy.

In January, a judge ruled not to extradite Assange on mental health grounds, but refused to release him on bail, citing fears he would abscond.

He is detained awaiting the outcome of an appeal against the extradition ruling.

Sweden dropped a rape investigation against Assange in 2019.

He is wanted in Washington to face 18 charges relating to the 2010 release by WikiLeaks of 500,000 secret files detailing aspects of military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

If convicted in the United States, he faces a maximum sentence of 175 years in jail.

Moris said Saturday she “hoped” the family would stay in Britain if the appeal by US prosecutors is blocked.

She has visited Switzerland and along with the UN special rapporteur on torture and Geneva’s mayor, called for Assange’s immediate release.

Read more:

Imprisoned Wikileaks’ founder Assange denied bail by London court

Assange ‘free to return home’ once legal challenges in UK over, says Australia PM

WikiLeaks founder Assange stripped naked and handcuffed, lawyer tells court

Ontario town divided on becoming nuclear waste site

Duration: 03:52 

A small Ontario town is deeply divided over whether to become the storage location for Canada’s nuclear waste. Advocates against the project accuse the waste management group behind the project of trying to garner support by putting money into their town.

 cbc.ca

BILLIONAIRES BUILD NUKES

UK gets glowing salute from Bezos-backed General Fusion: Nuclear energy company to build plant in Oxfordshire

Biz will develop Magnetized Target Fusion technology at the site

Tim Richardson

Fri 18 Jun 2021 

General Fusion – the Canadian-based atomic outfit backed by Jeff Bezos and a battalion of other major investors – is to build a test facility in Oxfordshire to showcase its power-generating technology.

Following a COVID-friendly handshake, the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) has given General Fusion the green light to proceed with its Fusion Demonstration Plant (FDP) at UKAEA's Centre for Fusion Energy Campus in Culham.

The campus – a Royal Navy airbase until it was handed to the UKAEA in 1960 – is home to a cluster of fusion development technologies.

The building of the new plant is expected to start in the second half of next year and should be up and running in 2025.


According to the announcement, the FDP will feature General Fusion's proprietary Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology. If successful, it could lead to the creation of a commercial pilot plant.

Writing in the company's blog, General Fusion chief exec Christofer Mowry explained: "At 70 per cent of full scale, it will be powerful enough to heat hydrogen plasma fuel to fusion temperatures of 150 million degrees.

Uncle Sam to blow millions on getting fusion power finally working – with the help of AI

Yes, true, fusion reactors don't work quite yet, but, er, maybe AI can help us stop our experiments from imploding

RIP Freeman Dyson: The super-boffin who applied his mathematical brain to nuclear magic, quantum physics, space travel, and more

Brit startup plans fusion-powered missions to the stars

"Utilising our pulsed Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology, the FDP is designed to refine those technical performance metrics that will become the measure of our technology's ability to economically produce energy, durably operate as a power plant, and easily follow the fluctuating demands of electricity on power grids."

According to General Fusion, just 1kg of fusion fuel can power 10,000 homes for a year.

Earlier this month TerraPower – the Bill Gates-founded nuclear company – and Warren Buffett-owned PacifiCorp revealed they were hooking up to build a Natrium reactor at a decommissioned coal plant in Wyoming, US.

The project is based around a 345MW sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt-based energy storage system.

According to boffins, the storage technology can boost the system's output to 500MW of power for more than five and a half hours when needed, which is equivalent to the energy required to power around 400,000 homes. ®

The Jeff Bezos-backed company General Fusion is building a nuclear fusion plant, which is due to switch on in 2025
insider@insider.com (Isobel Asher Hamilton) 

© Provided by Business Insider Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Nuclear fusion company General Fusion is building a demonstration facility in the UK.

Jeff Bezos has been an investor in General Fusion for over a decade.

The new facility will begin construction next year, and should be operational by 2025

General Fusion, a Canadian company backed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, announced Thursday it's building a nuclear fusion facility in the UK.


