29 May 2020

African Water Resources Mobility Network (AWaRMN) PhD Scholarships 2020 for African Scholars

Application Deadline: 5th June 2020 at 11:59 PM (SAST).

Target Groups:
  • Group 1: Students who are registered or have obtained a degree from any of the AWaRMN partner institutions: RU, UNIKIN, FUTMINNA, MU, ENSH.
  • Group 2: Students who are registered or have obtained a degree from any Higher Education Institution (HEI) established in an African Union Member State apart from AWaRMN partner institutions.
Eligible Field(s): These are:

Rhodes University, South Africa (RU)
  • PhD Water Resource Science
  • PhD Hydrology
Federal University of Technology, Minna, Nigeria (FUTMINNA)
  • PhD Applied Hydrobiology
Makerere University, Uganda (MU)
  • PhD Chemistry
University of Kinshasa, Congo (UNIKIN)
  • PhD Water Resources
Ecole Nationale SupĂ©rieure d’Hydrauilique, Algeria (ENSH)
  • PhD Hydraulics
Type: Degree-seeking Mobility (long-term study that leads to an award of a PhD degree).

Eligibility:
General eligibility
To be eligible for support from AWaRMN, applicants must:
  • be a national of an African Union member state and resident in Africa at the time of application.
  • meet both institutional and partnership requirements for admission.
  • not have benefited from any form of previous support from Intra-Africa Academic Mobility Scheme, or Intra-ACP Mobility or Erasmus or Erasmus + programmes
  • must be prepared to move from home country to another country where AWARM has a partner institution. This also apply to foreign applicants who resides in a country with AWARMN institution. For such applicants, you must then consider applying to a third country. For example, you are a Ugandan, but resides in South Africa or have studied in South Africa, you can not apply to Rhodes University in South Africa or Makerere in Uganda. Scholarships are attached to mobility.
Academic eligibility
Applicants must also fulfill the academic eligibility criteria of the partner institution(s) of their choice. Please read the Eligibility Criteria of the Partner Institutions document. You can find it here https://www.ru.ac.za/intra-africa-awarmn/

Selection:
  • Applicants will be informed about the outcome of the competitive selection process by email by 19 June 2020
  • Successful candidates will be expected to resume their study by August 2020.
  • Applications with incomplete or incorrect information will not be considered.
  • Female applicants, people with disability or people from socio-economically disadvantaged background are strongly encouraged to apply.
Eligible Countries: African countries

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: For successful applicants, AWaRMN funding will cover the following areas:
  • Participation costs (e.g. tuition/registration fees) of students.
  • Research costs (e.g. field work, laboratory consumables).
  • Subsistence allowance: PhD: 900 Euro per month.
  • Special allowance to female students for mobility equal or more than 2 academic years, viz – PhD: 900 Euro per year.
  • Economic class roundtrip flight ticket and visa costs
  • Insurance (Health, accident and travel)
  • One-off settling-in allowance upon arrival to cover installation costs, viz – PhD: 900 Euro.
Duration of Award: 2 years

How to Apply:
  • Read the guidelines carefully here: https://www.ru.ac.za/intra-africa-awarmn/ and complete the application form
  • The following documents need to be included in your application:
    • certified copies of academic degrees and official transcripts,
    • 2 paged CV,
    • 250 words motivation stating why you should be awarded a scholarship,
    • a formal identity document e.g. passport, national identity card, driver license or any other officially recognized form of identification indicating your nationality,
    • short research proposal of not more than 1000 words,
    • two reference letters (one academic and one non-academic). The academic referee must be able to attest to your academic standing.
  • Remember to click on the submit button.
General enquiries: awarmnadmin@ru.ac.za
  • It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.
Visit Award Webpage for Details

