This essay was originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus

Just before the recent climate summit in Dubai, COP28 president Sultan Al-Jaber, with some exasperation, came out with the following rather amazing statement:

“Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

Al-Jabar was posturing when he made this quip about caves, but he can almost be forgiven. We badly need a roadmap for a “phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development.” By noting the lack of one, he underscored its absence. This is true even if he spoke as a flack of the fossil fuel cartel.

Speaking of COP28, it helped settle the question of the COPs, which still troubles the climate left. The COPs are easily dismissed as “blah blah blah.” But they are, in a word, necessary. We would be in far greater trouble without them, and this is true even though the COPs are condemned to make decisions by consensus, even though they engender endless greenwashing, even though, with next year’s COP29 slated for Azerbaijan, two in a row will be hosted by straight-up petrostates.

The climate negotiations are finally circling core issues. COP26 saw a decision to “phase down” coal, and COP28 opened with the Loss and Damage fund finally lurching into existence. Then came COP28’s key decision text, which called for “Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Only a month later—with President Biden’s move to “pause” the approval of new liquified natural gas terminals, a decision the White House explicitly linked to COP28— the COP decision demonstrated real world benefits. It could have many more in the future, including outside the United States.

Meanwhile, COP29 is set to see the next big battle begin in earnest, as climate finance takes center stage. This battle could (if all goes well) culminate in 2025, where COP30 will be hosted by Lula da Sila’s Brazil, and deliver a meaningful decision on that crucial front. This is not the time to performatively insist that COP stands for “conference of polluters.”

Having said all this, I must immediately add that the climate negotiations have thus far failed, as decisively witnessed by the steadily rising atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration. COP skeptics are quite right about this. But in their failure the international negotiations are hardly alone. Domestic climate action has had many victories, but it has hardly put us on a path to deep and rapid decarbonization. Nor has the green technology revolution brought planetary emissions into a peak-and-decline pathway. Nor—and this is not easy to say—have the world’s direct action and climate justice movements filled the gaps. Politically, they may be everything, but they too have failed to stop the warming.

One key point: the COP28 text does not simply call for transitioning away from fossil fuels but rather stipulates that this transition must be “just, orderly, and equitable,” a much more challenging prospect. This led Sivan Kartha, a climate equity specialist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, to add that the “deepest fissure” in Dubai was between those who simply want a rapid fossil phase out and those who insist that, to have any hope of success, such a phase out must be fair.

Many of us agree—but what does such fairness imply? 

Embracing “Climate Emergency”

It has become fashionable, yet again, to argue that terms like “climate emergency” are dangerously demoralizing. Perhaps they are. Unfortunately, they are also accurate. We really do have to aim for net-zero emission by 2050, and that means facing political-economic challenges that are difficult to exaggerate. As are those posed by the closely related 1.5°C temperature goal. 

A graphic is appropriate here. I chose this one:

So far, the temperature spike we saw in 2023 is just temporary. For details, see here.

There are lots of voices telling us that 1.5°C is no longer achievable, but this is not quite true. Rather, 1.5°C remains achievable, but only via “overshoot and decline” pathways in which, sometime after the warming grinds past 1.5°C, we manage to claw it back down. What must we do to improve our chances? This is the real question.

We’re going to go into 1.5°C overshoot soon. As we do, even if we assume we’ll be able to draw the temperature back down, we can’t know how extreme the overshoot will be, or how long it will last. We can’t know because it depends on what happens in the future! Some people, Marxist climate hawk Andreas Malm among them, do not think we’ll be able to pull off the necessary drawdown (“I’m not an optimist about the human project”), though he agrees that it is technically possible. 

If we seriously intend to keep 1.5°C alive (as a long-term goal—think 2100), we must in the short term do everything to keep the temperature peak “well below 2°C” (the weak end of the Paris target), which is widely judged, by top scientists, to still be achievable. But there’s a hitch. Even this weaker goal demands, per the IPCC, “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” It’s not going to happen in the world as we have it today. 

If, in 2050, we are approaching true net-zero planetary emissions, we’ll have a good chance of avoiding a world in which the cascading consequences of the warming become unmanageable. Very rapidly building low- and ultra-low emissions energy systems around the world is a necessary step towards that goal—and because such systems are emerging, and rapidly dropping in cost, it’s possible to be honestly optimistic. But such systems are not going to be enough. 

Net-zero 2050 means going beyond the deployment of new, ultra-low emissions infrastructure to also eliminate existing fossil fuel infrastructure. This means that virtually all countries, be they rich or poor, developed or developing, should immediately stop investing in fossil fuel infrastructure, not least because that infrastructure will have to be decommissioned—shut down, mothballed, stranded—long before it’s worn out. All countries must also very rapidly decommission the fossil fuel infrastructure (e.g. existing oil wells, old coal plants) they already have in place—even if it’s profitable and even if people depend on it for their livelihoods. Such a decommissioning process is going to be both expensive and disruptive, in both political and economic terms, and in ways that are particularly hard on poor and insecure populations. 

In a world geared for rapid transition, these would be tractable challenges, but that would be a world in which we were speaking honestly about the depth and profundity of the necessary transformation, a world in which we were, as per Australian author and analyst David Spratt, in “emergency mode.” This, obviously, is not our world, which still tends towards greenwashing, soft-pedaling, and small-bore gradualism, if not actual denialism and climate “brightsiding.”

League of Conservation Voters Video: “A New England Case Study: Accelerating the Clean Energy Transition Through Offshore Wind”

The encouraging possibilities are real, don’t get me wrong.

The green technology revolution really does make it possible for us to save ourselves, and to build new futures. But we’re still facing almost impossible strategic challenges, and justice is at the heart of many of them. Brave choices are going to be necessary, and a political movement that tries to avoid them will not do well when push comes to shove. As it will, within the lifetimes of our children. 

A global extraction phase out

It will be very difficult to engineer a sufficiently rapid phase out of fossil fuel consumption. But the difficulties are even greater when it comes to fossil fuel extraction and production. Think mining, and drilling, and fracking.

There are rich countries like the United States and Norway, which are heavily invested in oil and gas extraction. High-poverty developing countries, like South Africa and India, are heavily invested in coal, while the Democratic Republic of Congo is highly dependent on oil revenue to provide public services. Gulf oil exporters like the United Arab Emirates, the COP28 host, was a developing country before it struck oil. Today, though the UAE may not be “developed” in the same way as, say, the United States or Germany, it is nonetheless a wealthy, high-capacity country with the money and resources to buffer the turbulence that will come with any rapid abandonment of oil.

Which countries deserve more time before they have to stop extracting and selling fossil fuels? The question haunts the climate negotiations, but it is not, in an important sense, the right question at all. The greater truth is that we must do everything to stop the fossil energy pipeline, globally and as soon as possible, and the right question is which countries need support—financial, political, and technological support—before they can hope to rapidly break their dependency on fossil fuel extraction. 

All extracting countries plead their cases. The most legitimate pleas come from poor developing countries that are highly dependent on fossil-related revenues and livelihoods. But before this can become obvious, a point of potential confusion must be clearly acknowledged – lots of countries call themselves developing, but some of them are a lot richer than others. The good news is that this confusion is dissipating, for reasons that were easy to appreciate in Dubai, the global city of the United Arab Emirate. The UAE, like Saudi Arabia, is an extremely wealthy Gulf oil exporter that, while still officially a member of the “Group of 77” developing countries, is not a developing country at all.

Why must we say this? Because we must transition away from fossil fuels in a “just, orderly, and equitable” manner, and because – as the challenge of a fossil fuel extraction phase out makes particularly clear – such a transition is going to be extremely difficult. It is also going to be expensive, which immediately raises the “who pays?” question. Those who wish to evade this question—there are many, and they tend to be rich—seek delay by any available means, and it is important to stress that in the next 10 years aggressively rosy predictions about carbon-dioxide removal—which would, if real, make a perfect case for delay—seem certain to play a leading role in their strategies. 

In this situation, with uncertainty layered upon complexity upon emergency, optimism is as much a danger as pessimism. For one thing, it is not at all obvious that we will manage to rapidly draw temperatures back down after they overshoot 1.5°C—Malm’s pessimism may, in the end, be well placed. For another, all efforts to honestly face the severity of our situation will be endlessly harried by soft-pedaling, false solutions, dangerous distractions, and lies. Politicians everywhere will want all the wiggle room they can get, and meanwhile the fossil cartel will move at every opportunity to deflect all efforts to mandate, or even discuss, the strategic demands of an actual planetary fossil-fuel phase out. 

Al-Jaber was right: we need that roadmap. 

On the ground, with war in the air

The climate negotiations are marked by endless skirmishing between global North and global South, which will not abate anytime soon. How could it, when our world – and its crises – are still strongly structured by the “uneven and combined development” of the colonial past, and the countries of the global North still host the majority of the world’s wealth?

Despite this skirmishing, which has for decades kept fossil fuels off the negotiating agenda, COP28 saw the fossil phaseout challenge finally take center stage. Activists and diplomats alike saw this challenge as a litmus test that would show if the climate negotiations were fit for purpose. Will the negotiations take up the challenge, or can they be forever derailed and distracted, while the fossil cartel just continues its relentless expansion? Perhaps we’ll know in a few years, but just now, after Dubai, a bit of guarded optimism may actually be in order. 

Not everyone in Dubai connected the brutal logic of the climate reckoning to the larger geopolitical crisis, but this crisis hung palpably in the air. COP28 took place in the Arab world, and Gaza did not seem so very far away. The atrocity of the Israeli bombing continued day by excruciating day, and it did not seem that it could be entirely separated from the discussions in the conference halls. The pain was acute within civil society circles. Demonstrations took place, and though they were marginalized by the COP’s security regime, they were noticed. Importantly, the ethos of the protests was an expansive one. The bombing, in particular, was not an isolated consequence of local hatreds. There were larger forces at work. The Palestinians had been given to champion the global South. The United States—the same United States that refused all talk of climate liability—was more than implicated. The term “settler colonialism” was heard again and again. The war, and war in general, was not a distant abstraction.

