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Merck Sells Federally Financed COVID-19 Pill to US for 40 Times What It Costs to Make
Sharon Lerner, The Intercept
Lerner writes: "The COVID-19 treatment molnupiravir was developed using funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense."
The Covid-19 treatment molnupiravir was developed using funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.
A five-day course of molnupiravir, the new medicine being hailed as a “huge advance” in the treatment of Covid-19, costs $17.74 to produce, according to a report issued last week by drug pricing experts at the Harvard School of Public Health and King’s College Hospital in London. Merck is charging the U.S. government $712 for the same amount of medicine, or 40 times the price.
Last Friday’s announcement that the new medicine cut the risk of hospitalization among clinical trial participants with moderate or mild illness in half could have huge implications for the course of the coronavirus pandemic. Because it’s a pill — as opposed to monoclonal antibodies, a comparable antiviral treatment that is administered intravenously — molnupiravir is expected to be more widely used and, hopefully, will cut the death rate. In the first 29 days of the trial, no deaths were reported among the 385 patients who received the drug, while eight of the people who received a placebo died, according to the statement put out by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, the two companies that are jointly launching it.
In addition to having huge implications for health, the pill could bring staggering profits to both Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics. A small Miami-based company, Ridgeback licensed the medicine from Emory University in 2020 and two months later sold the worldwide rights to the drug to Merck for an undisclosed sum. Although Ridgeback remains involved in the development of the drug, some have described the deal as “flipping.”
Like the vast majority of medicines on the market, molnupiravir — which was originally investigated as a possible treatment for Venezuelan equine encephalitis — was developed using government funds. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, provided more than $10 million of funding in 2013 and 2015 to Emory University, as research done by the nonprofit Knowledge Ecology International has revealed. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, also provided Emory with more than $19 million in additional grants.
Yet only Merck and Ridgeback will reap the profits from the new antiviral, which according to Quartz could bring in as much as $7 billion by the end of this year. After the announcement of the encouraging clinical trial results on Friday, Merck’s stock price climbed, while stock prices of some vaccine makers sagged. Despite its initial investment, the U.S. government seems to be facing a steep markup in prices. In June, the government signed a $1.2 billion contract with Merck to supply 1.7 million courses of the medication at the $712 price. The transaction is due to take place as soon as molnupiravir receives emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration.
Reasonable Terms
Good government advocates are pointing out that because federal agencies spent at least $29 million on the drug’s development, the government has the obligation to ensure that the medicine is affordable. “The public funded this drug, and therefore the public has some rights, including the rights you have it available under reasonable terms,” said Luis Gil Abinader, senior researcher at Knowledge Ecology International.
In an interview on CNBC, Ridgeback co-founder Wendy Holman noted that the company asked for but “never got government funding” to help manufacture molnupiravir. A whistleblower complaint filed by Rick Bright, the former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, in May 2020, described Ridgeback’s unsuccessful efforts “to secure approximately $100 million” from BARDA to develop the drug as a Covid-19 treatment. The company’s press release about the study results also noted that “since licensed by Ridgeback, all funds used for the development of molnupiravir have been provided by Merck and by Wayne and Wendy Holman of Ridgeback.”
Abinader was critical of Ridgeback’s failure to acknowledge the government’s initial investment in the drug before the company acquired it. “What they want to do, apparently, is to shape the narrative about who paid for the development of this drug in order to avoid demands from the public to make it available at reasonable prices,” he said.
In an emailed response to questions submitted to Ridgeback Biotherapeutics for this article, Davidson Goldin wrote, “Ridgeback has never received any government funding for molnupiravir and self-funded the development of this medicine for treating SARS-CoV-2 when the government did not provide financial support.” Merck did not respond to inquiries about this article.
No Strings Attached
Merck has promised to make molnupiravir accessible around the world and has already entered into licensing agreements with five Indian companies that manufacture generic drugs. “Merck has committed to providing timely access to molnupiravir globally, if it is authorized or approved, and plans to implement a tiered pricing approach based on World Bank country income criteria to reflect countries’ relative ability to finance their health response to the pandemic,” the company said in its announcement of the trial results on Friday. Indian companies are planning to price the drug at less than $12 for a five-day course, according to recent reports.
In the U.S., and likely in many upper-middle-income and all high-income countries, the price will be determined by the market. Noting that the treatment may be offered to people who are not yet severely sick with Covid-19, health advocates fear that will mean some in these countries will not be able to afford the new drug. “Offering someone a $700 treatment when they don’t yet feel that ill is going to mean that a lot of people are not going to take it,” said Dzintars Gotham, a physician at King’s College Hospital in London and a co-author of the report on the pricing of molnupiravir. According to the report, pricing molnupiravir at $19.99 would allow a company a 10 percent profit margin.
Melissa Barber, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of the report on molnupiravir, said that, while its pricing is not as extreme as that of some other drugs, it will likely still place the antiviral out of reach of some who could benefit from it. “If you can’t afford medicine because it’s 1,000 times more than you can afford, or because it’s 100 times more than you can afford, it doesn’t matter,” said Barber. “Those are both bad.”
