Sunday, March 31, 2019

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Michael Moore's film Sicko, Part 1












https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpgRuc2Ns10
































































Addiction and debt slavery: the real growth industries of the USA















Addiction and debt slavery are prime examples.




So many people are making fortunes off of the opioid CRISIS, that it is a real growth industry.


Opioid overdoses accounted for more than 42,000 deaths in 2016, more than any previous year on record. An estimated 40% of opioid overdose deaths involved a prescription opioid.

https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html





And the same holds for the student loan debt CRISIS, which is only getting worse.


The next generation of graduates will include more borrowers who will probably never be able to pay off their debt. Student loan debt in 2019 is the highest ever.

The latest student loan debt statistics for 2019 show how serious the student loan debt crisis has become for borrowers across all demographics and age groups. There are more than 44 million borrowers who collectively owe $1.5 trillion in student loan debt in the U.S. alone.


Student loan debt is now the second highest consumer debt category - behind only mortgage debt - and higher than both credit cards and auto loans. Borrowers in the Class of 2017, on average, owe $28,650, according to the Institute for College Access and Success.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2019/02/25/student-loan-debt-statistics-2019/#327aba50133f







Joe Biden Backed Bills To Make It Harder For Americans To Reduce Their Student Debt.

https://www.ibtimes.com/joe-biden-backed-bills-make-it-harder-americans-reduce-their-student-debt-2094664






The industry's political generosity increased in the years leading up to Congress' passage in 2003 of a Medicare prescription drug benefit. Since then, industry spending levels have fluctuated, though they have usually hovered around the $30 million range, including during the 2014 cycle when that number was nearly $32 million. 2012 was the cycle when the industry contributed the most -- over $50.7 million. The pharmaceutical industry has traditionally supported Republican candidates, with the 2008 and 2010 cycles serving as the only exceptions. During the 2014 cycle, Republicans received 58 percent of industry contributions whereas Democrats received only 42 percent.

The top contributors during the 2014 cycle were Pfizer Inc. (over $1.5 million), Amgen Inc. (above $1.3 million) and McKesson Corp. (more than $1.1 million).

The industry's policy goals include resisting government-run health care, ensuring a quicker approval process for drugs and products entering the market and strengthening intellectual property protections.

In terms of lobbying, key players in 2014 included the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (over $16.6 million), Amgen Inc(nearly $8.6 million), Pfizer Inc (nearly $8.5 million), the Biotechnology Industry Organization (almost $8.3 million) and Eli Lilly & Co (around $8.2 million). Lobbying efforts focus on the patent system, research funding and Medicare. While lobbying totals were fairly high at over $229.1 million in 2014, the industry hit a record in spending nearly 272.8 million on lobbying activities 2009 -- around the time when the Affordable Care Act was being debated in Congress.

One piece of legislation the industry has lobbied heavily on recently is the 21st Century Cures Act. The bill, which passed the House, would encourage the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to rely less on randomized controlled trials when deciding whether or not to put a new drug on the market. Critics argue that this would all but guarantee that more drugs will hit pharmacy shelves at a faster pace, though potentially at the expense of patient safety.




https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/background.php?cycle=2018&ind=H04





















UPS workers confront wall of union-company collusion in local supplement fights














By Kayla Costa and Mark Witkowski


27 March 2019





After the Teamsters union unilaterally imposed a sellout contract on nearly 250,000 workers at United Parcel Service (UPS) last October, resistant workers are now confronting efforts by union bureaucrats to push through local and regional supplemental agreements.

In addition to the national master agreements for UPS and UPS Freight, workers vote on three regional agreements for the Central, Western and Eastern regions, and twenty-five supplements and riders covering union locals, urban metro areas and state regions. These additional agreements sort out particular details relating to health care and pension benefits, wages, quotas for job creations, vacation days and overtime for workers within these regions.

