This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
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It is time for Christians to act on their ability to do more for the hungry, houseless, and sick.
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Since Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and the GOP’s subsequent slide into utter inanity, real life has continued to so far outpace satire that The Onion is starting to seem strangely mundane. Take, for example, the House GOP’s latest lurch into bizzaro-land: Several dozen hard-right lawmakers want to replace the country’s entire progressive tax code with a sales tax of 30 percent…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Clarity Press recently published Joan Roelofs’ latest contribution to the movements for peace in the United States, The Trillion Dollar Silencer (TDS). She has been a peace activist all her life and a scholar who always worked to bridge the gap between activism and academia that despite that effort seems to have widened rather than narrowed, at least since the 1990s. Part of the reason for this can be found in the activity of pseudo-academic institutions in the private sector, foundations and their appendages, think tanks. Naomi Klein may not have been the first to so describe them but her characterization cannot be disputed: places where people are paid to think by those who make tanks. After reading Joan Roelofs’ new book, it seemed more useful to talk to her about it rather than simply review it.Dr T P Wilkinson: Some years ago you published a book called Foundations and Public Policy. In it you give a substantial overview of the tax-exempt foundation landscape in the US and how these institutions have not only shaped but also created public policy in the US. As I understood the work your concern was not necessarily to condemn these efforts but to call attention to this exercise of political power by unelected institutions largely beyond public oversight and unknown to most citizens. Of course you also show that some policies that may be very controversial in fact originated in the foundation sector and owe their adoption and implementation to it. One suspects a sympathy with C. Wright Mills but as a political scientist you concentrate on the perspective from your own discipline.1 Now in this new book you start from the question “why is there no anti-war movement?” and proceed to show how much influence the “war movement” has on the potential for “anti-war movement”. This seems an extension of your argument in the earlier book: namely that many important policies are made beyond the scope of open political discourse and action — essentially hidden from the constitutional processes available to citizens. Does this book simply cover another sector or is it also an indictment of a general erosion of those constitutional processes and public control over the State?
Joan Roelofs: Foundations try to fix up our political and economic system without threatening capitalism and US world dominance. However, radical change is needed, for the sake of justice, protecting the environment, lessening the threat of war, and ensuring the basics of the good life for all. Foundations divert these goals, replacing them with reformist measures that often are only stopgaps. In the process, they removed incentives for radical activism, especially by creating a world of nonprofit organizations with decent staff income, doing obviously good things. They, along with government agencies, acted as soft cops in the Cold War, aiming to dispel the attraction of socialism throughout the world.
Democracy today, i.e., a truly representative system without corruption and bought representatives, would not necessarily produce justice, equality, peace, and environmental regeneration. It would reflect the self-interests of the majority, who are not poor. In earlier times the majority was poor, so democracy might have worked to produce major changes in wealth distribution. I’m not so sure that it could produce a rational economic system or anti-war fervor. In my old age I have more sympathy with Plato, especially because the semi-democracy of Athens voted for war.
TPW: Do I understand correctly, the majority is not poor today? Certainly the majority is not poor like those who live in Indonesian shantytowns or in Guinea Bissau. But with wages that have stagnated and declined for nearly 40 years now and a recognizable expansion of the gap between income and assets held by the majority and the minuscule segment of super-rich, surely there is growing poverty. Do you mean poverty as a fact or poverty as self-perception? How do you define poverty? Economist Michael Hudson has said that since the last major housing crash the last bastion of working middle class assets—home ownership – is rapidly deteriorating. This is equivalent to massive expropriation, turning homeowners into quasi-feudal tenants. Are you saying there is no democracy to counter that trend? People like Hudson and Jeffrey Sachs practically say that what makes China a democracy is that its system of government really responds to the needs of the vast majority of the people. Is the problem perhaps with the definition of democracy in the US?
JR: The official poverty rate in the US is 11.6%. Of course it is a disgrace, and especially the homeless, even in Keene. Many of these people do not vote. Many of the poor are tied into the social service system, government and NGO with housing, food, etc. Not in the mood for protesting. I live in a very mixed neighborhood and see how various poor people cope. Some own their homes (with their property taxes forgiven or unpaid), however run down; other in Section 8. The odd thing is that some of these decrepit houses have slate roofs, and even the landlords can’t afford or find people to repair them. My house was built in the 1850s, like much of the neighborhood.
TPW: Mao Zedong said during the Chinese Revolution “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” He was arguing that not only the revolution but also any accomplishments, such as land reform, that the Chinese people (particularly the peasantry) were able to accomplish could not survive without the armed force to defend it against enemies. In the 1930s that meant not only the reactionary forces gathered around the KMT and European colonial powers but also the Japanese. He specifically said that China — unlike Europe or the US — had no constitutional structures capable of protecting the peasantry or workers and their achievements.
Nonetheless when I finished reading your book I could not help thinking that it coincides with Mao’s dictum. The political power in the US grows out of the barrel of guns made by the enormous military-industrial-complex. At the end of your book you propose steps to take to oppose this power over American life and society. Allowing that one should use every tool available to oppose militarism in the US (or anywhere else) the impression one gets is that the power of the military is so pervasive that very few constitutional means are available. On the other hand the sheer mass of US military force seems more irresistible in the US than abroad. Does this mean that the US is really a military regime? If it is aren’t Americans faced with the same problem that countries ruled by warlords elsewhere in the world face? Are there examples from other countries that might strengthen attempts to reduce the power of the gun in US politics and society?
JR: I didn’t say there was no anti-war movement—but that it is very small. I listed a number that are doing good work. What is remarkable is that the progressives, academics, minorities, immigrants, religious institutions, et al have so little participation in anti-war causes and are mostly silent about ongoing overseas exploits. At election time foreign and military policy are barely mentioned by candidates or the press. Support or silence, not covert politics, maintains militarism.
TPW: So there is an anti-war movement that is very small. That means it is a niche issue. The difference must be that it has no “lobby” since the US Congress is no stranger to niche issues. One cannot help observing—especially from outside the US—that given the extent of US engagement, whether political, military or business, even people working beyond the US borders exhibit what might be called “geographical impairment”. We have even seen political leaders who apparently do not know where on the map to find the places they want to invade or sanction. Is it possible that the size of the anti-war movement is also a factor of the general ignorance in the population about the world beyond US borders? The instruments for maintaining this ignorance are the schools and mass media but also the latent feeling of superiority in the best of all possible worlds—in other words, complacency. What does it matter what happens to people or countries I cannot even find? To put the point positively: how much influence or potential does the anti-war movement have for raising the level of basic education about the world in which the US Empire exerts its power?
JR: One thing the antiwar movement can do is raise the awareness of what is going on, which is the aim of my book. There are planned marches in DC and Times Square. A demonstration was held in a Harvard class. The divestment movements inform workers and NGO patrons about the MIC. It is important to inform people on a local level, difficult but I have been trying. For many decades there has been a weekly vigil in Keene, as in other places.
There is a heritage of violence and its glorification in the US, perpetrated by propaganda, the educational system, and the adoration of family members who have been in the military. In addition, there are other reasons for supporting the military, including fear (of being considered unpatriotic, etc.), distractions, and interests. My book is mainly about the interests and the military connections pervading our social, educational, cultural, and economic institutions. Rust belt communities must be saved from destitution, and military contractors prop up ballet and classical music.
TPW: Does the Constitution have any practical bearing on contemporary US politics? In particular regulating the activities of the war departments? What about the militarization of the police and other institutions, after Vietnam and after 2001? Doesn’t this kind of militarism fall through the cracks?
JR: The Constitution doesn’t prevent demilitarization. The UN Charter makes war illegal, so “declaring war” needs to be amended. However, Article I states that no appropriation of money for armies shall be for longer than two years, and requires Congress to define and punish offences against the law of nations.
Courts have generally refused to question foreign policy or war activities, whether they are said to be in violation of laws or the Constitution.
This despite the provision that treaties are the law of the land.
TPW: Some years ago I argued that there was such a thing as military culture. This culture emerged in the late 19th century when, especially influenced by Positivism, militaries in Europe and Latin America saw themselves as the modernizing forces in society. They were at the vanguard of science and technology and management structures. As such they offered a vision of a rational, efficient society that abandoned the superstition of the past and the irrationality of populism or mass politics. In fact the National Defense University and its constituent colleges have had a very significant role in propagating this image of civil-military affairs and governance. Since 2020 there has been another push for “rational” governance, supposedly managed according to science (or medicine). National security ideology has been expanded to a global system of public health ostensibly embodying the same benevolent principles of good governance.
Shouldn’t we welcome the capacity of the military-industrial complex to propagate such a rational model for political and social management? If not, what is the alternative.
JR: Some aspects of the military favor rationality, science, and meritocracy—not the ideal system but better than nepotism, corruption, etc. for achieving both competence and justice. The irrational part is war, especially where nukes are involved. Victor Considerant (see my translation of his Principles of Socialism)2 was a graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris, joined the military engineering corps. He and many of his fellow students were socialists, (St. Simonian at first), and their goals were projects such as creating a national railway system. In the TDS, I recognize the positive side of military organization.
Science has been distorted for destructive ends. It should be concerned above all with how to provide the good life for all without destroying the planet.
Fletcher Prouty, in The Secret Team, explains how the military establishment was invaded by CIA Cold War covert action people.3 There is also a revolving door between the Department of Defense and military contractor personnel.
One reason for the massive military budget is that a “free market” economy is not sustainable. The invisible hand was always a myth, and now, because of automation, outsourcing, agribusiness, consumer satiation, and extensive poverty and disability, the economy requires massive government intervention even to go along in its irrational way. The Cold War prompted US de-industrialization policies in order to build up capitalist industrial powers in Southeast Asia.
TPW: I heard and also read Tony Benn say he found it incredible that when he was drafted to fight in World War 2, the government gave him everything he needed for the job of just going out and killing Germans, but was unwilling to guarantee these things for me to do productive work.4 It has been said enough, I suppose, that the reason corporations prefer their own health and pension plans to socialized health care and pensions is for the simple purpose of labour discipline. Now much of that old corporate “welfare” has been turned over to the big five funds or derivative speculation. Those who dare to demand what soldiers and sailors get as hired killers, just for paying taxes and being good citizens, enjoy very little support. Does this mean that killing is just seen as a greater economic good than anything else workers could produce in the US?
JR: Funding the DoD is much easier for Congress than civilian intervention (there is some), which is considered socialistic.
Now rural and small towns are desperate for any government contracts, and Congress is fine with giving the military trillions to play with.5
TPW: You mention that one of the effects of all this soft intervention by the military is to promote single-issue activity or movements. For some the anti-war movement, like pacifist movements, are all single-issue movements too. In a 1967 interview German student leader Rudi Dutschke was asked, not long before he was shot in April 1968, if he would engage in guerrilla warfare in Germany to change the conditions there.6
Gunter Gaus referred to priests participating in liberation struggles in Latin America. Dutschke responded that were he in Latin America he would fight with a rifle— but he is in the Bundesrepublik and therefore has to fight with other means. Is there anything in the massive US military apparatus that offers an opportunity for those inside to oppose the destruction of the country they are constitutionally sworn to defend? Or is this a closed culture that must continue to feed itself?
JR: There are some people in the military, at all levels, who question the fateful path of US policy and operations, and also fine organizations such as Veterans for Peace. However, today’s troops are pressured and wooed with benefits. Psychology is certainly utilized, as Merrill (see part 2) describes in your previous interview.
TPW: How do you see the impact of US military culture in rest of world? There was a time in the 80s still when people in Germany actually demanded that the US military leave— and certainly not install medium-ranged atomic missiles. However those days seem to be long gone. Does the “silencer” also silence abroad? Is there any relationship between the way US military-industrial power is exercised in the US and the way it is exercised among its “allies”? Do you see potential for cross-border action or is the differences embedded in US military culture too great to allow people to see the relationships to the rest of the empire?
JR: I mention some of these factors in Europe in TDS. There is a military industrial complex in Europe and much civilian manufacture is outsourced. NATO has many connections with civilian society, ministries of defense and foreign policy, and EU institutions. Bases are of economic importance, often situated in depressed areas. One important work on the topic is The Globalization of NATO by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, another Clarity Press book.
I wish others would extend my research on the military at the ground level, in the US and elsewhere. There is so much more, and visibility might help to activate people, perhaps to figure out how to change the system of wars and the ever-present threat of nuclear winter.
- C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956).
- Victor Considerant, Principles of Socialism, trans. Joan Roelofs, Maisonneuve Press (2006).
- Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team (1973).
- At a luncheon given in the Savile Club, London, shortly before his death, presenting Letters to my Grandchildren (2009).
- “The Retail Carrion Feeders of Rural America,” Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch, November 25, 2022.
- Zu Protokoll: Günter Gaus im Gespräch mit Rudi Dutschke, SWF (1967).
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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In the 14-second video now seen by millions, San Francisco gallery owner Collier Gwin stands nonchalant yet intent, his legs crossed casually, his age-folded face glaring as he pummels a Black homeless woman on the sidewalk with cold water spray.
Yes, it’s 2023, and a wealthy White man is blasting a hose on a homeless Black woman for sitting on the sidewalk, literally as if she were trash. Power dynamics don’t get much starker than that.
We hear of vile, violent abuses against homeless people often, but it’s rarely caught on video. Here, thanks to a concerned passerby, Gwin’s soulless, sickening assault became documented, indisputable evidence of a violent crime. He’s right there in the video, glaring at the woman, blasting cold water on her, shouting “Move! Move!”
Unhoused people are told to “move” constantly, by vigilantes like Gwin and by city police, public works teams, and by society writ large. Just “move” away from this spot right here, where we can see you, to some other spot; out of sight, out of mind.
In a moment, Collier Gwin became a hashtag of horrors, his gallery a window-shattered memory, a one-starred on Yelp. With rising anger came alleged death threats, and soon local television predictably changed the narrative: suddenly, the story was about Gwin’s grievances, his lost patience after supposedly trying to help the woman, and about the cascading threats. There was no talk about the homeless woman, her loss and pain, her experience surviving on these cold mean streets.
The woman, the crime victim, was disappeared—nameless, faceless, lost entirely from view. She was described only in Gwin’s terms, as a nuisance. We can’t even “say her name,” because we don’t know it.
The woman, the crime victim, was disappeared—nameless, faceless, lost entirely from view.
Meanwhile Gwin, who was at first stunningly unapologetic, embarked on an apology tour of sorts, with a maddeningly compliant media aiding and abetting. He griped to local media, “Nobody can get into their stores or into their offices. And so consequently, you know, if she got wet when that was happening, it was because she was there getting wet.”
Instead of a story of violence against a homeless woman, the narrative became about Gwin “snapping,” about ” patience wearing thin” with homelessness—and even with the term “the homeless,” as media still call “them.” Instead of a story about the larger violence and criminality of homelessness amid this city and region’s epic wealth, Gwin’s assault became contorted into a “yeah, but” tale of ultra-privileged exasperation at the unsightly, unprofitable plight in the streets.
Lost in the hubbub about Gwin’s attack is the larger constant violence that San Francisco and other big cities wage on unhoused human beings every day. Here in this supposedly “liberal,” allegedly “tolerant” city of Saint Francis, homeless people are policed relentlessly, pushed from block to block, and “swept” from view by the city’s Department of Public Works, their tents and belongings (clothing, medication, other personal valuables) destroyed.
Even in this cold rainy “Bomb cyclone” winter that’s been nasty enough for President Biden to declare a state of emergency, the city continues to “sweep” away homeless people and trash their belongings—in violation of both basic humanity and a court ruling ordering the city to stop its “sweeps” when it has a chronic shortage of shelter space.
This and other daily violence against unhoused human beings is enabled and empowered by an increasingly virulent, reactionary narrative that the poorest of the poor in our society are somehow the problem, that “they” are a nuisance, that “they” are the ones to blame. This is not just a rightwing Republican talking point—it is increasingly adopted by neoliberal Democrats and so-called “moderates” and centrists who insist they are “fed up” with the crises in the streets.
Just a day before Gwin’s hose spraying attack, one Tweeter I regrettably engaged with bellowed, “Good, sweep them all away!” Three others “liked” the comment. Another said of homeless people, “Comfortable is a state of being for them. They prefer to not work. No responsibility. No bills. Do drugs. Get free stuff/food.” Many peddle the bizarre false notion that the city “pays” homeless people hundreds of dollars a month to live on the streets. Even if someone filled out endless forms, stood on endless lines, and managed to get a host of city, county, state, and federal aid that somehow amounted to “hundreds” of dollars, it would be at best barely enough to stay alive, and nothing more.
This increasingly predominant and insidious neoliberal view falsely (and counter-productively) blames the individual rather than the system (yes, our structural system) of extreme private wealth accumulation and a 40-year demolition of public-sector solutions that are the real root causes of this impoverishment and suffering. We can chart this back to President Reagan’s decimation of aid to poor people, and mental health and public housing supports.