COPs are not mere climate meetings. The talk is not confined to carbon budgets and energy-system transformation. International debt relief, for example, is now front and center, as is the need for a radically new planetary finance architecture. The global military budget—now over $2 trillion a year—is a common point of comparison, and a reminder that we routinely subsidize violence on a vast scale. The problem of climate is the problem of history, and history is suddenly a very big problem. As the Financial Times noted,

The anecdotal evidence that war is surging round the world is confirmed by the numbers. A recent report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies documented 183 ongoing conflicts around the world, the highest number in more than three decades. And that figure was arrived at before the outbreak of the war in Gaza.

The fraying of the world order is, obviously, a threat to climate cooperation. Beyond this, and beyond the fading illusion that the climate challenge will yield to simple interventions, we’re still only beginning to come to terms with its implacable sprawl. There is little chance of climate stabilization without a political-economic shift that makes robust cooperation possible, but such a shift isn’t going to come cheaply and easily, and simple stories will not help trigger it. How could they when the riddle of climate stabilization is as well the riddle of development, and the riddle of peace?

The Gaza bombing is now on the agenda of the International Court of Justice, where it has joined a crowded docket that includes climate change lawsuits and all manner of other infamies. Nor can these all be laid entirely at the feet of the global North. The two million people of Gaza are currently, and justly, in the spotlight, but spare a thought for another two million people, the Rohingya of Myanmar, who have been murdered and expelled by a huge and terrifying wave of anti-Muslim violence. Southern elites are not innocent. 

And don’t forget Russia’s war in Ukraine, which, in addition to its immediate murderous consequences, is a milestone in the global right’s campaign against collective action, including climate action. It has certainly been an enormous setback to the Russian activist campaign for carbon neutrality.

Spinning the outcome

During COP28’s second week, the negotiations were roiled by the leak of a letter that Haitham al-Ghais, the OPEC secretary general, had sent to the 13 members of OPEC. The letter warned that “pressure against fossil fuels may reach a tipping point with irreversible consequences”, and argued that OPEC members must “proactively reject any text or formula that targets energy i.e. fossil fuels rather than emissions.” 

This was not an isolated move. There was also, by accounts, a great deal of arm twisting, and even a Saudi walkout. Jennifer Morgan, a long-time civil society climate strategist who is now Special Envoy at the German Foreign Ministry, went so far as to speculate that OPEC might be in “a bit of panic.” If so, the panic quickly passed. Once COP28 was over, the Saudis argued that the Dubai agreement to transition away from fossil fuels was entirely optional, just one of several “choices” on an “a la carte menu.”

There are two essential points here. The first is that the OPEC cartel, and the fossil cartel more generally, wants to prevent the “transitioning away” or “phasing out” or “phasing down” frames from taking hold, and argues that “emissions” (which can, it is said, be “captured”) are the real problem. This is the core of the greenwashing strategy, and its partisans will use all available arguments in its service, including repeated references to energy justice. Al-Ghais, for example, explains that “Our goal must be to reduce emissions, which is the core objective of the Paris Agreement, while ensuring energy security and universal access to affordable energy.” 

OPEC has no intention of scaling back fossil fuel extraction. This could change (one must hope) but there is absolutely no chance that it will do so unless the great powers of the global North have already taken the lead and begun their own fossil fuel extraction phase out. Which is why the Biden administration’s decision to scrutinize and hopefully reject a wave of new LNG export terminals, if it survives the counterattacks, could mark a decisive turning point. Talk, after all, is cheap, and just because a country’s delegation supported phase down/out at COP28 (as did the U.S. delegation) this doesn’t mean its actual decision makers are ready and able to follow through. At the COP, many of them clearly weren’t, as is crisply shown in this December 2023 graphic from Carbon Brief:

Some countries, or rather the fossil powers within those countries, are planning even greater production increases than the United States is. Some of these (India and Nigeria) are clearly developing countries, while some (Canada, Russia, and Saudi Arabia) are not. Most all fossil-rich countries, whether their history lay with the global North or the global South, are still planning on exploiting their coal, oil, and gas resources for as long as they possibly can, though do note that China is at the encouraging bottom of the chart. All told, despite its complexities, the picture is grim.

At the same time, the climate reckoning is arriving, and it finds us everywhere divided between rich and poor. In consequence, the countries of the global South can continue to make compelling appeals to basic levels of developmental justice, and these appeals cannot be easily dismissed, even when they bleed into PR cover for continued fossil investment. The energy poverty of the global South is deadly real, as is its pressing need—and its right—to a viable development path, as are the obstacles that today’s world system strews in its path.

(Note that this chart is somewhat out of date – Azerbaijan, which holds the COP29 presidency, has since COP28 announced that it is planning on raising its gas production by a third.)

Moving forward

To succeed, the fossil fuel phaseout roadmap must be reasonably detailed and properly funded. At the same time, it must sharply increase the development and build-out of low-carbon energy systems. In practice, this roadmap has to include nationally differentiated coal, oil, and gas extraction phaseout timeframes detailed enough to be useful to both government planners and political organizers, and financing strategies that can support them. 

Given the emergency, these phaseout timeframes will be extremely challenging, as befits the goal of net-zero emissions by or around 2050. We have to be realistic about this, but it’s not a traditional realism that we’re after. Traditional realism tells us that the necessary timeframes are unachievable, in large part because countries always hew to their “national interests,” which can be only slowly changed. Climate realism, on the other hand, tells us that it’s the pace of the necessary decarbonization, not the politics of the day, that is immutable, and that climate stabilization must come as a solution to a global collective action problem, in which national interests rapidly change. 

Collective action problems—commons problems—have a special relationship to justice. So, while I have no idea what the “orderly” part of “just, orderly, and equitable” is going to wind up meaning, I’m confident that justice and equity are going to be key to any successful climate transition. 

But what kind of justice? And what shape must it take? These questions bring us back to Al-Jaber’s roadmap, the one for a “phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development.” It’s a bear of a problem, but lots of people are working on it. For starters, look at the work of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative. Or Phaseout Pathways for Fossil Fuel Production within Paris-Compliant Carbon Budgets, the Tyndell Centre report that Dan Calverley and Kevin Anderson published in 2022. Or Economic Diversification from Oil Dependency, a report Vincent Yu, a key G77 negotiator, wrote for the Third World Network. Or the many reports of the Civil Society Equity Review, an international collaborative that, full disclosure, I work closely with. The conversation is still in its early days, but there are lots of good ideas floating around. 

Meanwhile, if we’re going to use terms like “economic diversification” and “developing countries,” let’s use them carefully. The challenges here involve “differentiation” between different kinds of countries and different kinds of circumstances, and they are anything but easy. The obvious example is the Gulf oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. They may in some sense be developing countries, but they have the money to diversify their economies as they phase out fossil fuel extraction, in ways that other developing countries like Kenya or even India absolutely do not. Harder cases come when you consider China, a hybrid that is both developed and developing, or when you take inequality within countries into proper account. For example, Saudi Arabia is traditionally considered to be a developing country, while the United States is the richest country in the world, but both are brutally divided between rich and poor. Somehow, this has to matter. 

At the end of the day, the biggest differentiation problem remains the one between the global North and the global South. The challenges here are now widely if not routinely recognized. In Dubai, soon after the COP28 decision was gaveled through, Avinash Persaud, now Barbados’ special climate envoy, noted that “Some activists were disappointed we didn’t commit to an immediate fossil fuel phase out. Still, without the trade, investment, and finance to achieve it, it would either have hit developing countries hardest or been meaningless.”

These points will have to be addressed as the finance challenge—the need for a global financial architecture that can support rapid climate transition—takes center stage. Which brings me to a new report – An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction: Towards a reference framework for a fast and fair rapid global phase out of coal, oil and gas—the preliminary version of which was released at COP28 by the Extraction Equity Working Group of the Civil Society Equity Review. 

I can’t summarize this report here—though it does sport a fine executive summary—but I do want to explain why its subtitle includes the words “towards a reference framework.” The explanation, basically, is that a detailed climate transition roadmap is not yet possible. An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction thus proposes a framework by which to judge the steps that can be taken in the next few years, to at least indicate if they are fair and ambitious enough to have a real chance. To this end, it concentrates on calculating coal, oil, and gas phaseout dates for all major fossil fuel producing countries—here’s a scatterplot with the oil dates; scroll right or left for coal and gas—and on estimating the minimum level of annual international public finance that will be needed to support these phase outs.

This minimum is denominated in “hundreds of billions of dollars” a year. 

An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction argues that, if we would limit warming to 1.5°C, all countries must immediately cease to build new fossil fuel extraction infrastructure. Further, wealthy fossil fuel producers whose overall economies are less dependent on fossil extraction—such as the United States, UK, Australia, Norway, Germany, and Canada—must phase out all fossil fuel extraction by 2031, while also providing significant financial support to poorer countries that are economically dependent on fossil fuel revenues and employment. Such poorer countries are given until 2050, though they too must be wrapping things up much earlier. 

One key point, in all this, should never be forgotten. The “unrealistic” nature of these dates is not the result of any equity-side logic—in which we try to model a fair phase out—but rather derives from the implacable constraints imposed by the Earth’s nearly-depleted 1.5°C emissions budget. To push these deadlines out, say to 2060 or 2070, we must either weaken our temperature goal or we must assume—as the geoengineers will incessantly encourage us to do—that gigatons upon gigatons of carbon-dioxide can very soon, and affordably, and safely, be collected and concentrated and “sequestered” away. 

