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Category: poverty

  • Poll Finds 83 Percent of Americans Want to Expand Social Security

    Social Security, one of the nation’s oldest welfare programs, is set to start running out of money in about a decade — and Americans want Congress to take action, new polling finds.

    In a poll of about 1,300 likely voters, Data for Progress found that a bipartisan majority of Americans — 84 percent — are “very” or “somewhat” concerned that Social Security won’t be able to pay out full benefits to future generations. Eighty-three percent of voters, also on a bipartisan basis, support raising Social Security benefits in order to match current cost of living standards, and to ensure that everyone who has paid into the program will be able to access its full benefits when they’re of retirement age.

    Plans to expand Social Security by taxing the rich are also popular. When asked about lawmakers’ bills that would raise taxes for Americans making more than $400,000 a year in order to pay for expansions of the program, 76 percent of respondents, including 83 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of independents and Republicans, said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support the proposal.

    One such bill is the Social Security Expansion Act, introduced by Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) last month. The bill would increase Social Security payments by $2,400 a year, and would fully fund the program for the next 75 years, until 2096.

    It would also create more parity in the tax system, as it would eliminate the cap for Social Security payments for people making over $250,000. Currently, the income cap for Social Security taxes is $147,000, meaning that people making more than that stop paying into the program by the time they’ve made that amount of income in the year; for instance, people making a salary of $1 million stop paying into the program by February each year.

    Thanks in part to Republicans’ refusal to raise taxes, the program is set to be insolvent by 2033, meaning that it will have to start paying out only 75 percent of the benefits, which are already low. Though GOP lawmakers likely wouldn’t say it out loud, due to the program’s popularity, right-wingers have been working behind closed doors and in think tanks for years to slash Social Security, often with the goal of privatization.

    This is an unpopular idea, however. Data for Progress found that 68 percent of likely voters oppose privatizing the program, including 75 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans. Economists also agree that privatizing Social Security would be harmful and lead to yet more poverty — and that what’s truly needed to ensure that the seniors and disabled people who are most in need have the funds they need to survive is a large expansion of the program.

    Meanwhile, when presented with the statement that Democrats are trying to expand the program and the GOP is trying to end it, 55 percent of voters say they would vote for a generic Democrat running for Congress, with 22 percent of self-identified Republicans agreeing as such.

    As it is, Social Security is failing to provide enough funding for many seniors to live off of, as Sanders pointed out in a Senate Banking Committee hearing in June. Over half of seniors are living on incomes of less than $25,000 a year, while many of those same seniors don’t have any retirement savings.

    “Our job, in my view, is not to cut Social Security, is not to raise the retirement age, as many of my Republican colleagues would have us do,” Sanders said at the time. “Our job is to expand Social Security so that everyone in America can retire with the dignity that he or she deserves and that every person in this country with a disability can retire with the security they need.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Ides of Bureaucrats and Blue State Idiots!

    So., why is the Ides of March bad luck? If you want to avoid death or worse, 1,000 cuts, beware the ides of March. The date was certainly unlucky for Julius Caesar, who was assassinated in front of the Roman senate on March 15. William Shakespeare dramatized the event in his play about Caesar with the famous quote, ‘beware the ides of March.” For us, the 80 Percent, we have 24/7, 365 days a year of those Ides of March!

    As a communist, I have deep understanding of the hate toward communists throughout history, and why countries in Africa and elsewhere are, were, and will lean toward socialism: kicking out the prostitutes, pimps and purveyors of chaos and terror. Bankers and Bombs. Viruses and Lockdowns. Neoliberal or Neocon. The purveyors of pain are at the top.

    And, well, in the middle. So, I quit a job November 3 when my supervisor hung up on me. I was stationed 80 miles from where she was headquartered, where the HR was headquartered and where the Executive Director was headquartered.

    This woman was a complete disaster as a human and professional (sic). She had already had issues with the fellow I replaced, who stormed out, quit. Her forked tongue and broken personality, well, she was the nonprofit’s two year wonder, her son worked for the nonprofit, and she had control of the small satellite office in my county.

    My job was to take over case management for adults with developmental disabilities. That system is county run, with state DHS funding. It is a broken system, understaffed, and staffed with broken humans. So, one month on this job I was subjected to this supervisor’s personal life, her homophobia even though her Air Force son was marrying a man. She called herself a beaner, as she has some Latina in her bloodline. She asked me if I drove like an old man. On and on, and so, when I heard her voice, heard her warn me she was hanging up on me, and the fact that she would not listen to my concerns about a client who complained about shorted checks for a janitorial job we were not managing for him, I knew it was time to go.

    Oregon’s judges:

    So, this is my thinking — it was a just cause quit, to use the parlance of the dirty Unemployment Insurance/Employment Department lingo.

    A job at $20 an hour, benefits like health insurance and PTO, and, I was expecting to be there for two years, three? But, for my physical health and mental health, bye-bye toxic and unprofessional people and organization. I was thinking this would be a legit quit making me eligible for some pittance of unemployment, as in $180 a week. Covid benefits had ended last November. Quitting or termination from a job after only one month looks bad to the future employers. Age 65, now, and alas, living in a rural county, and here we are, I am dead in the water as a worker, a man, a contributor to “society.”

    Then, the application for Unemployment Insurance. Hoops to jump through (easy), and then applying for jobs as part of the deal. Then, the hell of Idiots Rule, the Bureaucrats. The adjudicator was unprofessional, taking my statements in his home (Zoom Doom), I heard him drawing on cig after cig, and he had to tell me he was gay, a real liberal (he thought I was a liberal — fucking comedy hour: Read, Communist!). Real bizarre. Real Portland Bizarro

    The bastards got my story, and this dude had to get my statements over a span of three phone calls. He went off topic beyond stupidity, but he found against me: not eligible for UI, unemployment insurance. Then, I had to file an appeal.

    That was more hell, and three hours with a judge (sic) and the HR director came on the line. Five days later, the judge, again, found against me.

    Then, an appeal of the appeal through the Employment Appeals Board. That entailed sending in any additional information, to both the Board and the former employer.

    Forty days later, again, two out of three judges (the 3rd one was not present to hear my appeal) found against me. They predicate that I had opportunities to deal with the issues I was dealing with through, yep, the HR, which was, again, part of the clique. The Executive Director was already on his way out, heading for another nonprofit ED position in the same place, Coos Bay.

    Now, there is an appeal of the appeal through the state Appellate Court, but that entails a $391 filing fee. Yep, money to keep these blue state bureaucrats paid.

    Irony after irony is that I have been employed to help homeless or developmental disabled to navigate systems of rents, medical needs, employment, and getting through the paperwork hell. I have helped some with their unemployment claims, and to get the Veterans Administration to find they have service – connected disabilities so they might get a few hundred bucks a month from Uncle Sam.

    These are the systems of oppression and penury. This is the system that will never be discussed with gusto in mainstream and left-stream media. This is the system of holding people down and keeping worthless humans in jobs that are the opposite of humane and human.

    Now now, this is not a spilled milk screed, hyperbolic and completely insignificant just because the world is falling apart, Ukrainians are being blowing apart by ZioLensky, and wildfires are rampant, toxicity out the roof, housing homicidal, billionaires drunk on power. This is foundational, readers of DV. Yep, amazing writers here talking about Boris Johnson, lots about Roe v Wade, lots on “the global economies” and tons on Ukraine and the EU and UK and global “situations.” Climate change, climate fatigue, climate chaos in a climate of fear and Stockholm Syndrome.

    It starts locally, at the city and county level, at the state level. We (citizens) are here for a broken system of planned dysfunction, planned obsolescence, planned homicide to sputter ahead, to keep the bad people in jobs and the rest of us at their whim(s).

    Oregon’s lovely housing opportunities:

    Oregon’s growing business opportunities:

    Here, one is title by yours truly: “One Degree of Separation: There Will be Parasitic Capitalism’s Blood“

    But specifically here is one about this shit-hole nonprofit and my right to quit and the rationale for it: “Quitting is a Mental Health Decision”

    So, more shouts into the wilderness, flailing against the windmills of the Byzantine world of state policies, and rationalizations spewed toward the middle managers, the professional office class, the cogs in the systems of pain and begging and absurdity.

    Oregon’s seasonal recreation and employment — smoke jumpers:

    My letter to the two hearing board people: Nothing fancy, nothing a lawyer would write. But life sucks, no, when you don’t have the shekels to pay for criminal lawyers?

    Oregon:

    To an uncaring two-person appeals board – Hettle and Steger-Bentz:

    I wholeheartedly see this decision as both incompetence and lack of empathy. Citing that I as the employee had recourse to not quit a highly toxic work environment shows the lack of creed you have. You are not in the know about non-profits, about the developmental disabilities case management realm. You have no idea how toxic those small nonprofits can get. The new case manager, as I was, had no connection to the actual main office and all of those inner workings of their clique. I had no recourse to thrive or do well at this job after I was hung up on by the supervisor. I had already for a month dealt with her unprofessional commentary and her racist remarks. That was the culture there, and citing some sort of recourse I might have had with the HR head is inane.

    This is not a state or county agency with a more developed culture of workplace stability and professionalism.

    You have no street creed or ground truthing when it comes to workplace cultures.

    This outfit, Bay Area Enterprises, is shoddy, highly unprofessional, and alas, the rationale given in your wrong-headed decision is faulty: I did not have just cause to quit. Absurd. I needed to get out of a toxic and uncompromising situation. You are fools to think there was another option. You are overpaid State bureaucrats with little sense of the real workplaces workers in Oregon have to submit to. Do you realize that this small company, new to me, is all about insider cliques? That my immediate supervisor and the HR head work in the same office, 80 miles from where I was assigned? That the executive director left the company a week after my complaints, so he was already on the outs. That the executive director and the immediate supervisor I was worked in the same office and were in constant discussion back and forth about employee x and employee y? That there are prejudicial allegiances made under those circumstances?

    I was hung up on by my supervisor. She was in the office where the HR director and the ED work. My immediate motion for self-preservation was to resign. Indeed, your bureaucratic mentality is what I teach my students in colleges (and some in K12 as a substitute) to not only watch out for, but to rail against, and challenge. In this case, I went through the Oregon state hoops designed to assist companies to get out of paying some of the unemployment insurance. The system is rigged in favor of the employer.

    You are at fault for this decision, for not taking into account a deeper sense of the workplace, that workplace I was in. In no away was I going to put myself through mental and emotional hell by putting up with the situation I have already laid out. You can sit back and lord over workers, making the same tired decision that occurred first by the Unemployment adjudicator, then by the appeals hearing judge. Here we are, now, a faceless board of three with one absent making the same wrong decision.

    Now, for me to take this to the next level of appeal would require more state rip-off fees — $391 to file. This is why the average person has no faith in the State of Oregon’s so-called agencies for the people. You are dead wrong in denying me unemployment,  and your titles, whatever they might be in this sense, are not worth the paper I am printing this letter on.

    Shame on you, and, well, this is another teachable and journalistic moment for me but it doesn’t compensate for the time and effort I put in filing unemployment weekly, and looking for work in this  county where I live. I will rail against this system, your decision and the process that was so protracted. You will not feel shame because I suspect you are wired to not have empathy when it comes to these cases that indeed are just cause for quitting. Nuance is not something you three probably have as human characteristics.

    And so I have to pay for that lack of humanity.

    Disrespectfully, Paul Haeder

     

    The post The Ides of Bureaucrats and Blue State Idiots! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Warren Slams McConnell for Saying Labor Shortage Is Due to the Stimulus Checks

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is facing widespread criticism for his recent assertion that the so-called labor shortage in the U.S. is the result of the stimulus checks that were sent out over a year ago.

    At an event in Kentucky on Tuesday, McConnell said that the $3,400 in direct aid sent out to American taxpayers over the past two years has been holding people back from working — a misleading statement in several respects, especially considering the fact that unemployment is currently quite low, with some states documenting record low unemployment over the past few months.

    “You’ve got a whole lot of people sitting on the sidelines because, frankly, they’re flush for the moment,” McConnell said, according to Insider. “What we’ve got to hope is once they run out of money, they’ll start concluding it’s better to work than not to work.”

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) condemned McConnell’s statement on Twitter on Wednesday. “Mitch McConnell’s blaming Americans for not wanting to work. It’s absurdly out of touch,” she said. “More workers have jobs now than pre-COVID. Investing in affordable child care would help parents return to work, but Republicans refuse to support actual solutions.”

    Indeed, it is absurd to suggest that the checks, which were aimed at combating COVID-related financial and employment problems, could be a lifeline for struggling families years after they were sent out.

    Although the stimulus checks and expanded child tax credit did help decrease financial hardship and poverty immediately after they were sent out, the effects of the aid only lasted so long. As of last month — 14 months after the last stimulus checks were approved and six months after the last expanded child tax benefits were sent out — 39 percent of Americans said that it’s difficult to afford regular expenses like bills or rent. That’s up nearly 50 percent from last spring, according to an analysis by The Lever.

    For years now, McConnell and other Republicans have been moaning that the stimulus payments suppress employment. But analyses of the financial aid programs that Congress implemented for the pandemic show that these claims are simply not true.

    In fact, the extra financial aid may have helped people get back into the job market earlier than they would have, as the money helped people afford to pay for child care, as well as expensive measures that make it easier to get a job, like education, certifications, relocation, and more. Last year, economists found that employment recovery slowed down in states that prematurely ended the early COVID-era expanded unemployment insurance checks, in comparison to states that continued giving the checks out.

    In reality, the reason that McConnell and the GOP have complained about the stimulus checks and other federal aid is likely because their ideology hinges upon opposing measures that reduce poverty. For decades now, they have parroted lies that reducing the welfare state will help the economy, while quietly helping out wealthy donors and corporations at every turn.

    McConnell’s implication that there is a labor shortage is also misleading. Employers have been moaning about a lack of people willing to work — a myth that circulated last year and which was likely created by conservative think tanks and corporate lobbyists.

    But workers have said, through surveys and labor activism, that a major factor preventing them from getting or keeping work is that employers aren’t paying nearly enough to survive in the current economy. Data has backed up these claims; when accounting for inflation, workers actually got a pay cut across the board last year.

  • The myth of working-class men blocking gender equality

    As a kid, I was brought up in relative poverty on a working class council estate, and part of that upbringing involved experiencing and witnessing profound violence perpetrated by several working class ‘dads’. And yet, as a researcher of men, masculinities and social class, I have over the last decade or so been interested to challenge the ways that working class masculinity has been framed in popular, media and academic discussions.

    In terms of our everyday imagination, working class men are, perhaps, often the figure that comes to mind when many people think of the impediments to gender equality – a lower-educated man, maybe from a regional town or the ‘less desirable’ city suburbs, perhaps a tradie or factory worker.

    An adherent to regressive, traditional and harmful masculine ideals that perpetuate gender inequality in terms of divisions of domestic labour and enacting violence towards children, women and gender diverse people. In light of the recent revelations of the disgusting prevalence of sexual assault and harassment in Western Australian mining industry, this image might have been further underscored.

    I want to suggest, though, that the image of working-class masculinity operates as a convenient foil that works to obscure or minimise more privileged men’s significant contribution to gender inequalities.

    In a way, it’s strikingly obvious that powerful, wealthy, elite, professional-class men are also significant threats to the autonomy and safety of women and gender diverse people. Such men are the common thread in the evidence brought to light by the now global #metoo movement, 2016’s revelation that Donald Trump self-advocates for non-consensual ‘pussy grabbing’, and last week’s frankly grotesque US Supreme court decision to overturn the rights to abortion.

    Closer to home, we also need look no further than the accounts of misogyny and rape culture in our own seat of government as well as in some of Australia’s elite boys schools.

    Despite these attacks on the rights and bodies of women, as individual and collectives, by more privileged men, the negative stereotype of working-class masculinity remains stubbornly ingrained.

    My colleague, Karla Elliott, and I have recently attempted to illustrate how this remains the case in a lot of academic research, where violence, sexism, and homophobia are often understood as a response to relative (economic) powerlessness and status deficit that is inherent in the lives of working-class boys and men.

    Our individual previous research and collective ongoing studies centres the lives and voices of working class and other ‘men on the margins’.

    Our data has further undermined the idea that men in the margin somehow lag behind the real vanguard of progress: white, middle-class men.

    In particular, the interviews we have conducted in the UK and Australia in the last 18 months or so regularly reveal evidence of, among other things, what is sometimes called ‘caring masculinities’, i.e. ‘masculine identities that reject domination and its associated traits and embrace values of care such as positive emotion [and] interdependence’.