Air Pollution Mental Illness and Covid-19

Graham Peebles

Lockdowns imposed in response to Covid-19 forced millions of people to stay at home, businesses closed and a widespread hush descended. The major beneficiary of the controls has been the natural environment; in particular there has been a dramatic reduction in air pollution everywhere. But as countries begin to lift restrictions, road traffic levels are once again increasing, air and noise pollution rising.
Changes to working patterns and daily living have created a unique opportunity to re-imagine how we live and work. Central to any new pattern needs to be the environment; many people recognize this and the importance of not ‘going back’. Some cities in Europe are already responding positively (Milan, London, Bristol e.g.), proposing pedestrian only areas together with an increase in cycle lanes, and the results of a recent survey by the Automobile Association (AA) in Britain are encouraging. “Half of those polled said they would walk more and 40% intended to drive less…to maintain the cleaner air of the lockdown and protect the environment.” In addition around a quarter said they planned to (continue) to work more from home, as well as flying less.
Death by Breathing
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) 90% of the global population breathe filthy toxic air. The bulk of air pollution is the result of burning fossil fuels for heat and power generation (e.g. oil and coal power plants and boilers) and fuel combustion from vehicles – cars, motorbikes, lorries etc. All of which not only throw toxins into the air but also generate enormous levels of noise pollution.
Worldwide, air pollution is said to kill around nine million people a year, making it the fifth leading risk factor for death in the world. Children are particularly vulnerable; they inhale more airborne toxins than adults, tend to spend greater periods of time outside and are more active. The detrimental effects can be long lasting, affecting their physical and mental health as well their education.
Contaminated air is also a significant factor in a person’s susceptibility to Covid-19. Air pollution, particularly Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), as well as Particulate Matter (PM)) – both of which are released by vehicles burning fossil fuels, causes and exacerbates respiratory complaints. A university study conducted in Germany found that of the total number of coronavirus deaths in 66 administrative regions of Italy, Spain, France and Germany, “78% of them occurred in just five regions, and these were the most polluted.”
The results of the research “indicate that long-term exposure to this pollutant may be one of the most important contributors to fatality caused by the Covid-19 virus…poisoning our environment means poisoning our own body, and when it experiences chronic respiratory stress [Covid-19 e.g.] it’s ability to defend itself from infections is limited.” A separate study in the US shows that even small “single-unit” increases in particle pollution in the years prior to the pandemic is linked with a 15% increase in deaths. Cleaner air in London or New York e.g., in the past could have saved hundreds of lives.
Air pollution affects everyone but predictably the poorest members of society, including people from black and minority ethnic (BAME) groups, are the most severely impacted, they appear also to be the most at risk from Covid-19. In multi-cultural Britain e.g., people in deprived areas have been dying of coronavirus at double the rate of those in affluent areas. And those from BAME backgrounds –making up around 13% of the UK population – account for a third of virus patients admitted to hospital critical care units. Similar patterns have emerged in other European countries with large minority populations as well as the US. Black Americans represent around 14 per cent of the US population but total 30 per cent of those who have contracted the virus. In Norway people born in Somalia have infection rates more than 10 times above the national average.
The social causes behind the figures are complex. Many people from BAME groups live in overcrowded housing in extremely polluted areas and work in high-risk low paid jobs. Diet among some BAME communities is poor and (in part as a result) there is a propensity to underlying health conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity and respiratory illnesses, all of which make people more vulnerable to Covid-19.
Poverty is the world’s biggest killer, and Covid-19 is, it seems, the most recent addition to the symptomatic causes of death for the poor, the vulnerable and people from minorities, which, in many cases are one and the same.
In addition to causing millions of deaths and a variety of respiratory conditions, air pollution is increasingly being linked to a range of mental health illnesses, including depression, bipolar, and, according to a study in the UK, psychotic experiences in children.
An estimated 300 million people in the world suffer from depression, a similar number are plagued by anxiety. Many aspects of contemporary living contribute to mental health illnesses, various studies in recent years show that air pollution is one of them. The finest particle pollutants are known to reach the brain via the bloodstream and the nose, The Guardian report, causing increased brain inflammation, “damage to nerve cells and to changes in stress hormone production, which have been linked to poor mental health.” Air pollution has also been shown to quadruple the risk of depression in teenagers and is being linked to dementia.
Together with noise pollution, studies show that filthy air feeds sleep apnea symptoms and may disturb sleep by exacerbating asthma, COPD, or other respiratory or chronic diseases. This in turn creates greater vulnerability to depression and anxiety, as well as the current Covid-19 virus.
Changing behavior
Air pollution is poison, we are literally breathing in toxic compounds that are making us ill, physically and mentally. Urgent and lasting steps are required to reduce to an absolute minimum the levels of air pollution. This requires humanity to drastically reduce its dependency on fossil fuels.
For this to happen there needs to be a major shift in attitudes, triggering a change in behavior and greater levels of environmental responsibility. Consumerism (including consumption of animal food produce) is the principle cause of the environmental emergency, including air pollution. Excessive, unnecessary consumption needs to stop, sufficiency not excess promoted and adopted as the guiding principle. Meat and dairy diets reduced and the trend towards plant based diets encouraged.
At the same time investment in renewable sources of energy generation and supply needs to be increased throughout the world. All unnecessary travel should be eliminated (including air travel), and (where practical) a strategic movement away from the car onto public transport – reliable and clean, cycling and walking. Public transport needs to be state owned and run as a service, not for profit. China, with 99% of the world’s total electric fleet, leads the way in the electrification of public transport, in addition, the Chinese government has invested heavily in electric cars and has set a target of 40% electric vehicles by 2025.
The beautification of our towns and cities (where over 50% of the world’s population now live) goes hand in hand with the reduction in traffic and the promotion of clean modes of transport. Bold imaginative initiatives are required that prioritize the environment and human welfare over corporate concerns. Whole sections of cities and towns, major streets and abandoned sites could be redesigned as peaceful green spaces. And while many fear the closure of retail outlets and the slow death of shopping streets, the possibility of converting these areas to parklands and gardens, present itself and should be embraced.
All flows from a shift in thinking. The environmental emergency is the greatest crisis facing humanity; with every new report published the scope and depth of the crisis becomes increasingly stark, the need for action more urgent. To date the complacency of governments and corporations, as well as large tracts of the public, has been astonishing and shameful; this must now change.
Covid-19 forced governments to act (albeit in many cases inadequately); the same sense of urgency needs to be applied to tackling air pollution, which, I say again, is responsible for at least nine million deaths a year, and the wider environmental emergency. The pandemic has given the natural environment a brief respite from human abuse; as countries ‘open up’, we have the chance to adopt a new responsible approach to living and not revert to old destructive ways.