These agreements must be approved across the US before the national agreement can technically go into effect, though UPS, with the assistance of the Teamsters, has already ramped up exploitation of the workforce and announced a profit-boosting “transformation plan.” Serving as a direct arm of corporate management, the Teamsters union is eager to rush through these local and supplemental votes to give UPS the green light to establish a new tier of “hybrid” drivers, maintain poverty wages for the part-time workforce, and ramp up workloads and harassment.

During the nationwide voting process, workers voted against the following six tentative agreements: Central Pennsylvania, Western Pennsylvania, Local 243 Metro Detroit in Michigan, Upstate and Western New York, Local 804 New York City, and Trailer Conditioners Inc. (TCI). Their rejection sent union representatives back to the negotiating table, only to return with a second offer that workers knew was equally bad if not worse than the first offer.

Since the initial rejection, only the TCI supplement was approved, by a 58 to 42 percent “yes” vote. Workers voted against the follow-up offers in Upstate and Western New York, Western Pennsylvania, and Metro Detroit, and negotiations are ongoing behind workers’ backs in Central Pennsylvania and Local 804 in New York. However, workers confront the anti-democratic efforts of the union every step of the way.

For example, after workers voted by 65 percent against the Upstate and Western New York supplement, the Teamsters used the obscure “two-thirds clause” in the union constitution to declare it ratified. The clause requires a two-thirds vote to defeat a contract, instead of a simple majority, if less than 50 percent of eligible members participate in the ratification vote. Written into the constitution thirty years ago, this clause was used for the first time when 54 percent of parcel division workers voted against the national agreement last fall.

More recently, in early March, UPS workers voted against the supplemental agreements for Western Pennsylvania and Metro Detroit by 96 percent and 88 percent, respectively. Unable to use the bogus two-thirds loophole, Teamsters executives debated the best strategy to drive through the sellout as quickly as possible.

The faction of the union represented by Denis Taylor, the Package Division Director of the union, and President James Hoffa prepared to impose the agreements unilaterally, using “emergency” clauses in the constitution. Fearing that this would provoke a rebellion, the majority of the leaders on the General Executive Board pushed against this plan and instead suggested the pursuit of the normal strategy of wearing down opposition through repeated votes on sellout after sellout.

Avral Thompson, the Vice President of the Central Region, warned that, “The imposition would violate the trust and solidarity of our members and local unions,” adding that local leaders in the relevant states have threatened legal action if the agreements were forced through.

In 2013, the Hoffa administration amended the constitution in order to unilaterally impose the supplements and riders after workers voted three times to reject union-backed deals.

The Teamsters United and Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) have played a treacherous role by insisting that rank-and-file workers cannot take any action unless it is authorized by the Teamsters bureaucracy, which has repeatedly trampled on the rights of workers on behalf of management.
With sentiment growing for wildcat strikes and increasing support for the call by the WSWS UPS Workers Newletter for UPS workers to form rank-and-file committees to take the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the Teamsters, the two so-called reform factions did everything to uphold the authority of corrupt bureaucracy.

At the same time, they claimed the union would be democratized by electing TU and TDU-backed candidates in local elections and replacing Hoffa in the race for Teamsters president in 2021. But the presidency of TDU-backed candidate Ron Carey in 1992, who was elected in a US Labor Department-supervised election, did nothing to change the character of the Teamsters. Carey betrayed the 1997 UPS strike, signing a deal that sanctioned the hiring of part-time employees as full-timers with a reduced pay scale.

Carey was later brought down in a corruption scandal implicating the AFL-CIO and the Democratic National Committee.

As the union continues its campaign to ram through the sellout for hundreds of thousands of exploited UPS drivers, warehouse workers and other employees, the TDU and TU are reprising the same dead-end proposal as they did after the rejection of the national contract, telling workers to send the negotiators back to the table for a “good” contract. This is a fraud. The Teamsters is a business, not a genuine workers’ organization, and it is led by affluent executives who have a direct financial stake in increasing the exploitation of UPS workers and increasing the profits of the corporation.

