After passing a stimulus package last week that is projected to raise 16 million Americans out of poverty, Senate Democrats are looking to make some of the temporary aid provisions permanent.
Several Democrats are specifically focused on making the expanded child tax credit permanent; currently, the expansion only lasts for the next year. Some Democrats have pushed for this for a long time: Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) has advocated for a child tax credit expansion for nearly two decades. Now that the expansion is a reality for the next year, thanks to the stimulus, top Democrats say that they will push for DeLauro’s campaign to become a permanent reality.
“That’s one of the most important things we can do. We can change America if we make [the provisions reducing child poverty] permanent,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) on MSNBC on Sunday. “Look, when a child is born into poverty, they don’t get adequate nutrition, they don’t get adequate health care, they don’t get adequate housing, they don’t get adequate education. By the time they’re 18, they’re many steps behind.”
“If we can eradicate child poverty, it will be so good for these kids, their families, but for all of America and our economy,” Schumer continued. “I’ll do everything I can to make it permanent.”
The stimulus package makes the child tax credit more generous and fully deductible and makes the payments monthly instead of just during tax season. Under the plan, families with children aged 6-17 get $3,000 per child and families with children 5 and under get $3,600 per child over the next year — divided into monthly payments — starting in July.
Research has shown that the stimulus, in large part thanks to the expanded tax credit, is expected to reduce child poverty by more than half.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) found earlier this year that the expanded child tax credit alone would help lift nearly 10 million children out of poverty or closer to the poverty line. Research has shown that providing additional financial aid to lower- and middle-class families, such as raising the Earned Income Tax Credit, helps increase health and educational outcomes in children.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is also calling for expansions to the anti-poverty measures in the bill. Gillibrand has previously called for making paid leave for workers permanent and on Sunday pushed for the Agriculture Department to permanently increase the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, referred to as SNAP or WIC.
“We need to permanently raise the value of the food packages so families can afford not just to buy more food but healthier food,” Gillibrand said. The stimulus package includes investment in food assistance programs like WIC and SNAP, which will help increase the amount of aid they can provide.
Though the stimulus package contained some concessions to moderates, progressives have praised the bill, hailing it as “the most significant legislation for working people that has been passed in decades,” as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) told CNN last week. The expanded child tax credit is a rather progressive notion, as The New York Times has written, since it’s essentially a guaranteed income for families with children.
Democrats are hoping that the anti-poverty measures in the stimulus, which has wide and decisive bipartisan support among the public, will not only help the public struggling under the pandemic but also help their chances in future elections.
President Joe Biden is touring this week to tout the package that received zero Republican votes, and Democrats are saying that they will leverage their support of the bill when they run in 2022 and beyond. Biden has told Democrats this month that the stimulus package passed in 2009 under Barack Obama was massively helpful but ill-publicized, which led to Democrats losing seats in Congress in the ensuing years.
A backbench Labour MP has made a video about the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. Its narrative and analysis have shamed Keir Starmer’s response to the crisis. Because it highlights in under two minutes the ‘tale of two Covids’. It’s the story of how rich people have made a killing while the rest of us suffered.
A Tale of Two Covids: us…
Jon Trickett has been the Labour MP for Hemsworth since 1996. On Thursday 11 March, he put out a short video. It was called A Tale of Two Covids. In it, Trickett showed how the pandemic has affected people differently. And the video clearly highlights how for many of us, coronavirus has been a disaster.
Trickett highlighted how the NHS has:
“Lost” 22,000 beds.
“A record 4.5 million people still waiting for treatment”.
Been ‘insulted’ by the Tories with a 1% pay rise.
Then, he moved on to workers. Trickett noted that there are:
10 million people “precariously employed”.
5.5 million people “paid below the living wage”.
4.7 million people on furlough.
He also detailed the effect of the pandemic on communities:
4.2 million children live in poverty.
10 million adults do too.
“Deprived areas have the highest Covid death rates”.
Trickett then turned his attention to who had benefitted from the pandemic.
… and them
He noted that:
“1,000 billionaires’ wealth soared by £2.76 trillion globally”.
‘The London Stock Exchange increased by £639bn during the pandemic’.
“Big business” has cash reserves of £909bn; equal to 35% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Of course, all this is the tip of the iceberg. For example, six out of ten Covid deaths have been disabled people. The number of destitute households has more than doubled. Meanwhile, the number of so-called “dollar millionaires” in London (those worth the equivalent of $1m) has exploded. The Guardianwrote that:
one in 10 people living in London are dollar millionaires, with the data highlighting the yawning inequality gap in the capital. More than 2.5 million (or 28%) of those living in London are classed as “living in poverty”
Socialist solutions
So, Trickett outlined in the video what policies he think would help. His ideas included a wealth tax:
But ultimately what Trickett has done is shown up the Labour leadership.
Showing up Starmer
People have been critical of Starmer for effectively aping the Tories. He has repeatedlybacked Boris Johnson. But despite Labour’s polling seeing a bounce after Starmer became leader, its numbers have since gone into reverse.
Trickett’s video also appears to be a dig at Starmer’s leadership. Because it ends by saying that these ideas represent:
a radical socialist agenda. Join us.
This is put on screen with no link to joining the Labour Party. As SKWAWKBOXwrote:
was Trickett talking to the dreary party leader when he posted just two words with the video? “Brace yourself.”
His video is at odds with the Labour leadership. And it’s clear it was intentionally so. Where Trickett is going with this remains to be seen. And as one Twitter user said:
Some one needs to tell Keir… this is how you do it.
Whether Starmer would listen or not is another matter entirely.
Daniel Jadue is the mayor of Recoleta, a commune that is part of the expanding city of Santiago, Chile. His office is on the sixth floor of a municipal building in whose lower reaches one can find a pharmacy, an optical shop, and a bookstore run by the municipality that are dedicated to providing fairly priced goods. On the walls of his office are emblems of his commitment to the Palestinian people, including flags and an iconic cartoon of Handala created by Naji al-Ali, a Palestinian cartoonist who was assassinated in 1987. ‘I am Palestinian’, Jadue tells me with pride. ‘I was born on 28 June 1967, just days after the Israelis took Jerusalem’. The struggle of the Palestinians, which has haunted much of his political life, he says, is ‘not so different from the struggle of the Chilean people.
The March 5, 2021, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview with historian Alice O’Connor on the War on Poverty, originally broadcast as part of the September 30, 2016, show. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: In September of 2016, CounterSpinspoke with historian Alice O’Connor, who brought a story of the War on Poverty that had little to do with elite media’s Heritage Foundation–inflected version of it as a paternalistic campaign to throw cash at poor people—obviously unsuccessful, since people are still poor.