Coronavirus and the Telecom Crisis

David Rosen

The current Corvis-19 pandemic provides a unique vantage point to assess key social institutions of American life. Sadly, none has failed so gravely as the nation’s health care system, especially as underwritten by the private insurance model. The crisis of the U.S. healthcare system raises the deeper, more fundamental, question as to whether health care is a privilege or a right, a private business or a social utility?
This debate over the role of social services, whether private or public, defines other activities including housing and food, water, electricity and even roadways and telecommunications. The logic of capitalism demands that everything be turned into a commodity, something bought and sold, from one’s labor power to the air we breathe. And yet, as has occurred numerous times, the logic of the market – while beneficial for a select few — has failed the public at large. In such cases, the power of the redistributive society intervened.
When the Corvis-19 crisis is contained and an effective vaccine widely adopted, a day of reckoning will come for the private insurance system of health care. The same question will be raised regarding other social institution, especially the nation’s telecommunications system. Would Americans be better served by the current quasi-monopoly of private telecom companies or by publicly owned communications utilities?
***
The Corvis-19 pandemic has exposed the underlying weakness of the U.S. health care system based on private insurance. It has also exposed the limitations of the private, minimally “regulated,” telecommunications industry.
The policy of shelter-in-place to contain coronavirus has led to a significant increase in broadband usage. As one report notes, “in the week from March 11 to March 18, 2020, the average daily broadband data usage per user in the United States was 6.3 GB during the office hours, an increase of 41.4 percent compared to January.” It also points out that there’s been a 25 percent increase in overall average bandwidth usage between January and March 11-18, 2020 – from 12.19 GB to 15.45 GB. It concludes, “the increase is most likely due to more people working from home and overall restrictions for people to stay at home.”
Sadly, this report does not document the inequities inherent in the current private-market telecom system. Former FCC attorney Gigi Sohn estimated that some 141 million people in the U.S. lack access to fixed broadband at speeds of 25 Mbps, the FCC’s base definition of broadband.
Another report estimates that “42 million Americans, including a quarter of rural residents, lack access to broadband internet — and this doesn’t even include the people who don’t have broadband because they can’t afford it.” It goes on to warn, “nearly 5 million households with children, half of adults earning less than $30,000, and roughly six out of ten households in poor cities like Flint, Michigan and Trenton, New Jersey have no home broadband connection.”
In addition to the lack of connectivity, these poorer families with children tend to be dependent on smartphones – as distinguished from Internet-enabled devices (e.g., desktop or laptop PCs or tablets) to get online. In addition, an increasing number of hospitals and medical centers are relying on telemedicine to safely screen and treat patients (especially with Corvis-19) and the lack of Internet connectivity will restrict remote services. Making matters worse, data caps on broadband services are forcing low-income subscribers to ration online access.
According to the latest data from BroadbandNow, there are 2,665 Internet service providers (ISPs) operating in the U.S. These providers fall into six types: (i) Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) (882 ISPs); (ii) copper (business T1/T3) (235); (iii) cable (447); (iv) fiber-optic (1,297); (v) fixed wireless broadband (1,568); and mobile broadband (LTE)(52).
These providers reach an estimated population ranging from just a few thousand to hundreds of millions. However, the telecom industry is dominated by a handful of huge conglomerates, the 21st century telecom trust — the top five telecom providers in 2018 (and the annual revenue) were: AT&T ($170.7 billion); Verizon ($130.9 bil); T-Mobile ($43.3 bil); Sprint ($33.6 bil); and US Cellular ($5.2 bil).
Unfortunately, the development of broadband has resulted in the U.S. becoming a second-tier communications country. A July 2019 report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ranked the U.S. 15th of the 34 OECD countries in terms of broadband usage. The country’s position is pretty bleak per data rate. For mobile, it didn’t make the top 25 countries assessed; for fixed broadband, it ranked 11th at 130.9 Mbps – Singapore ranked first at 200.12 Mbps.
Compounding this picture, Americans pay more for inferior services. A 2019 report in Forbes assessed 6,313 mobile data plans in 230 countries and found that Americans pay the most for a gigabyte of data. Fees ranged from $0.26 in India and $0.27 in Kyrgyzstan to $6.66 in the United Kingdom and $6.96 in Germany. Costs in North America were the highest, averaging $12.02 in Canada and $12.38 in the U.S.
***
The tug-of-war between the dictates of capitalist self-enrichment and the needs of the public good defines the modern era. In the decades before the Civil War, three innovative technologies helped transform the U.S.’s emerging industrial economy — canals, railroads and the telegraph. In the decades after the Civil War, there was increased concerns over the concentration of power by those with significant influence or control over key sectors of social and economic life.
As David Gabel points out, “the telegraphy was the nation’s first high-speed information network,” essential for an efficient railroad system and the integration of banking and brokerage houses into a national economic market. In 1876, the telephone was introduced and, according to the Bureau of the Census, “By 1899 telephony … not only had surpassed telegraphy in physical and financial magnitude, but by its very growth had seriously restricted the expansion of telegraphy.”
However, in 1877, the Supreme Court, in Munn v. Illinois, sought to limit the absolutist power of private interests, the tendency toward monopoly market control. In this early case, it ruled against grain-elevator operators. A decade later, in 1887, Congress adopted the Interstate Commerce Act that regulated the railroad industry, particularly its monopolistic practices. That same year, the Court extended the thinking behind the Commerce Act to telecommunications. It ruled, in Chesapeake & Potomac Tel. Co. v. Baltimore & Ohio Tel. Co.:
The telegraph and telephone are important instruments of commerce, and their service, as such, has become indispensable to the commercial and business public. They are public vehicles of intelligence, and they who own or control them can no more refuse to perform impartially the functions that they have assumed to discharge than a railway company, as a common carrier, can rightfully refuse to perform its duty to the public.