Barber and Gotham acknowledge that the $17.74 cost of producing a five-day course of the antiviral pills is an estimate but said that the algorithm they used, and have employed to estimate the production costs for hundreds of drugs, tends to result in overestimates in the long run.
Meanwhile, the prices that private companies charge for drugs tend to go up rather than down. “For all these deals that have happened for therapeutics or vaccines, the price has only increased as uncertainty has decreased,” she said. “One price is given and then, for the next sale, the price goes up. The price went up for other drugs and vaccines, so I would be very surprised if this price didn’t go up, too.”
The pricing differential should be grounds to demand a better price under the Bayh-Dole Act, according to Knowledge Ecology International’s Abinader. Bayh-Dole, passed in 1980, regulates the transfer of federally funded inventions into commercial property and allows the government to “march in” and suspend the use of patents that were developed with government funding if it determines that the products are excessively priced.
“The pressure for march-in rights around this drug is going to be huge,” predicted Abinader, who suggested that the government could use the law to lower the price of molnupiravir. “When the Biden administration negotiates another supply agreement with Merck, they should probably leverage those rights in order to get a better price,” he said.
According to Gotham, who is based in London, the short story of molnupiravir already sums up the best and the worst of the U.S. pharmaceutical system. “It’s a great coup that the American government funded some scientists to develop antivirals,” he said. “The great tragedy is that, after their great success, they just gave it away to private industry with apparently no strings attached.”
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New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo: YouTube)
AOC Pounces on Facebook Blackout: 'Break Them Up'
Brenna Ehrlich, Rolling Stone
Ehrlich writes: "While the internet was gleefully lambasting the fact that Facebook and its other properties went down, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez highlighted a darker side to the blackout."
“It’s almost as if Facebook’s monopolistic mission to either own, copy, or destroy any competing platform has incredibly destructive effects on free society and democracy.”
While the internet has spent the day gleefully lambasting the fact that Facebook and its other properties are currently down, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has highlighted a darker side to the blackout: It’s a reminder of the tech giant’s stranglehold over the internet landscape — and the damage that does to U.S. democracy and to countries around the world.
AOC added to the sentiment, writing: “It’s almost as if Facebook’s monopolistic mission to either own, copy, or destroy any competing platform has incredibly destructive effects on free society and democracy. Remember: WhatsApp wasn’t created by Facebook. It was an independent success. FB got scared & bought it. … If Facebook’s monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should’ve been (perhaps around the time it started acquiring competitors like Instagram), the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now. Break them up.”
Ocasio-Cortez was retweeting Forbes editor José Caparroso, who on Monday wrote: “Latin America lives on WhatsApp. I am surprised by so many people underestimating how catastrophic this downfall has been.”
It should be noted that there are other messaging apps, like Viber, that are still functional, but it’s a noteworthy sentiment as the tech giant faces an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission. On Monday, the tech conglomerate filed a motion to dismiss the suit, saying that there is no evidence that the company has violated any antitrust laws. The judge overseeing the case has until mid-November to respond.
Facebook has continually used its vast cash reserves to absorb potential competitors, giving Mark Zuckerberg’s company tendrils across the internet. The company’s dominance also means that its content moderation policies — set by a company with its eye seemingly on its bottom line, rather than public benefit — can have major consequences for the national discourse. Those rules, and Facebook’s role in setting them, have become increasingly important as foreign and domestic groups exploit them to spread misinformation and propaganda.
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp have been down since noon Monday, likely due to an issue with Facebook’s Domain Name System, which is basically the phonebook of the internet. Bloomberg reports that founder Mark Zuckerberg has lost $6 billion in personal wealth since then; the stock has plummeted as well. Per Bloomberg, Zuck’s fortune has shriveled to $121.6 billion, or about the GDP of Angola.
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'Even as richer countries promise to shrink their carbon footprints, however, they still imagine that they can maintain their overall way of life and export that lifestyle to the rest of the world.' (photo: Getty)
John Feffer | Climate-Change Transition in the Age of the Billionaire
John Feffer, TomDispatch
Feffer writes: "We can't simply grow our way out of this predicament, nor should we sacrifice millions of human beings in the process."
Note for TomDispatch Readers: Dispatch Books has been publishing the three volumes of John Feffer’s Splinterlands trilogy, his dystopian novels which foresaw so much that’s since engulfed us, since we put out Splinterlands itself in 2016; Frostlands followed in 2018; and the final must-read, Songlands, focusing on the very world of climate change that’s clobbering us today, is now out. Mike Davis wrote of the project, “John Feffer is our 21st-century Jack London, and, like the latter’s Iron Heel, Splinterlands is a vivid, suspenseful warning about the ultimate incompatibility between capitalism and human survival.” Make sure to order yourself a copy, but any of you who might want to support TomDispatch in return for your own signed, personalized Songlands, should go to our donation page and contribute at least $100 (or, if you live outside the U.S.A., $125) and it’ll be yours. If you’re like me, you’ll be riveted by it! Tom]
Recently, I stumbled across an old book project of mine, long forgotten. It was something I had been writing in perhaps 1998 and 1999 but never finished. In reading through it, I was surprised to discover a reference to climate change (“…even the unlikely removal of every nuclear weapon from this earth wouldn’t come close to purging the planet of exterminatory consciousness or return it to a pre-global warming, -ozone depleting, -iceberg-melting, -rogue-nation threatening state”). Honestly, if you had asked me before I saw that, I would have said that I wasn’t truly aware of climate change until at least sometime early in this century.
