The price of war

In 2019 alone (the last year for which worldwide spending figures are available), federal spending on the U.S. military soared to $732 billion.  (Other military analysts, who included military-related spending, put the figure at $1.25 trillion.)

  As a result, the United States, with about 4 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 38 percent of world military spending.  Although it’s certainly true that other nations engaged in military buildups as well, China

accounted for only 14 percent of global military spending that year, while Russia accounted for only 3 percent.  Indeed, the United States spent more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.

In February 2020, the administration introduced a 2021 fiscal year budget proposal that would devote 55 percent of the federal government’s $1.3 trillion discretionary spending to the military.  By 2030, the military proportion of the federal budget would rise to 62 percent.

While the COVID-19 pandemic continues with over 110,000 deaths thus far, a large portion of the economy has collapsed, unemployment has reached the catastrophic levels of the Great Depression, and American cities are torn by civil unrest Republican officials argue that  public assistance measures are “too expensive.” America cannot afford to address its deep problems in healthcare, educational opportunity, and decent housing. Military spending is affordable! America possesses 5,800 nuclear weapons, capable of being launched from land, sea, and air, and is presently involved in a vast “modernization” program to rebuild the entire nuclear arsenal.  The price tag for this enormous undertaking over the next three decades, has been estimated as at least $1.5 trillion.

Patents Before Patients

The United Nations, International Red Cross and Red Crescent, and others said it was a “moral imperative” that everyone have access to a “people’s vaccine.” 

 Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo agreed.

“The global spread of COVID-19 has told us in no uncertain terms that disease knows no boundaries and no country can afford to go it alone,” he said. “Only a people’s vaccine with equality and solidarity at its core can protect all of humanity from the virus. ... A bold international agreement to this end cannot wait.”

But such grand declarations are unenforceable.

“We have this beautiful picture of everyone getting the vaccine, but there is no road map on how to do it,” said Yuan Qiong Hu, a senior legal and policy adviser at Medecins Sans Frontieres in Geneva. She said numerous problems must be resolved to manage distribution and that few measures have been taken. In the past, Hu said, companies have often applied for patents for nearly every step of a vaccine’s development and production: from the biological material like cell lines used, to the preservative needed to stretch vaccine doses and even how the shots are administered.

“We can’t afford to face these multiple layers of private rights to create a ‘people’s vaccine,’” she said, urging “very open conditions” so every manufacturer capable of doing so can produce a vaccine once its proven effective.

The World Health Organization and others have called for a COVID-19 “patents pool,” where intellectual property rights would be surrendered so pharmaceuticals could freely share data and technical knowledge. Numerous countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada and Germany have already begun revising their licensing laws to allow them to suspend intellectual property rights if authorities decide there is an overwhelming need given the pandemic. But the response from the industry has been lukewarm. Executives at Pfizer and some other major drug makers say they oppose suspending patent rights for potential COVID-19 vaccines.

 There is no precedent for divvying up vaccines that would arguably be needed by every country on the planet.

“We can’t just rely on goodwill to ensure access,” said Arzoo Ahmed, of Britain’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics, noting that precedents of how innovative drugs have been distributed are not encouraging. “With HIV/AIDS, it took 10 years for the drugs to reach people in lower-income countries."

https://apnews.com/4b93252bb290874c7c295cd2cb1a620c

Protecting their land

PanAust, an Australian-registered miner ultimately owned by the Chinese state-owned Guangdong Rising Assets Management, has proposed building a gold, silver and copper mine on the Frieda river, a tributary to the Sepik.

Chiefs from 28 haus tambarans – “spirit houses” – representing 78,000 people along Papua New Guinea’s remote Sepik river have formally declared they want a proposal for the country’s largest ever mine halted.

Haus tambarans are the cultural and political hub of villages in the Sepik region. Pre-colonisation their function was analogous to a local parliament, where debates were held and collective decisions taken. But they also play important roles in spiritual and ancestral connection and in rituals and initiations. In an unprecedented move, the 28 haus tambarans issued a collective Supreme Sukundimi Declaration calling for “a total ban on the Frieda river mine”.

It said: “The river is the life of the Sepik and therefore it must be protected at all cost. It is our innate role to guard the river from exploitation and destruction by outsiders. Our future is in peril from this proposed mine and, therefore, we have gathered together as guardians of the river to stand firm as one.”