It seems very relevant to current media debates, in which the idea of rechanneling resources currently going to law enforcement, or community budgetary control more broadly, is treated as an idea from Mars, which requires that media evade, or ignore, or erase some relevant, recent history.
Alice O’Connor is professor of history at the University of California/Santa Barbara, director of UCSB’s Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality and Democracy, and author of, among other titles, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in 20th Century US History.
I asked her first to take us back to 1964, and what the War on Poverty looked like in real time.
***
Alice O’Connor: In real time, the War on Poverty was associated with a very specific set of programs that surrounded what was most widely known as the Community Action Program. The core idea of the Community Action Program was that federal government funding should go, for a whole variety of social services, to local communities, who would have a say on how those resources were to be distributed, and were distributed in such a way that they would work to the benefit of that community, and that those funds would be planned and used with the so-called “maximum feasible participation” of the poor. And that was the most widely known of the War on Poverty programs at the time. We can talk a little bit later about why that was very controversial.
The reality, though, is that the War on Poverty as a broader initiative was a whole series of interlinked and really embedded programs, that started with the administration’s commitment to bringing the economy much closer to what they considered to be full employment, and that they would generate jobs that paid a decent wage. At that time, the minimum wage was higher in real terms than it has been until fairly recently—in some states, that is to say; I mean, right now, the federal minimum wage is pathetic, but it was closer then to what people are striving toward now in the $15 minimum wage.
Janine Jackson: Uh-huh.
The Watts Labor Community Action Committee, set up as part of the Community Action Program.
AOC: So the idea was the No. 1 weapon in the War on Poverty—and I have to underscore, this is the language that was being used at the time—the No. 1 weapon was a faster-growing, full-employment, decent-paying, good job–creating economy. And the commitment of the administration, more broadly speaking, was to make that happen.
Second was a whole other related series of programs, that were related to the Great Society, that were basically about expanding the welfare state. And I’m not just talking about the welfare state targeted at low-income people and people below the poverty line. Because this was an era and a period in which we got Medicare, Medicaid, as just two examples of really massive expansion in the provision of healthcare that reached a much broader array of people than people who were below the poverty line, but also created the Medicaid program, which was and continues to be targeted at people below the poverty line.
So the other programs that were related specifically to the War on Poverty were programs like Head Start, which is still around today, and is considered to be one of the most successful social policy programs ever, but a perpetually underfunded program, so a program that has never reached all of the children and families that are actually eligible for it. As well as programs like Job Corps and all sorts of other jobs-in-training programs, community-based health centers.
So the idea was that we’re going to really have a comprehensive array of initiatives. The other one, I should add, which was very, very important at the time, and which continues to be very important, but it was subsequently eviscerated, essentially, by the Reagan administration, was legal assistance for the poor. Not just narrowly construed Legal Aid, but the kind of legal assistance that would help low-income people get not only the representation, but the legal rights, that they deserved. So that’s just a way of kind of trying to get across the comprehensive nature of the idea behind the War on Poverty.
JJ: It was actually the fact that it wasn’t just handouts of cash, so-called, but that it was actually about social change. That was why it was attacked at the time.
Alice O’Connor: “The idea of putting resources of any kind in the hands of low-income people, in particular low-income minority people, low-income women…was going to be a threat to local power structures.”
AOC: That’s a big part of why it was attacked. Two things one can say about this is that when we go back and look at the comprehensive array of initiatives, we can see how there was a huge amount of potential at the time for a structural reform vision, but what happened in actuality was that a lot of that potential was not met. In part because the idea of really growing the economy and creating jobs in such a way that people would have access to them, well, frankly never panned out, because there was not strong enough a commitment to it.
But on the community action front, which was really where the War on Poverty came under immediate fire, and the most controversial part of it, that continues to feed into this completely distorted narrative of failure, was about the fact that the initial plan for the community action, especially coming from Washington, from Washington bureaucrats, was, OK, this is going to be a really good way to coordinate services in a more rational and holistic way, and so that we don’t have all sorts of narrow programs competing with one another. If we really coordinate things at the local level, we can have truly comprehensive intervention, and then we should let local people have a say in how this happens.
What a lot of those architects, at least some of them, didn’t adequately anticipate was that the idea of putting resources of any kind in the hands of low-income people, in particular low-income minority people, low-income women—and low-income people of any race, but especially low-income African Americans—was going to be a threat to local power structures, segregationist local power structures, and it was going to be an avenue of political empowerment for poor people, and poor people’s movements and organizations, that they were going to use to the hilt.
And when those dynamics started playing out, which was very quickly, you got massive resistance to the use of those funds for genuine empowerment, on the one hand, and then you also, very quickly, began to get attacks on the program, not just from arch-conservative segregationists, which you certainly did, but also from liberal party establishment figures at the local level who said, wait a minute, we don’t want other people in control of these resources; we want to direct where they’re going to go.
***
Janine Jackson: That was historian Alice O’Connor, professor at UC Santa Barbara, speaking with CounterSpin in 2016.
A new report has found that the American Rescue Plan, which passed the House on Wednesday and is expected to be signed into law by President Joe Biden on Friday, will sharply reduce poverty in the country, especially among Black and Latinx people.
The report, by D.C.-based think tank the Urban Institute, finds that the $1.9 trillion stimulus will reduce the projected poverty rate for 2021 from 13.7 to 8.7 percent overall. It will also shrink the racial poverty gap by reducing poverty among Black and Latinx people by 42 and 39 percent, respectively, the report says.
The economic impacts of the pandemic have hit Black and Latinx people especially hard, more so than other racial demographic groups. And, as the economy has bounced back over the past months, Black people have not bounced back as much, following the pattern of the fallout of the 2008 recession that left Black households in the lurch for over 10 years.
The American Rescue Plan, in combination with previous stimulus packages, could also cut the share of people experiencing deep poverty, or people earning under 50 percent of the poverty line, by a third, the Urban Institute report finds.
The provisions with the biggest impact on reducing poverty, say the report’s writers, are the additional unemployment checks, the extension of food stamp benefits, the $1,400 relief checks and the new expanded version of the child tax credit in the bill.
Biden’s stimulus package will also be particularly good for children, the report finds, reducing the poverty rate for children by more than half in 2021. This is in large part due to the expanded child tax credit in the bill, which expands upon the existing child tax credit by offering parents up to $3,600 per child over the next year in the form of monthly payments.
The report’s findings bolster previous reports which have also found that the expanded child tax credit could play a massive role in lowering child poverty, and poverty in general. This includes a Columbia University analysis, which found that the bill will cut child poverty by half (though the Columbia report also included several provisions like the minimum wage raise that didn’t make it into the final package).
The House passed the bill Wednesday afternoon, and the White House said that Biden will sign the bill on Friday afternoon, two days before key unemployment benefits from the last bill expire. The package passed the House and the Senate with zero Republican votes as Republicans united against the bill.