    This does not deny that problematic aspects of masculinity continue in the lives of working class or marginalised men – just as they do in the lives of more privileged men. Rather, the point to stress is that the biographical narratives we uncovered are replete with the commitments to egalitarian gender relations and other practices often passed off as being the domain of educated and/or otherwise privileged men.

    This includes what some academics call ‘lived egalitarianism’ – a significant if often understated contribution to household labour and childcare that is necessitated by the realities of working-class life that demands a dual-income.

    In contrast to working class men, middle class lives are often (though of course not always) characterised by ‘spoken egalitarianism’, where men can easily talk a good game on equality of household tasks, made all the more achievable when a proportion of the domestic and childcare duties are outsourced to poorly paid women domestic workers, often minority ethnic and immigrant women.

    To be clear here, oftentimes even a smaller gender gap in time allocated to childcare duties, or seeming evidence of ‘involved fatherhood’, is not a simple good that reflects middle class men’s commitment to equality, but is bound up with the problematic use of a marginalised workforce that are part of ‘the coloniality of labour’.

    Zooming back out from our own research, the picture of working-class masculinity as a key driver of a stalling gender revolution is complicated further when we factor in that studies repeatedly show that well-educated women, employed in high-earning professional occupations report higher levels of gender discrimination than their working-class peers.

    Coming back to a point above about a common thread: it’s the presence of professional-class men in such organisations!

    Feminism has, in the words of the esteemed cultural theorist Angela McRobbie, become ‘a ubiquitous force in everyday life’.  It has inspired new possibilities for gender relations, evident in the supposedly counter intuitive narratives that Karla and I have found in our interview data.

    Its ubiquity has also, though, been met with ferocious backlash with grim consequences, including the attack on reproductive rights in the US and the possible threat of what is to follow.

    We would do well to keep at the front of our mind that masculinity is centrally implicated in the latter, but we ought to resist any suggestions that it is specifically a product of working-classness. This is not an effort to engage in a form of ‘whataboutery’, but rather to ensure we can train our attention to the core of the problem – the powers, people and structures that sustain and expand gender inequalities.

     

     

     

     

    The post The myth of working-class men blocking gender equality appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • How Many Concussions from Capitalists Can Americans Take?

    America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

    — Hunter S. Thompson, “September,” Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, p. 413.

    Imagine, just how programmed are we, and this is it for an excuse?

    The Doctor Who Inspired The Movie Concussion - Truth Doesn't Have A Side

    So, the electricity will be shaky here, there, and everywhere. The excuse is, of course, supply chain. Ports are cloggged. Container ship chaos. They will not admit to the real reason for economic and spiritual collapse:  CAPITALISM and PRICE gouging. It’s Putin’s fault.

    Mass shootings, Roe v. Wade down the drain, empty shelves at hardware and food stores. It’s all Putin’s fault, including the price thieving for these electrical transformers, right? The $6 a gallon for gas in USA and $10 a gallon in Denmark, Putin’s fault. Mindless media midgets, and here we are: Western culture trapped in their own lies, inside their own self-fulfilling nightmares. Or continuous requiems for our dreams!

    Requiem for a Dream: Trailer, Kritik, Kino-Programm u.v.m. | KINO&CO

    The lies and the shallow inquiries and the lack of curiosity, right up there with everyone is a used car salesman.

    Journalism has always been dead in the mainstream:

    The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

    Which is more or less true. For the most part, they are dirty little animals with huge brains and no pulse.

    — Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s,  November 6, 2003.

    But back to other lies, and other lackeys lacking an inquiring mind. Local news from the local rag I publish my columns in, has stories about the local happenings. No pushback, just inverted triangle reporting. Referencing the local Public Utilities District here in Lincoln County:

    Like utilities nationwide, Central Lincoln is being greatly challenged by supply chain delays, material shortages and massive cost increases for materials delivered. Demand for electrical supplies is robust, while transportation bottlenecks and raw material constraints are causing us significant concern over our ability to meet construction timelines. As we address these issues, Central Lincoln will strive to maintain supply levels to meet customer needs, while still maintaining emergency inventories.

    We’ve all seen supply chain issues impact many aspects of life today. In some cases, lead times for Central Lincoln have increased six fold in the last two years when we’ve placed orders for materials. For example, new residential transformers typically took four months for delivery prior to the pandemic, and now they take between one year to 20 months to arrive. Costs for materials are also soaring — transformers that were $2,500 two years ago are now $15,000 each, and the cost is continuing to increase. This is not an exaggeration. (source)

    Read that again: $2,500 for necessary transformers two years ago now SIX times more, at $15,000?

    This is what defines USA, Biden, Trump, McConnell, Pelosi, Carson or Maddow, the entire shit show that is the American stupidity show. And how unprepared are we? This is the colonized mind, and this is the state of the American culture, as well as UK’s and Canada’s and EU’s. If all of this were true, and if we were guided (sic) by sane and humane folks, there’d be massive movements and masterful national plans to nationalize industries and rejigger the entire mess of capitalism for a world, a nation, that works for the people.

    Now, shifting over to Scott Ritter, military lover, but still, smart.  He’s not on mainstream TV, in mainstream news. Again, the plastic hair and the Botox lips and the grappling girdles on these airhead TV presenters match their plastic brains. Here (below), he talks about how stupid Americans are (about world issues), and that includes what Yanquis do not know or want to know about the Nazi Ukrainians and this special military operation that Russia FINALLY had to unleash on that disgusting Ukraine and that perverted Zelensky and his crew.

    But before Scott’s interview, how about  a little black robe insanity. Here we are now, with that un-Supreme Court, doing their shit show decision to get into the uterus of the female persuasion. Eichmanns, one and all.

    See the source image

    Imagine that? Supreme (not) Court now determining the legality of obesity, the calories, the sorts of foods, the environmental effects on the male perusasion. Will the male be held criminally libel for what they ingest and what they do to their bodies, their sperm, the RNA?

    Let’s be consistent here, perverts?

    There is substantial evidence that paternal obesity is associated not only with an increased incidence of infertility, but also with an increased risk of metabolic disturbance in adult offspring. Apparently, several mechanisms may contribute to the sperm quality alterations associated with paternal obesity, such as physiological/hormonal alterations, oxidative stress, and epigenetic alterations. Along these lines, modifications of hormonal profiles namely reduced androgen levels and elevated estrogen levels, were found associated with lower sperm concentration and seminal volume. Additionally, oxidative stress in testis may induce an increase of the percentage of sperm with DNA fragmentation. The latter, relate to other peculiarities such as alteration of the embryonic development, increased risk of miscarriage, and development of chronic morbidity in the offspring, including childhood cancers. (source)

    Preparing for American Roe v. Wade protests in DC. Imagine that, Plywood USA. DC Police Gauntlets. AmeriKKKa.

    Washington, On Edge About the Election, Boards Itself Up - The New York Times

    This all connects, really, these issues of local electrical power outages, and war. War against Russia, and, well, local costs soaring: War against the people. Supply chain excuses. Oh, where oh where are those Republican pukes and Democratic pukes serving us, the people? Electrical outages? Check that one failure of leadership for massive deaths and injuries in simple households?

    Ritter talks about Nato using nuclear weapons, talks about the stupidity of Americans, and actors and the cultural cancelling.

    Here you go, Gonzalo Lira: Israel Provokes Russia

    Because I’ve lost access to all my accounts and channels to the SBU (Ukraine’s secret police), I don’t have any way to promote my content—so please be so kind as to share this video with anyone whom you think might learn something. GL

    He talks about how Jews, not just Zionists and those in Occupied Palestine, seem to collectively hate Russians. It’s racism, of course, to hate an entire people: Russians? And, will this YouTube be taken down? For the opinion of Lira saying that Jews seem to hate Russians, or, for, another reason?

    So, on the Scheer Post, we get all sorts of mixed bag aggregated articles on Russia and Ukraine. Many are like this: “China Will Decide the Outcome of Russia v. the West: Is Putin the Face of the Future or the Final Gasp of the Past?”

    John Feffer wrote it, and he is bought and sold — co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is a fellow at the Open Society Foundation and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The original article came from Tom Dispatch. Feffer is self-described Jewish gay.

    Look up George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. Look up DSA’s stance on pouring weapons and death into Ukraine. DSA is all for billions of weapons to Ukraine, and billions for ZioLensky to “operate” the Ukraine government, err, Mafia. This is how these pencil necks see their world:

    In its attempt to swallow Ukraine whole, Russia has so far managed to bite off only the eastern Donbas region and a portion of its southern coast. The rest of the country remains independent, with its capital Kyiv intact.

    No one knows how this meal will end. Ukraine is eager to force Russia to disgorge what it’s already devoured, while the still-peckish invader clearly has no interest in leaving the table.

    Here some comments at Scheer Post, pushing back on this guy, and I won’t republish mine:

    Robert Sinuhe:

    This is what happens when you are seriously ignorant of facts. He seems to know what Mr. Putin is thinking which should prompt Mr. Putin to ask this fellow what he’s thinking. Complete nonsense!

    Roger Hoffmann:

    What a disappointing read from Scheerpost. As others have already noted the repeated falsehoods (Russiagate) and baseless claims (Russia wants to swallow Ukraine) and others, I won’t waste the time addressing them either.

    I will only say that it is apparent that this writer, in stating a narrative that overlaps much with that of Washington and its mouthpieces, seems oblivious to (or else, dishonestly chooses to ignore) much of the actual history of this conflict- the context in which it emerged, the pleas and warnings not only by Russia but of many seasoned U.S. officers from military, Intel and Diplomatic corps alike, and that of Russia-expert western scholars; and the actions of the U.S. since 2014 at least.

    My advice to the writer: please don’t write about things that you know so little about, especially if you want to persuade those who’ve taken the time to become informed.

    Terrence Bennett:

    Tom Dispatch is a now sadly Pro Nazi source for regressives.
    I urge Robert Scheer to monitor and reject many former progressives who now appear on organs like the late great Tom Dispatch

    So, taking it in the rear? The back alley abortions. The behind the box store automobile trunk deals for prescriptions and diapers. The people have a choice in what money goes here and there? No massive strike, rolling strikes, rebellion? Our lives are gutted more and more each day!

    Rents? Is that on the Republicans’ and Democrats’ agenda?

    Gerardo Vidal, who has lived in the same apartment in Queens, New York, with his family for 9 years, recently received a $900-a-month rent increase this year.

    “It means having to uproot my entire family, given the fact we’re still having a difficult time earning money due to the pandemic and loss of jobs,” said Vidal. “It’s unfair that we are being basically forced out of places we lived in for nine years and that landlords can get away with this.” (source)

    We’ll finish with Richard Wolff, on Capitalism and US Empire now that USA-Klanada-EU-UK are dumping their weapons on the world, and then a Brit who has been in Donbass reporting on the ground:

    “The Economic, Political and Social Crisis of the United States.” One hour!

    Here you go, the Nazi Zio-Zelensky using USA-French-German-Nato weapons to, well, bomb neighborhoods, bomb apartment blocks, bomb universities, bomb bomb bomb, and there are NO military targets in these volleys.

    Graham Phillips: “20+ Minutes in Donetsk Under Shelling Just Now – Uncensored, Love Donbass, do what you can to help Donbass.”

    Reality therapy. So, those transformers cost so much, uh? How many transformers in Donbass have been imploded by the USA-UK-France-Germany? Keep reading:

    “National Security State Censoring of Anti-Imperialist Voices… the Latest Phase of its Long-Term Strategy to Divide and Control the Left” on Dissident Voice, by Stansfield Smith 

    These secret US government and CIA operations have been detailed in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers, The Cultural Cold War, and AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?

    In 1977 Carl Bernstein revealed CIA interconnections with the big business media. More than 400 journalists collaborated with the CIA, with the consent of their media bosses. Working in a propaganda alliance with the CIA included: CBS, ABC, NBC, Time, Newsweek, New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, United Press International, Miami Herald, Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald Tribune. The New York Times still sends stories to US government for pre-publication approval, while CNN and others now employ national security state figures as “analysts.”

    Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat operate similarly, participating in covert British government funded disinformation programs to “weaken” Russia. This involves collaboration with the Counter Disinformation & Media Development section of the British Foreign Office.

    The CIA pays journalists in Germany, France, Britain, Australia and New Zealand to plant fake news. Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the largest German newspapers, showed how the CIA controls German media in Presstitutes: Embedded in the Pay of the CIA. Ulfkotte said the CIA had him plant fake stories in his paper, such as Libyan President Gaddafi building poison gas factories in 2011.

    The CIA was closely involved with the long defunct National Students Association and with the trade union leadership. The AFL-CIO’s American Institute of Free Labor Development, received funding from USAID, the State Department, and NED to undermine militant union movements overseas and help foment murderous coups, as against President Allende of Chile (1973) and Brazil (1964), as well as defended the rule of their masters at home. This continues with the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, which receives $30 million a year from NED.

    The CIA created publishing houses, such as Praeger Press, and used other companies such as John Wiley Publishing Company, Scribner’s, Ballantine Books, and Putnam to publish its books. It set up several political and literary journals such as Partisan Review. This CIA publishing amounted to over one thousand books, mostly geared to a liberal-left audience, seeking to bolster a third camp left, and undermine solidarity with the once powerful world communist movement.

    Ahh, those transformers:

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image-197.png

    No national movement to, well, nationalize the construction and deployment and installation of these valuable electrical units? Summer, heat, fridges, AC, fans, oxygen machines, well, you get how valuable electricity is and how dangerous disruption of it kill.

    No Marshall Plan for that? For clinics in all neighborhoods? Social workers and counselors for millions of students? Aging in place adults, no help for them? All those with Complex PTSD?

    Again, one little Oregon County, and, shit-show number 9,999,999, coming to a city-town-county-place near-by.

    Footnote: So, I went to pick up some vital medications at the Walgreens in Newport. Lo and behold, that electrical outage a few days ago fried the Walgreens’ computer — here, in Newport, and then, in Lincoln City. So, there were  people lined up, freaked out since some of their meds are, well, life saving. That’s it for America, and it will only get worse as I wait in a line of 20 at the small USPS office in Waldport, where signs say, “Don’t leave junk mail here since we do not have a janitor . . .  We are short staffed so we have to cut Saturday pick up window services . . . Please be patient as we are understaffed.”

    USPS, and Trump and Biden. Whew! Ben Franklin is turning in his grave. The light is out on his kite. Remember, USPS is a public service, and it is one foot in the grave:

    What this report finds: The United States Postal Service is a beloved American institution that provides an essential public service to communities and good middle class jobs for workers. It is a model of efficiency and responsive to changing customer needs. But the conflicting demands made upon it by Congress and regulators put it in a precarious financial position even before the pandemic. Anti-government ideologues and special interests have long sought to privatize, shrink, or hobble the Postal Service. The Trump administration revived these efforts, spurred by the president’s opposition to mail voting and his animus toward Amazon, a major customer.

    What needs to be done: The Biden administration and Congress must act to undo the damage and allow the Postal Service to adapt to meet unmet needs, including the revival of postal banking. (source)

    Is Louis DeJoy's 10-Year Plan the Death Knell for the U.S. Postal Service?

    The post How Many Concussions from Capitalists Can Americans Take? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The hot takes on Labour’s Wakefield win are laughable

    Labour has won the Wakefield by-election, taking the seat from the Tories. But the data shows this isn’t any kind of resounding victory. Yet if you believed the party and the pundits then the result was ‘beyond their wildest dreams’.

    Wakefield: wild?

    As Britain Elects noted, Labour won Wakefield with 47.9% of the vote:

    Across the media and on Twitter, Labour MPs are oozing positivity about the result. For example, shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh told BBC Breakfast:

    We were obviously hoping for victory last night in Wakefield, but the result went beyond our wildest dreams. It was a higher turnout than we expected, a much bigger swing, and a much bigger vote share as well.

    Haigh must have pretty tame dreams if the Wakefield result was beyond her “wildest” ones. Because actually, as pollster John Curtice noted, what actually happened was the Tories’ vote share collapsed more than Labour’s share rose. Never mind, though – because Keir Starmer branded the result as:

    A historic victory — this city deserved a fresh start.

    “Historic” is debatable. Because given the scandals surrounding Boris Johnson – Labour should have hammered the Tories. Plus, based on the size of the electorate in 2019 and the turnout – in reality only around 19% of the voting public voted for Labour.