Back to the ground

After Dubai, much of the left’s commentary focused on criticizing the late-game negotiations in which “phase out” was replaced by “transitioning away,” as if such diplomatic wordsmithing was only a watering down, as if it revealed the compromised truth at the core of a meaningless negotiation. For the activists embedded in the negotiations, the sense was different. They generally agreed that Dubai had “sent the necessary signal”—despite everything, the world’s governments have decided the fossil economy has to go.

Bill McKibben, to my mind, had the right take on this disagreement when he argued that the “transitioning away” phrase “will hang over every discussion from now on—especially the discussions about any further expansion of fossil fuel energy.” In a nutshell, he argued that the diplomats forged a tool and it’s up to us all to wield it.

The Dubai decision is of course limited. But its real weakness has more to do with loopholes and omissions than with any fine point of diplomatic wording. And the greatest of its omissions is financial: there is no agreement on how the phaseout will be funded. Harjeet Singh, now the Global Engagement Director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, put the overall picture succinctly and well,

A long-overdue direction to move away from coal, oil, and gas has been set. Yet, the resolution is marred by loopholes that offer the fossil fuel industry numerous escape routes, relying on unproven, unsafe technologies. The hypocrisy of wealthy nations, particularly the USA, as they continue to expand fossil fuel operations massively while merely paying lip service to the green transition, stands exposed. Developing countries, still dependent on fossil fuels for energy, income, and jobs, are left without robust guarantees for adequate financial support in their urgent and equitable transition to renewables. COP28 recognised the immense financial shortfall in tackling climate impacts, but the final outcomes fall disappointingly short of compelling wealthy nations to fulfil their financial responsibilities—obligations amounting to hundreds of billions, which remain unfulfilled.

Harjeet is being diplomatic when he refers to “hundreds of billions,” a figure that echoes the one used in the Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction report. It seems to be the formulation of choice these days, at least when civil society researchers and activists want to assert financial markers large enough to move the window, but small enough to be taken as realistic.

It’s important to understand that figures of this scale refer to public monies—grants and grant equivalents—and that they’ve lately been sharing the stage with references to trillions, which are typically private monies framed as “investments.” As in Dubai’s high-level Leader’s Declaration, which spoke of the opportunities that lay in “investing $5-7tn annually in greening the global economy by 2030.” 

The elites, left to their own devices, are far more likely to deliver on ambitious private finance pledges than on ambitious public ones. Investment is something they know how to do. But a future defined by “investment” and “insurance” and “loans” and “aid” is unlikely be a future that takes proper account of even deep decarbonization, let alone the challenges of development in a climate-constrained world, let alone people-centered adaptation and an ethically defensible loss and damage response and recovery system. Which is to say that, unless we win a comprehensive climate finance breakthrough, all hope for a “fair, orderly, and equitable” transition will be abandoned in favor of a short-term neoliberal expediency that is unlikely to deliver the global just transition we actually need. 

The challenge here encompasses everything from the historical responsibility of the global North to the debt crisis now wracking the global South to the inequality crisis raging in both North and South. Not to mention the crisis of democracy and the endless techno-economic complexities of the great rebuilding that’s now on the horizon. Bracket all this for now, but know that the next international battle will be fought over finance. 

It’s about time. 

Tom Athanasiou

This essay was originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus

I remember first reading The New Abolitionists in the 1990s when I was a college student and activist. I had grown weary of hearing older people complain about the inactivity of my generation, decrying why we weren’t more involved in the social issues of the day. Of course, even then, such critiques came in the face of mass protests, often led by the young, against the first Iraq war (launched by President George H.W. Bush), the Republican Contract With America, and the right-wing “family values” movement. Such assertions about the apathy of youth were proffered even as young people were waging fights for marriage equality, the protection of abortion, and pushing back against the attack on immigrants, as well as holding mass marches like the Battle for Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting as well as protests at the Republican National Convention of 2000, and so much more.

Another quote from Zinn remains similarly etched in my mind. “Theirs,” he wrote, “was the silent generation until they spoke, the complacent generation until they marched and sang, the money-seeking generation until they gave it up for… the fight for justice in the dank and dangerous hamlets of the Black Belt.”

And if it was true that, in the 1990s and 2000s, young people were so much less complacent than was recognized at the time, it’s even truer (to the nth degree!) in the case of the Millennials and Gen Z today. Younger generations are out there leading the way toward justice in a fashion that they seldom get credit for.

Don’t Look Up

Let me suggest, as a start, that we simply chuck out the sort of generalizations about Millennials and Gen Z that pepper the media today: that those younger generations spend too much money on avocado toast and Starbucks when they should be buying real estate or paying down their student loans. Accused of doing everything through social media, it’s an under-recognized and unappreciated reality of this century that young people have been showing up in a remarkable fashion, leading the way in on-the-ground movements to ensure that Black lives matter, dealing vividly with the onrushing horror of climate change, as well as continued conflict and war, not to speak of defending economic justice and living wages, abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and more.

Take, for instance, the greatest social upheaval of the past five years: the uprising that followed the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, with #BlackLivesMatter protests being staged in staggering numbers of communities, many of which had never hosted such an action before. Those marches and rallies, led mainly by teenagers and young adults, may have been the broadest wave of protests in American history.

Buy the Book

When it comes to the environmental movement, young people have been organizing campaigns for climate justice, calling for a #GreenNewDeal and #climatedefiance from Cop City to the March to End Fossil Fuels to a hunger strike in front of the White House. At the same time, they have been bird-dogging politicians on both sides of the aisle with an urgency and militancy not previously associated with climate change. Meanwhile, a surge of unionization drives, whether at Walmart, Starbucks, Amazon, or Dollar General, has largely been led by young low-wage workers of color and has increased appreciation for and recognition of workers’ rights and labor unions to a level not seen in decades. Add to that the eviction moratoriums, mutual-aid provisions, and student-debt strikes of the pandemic years, which gained ground no one had thought possible even months earlier.

And don’t forget the movement to stop gun violence that, from the March for Our Lives in Florida to the protests leading to the expulsion and subsequent reinstatement of state legislators Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in Tennessee, galvanized millions across racial and political lines. Teenagers in striking numbers are challenging this society to value their futures more than guns. And most recently, calls for a #ceasefirenow and #freepalestine have heralded the birth of a new peace movement in the wake of Hamas’s attacks on Israel and the Israeli destruction of much of Gaza. Although university presidents have been getting more media attention, Palestinian, Jewish, and Muslim students have been the ones organizing and out there, insisting that indiscriminate violence perpetrated against Palestinians, especially children, will not happen “in our name.”

From Unexpected Places

An observation Zinn made so many years ago about young people in the 1960s may have lessons for movements today: “They came out of unexpected places; they were mostly black and therefore unseen until they suddenly became the most visible people in America; they came out of Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, and Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. And they were committed. To the point of jail, which is a large commitment.”

Today’s generation of activists are similarly committed and come from places as varied as Parkland, Florida, Uvalde, Texas, Buffalo, New York, and Durham, North Carolina. Below the surface, some deep stuff is brewing that could indeed continue to compel new generations of the young into action. As we approach the first quarter mark of the twenty-first century, we’re stepping firmly into a new technological era characterized by unparalleled levels of digital power. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, as elite economists and think-tankers like to call it, promises a technological revolution that, in the words of World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, is likely to occur on a “scale, scope, and complexity” never before experienced. That revolution will, of course, include the integration of artificial intelligence and other labor-replacing technology into many kinds of in-person as well as remote work and is likely to involve the “deskilling” of our labor force from the point of production all the way to the market.

Residents of Detroit, once the Silicon Valley of auto manufacturing, understand this viscerally. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ford River Rouge Plant was the largest, most productive factory in the world, a private city with 100,000 workers and its own municipal services. Today, the plant employs only a fraction of that number — about 10,000 people — and yet, thanks to a surge of robotic innovation, it produces even more cars than it did in the heady days of the 1930s. Consider such a shift just the tip of the spear of the kind of change “coming to a city near you,” as one veteran auto worker and union organizer once told me. All of this is impacting everything from wages to health-care plans, pensions to how workers organize. Indeed, some pushback to such revolutionary shifts in production can be seen in the labor strikes the United Auto Workers launched late in 2023.

Overall, such developments are deeply impacting young people. After all, workers are now generally making less than their parents did, even though they may produce more for the economy. Growing parts of our workforce are increasingly non-unionized, low-wage, part-time and/or contracted out, often without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. And not surprisingly, such workers struggle to afford housing, childcare, and other necessities, experiencing on the whole harsher lives than the generations that preceded them.

In addition, the last 40 years have done more than just transform work and daily life for younger generations. They have conditioned so many to lose faith in government as a site for struggle and change. Instead, Americans are increasingly dependent on private, market-based solutions that extol the wealthy for their humanitarianism (even as they reap the rewards from federal policymaking and an economy rigged in their favor).

Crises upon Crises

Consider the social, political, and economic environment that’s producing the multi-layered crises faced by today’s younger generations. When compared to other advanced countries, the United States lags perilously behind in almost every important category. In this rich land, about 45 million people regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, nearly 80 million are uninsured or underinsured, close to 10 million live without housing or on the brink of homelessness, while the education system continues to score near the bottom compared to the other 37 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. And in all of this, young people are impacted disproportionately.

Perhaps most damning, ours is a society that has become terrifyingly tolerant of unnecessary death and suffering. Deaths by poverty are an increasingly all-American reality. Low-wage jobs that have been found to shorten lives are the norm. In 2023, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, found that poverty was the fourth-leading cause of death in this country, right after heart disease, smoking, and cancer. While life expectancy continues to rise across the industrialized world, it’s stagnated in the U.S. since the 2010s and, during the first three years of the Covid pandemic, it dropped in a way that, according to experts, was unprecedented in modern world history. That marks us as unique not just among wealthy countries, but among poorer ones as well. And again, its impact was felt above all by the young. What we call “deaths of despair” are also accelerating, although the label is misleading, since so many overdoses and suicides are caused not by some amorphous social malaise but by medical neglect and lack of access to adequate care and mental-health treatment for the under- or uninsured.