Though Republicans oppose the bill, the legislation and its policies enjoy overwhelming bipartisan support among the public. A new poll out Wednesday conducted by CNN finds that 61 percent of Americans support the bill overall. The poll also finds that 85 percent of those polled support the bill’s provisions to expand tax credits, including 95 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of Republicans — a far cry from the 0 percent buy-in from congressional Republicans.
The CNN poll of 1,009 people also finds a 55 percent majority support for the $15 minimum wage proposal that didn’t make it into the final bill.
Though the bill doesn’t include the vaunted progressive goal of raising the minimum wage, the American Rescue Plan does include provisions that have earned progressive praise. “Because of [the progressive movement’s] support, the U.S. Senate … passed the most comprehensive pro-worker piece of legislation in the modern history of our country,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).
Progressives in the House have also celebrated the package, which Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), the head of the Progressive Caucus, called in a statement, “a truly progressive and bold package that delivers on its promise to put money directly in people’s pockets.”
Dr Agnes Kalibata responds to a report on the 2021 summit that she is leading as a special envoy for the UN secretary general
As you note in your article (Farmers and rights groups boycott food summit over big business links, 4 March), farmers have for too long been on the fringes of global discussions about hunger, poverty and climate change, despite being the frontline of our food systems and the custodians of our natural resources.
The UN food systems summit marks a momentous opportunity for farmers, producers and many others who support them to be at the heart of the year-long consultative process that has been launched to improve our shared food system.
Fuck all royals. Take back everything they’ve stolen and give them minimum wage jobs and regard them with nothing but disdain forevermore.
❖
Still can’t get over the fact that there’s a “queen”. She wears a crown and sits on a throne, like a fucking Tolkien character. Then a whole commonwealth full of LARPers points at her and goes “Ooh, it’s the Queen!” like a bunch of fucking nerds.
“Oh hello, I’m the Queen.” No you’re not you ridiculous nerd, your name is Liz and you’re the most expensive LARP in the world.
❖
Royals are just oligarchs who rub your face in it.
The monarchy are literally white supremacist pirates. Someone please tell Oprah.
Poverty is torture. The poverty that capitalist countries bake into their system is the worst kind of all because the victims are made to feel ashamed, and like it’s their fault, and like the way out is through simping for their persecutors and working even harder for them.
❖
There’s a large faction of self-identified leftists who insist that the only path toward progress in the US is to continue slowly turning the Democratic Party into a leftist party. This is pushing on a fake fire exit painted on the wall in a burning building. That door will never open. This faction is joined by another functionally identical faction which in theory advocates voting Democrat to minimize damage while undertaking direct action to push real change, but in practice only ever does the voting Democrat part.
Continuing to advocate pushing on the fake fire exit door is guaranteeing that you’ll never escape from the burning building. There are other escape routes, they’re just harder than pretending you can use a counter-revolutionary party to advance revolutionary agendas.
“Using the Democratic Party is the easiest way to effect real change” is like the old joke about the man searching for his lost keys under the streetlight, then when asked if that’s where he actually lost his keys replies “No, but this is where the light is”. It seems like the easiest solution, but there are no actual solutions in that easiness.
Corporate Democrats are not freakish aberrations in the party, they are the party. An entire global empire is built on their continuing to do what they do, with a proportionate amount of power going into keeping that happening. The few progressives in the Democratic Party are just garnish on a turd.
You can’t vote your way out of a mess that you didn’t vote your way into. Nobody voted to let oligarchs control the government and tilt the entire political system to their advantage. Nobody asked your permission to steal your country; don’t ask their permission to take it back.
The entire electoral system is rigged against real change. Only direct action at mass scale will work, which will only become possible when we begin prioritizing countering oligarchic propaganda.
Remember kids, Russia and China are bad because Russia and China have state media. https://t.co/iisfWHTxuQ
If any non-US aligned nation began circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, waging constant wars and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it, we’d immediately have a third world war. Only by global propaganda operations is this behavior from the US normalized.
❖
The absurd difficulty in getting people to realize that most of their beliefs about the world are propaganda-implanted lies is their unexamined assumption that if mass-scale propaganda operations were happening in their country, they would have read about it in the news.
❖
The most significant thing happening in the world right now is the fact that the global capitalist order which is destroying our ecosystem is held in place by a US-centralized power alliance whose aggressions are putting our planet at increasing risk of nuclear war. There is nothing more urgent or newsworthy than the fact that multiple forms of human insanity are imperiling the entire human species, and indeed the life of every terrestrial organism. The fact that this isn’t at the forefront of our attention shows how propagandized we are.
❖
Joe Biden is imprisoning and torturing an Australian journalist because that journalist exposed US war crimes.
❖
People have this weird prevailing assumption that their ruling institutions which did many evil things in the past just magically stopped being evil at some point, despite their never even declaring any intention to change. The FBI, the CIA, the monarchy, the Vatican.
The US-centralized empire drops explosives on human beings many times per day and it hardly ever makes the news.
❖
America would be unrecognizable if it had ordered the separation of corporation and state like it orders separation of church and state.
❖
It’s always far easier to flow with power than push against it. That’s why all the wealthiest people are those who collaborate with dominant power structures.
❖
An individual will keep repeating the same toxic patterns until they bring awareness to the inner processes which give rise to them. The same is true of civilizations, and of empires. Shining the light of truth on what’s happening in the world is like taking the world to therapy, or like sitting it down on the meditation cushion to look within.
❖
Trying to heal your inner wounds without deeply loving yourself is like trying to hug someone with one arm while shoving them away with the other. Your traumatized bits won’t come into the light of consciousness if you don’t create a welcoming environment for them.
___________________________
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old bookWoke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Beijing – Today is International Women’s Day (IWD), and the theme for this year’s celebration is “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world.” We recognize the tremendous contribution and leadership demonstrated by women and girls around the world in shaping our recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and a more sustainable future.
A global review of the progress achieved towards commitments made at the Fourth World Conference on Women 25 years ago in Beijing, conducted by UN Women in 2020, reveals that no country has fully delivered on the Beijing Platform for Action, nor is close to it. Globally, women currently hold just one-quarter of the seats at the tables of power across the board and are absent from some key decision-making spaces, including in peace and climate negotiations.
This reality is despite the advances that we can see globally: there are now more girls in school than ever before, fewer women are dying in childbirth, and over the past decade, 131 countries have passed laws to support women’s equality.
