On this day, 3 February 1953, the Batepá massacre took place in São Tomé and Príncipe as Portuguese colonial authorities tried to quell protests of native Creole people, known as forros.
The colony faced labour shortages. Plantation owners relied mostly on contract workers from Cape Verde and Portuguese colonies on the African mainland like Angola and Mozambique, and public works were often undertaken by forced labourers, kidnapped by police.
Forros considered plantation work as slave labour, and refused to do it. So colonial authorities implemented various measures to try to force them into wage labour, like outlawing sales of alcohol that they made, and increasing the poll tax. They also planned to bring 15,000 more people from Cape Verde, and rumours spread that the government planned to seize forros’ land to give to the settlers, and forced them into wage work on the field.
Large protests, mostly by forros, broke out across the colony on February 3. Authorities claimed that they were part of a communist rebellion, and formed militias to crush them.
Over the next few days, security forces and militias killed hundreds of forros. Some were suffocated, others burned to death, and many more beaten, tortured and sentenced to forced labour. Bodies of the victims, the governor reportedly told his subordinates to “Throw this shit into the sea to avoid troubles”.
A subsequent investigation by Portuguese authorities concluded that there was no communist plot, however the governor was still praised and promoted. None of the murderers were prosecuted, but seven forros were convicted of murder for killing two police officers.
The massacre spurred a growth of support for independence, and February 3 is today remembered as the Day of the Martyrs of Liberty, and national holiday. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1644181005767043/?type=3
COVID-19 Vaccine Developers Want to Keep Getting Billions in Public Money With No Strings Attached »
When the US government awarded over $10 billion in contracts and advance purchase commitments to drug companies working on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, it did not require the recipients of government money to agree to offer their products at fair prices or share intellectual property rights to enable faster production.
Now, two of the companies awarded those contracts — Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson — are trying to prevent shareholders from voting on resolutions to require the companies to disclose information about the impact of government funding on vaccine access.
The US government has purchased two hundred million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and one hundred million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccines, for about $20 and $10 per dose, respectively.
The shareholder resolutions, filed by members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a shareholder activism organization, ask those two companies to inform their shareholders how “receipt of public financial support for development and manufacture of products for COVID-19 is being, or will be, taken into account when making decisions that affect access to such products, such as setting prices.”
Similar resolutions were also filed at Eli Lilly, Gilead, Merck, and Regeneron.
Both Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson filed “no action requests” with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in December, asking the agency to rule that the companies can withhold the proposals from shareholders. Neither company responded to the Daily Poster requests for comment.
“Did You Take Government Funding Into Account?”
In nearly identical filings prepared by the same lawyer, both Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson argued that the proposals attempt to “micromanage” the companies “by requesting an intricately detailed report.”
Meg Jones-Monteiro, ICCR’s health equity director, called the micromanaging claim “ludicrous.”
The claim that investors are trying to “micromanage” the companies comes from an SEC precedent finding that certain “ordinary business operations” should not be subject to shareholder oversight. But Jones-Monteiro argues that the issue of vaccine pricing during pandemics doesn’t fall into this category.