Nor are low wages, crises of legitimacy, and falling life expectancy the only significant issues facing our younger generations. Just last week, the New York Times reported that 2023 was the hottest year on record (with climate chaos worsening yearly and little chance of the elimination of our reliance on fossil fuels in sight). Add to that the fact that anyone born in the last three decades can hardly remember a time when the United States was not in some fashion at war (whether declared or not) and pouring its taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon budget. In fact, according to the National Priorities Project, this country has spent a staggering $21 trillion on militarization since September 11, 2001, including increased border patrols, a rising police presence in our communities, and various aspects of the Global War on Terror that came home big-time. Add to all that, the rise of Trumpian-style authoritarianism and attacks on our democratic system more extreme than at any time since the Civil War.

What Time Is It?

Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks taught that there were two ways to understand time — and the times in which we live. Chronos was quantitative time, the measured chronological time of a clock. Kairos, on the other hand, was qualitative time: the special, even transformative, time of a specific moment (and possibly of a movement). Kairos is all about opportunity. In the days of antiquity, Greek archers were trained to recognize the brief kairos moment, the opening when their arrow had the best chance of reaching its target. In the Bible (and as a biblical scholar I run into this a lot), Kairos describes a moment when the eternal breaks into history.

German-American theologian Paul Tillich introduced the modern use of kairos in describing the period between the First World War and the rise of fascism. In retrospect, he recognized the existential stakes of that transitional moment and mourned the societal failure to stem the tide of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain. There was a similar kairos moment in apartheid South Africa when a group of mainly Black theologians wrote a Kairos Document noting that “for very many… in South Africa, this is the KAIROS, the moment of grace and opportunity… a challenge to decisive action. It is a dangerous time because, if this opportunity is missed, and allowed to pass by, the loss… will be immeasurable.”

2024 may well be a kairos moment for us here in the United States. There’s so much at stake, so much to lose, but if Howard Zinn were with us today, I suspect he would look at the rise of bold and visionary organizing, led by generations of young leaders, and tell us that change, on a planet in deep distress, is coming soon.

Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Commondreams.org ) – The United States health care system—more costly than any on earth—will become ever more so as Wall Street increasingly extracts money from it.

Private equity funds own approximately 9% of all private hospitals and 30% of all proprietary for-profit hospitals, including 34% that serve rural populations. They’ve also bought up nursing homes and doctors’ practices and are investing more year by year. The net impact? Medical costs to the government and to patients have gone up while patients have suffered more adverse medical results, according to two current studies.

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) recently published a paper which found:

Private equity acquisition was associated with increased hospital-acquired adverse events, including falls and central line–associated bloodstream infections, along with a larger but less statistically precise increase in surgical site infections.

This should not come as a surprise. Private equity firms in general operate as follows: They raise funds from investors to purchase enterprises using as much borrowed money as possible. That debt does not fall on the private equity firm or its investors, however. Instead, all of it is placed on the books of the purchased entity. If a private equity firm borrows money and buys up a nursing home or hospital chain, the debt goes on the books of these healthcare facilities in what is called a leveraged buyout.

To service the debt, the enterprise’s management, directed by their private equity ownership, must reduce costs, and increase its cash flow. The first and easiest way to reduce costs is by reducing the number of staff and by decreasing services. Of course, the quality of care then suffers. Meanwhile, the private equity firm charges the company fees in order to secure its own profits.

With so much taxpayer money sloshing around in the system, hedge funds also are cashing in.

An even larger study of private equity and health was completed this summer and published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). After reviewing 1,778 studies it concluded that after private equity firms purchased healthcare facilities, health outcomes deteriorated, costs to patients or payers increased, and overall quality declined.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

One former executive at a private equity firm that owns an assisted-living facility near Boulder, Colorado, candidly described why the firm was refusing to hire and retain high-quality caregivers: “Their position was: We are trying to increase our profitability. Care is an ancillary part of the conversation.”

Medicare Advantage Creates Wall Street Advantages

Congress passed the Medicare Advantage program in 2003. Its proponents claimed it would encourage competition and greater efficiency in the provision of health insurance for seniors. At the time, privatization was all the rage as the Democratic and Republican parties competed to please Wall Street donors. It was argued that Medicare, which was actually much more efficient than private insurance companies, needed the iron fist of profit-making to improve its services. These new private plans were permitted to compete with Medicare Part C (Medigap) supplemental insurance.

In 2007, 19% of Medicare recipients enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans. By 2023 enrollment had risen to 51%. These heavily marketed plans are attractive because many don’t charge additional monthly premiums, and they often include dental, vision, and hearing coverage, which Medicare does not. And in some plans, other perks get thrown in, like gym memberships and preloaded over-the-counter debit cards for use in pharmacies for health items.

How is it possible for Medical Advantage to do all this and still make a profit?

According to a report by the Physicians for a National Health Program, it’s very simple—they overcharge the government, that is we, the taxpayers, “by a minimum of $88 billion per year.” The report says it could be as much as $140 billion.

In addition to inflating their bills to the government, these HMO plans don’t pay doctors outside of their networks, deny or slow needed coverage to patients, and delay legitimate payments. As Dr. Kenneth Williams, CEO of Alliance HealthCare, said of Medicare Advantage plans, “They don’t want to reimburse for anything — deny, deny, deny. They are taking over Medicare and they are taking advantage of elderly patients.”

Enter Hedge Funds

With so much taxpayer money sloshing around in the system, hedge funds also are cashing in. They have bought large quantities of stock in the healthcare companies that are milking the government through their Medicare Advantage programs. They then insist that these healthcare companies initiate stock buybacks, inflating the price of their stock and the financial return to the hedge funds. Stock buybacks are a simple way to transfer corporate money to the largest stock-sellers.

(A stock buyback is when a corporation repurchases its own stock. The stock price invariably goes up because the company’s earnings are spread over a smaller number of shares. Until they were deregulated in 1982, stock buybacks were essentially outlawed because they were considered a form of stock price manipulation.)

United Healthcare, for example, is the largest player in the Medicare Advantage market, accounting for 29% of all enrollments in 2023. It also has handsomely rewarded its hedge fund stock-sellers to the tune of $45 billion in stock buybacks since 2007, with a third of that coming since March 2020. Cigna, another big Medicare Advantage player, just announced a $10 billion stock buyback.

These repurchases are also extremely lucrative for United Healthcare’s top executives, who receive most of their compensation through stock incentives. CEO Andrew Witty, for example, hauled in $20.9 million in 2022 compensation, of which $16.4 million came from stock and stock option awards.

Those of us fighting for Medicare for All have much in common with every worker who is losing his or her job as a result of leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks.

A look at the pharmaceutical industry shows where all this is heading. Between 2012 and 2021, fourteen of the largest publicly traded pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends, more than the $660 billion they spent on research and development, according to a report by economists William Lazonick and Öner Tulum. Little wonder that drug prices are astronomically high in the U.S.

And so, the gravy train is loaded and rolling, delivering our tax dollars via Medicare Advantage reimbursements to companies like United Healthcare and Big Pharma, which pass it on to Wall Street private equity firms and hedge funds.

It’s Not Just Healthcare

In researching my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, we found that private equity firms and hedge funds are undermining the working class through leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks. When private equity moves in, mass layoffs (just like healthcare staff cuts and shortages) almost always follow so that the companies can service their debt and private equity can extract profits. When hedge funds insist on stock repurchases, mass layoffs are used to free up cash in order to buy back their shares. As a result, between 1996 and today, we estimate that more than 30 million workers have gone through mass layoffs.

Meanwhile, stock buybacks have metastasized throughout the economy. In 1982, before deregulation, only about 2% of all corporate profits went to stock buybacks. Today, it is nearly 70%.

Those of us fighting for Medicare for All, therefore, have much in common with every worker who is losing his or her job as a result of leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks. Every fight to stop a mass layoff is a fight against the same Wall Street forces that are attacking Medicare and trying to privatize it. Creating a sane healthcare system, therefore, will depend on building a massive common movement to free our economy from Wall Street’s wealth extraction.

To take the wind out of Medicare Advantage and Wall Street’s rapacious sail through our healthcare system, we don’t need more studies. It’s time to outlaw leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks.

( ProPublica) – Ever since he was a medical student, Dr. Neil Martinson has confronted the horrors of tuberculosis, the world’s oldest and deadliest pandemic. For more than 30 years, patients have streamed into the South African clinics where he has worked — migrant workers, malnourished children and pregnant women with HIV — coughing up blood. Some were so emaciated, he could see their ribs. They’d breathed in the contagious bacteria from a cough on a crowded bus or in the homes of loved ones who didn’t know they had TB. Once infected, their best option was to spend months swallowing pills that often carried terrible side effects. Many died.

So, when Martinson joined a call in April 2018, he was anxious for the verdict about a tuberculosis vaccine he’d helped test on hundreds of people.

The results blew him away: The shot prevented over half of those infected from getting sick; it was the biggest TB vaccine breakthrough in a century. He hung up, excited, and waited for the next step, a trial that would determine whether the shot was safe and effective enough to sell.

Weeks passed. Then months.

More than five years after the call, he’s still waiting, because the company that owns the vaccine decided to prioritize far more lucrative business.

Pharmaceutical giant GSK pulled back on its global public health work and leaned into serving the world’s most-profitable market, the United States, which CEO Emma Walmsley recently called its “top priority.” As the London-based company turned away from its vaccine for TB, a disease that kills 1.6 million mostly poor people each year, it went all in on a vaccine against shingles, a viral infection that comes with a painful rash. It afflicts mostly older people who, in the U.S., are largely covered by government insurance.

Importantly, the shingles vaccine shared a key ingredient with the TB shot, a component that enhanced the effectiveness of both but was in limited supply.

