3347. China Is Closing Its Wildlife Markets. Let’s Make It Permanent

By  Colin Poole, PBS Blog, April 17, 2020

Wild pygmy loris are caught and sold as pets and for traditional medicine. Photo credit: ©WCS

This week, we are reopening the WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) office in Guangzhou, China, and—after working from home for over two months—our staff are returning to their desks. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to close critical programs protecting wildlife around the world, so this is a rare beacon of hope.

Why, you may ask, is an international conservation organization, whose mission is to save wildlife and wildlands, working in the middle of one of largest urban jungles in the world? However, today, our job in Guangzhou is more important than ever, and a city previously famed for consumption and trade of wildlife, is at the forefront of putting in place policies to reduce the risk of future pandemics.

On April 9, Guangzhou adopted a set of municipal regulations on wildlife stronger than those of the Chinese central government. These include both higher fines—with the penalty for eating nationally protected wild animals up to double that of the national decision—and stricter regulations, for instance prohibiting keeping wild animals as pets, and banning the consumption of wild animals for medicine.

The neighboring mega-city of Shenzhen has done likewise, in addition strictly prohibiting the consumption of companion animals such as cats and dogs. The challenge now is to make these new regulations stick.

Guangzhou and Shenzhen have long been recognized as global trading hubs, and have led much of China’s modern growth, supplying goods manufactured from the Pearl River Delta and across China to the world. Increasingly, however, with growing wealth, they have come to be recognized for a darker reason, as the end destination and hub for much of the world’s wildlife trade, legal and illegal.

Over the past decade on visits Guangzhou, I have been taken by Chinese colleagues to visit markets, often vast and sprawling, selling everything from elephant ivory from the savannas of Africa and parrots from the rainforest of Amazon, to freshwater turtles from the lakes and rivers of North America and Saiga antelope horn from the steppes of Central Asia.

A wild-caught Asian emerald dove awaits sale. Photo credit: ©WCS

We began a small program in Guangzhou in 2007 specifically to build awareness of the issues around wildlife consumption and the global wildlife trade, and to work with local partners to build capacity to combat wildlife trafficking. In that time, local government agencies have made significant progress. On my trips to Guangzhou in recent years, I am no longer shown ivory in the art shops, exotic turtles in the pet markets, or pangolin scales in the traditional medicine markets. Today such achievements are under the global spotlight.

On February 3, in response to Chinese scientists identifying a live animal market in Wuhan as the probable source of the novel virus sweeping the country, President Xi Jinping announced plans to review relevant legislation and prevent the risks to public health from consuming wild animals.

Three weeks later, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China released a decision, “Comprehensively Prohibiting the Illegal Trade of Wild Animals, Eliminating the Bad Habits of Wild Animal Consumption, and Protecting the Health and Safety of the People.” This banned the hunting, trade, transportation, and consumption of almost all terrestrial wild animal species—whether captive-bred or wild caught. The laws are currently under review and are expected to be approved at the next People’s Congress.

This bamboo rat is being sold as food; bamboo rats are both wild-caught and bred on wildlife farms. Photo credit: ©WCS

As in much of this region, the issues around wildlife consumption in China are no longer primarily those of rural food security, but of increasing urban demand. The Chinese government has already closed wildlife markets selling live animals for consumption. It is outlawing wildlife trade and changing the way we think about future regulatory frameworks for wildlife worldwide. While just a beginning, upon my next return to Guangzhou I expect to see fundamental changes in the patterns of wildlife trade and consumption.

The Chinese government is now leading the global community with these new regulations. However, the real challenge lies in implementation—not today, but in years to come when a vaccine is widely available and the fear of Covid-19 is fading from memory. Will we really see government and societal commitment to the long-term economic and social change relating to wildlife and its use necessary to reduce the risk of these events happening again?

To prevent future viral outbreaks such as Covid-19 that impact human health, well-being, economies, and security on a global scale, governments worldwide need to support policies that stop all commercial trade in wildlife for human consumption—particularly of birds and mammals—and close all such wildlife markets. In today’s interlinked world, we truly are all in this together.

Supporting the efforts of my colleagues and their partners in Guangzhou is more critical today than ever. We are glad they are back at their desks. There is much to be done.

3341. The Pandemic Is a Portal

By Arundhati Roy, Financial Times, April 3, 2020

Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?

Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science?

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the New York governor’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is America!”

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered.

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.

The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists?

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed.

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser.

Women bang pots and pans to show their support for the emergency services dealing with the coronavirus outbreak © Atul Loke/Panos Pictures

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”.

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers.

He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed.

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.

Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray.

A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

Migrant workers head towards a highway leading out of New Delhi, hoping to return to their home villages © Rajat Gupta/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.

“Us” means approximately 460m people.

State governments in India (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear.