UPS workers must draw the lessons from this past year and begin to form rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions, to fight the corporate-union conspiracy and advance the interests of drivers, warehouse and other workers. These committees should link up with the fight of workers at Amazon, FedEx and other logistics companies in the US and internationally, to begin a coordinated effort to mobilize the enormous strength of workers in this strategically critical sector of the world economy. An industrial counter-offensive must be combined with a political struggle against both big business parties and the capitalist system they defend. The aim of such a struggle must be the socialist transformation of the economy, including transforming the logistics industry into a public enterprise, collectively owned and democratically controlled by the working class.






























Widespread losses of pollinating insects revealed across Britain















Wild bees and hoverflies lost from a quarter of the places they were found in 1980, study shows



Environment editor


Tue 26 Mar 2019 12.00 EDT








A widespread loss of pollinating insects in recent decades has been revealed by the first national survey in Britain, which scientists say “highlights a fundamental deterioration” in nature.

The analysis of 353 wild bee and hoverfly species found the insects have been lost from a quarter of the places they were found in 1980. A third of the species now occupy smaller ranges, with just one in 10 expanding their extent, and the average number of species found in a square kilometre fell by 11.



A small group of 22 bee species known to be important in pollinating crops such as oilseed rape saw a rise in range, potentially due to farmers increasingly planting wild flowers around fields. However, the scientists found “severe” declines in other bee species from 2007, coinciding with the introduction of a widely used neonicotinoid insecticide, which has since been banned.

Researchers have become increasingly concerned about dramatic drops in populations of insects, which underpin much of nature. Some warned in February that these falls threaten a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, while studies from Germany and Puerto Rico have shown plunging numbers in the last 25 to 35 years.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, is based on more than 700,000 sightings made by volunteers across Britain from 1980 to 2013. These are used to map the range of each species of bee and hoverfly over time. The data did not allow the assessment of numbers of insects, but some researchers think populations have fallen faster than range.

Pollinating insects are vital to human food security, as three-quarters of crops depend on them. They are also crucial to other wildlife, both as food and as pollinators of wild plants. “The declines in Britain can be viewed as a warning about the health of our countryside,” said Gary Powney at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, who led the research.

He called for more volunteers to take part in the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme: “Their contribution is vital for us to understand what is happening in our landscape.” Another recent study found that allotments, weedy corners and fancy gardens can all be urban havens for bees.

The biggest factor in the decline in pollinators is likely to be the destruction of wild habitats and use of pesticides as farming has intensified. But the analysis also revealed a particularly big drop of 55% in the range of upland bee and hoverfly species, and significant falls in northern Britain, which may result from climate change making conditions too warm.

Among the bees whose range has shrunk are the formerly widespread red-shanked carder bee, whose extent fell by 42%, and the large shaggy bee, whose range fell 53%. But the lobe-spurred furrow bee, which was once rare, has expanded its range fivefold and is now considered an important crop pollinator in England.

Powney said the increased range of the bees most commonly pollinating crops is good news and might be a result of more oilseed rape being grown, as well as wildflower margins being planted. But he also warned: “They are a relatively small group of species. Therefore, with species having declined overall, it would be risky to rely on this group to support the long-term food security for our country. If anything happens to them in the future there will be fewer other species to ‘step up’.”

Prof Dave Goulson, at the University of Sussex and not part of the latest research, said: “Previous studies have described declines in UK butterflies, moths, carabid beetles, bees and hoverflies – this new study confirms that declines in insects are ongoing.”

If the losses of upland and northern species are due to climate change, “then we can expect far more rapid declines of these species in the future, as climate change has barely got started”, he said. Goulson also said the start of more rapid declines in southern bees after 2007 coincided with the first use of now-banned neonicotinoid pesticides.

Roy van Grunsven, at the Dutch Butterfly Conservation project, said the decline in numbers of insects was very likely to be a lot higher than the shrinking of their range: “Going from flowery meadows full of bees to intensive agriculture with a few individuals in a road verge does not result in a change in distribution, but of course is a huge change in [numbers].”

Matt Shardlow, of the conservation charity Buglife, said unless the pesticide approval process was improved to help bee safety and green subsidies were targeted to create corridors that connect wild spaces, we can expect the declines to continue or worsen.