By 1901, the Court ruled in Western Union Tel. Co. v. Call Publishing Co. that the telegraphy was a common carrier and, as such, required to provide services on a nondiscriminatory basis. Nine-years later, with the Mann-Elkins Act (1910), Congress extended common carrier or public utilities status to telephones and telegraphs.
On September 21, 1932, the U.S. was in the throes of the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt was running for president. Not unlike today’s health crisis, he addressed a major social crisis of the day, faltering electrical service. “My answer has been, as it is tonight, to point out these plain principles,” Roosevelt told his audience in Portland, OR. “That where a community — a city or county or a district — is not satisfied with the service rendered or the rates charged by the private utility, it has the undeniable basic right, as one of its functions of government, one of its functions of home rule, to set up … its own governmentally owned and operated service.”
In 1934, following his election and amidst a deepening Great Depression, Pres. Roosevelt supported the enactment of the Communications Act of 1934. He recommended the creation of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), writing: “I have long felt that for the sake of clarity and effectiveness the relationship of the Federal Government to certain services known as utilities should be divided into three fields — transportation, power and communications.” Under Title II of the Act, the FCC came to regulate telecommunications networks as common carriers.
Other key social sectors – the gas, electric and water industries – followed similar patterns of evolution. From privately owned and operated systems with weak municipal oversight (late-19th century); to a period of aggressive municipal regulation (Progressive era); to extensive municipal/state regulation and/or ownership (post-WW-II era); and, currently, deregulation, with limited state/municipal control and increased competition.
In the decades between the Great Depression and post-WW-II period, a spirit of state/municipal regulation was widespread. However, in the wake of the oil crisis of the mid-1970s and Pres. Ronald Reagan’s push at deregulation in the ‘80s, a new era of aggressive privatization of the economy was launched. Among the major initiatives of the period were the breakup of AT&T in 1984 into a long-distance company and seven regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) and Congress imposing traditional rate regulation on cable television services.
It was under Pres. Bill Clinton that telecommunications was deregulated. He insisted that the 1996 Telecommunications Act would “promotes competition as the key to opening new markets and new opportunities.” And he argued, “it will protect consumers by regulating the remaining monopolies for a time and by providing a roadmap for deregulation in the future.”
***
Susan Crawford, a Harvard law professor, has been the strongest advocate for the replacement of the private operator, quasi-monopoly telecom system for one based on a public utility model. She has written, “a utility is not a luxury. Utility services can be sold by private or public entities, but they are always subject to public obligations to reach everyone at a reasonable price, with a service meeting public quality standards.” She reminds us, “services that start off as luxuries can become utilities as their centrality to life becomes clear.”
Digging deeper, Crawford lays out her analysis:
Utilities are things, physical networks, that public utility commissions regulate: electric, gas, communications, water, and wastewater, mostly. These commissions typically ensure that utilities provide reasonably priced, adequate, and efficient services to customers, while allowing the companies involved to recover their costs plus a fair return to their investors. These physical networks are considered to be “affected with the public interest.” They often have franchises from the government that give them benefits like special rights of access to rights-of-way in exchange for their promises to serve.
Over the last few years, states and municipalities have heard Crawford’s call for telecom as a public utility. One estimate finds that “more than 560 communities across the country are served by municipal networks and more than 300 are served by a cooperative.” Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga, TN, implemented the world’s first community-wide 10-gig Internet service, available to more than 170,000 homes and businesses. Other cities implementing telecom as a public utility plan are Virginia Beach, VA, that connects the city’s government buildings, schools, fire stations, and more. By connecting these sites, the city reportedly saves at least $500,000 per year. Schools in Portland, OR, are connected through a publicly owned network that cut costs by more than half (to $616 from $1,310 per month per site) and achieve speed 40 times greater. After a failed undertaken with Verizon, New York City is exploring implementing an open-access broadband network.
Bruce Kushnick, team leader of the Irregulators, a group of independent telecom expert challenging the FCC and various state telecoms, notes that the designation of “public” utilities is part of Illinois, New Jersey and California regulatory oversight (e.g., California Public Utility Commission).
The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) notes that as of the 2019 legislative session, “45 states and Puerto Rico addressed broadband in issue areas such as educational institutions and schools, dig once, funding, governance authorities and commissions, infrastructure, municipal-run broadband networks, rural and underserved communities and taxes.” It adds, “thirty-one states and Puerto Rico enacted legislation or adopted resolutions.”
(The American Public Power Association reports that “about 2,000 cities with public power utilities or ‘munis,’ and more than 900 cooperatively owned power companies that collectively serve over 100 million Americans.”)
As expected, the telecom companies are aggressively fighting back. Some 26 states have adopted laws that seek to either restrict or prohibit municipally owned broadband networks. In 2018, they spent over $92 million to block or ban public telecom utilities.
When the Covid-19 pandemic is finally contained, a day of reckoning over the various failures of the American social system will likely come. Foremost, Sanders’ call for a Medicare for All plan may well gain political support in the face of the failure of the private insurance model tied to one’s employment. In a similar spirit, an increasing number of localities may move to offer municipally owned broadband services and push a campaign to – yet again – break-up the 21st century telecom trust.