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

On the outskirts of New Delhi on March 29, a woman pushes her daughter on to an overcrowded bus as they attempt the journey back to their home village © Reuters

Migrant workers in New Delhi wait to board buses © Getty Images

As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains have broken, medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting.

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place.

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.

India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now.

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

A boy wearing a protective mask ventures on to a balcony in Srinagar, which recorded Kashmir's first coronavirus death in late March © eyevine

People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

3339. Mike Davis: Capitalism Is the Disease

By Mike David and Andy Hsiao, March 31, 2020

3337. COVID-19 Puts Capitalism On A Ventilator

By Anthony A. Gabb, March 28, 2020

The aftershock of previous pandemics was catastrophic. The fourteenth century Black Plague and the 1918 Flu pandemics inflicted colossal hardships and caused many deaths. The Black Plague shook the foundations of feudal social relations. It killed 25 to 30 million people, resulting in peasant uprisings, shortages that caused wages to rise, and large parcels of land to go fallow. Scientists believe the 1918 Flu could have come to Spain from the United States and spread to other parts of the world killing 20 to 50 million people, more than the 17 million who died in WW1. Even though it was common knowledge that the flu was already in Philadelphia, the authorities went ahead anyway with a parade to raise funds for the war causing many unnecessary deaths---at the time the economics of the war took priority over stopping the spread of the flu. Similarly, today there are competing views about whether fixing the economy should take precedence over addressing the ravages of COVID-19. 

COVID-19 originated through natural processes. On 31 December 2019, Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) of an outbreak. It has since become a pandemic. As it navigates its way across the planet, COVID-19 is expected to leave no less of a calamitous trail of suffering, death, and economic devastation. Globally, so far over 435,000 have been afflicted by the virus and over 19, 000 have died. The economic repercussions could result in “perhaps record dimensions”. The stock market has dropped over 30 percent, and whole industries such as airlines, tourism, and travel have been negatively impacted. 

Globally and in the United States COVID-19 spotlights capitalism’s dim response to cope with it. Many countries are using revolting health care systems. Not surprisingly, the U.S. healthcare system, which is inadequate under normal circumstances, is woefully insufficient and unpracticed. It is based on crisis management principles therefore it is devoid of advanced planning; this is evidenced by shortages of basic supplies like masks, testing kits, and ventilators. The delayed response, which is tantamount to a crime, is being coordinated by a President who is doltish, in denial, and who initially claimed the virus was a hoax and a Vice President who is an anti-science creationist. To be clear, the Democrats are equally responsible for this chaos.

Should the virus be contained within a reasonable short time, the economy will struggle with an easier recovery process. The longer it takes to suppress the virus, the effectiveness of the delayed response could be eclipsed by unnecessary misery, deaths and an existential economic meltdown. There are already calls once again for another bailout of corporate America and the banks. Again, it will fall on the backs of working people to save the system from itself.

Who we are, our individuality, is not separate from what and how we as a species produce things, as we interact with nature. COVID-19, like climate change, is a natural outgrowth of the profiteering activities of Anthropocentric Industrial Capitalism (AIC), which is an existential threat to humanity. If we continue to pillage the earth for profits, we will, in part, trespass deeper into the habitats of other species increasing the frequency of closer contact with them, creating the possibility for other novel coronaviruses. This should come as no surprise, since in the recent past the earth’s ecosystem has responded to abuse with AIDS, Avian flu, SARS, MERS, and Zika. It is time to start asking hard questions like: Is capitalism capable of addressing the problems it produces? How many times should a system that time and again fails to deliver be bailed out? And what’s the next coronavirus?    

In the absence of an advanced plan, the only response is containment, mitigation, and testing for the virus. To be clear, this is not a discussion about containment, mitigation, and testing per se which is a true and tested approach. Until a vaccine is found, there will be testing for the virus and those who have the virus will be targeted and contained. To mitigate the spread of the virus people are being told to stay at home, regularly wash their hands, stop shaking hands, and engage in “social-distancing”. Meanwhile, developing a vaccine could take another year. It is true that qualitative external shocks like COVID-19, tsunamis or wars can throw the economy out of kilter. But more importantly it is also true that crises are part of the internal logic of capitalism. Just before COVID-19 hit, as recent as December 2019, the economy was already showing signs of weakness. Its very existence depends on the generation of profits, while at the same time it produces misery, inequality, unemployment, inflation, alienation, stress, recessions, and systemic crises. A commodity like a health care service is virulent with these contradictions and tension. Many who work in the healthcare system are underinsured, or have no health care benefits. COVID-19 is the trigger that exposes systemic weaknesses and exacerbates this current crisis. 