General Fusion and the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) announced the project together, which will see General Fusion build a fusion demonstration plant in the village of Culham, near Oxford.

The facility will be a proof-of-concept, allowing General Fusion to demonstrate its Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology before going on to build its first commercial facility.

According to General Fusion, construction will begin in 2022, and it is expected to be about three years before the plant is able to open.

"This new plant by General Fusion is a huge boost for our plans to develop a fusion industry in the UK, and I'm thrilled that Culham will be home to such a cutting-edge and potentially transformative project," the UK science minister, Amanda Solloway, said in a statement.

The BBC reports Bezos has been an investor in General Fusion for over a decade, and the company raised $100 million in its latest funding round.

Nuclear fusion is still an experimental energy source. It differs from nuclear fission, which is what modern nuclear power plants use to generate energy.

Whereas fission involves splitting atoms, fusion happens when two atoms collide and form one heavier atom. Commercially viable fusion has been highly sought after, as it would theoretically produce much more power than fission as well as far fewer radioactive byproducts.

Read the original article on Business Insider

INDIA’S VACCINE MAKERS ARE PANDEMIC PROFITEERS, NOT HUMANITARIANS

The Indian government’s free-market approach to vaccine distribution has privileged profit over lives.

A health care worker holds a vial of Covishield at a vaccination center in Sopore, in the Baramulla district of Jammu and Kashmir on May 3, 2021. 

Photo: Nasir Kachroo/NurPhoto via AP

Aparna Gopalan
June 19 2021, 1:00 a.m.

IN APRIL, a deadly Covid-19 surge overtook India as the country’s overflowing hospitals and crematoria made global headlines. While new daily cases are now reportedly in decline, the overall death toll continues to rise — estimated to exceed official figures at well over 1 million. At the height of the surge, India’s vaccination rate began falling, and just 3.5 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people are fully vaccinated.

Most global media coverage has attributed the ongoing crisis to two key causes: the Indian government’s mismanaged pandemic response and Big Pharma. Over the last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right government engaged in superspreader theatrics rather than disaster mitigation. Meanwhile, by upholding patents on Covid-19 vaccines, pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and Europe have denied low- and middle-income countries the ability to produce lifesaving vaccines, creating a system of global vaccine apartheid that devalues non-Western lives.

Amid the censure of the Modi government and Big Pharma, India’s health care capitalists have gone largely unnoticed. Aided at each step by the government’s free-market approach to vaccine distribution, India’s very own Big Pharma has used the pandemic to strengthen market shares, grow profits, and place vaccines behind a paywall unscalable for most people in a country riven with dire systemic inequalities.

“The Indian vaccine ‘market’ is held in a vise-like grip of a vaccine duopoly,” journalist V. Sridhar, who has written about the country’s vaccination failures for the Indian news magazine Frontline, told me in a message. “What else would you call this duopoly but vaccine barons?”

Almost all of India’s vaccine supply comes from the country’s two largest vaccine producers: Serum Institute of India, led by CEO Adar Poonawalla, and Bharat Biotech, run by founder Krishna Ella. While both companies have repeatedly advertised their vaccines as the cheapest in the world, they seldom mention that those vaccines are also the world’s most profitable. For each dose sold to private hospitals, Serum makes profits of up to 2,000 percent — what Poonawalla might consider “super profits” — and Bharat Biotech up to 4,000 percent. In comparison, based on the estimated cost to make one dose, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s profit margins are 650 percent and 500 percent, respectively.

“Disasters are a fabulous business,” journalist P. Sainath writes in his recent piece on India’s widening wealth inequality. “There is always money to be made in the misery of the many.” India’s Covid-19 disaster is no exception.
The Prince of Profit

Poonawalla is one of India’s premier pandemic profiteers. He is the 40-year-old son of India’s eighth-richest man, from whom he inherited the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer. Among Western progressives, generics are often discussed as a public health solution to Big Pharma profiteering. Generics manufacturers like Poonawalla, however, are still businesspeople working for profit, not humanitarians motivated by the public good.