We should all be fed up with acts like Gwin’s inhumane assault and by the city’s daily violence and harassment of homeless people. We should all be fed up with the completely preventable epidemic of homelessness amid epic, obscene wealth and inequality. We should all be fed up knowing that, for all its complexities and varied contexts, homelessness can be prevented by mustering our vast financial resources (city, regional, and national) and some political humanity and courage to invest in meeting people’s basic needs.
Gwin’s violence against this homeless woman was despicable, and he should be held accountable for his crime. It took more than a week for district attorney Brooke Jenkins to issue an arrest warrant, charging Gwin with misdemeanor battery “for the alleged intentional and unlawful spraying of water on and around a woman experiencing homelessness.” With TV crews conveniently on hand, city police picked up Gwin at his gallery.
Meanwhile, the larger crime of homelessness amid extreme wealth goes unchecked; as does the city’s ongoing “sweeps” of unhoused people and illegal destruction of their belongings, in violation of court orders. While Gwin’s violence against a homeless woman may seem an egregious outlier, it’s indicative of a broader violence, hatred, and dehumanizing of homeless human beings. For homelessness to end, this larger violence and crime—the false, stale, and harmful blaming and scapegoating of homeless people, the perception that “they” are the problem—must end.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
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Maruja Mallo (Spain), La Verbena (‘The Fair’), 1927.
On 8 January, large crowds of people dressed in colours of the Brazilian flag descended on the country’s capital, Brasília. They invaded federal buildings, including the Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, and vandalised public property. The attack, carried out by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, came as no surprise, since the rioters had been planning ‘weekend demonstrations’ on social media for days. When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) was formally sworn in as Brazil’s new president one week prior, on 1 January, there was no such melee; it appears that the vandals were waiting until the city was quiet and Lula was out of town. For all its bluster, the attack was an act of extreme cowardice.
Meanwhile, the defeated Bolsonaro was nowhere near Brasília. He fled Brazil prior to the inauguration – presumably to escape prosecution – and sought haven in Orlando, Florida (in the United States). Even though Bolsonaro was not in Brasília, the Bolsonaristas, as his supporters are known, left their mark throughout the city. Even before Bolsonaro lost the election to Lula this past October, Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil suggested that Brazil was going to experience ‘Bolsonarism without Bolsonaro’. This prediction is supported by the fact that the far-right Liberal Party, which served as Bolsonaro’s political vehicle during his presidency, holds the largest bloc in the country’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate, while the toxic influence of the right wing persists both in Brazil’s elected bodies and political climate, especially on social media.
Mayo (Egypt), Un soir à Cannes (‘An Evening in Cannes’), 1948.
The two men responsible for public safety in Brasília – Anderson Torres (the secretary of public security of the Federal District) and Ibaneis Rocha (the governor of the Federal District) – are close to Bolsonaro. Torres served as the minister of justice and public security in Bolsonaro’s government, while Rocha formally supported Bolsonaro during the election. As the Bolsonaristas prepared their assault on the capital, both men appeared to have abdicated their responsibilities: Torres was on holiday in Orlando, while Rocha took the afternoon off on the last working day before the coup attempt. For this complicity in the violence, Torres has been dismissed from his post and faces charges, and Rocha has been suspended. The federal government has taken charge of security and arrested over a thousand of these ‘fanatic Nazis’, as Lula called them. There is a good case to be made that these ‘fanatic Nazis’ do not deserve amnesty.
The slogans and signs that pervaded Brasília on 8 January were less about Bolsonaro and more about the rioters’ hatred for Lula and the potential of his pro-people government. This sentiment is shared by big business sectors – mainly agribusiness – which are furious about the reforms proposed by Lula. The attack was partly the result of the built-up frustration felt by people who have been led, by intentional misinformation campaigns and the use of the judicial system to unseat the Lula’s party, the Workers’ Party (PT), through ‘lawfare’, to believe that Lula is a criminal – even though the courts have ruled this to be false. It was also a warning from Brazil’s elites. The unruly nature of the attack on Brasília resembles the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former US President Donald Trump. In both cases, far-right illusions, whether about the dangers of the ‘socialism’ of US President Joe Biden or the ‘communism’ of Lula, symbolise the hostile opposition of the elites to even the mildest rollback of neoliberal austerity.
Kartick Chandra Pyne (India), Workers, 1965.
The attacks on government offices in the United States (2021) and Brazil (2023), as well as the recent coup in Peru (2022), are not random events; beneath them is a pattern that requires examination. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been engaged in this study since our founding five years ago. In our first publication, In the Ruins of the Present (March 2018), we offered a preliminary analysis of this pattern, which I will develop further below.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Third World Project withered as a result of the debt crisis, the US-driven agenda of neoliberal globalisation prevailed. This programme was characterised by the state’s withdrawal from the regulation of capital and by the erosion of social welfare policies. The neoliberal framework had two major consequences: first, a rapid increase in social inequality, with the growth of billionaires at one pole and the growth of poverty at the other, along with an exacerbation of inequality along North-South lines; and second, the consolidation of a ‘centrist’ political force that pretended that history, and therefore politics, had ended, leaving only administration (which in Brazil is well-named as centrão, or the ‘centre’) remaining. Most countries around the world fell victim to both the neoliberal austerity agenda and this ‘end of politics’ ideology, which became increasingly anti-democratic, making the case for technocrats to be in charge. However, these austerity policies, cutting close to the bone of humanity, created their own new politics on the streets, a trend that was foreshadowed by the IMF riots and bread riots of the 1980s and later coalesced into the ‘anti-globalisation’ protests. The US-driven globalisation agenda produced new contradictions that belied the argument that politics had ended.
Leonora Carrington (Mexico), Figuras fantásticas a caballo (‘Fantastical Figures on Horseback’), 2011.
The Great Recession that set in with the global financial crisis of 2007–08 increasingly invalidated the political credentials of the ‘centrists’ who had managed the austerity regime. The World Inequality Report 2022 is an indictment of neoliberalism’s legacy. Today, wealth inequality is as bad as it was in the early years of the twentieth century: on average, the poorest half of the world’s population owns just $4,100 per adult (in purchasing power parity), while the richest 10 percent owns $771,300 – roughly 190 times as much wealth. Income inequality is equally harsh, with the richest 10 percent absorbing 52 percent of world income, leaving the poorest 50 percent with merely 8.5 percent of world income. It gets worse if you look at the ultra-rich. Between 1995 and 2021, the wealth of the top one percent grew astronomically, capturing 38 percent of global wealth while the bottom 50 percent only ‘captured a frightening two percent’, the authors of the report write. During the same period, the share of global wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent rose from 7 percent to 11 percent. This obscene wealth – largely untaxed – provides this tiny fraction of the world’s population with a disproportionate amount of power over political life and information and increasingly squeezes the ability of the poor to survive.
The World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report (January 2023) forecasts that, at the end of 2024, gross domestic product (GDP) in 92 of the world’s poorer countries will be 6 percent below the level expected on the eve of the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2024, these countries are projected to suffer a cumulative loss in GDP equal to roughly 30 percent of their 2019 GDP. As central banks in the richest countries tighten their monetary policies, capital for investment in the poorer nations is drying up and the cost of debts already held has increased. Total debt in these poorer countries, the World Bank notes, ‘is at a 50-year high’. Roughly one in five of these countries are ‘effectively locked out of global debt markets’, up from one in fifteen in 2019. All of these countries – excluding China – ‘suffered an especially sharp investment contraction of more than 8 percent’ during the pandemic, ‘a deeper decline than in 2009’, in the throes of the Great Recession. The report estimates that aggregate investment in these countries will be 8 percent lower in 2024 than had been expected in 2020. Faced with this reality, the World Bank offers the following prognosis: ‘Sluggish investment weakens the rate of growth of potential output, reducing the capacity of economies to increase median incomes, promote shared prosperity, and repay debts’. In other words, the poorer nations will slide deeper into a debt crisis and into a permanent condition of social distress.
Roberto Matta (Chile), Invasion of the Night, 1942.
The World Bank has sounded the alarm, but the forces of ‘centrism’ – beholden to the billionaire class and the politics of austerity – simply refuse to pivot away from the neoliberal catastrophe. If a leader of the centre-left or left tries to wrench their country out of persistent social inequality and polarised wealth distribution, they face the wrath of not merely the ‘centrists’, but the wealthy bondholders in the North, the International Monetary Fund, and the Western states. When Pedro Castillo won the presidency in Peru in July 2021, he was not permitted to pursue even a Scandinavian form of social democracy; the coup machinations against him began before he was inaugurated. The civilised politics that would end hunger and illiteracy are simply not permitted by the billionaire class, who spend vast amounts of money on think tanks and media to undermine any project of decency and fund the dangerous forces of the far right, who shift the blame for social chaos away from the tax-free ultra-rich and the capitalist system and onto the poor and marginalised.
The hallucinatory insurrection in Brasília emerged from the same dynamic that produced the coup in Peru: a process in which ‘centrist’ political forces are funded and brought to power in the Global South to ensure that their own citizens remain at the rear of the queue, while the wealthy tax-free bondholders of the Global North remain at the front.
Ivan Sagita (Indonesia), A Dish for Life, 2014.
On the barricades of Paris on 14 October 1793, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, the president of the Paris Commune who himself fell to the guillotine to which he sent many others, quoted these fine words from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich’.
The post When the People Have Nothing More to Eat, They Will Eat the Rich first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
New polling finds that the proportion of Americans who have delayed medical treatment due to costs has hit a record high as the pandemic rages on and it becomes harder for the working class to afford regular and emergency costs. According to Gallup, 38 percent of Americans had either put off seeking medical treatment themselves or a member of their families did so in 2022. This is a 12 percent…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As the cost of living crisis continues, new research has told poor people what they already knew: that financially, they’re screwed. However, what the data does do is shine a useful light into just how bad things are.
Cost of living crisis: dire straits
Torsten Bell is the chief executive of think tank the Resolution Foundation. The group does a lot of research into how government policy affects the poorest people. Now, Bell’s team has crunched some more numbers. He tweeted that 65% of the poorest fifth of people have no savings at all:
National savings rates cover a wide definition of savings. Let's focus on what most people think savings are: cash in the bank. The are LOTS of people with very little savings. 65% of lowest income 5th in Britain have less than 1 month's income in savings vs 56% in Germany/France pic.twitter.com/iuUU67f5Jc
— Torsten Bell (@TorstenBell) January 16, 2023
This has hardly changed since 2016-18, at a time when the poorest people who were in bad health could save even less. However, it’s no surprise that poor people can’t save any money. This is because they spend more on everyday costs than all other groups – from housing to food – and the least on “recreation”:
Soaring inflation has hit the poorest people the hardest. So their ability to save is directly linked to income, as Office for National Statistics (ONS) data has shown:
Falling into arrears
However, Bell showed another problem: that the poorest people are also often behind on their bills:
Hopefully you all knew no/low savings are a problem anyway. But if anyone needed convincing, when a cost of living crisis turns up it has meant people falling behind on bills/getting into debt pic.twitter.com/eP3ytAzXwe
— Torsten Bell (@TorstenBell) January 16, 2023
Again, it’s no surprise that people reliant on social security are in the worst position regarding paying bills. This is because successive Tory governments have repeatedly frozen benefit rates, cutting them in real terms. Similarly, polling commissioned by the BBC found that 32% of social housing tenants had fallen behind with utility bills in the past six months during the cost of living crisis. Between 2016 and 2018, the poorest fifth of people had the highest rates of “problem debt”, despite having the least money. This is likely to be the same now. Yet as Bell pointed out, the government helps the poorest people the least when it comes to savings:
Here's how we prioritise our support for savings:
– typical household in top 10% will get £800 next year
– compare that to £80/household for the poorest fifth pic.twitter.com/Hx8NbMTfT2— Torsten Bell (@TorstenBell) January 16, 2023
The end result of this is financial chaos for the poorest people.
A catastrophe
The BBC carried out a poll, but didn’t check whether people were rich or people. The poll found that:
Half those asked paid for at least some of their Christmas and holiday season spending on credit.
And:
A third of respondents to the poll who used credit to help get through Christmas and the holiday season said they were not confident about their ability to repay.
This leads to a deterioration in people’s mental and emotional wellbeing. Search engine optimisation agency BlueArray reported that surveying showed that:
when asked if they are worried about affording essentials such as food, clothing, housing, and travel over 84% are worried with 36% of these being extremely worried.
It also found that:
87% of those surveyed say financial stress is impacting their mental health with 26% of those saying it impacts them a lot.
2023 is going to be a disaster for countless people during the continuing cost of living crisis. With no savings, little meaningful government support, and energy bills set to go up again, the poorest people are running out of places to turn. So, it will be left to communities and not-for-profit groups to pick up the pieces.
Featured image via pixabay
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on Canary.
Predatory lending is an easily overlooked business that has damaged communities of color and poorer people for decades. It traps borrowers in never-ending cycles of debt with high-interest loans on coercive terms. But when Wall Street private equity gets in on the predatory lending industry, it amplifies the magnitude of financial exploitation.
Private equity, put simply, is supercharging the payday and predatory lending industries as it does in any other industry. Private equity has the money — big money — to buy control of lenders and reach more people with greater levels of abuse than they could before. That means more of the infamous debt traps that characterize predatory lending.
Over the last decade, private equity brought additional financial resources, and in some cases, a new level of sophistication, to the subprime lenders they acquired, often enabling the payday and installment lenders they acquire to buy competitors. Only a few months ago, private equity firm Park Cities Asset Management took control of Elevate Credit.
Elevate is a notorious predatory lender. “Elevate raked in over a half billion dollars in 2013 alone. And they showered over $210,000 of that cash on federal lobbyists to attempt to hinder regulations of the payday loan industry,” according to the website Payday Lending Facts. In August 2022, a federal judge in Virginia gave final approval to a settlement involving Elevate Credit, where the company agreed to pay $33 million to resolve litigation related to a predecessor company’s dealing with various tribes.
Private equity firms own more than 5,000 payday lending stores in America and provide capital for several startups’ online payday loans, a 2017 report from Americans for Financial Reform showed. The predatory lender, Mariner Finance, had only 57 branches in seven states in 2013. It now has roughly 480 branches in 22 states, nearly a decade after the Wall Street private equity firm Warburg Pincus – headed by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner – acquired it. In addition to that financial power, private equity has access to bond markets to fuel its expansion.
Private equity firms Diamond Castle Holdings and Golden Gate Capital merged Checksmart Financial and California Check Cashing Stores into Community Choice Financial in 2011, and over the years, acquired or rolled up other companies like CURO and Direct Financial Solutions to build what is now a network of nearly 500 locations nationwide.
Predatory lenders owned by private equity firms create incentives for their employees to mislead consumers on loan requirements. Private equity firms often pressure employees at predatory lenders they own to sell what are known as “add-on products.” For example, a lender may insert credit insurance on auto or personal loans or try to add high service fees.
“Mariner’s policies and business practices are set and directed by headquarters, leaving minimal discretion to branch managers and loan officers to extend loans that work best for consumers according to their needs and financial condition,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro wrote in a 2022 lawsuit against Mariner Finance. “The primary directive is to sell.”
For example, finance companies like predatory lenders often charge consumers all payments for any add-on products as a lump sum at origination. Essentially, even if a product expires years earlier during the loan term, consumers are still required to make payments on these add-ons. They often use illegal debt collection tactics to create a false sense of urgency to lure overdue borrowers into payday debt traps. Private equity-owned payday lender, ACE Cash Express, was one of the first companies in 2014 to be fined by CFPB for that business practice.
Mariner Finance, which specializes in personal loans of $1,000 to $25,000, with interest rates of up to 36 percent that can be inflated by additional fees. Fortress Investment Group owns similar installment lender OneMain Financial, while the Blackstone Group ― founded by billionaire Stephen Schwarzman ― controls Lendmark Financial Services, which in general, charge up to 30 percent in interest rates for its loans.
Payday loan lenders commonly charge fees of $15 for every $100 borrowed, which equals a 400 percent interest rate for a two-week loan. They prey on low-income and minority borrowers with arbitrary fees that are often more than what is permitted by their local states. “A high rate isn’t automatically a form of predatory lending—it may be higher because of your creditworthiness—but an unusually high one is definitely a red flag,” attorney Andrew Pizor with the National Consumer Law Center pointed out.
Predatory lenders target Black borrowers specifically. In Houston, while African-Americans make up only 15.6 percent of auto title lending customers and 23 percent of payday lending customers, 34.8 percent of the photographs on these lenders’ websites depict African-Americans, per a 2021 study by Jim Hawkins and Tiffany C. Penner of the University of Texas. Black Americans make up roughly 13 percent of the total American population, but end up with 23 percent of all storefront payday loans,” Pew Trusts reported.