    Status quo, maintained

    Ultimately the Wakefield by-election is useless as a public opinion gauge. Because the turnout was just 39.5% – way down on the general election. This is much like 2021’s Batley and Spen by-election, where Labour spun-it as some sort of victory when turnout was less than 50%. Both constituencies have higher rates of poverty than other parts of England. Hartlepool was a similar story: poverty met a by-election and the result was a turnout of less than 50%.

    Our systems of politics and democracy, and their proponents, disenfranchise the poorest people. So much so, that they rightly feel voting will change nothing. The difference in a richer area, like Tiverton and Honiton, is clear. Its by-election saw a 52% turnout and the Lib Dems got in – while the constituency has much lower rates of deprivation.

    So, no – the Wakefield election wasn’t a victory for Labour. It was a victory for the political and media class, who’ve maintained the status quo. And it’s all thanks to their disenfranchisement of the poorest people.

    Featured image via Good Morning Britain – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Solving poverty takes more than just talk

    By: Michael Tubbs

    Original post here.

    If you want to solve poverty, you can’t do it without listening to women, and particularly women of color. As my wife, Anna Malaika Tubbs, has noted, women of color are the folks most consistently treated as invisible, whose histories are ignored or erased. They also absorb the brunt of policy violence — legislative decisions that keep families trapped in poverty: over-policing, mass incarceration, family separation, low wages, no good jobs, lack of health care or child care, and more.

    End Poverty in California recently launched our statewide listening tour at the Young Women’s Freedom Center in Los Angeles. Through 2022, we will visit communities experiencing poverty, hear community members’ stories and ideas, and explore solutions. For 30 years, the freedom center has delivered opportunities to young women and trans youths of all genders who are affected by social systems such as incarceration and foster care — a perfect place to begin our tour.

    At the freedom center, we were welcomed by more than 50 Sister Warriors joining us from across the state. While the freedom center develops new policy, the Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition is the army fighting to see these policy changes realized. The coalition has 2,000 members in 14 chapters across California, and they share their stories with legislators to try to make policy proposals responsive to their needs.

    Many have grown tired of sharing stories.

    As coalition co-founder Krea Gomez said, “We have conversations with legislators who say, ‘I’m so glad you shared your story!’ and then they water down legislation [and] we have to wait years to revise it.”

    So my promise is that we aren’t listening for listening’s sake. We are listening to build power and to take meaningful action together.

    Many Sister Warriors talked about the “benefits cliff” — financially getting ahead just a bit only to have progress result in the loss of a child care subsidy, or food or housing assistance. There are opportunities for reform. 

    In Stockton, we worked with the county to obtain waivers so people who participated in our guaranteed income pilot wouldn’t lose other benefits. The “benefits cliff” issue is on the radar of state officials and some county welfare directors, and conversations to pursue positive reforms are happening. End Poverty in California will bring Sister Warriors into those conversations to inform design.

    Women also discussed their experiences with incarceration. Angelique Evans spoke of earning seven to eight cents an hour while working in jail, deepening her family’s poverty.

    The freedom center is working to amend the state Constitution so that involuntary servitude is no longer permitted, and to ensure that people are paid a wage comparable to that received for similar work outside of prison to help families and support reentry into the community.

    There is anger at resources being used to punish struggle rather than prevent it. Jessica Nowlan, executive director of the freedom center, noted that the cost of incarcerating a juvenile in San Francisco is astronomical — the San Francisco Chronicle reports that it is  $1.1 million annually per juvenile — and most are Black and from a few neighborhoods. What if these resources instead had gone to families to provide a guaranteed income floor? How might a family’s trajectory change?

    Finally, a Sister Warrior spoke of advocacy organizations being afraid to talk about the lack of resources available to undocumented immigrant families. There is no solution to poverty in California without finding ways to be more inclusive of immigrants.

    Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal would expand Medi-Cal eligibility to all income-eligible undocumented immigrants, and food assistance to all immigrants who are 55 or older, as would the Legislature’s budget blueprint.

    There also are legislative proposals to extend unemployment benefits to undocumented workers, and to expand food assistance to all income-eligible immigrant families and individuals. We should continue to explore these reforms as well.

    We departed the session in Los Angeles with a sense of the exhaustion people feel from sharing their stories, but hope that their voices might make a difference. Beyond hope, we know that poor people and allies must organize so that our constituency one day will be as powerful as other interest groups that maintain outsize influence in the state.

    On Tuesday in Sacramento, we have an opportunity to do just that. There will be a rally prior to the inaugural hearing of the Assembly’s Select Committee on Poverty and Economic Inclusion, chaired by Assembly member Isaac Bryan, a Democrat from Baldwin Hills. We will make our voices and our priorities heard. Please join us.

    _______________________________________

    About the author: Michael Tubbs is the founder of End Poverty in California and the senior fellow at the Rosenberg Foundation. He is the special adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom on economic mobility and former mayor of Stockton.

    The post Solving poverty takes more than just talk appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Anti-poverty campaigner: We need to stop ‘harmful’ new employment system

    Anti-poverty campaigners have called on the Anthony Albanese’s Labor government to scrap the controversial new Workforce Australia program, reports Isaac Nellist.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Calling For A Radical Break With The Status Quo Of Incrementalism

    While Democrats march around in Washington DC pretending they care about quality of life for poor people, it’s important to remember who actually walks the walk as opposed to just talking the talk.

    A joint press conference held by the Philadelphia-based Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign with the Black Alliance for Peace, shared these words of wisdom via zoom on June 16, 2022. Note that the PPEHRC operates as the Poor People’s Army, a well-established organization that has struggled and won housing for single mothers and their children. Details about attending their August boot camp to learn how it’s done are at the end of this post.

    The post Calling For A Radical Break With The Status Quo Of Incrementalism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • “Poverty Is Violence!” Thousands March on DC to Demand Economic Justice

    Led by the Poor People’s Campaign, advocacy groups and low-income individuals gathered in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to demand that policymakers “fight poverty, not the poor.”

    “We are the 140 million poor and low-wealth people, standing together to declare we won’t be silent anymore,” said Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the campaign. “Poverty is a policy choice and we will hold our leaders accountable.”

    Fellow campaign co-chair Bishop William Barber echoed that message in a speech at the Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington, which drew thousands to the nation’s capital.

    Barber declared that as long as essential workers are treated like they are “expendable” during a public health crisis, as long as federal lawmakers block pandemic relief for families, “as long as we have the stealing of native lands and unjust immigration,” and as long as millions of people nationwide face hunger and homelessness, “we won’t be silent anymore.”

    “Let us be clear: We are not simply here for a day,” explained Barber, who also highlighted voter suppression efforts and the United States’ significant military spending. “This assembly is to declare the full commitment of a fusion coalition.”

    “Now is the time for a Third Reconstruction. We are the rejected — who’ve been rejected by the politics of trickle-down economics and rejected by neoliberalism,” he continued, sharing the history of the first two reconstructions.

    “This is a movement — until children are protected; until sick folk are healed; until low-wage workers are paid; until immigrants are treated fairly; until affordable housing is provided; until the atmosphere, the land, and the water are protected; until saving the world, and diplomacy, and living in peace is more important than blowing up the world,” he added, “we won’t be silent anymore.”

    Participants in the event shared updates on social media with the hashtag #MoralAssembly2022:

    The event featured testimonies from people like Vivian Henry of the Minnesota Poor People’s Campaign, who spoke of her fears about losing her Medicaid due to politicians who don’t care whether she lives or dies.

    “I’m here to say that if Congress can repeatedly afford to give corporate welfare to the rich, then Congress can afford universal healthcare for all so that people don’t go bankrupt or are forced to use a GoFundMe to cover medical expenses,” Henry said. “Scarcity is a massive lie!”

    “My children are survivors just by being alive. It is not enough to be resilient and survive, it is our human right to grow and thrive,” declared Maya Torralba, an Indigenous mother who spoke at the assembly, followed by her daughter, Kateri Daffron.

    Describing her experience growing up in Anadarko, Oklahoma, Daffron said that “although I moved away I am still in poverty. I cannot leave poverty. I am a 17-year-old child and my country has already failed me.”

    Kevin Queen, who traveled to the rally from Nebraska, told North Country Public Radio that “it’s kind of sickening to me that we’ve come to the capital of the richest country on the planet and we see homeless people in tunnels and living on the streets.”

    “And so just to be able to be here and participate is an honor as well as something that’s very upsetting, because here we are, what, 60 years later, and we’re still marching for the poor — we still haven’t fixed this problem,” he added, referencing the 1963 March on Washington — where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

    Ahead of the assembly, Barber said that people were coming to D.C. “to say not only do we need a moral reset… we represent 32% of the electorate now, poor people do, and 45% of the electorate in battleground states. And it’s time for that power to be organized, mobilized, and felt in every election throughout this country.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • IN THE STEPS OF FRANCIS OF ASSISI

    Tomorrow, Sunday, my local church, the Aspley Uniting Church, at which I have been an Elder for 63 active years, celebrates ACTS SUNDAY, as we do every year at this time. ACTS is the community service arm of our small Church which has about 100 regulars attenders. Obviously named after the New Testament book, ACTS …

    Continue reading IN THE STEPS OF FRANCIS OF ASSISI

    The post IN THE STEPS OF FRANCIS OF ASSISI appeared first on Everald Compton.

    This post was originally published on My Articles – Everald Compton.

  • Tomorrow’s March on Washington Will Target Poverty, Voter Suppression, Climate

    We speak with Bishop William Barber and Reverend Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, about plans for Saturday’s Moral March on Washington and to the Polls to demand the government address key issues facing poor and low-income communities. The march will bring together thousands of people from diverse backgrounds to speak out against the country’s rising poverty rates, voter suppression in low-income communities and more. “To have this level of poverty that’s untalked about too often … is actually morally indefensible, constitutionally inconsistent, politically insensitive and economically insane,” says Barber. Theoharis says the lack of universal healthcare in the U.S. is a major source of economic insecurity and has contributed to the COVID-19 death toll. She asks how a rich country “that spends more money on healthcare than any other nation with a comparable economy still has [these] kind of poor health outcomes.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    As the United States experiences its worst inflation in decades with skyrocketing food, gas and energy prices, we end today’s show in Washington, D.C., where the Poor People’s Campaign has organized a massive Moral March on Washington Saturday. The demonstration is being led by low-income people and workers demanding access to stable housing, healthcare, living wages, gun control, and reproductive and voting rights.

    For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Bishop Dr. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, president of Repairers of the Breach. We also hope to speak with Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign.

    Bishop Barber, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can talk about what you’re doing in Washington? As inside the Capitol there is this epic historic hearing around the previous president’s attempted coup, the man who would not let go of power but was forced to in the end, I’m wondering if you could contrast what we’re seeing exposed there with what you’re doing this weekend.

    BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, thank you, Amy.

    We are not the insurrection. We are the resurrection, and a resurrection of thousands, of every race and creed and color and kind and geography, who are coming nonviolently to Washington, D.C., from all across this great land, to say that the 140 million poor and low-wealth people in this country, 43% of this nation, 52% of the children, 68% — 60% of Black people, 33% of — 30% of white people, 68% of Latinos, and so forth and so on, 87 million people who are uninsured or underinsured, 32 million people that get up every morning and work jobs that do not pay a living wage, less than $15 an hour — we won’t be silent or unseen anymore.

    The time has come for us to have a Third Reconstruction. We had one in the 1800s, one in the 1960s. We need one now, that’s about policy, reconstructing a moral framework, political framework in this country, because to have this level of poverty, that’s un-talked-about too often and unseen and unheard, is actually morally indefensible, constitutionally inconsistent, politically insensitive and economically insane. So people are coming. But poor people are coming to say not only do we need a moral reset — and low-wage workers are saying it — we represent 32% of the electorate now, poor people do, and 45% of the electorate in battleground states. And it’s time for that power to be organized, mobilized and felt in every election throughout this country.

    Now, when we look at what you see in these hearings, we have to ask the question, I think: Why were Trumpism or Trump and his team fighting to hold onto power? Why wouldn’t McConnell and them impeach him when they had a chance? I believe, Amy, and we believe, this isn’t just about personality, but policy. We’re witnessing a crisis of democracy, because some of the people who didn’t go along with Trump in this and didn’t go along with Eastman’s scheme still took the time to see if it was right, if there was a way they could do it. They still voted 99% of the time for Trump’s policies of extremism. And they still believe in a political policy coup d’état to suppress the vote, to rob the government of its resources by giving tax cuts to the wealthiest and to the greediest and the corporate interests, that disempowers the government from doing the things it needs to do for the least and the left-out and the workers and women. They are still the group that wants to take — to have a political coup d’état and take women’s rights to their own body. They’re still the group that wants to block living wages, block healthcare, block addressing climate change, block police violence. And all of these policies produce a policy murder. And we found out just this week that the denial of universal healthcare during COVID, for instance, has cost 330,000 lives. We found out, because of Trump and his allies’ policies in the beginning of COVID, poor people died at a rate of two to five times higher than anyone else in this country.

    So, we are the contrast. What you saw January 6th was the insurrection. What you see on Saturday is a resurrection. It’s a resurrection of people coming together, the Mass Poor People’s, Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March to the Polls. And we are calling on people to still join us at Third and Pennsylvania at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday morning.

    AMY GOODMAN: Liz Theoharis is also with us, the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis, who is co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and president — also executive director of the Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary.

    Liz, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you could talk about the significance of this march, and this coming at a time where a Yale study just came out saying that something like 338,000 people who died of COVID-19 during the pandemic in the United States — a third of the people — died unnecessarily, could have been saved if the U.S. had Medicare for All? Can you talk about how healthcare is a basic right, as one of the tenets of what people are calling for in Washington?

    REV. LIZ THEOHARIS: Well, thanks so much, Amy, and it is great to be back.

    And as Bishop Barber said, and as you just referenced, this study came out this week that says that, yeah, a third of the people who did not have healthcare would not have died from this pandemic. What we in the Poor People’s Campaign have been putting out, and we did a study with Jeffrey Sachs and with folks over at Columbia University that showed that between two and five times the number of poor people from poor communities died from the pandemic than richer communities and richer people. And again, this is because of these underlying issues of health inequality, of poverty, of low wages.

    And so, indeed, when we gather on Pennsylvania Avenue on Saturday and we hear the voices, the stories, but also the solutions coming out of poor and low-income people’s experience and lives, we will surely hear about the need for healthcare. As Bishop Barber has said, we need healthcare to be connected to people’s bodies, not to their jobs. And how is it, in this rich nation, that spends more money on healthcare than any other nation with a comparable economy, still has the kind of poor health outcomes, still has 87 million people who before the pandemic were uninsured or underinsured, and even some more who have — you know, tens of thousands who have lost their healthcare coverage in the worst public health crisis in generations?

    And again, this just does not have to be. It actually — you know, we could spend less on healthcare and lead healthier lives, and everyone could have universal coverage. We need to expand Medicaid, but we also need to implement a single-payer universal healthcare system. And again, this will lift society from the bottom.

    And so, this and then the cry and demand for living-wage jobs, for adequate housing, for immigration reform, for protecting this democracy, they’re all connected. And we see the interconnections, the intersections of the denial of healthcare, the destruction of our environment, the militarization of our communities, and the problems of poverty and low wages that are infecting almost half of the population, and, therefore, bringing this impoverished democracy to a real crisis.

    AMY GOODMAN: Liz Theoharis, you’ve also said that declaring war is a declaration of war on the poor. Explain.

    REV. LIZ THEOHARIS: So, you know, that actually comes from Dr. King and from many that have come before. But Dr. King, you know, when he comes out against the Vietnam War all those years ago, says that war, in all its form, is a war on the poor, and it’s cruel manipulation of the poor.

    And we’re seeing this today. I mean, we don’t have a draft in this country, but we have a poverty draft. And 22 veterans commit suicide every day in this country because of the moral costs of war. And if we look at our military budget, 53 cents of every discretionary dollar goes to the military. We can’t even spend 15 cents on healthcare and living-wage jobs and investments in our children and in anti-poverty programs combined. You know, this disproportionately impacts poor people. And that’s poor people in the United States, and that’s poor people across the world. As Dr. King said, you know, you have poor people come together from this rich nation to go and kill poor people across the world. And we’re seeing this, you know, across the world in this moment, as well.

    AMY GOODMAN: Bishop Barber, this is Pride Month, and there have been serious attacks or attempted attacks, from Coeur d’Alene to the Bay Area. You had Patriot Front in Coeur d’Alene, a small army stopped by police before they attacked a Pride march. Can you talk about the far right and the white supremacists using Christianity to justify what they’re doing?

    BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, I don’t call them “right.” I never use the term “far right” and “far left.” I think those terms are problematic. And one of the things the Poor People’s Campaign is saying is we need to have a moral conversation about right versus wrong, constitutional versus unconstitutional. And that’s part of our problem.

    The reality is that that’s heresy. Any time you use religion to justify violence against gay people, against women, against the poor, against any segment of a community, when you use it to suppress the vote, when you use religion to try to block living wages and healthcare, it is exactly wrong. One of the reasons it’s wrong from a moral and a religious standpoint is because those become the policies of death. You know, every piece of regressive policy costs lives. When you deny healthcare, it costs lives. When you attack LGBT communities, you cost lives. When you allow guns to flourish in the society, people to walk around with AK-47s, you cost lives. When you block living wages and people moving up out of poverty — we knew that, even before COVID hit, poor people were dying at a rate of 700 people a day, nearly 30 people an hour per day, 250,000 a year, from the effects of poverty. That is contrary to the biblical call to life. It is contrary to the call of the ancient prophets that says, “Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights and make women and children their prey” — P-R-E-Y. It’s contrary to the call of Jesus, that we’re supposed to be about life and good news to the poor. And it’s contrary to the Declaration of Independence, that we are supposed to be about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and contrary to the Constitution promise to establish justice and equal protection under the law.

    We are a movement of life, though. What we are saying is — and on Saturday, we are having Black people, white people, Brown people, Asian people, Native people, gay people, straight people, Republicans, Democrats, veterans, nonveterans. These are the voices you will hear, poor and impacted people, on the stage. It’s not a march and a rally and an assembly, really, for [inaudible] —

    AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

    BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: — for people to come and talk for people. People will talk for themselves. We are the resurrection and not the insurrection.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you both so much for being with us, Bishop Dr. William Barber and Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, holding the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington on Saturday.

    Oh, and, Liz, I also want to congratulate your sister Jeanne Theoharis. The film The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, based on Jeanne’s best-selling book by the same title, just premiered last night at the Tribeca Film Festival, directed by our former Democracy Now! producer Yoruba Richen, as well as Johanna Hamilton. It is fantastic, not to be missed by anyone. It was at the Tribeca Film Festival.

    And that does it for our show. Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Camille Baker, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Mary Conlon.

    On Monday, a Juneteenth special — don’t miss it — on Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Stay safe.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Killing as policy: Duterte’s bloody drug war that Marcos will inherit

    By Jodesz Gavilan in Manila

    A birth of a child usually draws out changes from people. Parents, and even grandparents, recreate themselves in a bid to better address the demands of the new addition to the family.

    Julio* knew this all too well. He first became a father at the young age of 17, and went on to work odd jobs to fulfill his responsibilities. But along the way, due to mounting pressure and the vicious cycle of poverty, Julio turned to illegal drugs.

    “Sabi niya sa akin hindi ko siya maintindihan kasi ako raw may maayos na trabaho at madali makahanap ng panibagong trabaho kung sakali, samantalang siya, walang ganoong oportunidad para sa kanya,” Cristina, his younger sister, told Rappler in an interview.

    (He told me I won’t be able to understand him because I have a stable job and can get another job if I want to, while he doesn’t have that opportunity.)

    Julio eventually separated from his first wife, and met a new woman who then got pregnant. With a new baby on the way, 39-year-old Julio was determined more than ever to change.

    He planned to start a sari-sari store, buy a refrigerator to sell frozen goods, just about anything to start anew.

    “Gusto niya na iyong iyong nagawa niyang pagkukulang sa unang pamilya niya, hindi na ulit mangyari doon sa ipinagbubuntis ng kanyang kinakasama,” Cristina recalled. (He wanted to avoid repeating the same shortcomings he had with his first family.)

    But President Rodrigo Duterte had other plans for Julio and thousands of others who came from the poorest communities in the Philippines. Drug dependents, for the country’s chief executive, are hopeless and useless to society.

    Enemy out of drug users
    Duterte made an enemy out of drug users and waged a “war” that smudged gutters, roads, and narrow alleys all over the country with blood.

    RealNumberPH, the government’s unitary report on the drug war, shows that at least 6248 people have died at the hands of police during anti-illegal drug operations between July 2016 and April 30, 2022, while human rights groups estimate the total death toll to reach 30,000 to include victims of vigilante-style killings.

    But figures obtained by Rappler show that the Philippine National Police (PNP) had already recorded 7884 deaths from July 1, 2016 to August 31, 2020.

    On December 11, 2018, Julio became one of the thousands slain. One person told his family that their son was standing outside when he and a companion were abducted by men riding a white van.

    Their lifeless bodies were found not long after.

    Cristina was sure it was the police who killed his brother, but they feared going public with this allegation. It didn’t help that the sole witness, who talked to them during his brother’s funeral, was also eventually killed.

    “Masakit ang pagkamatay niya pero iniisip ko na lang na at least nakita at naiburol namin siya, hindi tulad sa iba na nakikita na putol na ang kamay, wala na balita na bigla na lang nawawala,” she said.

    (It hurts that he died but at least we were able to find his body and do a proper burial, unlike others who were dismembered or just disappeared completely.)

    Duterte’s war on drugs
    This is Duterte’s war on drugs, a key policy in his administration that has been scrutinised by both local and international bodies, including the International Criminal Court.

    For Gloria Lai, regional director for Asia of the International Drug Policy Consortium, the bloody trail Duterte will leave behind once his presidential term ends on June 30 was highly unnecessary and preventable.

    “[Killing people] is not a solution,” she told Rappler.

    “What does success look like for the Duterte administration? It kept changing over time [and] there is no way you can say there is success,” Lai added.

    The President and his allies’ rhetoric in the past six years would make one think that the Philippines has become a narcostate where drug users are behind the most violent crimes. For Duterte, they steal, they kill, they take innocent lives.

    The Philippines indeed has issues with the proliferation of illegal drugs, but determining how widespread it is has been hard under the Duterte administration, given the overall lack of transparency and accurate data.

    Duterte himself has been dropping different figures over the years. But a report released in February 2020 by Vice-President Leni Robredo following her short stint as co-chairperson of the Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs stated that there “is no common and reliable baseline data on the number of drug dependents in the country.”

    ‘Keeping their grip on power’
    “It really just seemed to serve the administration well… to obtain power, to keep their grip on power, because it creates fear, it creates enemies, it creates scapegoats that justify really brutal and violent actions,” Lai said, adding that the drug issue was “exploited for political gain”.

    Six years into the administration, the Duterte government remains tight-lipped, if not vague, about what it deemed key performance indicators of the bloody war on drugs.

    PNP spokesperson Colonel Jean Fajardo said the police used two approaches in addressing the drug problem in the country. For the last six years, it had focused on reducing supplies and targeting their so-called pushers, up to high-value individuals.

    “Dalawa po ang lagi nating ginagamit na approach dito po sa ating kampanya laban sa ilegal na droga. Ito po ‘yong tinatawag natin na supply reduction strategy and demand reduction strategy,” Fajardo told Rappler.

    (We use two approaches in our campaign against illegal drugs. We call them supply reduction and demand reduction strategies.)

    But despite this, the PNP and its partner Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) only managed to clear 25,061 out of 35,471 barangays it identified as being involved in illegal drugs. As of April 30, 2022, there are still 10,410 drug-affected barangays yet to be cleared by the PNP and PDEA.

    Spike after start of bloody operations
    This means, 29.34 percent of drug-affected barangays are yet to be cleared by drug enforcement authorities. Based on data on drug-affected barangays from 2016 to 2022, the Philippines saw a spike in 2017, a year after the start of bloody operations.

    From 19,717 drug-affected villages in 2016, the number rose to 24,424 the following year. The number of drug-affected barangays then significantly dropped between 2020 and 2022 — the pandemic years.

    In terms of collected illegal drugs, the authorities were able to seize P89.29-billion worth of illegal drugs from July 1, 2016 until April 30, 2022. PDEA, one of the lead agencies for Duterte’s drug war, boasted that they were able to seize 11,843.41 kilograms or P76.55-billion worth of shabu or crystalline methamphetamine.

    The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has yet to release its 2022 report on synthetic drugs in Southeast Asia. But in their 2021 report, the UNODC reported that shabu was the cause of the majority of drug-related arrests and treatment admissions in the Philippines.

    For six years, authorities were able to arrest a total of 341,494 individuals. Of this number, only 15,096 are considered high-value targets.

    Based on the PNP’s classification, individuals who are considered high-value targets are those who run drug dens, are on the wanted list, and leaders and members of drug groups, among others.

    This means that of the total number of arrested individuals due to illegal drug offences, only 4.42 percent or around four in every 100 people arrested are high-value targets.
    Dehumanizing rhetoric, actions

    Drug users bacame pawns
    Duterte used drug users as pawns in his bid to make violence a norm in state policy and actions, Philippine Human Rights Information Center (PhilRights) executive director Nymia Pimentel-Simbulan said.

    “The legacy that he will be leaving behind would be institutionalization of state violence, this particular government has a proclivity towards addressing societal problems using a war framework,” she told Rappler in an interview on Monday, June 13.

    Staying true to his violent rhetoric, the President has effectively mobilised state resources to use violence and other punitive measures to address issues. Beyond the problem of illegal drugs, this approach can also be seen in the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

    If the Duterte government was serious about eradicating drugs in the Philippines, Lai said that it should’ve aimed for programs that better suit this intended outcome instead of focusing on killings.

    For one, the state should’ve highlighted how drug addiction is a health problem, therefore producing better health programs. For people who use illegal drugs like shabu to stay awake to work long hours, the government should invest in programs that will keep families out of the vicious cycle of poverty.

    But as it is, Duterte’s rhetoric and actions further dehumanize drug dependents, lumping them together with those who are part of the illegal drug syndicates.

    “If you forced them and placed them into a list where they could be hunted down and randomly interrogated by police, or even just prevent them from getting a job or going to a certain school, you just drastically diminished their life prospects,” Lai said.

    Gap in social response
    PNP spokesperson Fajardo admitted that there is still really a gap when it comes to social response, as well as rehabilitation facilities to cater to drug personalities.

    “Sinasabi natin, we agree on the fact na ito pong drug problem natin ay health problem. Hindi lang social problem. So ‘yong mga pasilidad kulang, ‘yong ating mga livelihood na pupuwede po nating i-offer dito sa mga sumurrender pati na rin po ‘yong mga nagtutulak, ‘yong mga pusher. Hindi po sa wala, pero kulang po talaga ‘yong efforts,” Fajardo said.

    (We say that we agree on the fact that this drug problem is a health problem. Not only social problems. So our facilities are lacking, the livelihood that we can offer for the surrenderees, to pushers. It’s not that we don’t have anything, but the efforts are not enough.)

    There are 64 drug rehabilitation centers in the Philippines as of 2021 — 16 under the Department of Health, nine with the local government units, and 39 privately-owned. Together, these facilities have 4840 bed capacity.

    In a forum in June 2021, DOH’s Dangerous Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment Programme manager Jose Leabres said there was a need for 11,911 additional in-patient beds for 2021 and 10,629 for 2022.

    Data from the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB) shows an increasing number of admissions to care facilities across the country. In 2021, there were at least 2344 new admissions.

    A trail of blood
    Duterte is leaving Malacañang on June 30 with a trail of blood from people killed in the name of his violent war on drugs. He also leaves behind thousands of orphaned children in the poorest communities, as well as a much more stigmatised issue of drug dependency in the Philippines.

    It now falls on president-elect Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. to “address all the harms done by the Duterte administration” on the issue of illegal drugs in the country, according to Lai, as well as giving justice to thousands of victims.

    During the campaign season, Marcos said he will continue Duterte’s drug war, but would focus on its being a health issue. He also hinted about shielding it from the International Criminal Court.

    Meanwhile, just this June, during courtesy calls with foreign ambassadors, Swedish Ambassador Annika Thunborg said there was a discussion to continue the drug war within the framework of the law and respect for human rights, among others.

    PNP spokesperson Fajardo said the incoming administration should put focus on demand reduction.

    “Pero ‘yong isa pa pong approach natin na tinatawag po nating demand reduction program, hangga’t may bumibili po, hangga’t may market po ay talagang meron at meron pong sisibol na panibagong players,” she said.

    (But the other approach that we call the demand reduction program, until there are people who purchase drugs, until there is a market for them, there will always be new players.)
    DRUG WAR DEATHS. Families of victims of drug-related extrajudicial killings and human rights advocates join a Mass at the Commission on Human Rights headquarters in Quezon City.

    Not holding her breath
    But Simbulan, whose group PhilRights has documented the victims of Duterte’s war on drugs, is not holding her breath, knowing the Marcos family’s track record and his alliance with Duterte.

    “I am not that optimistic that it will adopt a different method or approach,” she said. “Chances are, it will adopt the same punitive violent approach in addressing the drug problem in the Philippines.”

    IDPC’s Lai, meanwhile, said it’s going to be a massive turnaround if Marcos decides to do away with what Duterte has done. There is nothing preventing the incoming administration from focusing on drug issues, but it has to make sure to alter government response based on evidence and what communities really need, instead of a blanket campaign that puts a premium on killings.

    Most importantly, the new administration should focus their resources on areas that would make a difference on people’s lives for the better.

    “[They should] consider that in a lot of cases, the drug policies and the drug laws themselves have caused a lot more harm to people and communities than the actual drugs themselves,” Lai said.

    * Names have been changed for their protection

    Jodesz Gavilan is a Rappler reporter. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Land in South Africa Shall Be Shared Among Those Who Work It

    Sbongile Tabhethe works in the food garden at eKhenana land occupation in Cato Manor, Durban, 9 June 2020. Credit: New Frame / Mlungisi Mbele

    In March 2022, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres warned of a ‘hurricane of hunger’ due to the war in Ukraine. Forty-five developing countries, most of them on the African continent, he said, ‘import at least a third of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia, with 18 of those import[ing] at least 50 percent’. Russia and Ukraine export 33% of global barley stocks, 29% of wheat, 17% of corn, and nearly 80% of the world’s supply of sunflower oil. Farmers outside of Russia and Ukraine, trying to make up for the lack of exports, are now struggling with higher fuel prices also caused by the war. Fuel prices impact both the cost of chemical fertilisers and farmers’ ability to grow their own crops. Maximo Torero Cullen, chief economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, said that ‘one of every five calories people eat have crossed at least one international border, up more than 50 percent from 40 years ago’. This turbulence in the global food trade will certainly create a problem for nutrition and food intake, particularly amongst the poorest people on the planet.

    Poorer countries do not have many tools to stem the tide of hunger, largely due to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules that privilege subsidy regimes for richer countries but punish poorer ones if they use state action on behalf of their own farmers and the hungry. A recent report by no less than the WTO, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development provided evidence of these subsidy advantages from which wealthier countries benefit. At the 12th WTO ministerial conference in mid-June, the G-33 countries will seek to expand the use of the ‘peace clause’ (established in 2013) to allow poorer countries to protect their farmers’ livelihoods through the state procurement of food and enhanced public food distribution systems.

    Two young girls return to their homes after drawing water from a stream that the farm dwelling community shares with wild animals, 29 July 2020.
    Credit: New Frame / Magnificent Mndebele

    Those who grow our food are hungry, yet, stunningly, there is little conversation about the poverty and hunger of farmers, peasants, and agricultural workers themselves. More than 3.4 billion people – nearly half the world’s population – live in rural areas; amongst them are 80% of the world’s poor. For most of the rural poor, agriculture is the principal source of income, providing billions of jobs. Rural poverty is reproduced not because people do not work hard, but because of the dispossession of rural workers from land ownership and the withdrawal of state support from small farmers and peasants.

    Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (South Africa) has been paying very close attention to the plight of farmworkers in the region as part of our overall project to monitor the ‘hurricane of hunger’. Our most recent dossier, This Land Is the Land of Our Ancestors, is a fine-grained study of farmworkers from their own perspective. Researcher Yvonne Phyllis travelled from KwaZulu-Natal to the Western and Northern Cape provinces interviewing farmworkers and their organisations to learn about the failures of land reform in South Africa and its impact on their lives. This is one of the few dossiers that begins in the first person, reflecting the intimate nature of politics surrounding the land issue in South Africa. ‘What does the land mean to you?’, I asked Yvonne while we were together in Johannesburg recently. She answered:

    I grew up on a farm in Bedford, in the Eastern Cape province. My upbringing gifted me some of the best lessons of my life. One lesson was from the community of farmworkers and farm dwellers; they taught me the value of being in community with other people. They also taught me what it means to nurture and cultivate land and how to make my own meaning of what land is to me. Those lessons have informed my personal beliefs about the nature of land. All people deserve to live from the land. Land is not only important because we can produce from it; it forms part of people’s histories, humanity, and cultural heritage.