This week on CounterSpin: It’s not clear where the fight to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour stands in Congress right now, but while politicians do what they need to do, no one’s forcing news media to drown out discussion of the economic and historical sense, the simple rightness of lifting the wage, in smaller-bore talk about current political “feasibility.” Polls show wide public support, across party lines, so it’s only elite media forcing the idea that those opposing this overdue move are “moderate.” While a federal minimum wage increase would affect millions of workers and the social fabric, it would have particular impact on one “essential” yet somehow expendable group: Black women. We’ll talk about that with economist Michelle Holder, associate professor of economics at John Jay College/City University of New York, and author of the report The Double Gap and the Bottom Line: African-American Women’s Wage Gap and Corporate Profits.
CounterSpin210305Holder.mp3
Watts Labor Community Action Committee, 1965
Also on the show: The fact that news media can even host a debate around just how poor it’s OK to let a person be who works a full-time job in a wealthy country is a sign of the perverse nature of media’s storytelling on poverty. But media also distort the history of responses to poverty in this country, which has always included recognition that it’s about power, and not just money. We talked about some of this crucial but scarcely discussed history a few years back with Alice O’Connor, professor of History at University of California/Santa Barbara, director of UCSB’s Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality and Democracy, and author of, among other titles, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in 20th Century US History. We’ll hear some of that conversation today.
CounterSpin210305OConnor.mp3
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
I write about humanity’s problems as a species in all sorts of ways in this space, but really if you want to get straightforward about things all we’re ever actually talking about here is a lack of awareness of what’s true and the need to eliminate that lack.
A lack of awareness is the source of all our major problems, whether we’re talking about war, poverty, ecocide, corruption, exploitation, authoritarianism, prejudice, or even much smaller-scale problems like abusive family dynamics or the psychological suffering of the individual.
If there were sufficiently widespread and penetrating awareness of the contributing factors in any of these problems, these problems would cease to exist. All you’d have left would be the odd natural disaster and the inevitability of sickness and death, which would also become far less problematic with the introduction of more awareness.
Yes, from a certain point of view it is true and accurate to say that many of our large-scale problems are due to the fact that humans whose brains lack functioning empathy centers are most well-equipped to manipulate their way into positions of power and influence, and that the amoral nature of capitalism ensures that it will be dominated by those willing to do whatever it takes to climb to the top. From a certain point of view it is true and accurate to say that our problems are caused by the fact that things like war, oppression, ecocide and exploitation will necessarily continue as long as our world is dominated by a system where those things are profitable and human behavior is driven by profit.
But it is also true that underlying every single part of the dynamics I just listed is a fundamental lack of human awareness.
Why are psychopaths allowed to manipulate their way into power and influence? Because people aren’t sufficiently aware that it is happening. Manipulation only works if its target isn’t aware that they’re being manipulated, whether you’re talking about individual manipulation or collective manipulation via propaganda. If people were able to clearly perceive abusive power dynamics, their awareness of what’s going on would render manipulation ineffective, and they would use the power of their numbers to dissolve those abusive power dynamics.
If people were sufficiently aware of what their government is doing, what oligarchs are doing, what banks are doing, what the military is doing, those power structures would be unable to operate in the way that they do, because a sufficient number of people would rise up collectively to stop them. This is why so much energy goes into protecting government secrecy, circulating mass media propaganda, promoting internet censorship and jailing journalists who reveal too much: they are preventing awareness of the truth from spreading so that they can continue operating in the darkness.
If people were sufficiently aware of the horrors of imperialist aggression and of how much military expansionism is costing them personally, they would never stand for it, and they would force it to end.
If people were sufficiently aware of the insanity of stockpiling armageddon weapons on our planet, nuclear weapons would be eliminated everywhere.
If people were sufficiently aware of how aggressively and unjustly they are being robbed by the ruling class, they would use the power of their numbers to take back what was stolen from them and create a more equitable system.
If people were sufficiently aware of what we are doing to our environment and what will happen to us in the near term if we don’t stop, ecocide for profit would cease to be an option.
If people were sufficiently aware of how much wealth, information and freedom is being taken from them every day for no other reason than to benefit the powerful, existing power structures would not be permitted to exist any longer.
If people were sufficiently aware of the way mass-scale narrative control is being used to manipulate the thoughts they think about their nation and their world, those narratives would no longer be imbued with the power of belief.
If people were sufficiently aware of how completely artificial our system of money and economics actually is, they would change it to a system that doesn’t let human beings starve and die for not having enough imaginary numbers in their bank account.
If people were sufficiently aware of the injustices caused by racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice, and sufficiently aware of the humanity possessed by those who are different from them, all the injustices and inequalities caused by those prejudices would dissipate.
If people were sufficiently aware of the cruelty and unsustainability of factory farming, new food systems would quickly replace it.
If people were sufficiently aware of the abusive power dynamics in their nation, in their community, in their family, in their interpersonal relationships, those abusive power dynamics would not be permitted to continue.
If people were sufficiently aware of their early childhood trauma and the inner conditioning patterns which were set in place within them to cope with it, they would heal that trauma and begin moving harmoniously in the world.
If people were sufficiently aware of the way their personal suffering is caused by harmful mental habits arising from false identity constructs, their personal suffering would cease.
All our major problems are caused by a lack of awareness and can be solved by an increase in awareness. This is why fighting propaganda, opposing censorship, protecting press freedoms and exposing the truth of what’s really going on in our world is so important. It’s also why inner work on bringing consciousness to our inner processes is so important. Expanding awareness, both inwardly and outwardly, is the most important thing that a human being can do in this life.
If we had such awareness collectively, our few remaining problems would be easy to address. Without a system where all the resources are sucked away from the most needful for the benefit of the most powerful, the sick could be far more effectively cared for, and natural disasters far more efficaciously responded to.
If we had sufficient awareness of what’s true, in ourselves and in our world, we would have paradise on earth. Psychopathic manipulators would be no more capable of operating in such a world than a predator covered in glowing neon signs and clanging bells would be capable of hunting. All dysfunction would be seen as clearly as a black smudge on a white tile, and addressed just as easily. From there, our potential as a species would be limitless.
___________________________
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old bookWoke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
A parliamentary committee is running an inquiry into child poverty. And it wants to hear people’s voices on the issue. It may seem like the committee wants to hear from professionals, but this can also involve people who’ve actually lived through child poverty.
Child poverty: out of control?
The Canary has previously written about child poverty. In the last decade, it began to rise again – after falling previously. The Conversation summed this up in a graph:
But herein lies the problem. Because the figures above are based on one way of measuring poverty. If you take another method, devised by the Social Metrics Commission, then it’s higher but has remained fairly stable:
You can also measure child poverty by looking at low income households. Meaning that the waters can be muddied around the figures. For example, as the Conversation noted, it’s this muddying which allowed Boris Johnson to claim child poverty had fallen – by him using only one measure.
So the Work and Pensions Select Committee has launched an inquiry into child poverty.