Peni, from Korogu village on the Sepik River, said the villages felt the need to make the collective declaration – admissible in court – because “they do not trust the government, the police, the army and the outsider who is the owner of the Frieda mine”.

Peni said villages along the Frieda and Sepik rivers would seek to halt the mine through legal and legislative channels but would ultimately defend their ancestral lands.

“There will be an uprising in the Sepik region and lives will be lost. No one will win this uprising. The government of PNG will have blood on their hands.”

The mine would be the largest in PNG’s history, and one of the largest in the world, covering 16,000 hectares, and is forecast to yield gold, silver and copper worth an estimated US$1.5bn a year for more than 30 years.

Campaigner Emmanuel Peni told the Guardian PanAust had not been “honest or transparent” in its consultations with those who live in the Sepik river valley. He said people whose lives and livelihoods depended on the river feared their villages could be permanently damaged or destroyed by the mine, citing the case of Rio Tinto’s Panguna mine, which has left downstream villages with poisoned water, polluted fields and a ruined river valley.

“If the dam collapses it will be catastrophic and destroy the Sepik river and our way of life,” he said. “We need to ensure that the Sepik is protected. It is our identity, our life, and the heartbeat of our culture. A life without the Sepik river as we know it would devastate our communities forever.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/18/papua-new-guinea-chiefs-call-for-halt-to-plan-for-countrys-largest-ever-mine

An Uprising Means Rising Up From Your Knees

 If the ruling class are fortunate the present discontent remain protests but if working people are lucky then it will become an uprising against a whole system.  Instead of letting the rage create change, corporations and institutions are declaring themselves in solidarity to contain any intensification and escalation of the anger. They promise improvements in social services, more investment in local communities, redistribution of budgets describing it as de-funding the police. CEOs cry crocodile tears in support of the oppressed, offering platitudes and empty words of sympathy, token gestures of grief. Yet none dare to question or challenge the social system which systematically robs working people of their labor, their health and their lives. The people in power are only interested in saving themselves. Socialists say this is now the time to create an entirely different world.

The capitalist system came into being only after a number of revolutions and half-revolutions. The period of its birth lasted for decades, The change from the feudal system to capitalism was not as drastic as will be the change from capitalism to socialism, for the latter implies not the change of one system of exploitation for another, but the elimination of all exploitation and class rule. Socialism is the system of society that will carry on production FIRST, LAST AND ALWAYS to supply the needs of babies, their mothers and their fathers – and to hell with profits.

Socialism is based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution, upon production for use as against production for profit, upon the abolition of all classes, all class divisions, class privilege, class rule, upon the production of such abundance that the struggle for necessities to live is completely eliminated, so that humanity, at last freed from economic exploitation, from oppression, from any form of coercion by a state machine, can devote itself to its fullest intellectual and cultural development. Much can perhaps be added to this definition, but anything less you can call whatever you wish, but it will not be socialism. 

 Working people must take over society, remold it, reshape it, in the interests of people, on a rational basis; otherwise, society will decay into barbarism. If you do not take over, if the working class does not take over, there will be decay, and this decay will mean your ruin. It will mean your ruin. Today it is a bitter and cruel reality that stares us in the face. There is no socialism and no progress to socialism without the working class, without the working class revolution, without the working class in power, without the working class having been lifted to “political supremacy” (as Marx called it) to their “victory of democracy” (as Marx also calls it). No socialism and no advance to socialism without it! That is what we’re unshakably committed to.

 Socialism for the World Socialist Party, yesterday, today, tomorrow still means the end of class rule; the end of class privilege; the freeing of the people from all chains and all coercion, the fullest realization of democracy, the emancipation of women and of children; the end of wage-slavery, abundance for all, and therefore liberty for all.

Meat Shortage? A Lie

As workers in meat processing plants around the United States earlier fell ill with the COVID-19, threatening production, the meat industry called for the government to allow the facilities to remain open, citing the threat of a catastrophic domestic food shortage.  After slaughterhouses in several states were closed when thousands of workers tested positive and dozens died, the industry publicly lobbied the Trump administration to intervene with state and local officials or risk major meat shortages across American grocery stores. Indeed, some retailers put limits on the amount of meat customers could buy, and the fast-food chain Wendy's, at one point, ran low on hamburger. 

Trump issued an executive order allowing the plants to stay open as essential businesses even as workers were getting sick and dying. 

