In October 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released a report that received barely any attention: the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021, notably subtitled Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste, and gender. ‘Multidimensional poverty’ is a much more precise measurement of poverty than the international poverty line of $1.90 per day. It looks at ten indicators divided along three axes: health (nutrition, child mortality), education (years of schooling, school attendance), and standard of living (cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets). The team studied multidimensional poverty across 109 countries, looking at the living conditions of 5.9 billion people. They found that 1.3 billion – one in five people – live in multidimensional poverty.
During the pandemic’s first year, schools across the country lost track of more than 400,000 homeless students.
As schools reopened their doors for in-person learning this year, the number of students identified as homeless began to creep back up.
But, with the end of the federal eviction moratorium, there are fears that the problem is worse than it appears on the surface. And that more children are disconnected from two anchors in their lives — school and home.
“With the disruptions that we saw last year, and now new disruptions, we’re concerned that whatever schools are observing is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on homeless education.
That concern is evident in school districts in cities such as San Diego, California, and Richmond, Virginia, that are bracing for more evictions that would uproot families or struggling to locate students who disappeared during the pandemic.
The U.S. Department of Education released $800 million in additional grants last year to help K-12 schools identify and support students experiencing homelessness during the pandemic. But the funding has yet to reach many school districts because of bureaucratic tie-ups and slow-moving state legislatures.
Experiencing homelessness can have grave consequences for a child’s future: youth who live through it are far less likely to graduate high school and far more likely to experience it later in life.
Marcella Middleton knows the struggle firsthand. She experienced homelessness as a child and young adult and is now co-director of A Way Home America, a nonprofit focused on youth homelessness.
“There’s the assumption that the broader society has that once you’re an adult, it’s really on you. You have to get yourself together because you’re grown now,” Middleton said. “But it’s like, well, if I experienced these things while I was young and trying to figure things out, that’s going to impact how I navigate life as an adult.”
The Center for Public Integrity interviewed Duffield and Middleton about how the pandemic made it tougher to identify students experiencing homelessness and what the government can do to identify and support families.
* Public Integrity edited the conversations for length and clarity.
Why have schools struggled to identify children experiencing homelessness during the pandemic?
Barbara Duffield: The pandemic and disruptions in learning really masked how many students are experiencing homelessness. Certainly, we know that the housing crisis has not gotten significantly better. We know there was a slow start to the rent relief distribution, and that’s still a lot of barriers there. We know that the eviction moratorium, the federal one was lifted, and have concerns about that. All of the systemic drivers of homelessness have not been abated, so, yes, we would expect that. But, in terms of our ability to actually know, it’s been very challenging.
Marcella Middleton: The pandemic has shut off so much of a connection that young people had. Resources and the connectivity to that for young people were already scarce. And so, when the pandemic hit, a lot of young people were shut off from the world and just shut off from different resources just because of the way we had to navigate based on policies [designed] to keep people safe.
What happens when students experience homelessness?
BD: If you don’t know where you’re going to stay every night, at least being able to go to the same school gives you some sense of stability, and normalcy, and routine. So, it becomes an oasis when everything else is turned upside down. School becomes that much more important. At the same time, it becomes very challenging to keep that oasis in focus. Because, you’re worried about where you’re going to sleep, you’re worried about what’s happening to your parents or your siblings, you may not know if you’re going to have supper that night. The stressors that accompany homelessness do make their way into the classroom, and of course, there’s a big challenge with just regular attendance.
MM: You fall immediately into this fight or flight mode, which creates a lot of toxic stress. It’s hard for you to focus on day-to-day things. For me at the time, going to school, making sure my family was okay, going to work, focusing on those things were really hard because I was in this fight or flight mode because I was experiencing homelessness. How can I focus and function on all these other things and all these other places if I don’t have anywhere safe to lay my head?
How can federal funding support students who are experiencing homelessness?
BD: I would say that it’s way too early to know the ultimate impact [of federal funding], but what we’re hopeful about is that many districts that never had dedicated funding before, will, for the first time, have some funding specifically targeted for identifying and supporting these students. The districts that did have some funding before, now have significantly more, so they can up their game and increase their capacity to support these students. We hope that they will allow schools to not just meet the needs of the day, and identify more students, but also really show what can be done on a longer-term basis.
MM: The pandemic has done a good job of showing us the things that we were fighting for before, like direct cash payments to young people experiencing homelessness … was something that we could do. We’d been fighting for that before the pandemic. And we kept getting, “No, no, no.” Now the pandemic has convinced people this is something we can do. That’s really important, to assess the things that the pandemic has forced out into the open that can actually be done.
Molly-Mae is just one in a long line of privileged people who peddle the myth that their success is simply down to hard work and self-belief, and that’s all it takes to ‘make it’. Curtis Daly explains why this is bullsh*t.
Video transcript
The idea that all you need to be “successful” in our society is to work hard, is as pervasive as it is toxic. It’s time for us to pick apart this myth.
Social media erupted after Instagram influencer Molly-Mae made comments about her success on The Diary of a CEO podcast.
As you saw from the video, Molly-Mae claims that the true path to success is an individual’s ability to just go for it, that we all have the same 24 hours in a day, and all we need to do to ‘make it’ is to work hard. Despite acknowledging different economic backgrounds, she then completely ignores it anyway and simply explains that if you want something bad enough, hard work equals success.
Her point is not a new one, it’s a classic Thatcherite take which we have all heard before.
Molly-Mae is completely wrong, and here’s why.
Firstly, we need to look at how we define success.
Most of Molly-Mae’s success came after appearing on Love Island, a scenario that doesn’t happen to most of us. Her chances of being on the show increased because she is white and meets societal beauty standards.
Molly-Mae is working with companies that profit from scandalous, poverty wages. Should we really call anyone successful when their wealth is created by the exploitation of people and the planet?
Off the back of Love Island, Molly-Mae secured a deal that earned her £500k in one year with Pretty Little Thing. The parent company is BooHoo, which was found to be paying their staff as little as £3.50 per hour in some instances. They also decided to keep their factories open during the height of the pandemic, with no regard for the health of their workers.
Molly-Mae, and other CEOs, are literally making money off low wages. She directly benefits from scandalous, poverty wages as it enriches her, and many others in her position.
Wage labour is exploitation. The value that you bring to the company is taken away from you, and then a cut of that value is given back to you.
Is this how we want to define “success”? Success should be about more than wealth accumulation. And should we really call anyone successful when their wealth is created by the exploitation of others?
Then there’s the question of whether just working hard gets you what you want.
Different walks of life do determine where you end up, or it’s at least an incredible indicator of someone’s future. If you’re born in a poorer household, then of course opportunities are limited; worse healthcare options, lower standards of education, harder to provide a varied and healthy diet and fewer social links to lucrative opportunities. The options you have are often limited at birth.
What if you are disabled, or suffer from chronic illnesses, and need support as a result? Without that support – and many sadly do go without it – how can we expect everyone to have access to the same level of opportunity in the same ‘24 hours in a day’?’.
With bigotry still prevalent in today’s society, opportunities for those in minority groups are often limited.
Austerity also negatively affects these groups much more, pushing individuals into worse economic situations.
The collapse of social democracy in favour of neoliberalism has had a huge impact on society at large, with a significant decline in social mobility.
The welfare state and public services have been slashed for over four decades. .
Neoliberalism has caused a huge spike in income inequality and people’s purchasing power has been in severe decline
It’s not because young people are buying too much avocado on toast that they’re struggling, it’s because the rules have changed.
Buying a house is out of reach of many people as a result of wages not keeping pace with skyrocketing costs.
A lot of the success stories you see in legacy media paint a picture of young individuals or couples in their early twenties purchasing their first home through a can-do attitude. But almost every single time you look a bit deeper, and see that it was actually thanks to mummy and daddy.
These stories are aimed at those who are lucky enough to even look at buying a house. In Britain we still have thousands who are homeless. What do we say to these people? Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps? One day you too can be invited on to a reality show that will almost certainly give you endless possibilities afterwards?
If only rough sleepers use that spare change given by passers by and just simply invested in a startup or Bitcoin ( and don’t get me started on crypto currency).
Then there’s the factor of necessity due to everyday struggles. Humans will look at more immediate solutions when in more desperate situations.
When we worry about putting food on our table, paying bills, and rent, this can be overwhelming. Our immediate needs mean that long term planning and decisions will always be on the back foot and are already much harder to achieve.
Let’s look at this in a more radical way.
The issue with Molly-Mae’s comments is fundamentally a problem with capitalism.
How can we expect those at the bottom to simply just work harder to become successful, when capitalism literally rigs the system against those without capital in favour of those with it. That is why economic inequality explodes in a free market system, and social policies from the government ameliorate it.
Whether you work in a factory, retail, or hospitality, let’s say you bring in hundreds or even thousands of pounds for the company in an hour. The value was made through your human labour, yet in return, you will only receive 8,10, or maybe even 15 pounds an hour. The remainder of that value is never to be seen.
This is the reality – the reality of inequality under capitalism. It’s also a reality that inequality is being exacerbated further through social policy or a lack thereof, which means we need to understand the idea that simply working hard equals success is a load of bullshit.
In October 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released a report that received barely any attention: the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021, notably subtitled Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste, and gender. ‘Multidimensional poverty’ is a much more precise measurement of poverty than the international poverty line of $1.90 per day. It looks at ten indicators divided along three axes: health (nutrition, child mortality), education (years of schooling, school attendance), and standard of living (cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets). The team studied multidimensional poverty across 109 countries, looking at the living conditions of 5.9 billion people. They found that 1.3 billion – one in five people – live in multidimensional poverty. The details of their lives are stark:
Roughly 644 million or half of these people are children under the age of 18.
Almost 85 per cent of them reside in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
One billion of them are exposed to solid cooking fuels (which creates respiratory ailments), inadequate sanitation, and substandard housing.
568 million people lack access to proper drinking water within a 30-minute round trip walk.
788 million multidimensionally poor people have at least one undernourished person in their home.
Nearly 66 per cent of them live in households where no one has completed at least six years of schooling.
678 million people have no access to electricity.
550 million people lack seven of eight assets identified in the study (a radio, television, telephone, computer, animal cart, bicycle, motorcycle, or refrigerator). They also do not own a car.
The absolute numbers in the UNDP report are consistently lower than figures calculated by other researchers. Take their number of those with no access to electricity (678 million), for example. World Bank data shows that in 2019, 90 per cent of the world’s population had access to electricity, which means that 1.2 billion people had none. An important study from 2020 demonstrates that 3.5 billion people lack ‘reasonably reliable access’ to electricity. This is far more than the absolute numbers in the UNDP report, but, regardless of the specific figures, the trend lines are nonetheless horrific. We live on a planet with greatly increasing disparities.
For the first time, the UNDP has focused attention on the more granular aspects of these disparities, shining a light on ethnic, race, and caste hierarchies. Nothing is as wretched as social hierarchies, inheritances of the past that continue to sharply assault human dignity. Looking at the data from 41 countries, the UNDP found that multidimensional poverty disproportionately impacts those who face social discrimination. In India, for instance, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (‘scheduled’ because the government regards them as officially designated groups) face the brunt of terrible poverty and discrimination, which in turn exacerbates their impoverishment. Five out of six people who struggle with multidimensional poverty are from Scheduled Castes and Tribes. A study from 2010 showed that each year, at least 63 million people in India fall below the poverty line because of out-of-pocket health care costs (that’s two people per second). During the COVID-19 pandemic, these numbers increased, though exact figures have not been easy to collect. Regardless, the five out of six people who are in multidimensional poverty – many of them from Scheduled Castes and Tribes – do not have any access to health care and are therefore not even included in that data. They exist largely outside formal health care systems, which has been catastrophic for these communities during the pandemic.
Last year, the secretary general of ALBA-TCP (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty), Sacha Llorenti, asked Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Instituto Simón Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela to start an international discussion responding to the broad crises of our times. We brought together twenty-six research institutes from around the world whose work has now culminated in a report called A Plan to Save the Planet. This plan is reproduced with a longer introduction in dossier no. 48 (January 2022).
We looked carefully at two kinds of texts: first, a range of plans produced by conservative and liberal think tanks around the world, from the World Economic Forum to the Council for Inclusive Capitalism; second, a set of demands from trade unions, left-wing political parties, and social movements. We drew from the latter to better understand the limitations of the former. For instance, we found that the liberal and conservative texts ignored the fact that during the pandemic, central banks – mostly in the Global North – raised $16 trillion to sustain a faltering capitalist system. Though money is available that could have gone towards the social good, it largely went to shore up the financial sector and industry instead. If money can be made available for those purposes, it can certainly be used to fully fund a robust public health system in every country and a fair transition from non-renewable fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, for example.
The plan covers twelve areas, from ‘democracy and the world order’ to ‘the digital world’. To give you a sense of the kinds of claims made in the plan, here are the recommendations in the section on education:
De-commodify education, which includes strengthening public education and preventing the privatisation of education.
Promote the role of teachers in the management of educational institutions.
Ensure that underprivileged sectors of society are trained to become teachers.
Bridge the electricity and digital divides.
Build publicly financed and publicly controlled high-speed broadband internet systems.
Ensure that all school children have access to all the elements of the educational process, including extra-curricular activities.
Develop channels through which students participate in decision-making processes in all forms of higher education.
Make education a lifelong experience, allowing people at every stage of life to enjoy the practice of learning in various kinds of institutions. This will foster the value that education is not only about building a career, but about building a society that supports the continuing growth and development of the mind and of the community.
Subsidise higher education and vocational courses for workers of all ages in areas related to their occupation.
Make education, including higher education, available to all in their spoken languages; ensure that governments take responsibility for providing educational materials in the spoken languages in their country through translations and other means.
Establish management educational institutes that cater to the needs of cooperatives in industrial, agricultural, and service sectors.
Tina Modotti, El Machete, 1926.
A Plan to Save the Planet is rooted in the principles of the United Nations Charter (1945), the document with the highest level of consensus in the world (193 member states of the UN have signed this binding treaty). We hope that you will read the plan and the dossier carefully. They have been produced for discussion and debate and are to be argued with and elaborated on. If you have any suggestions or ideas or would like to let us know how you were able to use the plan, please write to us at gro.latnenitnocirtehtnull@nalp.
Study has been a key instrument for the growth of working-class struggle, as shown by the impact of working-class newspapers, journals, and literature on the expansion of popular imaginations. In 1928, Tina Modotti photographed Mexican revolutionary farmers reading El Machete, the newspaper of their communist party. Modotti, one of the most luminous revolutionary photographers, reflected the sincere commitment of Mexican revolutionaries, of the Weimar Left, and of fighters in the Spanish Civil War. The farmers reading El Machete and the peasant organiser in India reading the Turkish communist poet Nâzim Hikmet in a hut during the great Bengal famine of 1943 depicted in the woodcut by Chittaprosad suggest places where we hope the plan will be discussed. We hope this plan will be used not merely as a critique of the present, but as a programme for a future society that we will build in the present.
W.E.B. DuBois: ‘To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.’
This documentary (see below, first one linked) is not news, and then, of course, it’s Trump in office blather, too. As if UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Portugal are havens for social and people and environmental justice.
How Poor People Survive in the USA — vapid.
The documentarian is done, really, through the auspices of Euro trash context, POV, narrative framing. Contrarily, you have to be in the mix, in the middle, from the chambers of power, schools, colleges, social work, to real journalism, and into the mess personally, with daily fear of losing the job and seeing savings go go go. That is the slippage in the death spiral of USA.
This is a Reservation/Rez Society. Boarding School Society. Celebrity Cults. Internment Camp FEMA Village (Soon). This entire unfolding of history the past 70 years has been this big time military propaganda operation embedding into all systems. Confusion creator. Mystical hatred or subservience while praying for that blue-eyed, blond hippie Jesus. Dirt poor, and loving Trump. College student loans over $100K, and loving AOC and Biden.
The enemy for me, and I’d say for 80 percent of USA, is that grouping — colonized Eichmann’s, the upper classes, the dream hoarders, the intelligence/knowledge workers, the higher ups in education-medicine-incarceration-pharma-medicine-energy-banking-data collecting-surveillance-real estate-Chamber of Commerce-AI-science-ag-retail-logistics-transportation, and then, MIC, congressional military complex. Join the mercenary forces, and lucky you, get your teeth pulled and a GI Bill.