Similar measures were taken in response to previous pandemics. Those who had the plague were contained and walled off from entering other villages. Alarmingly, almost seven centuries later, in the age of high-tech communications, the same tools are being used to match those who get the virus with a limited number of available hospital beds. While the authorities can quickly find trillions of dollars to bailout corporations and banks, you are told that a planned robust universal health care system that anticipates pandemics is too expensive. 

Then there is the containment and mitigation of the virus while allowing the economy to unravel, hopefully for a short period. The longer the unravelling the deeper will be the economic carnage and the  longer will be the recovery. If you and everyone else stop dining out, your neighborhood restaurant will have no customers and will go bankrupt. After which wholesalers that supply your local restaurants will follow. This will cause unemployment to rise. If the ripple effect mutates the whole economy could be put on a ventilator. Global debt is about $188T, of which corporate debt is about $16T. Because their reserve cash is generally enough to keep them afloat for 12 days, small businesses will be the first to go under--small businesses are the canary in the coal mine. As a first step to complement these efforts to fight this and future pandemics and to prepare to transition to a planned system, we must immediately nationalize healthcare and manufacturing and convert manufacturing to produce healthcare products and fully mobilize our powers. 

The modern-day Robber Barons of industry and Wall Street, along with the government are frantically designing a ventilator to distribute taxpayer’s money to all organs of the economy--domestic and foreign banks and corporations and consumers. The corporate media is firing on all cylinders hoping to convince you to support the efforts of the “job creators”. While the Congress is preparing a stream of trillion dollar bailout programs, last Friday the Federal Reserve Bank handed the banks a massive $1T handout at zero interest rate.

But the optics of bailing out only corporations and banks might raise eyebrows this time. As a result, they are also saying that working people must receive help. While this is true, the hidden motive is that they know that workers do not have any money to spend in order to reset the system. Over forty percent of the US population has less than $400 in savings. Seventy percent of every dollar spent in the US is spent by consumers. 

Any bailout in the form and magnitude of the 2008 crisis bailout handed to banks and Wall Street, could trigger widespread anger in this country. This justifiable anger could find a productive outlet in the form of an alternative transition plan with firm accountability conditions in the interest of the many hard-working wealth creators and the planet, rather than 2,000 multi-billionaires, Wall Street and corporations. With this is mind there should be no more bank and corporate bailouts. When workers are required to buy health insurance, corporations in the airlines, hospitality, or any other industry should be required to do the same before they make risky investment decisions. They should no longer expect working people to bail them out. This is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us.

Following nationalization of health and manufacturing, the main goal of an alternative transition plan is to nationalize and restructure other key industries such as education, food, housing, and transportation. The plan would be under the control of working people and a restructured government. In order for businesses to qualify for phase one of this plan, they must have a history of: being friendly to unions; paying a livable wage with full benefits packages including childcare; and complying with environmental requirements. In addition, businesses must agree to regular monitoring of how the loan money is being used; must not have previously received any bailout money; and must commit to a timeline to transition to worker control of these enterprises. These conditions would be subjected to periodic review by a worker’s committee. The plan would be funded by a rollback of the $1.5T recent tax cut to the rich and a special bailout progressive tax on billionaires. Businesses that are a part of other than key industries, would be encouraged to seek financial assistance through the banks.

During the second phase of the transition plan, a Department For Environmental Research and Climate Change will be established and funded by a retroactive tax on corporations who profited from the destruction of the environment; a worker’s political party will be established; there will be free access to healthcare, education, vacant land/property/housing including utilities, food, and public transportation; a progressive tax on all income and wealth over $1 million;  all student debt will be cancelled; religious establishments will be taxed; inheritance laws, unproductive industries like advertisement, and rent will be abolished; banking and media will be nationalized/centralized; political prisoners and those who have been criminalized because they are poor will be freed; the military, which includes the police and the judiciary will be downsized; and a jobs bill for all working age adults will be enacted. 

Time and again billionaires, bankers and corporate executives have received unconditional bailouts. While they will benefit, working people are always those who are asked to finance these bailouts. If you are unemployed or in an insecure job with little or no benefits, have unpayable student debt or cannot afford to pay for an education, trapped in unsustainable housing conditions, another unconditional balout will not improve your quality of life. The level of inequality in the US is at dizzying heights and getting worse. The richest three people in the US have more wealth than the bottom 50 percent. Without fundamental changes, more bailouts will be necessary because economic crises are intrinsic to capitalism. This crisis precipitated by COVID-19 represents a great opportunity for transforming a chaotic system that has proven it is unable to deliver. The transition plan outlined in this essay might be a good place to start that transformation.    

1556. With Death Rate of 70%, Ebola Cases Are Expected to Reach 1.4 Million in Four Months

By Denise Grady, The New York Times, September 23, 2014

The body of an ebola victim is removed from her home in Monrovia, Liberia, last week. 