Now, admittedly, when it comes to such knowledge, 1999 isn’t really such a distant date. After all, in 1965, a science advisory panel prepared a report for President Lyndon Johnson (undoubtedly too involved in the disastrous Vietnam War to pay attention) that was remarkably prescient on the dangers of burning fossil fuels and the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So, long before I knew of it, while I was still out in the streets protesting that very war, those dangers were already significantly grasped, at least in the world of science.
And yet here we are, so many years later, living through what is indeed a growing hell on earth of fire and flood, storm and, as I said then, iceberg melting. And despite that knowledge, the preparations for climate change in the U.S. and globally have been pathetic. I mean, lurking in the wings is actual good news. The price of renewable energy has dropped so radically that a non-greenhouse-gas future is imaginable in which the transition to green energy and a green economy, as Bill McKibben wrote recently, promises the possibility of saving us trillions — trillions! — of dollars. But that transition… oh, yes, there’s the problem. In a world in which none of the nations that matter has even come close to meeting their commitments to the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, what can we expect?
At the very least, if we’re to have a hope of transitioning to a world which remains habitable for us, it’s time to focus on that transition-to-come and what might truly be possible. As he so often does, TomDispatch regular John Feffer, author of the all-too-timely climate-change-themed novel Songlands (the final volume of his Splinterlands series), takes on that hard task today in a thoughtful, if grimly realistic, way. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Climate-Change Transition in the Age of the Billionaire
A World of Solidarity Economics or Climate Profiteering?
It was supposed to be the greatest transition of modern times.
Practically overnight, a dirty, inefficient, and unjust system that encompassed 11 time zones was to undergo an extreme makeover. Billions of dollars were available to speed the process. A new crew of transition experts came up with the blueprint and the public was overwhelmingly on board. Best of all, this great leap forward would serve as a model for all countries desperate to exit a failed status quo.
That’s not what happened.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Russia emerged from its wreckage as the largest successor state, government officials in the newly elected administration of Boris Yeltsin teamed up with a cadre of foreign experts to chart a path into a post-Soviet system of democracy and free markets. The West offered billions of dollars in loans while the Russians generated more funds through the privatization of state assets. With all those resources, Russia could have become an enormous Sweden of the east.
Instead, much of that wealth disappeared into the pockets of newly minted oligarchs. During the 1990s, Russia suffered an economic catastrophe, with the equivalent of $20 to $25 billion leaving the country every year and the gross domestic product (GDP) falling nearly 40% between 1991 and 1998. The Soviet Union once had the second largest economy on earth. Today, thanks only to a reliance on Soviet-era fossil-fuel and arms-export industries, Russia hovers just outside the top 10 in total economic output, ranking below Italy and India, but still manages only 78th place — that is, below Romania — in per-capita GDP.
The failures of the Russian transition can be chalked up to the collapse of empire, decades of economic decay, the vengeful triumphalism of the West, the unchecked venality of local opportunists, or all of the above. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss such a cautionary tale as a mere historic peculiarity.
If we’re not careful, the Russian past could well become humanity’s future: a transition bungled, a golden opportunity squandered.
After all, the world is now poised to spend trillions of dollars for an even more massive transition, this time from a similarly dirty, inefficient, and unjust economy based on fossil fuels to… what? If the international community somehow learns the lessons of past transitions, someday we will all live in a far more equitable, carbon-neutral world powered by renewable energy.
But don’t bet on it. The world is slowly replacing dirty energy with renewables but without addressing any of the industrial-strength problems of the current system. It should remind us of the way the Russians replaced state planning with free markets, only to end up with the shortcomings of capitalism as well as many of the ills of the previous order. And that’s not even the worst-case scenario. The transition might not happen at all or the decarbonization process could be so endlessly drawn out over decades as to be wholly ineffectual.
The proponents of Green New Deals promise win-win outcomes: solar panels and wind turbines will produce abundant energy cheaply, the climate crisis will abate, workers will leave dirty jobs for cleaner ones, and the Global North will help the Global South leapfrog into a gloriously Green future. In reality, however, transitions of such a scale and urgency have never been win-win. In the case of Russia’s transition from communism, nearly everyone lost out, and the country is still suffering the consequences. Other large-scale transformations of the past — like the agrarian and industrial revolutions — were similarly catastrophic in their own ways.
In the end, perhaps a key part of the problem lies not just in the flawed status quo, but in the mechanism of transition itself.
Pyramids of Sacrifice
Transitions can have harsh, even genocidal consequences. Just ask the Neanderthals.
Oh, sorry, you can’t. They were wiped out 40,000 years ago in the great transition to modern homo sapiens. Those early hominids left behind some bones, a few tools, and a small percentage of DNA in the contemporary human genome. Neanderthals might have died out because of inbreeding or due to climate change. More likely, they were killed off by our ancestors over thousands of years of conflict. Poor Neanderthals: they were among the eggs that had to be broken to make the omelet that’s us.