Pune-based Serum makes 1.5 billion doses of various vaccines every year and sells them across 170 countries. Poonawalla sees Serum, with its sizable production capacity, as “almost designed for [a pandemic],” and the company has seized on its “once-in-a lifetime opportunity.” In 2020, Serum entered a partnership with British-Swedish company AstraZeneca through which Serum could produce the Oxford University vaccine in exchange for royalties. With the resulting vaccine — known in India as Covishield — Serum captured 90 percent of the country’s vaccine market share. The company also committed up to 200 million doses for export to the global vaccine-sharing initiative COVAX.

Adar Poonawalla, CEO of Serum Institute of India, at the company’s Hadapsar plant in Pune, Maharashtra, in India, on Jan. 22, 2021.
Photo: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images


Despite Serum’s lucrative licensing agreement with AstraZeneca, Poonawalla has been one of the loudest voices decrying global vaccine inequality and Western Big Pharma. In March, Poonawalla objected to U.S. President Joe Biden’s use of the Defense Production Act, which stipulated that U.S. companies manufacturing vaccine raw materials must prioritize U.S. government contracts. Poonawalla criticized the move and in April tweeted at Biden to “lift the embargo.”

Recent analysis notes how Poonawalla’s demand for raw materials “placed him at the heart of several heroic imaginations.” This was especially true once India’s Covid-19 surge became front-page news in April. Indian, global, and even socialist media picked up and amplified Poonawalla’s rebuke, pointing to U.S. hoarding of raw materials as a humanitarian concern right alongside India’s pressing need for oxygen and personal protective equipment. As activist and humanitarian pressure to release the raw materials mounted, Biden removed export restrictions on bags, vials, filters, and other materials. A White House spokesperson said in a statement that the U.S. had agreed to release “specific raw material urgently required for Indian manufacture of the Covishield vaccine.”

The spokesperson was mistaken, as was much of the global media. Poonawalla went on the record multiple times to clarify that his request was not for Covishield or indeed for any vaccine approved to inoculate Indians. Since January, Serum has had the capacity to produce around 5,000 doses of Covishield per minute. Rather, the raw materials Poonawalla sourced from the U.S. are for a new Covid-19 vaccine Serum is producing in commercial partnership with U.S. company Novavax. Poonawalla was able to benefit from activist outrage to secure vaccine raw materials that would do nothing to mitigate India’s public health crisis. Serum declined to comment on the record for this piece.

Read Our Complete CoverageThe Coronavirus Crisis


Media coverage has facilitated Poonawalla’s enterprising use of the gray zone between humanitarianism and commerce during the pandemic. While Serum has always emphasized its “philanthropic philosophy,” the company’s founding family has mostly been known for their ostentatious wealth — be it their majestic farmhouse where they hosted Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; their luxury car collection that includes a one-of-a-kind Batmobile; or the refurbished aircraft that houses Poonawalla’s office.

But ever since Poonawalla became an early investor in the AstraZeneca vaccine, news stories have praised him as a “vaccine prince” — a risk-embracing entrepreneur with a moral mission. The media’s acceptance of how Poonawalla presents himself explains how easily he has been cited as an advocate for global public health rather than as a billionaire CEO advancing his company’s commercial interests. Journalistic sympathy for Poonawalla often comes at the cost of fair reporting. For instance, the media’s portrayal of Serum’s vaccine exports as a charitable “bid to protect the world” obscures the fact that Serum is charging poorer countries up to $7 for the same vaccine dose that the European Union is getting from AstraZeneca at $2.
Westward Expansion

Poonawalla has been cast in news coverage not just as a disinterested advocate of public health, but also as a decolonial challenger to Big Pharma seeking to “save the world from coronavirus — and then radically remake the international pharma landscape.” Poonawalla’s supposed desire to transform the global pharmaceutical industry is extrapolated from his opposition to vaccine patents, especially as calls to “free the vaccine” from intellectual property restrictions have found salience in Western leftist circles.