Payday lending is inherently predatory and private equity is turbocharging its abuses, enlarging the burden it places on low-income individuals and borrowers of color. About 18 states across the country have a 36 percent rate cap or below to fight this problem, but many predatory lenders operate nationally. Congress must step in with a usury cap that applies nationwide. Stronger protections are the only way to stop the damage caused by predatory lenders, who now increasingly have the financial muscle of private equity behind them.
Two examples — Korea and Indonesia — will be documented here in order to display that America’s Cold War against communism was/is a cover-story, or deceptive cloak, for a war actually against the poor (and the political Left) in all nations: in other words, a fascist war, meaning that America’s Government became fascist-imperialist as soon as World War II ended, despite FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt — America’s President throughout WW II) having been passionately anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. All of this will be explained here, and documented in the article’s links. First, however, will be explained the underlying economic mechanism employed by means of this war that’s actually against the poor, not ONLY against communists. This modern version of fascist-imperialism relies more on deception — on sophisticated propaganda — than Hitler’s did, because Hitler never pretended to advocate for democracy, whereas America does. So, here it is:
In third-world countries, where labor is non-unionized and cheap, an international corporation can supply the latest industrial machinery, to be worked by the fewest dirt-wage workers in order to undercut the prices of any merely intranational (or ‘local’) corporation while still making intranational (within-nation) profits that are vastly higher than any merely local corporations (which are competing against the multinational ones) in any country can and do; and this is the secret of billionaires (who control international corporations) by which they consequently generate vastly higher rates of return on investment than any merely local entrepreneurs possibly can. Offshoring production thus greatly increases return-on-investment for the billionaires while it drives wages down for the workers in the industrialized countries. On a global scale, it’s a war by the super-rich against the poor. In both respects (by lowering wages in industrialized countries and prohibiting labor unions in the banana republics), the result is to cause an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s wealth to become concentrated amongst the billionaires — the people who control international corporations. From the standpoint of billionaires, it’s the system that surpasses any other. From the standpoint of the world’s poor, however, it is the worst system imaginable, because it funnels wealth from the masses to the super-rich; it impoverishes billions while pouring a bigger and bigger share of the world’s wealth into the control of the world’s mere 3,000-or-so billionaires. That’s the way the world works and ever-increasingly has worked ever since 1945.
Here’s how it happened:
Korea
“The secret genocide in South Korea you’ve probably never heard of”
(The sources in the article, by Écspielle Kay, excerpted here are mainly hidden behind paywalls because the U.S. Government has always suppressed what this article is reporting. But I have accessed every source here, and find the article to be fully honest and accurately documented. I have removed the photos but retain their descriptions.)
… What had really happened in Daejeon in the summer of 1950 … was later termed the Bodo League massacre.
The centre of Daejeon, South Korea, appearing as an ordinary industrial city. Also the site of one of history’s largest massacres.
Song Joon-ae immediately told the manager of the site. The manager of the site called the Daejeon division of the construction contractor company. It continued upwards until the discovery was brought to the attention to South Korean authorities. The construction site became an excavation site, and the bones which Soon Joon-ae found were not the last to be unearthed.
Government officials at the various sites around Daejeon found hundreds of sites with hundreds of bodies, some children, some infants, some civilians, some wearing peasant clothing, others wearing military uniform. Park Rae-mun, an archaeologist who appeared at the site estimated that 1.2 million people were massacred at the various sites around Daejeon. Kim Dong-Choon of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a South Korean governmental body, conservatively estimates that approximately 100,000 were executed by the South Korean military on October 1950, while many point to 400,000 as a likely figure. Both executioners and escapees came forward, and a picture gradually built up that these people were massacred on the suspicion of being leftists. …
The story of South Korea’s past starts with a provisional government often forgotten about in history textbooks. The People’s Republic of Korea lasted only from 1945 to 1946, and its capital was in Seoul. Through people’s committees all over the Korean peninsula, a twenty-seven-point programme was formed through democratic participation in government, a relatively novel experience for Korean people at the time.
“the confiscation without compensation of lands held by the Japanese and collaborators; free distribution of that land to the peasants; rent limits on the non-redistributed land; nationalization of such major industries as mining, transportation, banking, and communication; state supervision of small and mid-sized companies; …guaranteed basic human rights and freedoms, including those of speech, press, assembly, and faith; universal suffrage to adults over the age of eighteen; equality for women; labor law reforms including an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, and prohibition of child labor; and “establishment of close relations with the United States, USSR, England (ed. should be the United Kingdom), and China, and positive opposition to any foreign influences interfering with the domestic affairs of the state.”…
As soon as American troops landed in September of 1945, something seemed off about the People’s Republic of Korea. Nationalisation of major industries? Free distribution of land to peasants? People’s committees? Strong labour-unions and an eight-hour work day? To the United States, this experiment in a united Korean peninsula under democratic rule whiffed of communism.
What immediately occurred afterwards was the abolition of the People’s Republic of Korea by military decree. Officials serving under the government were shot, buildings were bombed, and supposedly “communist-sympathetic” Korean troops stationed in the country were summarily executed in a bloodbath lasting for several months. The United States Army Military Government was established, causing the eruption of mass public outrage at military personnel from the former Japanese Empire serving in office in South Korea.
To even further outrage, Lieutenant General John R. Hodge of the 24 Corps of the U.S. Tenth Army, assessing the situation badly, announced that the Japanese colonial government in Incheon would be kept, and, surprised at the poor reaction from Korean citizens his decision had elicited, tried to placate them by creating the Korean Advisory Council to represent the voice of ordinary Koreans. Unsurprisingly, his council was composed of landowners, wealthy businessmen, and officials from the Japanese colonial government.
Still not taking the hint, the military government continued to rule over months of civil unrest and outbursts of violence after outlawing the people’s committees and the PRK government. On September 23, 1946, 8,000 railway workers in Busan lead a strike, quickly spreading to hundreds of other towns and cities. A police station in Yeongcheon went under siege as a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands converged all at once, killing 40 policemen. More rebellions killed more than 20 Japanese officials and landlords. The situation escalated, and the American military declared martial law, tens of thousands being killed as military troops fired into mass crowds of demonstrators.
With haste, the First Republic of Korea, what we now know as South Korea, was declared in 1948. Syngman Rhee was flown abroad a US military aircraft to Tokyo, travelling to Seoul, and was installed as [president of the First Republic of Korea]. Rhee immediately arrested the remaining left-wing opponents in the political arena, setting his sights on Kim Koo, a former independence activist, an increasingly popular statesman, and advocate of unification. Syngman Rhee, as a fierce anti-communist and nationalist who would later be forced into exile by his own citizens, had him killed on 26 June 1949. …
***** “South Korea’s Embattled Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” 1 March 2010
MS [Mark Selden]: How have the media covered the work of the Commission?
KDC [Kim Dong-chun, retired Standing Commissioner of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission]: We have had to contend with the fact that the biggest Korean newspapers have ignored or suppressed our important findings and resolutions. The conservative press fails to recognize the relationship between past wrongs and present injustices facing many Korean citizens and those of other countries.
***** “The Road to the Truth: Lessons from South Korea’s Truth Commissions” (2021)
1 The Final Report of the Jeju Commission confirmed systemic massacres, indiscriminate arrests, torture, and summary executions by the Rhee government during the U.S. military occupation of Korea. 72 The release of the Final Report in 2003 resulted in a public apology from then President Roh Moo-hyun, the inclusion of the Final Report in Korea’s educational curriculum, and the creation of memorials for the deceased.73 Unlike the Anti-Nation Commission, the Jeju Commission had a clear mandate that authorized the Jeju Commission to freely conduct investigations into the Jeju Uprising.74 The extensive involvement of the Office of the Prime Minister also showed how proper governmental support helped the Jeju Commission succeed.75 The apology from President Roh was particularly significant because it marked the first apology by a head of state for human rights abuses in Korea.76 Furthermore, the allowance of the Final Report in high school classrooms allowed for a more neutral understanding of what really happened in the period leading up to the Korean War.77 C. South Korean Truth Commissions and the Korean War The Korean War claimed the lives of over 1,000,000 civilians, which made it the deadliest civilian event in Korean history.78 During the Korean war, atrocities were committed by the South Korean government against its own citizens. 79 For example, the 1949 Bodo League massacres that occurred during the Rhee presidency claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 South Koreans for allegedly being North Korean spies or communist sympathizers. 80 …
Although the TRCK made efforts to locate remains from mass graves related to the Bodo League Massacres and the Geochang massacres, the TRCK’s efforts were cut short due to an abrupt change in leadership in 2008, when President Lee Myung-bak came to power.89 When established in 2005, the TRCK had the full support of then President Roh Moo-hyun who was committed to using truth commissions as a vehicle for uncovering the violent truths of Korea’s past.90 In contrast, President Lee saw truth commissions as an obstacle to his goal of bolstering Korea’s economy.91 The TRCK’s resources and mandate became even more vulnerable when Lee appointed “new leaders” to the TRCK commission to better serve his policy agendas.92
***** “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea: Uncovering the Hidden Korean War”
1 March 2010, by Kim Dong-choon
The Other War: Korean War Massacres
More than 2 million people were killed during the Korean War. The casualties included not only military personnel but also innocent civilians. Few are aware that the Korean authorities as well as US and allied forces massacred hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians at the dawn of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. The official records of government, military and police, as well as survivor testimonies, reveal that mass killings committed by South Korean and U.N forces occurred before and during the Korean War (June 1950 to July 1953).
***** “Truman put Nukes in Guam and Gave the Order to Nuke North Korea”
(Based upon key details that slipped through in the academic book by Bruce Cumings; (2011) The Korean War, Robert Barsocchini documents that President Truman had an order drawn up to nuke North Korea but, for some unclear reason, “the order [to nuke North Korea] was never sent.” This was already after Truman had –)
managed to kill millions of Koreans, many, if not most, with “oceans” of napalm produced largely by the Dow Chemical Company, which the US air-force “loved”, referring to it as the “wonder weapon” for its ability to wipe out whole cities of people.
One day Pfc. James Ransome, Jr.’s unit suffered a “friendly” hit of this wonder weapon: his men rolled in the snow in agony and begged him to shoot them, as their skin burned to a crisp and peeled back “like fried potato chips.” Reporters saw case after case of civilians drenched in napalm — the whole body “covered with a hard, black crust sprinkled with yellow pus.”
US “intent was to destroy Korean society down to the individual constituent”.
Cities were destroyed, civilians burned to death and blown to bits with zero “tactical or strategic value”. Killing was an “end in itself”.
“[T]he United States Air Force was inflicting genocide”, Cumings notes, “on the citizens of North Korea.”
***** “The Case Against North Korea”
(I had posted this on 23 September 2019, to place into historical perspective the U.S. regime’s war against North Korea:)
So, Iran didn’t ever invade America, nor did Russia. What about North Korea, then? Did North Korea ever invade America? No, neither did that alleged ‘enemy’ of America. But America did invade North Korea during the Korean War. Have you ever seen the 764-page “Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China”? It documents America’s biological warfare program against North Korea in 1952. You probably haven’t even heard about it, because the U.S. regime managed to keep it hidden from the public until just this year, and because America’s ‘news’-media continue to blacklist its existence so as to continue the ‘justification’ for the U.S. regime’s still-ongoing efforts to conquer North Korea. But look at it here, as soon as its 764 pages have finished loading into your computer. Now that the U.S. regime is increasing its threats against both North Korea and China, the Governments in those countries recently released this document to the public, and thereby are challenging the U.S. propaganda-media to allow the publics in the U.S. and its vassal nations to see it — to see real history about this matter, not just propaganda (such as the U.S. is the world’s champion of).
This massive historical document opens:
On the 22nd. Feb. 1952, Mr. Bak Hun-Yung, Foreign Minister of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and on the 8th. March, Mr. Chou En-Lai, Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, protested officially against the use of bacteriological warfare by the U.S.A. On the 25th. Feb., Dr. Kuo Mo-Jo, President of the Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace, addressed an appeal to the World Peace Council.
At the meeting of the Executive Committee of the World Peace Council held at Oslo on the 29th. March, Dr. Kuo Mo-Jo, with the assistance of the Chinese delegates who accompanied him, and in the presence of the Korean representative, Mr. Li Ki-len, placed the members of the Committee, and other national delegates, in possession of much information concerning the phenomena in question. Dr. Kuo declared that the governments of China and (North) Korea did not consider the International Red Cross Committee sufficiently free from political influence to be capable of instituting an unbiassed enquiry in the field. This objection was later extended to the World Health Organisation, as a specialised agency of the United Nations. However, the two governments were entirely desirous of inviting an international group of impartial and independent scientists to proceed to China and to investigate personally the facts on which the allegations were based. They might or might not be connected with organisations working for peace, but they would naturally be persons known for their devotion to humanitarian causes. The group would have the mission of verifying or invalidating the allegations. After thorough discussion, the Executive Committee adopted unanimously a resolution calling for the formation of such an International Scientific Commission.
Ultimately, as Jeffrey S. Kay recently explained in his superb article at Global Research introducing this document to U.S.-and-allied publics:
Written largely by the most prestigious British scientist of his day, this report was effectively suppressed upon its release in 1952. Published now in text-searchable format, it includes hundreds of pages of evidence about the use of U.S. biological weapons during the Korean War, available for the first time to the general public.
Back in the early 1950s, the U.S. conducted a furious bombing campaign during the Korean War, dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance, much of it napalm, on North Korea. The bombardment, worse than any country had received up to that point, excepting the effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped out nearly every city in North Korea, contributing to well over a million civilian deaths. Because of the relentless bombing, the people were reduced to living in tunnels. Even the normally bellicose Gen. MacArthur claimed to find the devastation wreaked by the U.S. to be sickening.[1]
The massive document itself authenticates numerous reports of the U.S. flying planes over North Korea and dropping containers of fleas, clams, and other creatures, that were tested and verified as being contaminated with plague and cholera. For example, on pages 24-26 are described several such incidents. Typical was one in which “the Commission had no option but to conclude that the American air force was employing in Korea methods very similar to, if not exactly identical with, those employed to spread plague by the Japanese during the second world war.” Furthermore, one expert “gave evidence to the effect that he had urged the Kuomintang government to make known to the world the facts concerning Japanese bacterial warfare, but without success, partly, he thought, as the result of American dissuasion.” In other words: the U.S. regime not only protected and hired ‘former’ Nazis to use against USSR, but it did the same with Japan to use against China and North Korea. This 1952 operation against North Korea was perpetrated by the regime under U.S. President Harry S. Truman — the former Vice President who had been forced onto FDR’s final ticket by that Party’s top donors in order to get a war started against the Soviet Union and thereby keep their enormous government contracts continuing after WW II. Right after FDR died, Truman got fooled by Churchill and Eisenhower into starting the Cold War against the Soviet Union; and this 1952 international war-crime against China and North Korea was part of that.
(The Netflix series from South Korea, The Glory, is fictional but its portrayal of current South Korean culture is relevant here because it portrays South Korea as having a rigid and brutal caste-system that honors the rich and damns the poor, and thus it exemplifies in today’s generation of South Koreans the values-system that the U.S. regime has inculcated into their culture. This is an extreme version of neoliberalism-libertarianism, a zero-sum-game view of life in which individuals are evaluated mainly if not entirely by how wealthy or poor they are: rights come ONLY from wealth, and the poor are worth nothing and deserve to be trashed.)
***** Indonesia
The October 1965 through March 1966 Indonesian government extermination of anywhere from 500,000 to two million Indonesian supporters of communism and of any other left-wing (or pro-poor) political party — including supporters of Indonesia’s leader, General Sukarno, who had some leftist supporters, including some that were communists — was probably masterminded, ordered, by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, on behalf of the owners of the mega-corporations who were backing the Democratic Party. Certainly, LBJ was behind this ‘ethnic cleansing’, even well before it began. As early as March 1965, Johnson’s people were privately vitriolic against Sukarno, who was making noises about land-reform and possibly nationalizing natural resources. For example, on 18 March 1965, “118. Memorandum From the Under Secretary of State (Ball) to President Johnson” opened:
Our relations with Indonesia are on the verge of falling apart. Sukarno is turning more and more toward the Communist PKI. The Army, which has been the traditional countervailing force, has its own problems of internal cohesion. Within the past few days the situation has grown increasingly more ominous. Not only has the management of the American rubber plants been taken over, but there are dangers of an imminent seizure of the American oil companies.