The fate of the Neanderthals is extreme, but not unique. Whenever humans take a great leap forward, they tend to do so over an enormous pile of bones.
Take the agrarian revolution, which spelled the end for hunter-gatherers, except for those who survived in isolated areas like the Amazon rainforest. On the plus side, humanity received the gift of civilization in the form of politics, trade, and literacy. On the negative side, as anthropologist Jared Diamond argued in a famous 1999 Discover article, the Neolithic transformation spawned disease, malnutrition, and gross economic inequality. It was, Diamond concluded, “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
Ten thousand years later, humanity might have committed the worst mistake in the history of the planet. Sure, the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century eventually led to extended lifespans, food enough to feed the world, and TikTok. But the application of modern science and engineering to economic affairs also set in motion a ruinous despoliation of the planet. More ominously, as everyone who has gazed at the “hockey-stick” graph of carbon emissions knows, the industrial revolution marked the first time that humans, perhaps irrevocably, began changing this planet’s climate by burning fossil fuels at an ever more staggering rate.
The new religion of economic growth at any cost also exacted a human toll. Children were put to work in the “dark satanic mills” of the early factories; a new proletariat was consigned to lives nasty, brutish, and short; and millions died as colonialism cut a huge swath of destruction through the global south. The oligarchs of the time, enriched by plunder and exploitation, created a Gilded Age of astounding economic inequality that, despite the best efforts of trade unions and social democrats, has made a striking reappearance in our own Age of Billionaires.
Though critical of the cruelties of capitalism, communists turned out to worship the same god of economic growth. Leaders from Vladimir Lenin onward firmly believed that state-led modernization and coercive tactics would enable new communist states to out–produce any capitalist country. Yet, in telescoping decades of industrial modernization into a few short years, their efforts to surpass the West magnified the horrors visited upon local populations. The collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union in the 1930s led to around 10 million deaths, while the similar Great Leap Forward in China that began in 1958 cost the lives of as many as 45 million people. As the bodies piled up, the communist 1% — a new class of Party officials and their cronies — orchestrated their own personal leap forward.
For sociologist Peter Berger, communism and capitalism both adopted a “sacrificial” conception of development in which myths of “progress” and “growth” claimed their share of victims, much as Aztec priests had once used ritual murder to propitiate the gods and save their civilization. In his book Pyramids of Sacrifice, Berger writes that the “elite almost invariably legitimates its privileged position in terms of alleged benefits it is bestowing or getting ready to bestow upon ‘the people.’” More often than not, however, these promised benefits accrue to the elite, not the masses.
Which brings us again to the “great transitions” of the 1990s, in which countries that had gone down the road to communism doubled back to take the turn-off for capitalism. The losses for Russia in the 1990s were nothing like the horrors of collectivization. Still, aside from a small number of people who made out like bandits, virtually all other Russians took a step backward as the costs of transition fell disproportionately on pensioners, blue-collar workers, and farmers. As a result, in the early 1990s, one-third of Russians dropped below the poverty line. Due to a combination of alcoholism and unemployment, the life expectancy of Russian men suffered an extraordinary decline from 63 years in 1990 to 58 years in 2000. Disillusionment with liberalization helped to boost popular support for Vladimir Putin, a politician who has skillfully capitalized on those thwarted hopes. His approval ratings still remain relatively high so many years later, even though only 27% of Russians believe that their economic situation today is better than during Soviet times.
The rest of the former Soviet bloc suffered similar, though less severe, dislocations. In Poland, the first country to experiment with the “shock therapy” of an overnight transition to capitalism, the winners came to be known as Poland A, a younger, more well-educated, predominantly urban elite that successfully surfed the waves of change. Poland B — the older, less educated, more rural “losers” of that transition — would eventually exact their revenge at the ballot box by supporting the decidedly anti-liberal Law and Justice Party, which has ruled the country since 2015. Throughout the region, an Eastern Europe B has helped bring similar right-wing populists to power in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovenia.
Disenchantment with such liberal transitions notwithstanding, those countries benefited from something that wasn’t available to Russia: the European Union (EU). A continuous flow of capital, and the provision of technical assistance on governance and the rule of law eventually enabled Eastern European countries to outperform their Russian neighbor. A large gap still separates much of Eastern Europe from the wealthier West, but the average Russian can only dream of the life of a second-class EU citizen.
Both of these experiences of transition offer valuable lessons for what may come next.
The Green New Deal
If you take the statements of the world’s governments at face value, almost everyone is now treating climate change very seriously and nations globally are feeling the heat to declare carbon-neutrality by 2050 (or sooner). In August, articles about the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), emphasizing that global warming is “widespread, rapid, and intensifying,” were accompanied by terrifying photos of its real-world effects: the wildfires in California and Siberia, the disastrous flooding in Germany and China, the record-setting temperatures in Canada and Sicily, and that’s just to start down a list of climate disasters. Your head — or indeed, your entire body — would have had to be in the sand to ignore the emergency sirens going off all around you.