A new wide-ranging inquiry from the Work and Pensions Committee is to examine what steps the Government could take to reduce the numbers of children who grow up in poverty in the UK.
The inquiry will be looking at several areas. The Canary previously reported that work and pensions secretary Thérèse Coffey may as well have stuck two fingers up at the poorest children in the UK. This is because she dismissed many of the committee’s concerns. But now, the committee is taking its work one step further. It’s asking for people to get involved.
The Committee would like to hear your views on the following questions. You don’t have to answer all of the questions. You can respond on behalf of an organisation, or as an individual.
The questions were overarching, but they included:
“What is the impact of child poverty…?”
“How effectively does the [DWP] work with local authorities and with support organisations to reduce the numbers of children living in poverty and to mitigate the impact of poverty on children?”
You can submit your answers by uploading a document. If you can’t do this, email workpencom(at)parliament.uk for support.
Collective voice-raising
The committee needs a true picture of child poverty. To do this best, it should look at evidence from people with lived experience. And the more people who get involved, the better. At best, the Conservative government is playing down the issue. At worst, it’s wilfully ignoring it. Society needs to collectively raise its voice about this. And the Work and Pensions Committee’s inquiry is one way of doing it.
Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) welfare cuts have had a “direct” and “negative” impact on people’s mental and physical health. That’s the view of a new report into the UK’s social security system. Moreover, the research also highlights how DWP’s changes over the past five years led to a perfect storm of deprivation and ill health when the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic hit. Taken as a whole, the report’s findings suggest a greater number of people have died and suffered during the pandemic because of the cuts.
DWP: back to 2016
In 2016, the Conservative government put in place the Welfare Reform and Work Act. It made sweeping changes to the social security system. The then work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith said at the time it would form part of:
the Government’s aim to move from a high tax, high welfare and low wage society to a low tax, lower welfare and higher wage society. This Bill lays the ground for that commitment and helps us to continue the job of reversing the Labour’s Government’s failure that led us into the difficulties we inherited.
Now, five years on, the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Health in All Policies has looked at the Act. It has analysed the effect it has had on social security claimants. And the APPG has also looked at how the 2016 changes have affected society overall. Its findings and conclusion are damning.
Sweeping changes
The act made numerous changes to social security. As the APPG’s report laid out, it:
“Reduced the benefit cap (the total income from social security support)”.
“Limited the amount of support provided by child tax credit for families who become responsible to a third or subsequent child born on or after 6 April 2017”.
“Limited the child element of universal credit to a maximum of two children”.
“Removed the Work-Related Activity [WRAG] component in Employment and Support Allowance [ESA] and the Limited Capability for Work element in Universal Credit”.
In short, all these were effectively cuts or restrictions on the amount of money the DWP gave to claimants. Now, by combining lots of research, the APPG has reported on the vast impact the act has had.
Five key areas
The APPG looked at the act in the context of five areas. These were:
Benefit cap: £1.62bn cut.
Benefit freeze: £10.2bn cut; 30% of households saw a reduction in money.
Two child limit: £5.35bn cut, affecting 3.8 million families.
“Abolition of £30 a week support for disabled people who were unfit for work (ESA WRAG)”: £1.365bn cut, affecting half a million disabled and sick people.
“Extension of sanctions to ‘responsible carers’ (parents of pre-nursery age children)”.
Then, its report compiled lots of evidence. This showed that the 2016 act has not done what the Tories claimed it would do. In fact, when you look at what has happened, it has really done the opposite.
Overarching negative effects
After the Tories put the 2016 Act, and one from 2013, in place, The APPG report notes the following effects. Child poverty went up:
The number of homeless children in March 2019 was 51% higher than in 2014:
There was a rise in children on Free School Meals:
But it was the APPG’s analysis on welfare reform’s effects on people’s physical and mental health which made for the starkest reading.
DWP reforms: literally making people sick
Its research noted that:
Infant mortality rose from 3.6 per 1,000 live births in 2017 to 3.9. The report said this was “unprecedented in modern history”. The report also said that from 2016-18 there was a “16.4% increase in the number of women with 2 or more children terminating their pregnancies compared to increases of 7% and 10.3% for women with no children and one child, respectively“.
more than half of the 14 million people living in poverty have a disabled person in their household. Approximately 6.5 million disabled adults and children are living in poverty, with disabled working age adults having the highest rate (40%). Although physical disability rates have stayed the same over the last 5 years, mental health conditions have increased. Since 2012, there are an additional 1.6 million people with a severe mental health condition or mental disability.
Then, it cited 2017 research which said that negative health behaviours like smoking and not eating fresh fruit and vegetables were associated with increased poverty. More research showed that poor children:
were more likely to have socioemotional behavioural problems, cognitive disability and to be overweight or obese
Shortening claimant’s lives?
The report also noted that:
There was a 9% increase in claimants with “depressive-like symptoms” due to the benefit cap.
Another study found a “causal relationship between the psychological distress that claimants experienced and moving onto” Universal Credit.
The impacts of this social security-driven poverty on the health and wellbeing on the population is profound. The United Kingdom is one of a few advanced economies where our life expectancy has flatlined since 2018, with poor areas seeing a decline. But the impact of this poverty on our children on their life chances but also on their longevity is shocking for the 5th richest country in the world. The evidence that for every 1% increase in child poverty there’s an extra 5.8 infant deaths per 100 000 live births shame us.
But then the pandemic hit. And as the report highlights, all of the problems the DWP created made this worse.
Entrenching the issues
In early 2020, professor Michael Marmot released a report. It looked at the 10 years after The Marmot Review and looked at the health of society. Marmot found that:
people can expect to spend more of their lives in poor health.
improvements to life expectancy have stalled, and declined for the poorest 10% of women.
the health gap has grown between wealthy and deprived areas.
In December last year, he added to his “call” on the government. This was because coronavirus had hit poorest communities the hardest. Marmot said that the causes of this were the:
“governance and political culture which has damaged social cohesion and inclusivity”.
“widening inequalities in power, money and resources”.
“regressive austerity policies over the last decade”.
“declining life expectancy and healthy life expectancy of the poorest, particularly women, which is amongst the worst of all comparable economies”.
In other words, things like the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016 had directly led to people dying during the pandemic.
The ‘dehumanisation’ of claimants
Abrahams said in a statement that:
There is a growing evidence base of the direct and negative impacts of different aspects of the social security system on the mental and physical health of claimants and their families, in addition to the indirect impacts mediated by poverty as a result of having inadequate income from work and/or social security support.
In addition to quantitative evidence we looked at qualitative studies which pointed to a process of ‘dehumanising’ claimants that eroded their self-esteem and confidence, making them feel worthless. In some cases, the whole experience had proved too much for some claimants and they have taken their own lives.