I’ve asked why the stuff I send and publish elsewhere is no longer getting up on LA Progressive. No answer! Again, this documentary is broken (above), but that is documentary making, most times — focused, rarified, gatekeeping on steroids, with people on the projects not deep systems thinkers, and a willingness to leave out a lot.
Missing:
Tens of millions on the edge of the cliff of eviction, foreclosure, endless bad jobs, in the car or van, bunking up with family or friends, while working for middle managers who do not care, and the upper management and the billionaires and millionaires.
Inflammation — Capitalism is a complete, holistic, top-down disease, creating inflammation in the veins, brain, organs, belly. But worse — cuts the thinking process, deforms the mutual aid ethos, destroys collective action, kills the ability to squat and reappropriate wealth, land, whatever.
The rat race of those with a roof over their heads that continue to fuel prescriptions, Disneyland la-la-land thinking, buy-buy-buy, watching sports-stars-musicians, I got mine, you better fight to get yours
This country, USA, is the rotting roots and DNA of Europe, of that narrator above. These are not real people, and they are so sculpted in news speak, in priviledge.
This documentary doesn’t get to the fabric of colonization of cities, schools, the bullshit of privatization, and this wacky religious and wacky elitist country of Indian Removal, Enslavement then and now, and Nomadlands.
Americans are children, and that is thanks to the Media, the Boss, foolish k-6 education, and, well, we are here now, 355 million, and this is pre-covid crazies. Now? Complete imprisonment!
Oh, hell, the list is a thousand points long: Stan Brock, Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom. This is one fellow, and great heart, but in a world of Space Suits, Billionaires and Yachts, Lies Casted in Media-Banking-Digitalization, well, one guy. “He founded Remote Area Medical in 1985 to give people in need essential health care. Since then, RAM has provided free dental, vision and basic health care to more than 740,000 people.”
Here, the documentary on RAM above, description: During the U.S. debate about healthcare reform, the media reporters and news crews and filmmakers failed to put a human face on what it means to not have access to healthcare. Remote Area Medical fills that gap; it is a film about people, not policy. Focusing on a single three-day clinic held in the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee, Remote Area Medical affords us an insider’s perspective on the ebb and flow of the event, from the tense 3:30 a.m. ticket distribution that determines who gets seen to the routine check-ups that take dramatic turns for the worse, to the risky means to which some patients resort for pain relief. We meet a doctor who also drives an 18-wheeler, a denture maker who moonlights as a jeweler, and the organization’s founder, Stan Brock, who first imagined Remote Area Medical while living as a cowboy in the Amazon rainforest, hundreds of miles from the nearest doctor. But it is the extraordinary stories of the patients, desperate for medical attention, that create a lasting impression about the state of modern health care in America.
This can’t be ramped up, taken to the ultimate level? It’s socialism, brothers and sisters, the only way forward. Forget the hate that the right and the middle of the road have against socialism. They will ply the words of “one world government.” Or, the “government controlling us.” They will talk about Universal Basic Income. They will say it is brainwashing, and communism, and, well, that socialism means all rights are taken, managed, given to and taken away by some master groups of dictators. So we are dead in the water with capitalism by any means necessary: predatory, parasitic, casino, dog-eat-dog, shock therapy, zombie, trickle down nothingness.
That is, you know, vaccine passport, no. But, there is no Forced Healthcare for All. No, Massive Take Over the Empty Lots and Buildings for Massive Rehousing. No guerrilla farming everywhere. Nothing. Because, well, Capitalism is All about “We are all champions. We are all the New Eve and Adam. You can rest assured that the masters will NOT take care of you, but at least you have the stars and bars, god almighty, baby-land.”
This exceptionalism is what has detroyed many in the 80 percent. Many. They will work and think and do things against their own well-being. When you are a lost dog in this country, a limping stray, a hungry desperate pooch, well, you will jump to the master, run for the beasts of slapping, kicking, yelling, and hitting. Under the table, curled up, belly and organs exposed as its tail is between the legs.
Inflamed — Moreover, they point out how modern medicine has often missed these necessary connections—to our global detriment. What is needed is “deep medicine,” which, according to the authors, “requires new cosmologies, ones that can braid our lives with the planet and the web of life around us.”
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel spoke to YES! about the ravages of colonialist capitalism, the failures of modern medicine to treat them, and, most importantly, how a “deep medicine” approach can heal us all.
*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Is the title of the book, Inflamed, a metaphor for what is happening to our planet and its living systems?
Rupa Marya: It’s not at all a metaphor. It’s a description of what’s happening inside of our bodies and around us on the planet and our societies. The inflammatory response is the body’s ancient evolutionarily conserved pathway to restoring its optimal working condition when it’s been thrown off by danger or damage or the threat of damage. (Source, Yes Magazine)
No jobs, no good jobs, decayed systems, penalties, bad credit, criminal offenses, drugs, booze, and bodies torn at a very young age with multiple chronic diseases, many many diseases.
https://youtu.be/YrEwPp2bG48
This is the system that the beautiful people in the sciences, in technology, in the Reset Star Chamber, all of those hoarding money and the opportunities have set loose, and these fascists want these people — us, we the people — on UBI, held as data pools — body snatchers, mind snatchers, attention snatchers, activity snatchers, all part of mining people, putting us, them, the 80 percent, in the cloud, in algorithms, in data banks, all mashed up for social impact — do as we say, follow what we command, eat-drink-think like we say, and you will get the tokens, man, the money, the slice of a 200-square-foot-per-person habitat. No pets allowed.
The lapse of Democrats’ expanded child tax credit program at the end of last month has progressive lawmakers and advocates vocally warning of a major spike in child poverty in the new year just as the Omicron variant wreaks havoc across the U.S., fueling a staggering rise in infections and hospitalizations.
While some research suggests the highly transmissible Omicron strain causes less severe disease than other mutations, the enormity of the current wave is driving fears of widespread and potentially sustained societal disruptions, with disproportionate impacts on families without the resources to weather more pandemic-induced economic chaos.
Approved as part of the coronavirus relief package that President Joe Biden signed into law in March 2021, the enhanced child tax credit (CTC) provided eligible families with monthly payments of up to $300 per child under the age of six and $250 per child between the ages of six and 17.
Recent survey data indicates that the payments brought millions out of poverty and helped many low-income families afford food, rent, medications, and other basic necessities.
But thanks to the opposition of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and every congressional Republican, the program expired at December’s end, cutting off a key lifeline at what anti-poverty activists see as the worst possible moment. The sixth and final monthly CTC payments were distributed to the families of more than 61 million children on December 15.
“Yet another sign of the misaligned priorities of this country,” the Rhode Island Poor People’s Campaign said Monday in response to the CTC’s expiration. “Programs of social uplift are sacrificed to the war economy and militarism.”
The New York Timesreported over the weekend that with Omicron surging, “economists warn that the one-two punch of expiring aid and rising cases could put a chill on the once red-hot economic recovery and cause severe hardship for millions of families already living close to the poverty line.”
Anna Lara, a mother of two young children in Huntington, West Virginia, told the Times that without the boosted CTC, “it’s going to be hard next month.”
“Just thinking about it, it really makes me want to bite my nails to the quick,” Lara said. “Honestly, it’s going to be scary. It’s going to be hard going back to not having it.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote Monday that it is “totally unacceptable” for the Senate to let the CTC lapse. In November, the House of Representatives passed a version of the Build Back Better Act that would extend the enhanced CTC payments for another year.
“The Senate must act quickly to pass the Build Back Better Act and restore the child tax credit for millions of families who are counting on it,” Jayapal wrote. “The pandemic isn’t over — the relief to withstand it shouldn’t stop.”
More than a million people in the U.S. tested positive for coronavirus on Monday, a global daily record. The Washington Postreported early Tuesday that “more than 103,000 Americans were hospitalized with Covid-19 on Monday… the highest number since late summer, when the Delta variant of the coronavirus triggered a nationwide surge in cases.”
Pediatric hospitalizations have also risen at an alarming rate during the Omicron wave.
According to a recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, nearly 10 million children “are at risk of slipping back below the poverty line or deeper into poverty” if Congress doesn’t extend the monthly CTC payments.
Without congressional action, the CTC will revert back to its previous — and far more exclusionary — form with yearly lump-sum payments.
The Senate Democratic leadership has vowed to move ahead with Build Back Better negotiations this month, but it’s unclear how much progress will be made toward a final deal as Manchin continues to obstruct.
On Sunday, Axiosreported that the corporate-backed West Virginia Democrat is “open to reengaging on the climate and child care provisions in President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda if the White House removes the enhanced child tax credit from the $1.75 trillion package — or dramatically lowers the income caps for eligible families.”
It’s not clear whether progressive lawmakers would be willing to accept such a trade-off.
“I’m hoping that Senator Manchin will understand that his constituents, like many of mine, live below the poverty line and they need this child tax credit,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said Sunday.
In a Twitter post late Monday afternoon, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — chair of the Senate Budget Committee — noted that “the American Rescue Plan reduced childhood poverty in America by over 40% through the expanded child tax credit.”
“It helped millions of families to survive,” Sanders added. “Unless Build Back Better is passed, the expansion will end and we will see a huge increase in childhood poverty.”
The world’s 10 richest billionaires added roughly $402 billion to their collective wealth in 2021, a year marked by continued suffering and economic dislocation fueled by the global coronavirus pandemic.
“Heading into 2022, the 10 wealthiest individuals in the world are all worth more than $100 billion,” CNBCnoted, citing the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which tracks and ranks the fortunes of the planet’s richest people.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Sunday that the staggering growth of billionaire wealth amid a worldwide public health emergency and economic crisis should compel Congress to finally redress the fundamental injustices of the U.S. tax system.
“In 2022,” said Jayapal, “let’s tax the rich and invest in our communities.”
At the top of the Billionaires Index at the close of 2021 was Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who added over $121 billion to his wealth last year as the pandemic both took and completely upended lives, pushing tens of millions of people into poverty and intensifying preexisting inequities. Just behind Musk on the list was former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who tacked $5 billion onto his net worth in 2021, leaving him with a total fortune of $195 billion.
In November, the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) outlined a proposal by which Musk — now the richest man in the world — and other U.S. billionaires could donate just 0.36% of their pandemic wealth gains to help 42 million people facing starvation.
“The $6.6 billion required would help those in most need in the following way: one meal a day, the basic needed to survive — costing $0.43 per person per day, averaged out across the 43 countries,” the WFP said. “This would feed 42 million people for one year, and avert the risk of famine.”
The billionaires have not taken the WFP up on its modest plan to save millions of lives with a miniscule fraction of their pandemic profits.
The investigative outlet ProPublicareported in June that Musk, along with other U.S. billionaires, “paid $0 in federal income taxes” in 2018. Late last year, Musk garnered widespread publicity for selling off a portion of his Tesla stock, triggering a significant taxable event.
But as Bob Lord, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, observed in a recent blog post, Musk “has paid tax in 2021 — lots of it — because doing so was by far his best option.”
“Did he pay more tax than any American in history, as he claims? Probably,” Lord wrote. “But he also received compensation of more than $20 billion, which almost certainly dwarfs the compensation any other CEO in American history has ever been paid, from a company with profits not remotely commensurate with that level of compensation.”
2021 is coming to a close with the 10 richest people in the world all worth more than $100 billion https://t.co/EP8FwDGy1Q
The updated billionaire wealth figures come as Democrats in Congress are struggling to chart a path forward for their flagship social spending and climate legislation, which has been held up by corporate-backed Sen. Joe Manchin (D-Wa.).
The House-passed version of the Build Back Better Act includes a surtax on millionaires and other measures to help fund the bill’s investments and reduce out-of-control inequality. According to the Washington Post, Manchin recently told the Biden White House that he would be willing to support “some version” of a tax targeting billionaires, an idea that the West Virginia Democrat criticized in October.
“While the specifics of what Manchin would support remain unclear, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has unveiled a tax aimed at the accrued wealth of America’s approximately 700 billionaires,” the Post noted. “The measure is aimed at addressing the massive gains of the wealthiest Americans with a federal tax and probably would be unprecedented in how few people it affected… Congress’ nonpartisan scorekeeper has estimated it could raise as much as $550 billion over 10 years, or pay for more than one-quarter of the Democrats’ spending bill.”
In a social media post on New Year’s Day, the Patriotic Millionaires — a group composed of wealthy supporters of progressive taxation — warned that “history paints a bleak picture of what happens to extremely unequal societies.”
“For the well-being of rich and poor alike, it’s time to confront inequality and choose to tax the rich,” the group wrote. “If you don’t, then all the talk at Davos won’t change what’s coming — it’s taxes or pitchforks.”
National Federation Party leader Professor Biman Prasad has asked if the Fiji government inquiry into the Office of the Auditor-General will be held in public.
Professor Prasad was responding to the announcement this week of a Commission of Inquiry into the OAG “to inquire into and report on: the conduct, operations and performance of the Office of the Auditor-General” and other issues concerning the office.
Prasad, an economist before his political career, said commissions of inquiry were usually held in public.
“So we ask the government if this will be a public inquiry?” he said.
“Will the public hear the allegations against the Auditor-General’s office? Will the Auditor-General be allowed to respond in public to the Government’s complaints?”
“The government refuses to talk about Walesi’s accounts. Even though Walesi’s accounts up to 2017 are ready, the government refuses to release them.”
Petty argument while people in poverty
The NFP leader said the government would end 2021 as a “laughing stock”.
He said government “only cares about winning a petty argument even when tens of thousands of people are still living in poverty and despair because of the pandemic”.
“We are once again threatened by the omicron variant,” he said.
“Many families are in isolation because they have tested positive in homes, in villages and settlements on Vanua Levu, are struggling and are in need of help.
“What is the government doing to help? We should be preparing for the cyclone season and ensuring our people are safe.”
Luke Nacei is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
P.S. Jalaja (India), We Surely Can Change the World, 2021.
Bittersweet is the passage of this year. There have been some immense victories and some catastrophic defeats, the most terrible being the failure of the Global North countries to adopt a democratic attitude towards confronting the COVID-19 pandemic and creating equitable access to key resources, from life-saving medical equipment to vaccines. Tragically, by the end of this pandemic, we will have learnt the Greek alphabet from the variants named after its letters (Delta, Omicron), which continue to emerge.
Cuba leads the world with the highest vaccination rates, using its indigenous vaccines to protect its population as well as those of countries from Venezuela to Vietnam, following a long history of medical solidarity. The countries with the lowest vaccination rates – currently led by Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, South Sudan, Chad, and Yemen – are amongst the poorest in the world, reliant on foreign aid since their resources are essentially stolen, such as by being acquired at outrageously low prices by multinational companies. With 0.04% of Burundi’s 12 million people vaccinated as of 15 December 2021, at its current rate of vaccination the country would only achieve 70% coverage by January 2111.
In May 2021, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organisation, said that ‘the world is in vaccine apartheid’. Little has changed since then. In late November, the African Union’s vaccine delivery co-chair Dr Ayoade Alakija said of the emergence of Omicron in southern Africa, ‘What is going on right now is inevitable. It’s a result of the world’s failure to vaccinate in an equitable, urgent, and speedy manner. It is as a result of hoarding [vaccines] by high-income countries of the world, and quite frankly it is unacceptable’. In mid-December, Ghebreyesus appointed Alakija as the WHO Special Envoy for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator. Her task is not easy, and her goal will only be met if, as she put it, ‘a life in Mumbai matters as much as in Brussels, if a life in São Paulo matters as much as a life in Geneva, and if a life in Harare matters as much as in Washington DC’.
Addis Gezehagn (Ethiopia), Floating City XVIII, 2020.
Vaccine apartheid is a part of a broader problem of medical apartheid, one of the four apartheids of our time, the others being food apartheid, money apartheid, and education apartheid. A new report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation says that the population of undernourished people in Africa has increased by 89.1 million since 2014, reaching 281.6 million in 2020. It is worthwhile to consider Dr Alakija’s question about humanity, about the worth assigned to different human beings: can a life in Harare be valued as much as a life in Washington DC? Can we, as a people, overcome these apartheids and solve the elementary problems that are faced by the people of our planet and end the barbarous ways in which the current economic and political system tortures humankind and nature?