“We’re seeing a new system of vaccine apartheid coming into place,” says Tobita Chow, director of Justice Is Global, an initiative that campaigns to remove Covid-19 patents. Many public health experts agree that a temporary waiver of the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, provision is a necessary first step toward increasing vaccine production and access and creating a more competitive pharmaceutical industry worldwide. With sustained pressure from activists, last month the Biden administration signaled its support for a temporary TRIPS waiver, a measure initially proposed by the governments of India and South Africa.



Related
The Vaccine Divide


On the surface, Poonawalla has echoed activist concerns about pharmaceutical patents. But his fight against patents is not the same as activists’ fight for a people’s vaccine. Poonawalla’s interest in a TRIPS waiver comes from his admitted intention to poach competitors’ shares in Western markets. “Though we’re already in 165 countries, I will also expand our global reach: pushing into Europe and the United States — markets that we’ve never been able to enter as we’ve been blocked by Big Pharma,” he told GQ India last year. “These are the new and final frontiers.”

Serum has expanded into those frontiers. In 2012, the company acquired Bilthoven Biologicals from the Netherlands government and since then its European presence has only grown. In May, as Covid-19 ravaged India and the country’s vaccine supply dried up, Poonawalla sequestered himself in his $69,000-a-week rental mansion in London as the British government announced that Serum would invest over $330 million in the U.K. to create a new sales office, expected to generate business worth over $1.4 billion. If the clinical trials mentioned in the announcement are any indication, the vaccines developed as part of this deal might target European markets.

Serum’s global ambitions illuminate Poonawalla’s real problem with Big Pharma. It is not that Poonawalla is against the commercialization or patenting of lifesaving drugs; rather, he opposes Big Pharma insofar as it blocks his own access to Western markets. This is why, while campaigning against the hoarding of U.S. raw materials or supporting calls to waive U.S. drug patents, Poonawalla had also been working with then-President Donald Trump to escape the “stupid rules and regulations” that prevented him from selling his products in the U.S.

The TRIPS waiver might become yet another humanitarian response to India’s viral surge that enriches Poonawalla.

If these restrictions — raw material embargoes, patents, regulatory requirements — were waived for Covishield in Western markets, even at a price as high as $10 a dose, Covishield could easily outcompete the more expensive Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines while making a considerable profit. By undercutting competitors’ prices for Covid-19 vaccines, Serum could both expand its operations and trigger a race to the bottom, pushing other producers to consolidate or outsource to lower their prices. Back in 2016, Poonawalla had diagnosed that the pharmaceutical industry was experiencing “the lull before the storm” of acquisitions or mergers. If it succeeds in using the pandemic to break into Western markets, Serum could find itself riding the coming tidal wave of pharmaceutical industry consolidation.

The TRIPS waiver might become yet another humanitarian response to India’s coronavirus surge that enriches Poonawalla. The waiver could enable Serum to keep profiting from the AstraZeneca vaccine without paying royalties. Serum may also be able to develop a replica of the vaccine, the patent for which it could hold within India even as global patents are suspended. Several of the experts I interviewed saw the probability of such a vaccine monopoly emerging.

Poonawalla has done little to dispel these fears. Even as he stresses that Serum’s production capacity must increase to vaccinate the world’s poor, Poonawalla also maintains that there is no need to bring other manufacturers into the vaccine market to help increase supply.

Serum’s primary goal isn’t to equitably vaccinate the world or break down monopolies; it is to corner new markets while maintaining dominance within India. Without curbs on Serum’s power, the removal of global patents would not result in “freeing” the vaccine, only freeing streams of profit.