According to the New York Times and USA Today, the industry was lying about the threat of a shortage in order to maintain large exports to overseas markets.

"It was a fake meat shortage," tweeted labor journalist Steven Greenhouse.

"The meat companies were saying the sky was falling, and it really wasn't," Food & Water Watch senior lobbyist Tony Corbo told the Times. "It wasn't that there was not enough supply. It was that the supply was being sent abroad."

A record amount of pork to China in April, 129,000 tons, even as the industry was wringing its hands over shortages and appealing to the federal government for exemptions to Covid-19 restrictions imposed on the plants at the state and local level. Keeping the plants open was yo protect their long-term investments in exporting to China, a country that is vital to their growth.

Ben Lilliston, a co-executive director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, which advocates for fair and sustainable food systems, told USA Today  that industry claims about shortages do not appear to have been about maintaining American food supplies.

We've been very skeptical about these claims around shortages," said Lilliston. "I think they were able to use the idea of food shortages as leverage."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/17/it-was-fake-meat-shortage-reporting-suggests-industry-sacrificed-workers-during

The Pandemic - Cooperation and Solidarity

From empty supermarket shelves to crowded parks, public behaviour has come in for criticism during the Covid-19 outbreak. But blaming the spread of Covid-19 on selfishness or thoughtless behaviour is misguided and distracts from the real causes of fatalities, according to one of Britain’s leading behavioural psychologists.

“Despite media campaigns to vilify some people as selfish and thoughtless ‘covidiots’, the evidence on reasons for non-adherence shows that much of it was practical rather than psychological.” 

Prof John Drury, a member of a subgroup to the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said evidence shows that rather than mass panic or selfishness in times of emergency, people actually tend to show solidarity and cooperation.

“All the government evidence shows widespread adherence to the public health measures for Covid-19,” said the University of Sussex professor. 

The findings of surveys suggesting that adherence to lockdown measures in the UK is falling, particularly among younger adults, were unlikely to be down to selfishness, said Drury, noting the drop coincided with a decline in confidence in the government. Drury told the Guardian that public behaviour had often been misrepresented. “It is implicit in some politicians comments, but it was more often commentators, journalistic commentators, saying these kinds of things,” said Drury.

Drury’s comments come as he and colleagues published a commentary in the British Journal of Social Psychology arguing that “psychologising” disasters obscures the true causes of bad outcomes and instead blames victims.

The team argue that better explanations for the high Covid-19 death toll in the UK than public behaviour include lockdown being implemented too late because of under-reaction by politicians, as well as systemic problems such as poverty and other inequalities putting certain groups at risk, and failures of communication, including an early focus on self-protection rather than on protecting others.

“Where people think that others are not acting as one, that undermines the unity we need,” said Drury. Unity, Drury stressed, will be crucial as lockdown is relaxed while the success of the test-and-trace system hinges on public trust in the authorities administering and running it. “The same issues of common identity, collective interests, and collective responsibility that were relevant, and were effective, in the case of messaging around distancing and staying at home apply here also,” he said.

Causing Death but No Jail-Time

In a highly unusual US corporate acknowledgment of criminal wrongdoing, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) pleaded guilty to the deaths of 84 people in a wildfire.  The California utility  admitted the 2018 Camp Fire, the state's deadliest and most destructive, was caused by its faulty equipment.

The company will be fined millions of dollars, but no-one will go to jail. But some survivors have condemned the plea deal as a slap on the wrist for PG&E, which has been linked to several dangerous blazes since 2015. They accuse state officials of long failing to hold the utility accountable because of its political clout.

Over 10,000 homes were burned down and more than 153,000 acres razed. The utility has already committed to settle claims from insurers and local government agencies for more than $25bn. That includes a $13.5bn settlement with fire victims.

Racism Facts

The income of the median African American household is about 60% that of the median white household and this income gap, after narrowing a bit over the first couple of decades after World War II, is now wider than it was in 1970.  

One in five African Americans live in poverty (more than twice the rate for whites) and a third of African American children live in poverty. 

The unemployment rate among African Americans in the US is about twice as high as unemployment among whites, and this has been true for as long as we have been measuring US unemployment rates by race. 

The wealth of the median African American household is one tenth that of the median white household. 

 And—as is painfully evident these days - racial inequality manifests itself in other realms of social life as well: education, health care, life expectancy, infant mortality, housing, access to capital, exposure to toxins, and more. 