From a business standpoint, GSK’s decision made sense. Shingrix would become what the company calls a “crown jewel,” raking in more than $14 billion since 2018.

But the ability of a corporation to allow a potentially lifesaving vaccine to languish lays bare the distressing reality of public health vaccine creation. With limited resources, governments have long seen no other option but to team with Big Pharma to develop vaccines for global scourges. But after the governments pump taxpayer money and resources into the efforts, the companies get control of the products, locking up ownership and prioritizing their own gain.

That’s what GSK did with the TB vaccine. Decades ago, the U.S. Army brought in GSK to work on a malaria vaccine and helped develop the ingredient that would prove game-changing for the company. It was an adjuvant, a substance that primed the body’s immune system to successfully respond to a vaccine for malaria — and, the company would come to learn, a variety of other ailments.

GSK patented the adjuvant and took control of the supply of the ingredients in it. It accepted government and nonprofit funding to develop a TB vaccine using the adjuvant. But even though it isn’t carrying the vaccine to the finish line, it isn’t letting go of it entirely either, keeping a tight grip on that valuable ingredient.

As TB continued to rage around the globe, it took nearly two years for GSK to finalize an agreement with the nonprofit Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute, or Gates MRI, to continue to develop the vaccine. While the Gates organization agreed to pay to keep up the research, GSK reserved the right to sell the shot in wealthy countries.

The trial that will determine whether the vaccine is approved won’t begin until 2024, and isn’t expected to end until at least 2028. “We just can’t operate like that for a disease that is this urgent,” said Thomas Scriba, a South African scientist and TB expert who also worked on the study.

GSK pushes back against the premise that the company delayed the development of the TB vaccine and says it remains dedicated to researching diseases that plague underserved communities. “Any suggestion that our commitment to continued investment in global health has reduced, is fundamentally untrue,” Dr. Thomas Breuer, the company’s chief global health officer, wrote in a statement.

The company told ProPublica that it cannot do everything, and it now sees its role in global health as doing early development of products and then handing off the final clinical trials and manufacturing to others. It also said that a vaccine for TB is radically different from the company’s other vaccines because it can’t be sold at scale in wealthy countries.

Though a good TB vaccine would be used by tens of millions of people, it has, in the parlance of industry, “no market,” because those who buy it are mostly nonprofits and countries that can’t afford to spend much. It’s not that a TB vaccine couldn’t be profitable. It’s that it would never be as profitable as a product like the shingles vaccine that can be sold in the U.S. or Western Europe.

Experts say the story of GSK’s TB vaccine, and its roller coaster of hope and disappointment, highlights a broken system, which has for too long prioritized the needs of corporations over those of the sick and poor.

“We don’t ask for a fair deal from our pharma partners,” said Mike Frick, a director of the tuberculosis program at Treatment Action Group and a global expert on the TB vaccine pipeline. “We let them set the terms, but we don’t ask them to pick up the check. And I just find it frankly a little humiliating.”

Steven Reed, a co-inventor of the TB vaccine, brought his idea to GSK decades ago, believing that working with a pharmaceutical giant was essential to getting the shots to people who desperately needed them. He’s disillusioned that this hasn’t happened and now says that Big Pharma is not the path to saving lives with vaccines in much of the world. “You get a big company to take it forward? Bullshit,” he said. “That model is gone. It’s failed. It’s dead. We have to create a new one.”

Gaining Control

In the early 1980s, the U.S. Army was desperate for a way to keep troops safe from the parasite that causes malaria. Military scientists had some promising ideas but wanted to find a company that could help them develop and manufacture the antigen, the piece of a vaccine that triggers an immune response. They called on SmithKline Beckman, now part of GSK, which had a plant outside of Philadelphia committed to the exact type of antigen technology they were researching.

For the company’s part, working with the Army gave it access to new science and, importantly, the ability to conduct specialized research. The Army had laboratories for animal testing and ran clinical trial sites around the world. It’s also generally easier to get experimental products through regulatory approval when working with the government, and Army scientists were willing to be infected with malaria and run the first tests of the vaccine on themselves.

Col. Carl Alving, then an investigator at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, said he was the first person known to be injected with an ingredient called MPL, an adjuvant added to the vaccine. Today, we know that adjuvants are key to many modern vaccines. But at the time, only one adjuvant, alum, had ever been approved for use. Alving published promising results, showing that MPL boosted the shot’s success in the body.

Company scientists took note and began adding MPL to other ingredients. If one adjuvant was good, maybe two adjuvants together, stimulating different parts of the immune system, might be even better.

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

It was an exciting development, bringing the multiple adjuvants together, Alving said in an interview. But then he learned that the company scientists had filed a patent for the combinations in Europe, which put limits on what he and his colleagues could do with MPL. “The Army felt perhaps a little frustrated by that because we had introduced Glaxo to the field.”

Still, the Army wanted the malaria vaccine. Military personnel started comparing the adjuvant combinations on rhesus monkeys at an Army facility in Thailand and ran clinical trials that tested the most promising pairs in humans and devised dosing strategies.

The Army found that one of the combinations came out on top: MPL and an extract from the bark of a tree that grows in Chile. The bark extract was already used in veterinary vaccines, but a scientist at one of the world’s first biotech companies had recently discovered you could purify it into a material that makes it safe enough for use in humans.

Alving said that at the time, he didn’t patent the work he and his colleagues were doing or demand an exclusive license for MPL. “It’s a question of the Army being the Army, which is not a company,” Alving said. (This was actually the second time the government failed to secure its rights over MPL. Decades earlier, the ingredient was discovered and formulated by scientists working for the Department of Veterans Affairs and a National Institutes of Health lab in Montana. One of the scientists, frustrated that his bosses in Bethesda, Maryland, wouldn’t let him test the product in humans, quit and formed a company, taking the research with him. Though his company initially said it thought MPL was in the public domain and couldn’t be patented, he did manage to patent it.)

Experts say drug development in the U.S. is littered with such missed opportunities, which allow private companies to seize control of and profit off work done by publicly funded researchers. Governments, they say, need to be more aggressive about keeping such work in the public domain. Alving has since done just that, recently receiving his 30th patent owned by the military.

It’s an open secret in the pharmaceutical world that companies participate in global health research because it’s where they get to try out new technologies that can be applied to other, more lucrative diseases.

At an investor presentation in 2016, a GSK executive used the malaria vaccine example to explain the benefit of such work. “Of those of you who think this is just philanthropy, it is not,” Luc Debruyne, then president of vaccines at GSK, told the group. He explained that it was through the malaria work that the company invented the adjuvant that is now in its blockbuster shingles vaccine. And, he explained, vaccines are high-volume products that make a steady stream of money over time. “So doing good business, innovating and doing well for the world absolutely can get married.”

As the Army’s research on the combination of MPL and the bark extract evolved — and its market potential became clear — GSK moved to vacuum up the companies that owned the building blocks to the adjuvant.

In 2005, it bought the company that owned the rights to MPL for $300 million. In 2012, it struck a deal for the rights to a lion’s share of the supply of the Chilean tree bark extract.

The company was now in full control of the adjuvant.

Picking a Winner

GSK eagerly began to test its new adjuvant on a number of diseases — hepatitis, Lyme, HIV, influenza.

Steven Reed, a microbiologist and immunologist, had come to the company in 1994 with an idea for a tuberculosis vaccine. An estimated 2 billion people are infected with TB globally, but it’s mainly those with weakened immune systems who fall ill. A century-old vaccine called BCG protects young children, but immunity wanes over time, and that vaccine does little to shield people from the most common type of infection in the lungs.

Reed had just the background and resources to attempt a breakthrough: An adjunct professor at Cornell University’s medical school, he also ran a nonprofit research organization that worked on infectious diseases and had co-founded a biotech company to create and market products.

He and his colleagues were building a library of the proteins that make up the mycobacterium that causes TB. He also had access to a blood bank in Brazil, where TB was more prevalent, that he could screen the proteins against to determine which generated an immune response that prevented people from getting sick.

At the time Reed pitched the vaccine, the company’s decision over whether to take him up was made by researchers, said Michel De Wilde, a former vice president of research and development at the company that partnered with Reed and later became part of GSK. Today, across the industry, finance units play a much stronger role in deciding what a company works on, he said.

GSK signed on, asking Reed to add the company’s promising new adjuvant to his idea for a TB vaccine.

Reed and his colleagues used more than $2 million in federal money to conduct trials from 1995 to 2005. GSK also invested, but NIH money and resources were the key, Reed said. As the vaccine progressed into testing, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pitched in, as did the governments of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Australia, among others.

Amid all that, in 2003, GSK started testing the adjuvant in its shingles vaccine, according to annual reports, but at a much faster speed. With TB, it performed a small proof-of-concept study to justify moving to a larger one. There’s no evidence it did so with shingles. By 2010, GSK’s shingles vaccine was in final trials; in 2017, the FDA approved it for use.

To employees and industry insiders, GSK was making its priorities clear. The company built a vaccine research facility in Rockville, Maryland, to be closer to the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration; at the same time, it was retreating from TB and other global public health projects, according to former employees of the vaccine division.

All the while, the adjuvant was limited. GSK struggled to ramp up production of MPL, according to former employees there; it relies on a cumbersome manufacturing process. And it wasn’t clear whether there was sufficient supply of the Chilean tree that is essential to both vaccines.

After researchers learned of the TB vaccine’s successful proof-of-concept results in 2018, GSK said nothing about what was next.

“You would have thought people would have said: ‘Oh shit, this is doable. Let’s double down, let’s quadruple down,’” said Dr. Tom Evans, former president and CEO of Aeras, a nonprofit that led and paid for half of the proof-of-concept study. “But that didn’t happen.”

Scriba, who was involved in the study in South Africa, said he never imagined that GSK wouldn’t continue the research. “To be honest it never occurred to us that they wouldn’t. The people we worked with at GSK were the TB team. They were passionate about TB,” Scriba said. “It’s extremely frustrating.”