U.S. Declares a Vaccine War on the World

Prabir Purkayastha

Donald Trump launched a new vaccine war in May, but not against the virus. It was against the world. The United States and the UK were the only two holdouts in the World Health Assembly from the declaration that vaccines and medicines for COVID-19 should be available as public goods, and not under exclusive patent rights. The United States explicitly disassociated itself from the patent pool call, talking instead of “the critical role that intellectual property plays”—in other words, patents for vaccines and medicines. Having badly botched his COVID-19 response, Trump is trying to redeem his electoral fortunes in the November elections this year by promising an early vaccine. The 2020 version of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan is shaping up to be, essentially, “vaccines for us”—but the rest of the world will have to queue up and pay what big pharma asks, as they will hold the patents.
In contrast, all other countries agreed with the Costa Rican proposal in the World Health Assembly that there should be a patent pool for all COVID-19 vaccines and medicines. President Xi said that Chinese vaccines would be available as a public good, a view also shared by European Union leaders. Among the 10 candidate vaccines in Phase 1 and 2 of clinical trials, the Chinese have five, the United States has three, and the UK and Germany have one each.
Trump has given an ultimatum to the World Health Organization (WHO) with a permanent withdrawal of funds if it does not mend its ways in 30 days. In sharp contrast, in the World Health Assembly (the highest decision-making body of the WHO), almost all countries, including close allies of the United States, rallied behind the WHO. The failure of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)against COVID-19, with nearly four times the annual budget of the WHO, is visible to the world. The CDC failed to provide a successful test for SARS-CoV-2 in the critical months of February and March, while ignoring the WHO’s successful test kits that were distributed to 120 countries.
Trump has yet to hold his administration and the CDC responsible for this criminal bungling. This, more than any other failure, is the reason that the U.S. numbers for COVID-19 are now more than 1.5 million and about a third of all global infections. Contrast this with China, the first to face an unknown epidemic, stopping it at 82,000 infections, and the amazing results that countries such as Vietnam and South Korea have produced.
One issue is now looming large over the COVID-19 pandemic. If we do not address the intellectual property rights issue in this pandemic, we are likely to see a repeat of the AIDS tragedyPeople died for 10 years (1994-2004) as patented AIDS medicine was priced at $10,000 to $15,000 for a year’s supply, far beyond their reach. Finally, patent laws in India allowed people to get AIDS medicine at less than a dollar a day, or $350 for a year’s supply. Today, 80 percent of the world’s AIDS medicine comes from India. For big pharma, profits trumped lives, and they will continue to do so, COVID or no COVID, unless we change the world.
Most countries have compulsory licensing provisions that will allow them to break patents in case of epidemics or health emergencies. Even the WTO, after a bitter fight, accepted in its Doha Declaration (2001) that countries, in a health emergency, have the right to allow any company to manufacture a patented drug without the patent holder’s permission, and even import it from other countries.
Why is it, then, that countries are unable to break patents, even if there are provisions in their laws and in the TRIPS Agreement? The answer is their fear of U.S. sanctions against them. Every year, the U.S. Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issues a Special 301 Report that it has used to threaten trade sanctions against any country that tries to compulsorily license any patented product. India figures prominently in this report year after year, for daring to issue a compulsory license in 2012 to Natco for nexavar, a cancer drug Bayer was selling for more than $65,000 a year. Marijn Dekkers, the CEO of Bayer, was quoted widely that this was “theft,” and “We did not develop this medicine for Indians… We developed it for Western patients who can afford it.”
This leaves unanswered how many people even in the affluent West can afford a $65,000 bill for an illness. But there is no question that a bill of this magnitude is a death sentence for anybody but the super-rich in countries like India. Though a number of other drugs were under also consideration for compulsory licensing at that time, India has not exercised this provision again after receiving U.S. threats.
It is the fear that countries can break patents using their compulsory licensing powers that led to proposals for patent pooling. The argument was that since many of these diseases do not affect rich countries, big pharma should either let go of their patents to such patent pools, or philanthropic capital should fund the development of new drugs for this pool. Facing the pandemic of COVID-19, it is this idea of patent pooling that emerged in the recent World Health Assembly, WHA-73. All countries supported this proposal, barring the United States and its loyal camp follower, the UK. The United States also entered its disagreement on the final WHA resolution, being the lone objector to patent pooling of COVID-19 medicines and vaccines, noting “the critical role that intellectual property plays in incentivizing the development of new and improved health products.”
While patent pooling is welcome if no other measure is available, it also makes it appear as if countries have no other recourse apart from the charity of big capital. What this hides, as charity always does, is that people and countries have legitimate rights even under TRIPS to break patents under conditions of an epidemic or a health emergency.
The United States, which screams murder if a compulsory license is issued by any country, has no such compunction when its own interests are threatened. During the anthrax scare in 2001, the U.S. Secretary of Health issued a threat to Bayer under “eminent domain for patents” for licensing the anthrax-treatment drug ciprofloxacin to other manufacturers. Bayer folded, and agreed to supply the quantity at a price that the U.S. government had set. And without a whimper. Yes, this is the same Bayer that considers India as a “thief” for issuing a compulsory license!
The vaccination for COVID-19 might need to be repeated each year, as we still do not know the duration of its protection. It is unlikely that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 will provide a lifetime immunity like the smallpox vaccine. Unlike AIDS, where the patient numbers were smaller and were unfortunately stigmatized in different ways, COVID-19 is a visible threat for everyone. Any attempt to hold people and governments to ransom on COVID-19 vaccines or medicines could see the collapse of the entire patent edifice of TRIPS that big pharma backed by the United States and major EU countries have built. That is why the more clever in the capitalist world have moved toward a voluntary patent pool for potential COVID-19 medicines and vaccines. A voluntary patent pool means that companies or institutions holding patents on medicines—such as remdesivir—or vaccines would voluntarily hand them over to such a pool. The terms and conditions of such a handover, meaning at concessional rates, or for only for certain regions, are still not clear—leading to criticism that a voluntary patent pool is not a substitute for declaring that all such medicines and vaccines should be declared global public goods during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unlike clever capital, Trump’s response to the COVID-19 vaccine is to thuggishly bully his way through. He believes that with the unlimited money that the United States is now willing to put into the vaccine efforts, it will either beat everybody else to the winning post, or buy the company that is successful. If this strategy succeeds, he can then use “his” COVID-19 vaccine as a new instrument of global power. It is the United States that will then decide which countries get the vaccine (and for how much), and which ones don’t.
Trump does not believe in a rule-based global order, even if the rules are biased in favor of the rich. He is walking out of various arms control agreements and has crippled the WTO. He believes that the United States, as the biggest economy and the most powerful military power, should have the untrammeled right to dictate to all countries. Threats of bombing and invasions can be combined with illegal unilateral sanctions; and the latest weapon in his imaginary arsenal is withholding vaccines.
Trump’s little problem is that the days of the United States being a sole global hegemon passed decades ago. The United States has shown itself as a fumbling giant and its epidemic response shambolic. It has been unable to provide virus tests to its people in time, and failed to stop the epidemic through containment/mitigation measures, which a number of other countries have done.
China and the EU have already agreed that any vaccine developed by them will be regarded as a public good. Even without that, once a medicine or a vaccine is known to be successful, any country with a reasonable scientific infrastructure can replicate the medicine or the vaccine, and manufacture it locally. India in particular has one of the largest generic drug and vaccine manufacturing capacities in the world. What prevents India, or any country for that matter, from manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines or drugs once they are developed—only the empty threat of a failed hegemon on breaking patents?