A question like that sounds naïve to those who have forgotten what it means to believe in something – if not in the idea of humanity itself, then at least in the binding United Nations Charter (1945) and the partly binding UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948). The Declaration calls upon us as a people to commit to upholding each other’s ‘inherent dignity’, a standard that has collapsed in the years since heads of governments signed onto the final text.
Nougat, The Sniper of Kaya, 2021, courtesy of BreakThrough News.
Despite these apartheids, several advances for humankind are worth highlighting:
The Chinese people eradicated extreme poverty, with nearly 100 million people lifting themselves out of absolute misery over the past eight years. Our first study in the series ‘Studies in Socialist Construction’, entitled Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, details how this remarkable feat was achieved.
Indian farmers bravely fought for the repeal of three laws which threatened to uberise their working conditions, and – after a year of struggle – they prevailed. This is the most significant labour victory in many years. Our June dossier, The Farmers’ Revolt in India, catalogued the struggle over land in India and the farmers’ militancy over the past decade.
Left governments came to power in Bolivia, Chile, and Honduras, overturning a history of coups and regime changes in these countries that run from 1973 (Chile) to 2009 (Honduras) to 2019 (Bolivia). A year ago, our January dossier, Twilight, considered the erosion of US control over global affairs and the emergence of a multipolar world. The failure of the United States to attain its objectives in these countries and to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and the Venezuelan revolutionary process through hybrid wars is a sign of great possibility for people in the American hemisphere. Trends show that in 2022, Lula da Silva will defeat whoever is the right’s candidate in Brazil, ending the atrocity of Jair Bolsonaro’s governance. Our May dossier, The Challenges Facing Brazil’s Left, is a good place to read up on the political dilemmas in Latin America’s largest country.
A rising tide of anger on the African continent against the increasing military presence of the United States and France found expression in the town of Kaya in the western part of Burkina Faso. When a French military convoy drove near the town in November, a crowd of demonstrators stopped it. At that point, the French launched a surveillance drone to monitor the crowd. Aliou Sawadogo (age 13) shot down the drone with his slingshot, ‘a Burkinabé David against the French Goliath’, wrote Jeune Afrique. Our July dossier, Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity, was co-published with the Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group and tracks the growth of the Western military presence on the continent.
We have seen strikes by care workers of all kinds across the world, from health workers to domestic workers. These workers have been hit hard by the cruelty of neoliberalism and by what we have called CoronaShock. But these workers have refused to cower, refused to surrender their dignity. Our March dossier, Uncovering the Crisis: Care Work in the Time of Coronavirus, provides a map of the pressures weighing on these workers and opens a window into their struggles.
Harrison Forman (US), Afghanistan, men surrounding storyteller in Kabul market, 1953.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. These are merely some of the benchmarks of progress. Not every advance is clear-cut. After twenty years, the United States was forced to finally withdraw from Afghanistan as it lost the war to the Taliban. None of the United States’ aims for its war seem to have been attained, and yet it continues to threaten this country of close to 39 million people with starvation. The United States has prevented Afghanistan from accessing its $9.5 billion in external reserves that sit in US banks, and it has prevented Afghanistan’s government from taking its place in the UN system. As a consequence of the collapse of foreign aid, which accounted for 43% of Afghanistan’s GDP last year, the UN Development Programme calculates that the country’s GDP will fall by 20% this year and then by 30% in subsequent years. Meanwhile, the UN report estimates that by 2022, the country’s per capita income may decline to nearly half of 2012 levels. It is estimated that 97% of the population of Afghanistan will fall below the poverty line, with mass starvation a real possibility this winter. A life in the Wakhan Corridor is not valued as much as a life in London. The ‘inherent dignity’ of the human being – as the UN Declaration puts it – is not upheld.
This is not merely an Afghanistan matter. The newly released World Inequality Report 2022 shows that the poorest half of the world’s people owned merely 2% of the total private property (business and financial assets, net of debt, real estate), while the richest 10% owned 76% of the total private property. Gender inequality shapes these numbers, since women received barely 35% of labour income compared to men who received 65% (a slight improvement over 1990 figures, when women’s share was 31%). This inequality is another way of measuring the differential dignity afforded to people along class lines and along the hierarchies of gender and nationality.
In 1959, the Iranian communist poet Siavash Kasra’i wrote one of his elegies, Arash-e Kamangir (‘Arash the Archer’). Using the popular mythology of the ancient battle fought by the heroic archer Arash to liberate his country, Kasra’i depicts the anti-imperialist struggles of his time. But the poem is not only about struggles, for we also wonder about possibilities:
I told you life is beautiful.
Told and untold, there is a lot here.
The clear sky;
The golden sun;
The flower gardens;
The boundless plains;
The flowers peeping up through the snow;
The tender swing of fish dancing in crystal of water;
The scent of rain-swept dust on the mountainside;
The sleep of wheat fields in the spring of moonlight;
To come, to go, to run;
To love;
To lament for humankind;
And to revel arm-in-arm with the crowd’s joys.
When Congress passed welfare reform in 1996, states were given more autonomy over how they could use federal funding for aid to the poor. They could demand welfare recipients find work before receiving cash assistance. They could also use their federal “block grants” to fund employment and parenting courses or to subsidize childcare.
Twenty-five years later, however, states are using this freedom to do nothing at all with large sums of the money.
According to recently released federal data, states are sitting on $5.2 billion in unspent funds from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF. Nearly $700 million was added to the total during the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years, with Hawaii, Tennessee and Maine hoarding the most cash per person living at or below the federal poverty line.
States have held on to more of this welfare money amid rising poverty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 16.1% of children under age 18 lived in poverty in 2020, up from 14.4% the year before. The poverty rate also ticked up for people aged 18 to 64, from 9.4% to 10.4%. As unused TANF dollars have accumulated, applications to the cash assistance program have waned, though it’s not for a lack of need, say experts and people who have applied to the program.
Bonnie Bridgforth experienced the counterintuitive reality of a state, Maine, that is stockpiling more welfare money while using less to help those in need.
Two weeks away from giving birth near the end of 2014, the stay-at-home mom was thrust into the role of sole income provider when her then-husband was convicted and sentenced to jail time for possession of child pornography. Her family of five was left without a regular paycheck.
Bridgforth, then 35, turned to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, where a caseworker looked past her pregnant belly and told her that to get aid she’d need to meet the state’s requirement that she get a job. After explaining that it would be difficult to find employment with her due date weeks away and four children at home, Bridgforth was approved for $981 a month in cash assistance with the understanding she would start working after she gave birth.
Soon, with two of her children in school and her infant, 2-year-old and 4-year-old in the care of extended family, Bridgforth started working at a gas station. She earned $8 an hour, 50 cents above Maine’s minimum wage at that time, later receiving a 50-cent raise. Bridgforth was also pursuing an associate degree in justice studies and taking a full course load.
Yet less than two years later, DHHS informed Bridgforth that she no longer qualified for assistance, including child care. The notice from the agency said her family did not meet the “deprivation” standard, a TANF requirement that assesses the extent to which children have been deprived of financial support from one or both parents. Bridgforth’s children no longer met the standard because her husband had been released from jail and they were now considered a two-parent household, even though the couple was estranged and he was not living with them. They divorced soon after.
In an email to a DHHS welfare specialist, Bridgforth asked for an explanation. “I think I have whip lash. It is exhausting,” Bridgforth wrote in the Aug. 30, 2016 email.
The specialist replied, “Sorry Bonnie. An eligibility worker was reviewing the case and it appears that a decision was made that deprivation does not exist, I am not an eligibility worker so cannot make this determination.”
Reflecting back on the rejection, Bridgforth told ProPublica, “No one seemed to care that we were living in significant poverty.” During this period, she said, she struggled to buy diapers, gas, clothing and her children’s school books. Her oldest daughter, who was 12, “felt very poor because we couldn’t buy the good shampoo,” Bridgforth recalled.
The same year Bridgforth was kicked off TANF, Maine was sitting on $111 million in unspent welfare dollars. It spent only $45 million on the program that year. The following year — as Bridgforth “fought to keep a roof over my kids’ heads” — the unspent welfare money continued to pile up, reaching $141 million. While its surplus has since declined, Maine continues to have one of the largest per-capita stockpiles of welfare money in the nation, $93 million as of fiscal year 2020. That comes out to $657 per person in poverty.
The unused welfare stash tells a larger story of how the 1996 welfare reform law has failed the poor: It allows states to not distribute cash assistance even when they have the money to do so.
Each year, the federal government awards states a block grant, or lump sum, of funding, with the intention that the money be spent to help poor people meet their basic needs, become employed and start two-parent families. States have discretion in how they can use, or not use, the money and have increasingly used it to fill unrelated budget gaps. Experts say it’s reasonable for states to have some TANF reserves, even as large as their annual block grant, but when they stockpile the money from year to year it’s cause for concern.
Tennessee has $790 million in federal welfare funding sitting around — the largest pool of unspent welfare dollars nationwide — though it has recently promised to spend it. Hawaii has $364 million idling in an account, equivalent to $2,923 per person living in poverty. And Oklahoma has $264 million, nearly double its annual TANF budget of $138 million.
Devin Stone, director of communications for the Tennessee Department of Human Services, said, “Fluctuations in caseload and decreased participation in the state’s TANF program resulted in a surplus of TANF funds accumulating over a period of several years.” In fiscal year 2020, Tennessee reported its lowest-ever TANF caseload, about 17,000, down from 68,100 cases in 2006.
Jackie Farwell, a spokesperson for the Maine DHHS, gave a similar explanation for that state’s unspent TANF funds, saying it was caused by the Maine Legislature limiting lifetime welfare eligibility to five years. As a result, “Maine’s TANF caseload rapidly declined from 13,522 in January of 2012 to 4,320 in January of 2018,” she said. “This reduction in the number of people served by the program in turn led to an increase in Maine’s TANF block grant balance.”
Oklahoma’s Department of Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.
The coronavirus pandemic and accompanying economic travails did not make a dent in states’ TANF reserves. Between June and November 2020, the national poverty rate made its largest jump since the government began tracking it 60 years ago, from 2.4% to 11.7%. Other parts of the federal government’s social safety net increased aid to help some of the 7.8 million Americans who fell into poverty, with stimulus packages and expanded unemployment benefits. TANF, conversely, is helping fewer people.
TANF acceptance rates have steadily declined over the past few years, with some states — Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas and Nebraska — denying about 90% of applicants in fiscal year 2020, according to federal data.
“During the COVID pandemic, when unemployment rates and hunger rates were skyrocketing nationwide, TANF funds were still sitting unused,” said Ashley Burnside, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a national advocacy organization for low-income Americans. The devastation wrought by the pandemic “is as much of a ‘rainy day’ as states could have had. If funds are still left unused, it makes me question what states are waiting to use this money for.”
Ty Bishop, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Human Services, which has the nation’s lowest TANF acceptance rate at just 7% of those who apply, said most applicants there “exceed the income and resource limits.” To qualify, a family with two children and one caretaker must have less than $1,000 in assets and a monthly income of less than $188. Those requirements haven’t changed despite the state’s $281 million in unspent TANF funds in fiscal year 2020.
In 1995, Congress debated a precursor to the welfare reform law that ultimately passed the following year. Then-Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat from Illinois, predicted some states would choose to not spend the federal dollars instead of distributing them to the poor. She proposed an amendment to prohibit states from carrying over unused welfare funds from year to year.
“If we send the states this money in a block grant, there is nothing to prohibit that state from saying we do not want to have assistance for poor children,” Moseley Braun said. “We are not going to address the issue of job creation. We are not going to train people to go back to work. We are not going to provide the children with any assistance. We are just going to further squeeze the amount of resources devoted to the whole issue of poverty in our state and we are going to take the money we get from the federal government and use that to go from year to year to year to year and not maintain our own effort. I think that would be a real tragedy.”
Moseley Braun’s “race-to-the-bottom amendment” — intended to prevent states from “trying to underbid one another” in assistance to the poor — did not make it into the final bill that President Bill Clinton signed in 1996.
Representatives of the human services departments in Maine, Tennessee and Hawaii said their states are working on plans to spend the welfare funds on new programs that will help families on the brink of poverty find greater financial stability.
Hawaii plans to use its surplus to extend employment services like job coaching and placement for noncustodial parents who have children receiving TANF and to provide diaper assistance to families that are eligible for the program, said Amanda Stevens, a spokesperson for the state. The state is also considering increasing benefits and offering monthly housing assistance, said Stevens.
In Maine, the money will be used to pay for a variety of programs and “system-wide improvements” to better serve the poor, said Farwell, the DHHS spokesperson. These include counting the pursuit of a high school diploma as an approved work activity for receiving benefits; updating the state’s application system so TANF recipients can recertify their eligibility online; and providing “coaches” to help families set goals and access resources.
Tennessee lawmakers passed legislation this year pledging to work with community “partners” to spend down the state’s $790 million in TANF reserves. The law, which went into effect in July, increased monthly cash assistance for a family of three to $387 a month, from $277. It also includes a two-year pilot program to allocate $50 million to community organizations that serve low-income families and to provide additional cash assistance to individuals pursuing educational opportunities.
Despite those efforts, advocates and state welfare caseworkers say, the steep decline in TANF applications nationwide shows the program has already irreparably lost the trust of the poor.
“Many families living below the poverty line are deciding that the benefits TANF provides are not worth the onerous upfront requirements to get on and stay on the program,” said LaDonna Pavetti, a welfare expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Reserves are going up because caseloads are going down.”
If they qualify for TANF, applicants also risk losing any child support they might receive from a noncustodial parent, said Moriah Geer, a caseworker at Maine Equal Justice, a legal aid organization that assisted Bridgforth as she navigated TANF.
“There are so many unknowns and confusing parts about the program,” Geer added. “Families don’t want to go through the indignity of applying to this program again, even if more funds and programs are now being offered. I have many clients who choose poverty over having to go back and beg for cash assistance to be able to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads.”
Sky Arnold, a spokesperson for Tennessee’s Department of Human Services, said there are other explanations for the decline in welfare applications, including that “less families need the money. Our economy has been gangbusters in recent years and this is a sign of it.
“Decreasing applicant numbers speak to our state’s ability to build families who no longer need assistance,” said Arnold, who recently left the agency.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank that analyzes the impact of federal and state policies, disputes the notion that TANF’s decreasing numbers indicate families no longer need assistance. The organization designed a metric to show how many people living in poverty are actually helped by welfare. According to its “TANF to poverty ratio,” many states, including Tennessee, are largely failing to meet the needs of poor families. In 2019, the state assisted only 18 out of 100 poor families with children, down from 67 when the program began in 1996, according to the analysis.
A report this year found that TANF serves only one in four Maine children living at or below the federal poverty level, and that 84% of families in the state leaving the cash assistance program in 2019 were still living in poverty.
Today, Bridgforth, who completed her associate and bachelor’s degrees while remaining the sole breadwinner for her family (her ex-husband remains incarcerated; Bridgforth remarried in May 2021), works in special education. Her dream is to attend law school.
In September, she provided a written statement to the Maine Legislature about her experience with TANF and suggested how the state could improve the program.
“I made it despite the monthly attempts to kick me off TANF before I was ready,” Bridgeforth wrote in her statement. “I am no different from so many other women who find themselves on welfare.”
A few days ago people in Canberra awoke to the news that the ACT could be the first jurisdiction in Australia to provide free sanitary products in places like health facilities, public toilets, schools and libraries. The ACT Council of Social Service (ACTCOSS) has been a key organisation researching and advocating in this area. Dr Gemma Killen and Dr Emma Campbell from the organisation share their insights.
For the first year after she began menstruating, Jess kept her period a secret from everyone, including her family. Not wanting anyone to know what was happening, she avoided tampons and pads. Instead, she fashioned menstrual products from scraps of fabric in her craft box and stolen from her mother and grandmother’s sewing stashes. She recalls using shoelaces to tie the ‘pads’ to her underwear and avoid embarrassing leaks. At the end of each day, she would hide the pads in the bottom of the bin.
For Jess, period stigma turned a normal physiological process into a stressful and shameful experience. When she finally told her mum she was menstruating, her family were kind and supportive, and able to provide her with the necessary products. Other families are not as privileged.
Period poverty is not only an issue impacting low-income countries. It affects many people in Canberra (and the rest of the country!) and manifests itself in various ways, including a lack of access to sanitary products, menstrual hygiene education, clean toilets, hand washing facilities or appropriate waste management. Not having access to these basic amenities compounds a sense of shame and keeps people from participating in school, work and social life.