But Reed said that when the shingles vaccine was approved, he had a gut feeling that GSK would abandon the tuberculosis work.

“The company that dropped it used similar technology to make billions of dollars on shingles, which doesn’t kill anyone,” Reed said.

Those in the field grew so concerned about the fate of the TB vaccine that the World Health Organization convened a series of meetings in 2019.

Breuer, then chief medical officer for GSK’s vaccine division, explained that the pharmaceutical giant was willing to hand off the vaccine to an organization or company that would cover the cost of future development, licensing, manufacturing and liability. If the next trial went well, they could sell the vaccine in the “developing world,” with GSK retaining the sales rights in wealthier countries.

GSK would, however, retain control of the adjuvant, Breuer said. And the company only had enough for its other vaccines, so whoever took over the TB vaccine’s development would need to pay GSK to ramp up production, which Breuer estimated would cost around $200 million.

Dr. Julio Croda was director of communicable diseases for Brazil at the time and attended the meeting. He said he was authorized to spend significant government funds on a tuberculosis vaccine trial but needed assurances that GSK would transfer technology and intellectual property if governments paid for its development. “But in the end of the meeting, we didn’t have an agreement,” he said.

Dr. Glenda Gray, a leading HIV vaccine expert who attended the meeting on behalf of South Africa, said she wasn’t able to get a straight answer about the availability of the adjuvant.

The year after the WHO meeting, after what a Gates representative described as “a lot of negotiation,” GSK licensed the vaccine to Gates MRI, a nonprofit created by the Gates Foundation to develop drugs and vaccines for global health issues that for-profit companies won’t tackle.

GSK told ProPublica that it did not receive upfront fees or royalties as part of the arrangement, but that Gates MRI paid it a small incentive to invest in the company’s global health endeavors. GSK and Gates MRI declined to comment on the amount.

Gates MRI tax documents show a payment designated as “royalties, license fees, and similar amounts that allow the organization to use intellectual property such as patents and copyrights” the year the agreement was finalized. Among available tax documents, that is the only year the organization has made a payment in that category.

The amount: $10 million.

An Uncertain Future

In June of this year, the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust announced they were pledging $550 million to fund the phase 3 trial that will finally show whether the vaccine works. They’ve selected trial locations and are currently testing it on a smaller subset of patients, those with HIV.

Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist at the WHO, said he’s more optimistic than he’s ever been in his career that we’ll have a new TB vaccine this decade.

Gates MRI and GSK declined to say who had the rights to sell the vaccine in which countries, but Gates MRI said it will “work with partners to ensure the vaccine is accessible for people living in high TB-burden lower- and middle-income countries,” and GSK acknowledged that its rights extend to South America and Eastern Europe, two regions with significant pockets of TB.

As expected, Gates MRI will be reliant on GSK to supply the adjuvant, which concerns vaccine hopefuls because of the lack of transparency surrounding its availability. One of the key ingredients, the bark extract, comes from a tree whose harvest and export has been controlled by the Chilean government since the 1970s because of overexploitation. A megadrought and forest fires continue to threaten native forests today. The main exporter of the bark says it has resolved previous bottlenecks, and GSK said it is working on a synthetic version as part of its long-term plan.

In response to questions about why it retained control of the adjuvant, GSK said it was complicated to make, would not be economical to produce in more than one place, and was a very important component in many of the company’s vaccines, so it wasn’t willing to share the know-how.

The adjuvant is only growing in value to the company, as it adds yet another lucrative vaccine to its portfolio that requires it. In May, the FDA approved a GSK vaccine for the respiratory virus known as RSV. Analysts project that the shot will bring in $4 billion annually at its peak. GSK continues to study the adjuvant in additional vaccines.

GSK strongly insists that it has enough of the adjuvant to fulfill its forecasted needs for the RSV, shingles, malaria and TB vaccines through 2035.

The company and Gates MRI said their agreement includes enough adjuvant for research and the initial supply of the TB vaccine, if it is approved. The organizations declined, however, to specify how many people could be vaccinated. GSK also said it was willing to supply more adjuvant after that, but further negotiations would be necessary and Gates MRI would likely need to pay to increase adjuvant manufacturing capacity. For its part, Gates MRI said it is evaluating several strategies to ensure longer term supply.

Several experts said that Gates MRI should test other adjuvants with the vaccine’s antigen. That includes Farrar, who said it would be “very wise” to start looking for a new adjuvant. He is one of the few people who has seen the agreement between Gates MRI and GSK as a result of his previous role as director of the Wellcome Trust. Farrar is now helping to lead a new TB Vaccine Accelerator Council at the WHO and said he believes one of the group’s roles would be to find solutions to any future problems with the adjuvant.

Gates MRI declined to answer when asked if it was considering testing other adjuvants with the vaccine’s antigen. GSK, along with several other scientists and regulators that ProPublica spoke with, expressed that using a new adjuvant would require redoing all of the long and expensive clinical trials.

U.S. government officials, meanwhile, are working to identify adjuvants that aren’t already tied up by major pharmaceutical companies.

For a corporation, the primary concern is “what is this adjuvant doing for my bottom line,” said Wolfgang Leitner, who began his career working at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research on the malaria vaccine as a consultant for GSK. Now the chief of the innate immunity section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his job is to encourage the development of new adjuvants and to make sure that researchers have access to ones that aren’t tightly controlled by individual companies.

The WHO has also been helping to build a global network of vaccine manufacturers who can develop and supply vaccines to less wealthy countries outside of the shadow of Big Pharma; it is using a technology debuted during the COVID-19 pandemic called mRNA, which deploys snippets of genetic code to trigger an immune response. Reed, an inventor of GSK’s TB vaccine, co-founded the company at the center of that effort, Afrigen, after growing concerned about the fate of the vaccine he made for GSK.

Reed helped create a second TB vaccine, which Afrigen has the rights to manufacture for sale in Africa. But that vaccine has yet to start a proof-of-concept trial.

Over the past five years, an average of just $120 million a year has been spent on all TB vaccine research globally, including money from governments, pharmaceutical companies and philanthropic organizations, according to annual surveys conducted by the Treatment Action Group. For perspective, the U.S. alone spent more than $2 billion developing COVID-19 vaccines from 2020 to 2022. At a special UN meeting on tuberculosis in 2018, the nations of the world pledged to ensure $3 billion was spent on TB vaccine research and development over the next five years. Just 20% of that was handed out.

While that mRNA hub holds promise, it will be years before an mRNA TB vaccine enters a proof-of-concept trial, according to people involved. The pharmaceutical companies that made successful COVID-19 vaccines have refused to share the technology and manufacturing techniques that make mRNA vaccines work. One company, Moderna, has said it won’t enforce its patents on mRNA vaccines Afrigen creates for COVID-19, but it’s not clear what it’ll do if Afrigen applies those techniques to a disease like TB. (Paul Sagan, board chairman of ProPublica, is a member of Moderna’s board.)

To date, the GSK tuberculosis vaccine — which does not use mRNA technology — is the only one that meets a set of characteristics the WHO believes are necessary for a viable TB vaccine.

The phase 3 trial is set to begin early next year. In the time between the two trials, approximately 9 million people will have died from TB.

ProPublica

In stark contrast to those images of bustling productivity stands an outcropping of tall towers along the southern end of Manhattan’s Central Park. Built in the last 20 years, those ultra-luxury residential complexes make up what is unofficially known as “Billionaires’ Row.” The name is apt, considering that millionaires and billionaires have flocked to those buildings to buy apartments at unimaginably high prices.

In 2021, the penthouse on the 96th floor of 432 Park Avenue was listed at an astonishing $169 million (though its Saudi owner has since slashed the offering price to a mere $130 million). No less astonishing these days, such lavish, sky-high homes often sit empty. Rather than fulfilling any functional role, many serve as nothing more than speculative investments for buyers who hope, one day, to resell them for even higher prices, avoid taxes, or launder dirty money. For some among the super-rich, flush with more money than they know what to do with, Billionaires’ Row is simply an easy place to park their wealth. 

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Those empty apartments cast a shadow over a city full of people in need of affordable housing and better wages. Reaching from the southern tip of Manhattan into Brooklyn lies the most economically unequal congressional district in the country. To the north, in the Bronx, sprawls the nation’s poorest district. Just last week, the New York Times reported that, based on 2022 census data, “the wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites earned an average household income of $545,549, or more than 53 times as much as the bottom 20 percent, who earned an average of $10,259.”

In New York, where land is a finite resource and real estate determines so much, it is a cruel irony that the richest people in the world are using their capital to literally reach ever higher into the clouds, while back on earth, the average New Yorker, grimly ensconced in reality, lives paycheck to paycheck, navigating a constant storm of food, healthcare, housing, transportation and utility costs. 

Abandonment Amid Abundance

Extreme economic inequality, characterized by a small class of the very wealthy and a broad base of poor and low-income people, may be particularly evident in cities like New York, but it’s a fact of life nationwide. In September 2023, the wealth of America’s 748 billionaires rose to $5 trillion, $2.2 trillion more than in 2017, the year the Trump administration passed massive tax changes favoring the rich. The new 2022 census data offers a very different picture of life for the nation’s poor in those same years. In fact, the numbers are eye-popping: between 2021 and 2022 alone, the overall Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) rose by nearly 5%, while child poverty doubled in size.

The U.S. Census Bureau uses two measurements of poverty: the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) and that SPM. The OPM, it’s widely agreed, is shamefully feeble and outdated, while the Supplemental Poverty Measure casts a wider net, catching more of the nuances of impoverishment. Still, even that has its limitations, missing millions of people who flutter precariously just above the official threshold of poverty, constantly at risk of falling below it.