Nonetheless, despite such obvious warning signs of so much worse to come, the world has not, in fact, accelerated its pace of decarbonization. The next major climate-change conference is scheduled for Glasgow at the beginning of November, but the globe’s leading economies are all still falling painfully short of the commitments they made in Paris nearly six years ago. More horrifying yet, the IPCC reports that, even if countries were meeting those commitments, they would, by 2030, result in a mere 1% reduction in carbon emissions from 2010 levels. To avoid the worst-case scenarios of an overcooked planet, those emissions would have to be cut by nearly 50% within the next nine years. Only a couple of countries are preparing for such a dramatic transformation.
The time for modest reforms is long past. A radical cut in carbon emissions can’t be accomplished simply by banning drinking straws, ramping up production of electric cars, or even planting a billion trees. To meet the climate-change challenge will require a transformation comparable to the agrarian or industrial revolutions. But if those earlier system changes are guideposts, the losers of this next great leap forward will be legion.
Various “just transition” proposals are designed, at least on paper, to avoid such an enormous human toll. For a start, a “fair-share” approach would require the transfer of trillions of dollars to help the Global South keep fossil fuels in the ground while shifting to renewable energy. A similar approach within nations would provide the “losers of transition”– from coal miners to those on fixed incomes — with targeted assistance to “go green.”
Alas, such an approach runs counter to current practices. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, for instance, the international community did not implement a “fair share” approach. The wealthiest countries largely cornered the market on vaccines, and poorer countries have had to rely on a trickle of handouts. Moreover, despite the unprecedented opportunity provided by the Covid crisis to begin to act on the next coming disaster, climate change, governments have generally failed to allocate recovery funds to finance any kind of major economic transformation. In the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan of 2021, for example, a mere $50 million went to environmental-justice grants, while $8 billion went to airports. Similarly, fully one-tenth of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill now making its way (or not) through Congress is devoted to improvements to roads and bridges, which will only reinforce America’s love affair with cars, SUVs, and trucks.
And where is the necessary shift of resources to the Global South to help with its transition? Back in 2009, rich countries had already promised to mobilize $100 billion for such climate financing by 2020. They’re still $20 billion short and the assistance has come mostly in the form of loans, not grants, only deepening the dependence and indebtedness of the Global South.
Worse yet, richer countries have been at least modestly reducing their own carbon footprints at the expense of poorer countries by relocating polluting industries to the Global South or substituting carbon-intensive imports for domestic production of the same. Although China continues to boost its share of domestic renewable sources of energy, it’s been financing 70% of all coal-fired power plants built globally (though its leader, Xi Jinping, recently pledged to end this practice). The European Union is actually phasing out coal power — which China is emphatically not doing — even as it continues to rely on high-carbon imports from coal-using countries like Russia, Turkey, Morocco, and Egypt.
To combat such a shift of carbon emissions from north to south — and protect its own less carbon-intensive industries — the European Union has proposed a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which penalizes imports of cement, fertilizer, steel, and the like based on the amount of carbon emitted in their production. Hitting Russia the hardest, this tariff would indeed push that country toward a “greener” manufacturing process for its Europe-bound products. However, countries in the Global South that don’t have the resources to upgrade their export industries would be left out in the cold.
This lack of resources in the Global South is compounded by debt. The poorest nations are devoting nearly $3 billion a month to servicing their debts, diverting resources that could otherwise go into a transformation of energy and industrial infrastructure. Bridging this divide would require large-scale debt forgiveness; equitable debt-for-climate swaps; or, more ambitiously, an Organization for Emergency Environmental Cooperation that would marshal trillions of dollars in public financing to pay for the entire world to transition to clean energy.
Here, the experience of Eastern Europe is relevant. The European Union’s transfer of resources, training, and technology from west to east helped cushion the transition that so devastated Russia. Although not enough to prevent the rise of Eastern Europe B, the EU’s modest generosity at least gestured toward the kind of solidarity economics that the Global North needs to adopt in any future climate negotiations with the Global South. If there is to be belt-tightening to shrink the global carbon footprint, those who can most afford to lose the weight should step forward.
Such schemes address the all-important question of equity. But there’s an elephant in the room that’s so far gone unmentioned. And that beast is only getting bigger.
A Rising Tide
All the major transformations of the past were predicated on rapid economic growth, whether the increasing food production of the agrarian revolution or the incorporation of the Soviet Union into the industrialized world through its Five-Year Plans. Most versions of the Green New Deal adhere to the same growth paradigm, with electric cars filling the roads and more sustainably produced widgets circulating through the global economy.
Even as richer countries promise to shrink their carbon footprints, however, they still imagine that they can maintain their overall way of life and export that lifestyle to the rest of the world. But this high-energy lifestyle of computers, air conditioners, and electric SUVs depends on the Global South. By one estimate, the Global North enjoys a $2.2 trillion annual benefit in the form of underpriced labor and commodities from there, an extraction that rivals the magnitude of the colonial era. Moreover, the cobalt and lithium necessary for batteries for electric cars, the gallium and tellurium in solar panels, the rare-earth elements needed for wind turbines are predominantly mined in the Global South and their extraction is likely to come at a huge environmental cost.