Krishna Ella, founder and chair of Bharat Biotech, holds a package of the typhoid vaccine Typbar-TCV during a press conference in Hyderabad on Jan. 3, 2018.
Photo: Noah Seelam/AFP via Getty Images

Immunity for Sale

Serum is not the only Indian company engaging in vaccine profiteering. Bharat Biotech, which developed Covaxin with public funds, has been charging Indians exorbitant rates for each shot — up to about $5.40 for states and about $16 for private hospitals — despite founder Ella’s early assurance that the vaccine would cost less than a bottle of water. Bharat Biotech has also been expanding commercial Covaxin exports despite India’s recent export restrictions.

Unlike Serum’s Covishield, Covaxin is not restricted by any Big Pharma patent. The Indian government controls part of Covaxin’s intellectual property rights, yet Bharat Biotech inexplicably monopolized production until a month ago, when the government finally greenlighted manufacturing of the vaccine in its own production facilities. Bharat Biotech declined to comment for this piece.

Throughout the pandemic, the Modi government has refused to curb pharmaceutical profiteering. Despite using taxpayer money to provide clinical trial support and sizable production advances to Serum and Bharat Biotech, the government has failed to ensure affordable vaccines for India’s people. Until May, the central government had procured all the doses for $2 each — a price at which the vaccine companies are reported to have made between 188 percent to 500 percent in profits. But they wanted more.

“When you’ve got low supply and high demand, what happens to the price? It skyrockets,” Poonawalla has said in describing how U.S. drug companies insulate themselves from competition with generics. Yet Poonawalla essentially politically engineered the same reality in India.

“By self-admission, India’s monopolistic vaccine producers were deeply unhappy with the ‘normal profits’ they earned at the regulated prices,” R. Ramakumar, a development economist at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, told me in a message. “They lobbied to ‘free’ prices. Not surprisingly, vaccine prices more than doubled, even tripled and quadrupled, over just one week.”
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The Indian government enabled the rise in prices with its “liberalized” vaccine distribution policy, deliberately manufacturing a seller’s market. Starting May 1, the central government stopped procuring and distributing all the country’s vaccines as it and almost every other government in the world had been doing up until then. Instead, the central government began buying only half of the vaccine supply, leaving India’s 28 states and private hospitals to compete for the remaining doses on the private market — at prices set by the vaccine companies. The Indian health ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

By distributing vaccines through the open market, the Indian government fractured its citizens’ collective buying and bargaining power, giving up all leverage to capitalists. With a quarter of the country’s vaccine stock reserved for private hospitals, and vaccine producers vocalizing their preference to sell to those hospitals at higher prices, India’s vaccination drive was designed to favor private-sector monopolization.

The resulting inequalities have been stark. Private hospitals have outcompeted cash-starved states: In May, just nine hospital chains had cornered 50 percent of all doses. While India’s states pledged to vaccinate people for free, private hospitals voiced no such intention. Absent price caps, most of India’s impoverished population has either been paying exorbitant amounts to get vaccinated at private hospitals or waiting for government hospitals to acquire scarce doses.

By distributing vaccines through the open market, the Indian government fractured its citizens’ collective buying and bargaining power, giving up all leverage to capitalists.


“Imagine if the vaccine is sold at $10 to a family of four and they each need two doses,” health journalist Vidya Krishnan says. “How are they going to be able to afford it?” The average person in India makes an estimated $50 a month. Add to the mix the Modi government’s disastrous economic policies from prior years, and vaccination becomes unattainable for most Indians.

India’s vaccination plan for almost one-fifth of the world’s people has been so alarming that even the country’s judiciary and Modi’s own allies have joined journalists, opposition politicians, and medical experts in asking: Why no price standardization or price ceiling? Why not go back to centrally procuring vaccines instead of making states compete? Why not, as Krishnan asks, use the decades-old public vaccination system that was used to eradicate polio? Why not, as experts I interviewed suggest, waive patents within India and issue compulsory licenses so that more than two big companies could make vaccines?