That said, the SPM remains a helpful barometer for this country’s attempts to address poverty. Shailly Gupta-Barnes, my colleague at the Kairos Center and a poverty policy expert, observes that, because the “SPM accounts for family income after taxes and transfers…, it shows the antipoverty effects of some of the largest federal support programs.” Considering that, it’s neither an accident, nor a fluke of the market that the SPM just skyrocketed at an historic rate.

The explanation isn’t even complicated. It’s because a number of highly effective Covid-era, anti-poverty programs were callously cut. (No matter that cases of Covid are again on the rise.) When the newest census figures were released in September 2023, Gupta-Barnes explained, “41% of Americans were poor or low-income in 2022, up significantly since 2021, mainly because of the failure to extend and expand tested anti-poverty programs including the child tax credit, stimulus checks, Medicaid expansion and more.”

The take-away from all of this seems clear enough. When the abundant resources of this society are mobilized to tackle poverty, it decreases; when we undermine those efforts, it increases. The more subtle, but equally important take-away: how we measure poverty has massive implications for how we understand human deprivation in our country. As it happens, tens of millions of people who live in regular economic peril are being made invisible by our very tools for measuring poverty. How, then, can we ever hope to address it in its entirety if we can’t even see the people suffering from its iron grip?

The View from the Bottom

In 2022, the official threshold for poverty was $13,590 per year for one person and $27,750 for a family of four — with about 38 million Americans falling below that threshold. That number alone should shock the conscience of a nation as wealthy and developed as ours. But the truth is that, from the beginning, the official poverty line has been based on an arbitrary and shallow understanding of human need.

First formulated in the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson’s administration introduced its War on Poverty, the Official Poverty Measure focuses primarily on access to food for its base line and doesn’t fully take into account other critical expenses like health care, housing, and transportation. It is based on an austere assessment of how much is too little for a person to meet all of his or her needs. Because of its inadequacy, millions of Americans badly in need of support have essentially been erased from the political calculus of poverty. More than half a century later, they still remain so, since the OPM has endured not only as a bureaucratic benchmark but as the authoritative reference point for poverty, influencing our conception of who is poor and, on a policy level, who actually qualifies for a range of public programs.

Since the 1960s, much has changed, even if the official poverty line has remained untouched. The food prices on which it’s based have skyrocketed beyond the rate of inflation, alongside a host of other expenses, including housing, gas, utilities, prescription medicine, college tuition, and now essential costs like internet and cell-phone plans. 

Meanwhile, over the last four decades, wage growth has essentially stagnated. Since 1973, wages for the majority of workers have risen by just 9%, while actually falling for significant numbers of lower-income people. Productivity, on the other hand, continues to grow almost exponentially.  As a result, workers are making comparatively less than their parents did, even though they may produce more for the economy.

This crisis of low pay is no accident. As a start, over the last 50 years, CEOs have taken ever bigger chunks for themselves out of their workers’ paychecks. In 1965, the average CEO made 21 times what his or her workers did. Today, that figure is 344 times more. The reason for such a dramatic polarization of wages and wealth (as so vividly on display in the current UAW strike) is a half-century of neoliberal policy-making intensely antagonistic to the poor and beneficial for the rich.

Over the decades, our economy has been completely reshaped, transforming the kinds of jobs most of us have and the ways we do them. Today, growing parts of our workforce are automated, non-unionized, low-wage, part-time and/or contracted out, often without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. No one, therefore, should be surprised to learn that such an increasingly stark division of labor and money is accompanied by an unprecedented $17 trillion in personal debt. (And now, with student debt repayments beginning again on October 1st, there is even more needless suffering for those so poor that their economic value is in the negatives.)

In 1995, the National Academy of Sciences recommended the Supplemental Poverty Measure as a new way of assessing poverty and, in 2011, the Census Bureau began to use the SPM. But even that is insufficient. As Gupta-Barnes explains, “Although a broader and preferred measure, the SPM poverty threshold still remains an incomplete estimate of poverty. For instance, according to the SPM, a four-person household with an income of $30,000 is not poor because they fall above the designated poverty threshold. This means that many households living just above the poverty threshold aren’t counted as poor, even though they will have a hard time meeting their basic needs.”

Indeed, right above the 38 million people in official poverty, there are at least 95 million to 105 million living in a state of chronic economic precariousness, just one pay cut, health crisis, or eviction from economic ruin. In other words, today, the low-wage, laid-off, and locked out can’t easily be separated from people of every walk of life who are being economically downsized and dislocated. The old language of social science bears little resemblance to the reality we now face. When the economically “marginalized” are being discussed, it’s all too easy to imagine small bands of people living in the shadows along the edges of society. Unfortunately, the marginalized are now a near-majority of this country.

Poverty Is a Policy Choice

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, even paralyzed, by such a reality. No one — billionaires aside — is immune from the dread-inducing gravity of the situation this country finds itself in. But here’s the strange thing: deep in the depths of such a monumental mess, it’s possible to discover genuine hope. For if our reality is human-made, as it surely is, then we also have the power to change it.

Ironically, during the pandemic years, before the poverty numbers rose dramatically again in 2022, it was possible to see a notable and noticeable reduction in the numbers of poor Americans exactly because of decisive government action. In 2021, for example, the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) played leading roles in reducing child poverty to the lowest rates since the SPM was created. The protection and expansion of Medicaid and CHIP also helped mitigate food insecurity and hunger. The research firm KKF estimates that enrollment in those anti-poverty programs rose from “23.3 million to nearly 95 million from February 2020 to the end of March 2023.” And millions of families were able to stay in their homes and fight unlawful evictions during the first couple of years of the pandemic thanks to federal and state eviction moratoriums.

Unfortunately, these pandemic-era programs were sold to us as only temporary, emergency measures, though they were commonsensical policies that advanced the interests of millions of people who had been poor before Covid-19 struck. And unfortunately, alongside Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, congressional Republicans quickly rolled back some of the most striking advances, including letting CTC expire in 2022 (and they continue to advocate for ever greater cuts).

We are now in the midst of what pundits are calling the “great unwinding,” an awkward euphemism for deliberate, brutal reductions to Medicaid expansion in dozens of states. Since April, nearly six million people, including at least 1.2 million children, have been stripped of life-saving Medicaid coverage and estimates suggest that between 15 million and 24 million people may be disenrolled by next spring.

In (harsh) reality, there are at least these two interrelated ways in which poverty is a policy choice. How we choose to define poverty fundamentally shapes how we understand it, while how we govern has enormous consequences for the everyday lives of poor and low-income people. Right now, we’re either getting celebratory messages about the strength of our economy from Democrats or accusatory scapegoating from Republicans. In truth, though, the current bleak reality of poverty is the consequence of decades of neoliberal neglect and animus by both parties.

The pandemic years, sad as they have been, offered a small glimpse of what it would take to confront the needless scourge of poverty in a time of tremendous national wealth. Those investments could have been a first step in launching a full-scale assault on poverty, building off their embryonic success in the pandemic moment.

Instead, the consequences of the rollback of those programs and the threat of yet more cuts brings us to a potential turning point for the nation. Will we continue to condemn tens of millions of us to cruel and unnecessary poverty, while feeding the drive to authoritarianism or even an all-American version of fascism, or will we move swiftly and compassionately to begin lifting the load of poverty and so strengthen the very foundation of our democracy?

Copyright 2023 Liz Theoharis

Tomdispatch.com

But with corporations insistent on squeezing more profits no matter the cost, strikes are inevitable — and necessary.

Sonali Kolhatkar

Sonali Kolhatkar is the host of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. This commentary was produced by the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and adapted for syndication by OtherWords.org.

Otherwords.org

A new report reveals how stock buybacks have inflated CEO paychecks and widened pay gaps at the 100 largest low-wage corporations.

By Sarah Anderson

( Inequality.org ) – In response to strikes and union organizing drives, corporate leaders routinely insist that they simply lack the wherewithal to raise employee pay. And yet top executives seem to have little trouble finding resources for enriching themselves and wealthy shareholders.

In 2021 and 2022, S&P 500 corporations spent record sums on stock buybacks, a maneuver that pumps up stock prices by reducing the supply on the open market. Since stock-based pay makes up the bulk of executive compensation, CEOs reap huge — and completely undeserved — windfalls.

CEOs could watch cat videos all day and still reap huge windfalls through stock buybacks.

The Low-Wage 100

A new Institute for Policy Studies report, Executive Excess 2023, reveals how these financial shenanigans have widened disparities at the 100 S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median worker pay, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100.”

Between January 1, 2020 and May of this year, these companies reported a combined $341 billion in stock buyback spending.

Lowe’s led the buybacks list, plowing nearly $35 billion into share repurchases over the past three and a half years. In 2022 alone, Lowe’s spent more than $14 billion on buybacks — enough to give every one of its 301,000 U.S. employees a $46,923 bonus.

I’m guessing rank-and-file Lowe’s employees, half of whom make less than $30,000 per year, could find more productive uses for that money.

During their stock buyback spree, Low-Wage 100 CEOs’ personal stock holdings increased more than three times as fast as their firms’ median worker pay. At the 65 buyback companies where the same person held the top job between 2019 and 2022, the Low-Wage 100 CEOs’ personal stock holdings soared 33 percent to an average of $184.7 million. Median pay at these firms rose only 10 percent to an average of $31,972.

Image by Jonathan from Pixabay

FedEx founder and CEO Frederick Smith has the largest stockpile in the Low-Wage 100. With $3.6 billion in stock buybacks since January 2020, Smith’s personal stock holdings have grown 65 percent to more than $5 billion. By contrast, median pay for workers at the notoriously anti-union company fell by 20 percent to $39,177 during this period.

Taxpayer support for huge CEO-worker pay gaps

What makes all this even more upsetting? Taxpayers are actually supporting, through federal contracts, the buyback-fueled disparities at FedEx and 50 other Low-Wage 100 firms.