    Six generations of the Phyllis family have lived in this house and worked on this farm. Credit: New Frame / Andy Mkosi

    The process of colonialism by Dutch (Boer) and British settlers dispossessed African farmers and converted them into either landless workers, unpaid labour tenants, or the rural unemployed. This process was hardened by the Native Land Act (no. 27 of 1913), whose legacy continues to be felt today. Seventeen-year-old composer Reuben Caluza (1895–1969) responded to the law with his ‘Umteto we Land Act’ (‘The Land Act’), which became one of the first anthems of the liberation movement in the country:

    The right which our compatriots fought for
    Our cry for the nation
    is to have our country
    We cry for the homeless
    sons of our fathers
    Who do not have a place
    in this place of our ancestors

    The Freedom Charter (1955) of the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies promised those who struggled against apartheid, which formally ended in 1994, that ‘The land shall be shared among those who work it’. This promise was alluded to again in the 1996 South African Constitution, chapter 2, section 25.5, but it excludes explicit mention of farmworkers.

    This is the site of the ancestral graveyard of the Phyllis family on which Yvonne’s father Jacob and their family worked, 6 June 2021. Credit: New Frame / Andy Mkosi

    In fact, right from the 1993 Interim Constitution, the new post-apartheid system defended the rights of farm owners through a ‘property clause’ in chapter 2, section 28. Differences within the ANC led to the abandonment of the more progressive Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in favour of the neoliberal Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy – a self-imposed structural adjustment programme. What this meant was that there were simply insufficient political will and state funds allocated for the land restitution, land tenure reform, and land redistribution programmes. As our dossier notes, to this day the promises of the Freedom Charter ‘have yet to be fulfilled’.

    Rather than expropriate land from the primarily white land-owning class to compensate for historical injustices, the state provides for compensation to landowners and operates on the principle of ‘willing buyer, willing seller’. Bureaucratic red tape and a lack of funds have sabotaged any genuine land reform project. In his 2014 Ruth First Lecture, Irvin Jim, general secretary of the largest trade union in the country, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), noted that the centenary of the 1913 Land Act was not commemorated by the government but only by the militant strike by farmworkers in 2012 and 2013. ‘The strike is still fresh in our memories’, Jim said. ‘It continues to highlight the colonial historical fact that the land, and the produce that comes from it, are not being equitably shared among those who work the land’. Due to the neoliberal orientation of the land question, some of the programmes set up for restitution and redistribution have ended up benefitting large landholders over subsistence farmers and lifelong farmworkers.

    Former labourers Freeda Mkhabela, Lucia Foster, and Gugu Ngubane (from left to right) are among the activists struggling against landlessness as well as poor pay and working conditions and for better treatment of farmworkers, 26 May 2021. Credit: New Frame / Mlungisi Mbele

    A genuine agrarian reform project in South Africa would not only meet the cries for justice from the land but would also provide a pathway to deal with the hunger crisis in the countryside. Our dossier ends with a six-point list of demands developed from our conversations with farmworkers and their organisations:

    1. The government of South Africa must consult farmworkers and farm dwellers to incorporate their contributions into the development of a land reform programme which addresses their land needs.
    2. Labour tenants’ claims to land ownership should be given priority in order to avoid land reform that solely enriches Black elites.
    3. The Department of Agriculture, Land Reform, and Rural Development should facilitate the process of white farm owners apportioning some of their farmland to lifetime employees and descendants of families who have worked on farms for several generations.
    4. The government must purchase farms for farmworkers and assist them with capital for start-up costs, farming equipment, and agricultural skills.
    5. Land reform in South Africa must take into account the social factors that contribute to food insecurity and acknowledge the opportunities to rectify it through land redistribution.
    6. The process of land reform must address the marginalisation of women workers in the agricultural industry and the lack of land ownership by women farmers to ensure gender parity in both spheres.

    Loo ngumhlaba wookhokho bethu! This is the land of our ancestors! That’s the slogan that gives our dossier its title. It is about time that those who work the land get to own the land.

    The post Land in South Africa Shall Be Shared Among Those Who Work It first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Imperialism Cannot Solve Our Problems

    In learning more about the Poor People’s Campaign Moral March on Washington set for June 18th, I came across this statement by Bishop William Barber, the campaign’s national co-chair:

    Republicans say poverty is just a personal failure. And Democrats too often talk about the working class and those trying to make it into the middle class but refuse to talk expressly about poverty. Our debates are locked in struggles around and about trickle-down concepts of neoliberalism, and middle-class considerations.

    He concluded that the country’s refusal to address poverty is “the basic moral contradiction” of our time.

    I have to admit that I initially bristled at the idea of a “moral contradiction” because, as a non-religious person, that language sometimes raises red flags for me. But I began to think about how Marxists talk about the concept of contradiction.

    What is a contradiction? All social phenomena contain contradictions. Contradictions aren’t simply accidents but essential features of what those objects are. For example, the U.S. is a society that describes itself as free and touts its wealth but is plagued by the poison of white supremacy and male supremacy. The constitutional system grants due process, but cops kill and beat thousands of people each year. It has 142 million people living in dire poverty or one paycheck, one health crisis, or one disaster away from financial desperation. More than 52 million workers earn less than $15 per hour and often can’t meet their basic needs.

    U.S. leaders and capitalists brag about advanced technology, such as medical technology and knowledge. Still, they couldn’t prevent the loss of 1 million lives from COVID or 100,000 opioid overdose deaths, or 46,000 deaths from guns. We wring our hands while little change takes place. We wonder why we never see these things coming and constantly react only after so many people have been harmed.

    Political leaders boast about an advanced educational system but cannot provide it free or at a reasonable cost to the mass of working-class people. Decades-long debt peonage is the best choice we have. As illiteracy grows and workers score poorly on tests that measure competence with mathematics and language, politicians cut school and university budgets.

    These are essential contradictions that define the U.S. as a social formation. They aren’t just bad choices made by an otherwise just society.

    This reality shapes how I read Barber’s comments. “Moral contradiction” causes one of the major political parties to demand the state control women’s bodies by banning safe abortions claiming the human rights of unborn fetuses. But then, the next day, it votes as a bloc against immediate steps to remedy a baby formula shortage. A baby formula shortage! They will demand pregnant women register themselves to track births and punish abortions but refuse to consider gun registration. The Republicans and fascists built a morally bankrupt political platform. But the moral contradictions of the capitalist market economy, which they cherish even above life itself, are central pillars of the whole system. Abortion, gun violence, and baby formula are just the most recent plain examples.

    Contradictions

    Why do we care about contradictions like this? Social systems change and develop based on how social and class forces address these contradictions and turn a system into a new substance. Many capitalists and their sympathizers see contradictions as mere inconsistencies or glitches. Reformers want to fix these glitches and bring our “values” back into alignment with our actions. Or, they want to mend these problems by creating philanthropic or socially innovative programs that help out the poor but leave the system intact.

    Billionaires and fascists have different ideas about resolving contradictions. Think of Elon Musk’s recent embrace of the Republican Party and its fascist platform. He is mad that the government continues to investigate his suspicious financial activities, and he is afraid unions will weaken his absolute power in his companies. He wants state power that he can personally bend to his will to help him get over his emotional problems. He wants more power to resolve contradictions through coercion and legal force.

    Imperialism uses war to resolve contradictions. Consider the U.S. government’s drive to perpetuate or expand the war in Ukraine. It manufactures images of Russian human rights abuses—some of which are undoubtedly true. But the U.S. record of torture, mass killings, destroying civilians, racist mass incarceration, assassinations, political interventions, and hybrid wars on a global scale, in just the past two decades, embarrass even people like Henry Kissinger, among the vilest of abusers. George W. Bush’s recent verbal slip wasn’t just a gaffe.

    Though immoral, these aren’t simply moral inconsistencies. They are contradictions that comprise the structure of U.S. capitalism and its political system. Its capitalist class, on the whole, believes that it must maintain these structural forms of power if the U.S. is to keep its hegemonic position in the imperialist world system. In simple terms, these contradictions make the U.S. what it is as a country. This structure drives us from war crisis to economic crisis to health crisis and back all the way around again. So far, our only means of psychological survival has been self-induced amnesia. Forgetting, like self-medication, eases the pain of this moral contradiction, which I believe most of us feel very deeply.

    Barber’s terminology about moral contradiction is essential. And amnesia is no longer a practical solution. However, working-class power transformed into social power could be the basis for an answer.

    Imperialist world system

    In the present world system, five fundamental contradictions are interconnected and reveal moral bankruptcy, logical inconsistencies, and anti-human tendencies that make capitalism what it is:

    • a world imperialist system that denies to most humans their national aspirations
    • worldwide poverty that denies human dignity on a scale of billions
    • deepening rates of exploitation that spark frequent crises of overproduction
    • global socialization of labor vs. the anarchy of national systems that rely on the capitalist market economy
    • excess capitalist production without rational planning for the survival of humanity and the planet.

    What is a world system? World system is not a conspiratorial term, nor does it refer to “globalism” or the “deep state” or any mystifying right-wing concepts about evil hordes of racial others dominating the U.S. or Europeans. Those racist and anti-Semitic theories drive right-wing capitalist agendas and fascist violence.

    The world system names the dominant form of global integration of countries into the capitalist-imperialist system in a particular period. For example, the European slave-trade-based capitalist development, led by Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Dutch in the 17th century, and Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, formed a world system based on markets in human beings as a financial basis for market and industrial capitalist development. It created a settler-colonial-slavery complex, which also drove Indigenous genocide in the Americas. It made modern capitalism possible. (Gerald Horne’s The Dawning of the Apocalypse, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, The Counterrevolution of 1776, Negro Comrades of the Crown, and Confronting Black Jacobins can be read sequentially as a study of this world system. Joseph Inikori’s Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England is also an informative study of one aspect of that system.)

    These kinds of global interactions gave capitalism a racial characteristic it still relies on to maintain its capacity to accumulate surplus value and recirculate it as new capital.

    By the end of the 19th century, this slavery-settler system transitioned to an imperialist-colonial system. It kept critical features of the former, as settler features persisted in Southern Africa until 1994. And Canada, the U.S., and Australia continue to deny land and sovereignty to the Indigenous people who hold rightful claims. European powers, sometimes with agreement among themselves but always in fierce long-term competition, strove to conquer and dominate the entire earth.

    That system collapsed during the Great Depression and subsequent global war. Fascism—the most extreme form of capitalism and imperialism—pitted Europeans against one another in unprecedented ways. Within two decades, the colonialism system followed suit.

    After this unprecedented collapse of the world system, the U.S. managed to rise to the top of the heap. The debts incurred by the imperialist powers and the U.S.’s skillful management of the shift to dollarized neo-colonial control of former European colonies enabled this transition. (W. Alphaeus Hunton’s Decision in Africa and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Under Developed Africa are essential for this history of U.S./European colonialism and neo-colonialism in African countries.)

    Essentially, the U.S. recreated and managed a world system that expropriated vast tons of raw resources from the colonized world to fuel its own and Europe’s redevelopment after World War II. The collapse of the colonial regimes through national liberation struggles aided by the socialist countries prompted a transition to the domination of finance capital in the neoliberal regime of structural adjustments, privatization, forced labor, and hybrid war.

    That new regime successfully produced wealth and power for U.S. capitalists that one commentator characterized as the “end of history.” Meanwhile, vast billions of the human population suffered from extreme poverty, hunger, lack of health resources, rapid environmental change, disease, war, and conflict.

    The end of “the end of history” came after a series of financialization crises from the late 1990s to the 2007 housing collapse, which ruined the bliss of everlasting capitalist success. The failure to conquer Iraq and Afghanistan, which sucked trillions out of the U.S. economy, further signaled U.S. decline.

    Unlike the 1930s, when the U.S. political system responded to manage the contradictions through “Keynesian” economic theory and New Deal social democracy, the present system blunders along with handouts to the banks, tax cuts for billionaires, and more austerity. Today, we are at the end of 60 years of declining rates of growth that pale in comparison to China’s 8%-9% rates of growth each year for the past 40 years.

    The U.S. political class frequently admits that it can’t afford the record hundreds of billions pumped into military spending and a universal health system each year. It can’t afford to buy new missile systems and quality schools and universities. It can’t provide a meaningful safety net and ensure record profits and wealth accumulation for millionaires and billionaires with low tax rates.

    Even as globalization generates the socialization of labor on a world scale, the anarchy of capitalist market economies within national frames produced new internal contradictions in those ruling-class agendas. (I am indebted to Cheng Enfu’s China’s Economic Dialectic for the phrasing of this contradiction.)

    This contradiction between the needs of the empire and the interests of national economic and political systems is evident in the conflict over Ukraine. Consider how deeply and violently the U.S. ruling class split over the Russia-Europe contest. Trump was willing to dump Europe for an alignment with Russia, while much of the U.S. capitalist maintains corporate ties to Western Europe. We have yet to understand how much this conflict has altered and shaped U.S. domestic politics. (And the impending internal conflict over links to China has only been kicked down the road.)

    Over here

    The U.S. capitalist class aspires to maintain its dominance of the imperialist world system. But this means they have to carefully manage an increasingly expensive military, intelligence apparatus, local police, and border patrol system. The institutions operate strictly for the purpose of global and domestic repression of dissent. These are the only spending priorities for which a nearly unanimous Washington consensus exists.

    At the same time, however, capitalists discovered that their goal of endless higher profits had been little more than accounting schemes and fantasy for some decades. Corporate policies drove record profits with higher prices, lower wages, and benefit cuts, all aided by a significantly weakened labor movement since the 1980s. Further, accounting tricks like stock buy-backs and debt schemes made bubbles and fantasy wealth a mainstay of Wall Street chicanery.

    The capitalist class’s drive to manage the top spot in the imperialist system propels deepening exploitation worldwide, and in the U.S. Initially, globalization of production made the prices of imported goods seem like a boon. But then, the loss of manufacturing jobs meant a weakened labor movement, lower pay, and more frequent cycles of simply not being able to buy things. In some communities, whole neighborhoods became ghost towns. City services vanished overnight. Workers found they needed more than one job to survive. Consumption levels dropped, producing new levels of poverty combined with new demands for higher exploitation rates.

    Racist mass incarceration became a mechanism for resolving some aspects of that crisis simply by cultivating and exploiting racism to punish Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and immigrant people with imprisonments, criminalization, and mass deportations. Euro-American racial solidarity seemed to be an appropriate alternative to multi-racial working-class solidarity.

    Today, the performance of racial reforms (that aren’t reforms) and openly fascistic racist doctrine (great replacement dogmas, ravings about critical race theory, book burnings, and xenophobia) stand in for actual resolutions to deepening exploitation. Philanthropy and the non-profit industrial complex take the place of systemic solutions to poverty.

    The anti-war movements (2002-2008), Occupy Wall Street (2011), #BlackLivesMatter (2014-2020), and worker uprising (2020-2022) have lain bare the crisis of the political system. They have uplifted specific analyses of different aspects of these five main contradictions.

    Imperialist double jeopardy

    Withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan signaled the severe jeopardy of U.S. dominance of the imperialist world system. In contrast to the past, it appears unable to assert its agenda for Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the South Pacific, or even Latin America, which it had long proclaimed its “backyard.” De-dollarization combined with new military blocs appear to be steps toward sovereignty for some countries.

    Will this produce a new, competing imperialist system? Will this unique situation solidify into two new geopolitical and economic blocs? Are we simply witnessing a deadly realignment of imperialist forces? Yes, to each is possible—unless we bring forward internationalist, working-class revolutionary solutions.

    The U.S. intervention in Eastern Europe, specifically in Ukraine, from 2014 to the present, has centered on promoting a proxy military conflict with Russia. State Department officials recently admitted to this. However, like its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the results have been mixed for U.S. imperialism. It feels compelled to continue with this dangerous and deadly strategy, unfortunately.

    While the most violent part of that conflict is still in its early stages, many ruling class commentators may already be crying “uncle.” The New York Times recently opined that a negotiated settlement that concedes territory inhabited by Russian-language speakers to Russia might be necessary. Further, to provide promised energy resources to European allies, the U.S. was compelled to walk back its de-humanizing sanctions regime against Cuba and Venezuela.