 COVID-19 is killing African Americans at more than twice the rate of whites.  And "law enforcement" and "criminal justice" in the US systematically victimize and brutalize people of color.

The economist Darrick Hamilton, in his "Racial Equality is Economic Equality," conveys succinctly that this racist history is essential for understanding racial inequality in 2020:

"The racial wealth gap is an inheritance that began with chattel slavery, when blacks were literally the capital assets for a white landowning plantation class. The gap continued after Emancipation, when discriminatory laws and institutions established insurmountable barriers to the American middle class for black families. 

Today, hundreds of years removed from chattel slavery, there has virtually never been a substantive black middle class when defined by wealth. In contrast, the implementation of FDR’s New Deal and post-war vision facilitated an asset-based white middle class to cumulatively build wealth and pass it on to their heirs."

Over the course of the 20th Century, millions of American families, through home ownership, accumulated wealth as never before. African Americans were, overwhelming, excluded from this bonanza. Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro get it just right in their book, Black Wealth/White Wealth: African Americans were "locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history." 

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/16/whitewashing-capitalism

Happy America?

14% of American adults say they’re very happy, down from 31% who said the same in 2018. That year, 23% said they’d often or sometimes felt isolated in recent weeks. Now, 50% say that. Compared with 2018, Americans also are about twice as likely to say they sometimes or often have felt a lack of companionship (45% vs. 27%) and felt left out (37% vs. 18%) in the past four weeks.

Only 42% of Americans believe that when their children reach their age, their standard of living will be better. A solid 57% said that in 2018. 

Reimagining happiness is almost hard-wired into Americans’ DNA, said Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside.

“Human beings are remarkably resilient. There’s lots and lots of evidence that we adapt to everything. We move forward,” she said, adding that she’s done happiness studies since the pandemic started and found that some people are slightly happier than last year.

https://apnews.com/0f6b9be04fa0d3194401821a72665a50

Our Solidarity Must Be Global.

 "

Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.” — Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal.”

The social inequalities we live under every day gets magnified during a crisis. Corporations must profit at all times, and at times of crisis they can rely on governments to help them out. The ruling class can always depend on governments to find money when it comes to saving capitalism. 

Capitalist economists vacillates between apologists, obscurants and fantasists, presenting policies to advance the interests of the elite while pretending to serve the common good. None will work for common folk.

The current uprising against racism should be just beginning and has to become a deeper and broader resistance to capitalism itself. To achieve real change that will solve the many crises we face, demands must address the root causes of them. We must hold the ruling class accountable. Reformers seek to protect the system that has created inequality and injustice. The main political parties are the various wings of the ruling class. The State and its police are the enforcement arm that protects our masters. The police exist in order to protect property and wealth from those who do not own any. Reform is not enough. 

The protest movement needs to become more radical, not more moderate, and call for the elimination of capitalism. Social change will only come if we shift power into our own hands and exercise self-determination. The people would be in democratic control of how their communities are run. Defunding the police as being currently advocated without changing society means the wealthy elites will find other ways to protect themselves, private security and more gated communities. 

Anti-racism must be accompanied by the call for revolution, and the organising effort to dismantle the entire system. Those who hold power have started to make some concessions and compromises over the past few weeks of protests, but none of these has altered the systems that maintain the current inequalities and injustices. The protests have planted the seeds of transformation now it is our task to nurture them. We do that by putting out a vision of the changes we require and continuing to protest in support of that vision. We need to build relationships with others in our community to raise awareness of the crises and how to stop them. We need to support each other through mutual aid and building alternative systems to meet basic needs. Through our collective effort, we can create a new world. Only socialism brings solutions to the multiple problems at once — the pandemic crisis, the economic crash and the ecological collapse that threatens the future of organised human society. Socialism is the lifeboat that can save everyone.

Ending Slave Emancipation

“The Master, he says we are all free. But it don’t mean we is white. And it don’t mean we is equal.”

The report, Reconstruction in America, documents more than 2,000 black victims of racial terror lynchings killed between the end of the civil war in 1865 and the collapse of federal efforts to protect the lives and voting rights of black Americans in 1876.

 Equal Justice Initiative ’s groundbreaking 2015 research that identified and recorded more than 4,400 black victims of racial terror lynchings from the post-Reconstruction period, 1877 to 1950. 