The high-growth assumptions of the current system reappear under the rubric of “Green growth,” promulgated by old-style industrialists in new Green clothing. During the transition from communism in the 1990s, “red capitalists” were well-placed in the old system to profit under the new dispensation. Today, a class of “green capitalists” have similarly emerged to enjoy huge profits from the early days of a putatively post-carbon economy — Elon Musk in the world of electric cars, billionaires like Robin Zeng and Huang Shilin with lithium-ion batteries, and Aloys Wobben when it comes to wind turbines. Huge sums of money are now available for the sketchiest of projects, from “blue hydrogen” to the sea-bed mining of rare-earth minerals.
Big profits minus serious regulatory oversight equals the possibility of big-time malfeasance. Fraud was rampant in European wind farms in the 1990s, while renewable energy companies in the Global North have been implicated in bribery schemes in the Global South. The additional bonanza of Green funds through recovery, infrastructure, or transition programs — like the one-time financial resources made available by Russian privatization — could easily disappear into dubious private ventures, bureaucratic black holes, or the swamplands of corruption.
A rising tide, it was once said, would lift all boats: economic growth would lead to general prosperity. But a “rising tide” now has a different meaning in a climate-changing world. The planet can no longer support that kind of growth, whatever its color.
The next transformation must be different from its precursors when it comes to both economic expansion and social equity. We can’t simply grow our way out of this predicament, nor should we sacrifice millions of human beings in the process. Despite the enormous economic and political gaps that separate people around the world, we have to somehow join hands across vast differences to leapfrog over the fossil-fuel economy. United we transform or united we fall.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
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U.S. Navy guards escort a detainee after a "life skills" class held for prisoners at Camp 6 in the Guantanamo Bay detention center. (photo: Getty)
Biden Administration Fights to Keep Details of CIA Torture of Detainee Secret
Guardian UK
Excerpt: "At the center of the case being heard on Wednesday is whether Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002, can get information related to his detention."
Supreme court to hear case of Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian held at Guantánamo Bay and allegedly tortured at a ‘black site’ in Poland
The US supreme court is set to hear arguments about the government’s ability to keep what it says are “state secrets” from a Palestinian man who endured brutal torture by the CIA following 9/11 and is now held at Guantánamo Bay.
At the center of the case being heard on Wednesday is whether Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002, can get information related to his detention.
Zubaydah and his lawyer want to question two former CIA contractors about Zubaydah’s time at a secret CIA facility in Poland where they say he was held and tortured.
A federal appeals court sided with Zubaydah, and said that though the government maintained that the information should be kept secret, a judge should determine whether any information he is seeking can be disclosed.
The case has its origins in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks when the CIA set up a detention and interrogation program designed to collect intelligence about terrorist plots against Americans.
As part of that program, the agency set up secret prisons, so-called black sites, in other countries and used extreme interrogation techniques now widely viewed as torture.
Zubaydah, the first person in the CIA program, spent four years at CIA black sites before being transferred to Guantánamo Bay in 2006.
He was initially described as an al-Qaida leader, but the agency by 2006 had concluded he had not even been a member of the group. He has, however, been held at Guantánamo ever since, with no prospect of release.
According to a 2014 Senate report on the CIA program, among other things Zubaydah was waterboarded more than 80 times and spent more than 11 days in a coffin-size confinement box.
He is seeking information from former CIA contractors James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, who are considered the architects of the interrogation program.
Zubaydah wants evidence from them as part of a criminal investigation in Poland into his detention at a black site there.
The US government has never publicly acknowledged a CIA black site in Poland, though the former president of Poland has and its existence has also been widely reported in the media.
Zubaydah and his attorney note that Mitchell and Jessen have testified twice before in other situations, including hearings at Guantánamo, and that Mitchell wrote a book about his experience. They say they want non-privileged information from the men such as the details of Zubaydah’s “torture in Poland, his medical treatment, and the conditions of his confinement”.
The Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, says the information should not be disclosed because it would do significant harm to national security.
The United States has declassified a significant amount of information about the former CIA program but certain information, including the locations of former CIA detention facilities, cannot be declassified without a risk to national security, the administration says.
A federal court initially ruled that Mitchell and Jessen should not be required to provide any information. But an appeals court ruled 2-1 that the lower court made a mistake in ruling out questioning entirely before attempting to separate what can and cannot be disclosed.
In its briefs before the supreme court the government says Zubaydah was “an associate and longtime terrorist ally of Osama bin Laden”. Zubaydah’s lawyers say the CIA was mistaken in believing he was a high-ranking member of al-Qaida.
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The Education Department on Wednesday announced a sweeping overhaul to the loan forgiveness program that will immediately erase the debt of 22,000 borrowers. (photo: Getty)
What Borrowers Need to Know About the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Overhaul
Cory Turner, NPR
Turner writes: "On Wednesday, borrowers got more reason for optimism, as the U.S. Department of Education officially released the details of its overhaul plans."
Zahra Nealy was in the shower, listening to the radio, when she heard NPR reporting on Friday that the U.S. Department of Education would use its authority to help borrowers and relax the rules of the troubled Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program.