A Growing Wave of Bankruptcies Threatens U.S. Recovery

Pam Martens & Russ Martens

The bankruptcy epidemic in the U.S. started last year, long before any COVID-19 pandemic had touched down. U.S. retailers ranked among the greatest casualties of 2019 with a total of 17 bankruptcies. Big names among the retail bankruptcies in 2019 included Gymboree on January 16; Charlotte Russe on February 3; Things Remembered on February 6; Payless ShoeSource on February 18; Charming Charlie on July 11; Barneys New York on August 6; and Forever 21 on September 29.
Now, the retail shutdowns resulting from COVID-19 have simply accelerated what was already a growing trend of companies seeking relief from debts they cannot pay back. Some of the major bankruptcies this year mean permanent, not temporary, job losses.
The 118-year old J.C. Penney Co. had 846 stores when it filed for bankruptcy on May 15 of this year. It said it plans to permanently close 242 of those stores. On May 19, Pier 1 Imports, which filed for bankruptcy in February, said it plans to liquidate all of its remaining 540 stores.
Hundreds of store closings in malls spell escalating job losses and more pain in the commercial real estate market. According to Moody’s, shopping mall vacancies had already reached an historic high of 9.7 percent at the end of March. Distressed mall owners will, in turn, put stress on big Wall Street banks which will have to take more loan loss reserves on their exposure to commercial real estate. That, in turn, will mean that the big banks, which have an outsized presence in consumer and business lending, will start trimming credit card lines to consumers and credit lines to businesses. In fact, that process has already begun. That, in turn, will stunt consumer spending, which, unfortunately, represents two-thirds of U.S. GDP.
Another major shopping mall retailer, J. Crew, filed bankruptcy on May 4. It has been slowly closing stores since 2018. It currently operates 182 J. Crew retail stores, as well as 140 Madewell stores. Due to its debt burden, analysts say it could be forced to close as many as half of its stores.
Neiman Marcus, which filed for bankruptcy protection on May 7, had announced  in March that it would close most of its off-price Last Call stores by early 2021. It has indicated it hopes to keep its 43 Neiman Marcus stores and two Bergdorf Goodman stores open.
Other big name retail bankruptcies this year include Modell’s Sporting Goods on March 11; True Religion on April 13; Roots USA April 29; Aldo May 7; Stage Stores (owner of Bealls, Palais Royal, Peebles, Stage and Goody’s) on May 11.
Just yesterday, discount retailer Tuesday Morning filed for bankruptcy protection with plans to permanently close about 230 of its 687 stores.
But retailers are not the only companies piled high with debt that are increasingly turning to bankruptcy protection. Telecommunications company, Frontier Communications Corp., filed for bankruptcy protection on April 15. It had $17.5 billion in debt.
With almost $19 billion of debt, the century-old Hertz rental car company filed for bankruptcy protection on Friday, May 22. In addition to Hertz, it operates Dollar and Thrifty car rentals. At the end of 2019, it had 38,000 workers. Earlier this year, it announced 10,000 layoffs. Hertz operates a fleet of 500,000 vehicles. It may begin selling off tens of thousands of those cars to raise cash, raising concerns that this could devastate prices in the used car market, potentially shuttering small used car businesses. A long-term problem for Hertz is that approximately two-thirds of its revenue stream comes from business at airports. The public is not expected to warm up to vacation airline travel anytime soon.
Bankruptcies this year in the energy sector are almost as severe as with retailers. One of the largest was Whiting Petroleum, which filed for bankruptcy protection on April 1. It has reported a net loss in four of the past five years. Diamond Offshore filed for bankruptcy on April 27, having also posted losses in four of the last five years, cumulatively totaling $1.2 billion in losses. At the end of last year, Diamond had almost $2 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet with approximately $156 million in cash.
On April 15, shale driller Yuma Energy filed for bankruptcy protection, seeking court approval to auction off its assets.
Yesterday, S&P Global Market Intelligence reported that “the amount of defaulted U.S. leveraged loan debt over the past 12 months, at $37.4 billion, is 270% ahead of the figure one year ago, and is the highest since February 2010…” In February 2010, the U.S. was still in the midst of the overhang from the 2008 financial collapse on Wall Street, the worst crisis since the Great Depression.
S&P Global further reports that CLOs (Collateralized Loan Obligations) are “by far the biggest investor in the leveraged loan asset class” and that “CLOs have limits on the amount of lower-rated debt they want to hold.”
That would explain why the Federal Reserve has – after warning for months about the threat of leveraged loans – decided to accept CLOs as collateral for the loans it is making under its Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF), just one of its alphabet soup list of Wall Street bailout programs. Stocks and other questionable collateral are also being accepted under this loan facility, which is currently making loans at ¼ of one percent interest to the trading houses on Wall Street.
According to the Fed’s latest report to Congress, as of May 14 it has $9.287 billion in outstanding loans under the PDCF facility against collateral of $10.37 billion. This means that we are now back to the days of the roaring twenties when margin loans against highly questionable collateral are being made on 90 percent margin.
The Vice Chair for Supervision of the Federal Reserve, Randal Quarles, has repeatedly stated that the Fed plans to make extra efforts at transparency and will reveal the names of borrowers and dollar amounts for its emergency loan programs. It has now filed three monthly reports to Congress and not one of the three reports contains any name of a Wall Street borrower or the individual amounts borrowed by a specific Wall Street firm.