The coup started on 1 October 1965; General Suharto was installed to replace Sukarno, and promptly began the extermination-campaign. But he didn’t know whom to slaughter; so, as one excellent review of Vincent Bevins’s excellent book about the slaughters, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, succinctly put the matter, “The US provided arms, training, communication equipment and lists of thousands of real and alleged leftists to be killed. US-owned plantations furnished lists of ‘troublesome’ employees. US officials repeatedly sent cables to the leader of the butchery, General Suharto, to kill the leftists faster.” Other fine reviews of this book are here and here. However, like the other books that have been published about that extermination-campaign, Bevins’s focus isn’t on the masterminds who planned and bribed to get it done (its beneficiaries), but instead on the physical perpetrators and their victims. The coup-and-extermination’s ultimate beneficiaries aren’t named, nor identified.
The U.S. did that extermination in conjunction with other members of the American gang, mainly in Europe. The Judge in the International People’s Tribunal stated that “the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Australia were all complicit to differing degrees in the commission of these crimes against humanity.” It was a Rhodesist operation, done for the U.S.-and-allied (especially Netherlands) aristocracies.
As I have documented elsewhere, FDR was intensely opposed to all imperialisms, but on 25 July 1945, Truman made the decision to reverse FDR’s foreign policies and aim for the U.S. itself to take control over the entire world.
(The 1982 Peter Weir movie, The Year of Living Dangerously, dramatically represents, from the standpoints of diplomats who were serving in Indonesia at the time leading up to and during the extermination-campaign, the chaotic conditions in Indonesia during that period, but sheds little light upon the reasons, methods, perpetrators, and beneficiaries, behind the massacres.)
The post America’s “War against Communism” Was Really a War against Advocates for the Poor first appeared on Dissident Voice.
The energy crisis, the cost of living crisis, and companies imposing prepayment meters on customers are keeping millions in the dark and cold. A new report by the Citizen’s Advice Bureau (CAB) claims that more than two million people are being disconnected at least once per month.
The CAB did polling on people’s experience with prepayment meters. It found that that 33% of people’s energy had gone off at least once in the last year. Also, 19% of people had gone without electricity for periods of more than 24 hours at a time. Both these figures were due to people not being able to afford to top-up their meters. So, when the money runs out energy companies automatically switch off their supply. This equates to one person every ten seconds losing access to gas and/or electric – more than three million people.
Rule breaking
Additionally, the CAB said its staff had seen energy companies force people onto meters in breach of regulations:
At the same time, Citizens Advice frontline advisers have consistently seen evidence of people in vulnerable circumstances being moved onto prepayment meters, in breach of energy supplier regulations. We continue to see evidence of these practices even after the regulator wrote to suppliers in mid-November to remind them of their obligations.
They said the government and regulator’s lack of enforcement of regulations had had profound effects on the most vulnerable people:
Our polling exposes the consequences of the failure to effectively enforce these regulations: Over 130,000 households including a disabled person, or someone with a long-term health condition, are being disconnected from their energy supply at least once a week because they can’t afford to top up.
The CAB warned that the issue of prepayment meters is “so acute” that the government must ban their forced installation, and put extra safeguards in place:
This ban must include legacy prepayment meters and remote switches for smart meters. We will take forward further work to define what these safeguards should be in collaboration with industry, Ofgem and Government.
They said new and existing meter users should be reviewed “with a commitment to replace them with credit meters where this is necessary to remove the risk of disconnection”.
Class war
Prepayment metering is another front in the class war. Alongside the cost of living and fuel crises, frozen wages, and the precarious state of housing in the UK, the practice leaves many of society’s most vulnerable people struggling to survive.
Campaigns like Don’t Pay UK have sprung up to resist the increased costs being forced onto the population. And, as if we needed reminding, while bills have soared, energy bosses have been making a mint even as they’ve forced people onto meters.
The state should intervene to help people. However, the power to make them do so can only come from below – through organised resistance by those affected.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Eric Jones, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under CC BY-SA 2.0.
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on Canary.
The world is confronting multiple, compounding crises, from COVID-19, energy, inflation, debt, and climate shocks to unaffordable living costs and political instability. The need for ambitious action cannot be greater. However, the return of failed policies such as austerity, now called “fiscal restraint” or “fiscal consolidation,” and a lack of effective taxation and debt-reduction initiatives threaten to exacerbate the macroeconomic instability and daily hardships that billions of people are facing. Unless policymakers change course, an “austerity pandemic” will make global economic recovery even more difficult.
As we show in a recent report, the looming wave of austerity will be even more premature and severe than the one that followed the 2008 global financial crisis. An analysis of IMF expenditure projections indicates that 143 governments will cut spending (as a share of GDP) in 2023, affecting more than 6.7 billion people – or 85% of the world population. In fact, most governments started scaling back public spending in 2021, and the number of countries slashing budgets is expected to rise through 2025. With average spending cuts of 3.5% of GDP in 2021, this contraction has already been much bigger than in earlier shocks.
Even more worryingly, upwards of 50 countries are adopting excessive cuts, meaning their spending has fallen below their (already low) pre-pandemic levels. This cohort contains many countries – including Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Guyana, Liberia, Libya, Sudan, Suriname, and Yemen – with large unmet development needs.
The austerity measures that governments are considering or already implementing will be deeply harmful to their populations, and especially to women. Governments are planning to limit social protections for vulnerable populations; cut programs for families, the elderly, and people with disabilities; slash or cap the public-sector wage bill (implying a reduction of frontline workers like teachers and health personnel); eliminate subsidies; privatize transportation, energy, and water services; cut pension benefits; reduce labor protections and employers’ social-security contributions; and decrease health expenditures.In parallel, many governments are adopting short-term revenue-generation strategies that will also have detrimental social effects. These include increasing consumption taxes – such as regressive sales and value-added taxes (VAT) – strengthening public-private partnerships, and increasing fees for public services.
Just in eastern and southern Africa, UNICEF finds that Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, and South Africa are considering or implementing three categories of austerity measures, while Lesotho is pursuing four categories, and Botswana five. Botswana, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia are each applying four or more categories of measures to boost revenue. Including spending cuts and tax increases, Botswana, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, and Zambia are each considering at least seven categories of austerity measures that are known to have adverse social impacts.
Not only are these governments pursuing painful austerity at a time when the region is dealing with unprecedented droughts and a cost-of-living crisis. They also are showing little willingness to adopt policies – such as higher tax rates for corporations and wealthy individuals – that are critical to reducing their already-high levels of inequality.
Unless austerity is reversed, people in developing countries will lose social protections and public services just when they are most needed. According to Oxfam, almost half of the global population is already living on less than $5.50 per day. And, lest we forget, trillions of dollars have been mobilized since the start of the pandemic to support corporations, while ordinary people have borne many of the costs of adjustment.
The dangers of an aggressive austerity approach were made clear over the past decade. From 2010 to 2019, billions of lives were upended by cuts to pensions and social benefits; lower investments in programs for women, children, and the elderly; fewer and lower-paid teachers, health, and local civil servants; and higher prices from basic consumption taxes.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are alternatives to austerity. Even in the poorest countries, there are at least nine other financing options that some governments have been using for years, and that are fully endorsed by the United Nations and international financial institutions. These include progressive taxation; debt elimination or restructuring; clamping down on illicit financial flows; increasing employers’ social-security contributions and coverage by formalizing workers in the informal economy; using fiscal and foreign-exchange reserves; re-allocating public expenditures; adopting a more accommodating macroeconomic framework; securing official development assistance; and new allocations of the IMF’s reserve asset, special drawing rights.
Since fiscal decisions affect everyone, they should be made not behind closed doors, but through inclusive and transparent national dialogues that include trade unions, employer federations, and civil-society organizations. Governments must abandon austerity measures that benefit the few at the expense of the many. Only by exploring alternative approaches can we support people and get back on track to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The world is still suffering one kind of pandemic. There is no need for another.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Whatever Arizona’s new governor Katie Hobbs does with over 3,000 steel, 40’x8’x8.6,’ four-ton shipping containers — still arriving to wall off Mexico for 10 miles of the San Rafael Valley — is yet to be revealed.
Her predecessor, Republican Doug Ducey, in the last months of his regime was ramrodding containers into place on a 60’ strip of desert as part of former president Trump’s border wall. His executive-ordered crash project cost nearly $100 million to buy, truck in, bolt containers together and weld sheet metal over three-foot gaps from roller-coaster terrain.
A few days ago, a federal lawsuit now forces the state to remove them because they rest on federal land. Costs are estimated to be $70 million.
Previously, Hobbs has said she might move the containers and repurpose them as affordable housing. So she’s got the right idea. So have others. In the last two years the trend for buying used containers has increased for temporarily sheltering the homeless. They join tiny-house villages, RV and campsite communities, storage units, motels, and vacant factory and office buildings.
Too, the railroads are selling off their 50-foot boxcars which could double container capacity for “affordable” housing. A boxcar’s average age is 30 years, however, explaining why prices range from $2,000 to $4,000, half the cost of a container ($8,300 for 40-footers).
Hobbs even may be aware of a model for a container community: the two-year-old architectural prize-winning pair of three-floor temporary shelters for 232 of the homeless in Los Angeles’ Chinatown: the Hilda L. Solis Care First Village owned by Los Angeles county.
Looking like New Orleans’ balconied apartments, the orange and yellow shelters face each other on 60,000 square feet of the former LA sheriff’s parking lot. Built in less than six months for $57 million , workers stacked and bolted three floors of 66 containers together for the two main buildings. They overlook 20 one-story modular wooden housing units. Each end of the two buildings has wide staircases, and an exterior prefabricated elevator at each floor’s midpoint.
Interiors of the 135 square-foot rooms and 8.6-foot ceilings—including a bathroom — have four-panel vertical windows with blinds. Each room was drywalled and painted, followed by air-conditioner and heating units, a half-refrigerator and sink. Furnishings were monastic: a bed, table, microwave, and shelving. Landscaping is a grassy courtyard between the two buildings, raised planters of herbs, and a tree at each end of the turf.
A sizable modular administration building houses offices for intakes, case records, counseling and healthcare services, as well as a laundry, commercial kitchen, and dining room. It has 24-hour security. The only drawback is that the four-acres are contaminated requiring an onsite treatment plant to “manage” the soil underneath the complex.
Before apartment builders rush to apply the Solis model for expanding units with extra containers, a few caveats need to be weighed against bargain-basement cost, availability, and transport. Many containers have been found to be toxic , their plywood flooring prone to fires. Inside temperatures could reach 135ºF with an AC breakdown. Lifespan is 10 to 15 years even with regular maintenance.
So Hobbs can convert containers—probably for permanent, low-income housing—into a Solis-like suburb. Or buy and remodel boxcars (and cabooses) for the homeless. Both are a vast improvement over packed, vermin-infested, crime-ridden shelters and the inhumane outdoor measures taken by at least two major cities—LA and Portland, OR. They are beset by sidewalk squatters, tent encampments, and RV settlers, all drawn to the West Coast’s mild, year-round temperatures, and social services. Current homeless populations: LA, at least 40,000; Portland, 5,228 and 800 encampments.
They’re scarcely alone. Last year, 326,126 were homeless, New York City leading with 102,656 packed in shelters and uncounted thousands on streets or subways. All cities with a “homeless problem” are being pressured by complaints from owners of small and large downtown businesses about doorways blocked by transients, trash, and toileting. Echoing Malthus’ “final solution,” they want the homeless gone forever, driven to residential neighborhoods or beyond the city limits. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
In Los Angeles, the ACLU of Southern California issued a report last year about police and sheriff’s deputies first harassing the homeless, then bulldozing encampments and seizing belongings. If victims persisted in living on the streets, they were banished by threats of citations to the Mojave Desert near Lancaster and Palmdale in unincorporated, East Los Angeles County.
LA’s new mayor, Karen Bass declared at her inauguration that her “first act as mayor will be to declare a state of emergency on homelessness.” Heavy emphasis was laid on sheltering 15,000 by the end of her first year. During her campaign, she mused to the Los Angeles Times: “There’s a big chunk of land in Palmdale and maybe we could create a village out there.” Her vice mayor added that LA owns “thousands of acres in Palmdale.”
Lancaster (pop: 176,892) is only nine miles down the highway from Palmdale (pop: 172,790), and the first to revolt against Bass (local newspaper headline: “Homeless ‘Invasion’ is coming”). Its outraged city council just voted unanimously to declare a state of emergency to protect it from “an incursion” of LA’s homeless. Palmdale’s council probably won’t be far behind.
Up in Portland meantime, its city council was voting to spend $27 million chiefly to fund Mayor Ted Wheeler’s resolution that within 18 months the city would set up three, two- to four-acre sanctioned campsites. Each would eventually contain 100 tents and 250 people and perhaps expansion to three additional sites. Local channel KGW’s Blair Best reported that: “Residents will have access to food, case managers and mental health and substance-abuse treatment, and…on-site and perimeter [neighborhood] security.” Some $750,000 is allocated for private-security forces in designated neighborhoods.
Once the campgrounds are open, Wheeler warned that like New York City, the police will do street sweeps and arrest the homeless refusing to leave unless they either agreed to use city shelters or moved to the camps—no matter what the Constitutional ramifications are. Multnomah County which encompasses Portland, spent $2 million , two years ago to distribute 22,700 tents and 69,514 tarps to the homeless. Under Wheeler’s policy, most probably will wind up in landfills.
A major factor in this tragic dilemma is the fury of many neighbors where these complexes and campsites are to be located. The chief complaint against the homeless aside from unsightliness is the alleged increases in crime, drug use, garbage, and hygiene. Most of all, it’s the suspicion that any kind of congregate housing lowers property values and steals their taxpayer dollars.
A middle-class Portland resident typified that stereotypic view: “I live in this neighborhood, and I think it’s a very nice neighborhood. I would not want to have a large group of homeless around here. I think you would have the crime go up, that’s the main thing.”
And a news release from the city of Lancaster addressed Mayor Bass’s plans for neighboring Palmdale:
A large homeless population in one area could lead to increased crime and safety concerns and potential damage to property values. This could be a major concern for residents and businesses in the area, and it’s an issue Lancaster has already been struggling to support with its existing unhoused population. There are also serious health concerns for the homeless population who would be moved from a climate ranging from 60-80 degrees annually to the high desert which experiences extreme weather highs and lows.
But this view of homeless communities is not necessarily true at all, considering that, say, sober houses instantly boot troublemakers and backsliding alcoholics/addicts from the premises. There’s rarely noise nor traffic congestion. Can that be said for fraternity and sorority houses in residential neighorhoods? Too, Solis-type facilities offer only temporary housing, social services, and security to move residents into productive lives.
Those experiencing eviction because of layoffs, business bankruptcies, or acquisitions can readily identify with the plight of the homeless in those settings. Fortunately, many speak up in their defense at public meetings or in neighborhood informational canvassing—or take the time and make the effort to reach out on their behalf.
CounterPunch writer Desiree Hellegers set such myth-makers straight a few days ago: “Never mind that the Pacific Northwest is choc-o-bloc with models of tent cities and tiny- house communities that are democratically run, generally with elected councils: Dignity Village, Right 2 Dream 2, SHARE-WHEEL, etc. None of them is perfect, but they are safer and infinitely more empowering, humane, healing, and effective, and less likely to violate the Geneva Conventions than what Wheeler & Co. have in mind.”
And a Los Angeles tiny-house resident reminded the fearful or judgmental about shelter living: “For people who get their noses up in the air, this can happen to anybody.” That’s certainly true for many of the 3.8 million living paycheck to paycheck and either are about to be evicted because the American Rescue Plan’s rent-moratorium has expired , or the 8.5 million behind on rent, as well as those facing significant rent increases. Add to those figures the 1.5 million estimated to lose their jobs because the Federal Reserve’s continuing interest-rate hikes mean small and large companies can’t afford to expand operations, nor are startups able to raise capital.
Perhaps it’s time to educate “NIMBYs” (“Not in My Backyard”) and the general public about who most of the homeless are in those enclosures by WPA-like posters (“We’ve Been Downsized or Evicted, But Are Leaving Shortly!”) spread around affected neighborhoods.
Facing the prospect of a nation of Hoovervilles drawing violent reactions from local residents, a frightened President Biden’s team just launched a plan to reduce homelessness by 25 percent in 2025: the All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness . Unfortunately, nothing was said about funding or what would happen to the remaining 75 percent.
That’s because the plan was just a heavily researched “blueprint” for state and local governments to use as models “for addressing homelessness in their communities.” Said Biden: “ it is not only getting people into housing, but also ensuring they have access to the support, services, and income that allow them to thrive.”
Forget any Executive Order to finance a New Deal for jobs and housing, as president Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) did to help solve the Great Depression of the 1930s.
At bottom, the major question involving the overall homeless situation is almost never asked because it involves the responsibility of corporate America: What good is housing if people lack jobs to make rent or mortgage payments? To say nothing of buying basics.