FedEx pocketed $6.2 billion in fiscal years 2020-2023 for mail services for the Veterans Administration and other agencies. The largest federal contractor in the Low-Wage 100 is another company known for union-busting — Amazon. Over the past few years, Amazon has pocketed more than $10 billion in web services deals from Uncle Sam while spending nearly $6 billion repurchasing their shares.

Fortunately, support is growing for solutions to our CEO pay problem.

Solutions to executive excess

Before 1982, stock buybacks were viewed as market manipulation and largely banned. President Joe Biden hasn’t yet called for reinstating that ban, but he did rail against buybacks in his State of the Union address this year and called for quadrupling a new 1 percent excise tax on share repurchases.

The Biden administration is also starting to use federal money going to corporations as a lever for change. In an important first step, the administration is giving preferential treatment in the awarding of new semiconductor manufacturing subsidies to companies that agree to give up buybacks. Now they should extend that policy to all corporations receiving taxpayer money.

Buybacks are not the only trick CEOs can use to inflate their own paychecks. Over my decades of research, I’ve documented how corporate leaders have used myriad shady means to hit personal jackpots, from cooking the books and moving executive bonus goalposts to creating housing bubbles and other reckless financial schemes.

To tackle this systemic problem, policymakers need to go bolder. Executive Excess 2023 offers an extensive menu of CEO pay reforms. One of the most innovative: tax penalties for companies with huge CEO-worker pay gaps. Two major cities — San Francisco and Portland, Oregon — are already generating significant revenue through such taxes. Seattle is now considering a similar approach.

The idea that the person in the corner office is hundreds of times more valuable than other employees is a myth — even if that person is not just watching cat videos. All employees contribute to the profits of a corporation, and our economy would be far healthier if the fruits of our labor were more equitably shared.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project and co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. She is the author of the report Executive Excess 2023.

Via Inequality.org

Content licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License

“American oligarchs have used their wealth to accumulate an unprecedented level of political power, which they’ve used to amass even greater wealth. We must stop this cycle.

By Jake Johnson | –

( Commondreams) – A group of progressive U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday proposed a wealth tax that would automatically rise during periods of surging inequality and fall once inequality moderates.

The tax is at the heart of new legislation called the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Reverse Community Harms (OLIGARCH) Act, which was introduced by Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Summer Lee (D-Pa.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.).

“Inequality in the United States is worse in 2023 than it was during the Gilded Age,” Lee of California said in a statement. “It is unacceptable that millions of hardworking people remain impoverished, while the top 0.1% hold over 20% of the nation’s wealth.”

“The OLIGARCH Act is the solution we need to close the exorbitant wealth gap in America and create a tax system where everyone pays their fair share,” she added. “This level of wealth is not just a source of economic injustice, but a major threat to democracy.”

According to a summary of the bill released by the Patriotic Millionaires—an advocacy group that helped craft the measure—the wealth tax would have four brackets:

• 2% for all wealth between 1,000 and 10,000 times median household wealth;
• 4% for all wealth between 10,000 and 100,000 times median household wealth;
• 6% for all wealth between 100,000 and 1,000,000 times median household wealth; and
• 8% for all wealth over 1,000,000 times median household wealth;

“In the unlikely event median household wealth fell below $50,000 from its current level of about $120,000, the thresholds would be fixed at $50 million, $500 million, $5 billion, and $50 billion respectively,” the summary states. “Otherwise, the tax is not pegged to a specified dollar threshold. By design, this causes the tax to wax and wane with wealth concentration, intensifying during periods of rising inequality, but tapering off to near non-existence when median household wealth increases and inequality moderates to an acceptable level.”

The legislation would also require at least a 30% IRS audit rate on households affected by the new wealth tax, according to the summary. One recent estimate indicated that the richest Americans dodge taxes on more than 20% of their earnings, costing the federal government around $175 billion in revenue each year.

And yet low-income households have been targeted by IRS audits at a far higher rate than rich households in recent years.

In 2022, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, “the taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates—five and a half times virtually everyone else—were low-income wage-earners taking the earned income tax credit.”

“Extreme wealth inequality has become an existential threat to our country.”

During the coronavirus pandemic—which killed more than a million Americans and threw the country into economic turmoil—U.S. billionaires added trillions of dollars to their collective fortunes largely tax-free.

In the first half of this year, the 500 richest people on the planet added a combined $852 billion to their net worth—an average of $14 million each day.

Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, warned in a statement Wednesday that “extreme wealth inequality has become an existential threat to our country.” The advocacy group pointed to a 2009 paper by political scientists Jeffrey Winters and Benjamin Page, who estimated that “each of the top 400 or so richest Americans had on average about 22,000 times the political power of the average member of the bottom 90%, and each of the top 100 or so had nearly 60,000 times as much.”

“American oligarchs have used their wealth to accumulate an unprecedented level of political power, which they’ve used to amass even greater wealth,” said Pearl. “We must stop this cycle by passing the OLIGARCH Act as soon as possible.”

This story has been updated to include comment from Rep. Barbara Lee.

Officially, France operates under the rule of a colorblind identity, There are no Black, white, or brown French, just a French citizen. However, the shooting of Nahel has reignited a debate over systematic racism that many French politicians refuse to acknowledge exists. Yet, in reality, the problem runs deeper in the country and is more complicated.

Embed from Getty Images
Protesters hold placards reading “Justice for Adama, Nahel, Alhoussein and all the others” (R) and “Free our comrades” as they attend a demonstration against “State racism” in front of the court of Nanterre, western Paris, on July 10, 2023, following the shooting of a teenage driver by French police in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on June 27. More than 3,700 people were taken into police custody in connection with the protests since Nahel’s death, including at least 1,160 minors, according to official figures. (Photo by JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP) (Photo by JULIEN DE ROSA/AFP via Getty Images)

While many police officers reject the idea that minority groups are being discriminated against because of their skin color, a lot of incidents throughout the years prove otherwise. Solely in 2023, Nahel’s death has been the third police fatal shooting at a traffic stop. In most of the shootings throughout the years, the victims had been either black or of North African origin.  Furthermore, in 2021, Amnesty International along with other rights groups filed a lawsuit against the French state accusing it of police profiling on a racial basis.  

Another point that hints at police racism could be seen from the last French election. In that election, more than half of the police officers in France admitted that they would be voting for Marine Le Pen. The far-right candidate whose campaign focused mainly on anti-immigrant and anti-muslim rhetoric.

Nonetheless, this issue is not merely a police issue, it goes deep into French society.

A recent survey by the French representative council of Black Associations discovered that most black people in France have suffered from racial discrimination at one point or another.

Perhaps a better indicator of these sentiments can be seen in the fundraiser started for the 38-year-old police officer Florian M, who shot and killed Nahel. This fundraiser which was started by Jean Messiha, a former spokesperson for the far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, had collected over €1m while a similar fundraiser for the family of the victim had amassed less than €200,000.

These sentiments attributed to French society have also, in more than one instance, been encouraged by French media. In more than one example, the French media frequently relied heavily on police sources without verifying them, but have also vilified and criminalized Nahel, as an individual who deserved to be shot dead, rather than a victim of police brutality.

So this issue is not only a police problem but it also has strings all over the French population. But one cannot turn a blind eye to this problem within the French politics itself.  

As we just mentioned earlier,  In the last France election, A rhetoric spread by the right-wing candidate Le Pen showcases the existence of these racist sentiments within French politics. However, these sentiments are not something new. Since the start of immigration waves toward France, it has been the strategy of French governments to designate specific suburbs away from city centers to host immigrant communities. In theory, to provide support for these communities, but in practice, it left these communities isolated and in dire need of opportunities.

That in itself explains how the recent riots are not something new for the French capital as it echoes the same tragedy of the 2005 riots. It was a riot instigated by the accidental electrocution and death of two teenagers who were hiding from police.

Many individuals believe that both the 2005 and 2023 riots have these deeply-seated concerns from these communities as a catalyst for the riots. Concerning the 2005 riots, Eric Favreau, a French social commentator, claimed that people living in these communities don’t seek violence “The inhabitants don’t want it. The Muslims don’t want it. Even the drug dealers don’t want it. But the problems in these suburbs have been left to stagnate for 30 years, and somehow they’re right. The more they burn cars, the more we pay attention to them (NPR) “.

Embed from Getty Images
PARIS, FRANCE – JULY 8:Despite the ban on the annual march in tribute to Adama Traore, several hundred people gathered at Place de la Republique against police violence and the current climate of repression, at the call of Assa Traore, the Truth and Justice for Adama committee and NUPES-LFI deputies, in Paris on July 8, 2023,France. The memorial commemorated Adama Traoré, a black French man who died in custody in 2016 after he was arrested and restrained by police. The memorial comes the week after the death of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, who was killed by police in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, an incident which sparked protests across the country. (Photo by Antoine Gyori – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

Similarly, Amine Kessaci, the brother of another victim of a police shooting, in an interview for BBC denounced the violence but argued that “There are no other options. There are no companies coming here and saying we’ll pay you more than minimum wage… here people are supermarket cashiers or cleaners or security guards. We can’t be judges, lawyers or accountants.” (BBC).

While the issue of systemic racism in France is not something new or something that can easily be sorted out, the way the French government has been dealing with it will only deepen the issue. Ignoring this issue will not make it go away. When France was called out by the UN for the shooting of Nahel, the French Foreign Ministry blatantly claimed “Any accusation of racism or systemic discrimination in the police force in France is totally unfounded (LeMonde)”.

Also, the way that Macron and the French government have been dealing with the riots depicts a misunderstanding of the roots of the issue. Macron tried to paint the recent riots as an issue of moral crumbling and youth rebellion on one hand and even showcased some signs of authoritarianism by threatening to cut off social media to stop street violence.

All in all, the steps taken by the French government at the moment seem to mostly deflect the rooted issues that not only caused this riot but also the 2005 riots. A self-reflection by the government and the French people is quite necessary before even thinking about starting a conversation about Racism within the colorblind country.