Though research on period poverty is minimal, Period Pride’s recent ‘Bloody Big Survey’ showed that 15% of respondents in the ACT have been unable to afford period products at some point in their life. It is shocking that some members of the Canberra community are denied the basic dignity and hygiene afforded by the provision of period products.
More than a fifth of survey respondents reported improvising period products due to cost. For some people this means using toilet paper, newspaper or even old socks. Like Jess, many people who improvise these products feel a deep sense of shame about their periods.
Almost half of the survey respondents used products longer than recommended because they couldn’t afford to buy new ones. These practices put people at significant risk of developing toxic shock syndrome or pelvic inflammatory disease.
A recent report by Share the Dignity noted that educational achievement as well as emotional and mental health can be significantly impacted by period poverty. If they can’t afford the appropriate products, children and young people avoid school while on their periods.
For the ACT Council of Social Service (ACTCOSS), fixing period poverty is a key element of our work on social justice. Period poverty affects those most disadvantaged by the high costs of living in the ACT, as well as other people including those experiencing family violence. We also know that for those experiencing homelessness, a lack of a safe place to sleep also means a lack of access to clean, safe toilets and disposal facilities.
Our member organisations spend significant sums on providing basic hygiene items including period products to people on low incomes. An average menstruator could have more than 450 periods in their lifetime. If they are spending an average of $20 a month on period products, this amounts to approximately $10,000. This is an extraordinary amount of money for someone living on income support.
With the end of the Coronavirus Supplement earlier this year, income support payments now provide a mere $44 a day to cover job searches, as well as the basics of life including food, clothing, petrol, rent and essentials like period products. For some people, this means choosing between feeding their families and accessing appropriate and hygienic period care.
Last week, ACTCOSS welcomed the introduction of a Bill to help address period poverty and the stigma associated with periods in the ACT. The draft Bill, released by ACT Labor backbencher Suzanne Orr MLA, aims to ensure reasonable access to free period products at places of education and at ACT Government-run locations, such as libraries. Service providers will also be able to apply to be included in the scheme and receive ACT Government assistance to provide free-of-charge period products.
Menstrual information and educational resources will also be provided in public schools and ACT Government-run locations. This will help to reduce the social stigma associated with periods and period poverty that keep people from participating in school, work or social life and enable us to talk about periods about their relevance to all aspects of life.
We need to ensure that everyone who menstruates has free and ongoing access to period products as well as clean and sanitary public toilets in which to use them.
Over summer, BroadAgenda is republishing some of its most popular articles. This one was first posted in 2020.
When Libra’s #BloodNormal commercial aired on prime-time TV last year showing a woman having her period and menstrual blood in a sanitary pad, outrage ensued.
Over 500 complaints were received by the Advertising Standards Board, claiming the ad was offensive, vulgar and inappropriate for ‘family viewing time’.
Although society has progressed, menstruation is still a taboo topic around the world.
However, in some cultures menstrual taboos have serious implications and consequences on women, with restrictions enforced on a woman’s daily life and activities impacting on her health and freedoms.
In December, Parbati Buda Rawat, a 21-year-old woman, was found dead in a remote district of far-west Nepal after being removed from the family home to a shed while menstruating in which she suffocated after lighting a fire to keep warm. And she isn’t the first.
Chhaupadi is a long withstanding tradition observed in some parts of Nepal, whereby a menstruating woman is required to stay in a small hut or shed, external to the family home,
for the duration of her menses.
Originating from Hindu mythology, the practice is observed as menstrual blood is believed to be impure and harmful to others. Many believe menstruating women are cursed and untouchable, requiring separation from others to prevent misfortune.
As a result, girls and women are prevented from normal duties and tasks, including prayer and visiting temples, bathing in or drinking from a public water sources, eating certain foods, entering the kitchen and touching certain objects and people. Chhaupadi is a particularly extreme form of menstrual restriction.
In many families, the pressure to adhere to the ritual is unavoidable … For many women, shunning the tradition results in social isolation and rejection.
In many families, the pressure to adhere to the ritual is unavoidable. Characteristics like age, caste and ethnicity and familial composition increase the likelihood a girl or woman will be required to observe chhaupadi.
Issues of social stratification and reputation are significant factors influencing who practices these traditions. For many women, shunning the tradition results in social isolation and rejection.
It is common for girls and women to be exiled to a menstrual hut by older female family members including mothers, aunts and grandmothers.
However, the perception of menstruation as a danger and impurity carries enough weight in some districts that menstruating girls or women may also choose to observe chhaupadi or self-impose their menstrual restrictions, often to avoid stigma, social exclusion and repercussions from her family and community.
Chhaupadi or menstrual exile occurs throughout Nepal. Not every Nepali woman will observe menstrual exile and it is least prevalent in Central and Eastern districts – including the capital of Kathmandu.
However, chhaupadi is observed at significantly higher rates in West and far West districts of the country, particularly in remote and geographically isolated regions. Recent research found 77% of adolescent girls in Achham, far West Nepal, practised chhaupadi each month. In nearby Doti, another study reported 89 per cent observed menstrual exile.
The way a menstruating woman observes chhaupadi can vary. Most commonly, she is required to stay inside an external hut or shelter, known as a chhaugoth, for the duration of the menstrual period.
The shelter is often located close to the home and may be purpose-built or normally used to house livestock. The confined space, lack of ventilation, heating and security, coupled with the ordinary difficulties of managing menstruation, pain and other symptoms, create an environment of extreme vulnerability.
A 2018 study found shelters often lacked electricity, windows and provision of mattresses or blankets – women slept on a sack, straw or the bare floor instead.
A 2018 study found shelters often lacked electricity, windows and provision of mattresses or blankets – women slept on a sack, straw or the bare floor instead.
The consequences of a stay in a chhaugoth can be fatal. Women are exposed to the elements and try to keep warm by lighting fires. The lack of adequate ventilation in a small space creates significant danger. Many women have died from smoke inhalation, hypoxia and burns.
There are other hazards too – bites from scorpions and snakes, or hypothermia and pneumonia caused by the frigid temperatures. There have also been multiple reports of sexual assault and rape.
For the women who make it through a stay in chhaupadi, the consequences on their health and wellbeing can be significant. Research shows women who observe chhaupadi are more likely to report health problems during menstruation than those who do not practice exile, including infection, anaemia, caloric insufficiency and being underweight.
Furthermore, the taboo of menstruation and the justification for chhaupadi creates a society where girls and women are discouraged from discussing normal and important questions about menstruation – is my flow normal? How long should my period go for? Should I be in pain?
Menstrual taboos also reduce opportunities for women to properly understand their own menstrual and reproductive health, including menstrual disorders such as endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome. This could have lifelong effects and impact on a woman’s health.
Menstrual taboos and chhaupadi can also undermine a woman’s mental health and wellbeing.
Studies have found girls and women who observe significant menstrual taboos or exile report feeling ashamed, worthless, lonely and embarrassed. A lack of bodily autonomy, disempowerment and being labelled ‘dirty’ or ‘impure’ increases risk of distress, anxiety and depression.
The news of Parbati’s death is the 15th reported death of a woman while observing chhaupadi in just a decade.
These avoidable tragedies have resulted in local and community-led advocacy and awareness-raising efforts and have drawn global condemnation from organisations including Amnesty International and the United Nations. In 2017, the Government of Nepal outlawed chhaupadi. Anyone found to enforce menstrual exile can be fined or sentenced to a short-term in jail.
Several days after Parbati’s death, her brother-in-law was arrested and is being investigated for his involvement in her death. He is the first arrest since the new law was introduced, and many have questioned whether the laws are strong enough to actually reduce the prevalence of menstrual exile.
In response to increased attention and demands for action, local authorities and advocacy groups in Parbati’s district have begun destroying chhau huts to discourage the practice. The Government of Nepal is even offering rewards and incentives for those who destroy huts.
These actions may mark a significant turning point for Nepal. However, policing, monitoring and documenting the prevalence of chhaupadi is complicated and difficult in a country with sparse resources like Nepal.
Several Nepali organisations and advocacy groups have also raised concern over the effectiveness of tearing down menstrual huts or imposing fines on pro-chhaupadi individuals and groups when the stigmatising beliefs remain unchallenged.
Several Nepali organisations and advocacy groups have also raised concern over the effectiveness of tearing down menstrual huts or imposing fines on pro-chhaupadi individuals and groups when the stigmatising beliefs remain unchallenged.
What is needed are interventions designed to encourage and facilitate structural change to eradicate harmful beliefs and perceptions of menstruation.
Until this occurs, it is likely change will be temporary and menstrual taboos and restrictive practices will continue to impact the wellbeing, freedoms and rights of women to experience safe and dignified menstruation.
It’s the middle of winter now in Nepal, one of the most dangerous times of the year for a woman to practice chhaupadi. Many of the deaths in the past 10 years have occurred between December and February. Parbati’s death wasn’t the first as a result of chhaupadi, and she is unlikely to be the last either.
Despite years of preparations, New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell said there was no time to issue a mandatory evacuation order as Ida rapidly intensified into a powerful Category 4 hurricane. She urged city residents to “hunker down.” Mass evacuations require coordination among multiple parishes and states, and there wasn’t enough time. In several surrounding parishes, people were told to evacuate, but in low-lying and flood-prone areas, many residents couldn’t afford to leave.
Hurricane Ida became the most destructive storm of the busy 2021 Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Nov. 30. It was one of eight named storms to hit the U.S. as the season exhausted the list of 21 tropical storm names for only the third year on record.
Poverty in Wales would be halved if the Welsh Government established a universal basic income (UBI) system in the country, a major study has found.
The research, carried out by leading think tank Autonomy, found UBI would decrease overall poverty rates in Wales by 50%, and child poverty would decrease by 64%, bringing it to a rate of under 10% in Wales.
It is currently at 28% – the worst in the UK.
It also found nearly three quarters of people in Wales, 69%, support piloting UBI.
UBI is a government programme in which every citizen receives a set amount of money on a regular basis, regardless of their employment status.
It is a minimum payment, designed to meet basic needs, paid to everyone individually, unconditionally.
Pilot scheme
Earlier this year the Welsh Government announced its ambition to pilot a form of UBI in Wales, but suggested the scheme would focus on specific groups of people, like care leavers.
However, campaigners including UBI Lab Wales, the future generations commissioner Sophie Howe and more than 1,000 petitioners have since called on the first minister to ensure the pilot includes children, the employed, the unemployed and pensioners, as well as care leavers.
Howe, whose role was created under Wales’ Well-being of Future Generations Act, will give evidence to the Welsh Parliament’s Petitions Committee, alongside director of research at Autonomy Will Stronge, calling for a geographically-based universal basic income (UBI) scheme.
She said UBI could deliver “a more equal, prosperous Wales”. She continued:
Piloting a UBI trial here in Wales gives us a chance to increase the prosperity of every single person, giving more people a life jacket when they need to keep their head above the water – which has the potential to create a healthier, more equal population.
The findings in this report should excite leaders who say they want a true green and just recovery that makes life fairer for everyone.
“Bold changes” are needed
Stronge said:
The Covid-19 pandemic necessitates radical and bold changes to support people through future economic shocks.
As the economy and labour market struggles to find its feet, it’s clear that guaranteeing an income floor for all is the most progressive way of securing livelihoods.
Ewan Hilton and James Radcliffe, chief executive and head of policy at Platfform, a mental health and social change charity, will also be giving evidence at the session, as well as Lydia Godden, of Women’s Equality Network Wales (WEN Cymru).
A trial in Wales of 2,500 people, the report finds, could cost about £50m, with adults being paid from £60 per week.
Those who were already living in poor health, poverty or in marginalised communities are said to have been the hardest hit by the pandemic.
Rising living costs, combined with the end of the coronavirus job retention scheme, also known as furlough, on top of cuts to welfare benefits such as universal credit, is amounting to a “perfect storm” or “tsunami”, according to respondents to a Senedd Committee inquiry into debt and the pandemic held this month.
A review into a UBI pilot in Finland, which ran from 2017 to 2018, found people who took part were generally more satisfied with their lives and experienced less mental strain, depression, sadness and loneliness.
They also worked slightly more than those on unemployment benefits and reported better cognitive functioning. The study researchers said that:
The basic income recipients were more satisfied with their lives and experienced less mental strain than the control group,
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy,” published in 1926 by Red Book magazine
The rich are vampires. In 2020, for example, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion. Some 493 individuals became new billionaires while an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line. Indeed, the very rich are different. But it goes further than money. Much further.
The rich are vampires. In 2020, for example, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion. Some 493 individuals became new billionaires while an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line. Indeed, the very rich are different. But it goes further than money. Much further.
In early 2019, the Los Angeles Times wrote about “enormous wealth being focused on endeavors and technological breakthroughs that promise at least a shot at longevity, if not immortality.” The article details:
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has channeled much of his fortune into keeping the Grim Reaper at bay. Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page reportedly are heavy into anti-aging research, as is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Dmitry Itskov, a Russian billionaire, has launched the 2045 Initiative, which aims to map the brain so our minds can be downloaded into robot bodies or synced with holograms.
I’ve already told you about transhumanism, in general, but this is a more specific example. A company named Nectome claims it can “back up” your mind. It aims to do this by preserving your body for as long as it takes for technology to be able to turn your brain into a computer simulation. Again, the very rich are different. But it goes further than some delusional form of “immortality.” Much further.
The very rich have been paying hefty sums for transfusions of blood “harvested” from young people. Allegedly, this will slow the aging process by rejuvenating all those affluent organs. This is allegedly possible thanks to a heinous, Dr. Frankenstein-like procedure called parabiosis — surgically connecting two organisms or parts of two organisms.
You can look up the specifics if you dare. What I’ll end with are some questions:
How and why has aging become so stigmatized and who benefits from this perception?
Where are the “mandates” for basic self-care instead of experimental gene therapies?
Why can’t humans be encouraged and motivated to eat healthy, get enough sleep, do exercise each day, and practice stress management? Could it be that Big Pharma (and others) can’t make billions off such fundamentally helpful, free-from-side-effects guidance?
If “young blood” transfusions for the wealthy become more of a thing, where will all these young blood donors be found? What’s to stop the already thriving black market of trafficking children from “harvesting” blood for parasitic, billionaire vampires seeking immortality?
We already have things like tortured calves locked in veal crates to satisfy discerning palates. Why would anyone think the opulent class wouldn’t create young blood “harvesting” dens if they imagined it would allow them to live longer?
Coda: At a New York Times Dealbook conference in 2018, billionaire PayPal founder and parabiosis aficionado Peter Thiel stated: “I want to publicly tell you that I’m not a vampire. On the record, I am not a vampire.”
Thanks for the clarification. Sure sounds like something a non-vampire would say.
Reminder: The very rich are different from you and me.
Springfield, Missouri — The minivan leaves Springfield before the sun hits the limestone outcroppings of the Ozark Mountains, zipping past church-dotted roads and winding this way and that — deep, deep, deep into the hills. In its trunk are about a dozen boxes of Cuties and Huggies, sizes 4 and 5.
A handful of cars are already queued up when the van pulls into an otherwise empty shopping center — with a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it food pantry — in Forsyth, a town of about 2,500.
Kelly Brown unloads the boxes, her eyes on the cars in the line. Most are seniors coming for food — “I don’t need diapers, yet!” — but then she spots a child. About a quarter of children in this region live in poverty, and their parents, most of whom are working, can’t cover the cost of diapers — about $100 a month. In the back of Angela Colley’s Ford Excursion is her 3-year-old daughter in a booster chair. Brown bounds up to Colley’s window.
“Do you need any diapers for your kiddos?” she asks, wearing a black T-shirt that reads, “This shirt doubles as a cloth diaper.”
Colley’s eyebrows shoot straight up. Yes, she says, surprised. Brown quickly looks through their stores for a 74-pack of GoodNite pull-ups and stows it in Colley’s backseat. She hands the little girl a small stuffed cat.
Colley is at the food pantry to pick up food for her family of seven. She said she didn’t know she could also get diapers for free. Her 3-year-old isn’t fully potty trained just yet, and affordable pull-ups have been nearly impossible to find since the pandemic began. When she can’t, she’s done what she must: slapped a maxi pad onto toddler panties and prayed it could keep her daughter comfortable for at least a couple hours.