FDR’s WPA (Works Progress Administration) did both. It hired and trained 8.5 million of the unemployed for past and new federal programs. They ranged from infrastructure and environment to park systems and artists/writers projects. His FHA low-cost home-buying loans have housed 44 million since 1934, spurring massive house construction and providing capital for 4.8 million rental units—not counting residential care facilities, hospitals, and manufactured houses.
Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure program could have done the same. But he farmed it out to private interests. They might add and train a few thousand new employees, yet hardly on a WPA scale. If he were an FDR, he would have had the courage to shift part of the Pentagon’s FY2023 $858 billion budget allocation to civilians—as did Trump to spend more than $12 billion on his porous wall—to provide thousands of construction jobs and affordable housing for the homeless.
For the Pentagon, this tactic also might stifle increasing public opposition about its bloated, unaudited budget by showcasing its contribution to “domestic tranquility,” as the Constitution’s preamble puts it. Some $152 billion of next year’s funding—a 20 percent increase—goes for construction and veterans. That’s how those 750 overseas bases and at home were built by its engineers, equipment and supplies, and continue to be maintained. It doesn’t specify constructing what so the door is wide open to building affordable houses or rent-controlled apartment buildings for America’s homeless.
Using Trump’s rationale that his wall would defend the nation from an invasion of illegals, Biden now has precedent to declare such a neoWPA jobs-and-housing project would “provide for the common defense” of this nation and stop any domestic upheaval. After all, a major recession could trigger a massive uprising dwarfing today’s major strikes. So could climate-change migrations around the states.
As the Poor People’s Campaign co-chair Liz Theoharis reminds us: “In the coming years, movements dedicated to democracy and our economic flourishing need to invest time and resources in building permanently organized communities to help meet the daily needs of impacted Americans, while offering a sense of what democracy looks like in practice, up close and personal.”
To this, add the famous admonition to us by that man born into homelessness and persecution: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
The post Remodeled Shipping Containers, Boxcars Could Be Solutions for Expanding Homeless Shelters first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
COMMENTARY: By Martyn Bradbury
THE DAILY BLOG’S 2022 INFAMOUS MEDIA GONGS Last month The Daily Blog offered its New Year infamous news media gongs — and blasts — for 2022. In this extract, editor and publisher Martyn Bradbury names the mainstream media “blind spots”.
Graham Adams over at The Platform made the argument this year that the failure of mainstream media to engage with the debates occurring online is a threat to democracy.
With trust in New Zealand media at an all time low, I wondered what is the list of topics that you simply are NOT allowed to discuss on NZ mainstream media.
Here is my list of 17 topics over 30 years in New Zealand media:
- Palestine: You cannot talk about the brutal occupation of Palestine by Israel in NZ media. It’s just not allowed, any discussion has to be framed as “Poor Israelis being terrorised by evil angry Muslims”. There is never focus on the brutal occupation and when it ever does emerge in the media it’s always insinuated that any criticism is anti-Semitism.
- Child Poverty NEVER adult poverty: We only talk about child poverty because they deserve our pity. Adults in poverty can go screw themselves. Despite numbering around 800,000, adults in poverty are there because they “choose” to be there. The most important myth of neoliberalism is that your success is all your own, as is your failure. If an adult is in poverty, neoliberal cultural mythology states that is all on them and we have no obligation to help. That’s why we only ever talk endlessly about children in poverty because the vast majority of hard-hearted New Zealanders want to blame adults in poverty on them so we can pretend to be egalitarian without actually having to implement any policy.
- The Neoliberal NZ experiment: You are never allowed to question the de-unionised work force that amputated wages, you can never question selling off our assets, you can never criticise the growth über alles mentality, you are never allowed to attack the free market outcomes and you can’t step back and evaluate the 35-year neoliberal experiment in New Zealand because you remind the wage slaves of the horror of it all.
- Class: You cannot point out that the demarcation line in a capitalist democracy like New Zealand is the 1 percent richest plus their 9 percent enablers vs the 90 percent rest of us. Oh, you can wank on and on about your identity and your feelings about your identity in a never ending intersectionist diversity pronoun word salad, but you can’t point out that it’s really the 90 percent us vs the 10 percent them class break down because that would be effective and we can’t have effective on mainstream media when feelings are the currency to audience solidarity in an ever diminishing pie of attention.
- Immigration: It must always be framed as positive. It can never be argued that it is a cheap and lazy growth model that pushes down wages and places domestic poor in competition with International student language school scams and exploited migrant workers. Any criticism of Immigration makes you a xenophobe and because the Middle Classes like travelling and have global skills for sale, they see any criticism of migrants as an attack on their economic privileges.
- Hypertourism: We are never allowed to ask “how many is too many, you greedies”. The tourism industry that doesn’t give a shit about us locals, live for the 4 million tourists who visit annually. We are not allowed to ask why that amount of air travel is sustainable, we are not allowed to ask why selling Red Bull and V at tourist stops is somehow an economic miracle and we are certainly not allowed to question why these tourists aren’t directly being taxed meaningfully for the infrastructure they clog.
- Dairy as a Sunset Industry: We are never allowed to point out that the millisecond the manufactured food industry can make synthetic milk powder, they will dump us as a base ingredient and the entire dairy industry overnight will collapse. With synthetic milks and meats here within a decade, it is time to radically cull herds, focus on only organic and free range sustainable herds and move away from mass production dairy forever. No one is allowed to mention the iceberg that is looming up in front of the Fonteera Titanic.
- B-E-L-I-E-V-E victims: It’s like How to Kill a MockingBird was never written. People making serious allegations should be taken seriously, not B-E-L-I-E-V-E-D. That’s a tad fanatical Christian for me. It’s led to a change in our sexual assault laws where the Greens and Labour removed the only defence to rape so as to get more convictions, which when you think about it, is cult like and terrifying. Gerrymandering the law to ensure conviction isn’t justice, but in the current B-E-L-I-E-V-E victims culture it sure is and anyone saying otherwise is probably a rape apologist who should be put in prison immediately.
- The Trans debate: This debate is so toxic and anyone asking any question gets immediately decried as transphobic. I’ve seen nuclear reactor meltdowns that are less radioactive than this debate. I’m so terrified I’m not going to say anything other than “please don’t hurt my family” for even mentioning it.
- It’s never climate change for this catastrophic weather event: Catastrophic weather event after catastrophic weather event but it’s never connected to global warming! It’s like the weather is changing cataclysmically around us but because it’s not 100 percent sure that that cigarette you are smoking right now is the one that causes that lump inside you to become cancer, so we can’t connect this catastrophic weather event with a climate warming model that states clearly that we will see more and more catastrophic weather events.
- Scoops: No New Zealand media will never acknowledge another media’s scoop in spite of a united front being able to generate more exposure and better journalism.
- Te Reo fanaticism: You are not allowed to point out that barely 5 percent of the population speak Te Reo and that everyone who militantly fires up about it being an “official language” never seem that antagonistic about the lack of sign language use. Look, my daughter goes to a Māori immersion class and when she speaks Te Reo it makes me cry joyfully and I feel more connected to NZ than any other single moment. But endlessly ramming it down people’s throats seems woke language policing rather than a shared cultural treasure. You can still be an OK human being and not speak Te Reo.
- Māori land confiscation: Māori suffered losing 95 percent of their land in less than a century, they were almost decimated by disease and technology brought via colonisation, they endured the 1863 Settlements Act, they survived blatant lies and falsehoods devised to create the pretext for confiscation, and saw violence in the Waikato. Māori have lived throughout that entire experience and still get told to be grateful because Pākehā brought blankets, tobacco and “technology”.
- The Disabled: Almost 25 percent of New Zealand is disabled, yet for such a staggeringly huge number of people, their interests get little mention in the mainstream media.
- Corporate Iwi: You can’t bring up that that the corporate model used for Iwi to negotiate settlements is outrageous and has created a Māori capitalist elite who are as venal as Pākehā capitalists.
- Police worship: One of the most embarrassing parts about living in New Zealand is the disgusting manner in which so many acquiesce to the police. It’s never the cop’s fault when they shoot someone, it’s never the cop’s fault when they chase people to their death, it’s never the cop’s fault for planting evidence, it’s never the cops fault for using interrogation methods that bully false confessions out of vulnerable people. I think there is a settler cultural chip on our shoulders that always asks the mounted constabulary to bash those scary Māori at the edge of town because we are frightened of what goes bump in the night. We willingly give police total desecration to kill and maim and frame as long as long as they keep us safe. It’s sickening.
- House prices will increase FOREVER! Too many middle class folk are now property speculators and they must see their values climb to afford the extra credit cards the bank sends them. We can never talk about house prices coming down. They must never fall. Screw the homeless, scre the generations locked out of home ownership and screw the working poor. Buying a house is only for the children of the middle classes now. Screw everyone else. Boomer cradle to the grave subsidisations that didn’t extend to any other generation. Free Ben and Jerry Ice Cream for every Boomer forever! ME! ME! ME!
You’ll also note that because so many media are dependent on real estate advertising, there’s never been a better time to buy!
- Pacific Media Watch notes that the the brutal Indonesian military occupation of West Papua, a half century of colonisation, and violations of human rights ought to be cited on this list too.
Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury is a New Zealand media commentator, former radio and TV host, and former executive producer of Alt TV — a now-defunct alternative music and culture channel. He is publisher of The Daily Blog and writes blogs at Tumeke! and TDB. Republished with permission.
Yellowknife, Boxing Day 2022
Can you imagine walking downtown in Seattle, Vancouver, New York, Toronto, or any other burg in Canada or the United States and not seeing any panhandlers? This homelessness, begging, and dumpster diving is not confined to major urban centers. Last week, I was in Yellowknife, the capital of Denedeh (Home of the People; colonially designated as Northwest Territories), home to about 20,000 souls, where the temperatures ranged from -30° Celsius to -40° Celsius. Despite this, the homeless were out in the frigid temperatures asking change for a cup of coffee. There are shelters in Yellowknife. The take-away point, however, is that some people struggle with penury despite Canada being a signatory to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose preamble recognizes “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family…”
Specifically, Article 23(1) of the UNDHR holds,
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
Article 25(1) of the UNDHR states,
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
If Canada and the US honored their signatures on the UNDHR and abided by its articles, then absolute poverty should not exist.
While poverty is an important story for people to be cognizant of, and while it may not receive the media coverage and government prioritization that it deserves, the marginalized story that so many people seem unaware of is that there is a country that made it through 2022 having lifted its citizenry out of absolute poverty.
China declared victory against poverty in 2021. And it is not just China lauding its victory. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres commended China on its fight against poverty. The World Bank noted that China has lifted 770 million out of poverty over the last 40 years. Michelle Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said, “Poverty alleviation and the eradication of extreme poverty, 10 years ahead of its target date, are tremendous achievements of China.” Citing China’s eradication of absolute poverty, even the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, was moved to praise China’s amazing economic development.
This achievement was by the nominally communist China. Being aware of the victory over poverty is great, but this awareness ought also to be kept in mind before unthinkingly criticizing socialism or communism. The intellectual poverty of the criticism is such that many people consider it sufficient to just remark, “That’s communism/socialism,” as if providing a label for a political-economic system should evoke fear and invalidate it. Thus, in the US, Barack Obama was risibly derided as a socialist; he, nonetheless, sought to distance himself from such a descriptor.
Donald Trump declared his scorn for the bugaboo of socialism (apparently ignorant of what spending on the military; police; border security; highway, airport, train stations, railways, port facilities, bridge construction and maintenance; education; etc represent) and communism. He unsuccessfully tried to paint his presidential challenger in 2020, Joe Biden, as a socialist (again risibly).
Even university professors, such a Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, would add their ill-contrived opinions to the anti-socialist, anti-communist chorus.1
What Obama, Trump, Biden, Peterson, Justin Trudeau and other western-aligned personalities beholden to capitalism cannot tolerate is that a developing nation in the earliest stage of socialism (one with Chinese characteristics) has done something that the longtime capitalist-butt kissing nations have never, despite any lip service, come close to achieving: the elimination of absolute poverty.
What’s Next for Chinese Society?
China has identified a metric: “Human rights are an achievement of humanity and a symbol of progress.” Now China has set its eyes on achieving xiaokang (moderate prosperity), defined as “a status of moderate prosperity whereby people are neither rich nor poor but free from want and toil.” Xiaokang is to benefit all Chinese and benefit the world.
Meanwhile, the poor masses in capitalist countries languish while the middle classes, in the US and Canada, fall behind.
Why isn’t this war on poverty covered regularly and widely in capitalist media? Why doesn’t everyone know that the Chinese have conquered poverty and are embarked upon creating a prosperous society for all Chinese? Shouldn’t this be something all nations sincerely and actively aspire to?
- See “Understanding the Red Menace,” “Understanding the Soviet Union, Inequality, and Freedom of Expression,” and “IQ, Equal Pay for Equal Work, Population Control, Mao, and Communism.”
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
By Talebula Kate in Suva
Fiji’s new Minister for Women, Children and Poverty Alleviation, Lynda Tabuya, plans to use surveys and online platforms as an integral part of her ministry
During her official welcome yesterday along with her assistant minister, Sashi Kiran, Tabuya said that over the years she had made it her life goal to help those less fortunate.
She was happy that she could continue what she loved to do on a national stage in helping all Fijians.
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“As an integral part of my ministry, I plan on asking you — the citizens of Fiji — about the best way forward utilising surveys and online platforms,” Tabuya said.
“One of the foundations for building a better Fiji is providing equal opportunities to all Fijians irrespective of age, gender, physical ability or income level.”
To promote inclusivity and development, her ministry would continue to serve all Fijians through:
- The care and protection of children
- Greater policy intervention for older persons and persons with disability
- More innovative and targeted income support to families living or caught in the cycle of poverty; and
- Promoting gender equality and empowering women to reach their full potential.
Tabuya looked forward to strengthening and building on good partnerships with organisations whose activities and outputs support the ministries strategic objectives and those who provide services in the area of child protection and safeguarding, older people, people with disability, gender equality, women’s empowerment and ending violence against women and girls.
“During the turmoil of the last couple of months, the hymn ‘We Shall Overcome’ was often used as a source of inspiration,” she said.
“At this juncture, Fiji faces daunting poverty levels and incidences of domestic violence, but despite all these challenges I believe with God’s help and everyone working together, we shall overcome.
“I’m looking forward to working for the most disadvantaged in our society and together rebuilding Fiji into the way the world should be.”
Talebula Kate is a Fiji Times journalist. Republished with permission.
Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for progressive change. The reason is simple: “the system” is ruining the future for young people. Any system that threatens the future of its young people cannot retain their support and therefore is ripe for basic change.
Every morning, the daily news provides fresh evidence that “the system” is heading off a cliff—fruitless climate talks; growing nuclear threats; microplastics in food, water, breast milk and newborn babies; oceans damaged by warming, acidification, and dead zones; the military-industrial dragon preparing for war with China; Congress out of touch and deadlocked….
But there’s also good news: every day more young people are waking up to the facts and demanding that the system change.
What do I mean by “the system”? Back in 1996, when he was the editor of Harper’s magazine, Lewis Lapham described it as “the permanent government.”
Only slightly tongue-in-cheek, Lapham wrote, “The permanent government, a secular oligarchy… comprises the Fortune 500 companies and their attendant lobbyists, the big media and entertainment syndicates, the civil and military services, the larger research universities and law firms. It is this government that hires the country’s politicians and sets the terms and conditions under which the country’s citizens can exercise their right—God-given but increasingly expensive—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Obedient to the rule of men, not laws, the permanent government oversees the production of wealth, builds cities, manufactures goods, raises capital, fixes prices, shapes the landscape, and reserves the right to assume debt, poison rivers, cheat the customers, receive the gifts of federal subsidy, and speak to the American people in the language of low motive and base emotion.”
The permanent government is ruining the future for young people in two ways:
(1) destroying the natural world that humans depend upon for life itself—air, water, soil, vegetation, and wildlife, and
(2) degrading the social/economic sphere, creating a vast chasm between the megarich and everyone else, inciting anger and resentment that divide us against ourselves, which prevents us from protecting the natural world that sustains us.
Resentment is rising as social conditions are deteriorating
Radio host Thom Hartmann recently compared economic conditions for two groups of people of equal size in the U.S.: Baby Boomers (average age 67 today) versus Millennials (average age 33 today).
Back when the average Boomer was 33, Boomers held 21.3 percent of the nation’s wealth; in contrast, Millennials age 33 today hold only 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth. Prospects for Gen-Z are no better.
Hartmann identifies seven trends that have robbed young people of their fair share of prosperity: It boils down to the so-called “Reagan Revolution,” which Republicans (along with some Democrats) have pursued since 1980.