    On the gain side, the U.S.-Europe faction has drawn more “neutral” Sweden and Finland into its orbit and extracted billions in new contracts for U.S.-based weapons makers from Germany, the U.K., and other countries. But even these gains are fraught with localized contradictions as NATO isn’t an ideologically unified bloc, and its actors hold competing and contradictory interests.

    On the loss side, Russia controls vast amounts of natural gas and petroleum desperately needed in Eastern Europe. Their military power has proven to be far more robust than expected. Their restraint in this war (relative to U.S. “shock and awe” and Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo Bay-level atrocities) has proven disappointing to Western human rights watchers who regularly side with U.S. government interests.

    The petroleum element of this war produces an internal domestic problem for the U.S. government. Rationed resources have driven up prices, even as oil companies look to deepen their already sizeable profits on gas-guzzling U.S. consumers. High prices are another form of deepening exploitation of workers and provoke political instability. The fascists are already exploiting this instability.

    Meanwhile, the Western media and political establishments have soft-pedaled fascist movements that the U.S. has funded and used to spark international conflicts along the Ukraine-Russia border since 2014. Like a page out of the Cold War playbook, the U.S. government has supported extremists painted as “freedom fighters.” Those choices have never ended well for U.S. imperialism, even if it allows them to accomplish short-term goals. Think of the various U.S.-funded drug cartels in Central America (like Noriega’s in Panama), the mujahideen in Central Asia, the “contras” in Nicaragua, and the militarists in Chile, Indonesia, and South Korea.

    End of humanity?

    While the imperialist world system leaders plotted a Ukraine-Russia war, cried crocodile tears about “blonde, blue-eyed” refugees, and pumped billions of dollars into Ukraine to keep the war going. A United Nations call for immediate, urgent global attention to human-caused climate change went almost unheeded.

    UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated in April 2022 that if the world continues on its present course, humans can expect new levels of suffering due to “unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages, and the extinction of a million species of plants and animals.” He referred to a report by the International Panel on Climate Change that showed swift and deep action is needed within the next couple of years to turn back the worst effects of the changing climate.

    Few within the U.S. political class seem concerned, let alone capable of leveraging the sorts of emissions reductions needed to protect human life. Indeed, maintaining world system dominance appears to be their only operating concern.

    What do we do with these contradictions? They show us that imperialism cannot cure itself. Imperialism cannot deliver human rights and dignity to the people it regularly exploits and oppresses. Capitalism cannot end racism or stop mass killers motivated by racist theories. It cannot suspend its need for racist super-exploitation or its exploitation and destruction of natural resources, like the air we breathe, water, and soil in which we plant crops.

    We have no time to celebrate the failure of capitalism to solve the problems it has created.

    The working class, especially its socialist and communist parties, can fight for more prominent organizations, clearer analysis, and class leadership. The socialization of labor on a global scale creates unprecedented levels of working-class power. It is the one lever with which we can move the immovable force of ruling class power and resolve the major contradictions of the present to change this world into something new. When working-class power becomes the supreme power in the world system, we have the means to win peace, avoid climate disasters, reduce exploitation, uplift the national aspirations of the world’s peoples, and bring our values into line with our actions.

    The post Imperialism Cannot Solve Our Problems first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The entire culture needs to be recycled

    Recently, as I neared my local C-Town supermarket, I saw a middle-aged man standing near a recycling redemption machine. In front of him were several massive clear garbage bags teeming full of the cans and bottles he had collected.

    The man looked bloated, exhausted, defeated — his skin grayish as he went through the motions of securing a few bucks. He reached into one of the bags and pulled out an empty, crumpled liter-sized bottle of Coca-Cola.

    My eyes happened to meet the man’s eyes just as he lifted the dirty bottle to his mouth. Without any hesitation, he wrapped his lips around the opening and blew air inside. The plastic bottle inflated to a somewhat normal size. (Apparently, the bottles need to be close to their original shape for the machine to accept them.)

    I tried to hide it but he saw my grimace. With so much of the world scrubbing any exposed inch of their epidermis in a futile attempt to feel safe, this poor soul had reached an entirely different state of mind. “Taste the feeling” indeed.

    There are multiple supermarkets within a 15-minute-walk radius of my apartment. The prices and selections vary. How friendly the employees are can also fluctuate. The cleanliness level is usually consistently okay. What all these establishments have in common, however, is a recycling station.

    Just outside the entrance are a couple of machines at which locals can load the bottles and cans they’ve gathered. Once the metal and plastic are in the machine, the loader gets a receipt to bring to a cashier inside in exchange for “deposit” money.

    Here’s how the New York Department of Environmental Conservation explains the concept:

    New York’s Returnable Container Act requires at least a 5-cent deposit on carbonated soft drinks, beer and other malt beverages, mineral water, soda water, water, and wine cooler containers. A deposit is required on glass, metal, and plastic containers that hold less than one gallon or 3.78 liters.

    Unfortunately, due to poverty and the ongoing popularity of unhealthy items like soda, this is a common activity. Even during the widespread fear frenzy in NYC during the pandemic, the lines at the redemption machines remained long. Concerns about the virus were easily outweighed by a desperate need for whatever income was available.

    The dull-eyed man blowing into a used, germ-ridden Coke bottle was obviously not concerned about where that bottle might have been. Who touched it? What touched it? How many mouths had been on it? “Germophobia” is a luxury, I suppose.

    Over the past decade or so, bottles and cans have become a form of currency in my neighborhood. I walk to a local gym each day before 6 A.M. At that time, it’s often just me and can collectors alone on the streets (excluding a few stragglers still staggering home from clubs). You can hear the collectors long before you see them. They use supermarket shopping carts to transport their “currency” and the rattling sound is both loud and unmistakable.

    Some locals see them as a nuisance. Others diligently leave their cans and bottles where the collectors can easily find and access them. Just the other day, I saw a woman run after a collector with a large bag of plastic bottles. It was such a sweet interaction, it brought me to tears — of joy and sorrow.

    Social media is filled with examples of such “positive news.” Don’t get me wrong, I get weepy at some of these stories, too. But it doesn’t change the fact that we mostly aim our energy at cheering individual acts of charity but rarely (if ever) point out structural and institutional indifference.

    Projects like mine, for example, should not be necessary for a nation as wealthy as the U.S. But, in the Home of the Brave™, they are required and woefully insufficient. Our government is a failure for everyone below the top few percent.

    Speaking of failures: “Traditional recycling is the greatest example of modern-day greenwashing,” declares Ross Polk, an investigative journalist specializing in environmental issues. “Recycling is championed as the strategy to enable a cleaner, healthier world by those businesses that have profited the most from the extractive, take-make-waste economy. In reality, it is merely a cover to continue business as usual. Corporations espouse the efficacy of recycling via hollow ‘responsibility commitments’ to avoid examination of the broader negative consequences that their products and business models have wrought. Recycling is good for one thing, though — it helps us dodge the responsibility of our rampant and unsustainable consumption.”

    Polk concludes: “After nearly 50 years of existence, recycling has proven to be an utter failure at staving off environmental and social catastrophe. It neither helps cool a warming planet nor averts ecosystem destruction and biodiversity loss.”

    He could’ve added that recycling is also not a moral or effective way of helping poor people achieve any sense of financial security. The business of recycling is a facade. Any belief that redeeming cans and bottles will help individuals “get by” is equally as deceitful and self-serving as the recycling scam itself.

    We’ve spent much of the past two years fearing each other, dreading the act of breathing itself. We went months without seeing smiles, depriving loved ones of hugs, starving children of valuable and necessary non-verbal social input, and viciously turning on anyone who does not march in strict lockstep with the algorithm-induced views.

    Some might say the dull-eyed man at the redemption machine has sunk to a different level. In many ways and for many reasons, he certainly has. I might suggest that he’s also transcended some of what passes for normal.

    Trust me, this is not some misguided fantasy that the poverty-stricken have it “better.” I’m not Mother Teresa who once despicably stated: “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.” My supposition is merely a musing about letting go of the illusion of control and “order.”

    If only we could recycle the entire damn culture and start over.

    The post The entire culture needs to be recycled first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How China Strengthened Food Security And Fought Poverty

    The Covid-19 pandemic, the ensuing supply-chain crisis, and high rates of inflation around the world have led to rising food prices and fears of famine.

    These cascading and interlocking problems have pushed governments to prioritize economic self-sufficiency and food security.

    China is leading the way in this struggle. Beijing has shown how to strengthen food sovereignty, and simultaneously fight poverty, with a multi-pronged approach that combines state-funded agricultural cooperatives, stockpiling of nonperishable staples, a crackdown on waste, and government investment in new technologies.

    While the United Nations warns of “the specter of a global food shortage,” the Chinese government has provided countries with an alternative model to meet the needs of their people.

    The post How China Strengthened Food Security And Fought Poverty appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Social assistance recipients have given up on government help

    By: Sally Palmer.

    See original post here.

    The cold, wet weather of late winter and early spring was discouraging for everyone, combined with illness and restrictions brought on by COVID-19, and inflation rising to a 30-year high. But most of us have had a warm place to live and access to healthy food.

    It has been much worse for our citizens who depend on social assistance, which the PC government has frozen at $733 per month since 2018, for single people considered to be employable. No indexing to inflation, despite Canada’s annual rate peaking to 6.7 per cent in March. And no mention of social assistance rates in the Ontario budget.

    The Hamilton Social Work Action Committee and the Campaign for Adequate Welfare and Disability Benefits began a petition campaign asking the government to raise social assistance rates to match the federal CERB benefit: $2,000 per month for single people who lost their employment during the pandemic. To get “in-person” signatures, we reached out to people who lined up outdoors for donated food, often for over an hour in miserable weather.

    One cold, rainy evening at the Ferguson Avenue station we approached a group of about 25 hungry people, many living on social assistance, some with no fixed address. They were there for food, shivering in the cold rain, when a truck came by with light snacks at 5:30 p.m. After a 90-minute gap, some church volunteers arrived to cook hot food for the small crowd. No one had given up and left. We met many of the same people on Saturday mornings at Gore Park, again waiting patiently in the cold for food.

    Some of the food seekers refused to sign our petition, saying that the government will never increase social assistance. We are also hearing this now, as we knock on doors in government-subsidized apartment buildings, encouraging the residents to vote.

    We can understand why social assistance recipients have given up on being treated fairly by our government.

    Some of them were part of a basic income pilot, initiated by the previous Liberal government. Researchers from McMaster University found that many participants reported improvements in their physical and mental health, they had more hope for the future, and some had reached out for education and training that would help them to find employment.

    During the 2018 election campaign, the PCs promised to continue the basic income pilot, but cancelled it after winning the election. The last time a PC government gave a raise to social assistance was six per cent in 1985. This was nullified 10 years later by a 21.6 per cent cut by the Mike Harris government.

    Ironically, this government promised to make improvements to social assistance in their 2018 election platform. In Premier Ford’s words, “The best form of social assistance is a job.” He planned to find employment for recipients by subsidizing employers for the first few months. This approach has been used in other countries, but evaluations showed that the employees were dismissed when the subsidies ended. Although the government has promoted this plan over the past four years, there has never been a report on its progress.

    It is understandable that the hungry people who wait for food in miserable weather have given up on the government.

    Progressive Conservative candidates are seeking re-election at a time of extreme inflation, without even mentioning social assistance in their budget. This suggests that citizens who are hungry and homeless do not exist on their radar. We hope that public-spirited people will remember this when they vote June 2.

    The post Social assistance recipients have given up on government help appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Running wild: the children driven to a life of crime on the streets of Malawi

    With 15,000 living rough and stealing to get by, rising poverty and hunger in the country is driving more boys and girls from their homes


    Emily Maere had gone into the city of Blantyre to buy stock for her little grocery shop. As usual, she decided not to travel with cash but to use an ATM when she got there.

    This time, Maere, 25, from Neno in southern Malawi, was mugged. To her shock, her attackers were children. “No sooner had I finished the withdrawal than the group of street children attacked me, snatching my purse,” she says.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Sue Gray report tells us what we already know – this government hates working people

    On 25 May, senior civil servant Sue Gray’s long-awaited report on the Downing Street parties during the height of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic was published. The ‘Partygate’ report reveals the extent of the government’s law-breaking gatherings. Notably, it exposes the disrespect with which partygoers treated Downing Street’s low-wage workers.

    Led by Johnson, the government has fostered a culture that regards the lives of working people as totally insignificant and disposable. This is reflected in the examples of the poor treatment of low-paid Downing Street staff set out in the Gray report. This disregard for low-wage workers’ lives has had a devastating impact on poor and working people.

    Mistreating low-wage workers

    Some of the most infuriating details in the report include government aides’ and civil servants’ “unacceptable” treatment and expectations of cleaners and security staff. The report notes:

    multiple examples of a lack of respect and poor treatment of security and cleaning staff.

    The incidents included partygoers leaving red wine stains and sick for low-wage workers to clean up. In another instance, No. 10 aides mocked and “laughed at” a security guard who raised concerns that Downing Street parties were in breach of lockdown regulations.

    An insider said:

    I remember when a custodian tried to stop it all and he was just shaking his head in this party, being like, ‘This shouldn’t be happening.’ People made fun of him because he was so worked up that this party was happening and it shouldn’t be happening.

    Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana responded to these revelations, saying:

    No full sick pay

    The government’s disdain for working people goes far beyond snobbish behaviour and attitudes. It has devastating and far-reaching consequences for vulnerable workers.

    The government forced its own outsourced, low-paid cleaners, security guards and other low-wage staff to work through the pandemic, often without personal protective equipment or sick pay. This inhumane anti-worker model proved fatal for some.

    Ministry of Justice cleaner Emmanuel Gomes was one of the government’s low-paid, outsourced workers. Throughout lockdown, workers like Gomes were forced to risk their health working in an empty parliament while MPs worked from home. This continued in spite of union concerns that these workers were being put in “unnecessary danger”.

    Denied access to full sick pay, Gomes couldn’t afford to take sick leave. Gomes worked with suspected coronavirus symptoms for five days, and didn’t take time off to seek medical help. He died on 23 April.

    Remembering Gomez, independent media outlet Tortoise tweeted:

    Gomes was one of countless low-paid workers nationwide who – due to outsourcing, persistent employment and income insecurity, and unjust sick packages – were forced to continue working through the pandemic.

    The devastating case of Belly Mujinga springs to mind. Mujinga was a medically vulnerable public transport worker who died with Covid after a passenger allegedly spat and coughed at her.

    The government’s elitist, profit-driven socioeconomic model is responsible for deaths like these.

    The rich stay rich

    Following the publishing of the Gray report, chancellor Rishi Sunak announced plans for a support package to help some households with rising energy bills.

    Suggesting that this announcement is a bare-faced distraction tactic, political activist and commentator Femi Oluwole said:

    Lest we forget that through a decade of cuts, failure to cap fuel costs, and a general hatred for poor people – the Tories are responsible this crisis. 

    This announcement comes just days after the chancellor refused to help struggling families, saying that “the next few months will be tough”. This is the same man who the Sunday Times named as one of the richest people in the UK, with a shocking £730m fortune. This reflects the huge chasm between the lived realities of working people and that of those in power. 

    Reflecting on this, author Mikey Walsh tweeted:

    We can’t forget, we can’t forgive

    While low-income migrant workers were left with little choice but to work to death through the pandemic, toffee-nosed government aides laughed in their faces. The British public must not forgive or forget these grave injustices.

    We must demand respect for the rights and dignity of all working people. We can do this by wholeheartedly supporting the work of grassroots unions such as United Voices of the World that continue to demand better wages, sick pay, and protections for the UK’s most vulnerable low-wage workers.

    Featured image via Ugur Akdemir/Unsplash resized 770 x 403 px

    By Sophia Purdy-Moore

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • A small revenue-neutral UBI could cut poverty to lowest in 60 years at no net cost, according to new research

    See original post here.

    A new universal basic income model could cut poverty by more than half at no net cost, reducing it to its lowest level for 60 years, according to a report co-authored by a University of York academic.

    On the 80th anniversary of the historic Beveridge Report, the new research by the Basic Income Conversation and Compass represents the most substantive attempt yet to assess the impact of a basic income (UBI) scheme and the greater income security it provides.

    The fiscally neutral scheme involves no additional calls on the public finances and no net increase in taxation: the cost of the extra payments would be exactly offset by the extra revenue from internal changes in tax rates and National Insurance Contributions, the report’s authors say.