It’s important to note the knock-on impact that this ill health will have on health services and for social protection to be recognised as mitigating against socio-economic health risk factors.
So, what can be done?
Overarching changes needed
The APPG said it wanted the government to make 16 changes. These included:
“making permanent” the £20 a week Universal Credit uplift.
“Removing sanctions”.
“Eradicating benefit caps and lifting the two-child limit”.
“Ending the five-week wait for Universal Credit and providing cash grants for low-income households”.
But will the DWP and the Tories listen?
The DWP says…
The Canary asked the DWP for comment. It said in response to the APPG report:
This Government has always been committed to supporting the most vulnerable and targeting support to those in greatest need, including boosting welfare support by billions and investing at least £2.3 billion of extra funding a year in mental health services by 2023/24.
The DWP also pointed The Canary to additional measures it has put in place. These included the £20 Universal Credit uplift which runs until the end of March, and additional investment in mental health services.
But Abrahams disagrees.
Money-saving at the expense of people’s lives
She said the 2016 act has literally done little else except save money:
Although the Government achieved their aim of cutting welfare spending by introducing these measures – working age spending on social security has shrunk by £34bn since 2010 – there has been minimal impact on helping to get people into work who wouldn’t have got into work without these measures.
In the short term, Abrahams said:
This is a clear warning to the Chancellor that, as a bare minimum, he must maintain the £20 Universal Credit uplift in his Budget this week to help alleviate some of the devastating damage caused by this act, and the ongoing effects Covid, on low income families who are already struggling to survive.
But it remains to be seen how UK social security will pan out in the long term. The number of Universal Credit claimants has doubled since the pandemic started. With around six million people now claiming, it’s likely the problems that the APPG highlighted will now affect even more people. And given its track record, it’s unlikely the Tory government will act to stop this.
Economic justice organizers may soon triumph in their fight for a $15 minimum wage. Thanks to their years of effort, President Biden (and every Democratic contender during the primary debates) vowed to hike the minimum wage to $15 an hour. In keeping with that promise, Biden attached a wage bill to his $1.9 trillion COVID relief package.
Although Republicans and their political allies are firmly opposed to the measure, the Senate could approve it. But Democratic holdouts like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin could doom it, since he says $15 is too high for West Virginia and wants an $11 minimum instead. As almost a fifth of West Virginians live in poverty, a reasonable question would be: For whom is $15 too high?
This debate is not new. Since the early 1900s, businesses have balked at a livable minimum wage, while most others approve of it: According to recent polls, 75 percent of Americans want the minimum wage raised to $15. Even during the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt struggled for six years before he convinced Congress to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which set the federal minimum at 25 cents an hour and 40 cents by 1940.
Furious at the Supreme Court and business interests for demolishing labor-friendly laws, FDR cautioned Americans to “not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day … tell you … that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.”
Eighty years later, as of 2019, 34 million Americans still live at, under, or just above the poverty line; nearly half of workers earn under $15 an hour; and the federal minimum ($7.25 an hour) hasn’t budged since 2009.
For its part, the mainstream press isn’t helping. On February 11, a Washington Post editorial warned that, “Democrats must listen to the data,” claiming that “objective economic research” should convince Congress “to proceed with caution.”
So another question is whose data? For nearly 30 years, scores of scholars have reported on wage hikes’ positive effects: They pull the poor out of poverty and stimulate the economy by putting more cash in low-paid workers’ pockets, which they spend, boosting business receipts and raising tax revenues at all government levels.
But The Washington Post has fallen into FDR’s “calamity” camp, citing the supposedly nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data. On the plus side, in its latest report (February 2021), the CBO predicted that 27 million workers’ earnings would rise with a $15 minimum wage by 2025, lifting 900,000 Americans out of poverty. But it warned that, “1.4 million mostly young low-skilled workers would drop out of the labor force.” Equally grim, it claimed the federal deficit will soar by $54 billion over 10 years.
What’s little known is that the CBO doesn’t carry out its own studies and instead relies on others. And here’s the rub: According to Michael Reich, an economics professor at University of California, Berkeley, the CBO mainly looked at studies that found negative effects. Even worse, it kept spiking the damage, since its 2019 report said 1.1 million jobs would be lost — 300,000 fewer than its latest estimate.
Reich says the CBO based many of its figures on a University of Washington study, which found significant negative effects from Seattle’s 2014 minimum wage hike. However, the researchers redid the study in 2019 and found the effects were far smaller. But the CBO ignored the correction, and the Post did not alter its advice.
Citing his own research and studies from the Economic Policy Institute, Reich testified to Congress in 2019 that the $15 an hour wage would positively affect 32 million American workers. Also, he notes that while opponents claim that restaurants will have to raise prices and thus lose business, research shows that sales don’t drop. “This finding is based on a study of 27 metropolitan areas by two researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston and an MIT economist,” he says.
As to the deficit ballooning, Reich says the opposite is true: the hike will add $65 billion in revenues a year from low-wage workers’ payroll and income taxes. He adds that Arindrajit Dube, an economist at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found that it will reduce government spending on food stamps as well as the child and earned-income tax credits, since more workers will be able to afford their groceries.
The first study on minimum wage hikes was done in 1992, when Princeton economists David Card and Alan Krueger looked at fast-food restaurant jobs — after New Jersey raised its hourly minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05 and Pennsylvania did not. Opponents warned that New Jersey customers would take their business to Pennsylvania, and they’d need to cut their employees. But, based on the economists’ study of 410 restaurants, neither happened. “We find no indications that the rise in the minimum wage reduced employment.”
Reich adds that “many economists find that hikes to the minimum wage are fully passed on to restaurant customers and thus do not decrease the profits or sales. But the National Restaurant Association still remains opposed to minimum wages” — although retailers like Amazon and Costco advocate increasing them.
Today, 66,000 West Virginians earn less than the minimum wage, 16 percent live at or under the poverty line (which is $24,000 for a family of four), and the poverty rate for Black people in the state was 28.6 percent in 2018. One could infer Senator Manchin means a $15 minimum wage hike is too high for the state’s businesses. Perhaps he could be clued in about the needs of other West Virginians before he votes.
A December 2017 statement from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights notes that, while the US manages to spend “more [money] on national defence than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined”, US infant mortality rates were, as of 2013, “the highest in the developed world”.
The Special Rapporteur provides a barrage of other details from his own visit to the US, during which he was able to observe the country’s “bid to become the most unequal society in the world” – with some 40 million people living in poverty – as well as assess “soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction”.
Capitalism, it seems, is a deadly business indeed.