#1. Attack on wages
The attack on wages has three parts: (1) a coordinated offensive against labor unions, (2) passage of “right to work”(aka “right to work for less“) laws, and (3) flooding the political system with dark money so the megarich rule and ordinary people have no say.
Right-to-work-for-less laws prevent unions from collecting dues from workers who benefit from collective bargaining but who choose to withhold dues from the union that bargains on their behalf. This weakens unions, which reduces the incentive to join one, which weakens unions further.
Now 27 states have enacted such laws. Hartmann writes, “In every single case, anti-worker right-to-work laws have been passed in states controlled by Republicans at the time of passage.”
The attack on unions has succeeded. In 1983, 20 percent of workers were unionized; in 2021 it had dropped by half to 10.3 percent, even though 70 percent of Americans approve of unions.
As a result of these trends, today working people are taking home a 10% smaller share of the nation’s economic pie (“the labor share”) than they did in 1980. Ten percent may not sound huge, but it represents a transfer of 50 trillion dollars from working families to shareholders and business owners since 1975. Fifty trillion dollars. That’s $13,000 per year taken from every single worker in the bottom 90% of the wage-scale, year after year for 40 years.
Young people have been hit especially hard. In 1940, 90 percent of young people could expect to earn more than their parents. For children born in the 1980s, that measure of “absolute income mobility” has fallen to 50%—a major change that has degraded the future for tens of millions of young people.
No wonder working-class parents are angry and resentful as they see themselves precariously treading water, their children falling behind. This is where Trumpism began; then some cynical, privileged Republicans fanned those embers into flames. In 2018, Reuters/Ipsos asked 1,249 Trump voters what “Make American Great Again” meant to them and 2/3rds (63 percent) responded, “A better economy.”
#2. Restricting educational opportunity
Republican policies have put higher education out of reach for many children of low-income families and put millions more into crippling debt.
Professor Devin Fergus, now at the University of Missouri, has described the effects of the “Reagan revolution” on student debt. Prior to 1980, states paid 65% of student college costs, the federal government paid another 15%, leaving 20% for students to pay. Thom Hartmann has described how Mr. Reagan and his fellow “revolutionaries” set out to change all that. Students were “too liberal,”Mr. Reagan said, so “America should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.”After 40 years of defunding education, 44 million students are now saddled with $1.5 trillion in debt, making it hard or impossible for two generations of young people to create businesses, start families, or buy homes.
#3. Raising the price of a home
In 1950, the average price of a house was 2.2 times the median American family income. Today the median family income is $37,522 and the average house sells for ten times that amount—$374,900.
#4. “Financializing” the economy
As early as 2013, Bruce Bartlett, who served as an advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, described how Wall Street firms have grown in proportion to the whole economy. In 1950 the financial services industry represented 2.8% of gross domestic product (GDP); in 1980 that proportion has grown to 4.9% and by 2013 it has reached 8.3 percent. In 1980, wages and salaries in financial services were comparable to other industries. But then compensation in financial services began to rise and, by 2013, people in financial services were taking home 70 percent more than their counterparts elsewhere in the economy. Thus, financialization of the economy “is a major cause of rising income inequality,” Bartlett says.
#5. Tolerating monopolies
Competition is supposed to be the life blood of our economic system. As the Hamilton Project explains it, “Competition is the basis of a market economy. It forces businesses to innovate to stay ahead of other firms, to keep prices as low as they can to attract customers, and to pay sufficient wages to avoid losing workers to other firms. When businesses vie for customers, prices fall and economic output increases. When businesses hire workers away from each other, wages rise and workers’ standard of living improves. And as unproductive firms are replaced by innovative firms, the economy becomes more efficient.”
President Reagan ordered an end to anti-trust enforcement in 1983 and consolidation (contrary to U.S. law) has now affected many parts of the economy—agriculture, banking, insurance, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, internet providers, cable companies, gigantic food corporations, grocers, home mortgages, office supplies. Result: prices spiral upward, wages decline, jobs disappear.
#6. Profiting from disease and disability
In 1960, U.S. health care costs were 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP); by 2020, health care had risen to 19.7 percent of GDP. People in the U.S. don’t use more health care services than people in other countries; they just pay more for them.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 9% of U.S. adults (23 million people) are carrying medical debt totaling $195 billion. According to Forbes magazine, in 2021, one-in-five households (19 percent) “could not pay for medical care when it was needed.”How do you think that made them feel?
#7. Handouts for the megarich
If Republicans agree on nothing else, they agree on cutting taxes for the super-rich so their vast accrued wealth can “trickle down”upon the rest of us and (as a side benefit) can starve government so it can’t regulate business or provide “socialist”amenities like schools, hospitals, and old-age insurance (social security).
As Thom Hartmann puts it, “Reagan dropped the top income tax on the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 27 percent and cut corporate tax rates from 50 percent to functionally nothing… The average billionaire pays an income tax of under 3 percent and the majority of the nation’s largest corporations pay nothing.”
Recent studies show that in the 3-year period 2018-2020, 39 major corporations paid no taxes on $120 billion in profits and 73 others paid an average of only 5.3 percent during the period.
When billionaires and wealthy corporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes, the cost of running government gets dumped onto average citizens, who feel it, resent it, and then blame government for being weak and out of touch.
Summary
As things stand now, many working-class parents and their children are screwed, disrespected, even mocked as “deplorables.” Naturally they are seething with anger and resentment.
Cynical privileged Republicans have studied how to mobilize this resentment, to deflect it away from “the system”onto immigrants, gays, people Of Color, non-Christians and anyone who protests inequality or injustice (“slackers”and “hippies”). Yes, some privileged Republicans are more than just cynical; some are Nazis or Nazi sympathizers joined by dupes or dimwits or groupies—but most weren’t born that way; they have been bent by circumstance. Only 1 to 4 percent of people are born psychopaths without empathy or a conscience.
It is not fashionable to say so, but America is in trouble mostly because it no longer has a major political party sticking up for the working class. Since the mid-1970s, the permanent government has guided both major parties to benefit the few, not the many. Until that changes, we will have white-hot resentment and privileged opportunists who will trade on that resentment, creating rancor, division, and political stalemate, which will prevent us from protecting and repairing the natural world or spreading the wealth, upon which the future of all young people depends.
What is to be done?
In 2020, Nick Hanauer proposed a new kind of organization. Mr. Hanauer wrote, “…Imagine an AARP for all working Americans, relentlessly dedicated to both raising wages and reducing the cost of thriving—a mass membership organization so large and so powerful that our political leaders won’t dare to look the other way. Only then, by matching power with power, can we clear a path to enacting the laws and policies necessary to ensure that that trickle-down economics never threatens our health, safety, and welfare again.”
In 2018 the AARP had 38 million members.
Could Mr. Hanauer’s idea be built upon by young people, with support from their elders? Could we, together, create a new organization for all working Americans and for all young people, who are now losing their future? A mass-based organization dedicated to raising wages and to reducing the costs of thriving and to guaranteeing a future for young people by protecting and repairing the natural world. Large majorities of Americans already support these ideas.
Maybe name it simply: The Future.
Every existing issue-focused organization, including every labor union (like mine, the National Writer’s Union) could urge its members to not only support their own particular issues but also to join and help create The Future. Make membership dues affordable for everyone: No more than $10 per year. Recruit like crazy, build, deliver results.
Youth are already getting organized to protect their future. With youth choosing the path and leading the way, we elders could join The Future to serve as volunteer benefactors, fundraisers, cheer leaders, publicists, social-media posters, recruiters, and more. It could be big. Who knows? It might even work.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Reference photograph: Sandinistas at the Walls of the National Guard Headquarters: ‘Molotov Man’, Estelí, Nicaragua, July 16th, 1979, by Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos
The International Labour Organisation’s Global Wage Report 2022–23 tracks the horrendous collapse of real wages for billions of people around the planet. The gaping distance between the incomes and wealth of 99% of the world’s population from the incomes and wealth of the billionaires and near-trillionaires who make up the richest 1% is appalling. During the pandemic, when most of the world has experienced a dramatic loss in their livelihoods, the ten richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes. This extreme wealth inequality, now entirely normal in our world, has produced immense and dangerous social consequences.
If you take a walk in any city on the planet, not just in the poorer nations, you will find larger and larger clusters of housing that are congested with destitution. They go by many names: bastis, bidonville, daldongneh, favelas, gecekondu, kampung kumuh, slums, and Sodom and Gomorrah. Here, billions of people struggle to survive in conditions that are unnecessary in our age of massive social wealth and innovative technology. But the near-trillionaires seize this social wealth and prolong their half-century tax strike against governments, which paralyses public finances and enforces permanent austerity on the working class. The constricting squeeze of austerity defines the world of the bastis and the favelas as people constantly struggle to overcome the obstinate realities of hunger and poverty, a near absence of drinking water and sewage systems, and a shameful lack of education and medical care. In these bidonvilles and slums, people are forced to create new forms of everyday survival and new forms of belief in a future for themselves on this planet.
Reference photograph: Neighbourhood residents and other guests participate in a popular bible study in Petrolina, in the state of Pernambuco, 2019. Sourced from the Popular Communication Centre (Brazil).
These forms of everyday survival can be seen in the self-help organisations – almost always run by women – that exist in the harshest environments, such as inside Africa’s largest slum, Kibera (Nairobi, Kenya), or in environments supported by governments with few resources, such as in Altos de Lídice Commune (Caracas, Venezuela). The Austerity State in the capitalist world has abandoned its elementary duty of relief, with non-governmental organisations and charities providing necessary but insufficient band-aids for societies under immense stress.
Not far from the charities and self-help organisations sit a persistent fixture in the planet of slums: gangs, the employment agencies of distress. These gangs assemble the most distressed elements of society – mostly men – to manage a range of illegal activities (drugs, sex trafficking, protection rackets, gambling). From Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl (Mexico City, Mexico) to Khayelitsha (Cape Town, South Africa) to Orangi Town (Karachi, Pakistan), the presence of impoverished thugs, from petty thieves or malandros to members of large-scale gangs, is ubiquitous. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the favelados (‘slum dwellers’) of Antares call the entrance of their neighbourhood bocas (‘mouths’), the mouths from which drugs can be bought and the mouths that are fed by the drug trade.
Reference photograph: Bishop Sérgio Arthur Braschi of the Diocese of Ponta Grossa (in the state of Paraná) blesses food that Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) donated to 500 families in need, 2021, by Jade Azevedo.
In this context of immense poverty and social fragmentation, people turn to different kinds of popular religions for relief. There are practical reasons for this turn, of course, since churches, mosques, and temples provide food and education as well as places for community gatherings and activities for children. Where the state mostly appears in the form of the police, the urban poor prefer to take refuge in charity organisations that are often connected in some way or another to religious orders. But these institutions do not draw people in only with hot meals or evening songs; there is a spiritual allure that should not be minimised.
Our researchers in Brazil have been studying the Pentecostal movement for the past few years, conducting ethnographic research across the country to understand the appeal of this rapidly growing denomination. Pentecostalism, a form of evangelical Christianity, emerged as a site of concern because it has begun to shape the consciousness of the urban poor and the working class in many countries with traditionalist ideas and has been key in efforts to transform these populations into the mass base of the New Right. Dossier no. 59, Religious Fundamentalism and Imperialism in Latin America: Action and Resistance (December 2022), researched and written by Delana Cristina Corazza and Angelica Tostes, synthesises the research of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Brazil) working group on evangelism, politics, and grassroots organising. The text charts the rise of the Pentecostal movement in the context of Latin America’s turn to neoliberalism and offers a granular analysis of why these new faith traditions have emerged and why they dovetail so elegantly with the sections of the New Right (including, in the Brazilian context, with the political fortunes of Jair Bolsonaro and the Bolsonaristas).
Reference photograph: Participants of a march and vigil organised by the Love Conquers Hate Christian Collective light candles during a prayer with believers of various faiths in Rio de Janeiro, 2018, by Gabriel Castilho.
In the 19th century, a very young Karl Marx captured the essence of religious desire amongst the downtrodden: ‘Religious suffering’, he wrote, ‘is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people’. It is erroneous to assume that the turn to forms of religion is merely about the desperate need for goods that the Austerity State has not been willing to provide. There is more at stake here, far more indeed than Pentecostalism, which has earned our attention, but which is not alone in its work in the slums of the urban poor. Trends similar to Pentecostalism are visible in societies that are dominated by other religious traditions. For instance, the da’wa (‘preachers’) of the Arab world, such as the Egyptian televangelist Amr Khaled, provide a similar kind of balm, while in India, the Art of Living Foundation and a range of small-time sadhus (‘holy men’) along with the Tablighi Jamaat (‘Society for Spreading Faith’) movement provide their own solace.
What unites these social forces is that they do not focus on eschatology, the concern with death and judgment that governs older religious traditions. These new religious forms are focused on life and on living (‘I am the resurrection and the life’, from John 11:25, is a favourite of Pentecostals). To live is to live in this world, to seek fortune and fame, to adopt all the ambitions of a neoliberal society into religion, to pray not to save one’s soul but for a high rate of return. This attitude is called the Life Gospel or the Prosperity Gospel, whose essence is captured in Amr Khaled’s questions: ‘How can we change the whole twenty-four hours into profit and energy? How can we invest the twenty-four hours in the best way?’. The answer is through productive work and prayer, a combination that the geographer Mona Atia calls ‘pious neoliberalism’.
Reference photograph: Doing the Ring Shout in Georgia, ca. 1930s, photographer unknown. Sourced from the Lorenzo Dow Turner Papers, Anacostia Community Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
Amidst the despair of great poverty in the Austerity State, these new religious traditions provide a form of hope, a prosperity gospel that suggests that God wants those who struggle to gain wealth in this world and that measures salvation not in terms of divine grace in the afterlife but in the present balance of one’s bank account. Through the affective seizure of hope, these religious institutions, by and large, promote social ideals that are deeply conservative and hateful towards progress (particularly towards LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and sexual freedom).
Our dossier, an opening salvo into understanding the emergence of this range of religious institutions in the world of the urban poor, holds fast to this seizure of the hope of billions of people:
In order to build progressive dreams and visions of the future, we must foster hope among the people that can be lived in their daily reality. We must also recover and translate our history and the struggle for social rights into popular organisation by creating spaces for education, culture, and community in which people can gain better understandings of reality and engage in daily experiences of collective solidarity, leisure, and celebration. In these endeavours, it is important not to neglect or dismiss new or different ways of interpreting the world, such as through religion, but, rather, to foster open-minded and respectful dialogue between them to build unity around shared progressive values.
This is an invitation to a conversation and to praxis around working-class hope that is rooted in the struggles to transcend the Austerity State rather than surrender to it, as ‘pious neoliberalism’ does.
Reference photograph: The March of Daisies (Marcha das Margaridas), a public action in Brasilia in 2019 involving more than 100,000 women, by Natália Blanco (KOINONIA Ecunumical Presence and Service). Sourced from the ACT Brazil Ecumenical Forum (FEACT).
In February 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, went to the town of Maarat al-Nu’man and beheaded a seventy-year-old statue of the 11th century poet Abu al-Alaa al-Ma’arri. The old poet angered them because he is often thought of as an atheist, although, in truth, he was mainly anti-clerical. In his book Luzum ma la yalzam, al-Ma’arri wrote of the ‘crumbling ruins of the creeds’ in which a scout rode and sang, ‘The pasture here is full of noxious weeds’. ‘Among us falsehood is proclaimed aloud’, he wrote, ‘but truth is whispered… Right and Reason are denied a shroud’. No wonder that the young terrorists – inspired by their own gospel of certainty – decapitated the statue made by the Syrian sculptor Fathi Mohammed. They could not bear the thought of humanity resplendent.
The post The Perils of Pious Neoliberalism in the Austerity State first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
By: Kate Bueckert
See original post here.
Food banks aren’t supposed to exist in 2022.
They were started in Canada about 40 years ago as a temporary response to the recession in the 1980s.
So it’s disheartening to Carolyn Stewart, executive director of Feed Ontario, that food banks are not only still needed, but demand is growing at an incredible rate.
“I think what it really shows for us is that it’s increasingly more difficult … to escape poverty today than it was 40 years ago,” she said.
“But on top of that, that the changes and disinvestments that we’ve made in social assistance programs and housing, and that today’s quality of employment, are just making it increasingly inaccessible for people to have a standard quality of living here in Ontario.”
How far does a dollar go?
One dollar “is not stretching as far” right now, she said.
“People are doing their very best, but it’s virtually impossible to afford everything, and so people are having to turn to food banks for help. And as much as food banks are the first people to say they wish we didn’t have to exist and we would gladly close our doors if the need was not there, the need just continues to grow.”