    Changes

    Under the model, compared to the current system:

    • Child poverty falls by more than a half to 12.5%, taking it to below the level of 14.0% in 1977.
    • Working-age poverty falls by just over a quarter, from 19.4% to 14.9%.
    • Pensioner poverty falls by 54%, from 16.7% to 7.7%. This takes the level of pensioner poverty to well below the lowest post-1961 rate of 14% in the early 1980s.
    • The Gini coefficient – a summary measure of inequality – falls by 12.5%, taking it back towards the peak equality achieved in the 1970s.    
    • The gains are concentrated among the poorest and the losses among higher-income groups.

    The model involves two broad sets of changes to the existing tax and benefit system:

    • A guaranteed set of weekly payments which provide an income floor. These are £41 per child and £63 per adult of working age, making a guaranteed payment of nearly £11,000 a year for a family of four.
    • A series of tax adjustments pay for the weekly basic income: the changes involve lowering the personal allowance to £750, a rise in existing tax rates of 3p in the pound and a change in the current system of National Insurance Contributions.

    As well as ensuring fiscal neutrality, these changes ensure that the gains are concentrated among the poorest, the report concludes.

    Evidence

    Professor Kate Pickett, from the University of York’s Department of Health Sciences and one of the author’s of the report, said: “Here is the evidence that a Universal Basic Income is affordable and beneficial  – imagine how good it would feel to be tackling child poverty while enhancing everybody’s financial security. This could be a giant step forward to a better post-Covid world.”

    Neal Lawson, Director of Compass, added: “At a time of skyrocketing poverty, this report shows universal basic income can take us back to the lowest level of child poverty in over 50 years at no net cost to the Treasury.

    “In showing universal basic income can deliver record low levels of poverty with no extra burden on the nation’s finances, this report makes transformative change a political decision not an economic one.”

    About this research

    The report ‘Tackling Poverty: the power of universal basic income’ is published on the Compass website. Its research models a basic income that could reverse the poverty and inequality rises of the last 45 years.

    The post A small revenue-neutral UBI could cut poverty to lowest in 60 years at no net cost, according to new research appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • End of Free School Meals Will Be Catastrophic for Kids

    When Congress passed a $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill in March, anti-hunger advocates were stunned that appropriations to ameliorate child hunger worsened by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic were not included.

    A month earlier, more than 2000 organizations signed a letter, initiated by the 52-year-old Food Research and Action Center, to demand that Congress continue to allow schools to sidestep a host of rules that, pre-COVID, means-tested student eligibility for school breakfast and lunch programs, and restricted what was served and where it was served.

    “The COVID pandemic is far from over,” the letter stated. “Families continue to need support, particularly Black, Hispanic and Indigenous families who disproportionately lack reliable access to healthy meals…. School nutrition departments and community sponsors still struggle to operate under the unique circumstances created by the pandemic.”

    Those unique circumstances, of course, shuttered schools in March 2020, and the letter reminded lawmakers that because of the unprecedented health crisis, Congress gave the U.S. Department of Agriculture — which oversees school meals programs — the authority to issue nationwide child nutrition waivers “to address access and operational challenges” created by the fast-spreading virus.

    In short order, schools began to make grab-and-go bag lunches and breakfasts available for pick-up at designated sites; allowed school buses to drop off meals at students’ homes; and extended eligibility for meals to every student, regardless of family income. When schools reopened months later, no-cost meals — and in some cases after-school snacks — continued to be provided to each and every pupil.

    But unless Congress acts, these changes will expire on June 30.

    Advocates say that this will have a catastrophic impact, not just on students, but also on food service staff and school administration.

    Without an extension of the waivers, schools will have to revert to a three-tiered system: free meals given to those at or below 130 percent of federal poverty guidelines ($23,803 for a household of two; $36,075 for a household of four); reduced fee meals for those between 131 and 185 percent of the guidelines (up to $33,874 for two and $51,338 for four); and full-payers, whose per meal fee is set by local school authorities.

    Before the pandemic, “we spent millions of dollars a year on paperwork,” Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, a New York City-based advocacy and direct-service organization, told Truthout. “It was and is counterproductive. We know that food is key to educational advancement. If a kid hasn’t eaten breakfast, by 2 pm their head will be on the desk and they will be napping. Universal school meals increase attendance, improve health and give kids a good start in life. When we force people to fill out forms to prove they’re eligible, we’re essentially spending money to keep food away from kids who need it.”

    Even if lawmakers do not care about the morality of letting kids go hungry, the bottom line is that kids can’t study and learn unless they’re well fed, Berg said. At the same time, the pandemic has made providing high-quality, nutritious food increasingly difficult.

    “Schools are short-staffed and food prices have skyrocketed,” Diane Pratt-Heavner, director of media relations at the School Nutrition Association, a professional association representing more than 50,000 food service workers and agencies, told Truthout. “But thanks to the waivers, schools have been reimbursed at a rate of $4.56 per lunch as opposed to $3.75, which is what they received pre-COVID. This makes a big difference.” Going back to the lower reimbursement rate, she explained, will be devastating because of escalating food, labor and fuel costs.

    “The idea is that it is time to get back to normal, but what schools are facing is not close to normal,” Pratt-Heaver said. “There are huge supply chain issues and many families are struggling with unemployment, the high cost of gasoline and health issues. People who are slightly above the federal poverty threshold are still having trouble making ends meet and if their kids are no longer eligible for free meals, it will be a huge loss.”

    Jillien Meier, director of No Kid Hungry, a campaign of Share Our Strength, a national nonprofit that works to end hunger and poverty in the U.S. and throughout the world, told Truthout that the waivers have given schools “a cushion and breathing room” to mitigate shortages.

    “There has been difficulty finding bread, ketchup and ground beef,” she said. “We have been hearing stories of school staff going to Kroger’s or Costco at 4 am to pick up supplies. Many, many people are going above and beyond to make sure kids have enough nutritious food to eat. Not extending the waivers is hitting these programs when they’re already down. Everyone wants to return to normal, but normal isn’t here yet. The waivers allowed non-congregate meal sites to offer food and authorized the bundling of more than one meal at a time when schools are closed. This was helpful to staff preparing the food as well as to food recipients.”

    These measures have been extremely important for staff working in the Paradise Unified School District in California, an area that was decimated in 2018 by wildfires that burned 240 square miles and killed 86 people. “The waivers that were put in place due to the pandemic have made it possible to serve more of our community, not just our K-12 students,” Tanya Harter, director of food services for the district, told Truthout. As a result, kids enrolled in a daycare center and charter school were also fed.

    Tanya Harter (center), the director of Paradise Unified School District Food Services, poses with her coworker Jennifer Faria (left) and two parents who came to pick up pandemic-era to-go meals for their schoolchildren.
    Tanya Harter (center), the director of Paradise Unified School District Food Services, poses with her coworker Jennifer Faria (left) and two parents who came to pick up pandemic-era “to-go” meals for their schoolchildren.

    Harter’s colleague, Melissa Crick, is the president of Paradise District Schools, a locale with six schools serving 1487 students, at least 30 percent of whom lack a permanent home. Many families are living in trailers, cars, temporary rentals or are doubled up. High unemployment, far distances between homes and schools, and astronomical gas prices have made it extremely difficult for families to access food without help from the district.

    “Hundreds of people need food and jobs, but gasoline is $5.60 a gallon so a 20-mile drive puts a huge strain on the already strained resources of most families,” Crick said.

    In addition, the district was given short-term federal recovery funds following the wildfires; these funds are set to expire before the next academic year begins. “If the state does not come in to help, we will have to make layoffs in the schools,” Crick said. “About 90 people — teachers and staff, including food service workers — will have to be terminated.”

    If the remaining staff have to process applications for free-or-reduced price meals, it will exacerbate this highly fraught situation, she added.

    “It makes no sense to take away critical programs when we know that a tidal wave of social and emotional issues will continue to come at us,” she continued. “Students are reporting more suicidal ideation and are seeking a record number of counseling appointments. We should be increasing services, not decreasing them, and not just here in Butte County, but nationwide.”

    “Without Eating, I Can’t Focus on School”

    School meals have been a lifeline for Dawn Zephier and her five children. The family fled a “bad situation” in South Dakota last August and now live in Las Cruces, New Mexico. “When we arrived, I rented a motel room,” she begins. “There were nine of us living together at that time, including two grandchildren, and I thought that we’d stay in the motel for a week or two, tops. But there is a crazy affordable housing shortage here and it was really hard on us. We had to stay in the motel for four months.”

    Although the family now lives in a four-bedroom house thanks to a Section 8 subsidy, Zephier says that the free school meals have been a lifesaver.

    Israel, her 17-year-old son, agrees. School meals get a bad rap, he begins, but they are often enjoyable. “I take food even if I’m not hungry,” he says, “and even if I don’t like it because someone else in my house might like it. I know that without eating, I can’t focus on school. If I’m hungry, I need to eat something, even if it’s just a stick of gum.”

    Israel and Eric with their mother Dawn Zephier
    “When you don’t know when you will eat again, you might as well chow down until you can’t eat anymore,” says 18-year-old Eric Zephier (right), who has relied on free meals at his high school. Eric appears here with his brother Israel and his mother Dawn.

    His brother Eric, 18, adds that when he first enrolled in the school, he did not know that he could take more than one helping of the meals served. “One of the guys who makes the food told us that we can take seconds or even thirds. So, hey, it’s free, and when you don’t know when you will eat again, you might as well chow down until you can’t eat anymore.”

    And, while both he and Israel work part-time, he says that not only have the free meals enabled him to help his mom and siblings, they have sensitized him to the needs of other low-income people.

    “When we were in South Dakota, my son told me that a boy had his lunch tray taken away because his family owed money to the school for his meals,” Dawn told Truthout. “Why would anyone humiliate a child this way? No child should have to deal with this kind of bullying; every kid should have enough food to eat.”

    Anti-hunger advocates are in complete agreement and are working with Congress to see if waiver extensions can be added to pending legislation.

    “We need Congress to act now or the next school year will be derailed,” Meier says. “Yes, there are a lot of competing issues and it is easy for something like school meals and nutrition programs to get lost, but advocates are not calling it a day. All of the anti-hunger groups have been relentless in pushing Capitol Hill and the White House to do something, and we are looking for any bill that can be amended to include waiver extensions. We know that time is of the essence. We also know that it is quickly running out.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Inflation: here’s how much more an average day costs you

    It’s official – inflation hit 9% in April. We know what that means: the cost of everything we buy has gone through the roof. However, inflation isn’t the same on everything we buy. So, across the course of an average day, how much more does it cost just to live? Hint: it’s a lot more expensive for the poorest people than it is for the richest.

    Inflation: the worst for 40 years

    Sky News reported that:

    Inflation has hit its highest level in 40 years…

    The rate shot up to 9% last month – its highest level since comparable readings in 1982.

    It also noted that almost three-quarters of the rise came from the 54% increase in energy prices. However, this isn’t the whole story – as a day in the life of many of us shows.

    Don’t even try to live a life

    You’d best start putting less milk in your morning tea, because that’s gone up by 12.2%. If you want some toast to go with that, spread the jam thinly – it now costs 15.6% more. But you might want to skip both, given that the transport costs of doing the school run, getting to work, or going to sign on at the Department for Work and Pensions have rocketed by 13.5%. Let’s hope your car (if you can afford one) doesn’t run on diesel – because the price of that has gone up by 36%.

    Lunch could be a no-no, unless you can afford the 22.7% increase in margarine to spread on the bread. Fortunately, that’s only gone up by 4.9% – so you can just eat it dry. Now, don’t forget to check on your baby – but only if you can afford to reproduce in the first place. Baby-related products have gone up by 15.9%. When the older kids get back from school, check their shoes for tears and tape them up if necessary; there’s been an 11% increase in the cost of children’s footwear.

    It doesn’t really matter what (if anything) you choose to have for dinner – overall food prices have gone up by 10.6%. But if you want to make stuff from scratch, even that is costing a lot more. Because while the price of flour has risen by 9.3%, ready meals have only gone up by 7.8%. And if you can’t afford the gas/electric to cook or heat either of those things? Hey – at least the ready meal can technically be eaten cold.

    Inflation = class war

    If you try to navigate all this, you’d best not be poor. Because while headline inflation is 9%, for the poorest households it’s actually 10.2%. Take comfort from the fact that the inflation rate for the richest households is less than yours and the headline figure – sitting at 8.7%. Luckily for them, the cost of their servants has only gone up by 1.4%. They can jet off on a package holiday that’s only gone up by 3.1%, knowing that the kids will be well looked-after in their absence.

    The point being, the government knows that inflation hits poor people the hardest. Yet it still chooses to do nothing about it – making the current chaos we face an intentional class war, not a cost of living crisis.

    But don’t worry – if all this is utterly depressing, the cost of chocolate has actually fallen by 0.4%, and fags have only gone up by 7.5%. So, you can gorge and smoke yourself to an early, heart attack-induced grave safe in the knowledge that the cost of a funeral has only gone up by 3.5%. Small mercies, hey?

    Featured image via The Canary

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Bolivia: “We Are The Center Of The World”

    Humanity is at a turning point. Not only war and climate change threaten life on our planet. Ideologies and some people as well.

    We know that money and the production of wealth and well-being have created a widening and deepening gap between people, neighborhoods, cities and countries that has been exacerbated in the wake of the pandemic.

    So I would like to stop thinking of ourselves as the poor periphery of an unequal, colonial and racist globalization.

    In Bolivia, since the beginning of this century, we have been struggling with some of the most important and decisive issues for the future of the human species: water, our sacred coca leaf, the goods that we can distribute thanks to the generosity of the Pachamama and – of course – the right to decide collectively about our lives.

    The post Bolivia: “We Are The Center Of The World” appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A guaranteed basic income could end poverty, so why isn’t it happening?

    By: Lorne Whitehead & Jiaying Zhao

    See original post here.

    On April 27, Senator Diane Bellemare published an op-ed in the Globe and Mail opposing a proposal for guaranteed basic income where all Canadian citizens and residents over the age of 17 would receive unconditional guaranteed sufficient income.

    One recent poll suggests nearly 60 per cent of Canadians support a basic income of $30,000. In another poll, 57 per cent of Canadians agree that Canada should create a basic universal income for all Canadians, regardless of employment.

    Despite the strong public support, Bellemare argued that, “A basic income would be an unfair, complicated, and costly way to eliminate poverty.” As a social scientist who has researched cash transfers, and an entrepreneur and organizational leader, we challenge the view that basic income is “unfair”, “complicated” and “costly.” Instead, we argue that it can be fair, simple and affordable.

    Basic income can be fair

    Basic income can be fair to all Canadians, accommodating people with different needs. A system that includes basic income does not necessarily entail clawing back existing benefits and services.

    Importantly, a gradually phased-in, carefully designed basic income program can be monitored and adjusted over time, to ensure that diverse individual needs are always addressed.

    Research from Stanford University suggests that a basic income program can inspire meaningful social integration — greater participation in social and civic activities in the community — while also providing individuals with stability, safety and security.

    An analysis of Ontario’s basic income trial illustrated that people with diverse needs reported better personal relationships with friends and family with basic income. In turn, their sense of social inclusion and citizenship improved.

    A woman in a suit speaking into a microphone on a podium
    The Ontario Conservative government cancelled the Ontario Basic Income Pilot that was initiated by former Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

    Basic income can be simple

    With careful planning, a basic income system could be designed to be simple, adaptable, reliable and fair. In other words, it could be a type of synergistic solution that involves an optimal mix of different policy programs that yield greater efficacy. For example, a basic income program could be combined with a wage subsidy program.

    Contrary to Senator Bellemare’s assertion that “basic income would likely hamper participation in the labour market,” research has found that basic income has no negative impacts on the labour market. That is, basic income has no negative impact on employment rates or wages.

    With a basic income program, recipients would be motivated to participate in the labour market and feel empowered to discover the most fulfilling way to work without fearing for their financial security.

    Basic income can be affordable

    Recent cost-benefit analyses have demonstrated that carefully designed cash-based interventions can be cost effective and generate net savings for society. Recipients rely less on social services over time, meaning governments pay less to fund these programs.

    While Bellemare’s analysis suggests there could be a cost problem, other, more thorough analyses have taken into account the true costs and benefits of basic income programs and rebuked that claim.

    We caution against overly simplistic cost estimates and call for a more careful, thorough calculation of the true costs and benefits associated with of basic income programs. In fact, Canada can adopt a basic income program without increasing its fiscal debt.