Who Are the Secret Puppet-Masters Behind Trump’s War on Iran?

Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J S Davies

On May 6th, President Trump vetoed a war powers bill specifying that he must ask Congress for authorization to use military force against Iran. Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of deadly sanctions and threats of war against Iran has seen no let-up, even as the U.S., Iran and the whole world desperately need to set aside our conflicts to face down the common danger of the Covid-19 pandemic.
So what is it about Iran that makes it such a target of hostility for Trump and the neocons? There are many repressive regimes in the world, and many of them are close U.S. allies, so this policy is clearly not based on an objective assessment that Iran is more repressive than Egypt, Saudi Arabia or other monarchies in the Persian Gulf.
The Trump administration claims that its “maximum pressure” sanctions and threats of war against Iran are based on the danger that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. But after decades of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and despite the U.S.’s politicization of the IAEA, the Agency has repeatedly confirmed that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.
If Iran ever did any preliminary research on nuclear weapons, it was probably during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, when the U.S. and its allies helped Iraq to make and use chemical weapons that killed up to 100,000 Iranians. A 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, the IAEA’s 2015 “Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues” and decades of IAEA inspections have examined and resolved every scrap of false evidence of a nuclear weapons program presented or fabricated by the CIA and its allies.
If, despite all the evidence, U.S. policymakers still fear that Iran could develop nuclear weapons, then adhering to the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), keeping Iran inside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and ensuring ongoing access by IAEA inspectors would provide greater security than abandoning the deal.
As with Bush’s false WMD claims about Iraq in 2003, Trump’s real goal is not nuclear non-proliferation but regime change. After 40 years of failed sanctions and hostility, Trump and a cabal of U.S. warhawks still cling to the vain hope that a tanking economy and widespread suffering in Iran will lead to a popular uprising or make it vulnerable to another U.S.-backed coup or invasion.
United Against a Nuclear Iran and the Counter Extremism Project
One of the key organizations promoting and pushing hostility towards Iran is a shadowy group called United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI). Founded in 2008, it was expanded and reorganized in 2014 under the umbrella of the Counter Extremism Project United (CEPU) to broaden its attacks on Iran and divert U.S. policymakers’ attention away from the role of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other U.S. allies in spreading violence, extremism and chaos in the greater Middle East.
UANI acts as a private enforcer of U.S. sanctions by keeping a “business registry” of hundreds of companies all over the world—from Adidas to Zurich Financial Services—that trade with or are considering trading with Iran. UANI hounds these companies by naming and shaming them, issuing reports for the media, and urging the Office of Foreign Assets Control to impose fines and sanctions. It also keeps a checklist of companies that have signed a declaration certifying they do not conduct business in or with Iran.
Proving how little they care about the Iranian people, UANI even targets pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical-device corporations—including BayerMerckPfizerEli Lilly, and Abbott Laboratories—that have been granted special U.S. humanitarian aid licenses.
Where does UANI get its funds? 
UANI was founded by three former U.S. officials, Dennis Ross, Richard Holbrooke and Mark Wallace. In 2013, it still had a modest budget of $1.7 million, nearly 80% coming from two Jewish-American billionaires with strong ties to Israel and the Republican Party: $843,000 from precious metals investor Thomas Kaplan and $500,000 from casino owner Sheldon Adelson. Wallace and other UANI staff have also worked for Kaplan’s investment firms, and he remains a key funder and advocate for UANI and its affiliated groups.
In 2014, UANI split into two entities: the original UANI and the Green Light Project, which does business as the Counter Extremism Project. Both entities are under the umbrella of and funded by a third, Counter Extremism Project United (CEPU). This permits the organization to brand its fundraising as being for the Counter Extremism Project, even though it still regrants a third of its funds to UANI.
CEO Mark Wallace, Executive Director David Ibsen and other staff work for all three groups in their shared offices in Grand Central Tower in New York. In 2018, Wallace drew a combined salary of $750,000 from all three entities, while Ibsen’s combined salary was $512,126.
In recent years, the revenues for the umbrella group, CEPU, have mushroomed, reaching $22 million in 2017. CEPU is secretive about the sources of this money. But investigative journalist Eli Clifton, who starting looking into UANI in 2014 when it was sued for defamation by a Greek ship owner it accused of violating sanctions on Iran, has found evidence suggesting financial ties with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
That is certainly what hacked emails between CEPU staff, an Emirati official and a Saudi lobbyist imply. In September 2014, CEPU’s president Frances Townsend emailed the UAE Ambassador to the U.S. to solicit the UAE’s support and propose that it host and fund a CEPU forum in Abu Dhabi.
Four months later, Townsend emailed again to thank him, writing, “And many thanks for your and Richard Mintz’ (UAE lobbyist) ongoing support of the CEP effort!” UANI fundraiser Thomas Kaplan has formed a close relationship with Emirati ruler Bin Zayed, and visited the UAE at least 24 times. In 2019, he gushed to an interviewer that the UAE and its despotic rulers “are my closest partners in more parts of my life than anyone else other than my wife.”
Another email from Saudi lobbyist and former Senator Norm Coleman to the Emirati Ambassador about CEPU’s tax status implied that the Saudis and Emiratis were both involved in its funding, which would mean that CEPU may be violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act by failing to register as a Saudi or Emirati agent in the U.S.
Ben Freeman of the Center for International Policy has documented the dangerously unaccountable and covert expansion of the influence of foreign governments and military-industrial interests over U.S. foreign policy in recent years, in which registered lobbyists are only the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to foreign influence. Eli Clifton calls UANI, “a fantastic case study and maybe a microcosm of the ways in which American foreign policy is actually influenced and implemented.”