"That's me! You're talking about me," Nealy, who works for a Southern California nonprofit, remembers thinking. "It's really hope, in a desperate time."
On Wednesday, borrowers like Nealy — who have felt stymied by the federal program meant to forgive the student loan debts of longtime public servants — got more reason for optimism, as the department officially released the details of its overhaul plans.
"Borrowers who devote a decade of their lives to public service should be able to rely on the promise of Public Service Loan Forgiveness," said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in a press release announcing the changes. "The system has not delivered on that promise to date, but that is about to change for many borrowers who have served their communities and their country."
Up to this point, to qualify for PSLF, borrowers have had to meet a handful of requirements:
- Working in a public-sector job.
- Making 120 on-time student loan payments.
- Participating in a qualified repayment plan.
- Having a specific type of loan, known as federal Direct Loans.
Now, the department says, it will use its authority to give borrowers a time-limited waiver — essentially relaxing several of these rules retroactively, so that previously disqualified loan payments can now be counted toward forgiveness.
The department estimates that this waiver could have an enormous impact on borrowers, with roughly 22,000 immediately eligible to have their loans erased automatically. Another 27,000 borrowers could likewise see their debts disappear if they're able to prove they were working in public service at the time they made payments that had been declared ineligible. By comparison, 16,000 borrowers have had their loans forgiven under PSLF since the program was created.
Many disqualified payments will now count toward loan forgiveness
In the past, monthly loan payments were disqualified not only for being received late but also for being even slightly different from the amount required.
Now, the department says, past-due payments will be counted — as will payments that were disqualified for differing slightly, even by just a few cents, from the amount due.
Different repayment plans will also temporarily count toward forgiveness
The PSLF program requires that a borrower be enrolled in one of a few specific repayment plans, including the Income-Based Repayment Plan (IBR) and the Pay As You Earn Repayment Plan (PAYE). But because of complaints from borrowers about loan servicing companies misinforming them or automatically switching them to disqualified plans, the department says these past ineligible payments will now count toward forgiveness, at least temporarily.
Past FFEL loan payments will now count toward forgiveness
PSLF was designed to encourage borrowers to consolidate their old federal loans, known as Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL), into federal Direct Loans. But for myriad reasons — on a spectrum from mistakes to mismanagement to misconduct — loan servicing companies and the Education Department muddied this message to borrowers.
Many borrowers would express interest in Public Service Loan Forgiveness to their servicer only to make it years into repayment before realizing (or finally being told) that their FFEL loans didn't qualify. And while they could consolidate them into federal Direct Loans, none of those old FFEL payments counted toward the 120 total payments required for PSLF.
In perhaps the most consequential softening of the program's rigidity, the department is retroactively allowing borrowers to receive credit for all of those old payments they made toward ineligible FFEL and Federal Perkins Loans — going back to the beginning of the program, in 2007 — regardless of whether they consolidated those loans into Direct Loans.
In fact, for borrowers who were already certifying their public service employment, the department will attempt to automatically revise their count of PSLF-qualified payments.
The Education Department estimates that more than 550,000 borrowers, who previously consolidated their loans to qualify for PSLF, will now get to fast-forward on their path to forgiveness by an average of 23 payments — or nearly two years.
Which brings us back to Zahra Nealy in Southern California. She says she has worked in public service for nearly a decade, most recently with the Cedars-Sinai health care system, and has $67,000 in federal Direct loans. She has made 111 of 120 required payments, leaving just nine to go before her remaining debts are forgiven under PSLF. This overhaul will likely have little bearing on Nealy's Direct Loans, or how quickly she'll be rid of them.
But Nealy also has at least $28,000 in FFEL loans — debts she has worked hard to pay down, knowing they were not eligible for public service loan forgiveness. According to new details shared by the Education Department, however, these loans could now be eligible and, because Nealy has worked consistently in the public sector, they too could be erased soon.
"That's money that I can save and store away, you know, and maybe make homeownership an actual reality, which is becoming unattainable, especially for our generation," says Nealy, who graduated from college in 2009 during the Great Recession.
There's extra help for military service members
There's also good news for service members in this PSLF reset. The department says it will now allow all months spent on active duty to count toward PSLF — that's even if the borrower's loans were in deferment or forbearance and not actively being repaid.
What has not changed
Public service is still non-negotiable, as are the 120 required payments — though what now qualifies as a payment has expanded dramatically.
The department says it also plans to use the rulemaking process to improve PSLF moving forward, so more changes may be on the way.
To benefit from the temporary changes the department is making, borrowers who have not yet applied for PSLF must do so before Oct. 31, 2022. For borrowers with FFEL or Perkins loans, the department says they must consolidate those loans and submit a PSLF form. The Department of Education says it will post more information about its PSLF waiver at StudentAid.gov/PSLFWaiver.
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David Makara fights for victims of police brutality in Kenya. (photo: Nikole Lim)
'They Wanted to Kill Me': The Lawyer Taking on Police Brutality in Kenya
Sarah Johnson, Guardian UK
Johnson writes: "Almost 20 years ago, a police shooting left David Makara without an arm and facing jail. Inspired by the blind lawyer who saved him, he now defends others facing injustice."