Colley has five children — ages 18, 10, 9, 8 and 3 — and she remembers a time when three of them were in diapers at once, running through as many as 10 to 12 a day each. Now, a pack will hold her daughter through the week, but in those days, the need for diapers brought her to her knees.
Their family wasn’t always struggling financially. Colley’s husband lost his job as a truck driver due to a health condition during the Great Recession. The family was evicted and became homeless. Her kids were just babies then. They could get food and clothes at a pantry or with food stamps, but diapers were a different story. So she began asking strangers for money to buy them.
“You cry — it’s very humbling to have to ask strangers for money for diapers,” Colley said.
Once, she gathered up all her silver jewelry, gifts from her family, and pawned it for $20 — enough to buy one big pack of Luvs. Another time, she found a pack of diapers for $8 at a thrift store, but all she could scrounge together in her car was $5 in change. She wept when she asked for a $3 discount that was denied. Later, she wrapped a towel around her child instead.
Diapers have rattled Colley’s conviction, sending her thoughts racing when her need was greatest: Am I even fit to be a mom?What if I don’t deserve these kids? Will my children get taken away from me?
Nationwide, studies have found that diaper need is a greater contributor to postpartum depression than food insecurity and housing instability. A landmark 2013 study in Pediatrics, a peer-reviewed medical journal, was the first to quantify the psychological trauma diaper need has on parents, some who reported leaving their children in soiled diapers for extended periods when they couldn’t find any, leading to urinary tract infections and diaper rash. Other parents skipped meals to pay for diapers. Almost always, mothers suffer the greatest impact.
“Because women are much more likely to be burdened by poverty … it becomes an issue that is not gender neutral,” said Megan Smith, the lead researcher in the Pediatrics study. “[Diaper need] was really just all-consuming for the mothers we talked to.”
During the pandemic, the cost of diapers ballooned about 14 percent on average, according to a Nielsen report. At the Family Dollar months ago, a pack was $9, Colley said. Now it’s $11. She spends $44 a month on pull-ups, even for a kid who is nearly 100 percent potty trained.
The frustration over diapers has given way to anger more times than Colley can count. The questions from others are almost always the same: Why did she have kids, if she couldn’t afford the diapers? Her family was doing OK when they had their older children, and then OK again when her 3-year-old was born. But poverty is not an identity — it’s a state, one you can move in and out of.
The inability to provide diapers is a silent struggle in this country. Unlike with food and clothes, diapers cannot be rationed or modified — the option is a disposable diaper or a cloth one, an expense that doesn’t qualify for federal aid under most public assistance programs, including food stamps.
That’s where organizations like the Diaper Bank of the Ozarks step in.
Welfare reform in the mid-1990s eliminated the cash assistance program the majority of low-income families relied on and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a program that less than a quarter of low-income families can now access. Shortly after, in the early 2000s, diaper banks — which collect diapers and distribute them to families in need for free — started popping up. The National Diaper Bank Network was created to help support banks across the country in 2011, around the same time the Diaper Bank of the Ozarks was founded by Jill Bright, a retired British nurse who learned about diaper need at a conference and brought the concept back to Springfield.
The bank started out in a closet of another nonprofit, with just seven partner agencies, distributing 50,000 diapers the first year. And then it exploded. For the first couple of years, distribution doubled annually. In 2021, it’s on track to distribute 1.2 million diapers through 105 partner agencies, covering one of the largest areas of any bank in the country — 50,000 square miles across 50 counties in the Ozarks — a region mostly made up of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas — into communities with only a couple hundred residents. It is the model for rural diaper bank distribution.
And yet, “it’s not good enough,” said Kelly Paparella, the bank’s assistant executive director who, along with Brown, represent the two paid staffers at the Diaper Bank of the Ozarks (both named Kelly). “We’re really looking at the gaps — who are the people who really need the services? — because we know that there’s inequities.”
But, so far, the public and political will has not been there to address it, and banks like the one in Missouri continue to string together a grassroots effort to reach into the poorest pockets of the state with barely enough resources to even get there.
The Diaper Bank of the Ozarks recently completed a study to see how many diapers it could distribute to meet just the supplemental need among low-income children in their region. The number wasn’t the 1.2 million they’ll distribute this year, an all-time high — not even close.
It was 27 million.
* * *
After the distribution in Forsyth, the Kellys hop back into their van and chart a course into the mountains toward Branson, a tourist town about 30 minutes away, known for its profusion of theaters, motels and family-style amusements — mini-golf courses, zip lines, thematic museums.
At another food pantry run by a Christian organization, the line of cars is already a half dozen deep as the van pulls in, long before the distribution is set to start. They go car by car, asking if anyone needs diapers for their kids — or their grandkids. Meth addiction has cost many children their parents here. About 20 percent of the people the Ozarks diaper bank helps are grandparents on a fixed income caring for grandchildren.
Brown and Paparella meet Heather Reeves, a grandmother of three children under 3, who can’t afford diapers with the income she gets from her disability payments. She relies on the bank to pick up diapers twice a month.
They give a couple of packs of diapers to Sommer Guthrie and her boyfriend, Colby Ball, who stop by every month for their 3-year-old. Ball works at LongHorn Steakhouse and they live in a hotel with a roommate. Guthrie has tried to look for work, but the pay wouldn’t be enough to cover day care. When her son was a baby, she asked the folks at the food pantry if they had diapers, and to her surprise, they did. She’s been coming back consistently since.
When the Kellys offer diapers to parents or grandparents, they can see the relief on their faces. That moment is why they describe this work as their calling.
“I found a role in my piece to be able to tackle poverty because I, too, was just completely dumbfounded [when I learned about diaper need],” Paparella said. “Everyone knows diapers are expensive. We joke about it: You’re pregnant and immediately the first thing was, ‘Oh wait ‘til you have to buy diapers.’”
Often to the surprise of parents, assistance programs, like food stamps or WIC, the supplemental program for low-income women and children, cannot be used to buy diapers. Both are nutritional assistance programs, and diapers don’t qualify because they are considered a hygiene product. Medicaid won’t cover them unless a doctor deems them “medically necessary” to treat a specific ailment like diaper rash, which can arise from parents not having enough diapers in the first place.
Only TANF provides cash assistance for low-income families that could conceivably be used to purchase diapers. But TANF is difficult to apply or qualify for, and it’s increasingly shrinking — in Missouri, only about 9 percent of the state’s TANF funds are spent on cash assistance for families.
And then consider the poverty tax: Diapers, when bought in bulk, are significantly cheaper per unit, but to do that, families have to spend more upfront, or have a membership to a big-box retailer like Costco. A single diaper may cost about $1.50, but in bulk the cost can drop to as little as a quarter per unit, said Kelley Massengale, the researcher who led the study in North Carolina.
The result of that inability to buy diapers in bulk shows up in just how much diapers soak up in a low-income family’s budget. The poorest 20 percent of families in the country spent nearly 14 percent of their household income in 2014 on diapers, according to an analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. For middle-income families, diapers absorbed about just 3 percent of their income.
That reality, though, is hard to convey in southwest Missouri, where the concept of giving away diapers for free is often met with questions about why parents aren’t “just” doing cloth instead, or why the parents aren’t working, why they had a child if they couldn’t afford the diapers.
Laura Mowery, who heads one of the Ozark bank’s partner agencies, a mobile unit that carries diapers to rural towns, said the struggles low-income families endure have been oversimplified to the point that some people internalize beliefs about what families should be able to do. She did it herself at first when her church asked for diaper donations.
“I myself swept it under the rug because I thought, ‘I’m not buying diapers. If you want them, go to work,’” Mowery said. “But let’s say you do have a kid and you are working — you’re working every day — but you have to pay your rent, and your utilities. Where’s your food money? Where’s your diapers? People really need to understand there’s more than just, ‘Get a job’ for these parents.”
Two-thirds of families experiencing diaper need are employed. Some of them can’t work because, without diapers, they can’t put their children in child care. Day cares typically change children’s diapers every two hours, and parents are expected to provide enough diapers up front to last the day. A 2017 study of diaper bank recipients in North Carolina found that 7 percent said they had to miss work because of diaper need. When diapers were provided to those families, 15 percent of parents reported it allowed them to return to work or school and 18 percent said it allowed them to put their children in child care.
The Ozarks diaper bank provides diapers to child care centers to have on hand in case a parent doesn’t have the necessary amount. Paparella said they realized parents weren’t changing their kids at home to ensure they could still go. One day care center would put a Sharpie mark on infants’ last diaper change of the day, and sometimes, that same diaper came back the next morning.
The bank’s cloth program, which Paparella leads and will talk about for hours if you get her started, also helps provide crucial services for parents. Cloth diapers, while reusable, can run from a couple dollars to $30 each, and parents need about two dozen. The bank gives parents all the cloth diapers they will need for free through the time their child is potty trained, eliminating the high cost barrier.
Paparella runs a class at the bank educating about the cost savings in the long run with cloth diapers and the best ways to wash them (you can’t use softener, for one). The bank estimates that the 64 cloth diaper kits it gave out last year equate to about 600,000 disposable diaper changes. But cloth isn’t for everyone: Some laundry facilities and day cares won’t accept them, and they are difficult to transport on public transit if you don’t have a car or a washer and dryer at home.
The Ozarks bank has tried to provide this education and expand as far as it can with the little resources it has. The first year Paparella joined the bank, for example, in 2017, it was serving 15 counties. Then 30 counties the next year. Now 65. Out here, where towns are far apart and most families still don’t know the diaper bank exists, their work is difficult. Most of the parents they saw on their trip to Forsyth and Branson were learning that diapers were available at the food pantries for the first time.
“Just like it takes a village to raise a child, it takes all of the collaborations of organizations and agencies in those communities to reach families,” Brown said. “Some of our partners travel four hours one-way to come get diapers, so we are dependent on them to carry out that mission in their community.”
* * *
Research on diapers is still in its nascent stages, but Massengale is helping conduct a nationwide study of diaper need with the help of 60 diaper banks, including the one in the Ozarks, surveying as many as 11,000 families.
The data could pave the road for more policy, showing that “whenever there is a diaper bank in a community, it’s helping to meet this basic human need for families,” Massengale said. “It’s also saving our health care system dollars, it’s providing access to early childhood education, it’s keeping families in the workforce.”
But currently, diaper need has been met with all but indifference while more and more families report struggling to even have enough food for their children. There has been, however, a precipitous rise in policy that supporters claim protects children.
In the past year, more states have enacted laws restricting abortion in 2021 than any other time in American history. After Texas, where a new law all but eliminates abortion access, Missouri’s patchwork of regulations is considered among the harshest in the country.
Many people specifically cite their inability to sustain their families financially as part of the reason they seek out abortions. And yet, there is far less impassioned discussion about what needs to happen to support families after a child is born.
Joanne Goldblum, the CEO of the National Diaper Bank Network — which now counts more than 225 members — estimates demand for diapers has grown 86 percent during the pandemic. Nationwide some diaper banks reported doubling their distribution; At one of the Ozark bank’s partner agencies in Ash Grove, a town of 1,400 a half hour outside Springfield, the number of families needing diapers has doubled, said Pattie Moulin, who runs the diaper pantry from the town’s United Methodist Presbyterian Church. Before March 2020 they were serving maybe 17 or 18 local families — now it’s 40.
The collision of those two things — a rise in poverty while abortion access shrinks — incites a complicated question about American ideology: Does the sanctity of life end after those first cries if, in practice, the United States fails to support children once they are out of the womb? In rural areas, where abortion is largely decried but aid is necessary, it gets even muddier.
“We’re very pro-life [in this region],” Paparella said. “You want to protect the unborn baby, but we need to protect the baby that’s born afterwards.”
Colley, the mom of five, is religious and doesn’t support abortion, but she can understand why someone would get one.
“You just gotta understand how hard it is for people to raise children in this world these days with no support,” she said. “If we’re making anti-abortion laws, we need to support the children that are here more.”
Yet, there has been almost no concrete action on diaper need at the federal level, despite a handful of bills that have been proposed to shuttle aid to diaper banks. It’s low-hanging fruit, advocates argue, that could help significantly reduce diaper need in the country. Most banks, like the one in the Ozarks, are run almost entirely by volunteers, who are led by a few paid employees and a budget of a couple hundred thousand dollars a year.
Meanwhile, the need is neither new nor diminishing. It’s a window into poverty, Goldblum said.
“I know that diapers are not the answer to ending homelessness, but sometimes diapers can be the difference for one family,” she said. “I think that’s what’s powerful about this — we are talking about basic human dignity. We’re not talking about complicated issues.”
There were moments in the pandemic when diaper need suddenly shot up to national prominence. Major publications carried stories about the cost of diapers rising; about big-box retailers running out of supplies; about a dad stealing a box for his kids, drawing a crackdown from his local police department and an outpouring of support from parents who came to his defense. It’s the kind of moment-in-time focus that also happened after the Great Recession, when President Barack Obama called for ending diaper need.
This year, two bipartisan bills emerged, the first time Republicans have cosponsored legislation.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst cosponsored a bill with Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy that would provide $200 million in aid to diaper banks as a result of the pandemic. Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer joined Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat, in introducing companion legislation in the Senate to the End Diaper Need Act, a bill Reps. Barbara Lee and Rosa DeLauro have been pushing in the House for years. It would provide ongoing aid to diaper banks — $200 million a year through 2025 — as well as qualify diapers for use with a health savings account, and allow Medicaid recipients to receive diapers for older children with a medical necessity.
All potential watershed moments, and then — nothing. The bills sit in the record, unmoving. Perhaps there’s still not enough bipartisan support, or political will, or too many other priorities.
“This should be a lay-up,” said Audrey Symes, a volunteer lobbyist for the National Diaper Bank Network. “Why is it not happening? It’s not that expensive.”
Goldblum has come up against this reality endlessly in the two decades since she started a diaper bank in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the first in the country. Two decades of advocacy have turned up a handful of legislators willing to take on the cause, a couple proposed bills, some movement in some states, but not much else. Often, she is still explaining diaper need to people for the first time.
“Legislators tend to think about the big picture and the truth is nobody very much thinks about the little things,” Goldblum said. “But something as small as a diaper — I’ve had people say, ‘This to me can make the difference between being able to make ends meet at the end of the month.’”
Goldblum and the diaper banks have pushed for legislation that does not include diapers in food stamps or WIC because those are food assistance programs, they argue, that are already suffering from little funding as it is. They don’t want to see families weighing whether to use the money to feed or diaper their child. Instead they want to see individual set asides (the proposed legislation would be funded through the existing Social Services Block Grant, instead).
But previous attempts at doing that have been mocked. The first federal bill addressing diaper need, introduced in 2011 by DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, proposed that the federal government distribute diapers through child care centers. Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh lambasted DeLauro’s proposal as an example of “nanny-state” legislation that “gives a new meaning to the term ‘pampering the poor.’” Limbaugh argued the bill also left out parents whose kids were not in day care.
Lee, the Democrat from California, has tried a couple different directions, proposing removing sales tax on diapers — something 10 states now do, including California — sending grants to diaper banks and allowing parents to pay for diapers using pre-tax dollars in health savings accounts.
She said some of her fellow members of Congress have laughed at the idea, “They said, ‘OK Barbara, diapers? Why diapers?’” Lee said. It’s the same people who passionately decry abortion, and yet diapers has not been able to drum up the same attention, she said.
DeLauro knows this road well. This year, legislation to expand the child tax credit to the poorest families, something she’s been championing for decades with little bipartisan support until quite recently, finally passed. Parents have reported using the funds — up to $360 a month for the youngest children — for diapers.
But the child tax credit expansion is currently just for a year, and, besides, it’s not a targeted solution to diaper need, she said.
“People feel it’s not a front-burner issue,” DeLauro said. “With the child tax credit, it wasn’t opposition, but it was indifference. That may be the case here.”
* * *
In Branson, Kelly Paparella gets a phone call.
A mom in her cloth diaper program, Desiree Abbott, has just been to the doctor with her 10-month-old son and learned he’s allergic to coconut oil, the replacement for diaper rash cream that Paparella suggests parents use with cloth diapers. (It’s one of the main ingredients in most creams, and it’s better for the diapers). She doesn’t have any disposable diapers for the baby.
Abbott is living in a hotel with her husband, Steven Bryant, the baby and their 2-year-old.
“So, the address, we’re gonna text it to you, OK?” Paparella tells her from outside the food pantry. “You can just click it and get on over here, and you guys can get some food and diapers today.”