A demonstrator from the Occupy Wall Street campaign seen with a dollar taped over his mouth as he stands near the financial district of New York September 30, 2011. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)
How the Cookie Crumbles
She’s 80, comes from Ayr, Scotland, lives in a sea town along the Oregon Coast. She is caretaker for her 55-year-old nephew. Her heart-failed husband, liver shot through, dialysis weekly, is another of her charges.
Imagine, she and her family ran a small chain of shops — clocks, another locksmith, another fish and chips. That was in Bonnie Scotland.
Her sister married a bloke in the US Air Force, and she shipped out with him. Pregnant. Child Drew, early on, in Tucson at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, he was diagnosed with Downs Syndrome. Life for her changed, and then her sister promised if anything happened to this sister, Aunt Regina would take care of Drew. That was a long long time ago.
Regina’s sister and her sister’s husband immolated in a crash coming back from El Paso. Boy Drew left with a younger sister — the boy age 20, sis 16.
For 35 years, our Regina and her Bob raised the boy. Drew is now 55, and part of my job is to support him in his job at a grocery store. He’s been there more than 15 years, and he makes $12.01 an hour.
Forget that economic injustice for a moment. Listen to how the crumbling cookie goes in predatory capitalism — Regina has not been back to the old country in 20 years. She has two knees that are shot. She needs two replacements, but she is the caretaker for the chronically-sick husband. Drew lives with them, getting his two-times a week work at the grocery store as a bagger.
He’s got the infectious personality, and he also has some “issues” glomming onto female staff. Regina was not told that adults with Downs Syndrome many times have lost the synoptic connections tied to urgency for urination and defecation.
Sweet drinks he gulps down, like a lost man in the Sahara. He scarfs down or wolfs down his food.
Like anyone, Drew wants to be in a relationship, married, on some piece of property with a horse, dogs and big garden. He works eight hours a week, and receives under $800 in social security payments.
The state pays Aunt Regina for his care. Her biggest worry is Drew losing his job because of the bathroom accidents or the sexual harassment.
Regina is kind but firm, and her bedside manner isn’t from the latest holistic and enlightened training around people who live with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
“I tell Drew, that if he messes up one more time, the grocery store will fire him. The job is more than pocket change for him. He gets out, has responsibilities, is growing some from the integrated employment, and, mind you this is a big AND, I get him out of the house for a few hours a week so I can gain some sense of sanity. I don’t know if he has to be put into a state institution.”
Luck of the draw, luck of the gene expression, luck of the accidental car mortalities, luck luck luck.
That’s the way the cookie crumbles, and in capitalism, we are not judged by how we treat our aged, infirm, vulnerable, youth, sick, disabled, poor. The worse we treat “them,” the more “they” have to struggle, the more daily fear “they” have of failing, faltering, flipping out mentally, the more successful those Capitalists and those Investors and those Finance Wizards and those Upper Economic Class are!
Redistribution of wealth for “them” is taking every last penny from “them,” us. Working people at $12.01 an hour after 15 years in a national/international chain.
A mentality that posits that “they” meant to do that, defecate in their pants, or, oh, “they” know better, and, oh, “they” are gaming the system and pulling the wool over your bleeding heart social services worker heads.
Heartless in a Time of Plague
Our Scottish Regina is worried about what will happen to Drew once she kicks the bucket, or when she is no longer physically capable of carrying on and running a household with a very demanding Drew and a very failing Bob, her 86-year-old husband.
We talk about the old country’s National Health Service. We talk about the failures of a society that has been ripped open time and time again by the purulent investors — another word for making money anyway they can.
Gutting medical care, gutting entitlement programs, gutting progressive taxation, gutting the measures for health and safety for and by the public. Where oh where will Drew go once his aunt and uncle pass on?
Think of every dollar and penny pinched, and then think of how much we the taxpayer shell out for every nanosecond of the crimes of corporations eating at the belly of communities, and every penny taken in light speed for everything run by the imposters, the misanthropes.
Every million$ here, every billion$ there. Grifters and grabbers. How much did the first Billionaire’s “impeachment” cost us? How much does an Alex Jones or Tom Brady or Michelle Obama get paid for their insipid bolstering of their self-referential mythology? Each speech? Each rot gut book penned?
Every rivet sunk into a Hellfire missile, every pound of fuel used in US Military Terrorism Toys, every nanosecond million made through illegal and unethical investing through algorithm?
That Moon shot by India, or that Mars rover by Japan, or Israel gunning for more surveillance. How much is every human lifetime worth, if we are lumped together in that big pile of “other” and “non-human”?
That heartless cookie crumbling capitalism is rotten to the core. The joke is, though, by the filthy rich, the Art of War Friedman’s and Bezos and all the Google middling’s and upper crust, that if all the billions were taken from the filthy rich, and dumped into the majority on planet earth — the poor, the uneducated, the misbegotten, the terminal, the dysfunctional, the Jerry Springer protagonists and antagonists, in five years all that and more would be back in the hands of the Star Chamber 1,000 or 2,000 Multi-Billionaires.
“We’d just get it all back, because the masses are inherently stupid, know nothing about the value of a dollar, would buy all the junk and shit and whoring dreams we create to sell. We’d have all that so-called ‘redistributed’ wealth back in our hands.”
That myth is coupled with another one, where the rich and the rest of us, having collectively, as much as the 1,000 or millionth richest? Christian Parenti lays it out simply and clearly here:
The 85 richest in the world probably include the four members of the Walton family (owners of Wal-Mart, among the top ten superrich in the USA) who together are worth over $100 billion. Rich families like the DuPonts have controlling interests in giant corporations like General Motors, Coca-Cola, and United Brands. They own about forty manorial estates and private museums in Delaware alone and have set up 31 tax-exempt foundations. The superrich in America and in many other countries find ways, legal and illegal, to shelter much of their wealth in secret accounts. We don’t really know how very rich the very rich really are.
Regarding the poorest portion of the world population—whom I would call the valiant, struggling “better half”—what mass configuration of wealth could we possibly be talking about? The aggregate wealth possessed by the 85 super-richest individuals, and the aggregate wealth owned by the world’s 3.5 billion poorest, are of different dimensions and different natures. Can we really compare private jets, mansions, landed estates, super luxury vacation retreats, luxury apartments, luxury condos, and luxury cars, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars in equities, bonds, commercial properties, art works, antiques, etc.—can we really compare all that enormous wealth against some millions of used cars, used furniture, and used television sets, many of which are ready to break down? Of what resale value if any, are such minor durable-use commodities? especially in communities of high unemployment, dismal health and housing conditions, no running water, no decent sanitation facilities, etc. We don’t really know how poor the very poor really are.
The books and discourse and deep discussions and analyses have already been posited and published, and yet, we are in 2021, and the school system, the media system, the propaganda machines of government-military-resource extraction-big ag/med/pharma/AI/finance continue to cobble truth, censor the reality of the penury system that is consumer-corporate-criminal-corrupt Capitalism.