EJI has documented 34 mass lynchings during Reconstruction. The deadliest of them took place in the fall of 1868 in Opelousas, Louisiana, where an orgy of white violence over two weeks claimed the lives of 200 black people who were mercilessly hunted down through fields and swamps.

The new report allows that grim tally to be further expanded with the addition of the 2,000 documented victims from the Reconstruction era itself – bringing the total number of documented cases of black people who were supposedly free yet were lynched in the most sadistic fashion to a staggering 6,500 men, women and children. EJI notes that its newly revised toll of racial terror lynchings in America is likely to underestimate the total by hundreds or even thousands given gross underreporting of racial violence and widespread efforts to suppress the truth.

Known as Reconstruction, a reign of terror was unleashed by Confederate veterans and former slave owners in a brazen effort to keep black people enslaved in all but name. Freed slaves were lynched at an average rate of almost one every two days.

EJI’s new report depicts the paradox of how quickly the promise of freedom was stolen from freed black Americans. In the first flush of emancipation, more than 3 million black people living overwhelmingly in the south rushed to claim the benefits of citizenship.

A swath of equal rights groups popped up encouraging freed slaves to register to vote. By the summer of 1867, about 80% of eligible black male voters had registered in all but one of the 11 former Confederate states.

Black representation followed, with some 2,000 black men holding elected office during Reconstruction. In 1870 Hiram Revels from Mississippi took a seat in the US Senate, the first African American to serve in Congress.

Such an extraordinary surge of black political participation was matched, however, by an equal and opposite surge of white violence designed to put black people back in the box. Withholding the vote from the country’s new citizens was seen as a crucial means of reimposing white supremacy in the absence of the physical chains of slavery.

On 24 December 1865, less than three weeks after the 13th amendment was ratified abolishing slavery, six former Confederate leaders came together to form the first chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and began what WEB Du Bois described as “armed guerilla warfare”. Appalling acts of sadistic homicidal terrorism, targeted frequently against nascent black leaders who were at the forefront of the movement to claim the benefits of citizenship, were swift to follow. Mass violence were committed against black people who had the audacity, after slavery was ended, to ask to be paid for their work in the fields. Still others were killed because they tried to leave the cotton plantations where they had been enslaved, or because they set up schools to teach black children how to read. In 12 short years, the white supremacists managed through a whirlwind of violence to change the entire course of American history – putting the country on the path towards inequality and discrimination under which it still labors today.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/lynchings-report-reconstruction-era-black-americans

The Tax Fiddlers

Researchers from Warwick University and the London School of Economics (LSE) analysed HMRC tax returns of higher earners and found that the average person with £10m in total remuneration had an effective tax rate of just 21 per cent – less than someone on median earnings of £30,000.

And a tenth of people receiving more than £1m paid a lower rate than someone earning just £15,000.

The very rich are able to – entirely legally – reduce their taxes by structuring their affairs to take their remuneration as capital gains and corporate dividends. These are forms of remuneration that attract a significantly lower tax rate than income tax.

“Instead of asking, can the rich pay more?, a better question may be: who amongst the rich is not paying their fair share?,” they write.

Other research this year by the Warwick and LSE authors shows that, if capital gains are included, the total remuneration share of the top 1 per cent has been growing faster than previously thought over the past decade, rising from 15 per cent to 17 per cent.

Some tax experts argue that attempts to increase taxes on the very wealthy, regardless of the fairness question, are unlikely to raise much additional income, partly because people would move their assets offshore in response.

Opponents of higher tax rates on the wealthiest point out that an estimated 30 per cent of total UK income tax was paid by the top 1 per cent in 2019-20, up from 25 per cent before the 2008-09 financial crisis, while their share of income has been constant at around 14 per cent. Yet such calculations do not include capital gains.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/wealthy-uk-tax-cost-rate-capital-gains-income-tax-a9566211.html

Planning and Big Pharma?

A study published by global consultancy EY on Monday shows that last year the bulk of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies focused on the development of anti-cancer drugs. A total of 2,586 active agents were reported to be in the stage of clinical development  while "only" 605 anti-virus agents reached the same phase in 2019.

During the same time, cancer-related activities secured the biggest revenues for Big Pharma. Companies were able to boost their turnover by one-fifth last year to €174 billion ($196 billion), also driven by big blockbuster drugs generating revenues of at least $1 billion each. Medication for the treatment of infections accounted for "only" €46 billion in revenues in 2019.