Abbott is only 25, but she and Bryant, 26, have faced more adversity in the past couple of years than most people see in a lifetime.
When her eldest son was born, she worked three jobs and cared for her sick grandfather. She was just a teenager. Her son was eventually adopted by her uncle. Last year, when Abbott was seven weeks pregnant with her youngest, doctors found an infection in the bone behind her left ear that caused partial facial paralysis. As she underwent treatment, she showed up to her job at McDonald’s with a picc line in her arm.
“I can’t not provide for my kids,” Abbott said. She lost a job this year as a housekeeper because she missed work while her middle son was in the hospital battling severe pneumonia.
They tried cloth diapers to save some money, and now even that isn’t quite working
Before Abbott arrives, Paparella prepares herself. What luck, she tells Kelly Brown, that they happen to be in Branson on the same day. But her job is tricky — she isn’t just distributing diapers. Sometimes, she’s acting as the connective tissue and different forms of aid. Paparella wants to help parents be self-sufficient, and some of that means keeping them accountable, making sure they are reaching out for all the help that’s available to them. That requires building trust.
She spots Abbott right away when her car pulls up to the line outside the pantry. Strapped to the top of her old red Nissan is a big black stroller. The two boys are in the back in their car seats, wearing matching tie-dye shorts and tank tops.
After volunteers pack the back seat quite literally to the roof of the car with diapers and wipes, Bryant takes the boys out and to a nearby park while Paparella talks through options with Abbott.
They have two nights left in their hotel, and then they have to go somewhere else. Some people have suggested she leave the kids at Isabel’s House in Springfield, an emergency services shelter. But Abbott is worried it could cost her custody of the boys. It could signal she isn’t fit to care for them.
Paparella also urges Abbott to leave the kids at Isabel’s House. It won’t put her custody in jeopardy, she tells her.
“To put myself in your shoes,” Paparella tells her, gently, “I would understand completely, because when I first learned about that, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, how do you build trust with somebody to allow your kids to be staying with them?’ When you meet the staff and when you see what’s going on in there, they want and encourage you to want to come all the time. That’s why I want you guys to move to Springfield.”
Paparella has been trying to encourage them to move out of rural Missouri, to where the aid is more concentrated, where she can reach them. She wants Abbott to be connected to every resource available, because “one thing I understand, in everything that you’ve ever said is, this is your life,” Paparella tells her, motioning with her index finger at Abbott’s family in the distance.
Abbott and Bryant’s lives are so clearly built around their children. It’s purposeful: Bryant didn’t grow up with his dad, and being a father felt like a calling for him long before he became one. When he and Abbott found out they were pregnant with their first child, he carried the positive pregnancy test in his pocket. On his left bicep is a tattoo that reads “Ohana.” Family.
When they’ve had diapers, things are OK, they can provide. When they haven’t, they’ve fallen into periods of severe depression.
It’s so upsetting, Bryant struggles to find the words to describe it. “It’s emotional,” Abbott says. “At that point, it makes me think, maybe my kids are better with someone else.”
Diapers for them are a symbol of who they are as parents. Without them, who are they?
As the COVID pandemic upended the economy in the spring and summer of 2020, tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and became ever more vulnerable to hunger. In consequence, the country’s network of food banks saw a sudden spike in usage.
Since then, that dizzying increase has leveled off or fallen somewhat in many places, but that doesn’t mean the country’s no longer suffering an epidemic of food insecurity. To the contrary: Large food banks around the country are still reporting far higher levels of need — and of food distribution to attempt to meet that need — than was the case prior to COVID.
In Washington, D.C. for example, the big food banks are reporting an increase in usage of more than 60 percent compared to 2019. Put simply, as Thanksgiving rolls around again, millions of Americans are struggling to feed their families the bare minimum on a daily basis. If they are able to have a big spread, it will likely be only thanks to food charities and their volunteers and donors.
Looked at one way, these numbers, and the resilience of SNAP in the face of long-standing conservative antipathy to the program, are success stories: Tens of millions of Americans do not have enough economic security to easily feed themselves and their families, but thankfully the country does not have an epidemic of starvation. Instead, its charitable networks have gone into overdrive — and a food distribution mechanism has been fine-tuned to keep hunger at bay for the vast majority of recipients. At the same time, SNAP has become the de facto success story of an otherwise withered social safety net.
Looked at another way, however, and these numbers are a devastating indictment of the current U.S. economic model: In the world’s richest country, with more billionaires than anywhere else on Earth, a large percentage of the population lacks the ability to set aside the financial resources to be able to easily feed themselves and their children. Instead, they have to fall back either on charity or on government assistance. Many people who rely on food aid have jobs — just not jobs that pay enough of a living wage to allow them to buy food for their families.
In the South, in particular, where in few places does the local minimum wage exceed the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour (less than half what it is in cities and states that moved toward the $15 per hour “living wage” in recent years), the scandal of food insecurity for the working poor remains omnipresent.
This is a crisis — magnified, though by no means created, by the pandemic — not of food-production failures but of skyrocketing inequality. There is, clearly, no shortage of food in the U.S., but there is a shortage of disposable income among a growing percentage of people at the bottom of the economy. We have, as a society, become inured to the stunning realities of families experiencing shortages of food amid a broader glut of staples.
Given that low-income Americans are also being particularly hard hit by surges in prices for housing, fuel, and a range of consumer goods such as used cars, the inflationary trends within the food industry threaten to render their economic tightrope walk even more dangerous.
The COVID-19 pandemic and unprecedented nationwide protests against racial inequity in 2020 shined a necessary light on the systemic racism embedded in our country’s policies and institutions. The Child Tax Credit is one striking example. From the time it was enacted in 1997 until this year, the Child Tax Credit, which was expressly intended to help struggling families, was not fully available to 50 percent of the Black children in this country (as compared to just 20 percent of white children) because their families’ incomes were too low. This statistic should stop us all in our tracks.
As Congress continues to debate one of the most significant pieces of legislation in our lifetimes — a nearly $2 trillion Build Back Better “reconciliation” bill that would expand childcare, health care, and education funding among so many other overdue structural supports to our economy — we need to push for an extension of the Child Tax Credit beyond 2022 and make it permanent.
This is a critical opportunity to not only create an infrastructure that supports historic, sustainable long-term economic growth but also helps close the racial wealth gap.
For the first time since its enactment, the Child Tax Credit included a temporary increase and refundability provision that made it fully available to families whose incomes are too low to owe any federal income tax and distributed those payments periodically, instead of just once per year during tax season. This change in policy helped prevent millions of families from slipping into poverty during the pandemic and allowed working parents to start building savings to offset future economic downturns.
Congress is now debating whether to make these temporary changes permanent, which researchers from Columbia University estimate would cut the child poverty rate for Black children by more than 50 percent and for all children by 45 percent. This would lift over 4 million children above the poverty line and provide significant long-term benefits for children’s academic progress, health, and future earnings as adults.
We are already seeing significant gains from the temporarily expanded Child Tax Credit. Within just the first month of the initial payment being issued, the number of households with children reporting that they did not have enough to eat dropped by 3.3 million or nearly one-third. By boosting household consumption of goods and services and spurring economic activity in local communities, the impact of the Child Tax Credit has extended far beyond households with children and those experiencing poverty.
An issue at the heart of the current debate in Congress — that making the expanded Child Tax Credit permanent could discourage parents from working — is unfounded. More than 400 economists recently signed a letter of support for making expanded availability permanent, explaining, “recent empirical studies suggest that the income provided through the program is unlikely to meaningfully reduce parental labor supply.” In fact, according to a new study by Humanity Forward, 94 percent of Child Tax Credit recipients said they planned to continue working or even pursue overtime opportunities since they would be able to afford child care and other child-rearing expenses. Similarly, the National Academy of Sciences projected that 99.5% of working parents receiving the Child Tax Credit would continue to work.
Beyond a poverty-fighting tool, the expanded Child Tax Credit has the power to set millions of Black families on an upward path toward long-term economic and social mobility. By making it permanently fully refundable at current levels — $3,600 per child for children under five and $3,000 per child for children between six and seventeen — the Child Tax Credit would generate an increase of $76 billion in children’s future earnings in adulthood and nearly $536 billion in increased benefits caused by children’s improved health outcomes. This kind of economic mobility benefits the entire national economy — the estimated $800 billion current and future value of this tax credit to society is roughly eight times the $100 billion initial cost. It is rare that any public policy achieves such a high return on investment.
We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to lift over 4 million children out of poverty and shore up structural damage in the U.S. economy by correcting a provision in our tax code that has systemically prevented Black families from thriving for decades. Congress needs to make the fully refundable expanded Child Tax Credit permanent and continue to distribute those payments periodically. There should be no debate.
YOUTH living in Windhoek’s 8ste Laan informal settlement are demanding a basic income grant (BIG), while accusing the nation’s leaders of intentionally keeping the country in an enforced state of poverty since independence.
Christa Nekwaya (20), who was speaking at a BIG Coalition media conference today in Otjomuise, accused Namibia’s three presidents of being the engineers of poverty in the country.
Another speaker, Kevin Wessels (25), said the government should be held accountable for the low employment rate and poverty in the country.
“The BIG can help improve the lives of the youth. The N$750 we got from the government as Covid-19 relief funds last year has proven that it can help alleviate and reduce poverty,” Wessels said.
He added that the youth are told to create opportunities for themselves, but are expected to do so without funds.
“We are demanding a basic income grant. We are telling the president that the 42 000 people he wants to give the BIG to is nonsense. How do you determine that only 42 000 people are going to get it? That is where you create inequality,” Wessels said.
Josephina Nekwaya (21) said the majority of the country lives in poverty, which has exacerbated unemployment.
“Our supposed freedom only exists on paper but not in practice because we, the majority, which is 1.6 million Namibians, live in our own country as impoverished slaves and are struggling to survive while being lied to that Namibia is doing well,” she said.
On February 1, 2022, the relief student-loan borrowers have had since the start of the pandemic will be stripped away and they will be thrown back into repayment — whether they’re ready or not.
And most of them are not.
The Student Debt Crisis Center, in partnership with Savi — a social impact technology startup — released the results of the fourth installment of the Student Debt x COVID-19 series on Wednesday examining the impact of the pandemic on student-loan borrowers. It found that although student-loan company communication to borrowers has improved since June, 89% of fully-employed borrowers say they do not feel financially secure enough to resume payments in a few months.
One in five of the respondents said they will never feel financially-secure enough to restart their student-loan payments.
We don’t want a BIG out of laziness, we need it because, without it, our poverty will kill us. If I ask any woman or man in my community if they want to work, they will say ‘I am ready to work — just tell me where and when’. The BIG and decent-paying jobs must happen together.
My name is Israel Nkuna, a community activist from a small village called Mahlathi near Giyani in Limpopo, who receives the R350 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant. Every month, I assist around 500 people in all nine provinces with their SRD grant applications.
I have serious questions about the ‘household grant’ that we hear the National Treasury is considering.
Who is the head of a household — is it a man who has a wife and children in Mahlathi but spends months living and working in North West, where he has another family? Which household will receive the household grant? What will happen if the man receives the household grant and withholds it from the family? Or if the mother receives the grant, but she’s not able to spend it on herself and her children because of an abusive husband?
What about a family with no parents, just young brothers and sisters, some with drinking and drug problems? Who receives the household grant, and how will you make sure everyone in that family can buy food and put money aside?
How will the government register all these families and heads of families, and make sure this grant gets to the people who need it?
These questions trouble me, especially when I think about all the problems we’ve had with the SRD grant. The Treasury says they have consulted with people. But they haven’t consulted with people like me and those in my village — if they had, they would know the problems we face.
The majority of people I help with SRD applications don’t know technology and don’t have smartphones to apply for the grant. Even if I can assist them, the Sassa system often declines them. How will a family grant application work any better?
We need a Basic Income Grant/guarantee (BIG) without a complicated, faulty application process. We need a BIG at a decent level that’s given to individuals so they can access their own funds.
And we need it now.
There are many things we have to pay for to survive in my community. A simple thing like getting water is a problem — I have to spend R5 for 20 litres of water and I don’t have a choice. We have a gravel road that is in a bad state — if we need to buy something in town, if we have to go to a government office, if we want to get our sick relatives to a clinic, we have to pay to get there. We don’t have a choice.
If we want to look for work, we have to pay, too. But there is no work to be found for many of us in our community. For someone over 40, if they don’t have work now, they are not going to find it for the rest of their life.
We don’t want a BIG out of laziness, we need it because without it, our poverty will kill us. If I ask any woman or man in my community if they want to work, they will say ‘I am ready to work — just tell me where and when’. The BIG and decent-paying jobs must happen together.
My community believes in education. But our daughters and sons cannot learn if they cannot eat. They cannot learn if they can’t afford the bus or the taxi fare to get to school. They cannot learn if they see their family around them starving.
A BIG would support families so it’s easier to send our daughters and sons back to class.
For those people like me, who do receive the SRD, we are able to buy maize meal, cooking oil, potatoes, soap, and washing powder. But R350 is equal to R11 a day — that’s not enough to live on. I’m unable to buy clothes and healthy foods. I’m unable to save money to go to the clinic when I feel sick. I’m unable to save to pay a funeral parlour for a deceased relative, or to buy the many things that are needed in a household.
The BIG would be a guarantee — not a handout — that everyone in this country can have their basic needs met. What else should our government be working towards?
Let’s make the BIG something South Africans can be proud of, not something to be ashamed of. Let it save lives, save our daughters and sons from starvation, let our women live safely, let all people live with dignity, give them a chance to build something and contribute to their communities and our economy. Let us resist a household grant and insist on a BIG for individuals.
Only around a quarter of people eligible to vote chose to cast their votes for the ANC in the recent election. The mass stay away from the polls is a mass rejection of the ANC, along with the DA and the EFF which could not attract the support of significant numbers of former ANC voters. When you do not respect the dignity of the people and you undermine their power you always pay the price.
We have always said that the day is coming where South Africans will no longer have the loyalty to the ANC and will vote them out of power. This election shows that that day is coming.
We must never forget that this country was liberated from apartheid by ordinary people, by the long history of popular organisation at a mass scale running from the ICU to the UDF. We must not forget the Durban strikes of 1973, the Soweto Uprising of 1976 and the uprising in cities and towns across the country that began in 1984. We must always remember the price that ordinary people paid for our liberation from apartheid.
However, we do also remember the great men and women who led the ANC, people like OR Tambo, Chris Hani, Dorothy Nyembe and many others who gave their lives to the fight against the evils of apartheid. We must also acknowledge that when the mass struggles on the factory floors and in communities brought apartheid to the brink of collapse the majority of the people accepted the ANC as their leaders.
But now, twenty-seven years after the end of apartheid, we are ruled by political gangsters in some parts of the country. When we organise and march against corruption we are organising against the day to day theft of our own futures. When houses are actually built they are sold by corrupt councillors. We have seen this in Cato Crest, KwaNdengezi, Lindelani, Cornubia, Mount Moriah and in many places around the eThekwini Municipality.
When there is development it is imposed on the people. Grassroots planning is taken as criminal, as a political threat to be crushed. We have seen this in In Tembisa outside Johannesburg where the ANC undermined people’s democracy by imposing reblocking. This is a process that needs to take place through democratic engagement with the communities. However the ward councillors ignored the views of the people.
Evictions take place with impunity and at gunpoint through private security companies or the Anti Land Invasion Unit. They are carried out in brazen violation of the law, and sometimes court orders too. The politicians continue to assume that they are above the law and that we are beneath the law.
As a result of austerity and corruption we are left in the mud without water, electricity and sanitation and violently attacked when we organise land reform, urban planning , service provision and food sovereignty from below. We cannot continue to live without land and work, to have our dignity vandalised and to live in the mud like pigs year after year while a few political elites live in luxury at the expense of the poor. Many families continue to go to sleep without any bread on the table. The same system that makes the rich to be rich makes the poor to be poor.
We are beaten, arrested, tortured, jailed and murdered when we stand up for our dignity. ‘Land or death’ has become a common saying because people know that to struggle for land is to risk death. ‘Phansi nge ANC!’ has become a common slogan in rallies and big meetings.
The ANC has become the enemy of the people. It is just as Frantz Fanon warned us.