    Last year, the Parliamentary Budget Office of Canada estimated that a guaranteed basic income of $17,000 per individual would cost the government $88 billion.

    This amount could be offset by scaling back tax credits that disproportionately benefit Canadians who earn higher incomes. In addition, a well-designed basic income program can provide non-monetary benefits that are typically not captured in cost-benefit analyses, such as improvements in health, education, social cohesion and productivity.

    Research supports basic income

    There is a considerable amount of research that supports basic income around the world. It is prudent to carry out significantly enhanced research to reduce hesitations on basic income on social and economic grounds. Basic income can be a reliable, powerful component of a nationwide program to reduce poverty and enable all citizens to thrive.

    Basic income should form part of a practical comprehensive plan for eliminating poverty in Canada. Indeed, there is emerging political will to push for a national strategy for a guaranteed basic income.

    Last summer, Liberal MP Julie Dzerowicz sponsored Bill C-273, the National Strategy for a Guaranteed Basic Income Act. It was the first time a bill about basic income was debated by Parliament. And in February 2021, four senators — three from Prince Edward Island, one from Ontario — published an open letter that called for nationwide guaranteed basic income.

    This is essential, because poverty is an unnecessary, cruel abomination. Think of it this way: most Canadians probably have a close friend or family member who is impacted by poverty, since one in 15 Canadians still live in poverty.

    Poverty touches us all — it is everyone’s tragedy, which is absurd because poverty can be affordably reduced as we have argued above. Hopefully, one day future Canadians will look back to 2022 and ask how a just society could ever have tolerated such needless suffering.

    The post A guaranteed basic income could end poverty, so why isn’t it happening? appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Giving People Money With No Strings Attached Is Good for Their Health, Dozens of Studies Indicate

    By: Sze Yan Liu

    See original post here.

    The Big Idea

    When people living in poverty in countries like Malawi, Indonesia, and Ecuador receive cash payments without having to do anything in return, they have better health, according to a scientific review of a large body of research.

    To reach that finding, our interdisciplinary team of public health experts, economists, and epidemiologists from Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United States pooled data from 34 studies that involved 1,140,385 participants in 50,095 households across Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia.

    Our systematic review and meta-analysis also determined that unconditional cash payments in low- and middle-income countries not only reduce poverty, but they also lead to greater food security, improved nutrition, and more consistent school attendance.

    Follow-up surveys with individuals who received this money earlier found that they were less likely to have been sick in the previous two weeks to three months compared with individuals who had not received this money. In addition, there is some evidence that people who got cash payments spent more money on health care.

    The studies we examined involved 24 cash-payment programs in 13 countries that were run either by governments, nonprofits, or researchers. The value of the money given to people in need varied widely, anywhere from 1.3 percent to 81.9 percent of gross domestic product per capita.

    Why It Matters

    Governments, nonprofits, and researchers around the world are increasingly experimenting with a simple approach to reduce poverty: giving people money to spend on whatever they need.

    Many of these cash-transfer pilots and experiments — often called basic-income programs — have required people to do something to receive the money, such as making sure their children regularly attend school. Sometimes the condition involves completing a specific health-related task, such as attending a health education workshop or going to a preventive care medical appointment.

    Researchers are debating whether these conditions improve or hinder the effectiveness of these programs.

    Other programs, like those we studied, have no such requirements.

    One advantage of the no-strings-attached approach, argue the GiveDirectly nonprofit and other supporters, is that it eliminates the need to monitor compliance and slashes administrative costs. Unconditional cash payments may empower recipients more since they can decide how to use the money to meet some of their immediate needs.

    Making payments contingent on people meeting requirements may also unintentionally harm people in need who can’t comply with conditions due to physical, social, or economic barriers. For example, requiring a clinic visit to “earn” a cash payment does not help anyone unable to make the trip.

    What Still Isn’t Known

    We still don’t have enough information to determine if this pattern holds true in the United States and other wealthier nations.

    The long-term health benefits of unconditional cash payments is also not clear.

    Finally, more research is needed to understand whether the impetus for these programs, such as when they follow a hurricane or other major disaster, makes any difference.

    What’s Next

    Our team plans to study whether cash-payment programs that require compliance with conditions lead to better health, too. We also want to update a previous review we conducted of payments given to people who had experienced humanitarian disasters to include evaluations of similar efforts carried out during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Editor’s note: This article is part of a partnership the Chronicle has forged with the Conversation to expand coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits. The three organizations receive support for this work from the Lilly Endowment. This article is republished from the Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

    The post Giving People Money With No Strings Attached Is Good for Their Health, Dozens of Studies Indicate appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • 25 Issues Of Increasing And Serious Concern In India

    There is increasing worry that in some areas of critical importance the situation in India has been deteriorating steadily during the last eight years or so. As India is home to about 18 per cent of people in the world, this is clearly a matter of urgent concern. Hence a review of these disturbing trends is urgently needed with a view to suggesting suitable remedial actions for checking this deterioration.

    Inequalities have been increasing recently to record levels. According to the World Inequality Report, after years of significant reduction of inequalities in the post-independence period, inequalities are coming back to their colonial levels in recent times. This report tells us that the bottom 50% have only 6% of the wealth, while the top 1% have 33% of the wealth. The bottom 50% have only 13% of the income, while the top 1% have 22% of the income.

    The post 25 Issues Of Increasing And Serious Concern In India appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Millions more households affected by food insecurity

    Around one in seven adults live in homes where people have skipped meals, eaten smaller portions, or gone hungry all day because they could not afford or access food, research suggests.

    The number of people struggling to buy food has risen by 57% in three months, according to research by the Food Foundation.

    The charity also said food bank users are increasingly requesting items that don’t need cooking. This is because they’re worried about how they will afford rising energy bills.

    The “chilling” figures come at a time when the cost-of-living crisis is increasingly hitting families who are facing rising utility and food prices. These are far outstripping the amount by which benefits have risen.

     

    Going hungry

    The charity analysed responses from 10,674 UK adults who were surveyed online by YouGov between 22 and 29 April.

    Some 13.8% said they or a member of their household had either eaten smaller meals than usual or skipped meals, not eaten despite being hungry, or not eaten for a full day because they could not get food in the past month.

    Extrapolated to UK population level, the findings suggest around 7.3 million adults live in households affected by food insecurity. This includes 2.6 million children.

    This is up considerably from 4.7 million adults surveyed in January (8.8% of respondents).

    The research shows that nearly half of households on Universal Credit have been food insecure in the past six months.

    Moreover, certain groups have a higher risk of food insecurity. These include people in households where someone has a disability, households with children, and non-white ethnic groups.

    There’s also been a rise in the number of families with children experiencing food insecurity in the past month. The figure is 17.2% in April, up from 12.1% in January.

    The Food Foundation warned that people will become more reliant on lower-cost foods that tend to be “calorie-dense and nutrient-poor”, which will risk their health.

    Catastrophic for families

    The Food Foundation is calling on the government to increase benefits in line with inflation and expand access to free school meals and the Healthy Start programme.

    Dominic Watters, a single father from Canterbury, told the charity:

    The last few months have been really tough.

    I’ve had days where only my daughter ate and I’ve had her leftovers, if anything at all.

    Anna Taylor, executive director of the Food Foundation, said the “extremely rapid rise” could be catastrophic for families.

    She said:

    The situation is rapidly turning from an economic crisis to a health crisis. Food banks cannot possibly be expected to solve this.

    The Government needs to realise the boat is sinking for many families and it needs to be fixed. Bailing out with emergency food parcels is not going to work.

    A fundamental failing

    Professor Michael Marmot, director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity, added:

    If one household in seven is food insecure, society is failing in a fundamental way.

    These figures on food insecurity are all the more chilling because the problem is solvable. But, far from being solved, it is getting worse.

    A government spokesperson said:

    We recognise the pressures on the cost of living and we are doing what we can to help, including spending £22 billion across the next financial year to support people with energy bills and cut fuel duty.

    For the hardest hit, we’re putting an average of £1,000 more per year into the pockets of working families on Universal Credit, have also boosted the minimum wage by more than £1,000 a year for full-time workers and our Household Support Fund is there to help with the cost of everyday essentials.

    Shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Ashworth said:

    These are devastating findings that reveal the acute levels of hunger impacting families and children nationwide caused by the Conservative cost-of-living crisis.

    The so-called ‘cost-of-living crisis’ is part of a wider tapestry of Conservative policies that have served to entrench poverty among the working class in Britain. It has been described as a class war waged on the most vulnerable in society.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Expanding Child Tax Credit Improved Kids’ Lives. Congress Should Do It Again.

    All mothers want their children to have enough to eat, a safe home, and the opportunity to thrive, and the American Rescue Plan’s expanded Child Tax Credit provided critical financial support to help mothers build this solid foundation for their children — but only for 2021. As we celebrate Mother’s Day, Congress should recognize the contributions of mothers by expanding the Child Tax Credit for 2022 and beyond, most importantly by making the full credit available to children in families with low or no earnings, who otherwise get only a partial credit or no credit at all.

    Mothers bore the brunt of the additional child caretaking responsibilities created by the pandemic, balancing work, child care, and their children’s schoolwork. Many mothers had to leave their jobs or take unpaid leave to care for their children. For example, in June 2021 over 6 million women (and 1 million men) reported not working for pay because they were caring for children not in school or day care, our analysis of the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey shows.

    For six months, from July through December 2021, the Rescue Plan helped ease their financial burdens and stress by providing advance monthly payments of the Child Tax Credit of up to $300 per child under age 6 ($250 for children 6 through 17). Families with low incomes largely used these payments to pay for everyday expenses — food, housing, clothing, and utilities — as well as education. Roughly 32 million mothers (defined broadly to include grandmothers and other women caring for children) and more than 65 million children benefited from the Rescue Plan’s expanded Child Tax Credit, we estimate. But the expansion expired at the end of 2021, leaving mothers to face rising costs and inadequate or unaffordable child care without the needed support that an expanded Child Tax Credit would provide.

    The most important feature of the Rescue Plan’s Child Tax Credit expansion was its “full refundability” provision, which made the full credit available to an estimated 12 million mothers and 27 million children whose families previously were eligible for no credit or less than $2,000 per child because their earnings were too low. This included roughly half of all Black and Latino children and about half of children who live in rural areas. (Other provisions of the Rescue Plan raised the maximum value of the credit and extended it to cover 17-year-olds, not just children 16 and under.)

    Making the credit fully refundable again would reduce child poverty by roughly 20 percent, lifting an estimated 2 million children above the poverty line, and help millions of others.

    A couple of examples demonstrate the impact in 2022:

    • A single mother with a toddler and a child in elementary school works part time around her kids’ schedule, earning $15,000 a year as a child care worker. Under current law she receives a Child Tax Credit of $1,875. If the current credit were fully refundable, she would receive a $4,000 credit ($2,000 per child).
    • A married mother with an infant and toddler, whose spouse cares for their kids at home, earns $25,000 a year working full time as a home health aide. Under current law they receive a Child Tax Credit of $3,000. If the current credit were fully refundable, they would receive $4,000.

    Research shows that additional income, like from an expanded Child Tax Credit, helps children in families with low incomes do better in school and live healthier lives, and lifts their earning potential as adults. An expanded Child Tax Credit would acknowledge and support the work that mothers do every day to give their children safety, stability, and opportunity.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Long COVID”: Economic Devastation and Quarter of a Billion Pushed Into Extreme Poverty  

    There is a terrifying prospect that in excess of a quarter of a billion more people will fall into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone. Without immediate radical action, we could be witnessing the most profound collapse of humanity into extreme poverty and suffering in memory.

    That is according to Oxfam International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher.

    She adds this scenario is made more sickening given that trillions of dollars have been captured by a tiny group of powerful men who have no interest in interrupting this trajectory.

    In its January 2021 report ‘The Inequality Virus’, Oxfam stated that the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn between 18 March and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth then stood at $11.95tn, a 50 per cent increase in just 9.5 months.

    In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. This despite the IMF’s own research showing austerity worsens poverty and inequality.

    Barely days into the shutdown of the global economy in April 2020, the Wall Street Journal ran the headline ‘IMF, World Bank Face Deluge of Aid Requests From Developing World‘. Scores of countries were asking for bailouts and loans from financial institutions with $1.2 trillion to lend.

    Prior to that, in late March, World Bank Group President David Malpass said that poorer countries would be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various COVID-related lockdowns. However, any assistance would be on condition that further neoliberal reforms became embedded.

    Malpass said:

    For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.

    Two years on and it is clear what ‘reforms’ really mean. In a press release issued on 19 April 2022, Oxfam International insists the IMF must abandon demands for austerity as a cost-of-living crisis continues to drive up hunger and poverty worldwide.

    According to Oxfam’s analysis, 13 out of the 15 IMF loan programmes negotiated during the second year of COVID require new austerity measures such as taxes on food and fuel or spending cuts that could put vital public services at risk. The IMF is also encouraging six additional countries to adopt similar measures.

    Kenya and the IMF agreed a $2.3 billion loan programme in 2021, which includes a three-year public sector pay freeze and increased taxes on cooking gas and food. More than three million Kenyans are facing acute hunger as the driest conditions in decades spread a devastating drought across the country. Oxfam says nearly half of all households in Kenya are having to borrow food or buy it on credit.

    At the same time nine countries, including Cameroon, Senegal and Surinam are required to introduce or increase the collection of VAT, a tax that disproportionately impacts people living in poverty.

    In Sudan, nearly half of the population live in poverty. However, it has been told to scrap fuel subsidies which will hit the poorest hardest. A country already reeling from international aid cuts, economic turmoil and rising prices for everyday basics such as food and medicine. More than 14 million people need humanitarian assistance (almost one in every three people) and 9.8 million are food insecure in Sudan.

    In addition, 10 countries are likely to freeze or cut public sector wages and jobs, which could mean lower quality of education and fewer nurses and doctors in countries already short of healthcare staff. Consider that Namibia had fewer than six doctors per 10,000 people in early 2020.

    Prior to Covid, the situation was bad enough. The IMF had consistently pushed a policy agenda based on cuts to public services, increases in taxes paid by the poorest and moves to undermine labour rights and protections. As a result, 52 per cent of Africans lack access to healthcare and 83 per cent have no safety nets to fall back on if they lose their job or become sick.

    Nabil Abdo, Oxfam International’s senior policy advisor, says:

    The IMF must suspend austerity conditions on existing loans and increase access to emergency financing. It should encourage countries to increase taxes on the wealthiest and corporations to replenish depleted coffers and shrink widening inequality.”

    It is interesting to note what could be achieved. For instance, Argentina has collected about $2.4 billion from its one-off pandemic wealth tax. Oxfam estimates that a ‘Pandemic Profits Tax’ on 32 super-profitable global companies could have generated $104 billion in revenue in 2020 alone.

    Many governments are nearing debt default and being forced to slash public spending to pay creditors and import food and fuel. The world’s poorest countries are due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports. Oil and gas giants are reporting record-breaking profits, with similar trends expected to play out in the food and beverage sector.

    Oxfam and Development Finance International (DFI) have also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next five years.

    Oxfam says that, despite COVID costs piling up and billionaire wealth rising more since COVID than in the previous 14 years combined, governments — with few exceptions — have failed to increase taxes on the richest.

    Gabriela Bucher rejects any notion that governments do not have the money or means to lift all people out of poverty and hunger and ensure their health and welfare. She says the G20, World Bank and IMF must immediately cancel debts and increase aid to poorer countries and act to protect ordinary people from an avoidable catastrophe.

    Nabil Abdo says:

    The pandemic is not over for most of the world. Rising energy bills and food prices are hurting poor countries most. They need help boosting access to basic services and social protection, not harsh conditions that kick people when they are down.

    The ‘pandemic’ is not over for most of the world – for sure. People too often conflate the effects of COVID-related policies with the impact of COVID itself. It is these policies that have caused the ongoing devastation to lives and livelihoods.

    What it has amounted to is a multi-trillion-dollar bailout for a capitalist economy that was in meltdown prior to COVID. This came in the form of trillions of dollars pumped into financial markets by the US Fed (in the months prior to March 2020) and ‘COVID relief’.

    As the world’s richest people lined their pockets even more in the past two years, COVID IMF loans are now piling more misery on some of the world’s poorest people. For them, ‘long COVID’ is biting austerity – their ‘new normal’.

    All this resulting from policies supposedly brought in to protect public health – a claim that rings hollower by the day.

    The post “Long COVID”: Economic Devastation and Quarter of a Billion Pushed Into Extreme Poverty   first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.