" The largest pharmaceutical firms are unlikely to stop their long-term programs and will hardly focus solely on COVID-19."  Siegfried Bialojan, head of the EY Life Science Center in Mannheim, Germany, says the reason for this is simple. "Pandemics are not predictable as a business factor, because you just don't know when and in which form they may occur."

With COVID-19 "There are too many imponderables right now and too much insecurity, meaning that potential buyers and sellers really don't see eye to eye on the transaction price." says Alexander Nuyken, EY's head of Life Science, Transaction Advisory for Europe, Middle East, India & Africa. "We estimate that 97% of the vaccines being tested right now will not be approved, meaning that a lot of companies will just have burned big amounts of R&D money at the end of the day."

https://www.dw.com/en/will-coronavirus-pandemic-change-big-pharmas-long-term-focus/a-53807139

A General Strike for Hong Kong

Last June, Hong Kong protesters took to the streets against a proposed extradition bill and started a year-long protest movement. 

Since June 2019, police have fired more than 16,000 rounds of teargas, over 7,000 rubber bullets and made nearly 9,000 arrests. Police are accused of excessive use of force and conducting arbitrary arrests.

"Because of police brutality, the COVID-19 social gathering ban and the national security law, many people are afraid to speak out. That's why we want to provide a safe channel for our members to express their opinions," said Vic Tse, who is  the chairperson of Hong Kong Public Relations and Communications Union that was formed in December 2019, during the protests and also a representative of a new coalition of labor unions. The coalition, which comprises 24 unions across 20 different industries, recently called for a referendum on whether to go on strike against the proposed national security law.

According to Hong Kong's Labor Department, 1,578 applications for union registration were submitted over the first three months of 2020, compared with 142 across all of 2019 and 13 in 2018. As police are increasingly rejecting applications to hold rallies, those who protest anyway are now at greater risk of being arrested for "illegal assembly." Large-scale, organized union actions such as general strikes thus provide an alternative to the traditional protest movement.

Tse's coalition hopes that the referendum will gather over 60,000 votes. If over 60% of the votes support the motion, they will go ahead with a three-phase general strike, with the first phase lasting for three days in order to first warn Beijing against the consequences of implementing the law in Hong Kong. A general strike in August last year against the now-withdrawn extradition bill sent the city into chaos, leading to the cancellation of more than 200 flights, as well as the disruption of train and bus services. But subsequent strikes haven't created as much momentum, and in many cases, Tse said, have led to serious repercussions for the few people who participated in them. A referendum, she said, would ensure that enough people take part in order to minimize overall risk for participants.

"The paradox of strikes is that the more people participate, the less dangerous it is because the chance of repercussions is lower. They can't just fire everyone," said Tse. 

Iran's falling fertility rate

Iran has restricted family planning services at state-run hospitals as it tries to boost its population size. Vasectomies will no longer be carried out at state-run medical centres and contraceptives will only be offered to women whose health might be at risk.

The Iranian government has become concerned about fewer births and an increasingly ageing population. Annual population growth has dropped below 1%.  Just two years ago, the country was recorded as having population growth of 1.4% and, now, if no action is taken, Iran could become one of the world's oldest countries in the next 30 years. The Ministry of Health explained, “We have controlled mortality under age five, and life expectancy increased by 20 years, however, delay in marriage and childbearing, and the gap between the first child and the second one are issues that need to be addressed.”

Over the past four decades, life expectancy has increased from 50 years to more than 70 years, 21.4 years for men and 23.4 years for women.

Marriage and children within marriage are both in decline. The marriage rate had dropped by 40% in a decade.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been calling for people to have more children, saying he wants the current population population of 80 million to grow to 150 million.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53048719

Meet the Chinese Capitalists

China’s third richest man is one of the country’s youngest billionaire entrepreneurs. Colin Zheng Huang, age 40, founded online discount platform Pinduoduo in 2015 and took the e-commerce firm public on the Nasdaq in 2018. Following a 14.5% surge in share price that boosted Huang’s fortune by $4.5 billion, Huang is now worth $35.6 billion, according to Forbes — becoming the 25th richest person in the world.

In net worth terms, that puts him behind two giant Chinese internet titans: Tencent chairman Ma Huateng (worth $46.4 billion) and Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma (worth $41.3 billion.)