Carolyn Stewart, executive director of Feed Ontario, says this year’s Hunger Report shows demand for food banks continues to rise, not just from pandemic recovery or inflation. (Feed Ontario) Feed Ontario, an organization made up of 1,200 partner food banks, released its most recent Hunger Report on Monday, and it doesn’t mince words about the growing need in this province.
Between April 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, more than 587,000 people in Ontario accessed a food bank, with more than 4.3 million visits.
“This marks a 15 per cent increase and 42 per cent increase respectively over the last two years and the sixth consecutive year that food bank use has risen,” the report says.
“While it was initially hoped that rapidly escalating food bank use was the result of an acute set of circumstances related to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than three years later, food bank use has only continued to increase.”
Concerns that need will outpace supply
The Hunger Report notes that in the first nine months of 2022, the number of people accessing food banks increased 24 per cent over the same time period in 2021.
Of those, one in three people was seeking help from the local food bank for the first time.
It’s worrisome, Stewart said, because the rising costs are also having an impact on donations. Shelves once stocked for two or three months now are depleted within two or three weeks.
“There is concern out there that the demand will outpace capacity,” Stewart said. “And then what?”
That concern is echoed in the report: “While food banks are working hard to meet this growing demand, their resources are finite and there is concern that the need could outpace the capacity of the provincial food bank network.”
It’s something the Windsor-Essex area is seeing.
June Muir, chief executive officer of UHC Hub of Opportunities, helps oversee 15 food banks in the Windsor-Essex area, and at one location in Windsor, volunteers hand out food hampers.
“People line up and walk up for those food hampers, and sometimes we run out and it’s just heartbreaking to see people leave and not have food to leave with,” she said.
“What I see happening in our community are things I have never seen before, all while we’re struggling as food banks to keep food on our shelves.”
‘Going through food at a double rate’
Ro Mullen is executive director of the Inner City Home in Sudbury, which serves 1,200 households on average each month and is one of 44 agencies under the Sudbury Food Bank umbrella.
“We’re going through food at a double rate to what we were used to, and so there are many times that we run out of particular items,” she said.
Mullen said they’ve been able to continue to feed those in need thanks to the generosity of people in the city.
“We just ran out of pasta sauce unexpectedly. We thought we had enough to go through the week, but we didn’t. So we called Sudbury Food Bank and said, ‘Hey, can you help us out?’ And they gave us two boxes of pasta sauce just like that,” she said.
“We put out an ad on Facebook saying that we needed school snacks, and fresh fruit and vegetables earlier in the week, and we’ve had several people just show up with a bag of carrots or a bag of apples, and so the community’s been really fantastic.”
The problems: Pandemic, inflation, policies
The Feed Ontario Hunger Report isn’t surprising for those who work or volunteer with food banks. In October, Food Banks Canada released a similar report that showed a record number of people used food banks across the country in the past year.
While the global pandemic and rising inflation have an “undeniable role” in the increased use of food banks, the Feed Ontario Hunger Report says there are other longstanding issues.
It says provincial government policies play a role in thousands of Ontarians needing to use food banks.
Some of those issues include:
- Minimum wage, which is $15.50 as of October, but “still falls significantly below a living wage.”
- Changes through the government’s Making Ontario Open For Business Act that cancelled paid sick days for people and eliminated a worker’s right to refuse last-minute or unscheduled work.
- “Insufficient” financial support provided for people who need Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program. It noted two out of three people who use food banks are social assistance recipients.
- High cost of rent, often a fixed expense and non-negotiable, means people will pay for housing and have little left over for other necessities, like food, the report says. This goes hand in hand with a lack of investment in social housing, which often have long wait lists.
- Labour market changes in Ontario, including the rise in precarious employment and the gig economy.
“What is most concerning about this particular moment in time is the deepening cracks in our economic foundation that make it more difficult than ever for the lowest-income households to weather a new storm and the potential for it to leave lasting scars on our province,” the report said.
‘They just can’t make it’
The report said it’s no longer good enough to have just a full-time job to pay all the bills.
Dan Erwin is with Partners for Mission in Kingston, which has operated since 1984 and provides food hampers. He said people with jobs are also turning to them for food.
“We’re seeing new faces. They’re working. They’re trying to get through, but they just can’t make it,” Erwin said.
“Inflation’s impacting everyone. Prior to 2020 and COVID-19, there were many who were struggling but they were getting by. And now, when you add a couple of years of heavy inflation, now they’re kind of under water.”
- High food costs, higher demand, burn candle at both ends for Sudbury Food Bank
- More employed people turning to Toronto food banks amid record-high visits, new report says
He said he doesn’t know what 2023 will bring, but the possibilities are on his mind.
“I’m trying to find a crystal ball because I was completely out to lunch for this year. We did really good planning on food costs because of some great advice from Food Banks Canada and Feed Ontario … but I totally missed on our demand. I never anticipated we’d be over 18 per cent at this point,” he said.
Erin Kewaquom co-ordinates the food bank in Saugeen First Nation, a small reserve on the shores of Lake Huron. Before the pandemic, they would see between 80 and 100 clients each month. That’s risen to 130 people per month.
Kewaquom said they’re able to meet the demand right now because of donations through the community, funding from the band office and other grants.
The food bank buys perishables — such as milk, cheese, bread, and fruit and vegetables — from a nearby grocery store. But Kewaquom said they’ve noticed they’re spending up to $600 every two weeks now, up from $450 a few months ago.
The rising cost of food and other items “does have a huge impact on how much we can buy.”
She knows Christmas can be a tough time for many in the community, but it’s the months after the holidays that can be bleak.
“In January and February, because I know Christmas is a very tight time for budgets for families, we do allow two accesses [to the food bank] per month just to help offset all the costs,” she said.
- The face of poverty is changing. This woman is feeding more mouths than ever
- This Cambridge TikToker took a food bank shopping with money he raised on the app
Chris Peacock, executive director of the Sharing Place Food Centre in Orillia, said they’ve seen a significant increase of new faces. Last month, 140 new people sought help. That’s up from the usual 30 to 40 new people a month the centre has seen previously.
He said it’s often “people that did not know that they were going to be in the position that they are … all of sudden they realize, ‘Wow, I can’t afford food,’ and they’re in a very difficult position.”
Rent vs. food
Three years ago, Kimberly Mitchell and her husband lived in the Toronto suburb of North York, but they weren’t able to afford rent and their other bills, so they had to move. She told CBC Toronto they had to rely on shelters, food banks and church food programs to survive.
“If you’ve ever had a feeling of hunger, it’s a deep pain,” Mitchell said. “It’s not a comfortable feeling.”
They now live in Toronto and make ends meet with the help of the Ontario Disability Support Program and food banks.
“We wouldn’t be able to live day to day if we didn’t have the assistance from the food bank,” she said.
Similar stories are being heard at other food banks.
On Friday, The Food Bank of Waterloo Region released its community impact report. It said between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2022, one in 14 households required emergency food assistance. That’s up from one in 20 in the same time period a year earlier.
Kim Wilhelm, the food bank’s interim executive director, said the report paints a grim picture of just how many people in the community are food insecure.
“The cost of living has never been higher and that is forcing people to choose between paying rent or a mortgage, putting gas in their car to get to work, or putting food on the table,” Wilhelm said in a release.
The Hamilton Food Share said the city has the second highest per-capita food bank access in the province. In the group’s own hunger report, it found 62 per cent of people who took a survey indicated they were able to pay rent because they could use the food bank.
The report asked, “Would you be at risk of losing your housing if you needed to purchase the food received from the food bank?” Almost half — 46 per cent — said yes.
What can be done
The Hunger Report outlines four areas needing improvement:
- Quality of work.
- Social assistance.
- Social housing.
- Put people at the centre of policy and program design.
“We believe that the government agrees with our vision of a hunger-free Ontario and so we hope that they are interested in learning more,” Stewart said.
“We also want everyone in the community to learn more about food insecurity — why their neighbours are going hungry and what they can do to help make change,” she added.
“We encourage them to go speak to their local representatives, whether that be city councillors, mayors, MPPs … and let them know that this is an important issue.”
Allison Hill at the Thunder Bay Food Banks said in her city, the organization that started “as a stopgap measure” has become part of the “fabric of our community.”
She said it raises the question: Why?
“What is wrong in our society and the public policy that food banks are not only necessary, but growing, the need is growing every year? I would love to see us go out of business,” Hill said.
“The Thunder Bay Food Bank is so appreciative of the community support that we get and we couldn’t do it without the community support, but we really hope that someday the government and public policy and systems are in place that we won’t be needed.”
This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.
“You don’t think about the future.… There’s no future to think about. Future is arriving home to sleep,” Nemir said. “It’s stressful. Sometimes you feel like you won’t get anywhere. You can’t plan anything. You feel defeated.” Nemir (who requested his last name not be used due to fear of reprisal), worked for years delivering food via apps like Rappi, and now cleans and delivers 20-liter bottles…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A shop in West Sussex has used its Christmas window display to take aim at the Tory government over the ongoing cost of living crisis.
Eco2Home: the circular economy
Lee Barnett owns Eco2Home, a shop in Burgess Hill, West Sussex. The outlet describes itself as a ‘circular economy’ shop. This means it sells items usually destined for landfill. As the website Circular wrote:
The circular economy is based on a fundamentally different concept to the linear model of economic activity with which we are all familiar.
The circular economy is, essentially, a production and consumption system that relies on recycling, reuse, repair, remanufacturing and sharing of products – so, by definition, it demands a change in consumption patterns, new business models, and circular systems of production and resource allocation.
As a result, our usual ways of judging national economic performance in a linear system – with indicators such as gross domestic product, productivity and inflation rates – are not sufficient or adequate for measuring circular activity.
At the moment, estimates suggest that only 8.6 per cent of the world’s economy is circular.
Open two days a week, the shop has several values, and states that it will:
plant 45 trees for every 1 ton of waste we are unable to recycle or reuse.
Eco2Home won Burgess Hill’s best Christmas window competition in 2020 for a genuinely festive display. However, this year Barnett has chosen to make a political point – and it’s a massive departure from what Eco2Home usually does.
Taking aim at the Tories
Barnett used his shop window frontage to create ‘The reality of Christmas in 2022’. One window features Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson and Mims Davies (MP for Mid Sussex) in a decadent living room setting:
A second window has a child wrapped in blankets, sitting at a table with a pot noodle and a letter to Santa describing the bleak reality of the cost of living crisis. An electric fire has a ‘do not turn on’ note on it:
There’s a note from a child asking Santa:
could my mum be home for Christmas, she always has to be at work.
Eco2Home has made pertinent points about the current cost of living crisis: how the Tories are sitting pretty, while the rest of us suffer to varying degrees. Barnett should be applauded for this, and in a just world would win the best shop window display again – though perhaps for different reasons this year.
Featured image and additional images via Eco2Home
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on Canary.
This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.
• China bids farewell to Jiang Zemin
The post China Bids Farewell to Jiang Zemin first appeared on Dissident Voice.
• China expands social welfare
• New trends in Chinese literature
• Chinese tea, Intangible Cultural Heritage of HumanityThis post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Tory MP, failed leadership candidate, and current leader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt has caused uproar on social media. She tweeted a video of herself promoting a new initiative in her constituency city of Portsmouth: Mordaunt is opening a handful of foodbanks. However, the MP has decided to call them something else, in a bid to make her move slightly less awful than it actually is.
Mordaunt’s food ‘pantries’, not ‘foodbanks’
As the News reported, Mordaunt is paying for three food “pantries” (not ‘foodbanks’ – ‘pantries’) to open in Portsmouth. She’s funding it from the royalties of a book she wrote. The News said that these pantries are where:
people facing financial difficulties can buy heavily-discounted groceries.
Yes, we know. That’s a foodbank – right? Well, not if you’re Mordaunt. The News continued, implying that unlike foodbanks:
No referral is needed to access them.
Never mind the fact that people don’t need a referral from places like Citizens Advice to access many independent foodbanks, anyway. So, what is the difference between Mordaunt’s pantries and a foodbank? The News revealed that:
a typical weekly shop bought through them would cost as little as £4.
Right – so you have to pay for the food. Now it’s making sense. Essentially, Mordaunt admits people are too poor to afford food, so has set up a load of discount shops under the guise of helping her community – which are foodbanks in all but name (and the fact people have to pay). Her party’s governments have caused poverty to skyrocket. Yet Mordaunt is so proud of her pantries that she filmed a video telling us all about them.
“They’re NOT foodbanks”
Mordaunt said that:
Food pantries are a great scheme that can help families reduce their food bills by about £800 a year. They’re not foodbanks where you need to be referred in. They’re open to everyone, and for a few pounds a week you can get a decent shop.
I’m opening 3 new Food Pantries in Portsmouth North with the proceeds from @GreaterTheBook. Paulsgrove and Baffins now up and running.
Huge thank you to @TheHive_Project @portsmouthtoday @CircularIT @portsmouthnews @StCuthbertCofE @PaulsgroveC @coopuk @PegasusPrince2 @LewisGos92 pic.twitter.com/ImJmLUanIy— Penny Mordaunt (@PennyMordaunt) December 7, 2022
Naturally, people on Twitter weren’t having Mordaunt’s nonsense. TV host professor Alice Roberts noted the foodbank overtones of Mordaunt’s pantries, while also highlighting her cynicism:
This is not just any food bank, it’s a Make-Britain-Great-Again food bank. Sorry, pantry.
And a great vehicle for advertising a book, too! https://t.co/nGo244NcO5— Prof Alice Roberts
(@theAliceRoberts) December 8, 2022Someone else pointed out the gaslighting:
“We made people poor and desperate, and now we’re making it seem as though we’re angels for saving them” https://t.co/it4ruv0nbY
— Prof Paul Bernal (@PaulbernalUK) December 8, 2022
And as writer Will Black implied, rebranding foodbanks is pretty ghoulish:
Nothing says out of touch and dishonest as Tories talking about "opening" "food pantries"
Causing and exploiting for PR isn't the same as opening / running @PennyMordaunt
And no working class person who isn't a maid or butler has said pantry for 50 years https://t.co/GuP7OPh1ES
— Will Black (@WillBlackWriter) December 8, 2022
Ghoul
In 2010, 60,000 food bank packages were handed out in Britain. Last year, it was 2.5 million. This is the result of political choices – and the cost of living crisis will see millions more fall into food poverty.
The Tories have been in power all that time. So, Mordaunt would never admit that foodbanks were a scourge of successive governments – that would implicate her in the horror. Instead, this ghoul chooses to gaslight everyone who has to use them – by rebranding them and making our she has a charitable nature in the process. Mordaunt is supposed to be the palatable face of the Tories – yet here she is, running around trying to appeal to the ‘squeezed middle’ with this ‘food pantry’ dross. Beyond rancid.
Featured image via Sky News – YouTube and Guardian News – YouTube
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on Canary.
Originally published by The 19th A year ago, the expanded child tax credit ended. Between 2020 and 2021, the credit — which gave monthly payments of up to $300 per child — helped reduce child poverty by more than 40 percent. More than 36 million families received the credit in 2021, and the money helped push the child poverty rate below that of adults for the first time. But since the program…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
When the African American Research Collaborative surveyed a cross section of Florida voters earlier this fall, more than 25 percent of those questioned reported that they had experienced homelessness — doubling up with family or friends or living in a car, shelter, storage shed or motel — at some point in the last few years.
This came as no surprise to Sheena D. Rolle, senior director of strategy at Florida Rising, an organization that formed in 2021 from a merger between the New Florida Majority and Organize Florida. The goal of the group, according to its website, is to “win elections, change laws and create a state where everyone can be safe, happy, healthy and whole.”
Permanently affordable housing is, of course, key to achieving this outcome. “Winning rent controls is a nonpartisan issue across Florida,” Rolle told Truthout. “Regardless of age, race, gender or home ownership status, support for rent protections is nearly universal, and we see people moving toward an ideology of housing as a human right, a value.” This, she says, confirms the findings of the African American Research Collaborative. “People recognize how normalized homelessness has become. Most people know someone who works full-time but does not earn enough to pay rent and is living in a U-Haul, a storage facility, or a car parked in the Starbucks parking lot.”
And it’s not just Florida. Tenant activists and housing justice organizers in every part of the country are mobilizing in response to an unprecedented increase in the cost of rental housing, a spike that threatens approximately 3.6 million tenants with eviction each year if they fall behind on payments.
The reason is obvious: the rent is simply too damned high.
According to statista.com, a company that monitors business trends, as of February 2022, the average monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the U.S. was $1,295, up from $1,100 one year earlier.
Even more outrageous, online rental marketplace rent.com notes that 19 states saw average rents rise by more than 10 percent, and two — Florida and South Dakota — saw what the real estate industry calls “registered rent growth” that exceeded 20 percent between October 2021 and October 2022.