We have always said that the anger of the people may go in many directions. Some of those who took their votes away from the ANC took them to right-wing and xenophobic parties. This is a dangerous development. Nobody is poor because their neighbour was born in another country. We were made poor by colonialism and kept poor by the ANC.
Prior to these elections we have called on our members, of which there are more than 100 000 in good standing, as well as those who support our struggle, to refuse to vote for their grave, to refuse to vote for the ANC. Our members, many of our supporters headed this call and huge numbers of other people also refused to vote for the ANC. For the first time the ANC could not win a majority in Durban and the municipality is now a hung municipality. The ANC will have to depend on other parties in order to run the municipality again.
The outcome in these elections are not about the factions in the ANC, they are a result of years of the abandonment and repression of the poor. They are about years of gangsters continuingly looting the state while we continue to live in shacks of indignity. But there are consequences for undermining the poor.
Now the poor have shown their power.
The ANC, DA and EFF will all leave the poor to continue to be poor. There is no hope from these parties. The only hope that we have is ourselves. We will continue to mobilise and organise the power of the impoverished from below to build our power from below to ensure that all of us in the shack settlements, the townships and rural areas find solutions to move forward, abolish poverty and build a real democracy.
A prolific writer and researcher for seven decades, Miller’s greatest talent was putting that knowledge to work on behalf of activist groups in the United States and around the world.
Joey King, a community services professional and student living with mental illness, details the systemic pressures that keep her ‘dirt poor’ and homeless.
I googled the term “dirt poor”. I know it comes from a time when people couldn’t afford to have flooring or even straw in their homes, but I wanted to see what it might mean here, in Australia. Many dictionaries said “suffering extreme poverty” or “very poor”, but Dictionary.com states: “lacking nearly all material means or resources for living”. This resonates for me, a 52 year-old woman living in Australia in 2021.
I am part of the fastest growing demographic for homelessness and poverty in Australia. I have had a severe and persistent mental illness for most of my life and I have been living in my car outside Perth, in the south west of Western Australia, for the past two years.
I do not have the material means or resources to secure viable safe housing or employment. I do not have choices that will help me move on from where I find myself. I do not want to be this person but cannot see a way things will change.
In Perth, homelessness has risen almost 60% in 2021. It is not going to stop until people that the Government is prepared to listen to speak out loud and demand true action, not the token efforts of events the rich are invited to participate in that raises money for a few or one week in a year of marketing to remind people that people have mental illnesses, experience homelessness and live in poverty. We are desperate and real change needs to occur – or the chasm that exists between rich and poor will continue, and ever more people will be living in poverty.
I’m educated, articulate, and used to be involved in my community through work and volunteering, yet I have lived out of my car since July 2019.
Have I asked for help? Yes!
I used to work and teach Community Services, and I know how to research to find and ask for help.
Have I been helped? No.
I am looking at least another two years before public housing becomes available.
My Jobseeker payments are approximately 38% below the recognised poverty line in Australia. I miss meals, juggle my medication, have no social life, and wonder how I can be expected to look for employment when I might go days without a shower or have been awake all night because I’m in fear of my surroundings? I am one of the 40% of women my age who live in poverty. I am ‘dirt poor’.
I am constantly stressed, afraid and triggered. My mental health has been further destabilised because of my financial and housing situation. Women like me experience (in no particular order): uncertainty, fear, loneliness, truly being cold, vulnerability, mental and physical health decline, risk of being assaulted or being moved on by police, discrimination, judgement, assumptions you are an alcoholic or drug addict or that you chose to be homeless.
I’m not what people assume homeless people should look like, therefore not considered desperate enough to be helped.
As a 52-year-old woman without children, I am the lowest priority for both government and social services – as I was informed by WA Department of Housing staff. I tell people I’m homeless and they just shrug likes it’s no big thing. I wonder: when did the wellbeing of some of the most vulnerable people in this country become so dismissed? When did homelessness and poverty become normalised in people’s eyes? When did people stop caring?
This year, West Australian Premier Mark McGowan has delivered a record budget surplus of about $5 billion. This money has the potential to end all street homelessness in Western Australia – and also build 15,000 social/public houses, end all public housing waiting lists and all other forms of homelessness, like couch surfing. The WA Government has pledged to spend $884m to build 3,300 social housing properties – far short of the required number. Luke Henriques-Gomes, Social affairs and Inequality Editor at Guardian Australia, wrote last week that 44 homeless people have died so far this year in Western Australia. These people didn’t need to die. They died because they were “lacking nearly all material means or resources for living”. They, like me, were “dirt poor”.
Poverty is a national and state problem that needs the support of business, community, and government leaders across Australia, to ensure we are heard, supported, and given choices so that we can be part of a community, gain back what we have lost and be seen again.
The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” – Thomas Jefferson
The effect of Rishi Sunak’s budget has potentially become clear. Several think tanks have calculated that despite measures around things like Universal Credit, the poorest people in the UK will still be worse off. And the picture is even bleaker for the most deprived of all of us. Because the think tanks have not even been able to quantify just how much worse off the most destitute in society will be.
The budget: losers and losers?
The Canary previously reported on Wednesday 27 October’s budget. It noted that Sunak made some changes to Universal Credit and the National Living Wage. These included reducing the Universal Credit taper rate from 63% to 55%. Sunak tweeted that the taper rate:
withdraws support gradually as people work more hours. It is currently 63%, so for every extra £1 someone earns, their Universal Credit is reduced by 63p.
As The Canary noted:
Around 5.5 million families were hit by the £20-a-week cut to Universal Credit. So, over 3.6 million of them, including many sick and disabled people, are still worse off – because the changes to Universal Credit will only affect 1.9 million people. Moreover, as The Canary previously reported, the £20-a-week uplift was inadequate to begin with. With inflation continuing to rise, the value keeps diminishing.
Think tank the Resolution Foundation has crunched the numbers further. As it summed up:
Around 75 per cent of the 4.4 million households on Universal Credit will be worse off as a result of decisions to take away the £20 per week uplift despite the Chancellor’s new Universal Credit measures in the Budget.
But the devil is in the detail. And the Resolution Foundation have found that the negative effect of the budget varies depending on how poor you are.
Haemorrhaging money
Overall, the changes in Universal Credit don’t fully make up for the loss of the £20-a-week uplift for many. The poorest people are set to lose the most:
The budget also hits poorer lone parents on Universal Credit. The Resolution Foundation says that a lone parent with one child who works 20 hours at the minimum wage will actually be £5 a week worse off by April 2022:
A single adult not working will be £20 a week worse off:
A couple with two children, where one adult works full time on the minimum wage, will only see a £4 weekly increase in their money:
However, the Resolution Foundation didn’t look at is the poorest 5% of households. It breaks its analysis down into 20 income brackets. But it says that:
We exclude the bottom 5 per cent, due to concerns about the reliability and volatility of data for this group.
Spiralling poverty?
The New Economics Foundation’s analysis also paints a similar picture. It found that:
the poorest fifth of people would have been £380 a year better off on average if the £20-a-week uplift had stayed in place instead
And it said that if Sunak had kept the £20-a-week uplift, this:
would have prevented 300,000 more people from being pushed into poverty this winter.
But like the Resolution Foundation, the New Economics Foundation did no calculations for the bottom 5% poorest people. So, while the negative effects of the budget are stark for some of the poorest people, how it will hit the most destitute in society is still unclear.
The most destitute, forgotten?
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) gave some indication of who would be affected and the scale of it. As it noted:
The position of those out of work, especially those without children, remains precarious indeed. No increase in out of work benefits [so-called legacy benefits like Jobseeker’s Allowance, JSA] for the childless unemployed for half a century leaves their living standards dramatically trailing those of the working majority. The gap between the generosity of the furlough scheme and the meanness of our out of work benefit system could hardly be more stark.
In other words, people on social security like JSA and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) are hit the hardest, and these people may well be in the other think tanks’ missing bottom 5% bracket. It’s of concern that neither the Resolution Foundation nor the New Economics Foundation gave this data. Because as The Canary previously reported, 1.9 million people on these legacy benefits are sick and disabled people – who should be protected by the Equality Act.
More misery to come
It seems that after over ten years of austerity and then the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, the poorest people in the UK will now face another decade of misery. Sunak’s budget has done little for those lower down the UK’s economic pecking order. But it’s done the least for those that are on the bottom rungs of the system through no fault of their own. Sick and disabled people and the country’s poorest individuals have been thrown under the bus by a government intent on pushing people to the fringes of society.
The they, of course, are the capitalists. The bankers. The mortgage companies. The housing agencies. The alphabet soup of agencies which will squeeze blood from turnips and your progeny’s progeny.
The media is the medium for their poison, all those tricks of the mind, subliminal and overt, messages that cause chaos, the mass hysteria, the constant fear, the rage against the ‘other.’ And, the other are our fellow citizens, victims, most of us, sliding and slipping and slurrying down the proverbial drain.
Housing management companies; i.e., apartment management companies, now property management companies. We are talking about putting people out on the streets management companies. Black Rock or Black Stone, or the top (largest) property management companies in USA are evil doers, in the words of the criminal, George W. Bush. Terrorists in our own land.
Take a look at the number of “units” these thieves “own,”; i.e., manage! National Multifamily Housing Council — 50 Largest Apartment Managers
Again, the ‘they’ in the subheading are those who look at citizens as, well, semi-useless renters, eaters, drivers, patients, breathers, breeders. UNITS as in a person’s home, shelter, abode, gathering place, roof-running water-place-to-raise-a-life-or-a-family. In the hands of management companies, who are in Gucci suits and are beholding to the devils of capitalism: money schemers, bond holders, the top echelon of this Ponzi scheme. No national red alert state by state around eviction moratorium running out, or the exorbitant rents and sickening inflated cost of houses, new or preowned? Instead, this Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum Administration is saber-nuke rattling with China and Russia. Instead, this Brokeback Administration is pushing Jab of the Month on every living mammal in the USA. But real change, real safety, real social contracts? Never in the Art of the Deal shit-hole that is the Democratic and Republican mentality, which is for us, useful idiots, mental disease!
I have dealt with some of these property management (killer) outfits. Recently, with one of my clients — homeless veteran, diabetes, amputated leg from the knee down, other chronic illnesses — I went through email-telephone-snail mail hell. Zero response about his one apartment we landed that needed some ADA addition so he could get out of the bloody apartment in his wheelchair. I’ve written about Pinnacle (number three on that list above with 172,000 ‘units’). My client had a Rotary Club and Boy Scout unit and a construction company ready to put in a sound, safe, nice pathway so he could exit and enter his apartment.
Nothing from Pinnacle after hours spent attempting a two-way communication with them. I did get an apartment manager, in the Portland apartment complex office, who was from Ukraine, and who was, again, in this shit-hole country, afraid of rocking the boat, afraid of really helping me get to the top brass. Even the top brass, via email and snail mail, did not respond. You can’t even pull the old wounded military veteran with chronic illness card to get to their heart-strings, because, they have no heart — just a big set of investment-banking-real estate accounts.
What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
― W.E.B. DuBois
Michael Hudson, again, explains how messed up we are in USA with this rentier system. This system of penury, three steps to poverty hustle. And Corporate/Mainstream Media are in with this scam. Don’t get confused with the title, Super-imperialism, Michael Hudson’s book. He goes to the heart of this USA scam:
So, I am talking about even redneck Texas, Dallas, where working class folk are seeing that $1,100 a month one bedroom apartment rent jump to $1,800 in November. Just like that, oh, that Lone Star Shit Hole State. But wait, that jump is happening all over the land. Every rotten governor who dares go on TV to express their Jab-Jab-Jabberwocky and their Unvaccinated-Going-to-get-sacked-turned-away-from-everywhere-no-medical-help-no-entitlements-no schooling sick fascist soft-shoe Vaudeville Big Pharma Blue Face bullshit, well, they are the Paper-Pharma Tigers, with state legislatures as pimped out by corporations and US Chamber of Commerce shits to the point of massive infrastructure failure, pot holes as big as DMZ craters, dirty water, dirty air, zero housing for the 80 percent, no bus drivers for the kiddos. This is America, the land of the Survival of the Fittest, of Richest, or Most Connected, or Most Sociopathic!
This is what these whippersnappers in the Blue States and Red States do — privatize EVERYTHING, since we are almost useless eaters and useless breathers. Useful, to them, as they call us their “useful idiots.” Title any way you want to: “Retirees Flee City Medicare Program as Deadline Looms for Move to Private Health Plan” or, “New York City Retirees Refusing to Eat the Medicare Advantage Dogfood“
So, no rent control, no national housing plan, no holding the US Chamber of Commerce and the other 10,000 thuggery lobbying groups for the building and paving and clear-cutting industries to the people’s standards. And, yes, a few brethren send me link and story after story and link. It’s what I have been feeling and seeing since age 13. Yes, the ugly reality of kill squads, School of the Americas, in Central America. Yes, in Arizona, age 13, after years overseas, seeing the government, the administrations, and their policy of undocumented folk from US-spit upon countries and their death squads coming over the borderline, illegally. Imagine that, people as illegals, and worse, as aliens, from another planet! Media and the newspapers I worked for, I fought those terms — illegal alien. Sick sick roots of this slaver country. Look at this, 15 years ago, with the old web site, Dissident Voice: “This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens.”
Here, Ferlinghetti — from that little book, Poetry as Insurgent Art!
What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it. (A voice in the wilderness!)
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words.
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti, pp.2-3
This headline, in the context of housing crisis, job crisis and, well, the supply chain made up crisis, which Michael Hudson talks about above with Blumenthal and Norton. “Biden says US will go to war with China to defend Taiwan”!
US President Biden bluntly declared at a Town Hall meeting on Thursday that the US was committed to going to war against China in defense of Taiwan. The statement is another provocative step that undermines the basis of US-China diplomatic relations and intensifies the already acute tensions between the two countries. (source)
These are not normal human beings, any of them in these dastardly administrations — Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden. Oh, historically, it gets much much worse. Just the health care crises after crises, and get some slice of the National Health Services in Britain which my aunts and cousins and uncles in the old days used as ways to be treated with dignity for medical ailments. It’s all gone the way of dog food, Reagan/Thatcher, on down the line, Blair/Clinton, Obama/Trump/Biden. More news and analyses coming from a hip-hop guy, than anything from the Fox-MSNBC-CNN-Et Al crap:
Speaking of those great health authorities, those alphabet soup acronym junk science folk from our own FDA, get a grip on this during the planned pandemic:
That FDA, even reported on brokeback NBC: ‘Even the website of the approved product, R.J. Reynolds’ Vuse, which offers “7 Bold Colors, 3 Premium Flavors, 3 Nicotine Levels” along with sleek accessories like pretty “racing wraps” and holsters, says on top: “WARNING: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.” But the FDA claimed that with vaping, “the potential benefit to smokers who switch completely or significantly reduce their cigarette use, would outweigh the risk to youth.” Apparently the argument is: It’s OK if young people get addicted to vaping nicotine because they will now be able to buy e-cigarettes to later quit.’
You know, the FDA in cahoots with the other great Pharma Folk, the self reporting Jewish Family, a la Sackler/Purdue:
Oh, it’s on Hulu, and it is a protracted, goofy drama of the St. Elsewhere kind. SO protracted, so long, but from Macy’s book. Oxycontin. Man, that dope in the white-blue-yellow-pink pill. Talk about emblematic of Pfizer/Merck/GSK/The Lot of them!
Curtis Wright was the FDA’s deputy director overseeing anesthetics and addiction products during the time OxyContin was being approved. In this position, Wright played a key role in allowing the deceptive marketing that suggested OxyContin was non-addictive. Particular focus has fallen on a special label issued by the FDA specifically for OxyContin which read “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.” As depicted in Dopesick, this label was used by sales representatives to sell OxyContin as a treatment for moderate pain to skeptical doctors like the one played by former Batman star Michael Keaton. However, Purdue had conducted no actual studies to support this claim and Wright knew it. In Dopesick, FDA employees also confirm the person who approved of this label was Curtis Wright. (source)
Nah, we can’t call these people evil. We can’t call their business dealings illegal. We can’t call into question their ethics. We can’t question where they developed such sick marketing. We can’t look at their origins, their friends, their rabbis, their associations with family lines that go way back. That, my kind reader, would be, well, in the words of racists and fascists, anti-Semitic?