In response to months of public outcry, last week Modi announced a partial reversal of his vaccine distribution “experiment.” Starting June 21, the central government will procure 75 percent of the country’s total vaccine stock directly from the companies, which it will give to state governments to distribute to their residents for free.

The change reverses one of the most politically controversial aspects of the previous policy but still leaves plenty of room for profiteering. A quarter of India’s vaccine stock will remain reserved for private hospitals and, consequently, for the rich. Even with price caps at private hospitals, vaccine manufacturers’ rates of profit will reach over 1,000 percent. As Yogesh Jain, a founder of the rural health care nonprofit Jan Swasthya Sahyog, wrote on Twitter, India’s vaccination capabilities will remain “publicly provided, and privately guzzled.”

The Modi government has tweaked India’s profit-centric vaccine policy, but as Ramakumar says, what is needed is an overhaul. Instead of using the powers at its disposal on behalf of the people, the Indian government continues to privilege profit over lives.

Employees work on the production line to make vials of Covishield at the Serum Institute of India’s Hadaspar plant in Pune, Maharashtra, in India, on Jan. 22, 2021.
Photo: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Profiteering as the Public Good

The failures of India’s vaccination drive are reflective of the country’s overall pandemic response, characterized by the government’s strong support of private profiteering. India’s Supreme Court has repeatedly suggested that the central government has the power to speed up the manufacturing of oxygen and other essentials by investing public funds, which Indian cities like Madurai and states like Kerala have done successfully. But not only did the central government do nothing to increase its critically low oxygen capacity, it also allowed India’s industrial oxygen exports to rise by over 700 percent over the course of the pandemic instead of redirecting oxygen production to medical needs. Unsurprisingly, the stock of oxygen corporations like Linde India shot up even as countless people gasped to death.

“The government of India has withdrawn from the central social responsibility of an enlightened welfare state,” Ramakumar told me. “It has also opened the floodgates for a vulgar form of predatory capitalism to take over the stage amid the raging human tragedy.”

Poonawalla has claimed that “even God” couldn’t have foreseen the gravity of the crisis, but India’s pandemic disaster was long foretold. Things did not have to play out this way. India could have had medical supplies, PPE, testing kits, and vaccines ready if public health dictated production and distribution, rather than profits. Wherever vaccines have been administered on a mass scale, it has happened because at key moments of reckoning, public health advocates challenged the profit motive. But in India, profiteering itself masquerades as the public good.

In India, 38 new billionaires were minted in the past year, while the combined wealth of the country’s 140 billionaires went up by 90.4 percent.

Pandemics often exacerbate preexisting sociopolitical dynamics, argues Nivedita Saksena, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. India’s current situation is no exception. With a public health system that has been starved of funds for decades, and no viable alternative to for-profit health care, India’s Covid-19 pandemic was bound to become an opportunity for profiteering.

India’s big businesses have even managed to use aid from abroad to make money — which is why private hospitals sold airlifted oxygen cylinders to desperate patients, why vaccine raw materials from the U.S. are being used for disaster profiteering, and why a global patent waiver will likely strengthen the power of Indian Big Pharma.

To win a world where human life is truly valued above profit, we must realize that the small handful of very wealthy people who stand in the way of the public good are dispersed across the world — as much in Pune as in New York City. Their numbers are growing, as is their power within their home countries. In India alone, 38 new billionaires were minted in the past year, while the combined wealth of the country’s 140 billionaires went up by 90.4 percent. During the pandemic, Poonawalla’s net worth rose by 85 percent in five months, as tens of millions of Indians descended into poverty. This is not a coincidence, as P. Sainath writes, in “a year when hundreds of millions of Indians were hungrier than they’d been in decades.”

“A wealth ‘surge’ usually rides on a misery surge,” Sainath says. The swelling wallets of India’s health care elites are directly linked to the bodies in the streets. Until we eliminate the profitability of misery, India’s nightmare has no end in sight.