Rolle knows that reversing this trend and winning protections against landlord price gouging will be a long process and will require a multiplicity of tactics and strategies, from electing tenant-friendly lawmakers, to enacting robust regulations to cap rents and lease renewal increases, to providing free legal counsel to low-income tenants at risk of eviction.
In many cities and towns, these efforts are already playing out. While some housing activists are working to push the White House to issue executive orders to regulate rents in federally managed housing, others are working to upend statewide bans on municipal rent controls, rules that bar local lawmakers from limiting the amount a landlord can charge when a tenant enters into a rental agreement or renews a lease. At present, 37 states have this type of restriction on the books. Meanwhile, 182 municipalities now have some form of rent control in place, and tenants and housing justice proponents are working hard to expand that number by pushing progressive city and state lawmakers to introduce pro-tenant measures.
What’s more, in some areas, voters in the November midterms had a chance to weigh in on ballot measures that support rent regulation. In Pasadena, California, for one, voters approved an initiative to limit rent increases to 75 percent of the Consumer Price Index and barred landlords from evicting tenants without good cause. Even more impressive, renters in Kingston, New York, voted to reduce rents by 15 percent.
Regardless of approach, they have their work cut out for them. Despite widespread public support for their efforts, the fight to expand tenant protections faces both legislative roadblocks and fierce, deep-pocketed landlord opposition. Thanks to groups including RealPage, a big tech firm that sells software to property owners and managers, the real estate lobby has poured tens of thousands of dollars into campaigns to stop pro-tenant ballot initiatives and defeat pro-tenant candidates, most prominently in California. Activists there report that since 2018, real estate interests have spent an estimated $1 million to defeat two propositions sponsored by Housing is a Human Right and its parent organization, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Both would have ended statewide restrictions on rent controls.
Similarly, the pro-landlord National Multifamily Housing Council has continually lambasted rent controls, telling the public that such laws cause more harm than good. “Rather than improving the availability of affordable housing, rent control laws exacerbate shortages and cause existing buildings to deteriorate,” their website states.
Housing justice activists call this hogwash and blame landlord greed for poor building maintenance and a lull in new affordable housing construction.
But even when rent controls are won, tenants can continue to face economic difficulties.
Take Oregon. In 2019, Oregon enacted statewide rent control when it passed Senate Bill 608. Loren Naldoza, policy and communications manager at Neighborhood Partnerships, the organizational convenor of the Oregon Housing Alliance, explains that the law allows landlords to raise rents by 7 percent a year plus the rate of inflation. “Normally, inflation is not something we worry very much about, but this year has not been normal,” Naldoza told Truthout. “Because of record-high inflation, rent increases for 2023 will be capped at 14.6 percent, which is a huge issue for many Oregonians. For folks who are already severely rent burdened, already paying more than 30 percent of their income for rent, this is effectively a notice of eviction.”
This jarring reality, he says, has pushed Neighborhood Partnerships to facilitate conversations between people who live in so-called affordable housing — residents of public housing as well as those who have Section 8 vouchers or other housing subsidies — and state lawmakers to ensure that legislators understand the impact of rent increases on the state’s poorest residents and will do something to help them.
“More than 100 million people live at or below [200 percent of] the federal poverty line,” Jasmine Rangel, senior housing associate at PolicyLink, a national research and action institute working to advance racial and economic equity, told Truthout. “Homeowners with a 30-year fixed mortgage rate essentially have price controls on their housing. Tenants do not have this kind of predictability and can’t easily plan for their future in the communities they call home.”
Ballot initiatives like the one passed in Oregon in 2019, she says, have traditionally been seen as an effective way to regulate the cost of rental housing, but because these measures do not include a rent rollback, they can be of limited long-term usefulness to those with the lowest incomes.
“Many people are one crisis away from being unable to pay rent,” Rangel says. “An unexpected car repair or medical bill can put them in a tight financial spot. When people are evicted, it’s almost always for less than a month’s rent, caused by an emergency they did not foresee. When people know that their rent cannot go up at their landlord’s whim, they’re better able to plan their finances and try to save for an emergency.”
But even the best-laid plans sometimes come to naught, something voters in St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, discovered in 2021 when they voted to restrict landlords from imposing rent increases of more than 3 percent in any 12-month period. Despite the electoral mandate, within a year of passage, the largely conservative city councils in both cities overrode the vote and gutted the protections.
Joe Hesla, a member of the coordinating committee of Minneapolis United for Rent Control told Truthout that while housing activists are continuing to push for strong rent protections in the Twin Cities, the City of Minneapolis has commissioned a Housing/Rent Stabilization Work Group that is expected to issue policy recommendations sometime in December. “We are confident that they will either make weak recommendations or write nothing at all,” he says. “We know that 56 percent of African Americans in the city are rent burdened and pay way more than 30 percent of their income on rent, but every renter is in the crosshairs. If you do not own a house — and most people in the city do not — you are at risk.”
Hesla anticipates a protracted struggle to enact meaningful rent protections not only in Minnesota but throughout the country. “We’re going to have to fight like tigers,” he says, “but we’re also going to have to learn how to stay close to each other as neighbors. It’s going to be that brutal.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Soon after arriving in Oslo, my taxi zigzagged through the city’s well-organized streets and state-of-the-art infrastructure. Large billboards advertised the world’s leading brands in fashion, cars, and perfumes. Amid all the expressions of wealth and plenty, an electronic sign by a bus stop flashed the images of poor looking African children needing help.
Over the years, Norway has served as a relatively good model of meaningful humanitarian and medical aid. This is especially true if compared to other self-serving western countries, where aid is often linked to direct political and military interests. Still, the public humiliation of poor, hungry and diseased Africa is still disquieting.
The same images and TV ads are omnipresent everywhere in the West. The actual tangible value of such charity aside, campaigns to help poor Africa do more than perpetuate a stereotype, they also mask the actual responsibility of why natural resource-rich Africa remains poor, and why the supposed generosity of the West over the decades has done little to achieve a paradigm shift in terms of the Continent’s economic health and prosperity.
News from Africa is almost always grim. A recent ‘Save the Children’ report sums up Africa’s woes in alarming numbers: 150 million children in East and Southern Africa are facing the double threat of grinding poverty and the disastrous impact of climate change. The greatest harm affects the children population in South Sudan, with 87 percent, followed by Mozambique (80 percent), then Madagascar (73 percent).
The bad news from Africa, illustrated in the Save the Children report, was released soon after another report, this time by the World Bank, indicating that the international community’s hope to end extreme poverty by 2030 will not be met.
Consequently, by 2030, around 574 million people, estimated at 7 percent of the world’s total population, will continue to live in extreme poverty, relying on about two dollars a day.
Sub-Saharan Africa currently serves as the epicenter of global extreme poverty. The rate of extreme poverty in that region is about 35 percent, representing 60 percent of all extreme poverty anywhere in the world.
The World Bank suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russia-Ukraine war are the main catalysts behind the grim estimates.
Growing global inflation and the slow growth of large economies in Asia are also culprits.
But what these reports don’t tell us, and what images of starving African children don’t convey is that much of Africa’s poverty is linked to the ongoing exploitation of the continent by its former – or current – colonial masters.
This is not to suggest that African nations have no agency of their own, in contributing to their worsening situation or in challenging intervention and exploitation. Without a united front and major change in geopolitical global balances, pushing back against neocolonialism is not an easy feat.
The Russia-Ukraine war and the global rivalry between Russia and China, on the one hand, and western countries on the other have encouraged some African leaders to speak out against the exploitation of Africa, and the use of Africa as a political fodder for global conflicts. The food crisis has been at the center of this fight.
In the late October Dakar International Forum on Peace and Security, some African leaders resisted pressure from western diplomats to toe the West’s line on the war in Ukraine.
Ironically, French minister of state Chrysoula Zacharopoulou sought “solidarity from Africa”, alleging that Russia poses an “existential threat” to Europe.
Though France continues to effectively control the currencies, thus economies of 14 different African countries – mostly in West Africa – Zacharopoulou declared that “Russia is solely responsible for this economic, energy and food crisis.”
President of Senegal, Macky Sall was one of several African leaders and top diplomats who challenged the duplicitous and polarizing language.
“This is 2022, this is no longer the colonial period… so countries, even if they are poor, have equal dignity. Their problems have to be handled with respect,” he said.
It is this coveted ‘respect’ by the West that Africa lacks. The US and Europe simply expect African nations to abandon their neutral approach to global conflicts and join the West’s continued campaign for global dominance.
But why should Africa, one of the richest and most exploited continents, obey the West’s diktats?
The West’s insincerity is glaring. Its double standard didn’t escape African leaders, including Nigeria’s former president Mahamadou Issoufou. “It’s shocking for Africans to see the billions that have rained down on Ukraine while attention has been diverted from the situation in the Sahel (region),” he said in Dakar.
Following the elevated political discourse emanating from African leaders and intellectuals gives one hope that the supposedly ‘poor’ Continent is plotting an escape from the grip of western domination, though many variables would have to work in their favor to make this happen.
Africa’s existent wealth alone can fuel global growth for many years to come. But the beneficiaries of this wealth should be Africa’s sons and daughters, not the deep pockets of the West’s wealthy classes. Indeed, the time has come that Africa’s children are not paraded as charity cases in Europe, a notion that only feeds into the long-distorted power relations between Africa and the West.
The post Liberating Africa from Poverty Requires Changing Power Relations with the West first appeared on Dissident Voice.
On 15 November, the inquest into the death of 2-year-old Awaab Ishak in 2020 concluded that the toddler died due to prolonged exposure to black mould in his family’s flat. Since 2017, Awaab’s family had complained to Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) about the damp and mould in their home, and had requested to be re-housed. RBH, the social housing association responsible for the Rochdale council flat, failed to take action. The toddler died on 21 December 2020, having been discharged from hospital two days prior.
Unfit for human habitation
A post-mortem examination revealed fungus in the toddler’s blood and lungs.
Senior coroner Joanne Kearsley said:
Awaab Ishak died as a result of a severe respiratory condition caused due to prolonged exposure to mould in his home environment.
She added:
Action to treat and prevent the mould was not taken. His respiratory condition led to respiratory arrest.
Surveyor Daniel McVey, who inspected the property two days after Awaab’s death, told the court that it was unfit for human habitation. Despite this, RBH refused to rehouse Awaab’s family following his death. His mother was pregnant at the time.
Responding to the inquest’s conclusions, the family’s barrister Christian Weaver shared:
It has been an honour representing Awaab’s family as their barrister.
Their home was, literally, unfit for human habitation – yet nothing was done.
The family’s call for better conditions for social housing tenants must not be ignored.
Awaab’s death must not be in vain. https://t.co/4qJ4gmBBo4
— Christian Weaver (@ChristianKamali) November 15, 2022
Racist treatment
According to solicitors Kelly Darlington and Alice Wood, in the lead up to Awaab’s death, RBH suggested that his parents were responsible for the mould and damp in the flat due to their “lifestyle and bathing habits”. Highlighting the racist undertones of the association’s suggestions, Garden Court Chambers barrister Sonia Birdee tweeted:
Or in Awaab Ishak's case alleging 'ritual bathing' because there was a bucket in the bath!!!! and leaving it entirely to the tenant to address the problem. There were so many other terrible failings but it's time to call out the racism behind this approach.
— soniabirdee (@soniabirdee) November 16, 2022
A statement written by Awaab’s parents addressed RBH directly, and the family’s lawyers read it out:
Stop being racist. Stop providing unfair treatment to people coming from abroad who are refugees or asylum seekers. Stop housing people in homes you know are unfit for human habitation. We were left feeling absolutely worthless at the hands of RBH.
No justice, no accountability
At the inquest, RBH’s director of customer and community Nadia Khan said that Awaab’s preventable death has been a “big learning experience” for the association. Calling out this lacklustre response, social housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa tweeted:
Found with mould in his blood and lungs. Years of complaints from his parents and other professionals but ignored like hundreds of thousands across the country.
— KWAJO- Social Housing (@KwajoHousing) November 15, 2022
In spite of pressure to resign, RBH chief executive Gareth Swarbrick remains in his £185k-a-year position following the toddler’s death. He hasn’t apologised to Awaab’s grieving family.
Indicting all those responsible for Awaab’s premature death, Labour MP for Streatham Bell Ribeiro-Addy shared:
It's an absolute disgrace that the CEO of Rochdale Boroughwide Housing hasn't yet resigned over the death of Awaab Ishak.
But the buck doesn't just stop there. The Government that has failed to tackle these lethal housing conditions must go too.https://t.co/GK2PGZkbtJ
— Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP (@BellRibeiroAddy) November 16, 2022
According to a statement by Greater Manchester Tenants Union, Swarbrick landed a £41,000 rise in pay between 2019 and 2021. Highlighting RBH’s unsafe and unjust practices, the union stated that the social housing association is leaving “hundreds of good homes empty for demolition”. Disgusted, the union shared:
The rot starts at the top. @garethswarbrick must go.
While Awaab's family were grieving, RBH bosses enjoyed massive pay hikes. Awaab and his family deserve justice. The credibility of RBH is gone.
Full statement
https://t.co/9J8mCFDQsm pic.twitter.com/OAm8RdvRMH— Greater Manchester Tenants Union (@gmtenantsunion) November 16, 2022
We’ve seen this before
In a statement, Swarbrick said that Awaab’s death “should be a wake up call”. But social housing tenants, including Awaab’s family, have been sounding the alarm for years.
The circumstances surrounding Awaab’s death reflect those of the Grenfell Tower tenants. People living in Grenfell Tower repeatedly urged Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTO) to take action to change their unsafe living conditions. KCTO and the local council ignored these calls, and failed to take action which could have prevented the fire killing 72 residents.
Grenfell United, a group of survivors and bereaved families from the Grenfell Tower fire, shared:
Another life lost due to complete disregard for resident safety. Our thoughts are with Awaab’s family at this difficult time. Things must change
https://t.co/rqQ8Bs7H8K— Grenfell United (@GrenfellUnited) November 15, 2022
The government promised change in the wake of the Grenfell tragedy. However, it hasn’t enacted any recommendations made at the inquiry.
Furthermore, nine-year-old Ella died from asthma caused by the excessive air pollution in and around her Southeast London home in 2013. Her mother shared:
Speaking to @EveningStandard about this terribly tragic case. It is common place for respiratory consultants to write supporting letters to councils about rehousing their patients due to poor housing conditions impacting children’s health. https://t.co/MlBvKxKfcs
— Rosamund Adoo-KD FBSA (@EllaRobertaFdn) November 16, 2022
Not an isolated incident
Ahead of the inquest into Awaab’s death, Manchester Evening News reported that a number of flats on the same estate also had significant damp and mould. RBH is responsible for all the flats on the Rochdale estate.
Landlords, councils and social housing associations are leaving families to languish in unsafe conditions up and down the country. Highlighting one case of many, Tweneboa tweeted:
Awaab is one example of many children forced to live in homes riddled with damp and mould. Forcing children aged 6,2 and 1 years old to live in conditions like this is cruel. Disgraceful from Wandsworth Council @Sarahcoconnell @JasonFarrellSky: https://t.co/aig93wjbqI
— KWAJO- Social Housing (@KwajoHousing) November 15, 2022
Sharing a thread of countless cases in which landlords, councils, and housing associations are ignoring tenants’ urgent calls regarding their dangerous living conditions, ITV News investigations correspondent Daniel Hewitt tweeted:
CROYDON – March 2021
We find residents of Regina Road living in council flats described by @Shelter and others as the worst in Britain. Two independent investigations later concluded families were put in danger and the homes were unfit to live in 2/16 pic.twitter.com/8ie5WKGWWw
— Daniel Hewitt (@DanielHewittITV) November 16, 2022
Reminding us of who is ultimately responsible for the proliferation of unsafe housing in Britain, Shivani Sharma tweeted:
A two year old boy, Awaab, has died in a home which wasn’t fit to live in.
In 2016, 309 Tory MPs voted against a law to make homes fit for human habitation because it would be ‘too costly’ for landlords.
This story is much bigger than Rochdale Boroughwide Housing. pic.twitter.com/zmimg183N2
— Shivani Sharma (@shivanisharmaaa) November 15, 2022
We must see accountability at all levels for those responsible for the death of young Awaab. Now is the time for urgent action. It’s time to develop a housing sector that empowers communities, and ensures that every person can live in safety and dignity. This is the only way we will see an end to these unjust and preventable deaths.
Featured image via Ben Allan – Unsplash
This post was originally published on Canary.
Human rights council makes more than 300 recommendations, with many coming from less well-off countries
The UK must tackle rising poverty, the UN human rights council has said in a report that includes demands from less well-off countries for the British government to act.
Amid worsening financial prospects for millions, the member states of the UN body also demanded action on housing to prevent homelessness, better food security for young children, and equal rights for people with disabilities.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