Well, I guess I can leave the origins stories up to the, well,
“How the Sackler family built a pharma dynasty and fueled an American calamity”
In ‘Empire of Pain,’ Patrick Radden Keefe details the humble Jewish immigrant roots of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, and how it is evading justice despite being behind the opioid crisis
In the 1960s, esteemed psychiatrist/genius ad man Dr. Arthur Sackler cemented his family’s massive fortune when his marketing strategy transformed diazepam, better known as Valium, from just another drug produced by his client Hoffman-La Roche into the top-selling “wonder” drug in the United States between 1968 and 1982.
Though the Jewish-American Sackler, whose parents immigrated to the US from Eastern Europe, initially encountered antisemitism, the wealth that he brought his family helped change all that.
Along with his psychiatrist brothers Mortimer and Raymond, Sackler would see enormous success marketing pharmaceuticals directly to doctors. The family delved into philanthropy in addition to pharma, and the name once snubbed by antisemites soon adorned prestigious educational and cultural institutions, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Louvre.
Yet more stories coming from friends that define CAPITALISM, and that is the C which is the big Corrupt, Colluding, Conspiratorial, Contagious, Calamitous, Corrosive, Cancerous. That is the soft shoe here — the C-C-C-C-C-C-C of Capitalism, with those Seven Deadly Sinful C’s! And just to make a quick aside, sort of the Robin Leech, The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous detour, get a load of this set of seven deadly sinful C’s: Living: “The Super-Rich Are Forming a New Exclusive Club. For $180,000, a three-year membership includes investment opportunities, access to West Point generals, confidential support groups and private getaways.” (source, again, the 7 Sinful C’s Bloomberg News [sic])
Nah, never off with their heads!
[Tag: Richard Branson, from left, during an R360 networking tennis match with Michael Cole and Christopher Ryan, a former Tiger 21 chair in Texas and Puerto Rico and chief executive officer of GoBundance, a professional networking group. Courtesy of R360]
And these fella’s are controlling the narrative around 5/6G, Fake Green Capitalism, World Economic Forum’s “The Deplorables/Barely Useful Idiots Will Be Soylent Green” project of massive anal and biometric and cellular surveillance, and, then this bizarrely vapid story about “the only way to save the earth — read, saving/protecting/growing the billionaires’ and millionaires’ wealth, power, ego, land, families — is with, err, the billionaires’ and millionaires’ great know-how and techie future.”
Oh, Canada, the tail and hind teat of USA: “Why we must embrace geoengineering and other technologies to stop the climate crisis” by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, University of Winnipeg. I’ll quote her, and just the two paragraphs say it all for me, and alas, while I do come from academia, albeit remedial college courses, writing courses, a la adjunct/freeway flyer, I have to say that my dealings with sustainability and green pornography/greenwashing experts over the years (yes, I ‘graduated’ from the University of British Columbia’s Green/Sustainability Summer Institute mumbo-jumbo course) has pretty much gelled the reality: most academicians are very-very much corruptible and corrupting, back to the 7 Very Sinful C’s of Capitalism:
Diplomacy aside, it’s time to do more than agree to cut emissions. Some scientists say an engineered climate recovery must be taken seriously, with aggressive and deliberate management strategies put in place. We need to cultivate citizen interest and government support for research into the development of large-scale geoengineering projects.
As a media and communications scholar, I cannot argue that one science is superior to another. My research examines how Marshall McLuhan’s thinking about technology relates to the current climate crisis. Drawing on the work of McLuhan and others, I believe there are emerging technological options of urgent interest to citizens committed to a sustainable future, and we need to pursue these rather than holding onto remnants of a new normal. (source)
It all comes down to reset after reset, the great openly brazen and powerful Very Seven Very Deadly Very Sinfully C ‘s of the Worst System for Humanity and Earth Ever Devised, Capitalism! Corrupt, Colluding, Conspiratorial, Contagious, Calamitous, Corrosive, Cancerous
So many truths, so many millions of stories, so many people dazed and confused. This is the trickster veil that the overlords of capitalism have dished out for the planet. The USA has taken it hook, line and sinker:
No one group has done more to damage our global agriculture and food quality than the Rockefeller Foundation. They began in the early 1950s after the War to fund two Harvard Business School professors to develop vertical integration which they named “Agribusiness.” The farmer became the least important. They then created the fraudulent Green Revolution in Mexico and India in the 1960s and later the pro-GMO Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa since 2006. Money from the Rockefeller Foundation literally created the disastrous GMO genetically altered plants with their toxic glyphosate pesticides. Now again, the foundation is engaged in a major policy change in global food and agriculture and it’s not good. (source)
There you have it, way before 10 a.m. PST, October 23, eight days before the CDC-Fauci-FDA approved Halloween, this blog to never end all blogs. Blots on us all, and, Plague Upon All Their Houses. Just reread, scroll back up, and you get the idea as to whose heads must roll. And it is just a short list. You’ve read about other heads that must roll in many other of my diatribes or rants. Righteous indignation? Nah, calm forward thinking starting 51 years ago when I was just a wee one.
Oh, shoot, back to the future, again:
Max Blumenthal question: “Are current politicians basing the corona measures on incorrectly established scientific principles?”
Mattias Desmet: I think so. Here, too, we see a kind of naïve belief in objectivity that turns into its opposite: a serious lack of objectivity with masses of errors and carelessness. Moreover, there is a sinister connection between the emergence of this kind of absolutist science and the process of manipulation and totalitarianisation of society. In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the German-American political thinker Hannah Arendt brilliantly describes how this process took place in Nazi Germany, among other places. For example, nascent totalitarian regimes typically fall back on a ‘scientific’ discourse. They show a great preference for figures and statistics, which quickly degenerate into pure propaganda, characterized by a radical “disregard for the facts”. For example, Nazism based its ideology on the superiority of the Aryan race. A whole series of so-called scientific data substantiated their theory. Today we know that this theory had no scientific validity, but scientists at the time used the media to defend the regime’s positions. Hannah Arendt describes how these scientists proclaimed questionable scientific credentials, and she uses the word “charlatans” to emphasize this. She also describes how the emergence of this kind of science and its industrial applications was accompanied by an inevitable social change. Classes disappeared and normal social ties deteriorated, with much indefinable fear, anxiety, frustration, and lack of meaning. It is under such circumstances that the masses develop very specific psychological qualities. All fears that haunt society become linked to one ‘object’ – for example, the Jews – so that the masses enter into a kind of energetic struggle with this object. And onto that process of social conditioning of the masses, a completely new political and constitutional organization subsequently grafts itself: the totalitarian state.
Today, one perceives a similar phenomenon. There is widespread psychological suffering, lack of meaning, and diminished social ties in society. Then a story comes along that points to a fear object, the virus, after which the population strongly links its fear and discomfort to this dreaded object. Meanwhile, there is a constant call in all media to collectively fight the murderous enemy. The scientists who bring the story to the population are rewarded with tremendous social power in return. Their psychological power is so great that, at their suggestion, the whole of society abruptly renounces a host of social customs and reorganises itself in ways that no one at the beginning of 2020 thought possible. (source)
Oh? So, this discussions can’t happen because the overlords, their masters, the Seven Sinful C’s of Capitalism, the planned resets, all of that trump us barely useful eaters, readers, watchers, walkers, drivers, patients, renters, dreamers, breathers, sleepers, consumers!
As Democrats reintroduced a bill to expand Social Security on Tuesday, cosponsor Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) shared her personal experience with the program, emphasizing that wealthy people should contribute more.
Social Security 2100, introduced by Social Security Subcommittee Chair Rep. John Larson (D-Connecticut), would expand social security benefits and extend the depletion date by three years to 2038, after which the program will have to begin cutting benefits by 20 percent. It would give a small bump to current beneficiaries and increase the minimum benefit to 125 percent of the poverty line.
New increases would be paid for with taxes on the wealthy, applying payroll taxes to wages above $400,000. This would affect the wealthiest 0.4 percent of earners, according to the lawmakers.
Ocasio-Cortez, one of the nearly 200 cosponsors of the bill, emphasized the importance of the program and shared its impact on her own life at the bill’s unveiling. “It’s so important for us to know that Social Security is there for all of us: when we lose a parent, a spouse, or, god forbid, having an unexpected diagnosis or an accident,” she said, stressing that the program can benefit people of all ages, not just seniors.
“When I was a kid, my dad passed away due to an unexpected cancer diagnosis,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “I was the daughter of a domestic worker, and social security checks helped my family through. It’s why my brother and I were able to go to college; it’s why I felt confident while I was at college that my mom would be able to have something to eat.”
“To have that social safety net isn’t just good for us individually for peace of mind, it helps us feel like we are part of a society that respects our elders and values our vulnerable,” the lawmaker said.
Social Security is vital to preventing poverty, keeping more people out of poverty than any other program in the U.S. According to an analysis by the Census Bureau, Social Security kept 26.5 million people out of poverty in 2020. Still, policy experts say that the program, established in 1935, is in need of dire improvement and investments, as budget cuts have created delays, insufficient payouts and general service issues that have compounded over the past decades.
In 2020, the maximum federal Social Security benefit was $783 a month, or only about $9,400 a year — less than three-quarters of the federal poverty line, which is already extremely low by modern standards.
The bill is “common-sense legislation that expands and strengthens Social Security and includes particularly important provisions for unmarried caregivers, poorly compensated workers, and older people in their 80s and 90s,” Shawn Fremstad, senior policy fellow for the Center for Economic & Policy Research, told Truthout. The bill provides caregiver credits so that retired caregivers aren’t punished for exiting the workforce to take care of dependents.
Democrats plan to pay for the expansion by applying payroll taxes to incomes above $400,000, which Fremstad says “would be sufficient to fund the expansions in the bill and strengthen Social Security for the long term.”
Currently, wages above $142,800 aren’t subject to payroll taxes, which fund the program. Policy experts say that this is an egregious oversight of the bill, as people making far less than the wealthiest Americans bear more of the burden to pay into Social Security than the rich do. Because contributions are capped at that rate, millionaires can stop paying into the program as early as February each year, while the middle- and lower-classes have to pay into it every paycheck.
“Every year, when I did my taxes, I saw how much I contributed to Social Security as a waitress — thousands of dollars a year. What we want to do is make Social Security better, to expand it, to cover people like my mom, who left her job to care for my dad while he was ill,” said Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday. “And we want to do that by asking the wealthy to pay into Social Security the same way that I did when I was a waitress. It’s pretty simple.”
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is potentially facinganother court case. It’s once more over Universal Credit. The claimant in the case is having to appeal to the highest court in England. But will it listen?
Universal Credit and childcare
Nichola Salvato is a lone parent from Brighton. She’s a Universal Credit claimant who works. Under the system, Universal Credit should give Salvato her childcare costs back. But for her and potentially 500,000 other claimants, there’s a major flaw with this.
In September 2018 she began working full time as a welfare rights adviser for a housing association, and needed up to 3.5 hours childcare per day for her then 10-year-old daughter.
Although Nichola was working full time, she could not afford the £377.40 of upfront childcare costs that arose in September-October, so she had to borrow the money.
She had to borrow the money because Universal Credit does not pay childcare costs up-front. Claimants have to pay them first before the DWP gives the cost back to them. So, as Leigh Day wrote:
this situation continued in the months that followed and gave rise to what she described as a “cycle of debt where I was constantly owing childcare as well as loan providers and struggling to find the money to cover payments”.
“Overwhelmed”
The situation worsened for Salvato. Leigh Day wrote that:
By January 2019, Nichola was “becoming overwhelmed with the juggle of work, childcare, parenting and ongoing poverty”. She took as much time off as she could to minimise childcare costs and was constantly stressed and worried. Eventually Nichola had to cut her work to 32 hours, then 25.5 hours, which reduced her monthly income and increased her dependence on benefits.
So, she decided enough was enough and started a legal challenge against the DWP. Her case argued that Universal Credit should pay childcare costs upfront. The DWP said that the system was like it is to reduce “error and fraud”. But the judge agreed with Salvato. He ruled in January that the DWP had acted irrationally and discriminated against her based on her sex. Justice Chamberlain said:
It is not obvious why a system of awards based on liability to pay (evidenced by an invoice) would be any more likely to result in error or fraud than a system based on actual payment (evidenced by a receipt).
There is no evidence that the decision to make payment of the [childcare costs element] dependent on proof of payment (rather than proof that the charges have been incurred) was ever directly considered by Ministers.
But this wasn’t the end.
DWP: appealing common sense?
The DWP appealed the ruling in July. The Court of Appeal, according to Leigh Day, found:
that while the “proof of payment” rule does indirectly discriminate, the difference in treatment is justifiable and the rule is not irrational.
In other words, the DWP won. But Salvato is not accepting this. She has applied to appeal the previous Court of Appeal decision in the Supreme Court. Salvato said in a press release:
Although I’m very disappointed that the Court of Appeal did not uphold the High Court ruling, I am hopeful that that the Supreme Court will address the issue. So many of us single parents want to work but find the upfront childcare costs through Universal Credit an impossible barrier, meanwhile the government continues to support better off families with their childcare costs in advance via the tax-free childcare system.
Of course, this is not the first time claimants have taken the DWP to court over Universal Credit. Recently, a claimant won a case over hardship payments and how the DWP made people pay them back. The department has also been back in court for a third time over Universal Credit’s discriminatory treatment of severely disabled people.
The system is clearly discriminatory, and the Court of Appeal agrees that it is discriminatory, but has said the government is entitled to discriminate unless I can show that there is an easy and better way. I don’t think that is correct and I will continue my fight to get our voices heard. Affordable, accessible childcare support is fundamental to our infrastructure if the government want to achieve higher levels of employment among single mums and reduce child poverty.
Now, if Salvato’s appeal is granted, it will be down to the Supreme Court to decide if what seems to be common sense prevails, or if the DWP gets away with this alleged discrimination.
The chancellor has appeared to reject a call from footballer Marcus Rashford to extend the free school meal programme into the school holidays for the next three years.
Rejecting children
In a letter to the Sunday Times, England and Manchester United forward Rashford joined with supermarket bosses and food industry leaders to demand ministers continue providing the meals to vulnerable children, even when they were not in the classroom.
The signatories said that doing so during the earlier stages of the pandemic, after campaigning from Rashford forced a government U-turn, had been “a great success, bringing nutritional and educational benefits to children”.
Protestors hang up paper plates carrying slogans calling for the Government to extend the free school meals provision (Dominic Lipinski/PA)
They added that to go against recommendations in the National Food Strategy to extend this by three years would “both deepen and extend the scarring caused by the pandemic on our youngest citizens and ultimately our economy”.
However, Rishi Sunak told The Andrew Marr Show on BBC One that as other support such as the furlough scheme had come to an end, so should the provision of free school meals in the holidays. The chancellor said:
So we put in place some measures to help families during coronavirus, that was the right thing to do, and in common with the other things that have now come to an end, whether it was furlough or other things, that’s right that we’ve transitioned to a more normal way of doing things.
But we have replaced… but we have actually already acted, is what I’d say to Marcus and everyone else. We’ve put in place something called the holiday activities program, which provides not just meals but also activities for children during holiday periods for those families that need extra help.
That is a new programme, it was announced earlier this year, it’s being rolled out across the country, and I think that can make an enormous difference to people.
Rishi Sunak on The Andrew Marr Show (Jeff Overs/BBC)
Help needed
The joint letter in the Sunday Times said:
Better jobs are the route out of poverty, and the virtue of these children’s food schemes is that when working families shore up their income they can buy school and holiday meals themselves.
Until this happens, surely equality of opportunity and levelling-up begin with guaranteeing that every child in Britain can eat well – at least once a day.
It added that extending the free school meal scheme and the Healthy Start programme, which provides free vouchers to buy milk, fruit and vegetables, would cost £1.1bn a year, equivalent to 1% of the education budget and 4% of annual spending on the immediate consequences of obesity.
Rashford also previously called for the expansion of free school meal eligibility to all children aged 7-18 in all households earning £20,000 or less after benefits, and to children that are undocumented or living in immigrant households with “no recourse to public funds”.
Asked whether this would be part of his Budget, Sunak told Times Radio:
Well, I obviously wouldn’t… you wouldn’t expect me to comment on these things in advance of next week.
What I will say on that general agenda, which obviously Marcus has been passionate about and rightly ensured that we all talk about is, we acted during the crisis to put expanded support in place, that was the right thing to do.
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