All India Democratic Students Organization
It’s November 18th, the John Deere strike is finally over, and the workers did pretty damn well in their contract.
Much of the press coverage of Cuba last week focused on the anti-government protests that didn’t eventuate. Less covered has been something of potentially greater global significance: its vaccination drive.
After a dire twelve months, when a too hasty reopening sent the pandemic surging, deaths peaking, and the country back into a crippling shutdown, a successful vaccination program has turned the pandemic around in the country. Cuba is now one of the few lower-income countries to have not only vaccinated a majority of its population, but the only one to have done so with a vaccine it developed on its own.
The saga suggests a path forward for the developing world as it continues struggling with the pandemic in the face of ongoing corporate-driven vaccine apartheid, and points more broadly to what’s possible when medical science is decoupled from private profit.
The Safer Gamble
According to Johns Hopkins University, as of the time of writing, Cuba has fully vaccinated 78 percent of its people, putting it ninth in the world, above wealthy countries like Denmark, China, and Australia (the United States, with a little below 60 percent of its population vaccinated, is ranked fifty-sixth). The turnaround since the vaccination campaign began in May has revived the country’s fortunes in the face of the twin shocks of the pandemic and an intensifying US blockade.
After a peak of nearly ten thousand infections and close to one hundred deaths each day, both figures have now plummeted. With 100 percent of the country having taken at least one vaccine dose by the end of last month, the country reopened its borders on November 15 to tourism, roughly a tenth of its economy, and has reopened schools. This makes Cuba an outlier among low-income countries, which have vaccinated only 2.8 percent of their combined populations. This is owed largely to vaccine hoarding by the developed world and their jealous guarding of patent monopolies, which bar poorer countries from developing generic versions of the vaccines that were produced through public funding in the first place.
Key to this outcome was Cuba’s decision to develop its own vaccines, two of which — Abdala, named for a poem penned by an independence hero, and Soberana 2, Spanish for “sovereign” — were finally given official regulatory approval in July and August. In the words of Vicente Vérez Bencomo, the internationally acclaimed head of the country’s Finlay Vaccine Institute, the country was “betting it safe” by waiting longer to manufacture its own vaccines. This way, it would avoid dependence on bigger allies like Russia and China while adding a new commercial export at a time of ongoing economic hardship.
Opinion | We’re a Small Arkansas Newspaper. Why Is the State Making Us Sign a Pledge About Israel? »
It soon became clear that The Arkansas Times had to answer our advertiser. Though boycotting Israel could not have been further from our minds and though state funding is a significant source of our income, our answer was no. We don’t take political positions in return for advertising. If we signed the pledge, I believe, we’d be signing away our right to freedom of conscience. And as journalists, we would be unworthy of the protections granted us under the First Amendment.
And so, instead of signing, we sued to overturn the law, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, on the grounds that it violates the First and 14th Amendments. We are still fighting it.
The Arkansas legislature is dominated by conservative evangelicals, such as the former Senate majority leader, Bart Hester. He is featured in the new documentary film “Boycott,” directed by Julia Bacha and produced by the group Just Vision. “Boycott” follows three plaintiffs, including me, challenging their states’ anti-boycott laws. In the film, Senator Hester explains that his religious belief motivates everything he does as a government official, including writing Arkansas’s anti-boycott law. He also explains his eschatological beliefs: “There is going to be certain things that happen in Israel before Christ returns. There will be famines and disease and war. And the Jewish people are going to go back to their homeland. At that point Jesus Christ will come back to the earth.” He added, “Anybody, Jewish or not Jewish, that doesn’t accept Christ, in my opinion, will end up going to hell.” Senator Hester and his coreligionists may see the anti-boycott law as a way to support Israel, whose return to its biblical borders, according to their reading of scripture, is one of the precursors to the Second Coming and Armageddon.
In other words, Senator Hester and other supporters of the law entwine religion and public life in a manner that we believe intrudes on our First Amendment rights.
These types of laws are not restricted to states in which fundamentalist Christians hold sway. In 2016, California passed a law requiring large contractors working with a state agency to certify that they will not discriminate against Israel, and Andrew Cuomo, as governor of New York, signed an executive order that compels state entities to divest money and assets from a list of organizations regarded by the state as participating in the boycott. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York proposed national anti-boycott legislation.
Let’s be clear, states are trading their citizens’ First Amendment rights for what looks like unconditional support for a foreign government.
Workers and activists in more than 20 countries are expected to protest as part of a campaign led by “Make Amazon Pay,” a coalition of 70 trade unions and organizations including Greenpeace, Oxfam, and Amazon Workers International.
Individuals everywhere “from oil refineries, to factories, to warehouses, to data centers, to corporate offices” are expected to participate in the November 26 event, according to the campaign.
“The pandemic has exposed how Amazon places profits ahead of workers, society, and our planet,” Make Amazon Pay wrote in a list of demands shared on its website. “Amazon takes too much and gives back too little. It is time to Make Amazon Pay.”
The protests come amid growing dissent from Amazon employees over working conditions, including long hours, low pay, and complex performance review systems. Make Amazon Pay’s demands include increased salaries, better job security, and “suspending the harsh productivity and surveillance regime Amazon has used to squeeze workers.”
The coalition also calls for a “pay back to society” that includes enhanced sustainability efforts, increased transparency over data and privacy, and ending partnerships with police forces and immigration authorities that are “institutionally racist.”
“Amazon is not alone in these bad practices but it sits at the heart of a failed system that drives the inequality, climate breakdown, and democratic decay that scar our age,” Make Amazon Pay wrote in its demands.
In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told Insider that the company is “inventing and investing significantly” in several of the categories the campaign addresses, including climate efforts, like a commitment to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 and pushes to improve competitive wages and benefits.
“These groups represent a variety of interests, and while we are not perfect in any area, if you objectively look at what Amazon is doing in each one of these areas you’ll see that we do take our role and our impact very seriously,” Nantel said.
The rank-and-file membership of the Teamsters sent a clear message – they are ready for the union to fight the employers for stronger contracts and end the age of endless concessions to the bosses. Hoffa Jr. sealed his fate in 2018-2019 when he used a bogus clause in the union’s constitution to approve the UPS contract, despite the membership voting to reject the weak contract three separate times.
The Moon. Art by Karina Pavlova, from The Corrupted Tarot.
A shattered reflection of a werewolf—as unstable in her physical form as she is in her wrecked mind. She denies accepting all the facets of her nature, including her weakness and monstrousness. When the corrupted Moon appears in a reading, you must muster your courage and sense of self, or you will remain lost in the darkness.