CEPU and UANI’s staff and advisory boards are stocked with Republicans, neoconservatives and warhawks, many of whom earn lavish salaries and consulting fees. In the two years before President Trump appointed John Bolton as his National Security Advisor, CEPU paid Bolton $240,000 in consulting fees. Bolton, who openly advocates war with Iran, was instrumental in getting the Trump administration to withdraw from the nuclear deal.
UANI also enlists Democrats to try to give the group broader, bipartisan credibility. The chair of UANI’s board is former Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, who was known as the most pro-Zionist member of the Senate. A more moderate Democrat on UANI’s board is former New Mexico governor and UN ambassador Bill Richardson.
Norman Roule, a CIA veteran who was the National Intelligence Manager for Iran throughout the Obama administration was paid $366,000 in consulting fees by CEPU in 2018. Soon after the brutal Saudi assassination of journalist Jamal Khassoghi, Roule and UANI fundraiser Thomas Kaplan met with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, and Roule then played a leading role in articles and on the talk-show circuit whitewashing Bin Salman’s repression and talking up his superficial “reforms” of Saudi society.
More recently, amid a growing outcry from Congress, the UN and the European Union to ease U.S. sanctions on Iran during the pandemic, UANI chairman Joe Lieberman, CEPU president Frances Townsend and CEO Mark Wallace signed a letter to Trump that falsely claimed, “U.S. sanctions neither prevent nor target the supply of food, medicine or medical devices to Iran,” and begged him not to relax his murderous sanctions because of COVID-19. This was too much for Norman Roule, who tossed out his UANI script and told the Nation, “the international community should do everything it can to enable the Iranian people to obtain access to medical supplies and equipment.”
Two Israeli shell companies to whom CEPU and UANI have paid millions of dollars in “consulting fees” raise even more troubling questions. CEPU has paid over $500,000 to Darlink, located near Tel Aviv, while UANI paid at least $1.5 million to Grove Business Consulting in Hod Hasharon, about 10% of its revenues from 2016 to 2018. Neither firm seems to really exist, but Grove’s address on UANI’s IRS filings appears in the Panama Papers as that of Dr. Gideon Ginossar, an officer of an offshore company registered in the British Virgin Islands that defaulted on its creditors in 2010.
Selling a Corrupted Picture to U.S. Policymakers
UANI’s parent group, Counter Extremism Project United, presents itself as dedicated to countering all forms of extremism. But in practice, it is predictably selective in its targets, demonizing Iran and its allies while turning a blind eye to other countries with more credible links to extremism and terrorism.
UANI supports accusations by Trump and U.S. warhawks that Iran is “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism,” based mainly on its support for the Lebanese Shiite political party Hezbollah, whose militia defends southern Lebanon against Israel and fights in Syria as an ally of the government.
But Iran placed UANI on its own list of terrorist groups in 2019 after Mark Wallace and UANI hosted a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York that was mainly attended by supporters of the Mujahedin-e-Kalqh (MEK). The MEK is a group that the U.S. government itself listed as a terrorist organization until 2012 and which is still committed to the violent overthrow of the government in Iran – preferably by persuading the U.S. and its allies to do it for them. UANI tried to distance itself from the meeting after the fact, but the published program listed UANI as the event organizer.
On the other hand, there are two countries where CEPU and UANI seem strangely unable to find any links to extremism or terrorism at all, and they are the very countries that appear to be funding their operations, lavish salaries and shadowy “consulting fees”: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Many Americans are still demanding a public investigation into Saudi Arabia’s role in the crimes of September 11th. In a court case against Saudi Arabia brought by 9/11 victims’ families, the FBI recently revealed that a Saudi Embassy official, Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, provided crucial support to two of the hijackers. Brett Eagleson, a spokesman for the families whose father was killed on September 11th, told Yahoo News, “(This) demonstrates there was a hierarchy of command that’s coming from the Saudi Embassy to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs [in Los Angeles] to the hijackers.”
The global spread of the Wahhabi version of Islam that unleashed and fueled Al Qaeda, ISIS and other violent Muslim extremist groups has been driven primarily by Saudi Arabia, which has built and funded Wahhabi schools and mosques all over the world. That includes the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles that the two 9/11 hijackers attended.
It is also well documented that Saudi Arabia has been the largest funder and arms supplier for the Al Qaeda-led forces that have destroyed Syria since 2011, including CIA-brokered shipments of thousands of tons of weapons from Benghazi in Libya and at least eight countries in Eastern Europe. The UAE also supplied arms funding to Al Qaeda-allied rebels in Syria between 2012 and 2016, and the Saudi and UAE roles have now been reversed in Libya, where the UAE is the main supplier of thousands of tons of weapons to General Haftar’s rebel forces. In Yemen, both the Saudis and Emiratis have committed war crimes. The Saudi and Emirati air forces have bombed schools, clinics, weddings and school buses, while the Emiratis tortured detainees in 18 secret prisons in Yemen.
But United Against a Nuclear Iran and Counter Extremism Project have redacted all of this from the one-sided worldview they offer to U.S. policymakers and the American corporate media. While they demonize Iran, Qatar, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood as extremists and terrorists, they depict Saudi Arabia and the UAE exclusively as victims of terrorism and allies in U.S.-led “counterterrorism” campaigns, never as sponsors of extremism and terrorism or perpetrators of war crimes.
The message of these groups dedicated to “countering extremism” is clear and none too subtle: Saudi Arabia and the UAE are always U.S. allies and victims of extremism, never a problem or a source of danger, violence or chaos. The country we should all be worrying about is – you guessed it – Iran. You couldn’t pay for propaganda like this! But on the other hand, if you’re Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates and you have greedy, corrupt Americans knocking on your door eager to sell their loyalty, maybe you can.