Almost 20 years ago, a police shooting left David Makara without an arm and facing jail. Inspired by the blind lawyer who saved him, he now defends others facing injustice
When the police started shooting at David Makara in his home town of Nyahururu, in Kenya, he ran before quickly collapsing. Two bullets had hit him – one in his right arm, one in his hip – but he only realised when he looked down and saw his hand dangling from his wrist and blood pouring out.
“I thought I was going to die,” he says.
Makara turned back to where the shots had come from to try to make it to the hospital, located opposite the police station. He collapsed again and lost consciousness. The police saw his body, assumed he was dead and left to get a van to take him to the mortuary. At that point, Makara regained consciousness and stumbled to the hospital, where he was admitted.
Earlier that day in December 2002, Makara had gone to collect some videos for his job showing films. Some police officers came out of a nearby bar where they had been drinking and arrested a man who said he was waiting for Makara. They then arrested Makara and put him in a van to take him to the police station. When they arrived, Makara bribed one of them to let him go but as he turned to leave, they started shooting.
Makara survived, but his arm was amputated. “I woke up the following morning to a bitter realisation that I was now a person with a disability. My right hand had gone.”
When the police realised that Makara was still alive, they went to the hospital, threatened the staff, handcuffed Makara to his bed, and charged him with a violent crime that could have put him in prison for life.
With little money, the thought of hiring a lawyer seemed impossible for Makara. But after his community protested in the streets against the charges, International Justice Mission, an organisation that protects people in poverty from violence, learned of the case and assigned him a lawyer, Victor Kamau, who is blind.
“I thought the situation was hopeless,” says Makara. “The police were preparing to file false charges against me. Now a blind lawyer was the one to represent me. I was devastated and could not see any hope in a blind lawyer getting me back my freedom.”
However, he was proved wrong. Kamau worked tirelessly to have the charges dropped and the police officers charged. Makara was so inspired by Kamau that he decided to study law. He learned to use his left hand to write and was admitted to the bar in 2017. Now, he represents marginalised communities and victims of violence. He also chairs the Kenyan chapter of the Global Survivor Network, an organisation of survivors of police brutality who advocate for justice and safer communities.
“I’m happy this event dropped into my life and not that of anyone else,” says Makara. “I praise God that I can stand before a judge in the defence of those who are going through violations. I remember when I was there on that hospital bed, I could not see any light in my life. I did not believe I would ever come out of jail.
“The police wanted to kill me, but through the support of other people, my life was saved. Today I am assisting others, just like I was assisted.”
Since qualifying as a lawyer four years ago, there are two cases of which he is particularly proud. One is ongoing and involves a woman who was attacked by the police after getting into a fight with an officer’s girlfriend. Two neighbours came to help her, and all three were arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer. He believes these are “trumped-up charges” and that he will win the case.
The second case involved a 30-year-old man who had gone to see his uncle in a slum area, in 2019. His cousins had been arguing and the noise had brought the police to the house. The man told the police the situation had been resolved but they assaulted him and broke his hand before arresting him and his uncle. Makara worked to secure their release from prison and the police officers were transferred.
Twenty years after Makara almost lost his own life, cases of police brutality are still rife in Kenya. In 2020, the Kenyan police killed 157 people, up from 144 the previous year, according to Missing Voices, a group of organisations investigating unlawful killings in Kenya.
Nevertheless, Makara remains hopeful about the future. The Kenya independent policing oversight authority has received and processed more than 18,000 complaints since it was established a decade ago. “This year we have seen police officers being arrested and convicted,” he says. “One was convicted to serve for 20 years. The situation is changing slowly.”
In the meantime, he will continue in his fight for justice for victims of police brutality. “My hand is a permanent reminder that violations are still there,” he says. “It’s like a walking stick I use to remind me and to direct me towards where violations are so I can try to soothe the pain of others.”
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Children, ages 2 and 3, eating lunch at a public child care center in Denmark. (photo: Mathias Svold/The New York Times)
This Is How Other Nations Pay for Child Care. The US Is an Outlier.
Claire Cain Miller, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Rich countries contribute an average of $14,000 per year for a toddler's care, compared with $500 in the U.S. The Democrats' spending bill tries to shrink the gap."
Rich countries contribute an average of $14,000 per year for a toddler’s care, compared with $500 in the U.S. The Democrats’ spending bill tries to shrink the gap.
Typical 2-year-olds in Denmark attend child care during the day, where they are guaranteed a spot, and their parents pay no more than 25 percent of the cost. That guaranteed spot will remain until the children are in after-school care at age 10. If their parents choose to stay home or hire a nanny, the government helps pay for that, too.
Two-year-olds in the United States are less likely to attend formal child care. If they do, their parents pay full price — an average $1,100 a month — and compete to find a spot. If their parents stay home or find another arrangement, they are also on their own to finance it, as they will be until kindergarten.
In the developed world, the United States is an outlier in its low levels of financial support for young children’s care — something Democrats, with their safety net spending bill, are trying to change. The U.S. spends 0.2 percent of its G.D.P. on child care for children 2 and under — which amounts to about $200 a year for most families, in the form of a once-a-year tax credit for parents who pay for care.
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