Yet another set of ominous projections about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa was released Tuesday, in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that gave worst- and best-case estimates for Liberia and Sierra Leone based on computer modeling.

In the worst-case scenario, the two countries could have a total of 21,000 cases of Ebola by Sept. 30 and 1.4 million cases by Jan. 20 if the disease keeps spreading without effective methods to contain it. These figures take into account the fact that many cases go undetected, and estimate that there are actually 2.5 times as many as reported.

In the best-case model, the epidemic in both countries would be “almost ended” by Jan. 20, the report said. Success would require conducting safe funerals at which no one touches the bodies, and treating 70 percent of patients in settings that reduce the risk of transmission. The report said the proportion of patients now in such settings was about 18 percent in Liberia and 40 percent in Sierra Leone.

The caseload projections are based on data from August, but Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the C.D.C. director, said the situation appeared to have improved since then because more aid had begun to reach the region.

“My gut feeling is, the actions we’re taking now are going to make that worst-case scenario not come to pass,” Dr. Frieden said in a telephone interview. “But it’s important to understand that it could happen.”

Outside experts said the modeling figures were in line with estimates by others in the field.

“It’s a nice job,” said Ira Longini, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida who has also done computer modeling of the epidemic. “It summarizes the extent of the problem and what has to happen to deal with it.”

Bryan Lewis, an epidemiologist at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech, agreed that the estimates were reasonable, perhaps even a bit low compared with those generated by other models. He said that if some of the latest data from the World Health Organization is plugged into the C.D.C. model, “the very large numbers of estimated cases are, unfortunately, even larger.”

The current official case count is 5,843, including 2,803 deaths, according to the W.H.O.

The C.D.C. estimates omit Guinea, which has been hit hard, because the epidemic struck in waves that could not be modeled. 

The W.H.O. published its own revised estimates of the outbreak on Monday, predicting more than 20,000 cases by Nov. 2 if control does not improve. That figure is more conservative than the one from the C.D.C., but the W.H.O. report also noted that many cases were unreported and said that without effective help, the three most affected countries would soon be reporting thousands of cases and deaths per week. It said its projections were similar to those from the C.D.C.

The W.H.O. report also raised, for the first time, the possibility that the disease would not be stopped but could become endemic in West Africa, meaning that it could become a constant presence there.

President Obama’s promise last week to send 3,000 military personnel to Liberia and to build 17 hospitals there, each with 100 beds, was part of the solution, Dr. Frieden said. But it was not clear when those hospitals would be ready, or who would staff them.

Dr. Frieden said the Defense Department had already delivered parts of a 25-bed unit that would soon be set up to treat health workers who become infected, a safety measure he said was important to help encourage health professionals to volunteer. He said that more aid groups were also arriving in the region to set up treatment centers, and that a “surge” of help would “break the back of the epidemic.”

Dr. Jack Chow, a professor of global health at Carnegie Mellon University and a former W.H.O. official, said, “The surge only becomes realized when those beds are up and operating and the workers are delivering care.”

He added, “If even the medium case comes to pass, with, say, 700,000 cases by January, the epidemic will quickly overwhelm the capabilities that the U.S. plans to send.”

The W.H.O. reported that a new center had just opened in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, with 120 beds for treatment and 30 for triage. Patients were already lined up at the door.

The report from the C.D.C. acknowledged that case counts were rising faster than hospital beds could be provided. It said that in the meantime, different types of treatment would be used, based in homes or community centers, with relatives and others being given protective gear to help prevent the disease from spreading.

The United States government is also sending 400,000 kits containing gloves and disinfectant to Liberia to help families take care of patients at home.

At least one aid group in Liberia is already shifting its focus to teaching people about home care and providing materials to help because there are not enough hospital beds for the sick. Ken Isaacs, a vice president of the group, Samaritan’s Purse, said, “I believe inevitably this is going to move into people’s houses, and the notion of home-based care has to play a more prominent role.”

“Where are they going to go?” he said.

Though providing home-care kits may seem like a pragmatic approach, some public health authorities said they were no substitute for beds in isolation or containment wards.

But Dr. Frieden said that home care had been used to help stamp out smallpox in Africa in the 1960s. The caregivers were often people who had survived smallpox themselves and were immune to it. Some experts have suggested that Ebola survivors might also be employed to care for the sick.

Dr. D. A. Henderson, who led the W.H.O.’s smallpox eradication program, said that local people had been paid to help in the campaign.

“We recruited a lot of people to stand guard at huts with smallpox,” said Dr. Henderson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of Pittsburgh. “The important thing was to know they got paid.”

He added: “We gave money and food to families who had smallpox so they didn’t have to go out and beg, and they didn’t have to go to the market and potentially infect people. What can you do? If you don’t have food, you’ve got to leave the house and go out. Money can play a useful role.”