Here, a hodgepodge of readings ramifying the thesis in this essay of mine —
Chris Hedges and Richard Wolff: Capitalism Does Not Work for the Majority of the People
Make No Mistake: The Rule Of The Rich Has Been A Deadly Epoch For Humanity
Michael Parenti: Does Capitalism Work? (2002)
The 1% Pathology and the Myth of Capitalism
Capitalism: The Systematic Poverty and Exploitation of Human Beings by Finian Cunningham
Michael Parenti: These Countries Are Not Underdeveloped, They Are Overexploited (1986)
Luxury Eco-Communism: A Wonderful World is Possible
The Growing Disparity In Living Conditions and Its Consequences by Rainer Shea
Covid-19 and the Health Crisis in Latin America by Yanis Iqbal
The Start Of The Great Meltdown For Industrial Civilization by Rainer Shea
MFTN: Poverty Will Kill More Of Us Than Terrorism
The Rich Are Only Rich If We Let Them Be by Dariel Garner
Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World by Michael Parenti
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger + How Economic Inequality Harms Societies
Wealth Belongs To All Of Us – Not Just To The Rich by Dariel Garner
We Are So Poor Because They Are So Rich by Dariel Garner
It all comes back to the rackets — war, banking, big ag, law, prisons, military, computing, finance, insuring, retail, lending, investing, for-profit medicine, education, utilities.
The rackets of putting garnishments on all of our wages. The punishment rackets of fines, foreclosures, levies, taxes, fees, surcharges, add-ons, user fees, disposal fees, tolls, late fees, interest fees, penalties, wage attachments, wage theft, any-government-revenue/policing/judicial entity having the legal right to crack into any savings or checking or real estate holding they want to….And steal!
Imagine that freedom, uh? My Drew or my Don, they work for pittances, and they have their measly wages garnished if they make too much above the allowable social security benefit level. Imagine all of the flimflam, all those middle and peripheral and shadowy and underhanded people and agencies each taking a gram of flesh until that human life has been pecked away.
Stuck in a closet somewhere. Huddled around a TV, surrounded by the deadly products of a food industry responsible for billions dead. Food (sic) more deadly than cancer sticks, AKA cigarettes.
Think hard how those children-who-come-to-me-as-adults as their social services manager, wanting me to help them find jobs in a dog-eat-dog culture, where the cookie isn’t just crumbling, but rather smashed into smithereens by the capitalists. All those poisons in food, all the polluting, toxin-laced, dam-building, river-tainting, air-staining processes that bring us better living with plastics-fastfood-shelf lives of a decade. Better living through chemistry, pharmaceutics, chronic illness, disease management, pain regulating.
Then, we cannot discuss the possibilities of a society with more and more allergies, more and more chronic illnesses, more and more learning disabilities, more and more developmental disabilities, more and more intellectual disabilities, more and more trauma and PTSD and generalized anxiety and physiological premature weathering.
And poverty does more than just kills. Poverty eats at the soul, drives people to unsafe harbors like consumerism, disposability, obsessions, addictions, inattentiveness, collective Stockholm Syndrome, perversions, empty calories-entertainment-thinking.
There are numbers just for one aspect of our consumer-retail-exploitative societies competing in a trans-national gallery of dirty capitalism — 4.2 million premature deaths annually? Five million? More? Exposure to air pollution caused over 7.0 million deaths and 103.1 million disability-adjusted life years lost in one year.
Attributed to dirty (polluted) air. Not dirty water. Not dirty food. Not dirty drugs. Not smoking. Not boozing. Not war.
The study uses existing data from IHME on global burden of diseases (Mortality and Disability Adjusted Life Years) related to air pollution such as Trachea, Bronchus and Lung cancer, COPD, Ischemic heart disease and Stroke. This study shows that air pollution is one of the major environmental risk factors for the global burden of disease in 1990-2015 and has remained relatively stable for the past 25 years. By region, the largest burden of disease related to air pollution is found in Western Pacific and South-East Asia, reflecting the heavy industry and air pollution hotspots within the developing nations of these regions. Moreover, the rates of Disability Adjusted Life Years increased because of increase in pollution, especially in South-East Asia region, African region, and Eastern Mediterranean region where populations are both growing and ageing.
I’ve written about this for years — how there is so much disconnect in Criminal Capitalism, where the marketing ploys and psychological tricks force babies and then toddlers and then kindergarteners and then grade schoolers and then more and more millions of growing minds to adapt to counterintuitive thinking, to accept death, slow or otherwise, as part of the social contract. Dog-eat-dog, predation, big fish/small pond, and the roots of America after decimating Turtle Island, one smoke and mirror show after another snake oil sales pitch.
Which sane or humane person would accept a PayDay loan scam? Which humane person would accept forced arbitration clauses? Which caring human would not endorse clean, well-run, full coverage public transportation? Which caring mother would not demand prenatal care, and medicine and clinics on demand? Where is the logic of old men and old women (look at the senate, the congress, the administration) running the lives of the unborn, newborn and youth into the ground.
Even the thirty-somethings in Brooks Brothers suits look, sound, smell, and espouse OLD. I don’t mean old and wise, or elder thinkers, or experienced and well traveled. I mean old in decayed.
If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with old minds and new programs. It will not be saved by people with the old vision but a new program.
The Takers accumulate knowledge about what works well for things. The Leavers accumulate knowledge about what works well for people.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
These flimflam artists, these liars and cheaters and pontificators and media monsters, they are antithetical to a good governance, good society, good people.
They not only do not know the stories of Drew and his Aunt Regina and Uncle Bob, but they have no forward-thinking solutions to the aging old foster parents and the still healthy middle-aged Drew. With all his beauty. With all his kindness. With all his adept knowledge of how to get on, get along, get his day going. Drew, born in the cookie crumbles crap shoot. Regina, who was on her way back to the UK, Scotland, when she answered the call to take care of Drew and his sister.
This story is repeated a million times a month, worldwide. The penalty for living, for being human, for being not one of them (rich, powerful, greed-wielding) and for stopping their lives to do the right thing.
You wake up one day and believe you have a worthy life. You wake up and take account of what good you have done. You wake up and look in the mirror and wonder what it is you actually dreamt, thought, spoke, cared for, read, built, protected, grew, sheltered, did, held sacred, envisioned, husbanded, parented, fostered, ate, drank, created.
Did any of that living have purpose, or some connection to the humanity that is the real culture of Homo Sapiens, mother culture?
Daily, I have a million intersections with culture and cultures — Big D for deaf or small d for disabled? Brain-injured at birth, or hit by a truck at age 11. Traumatic Brain Injury from an early childhood beating, or massive psychological trauma from a rape at age 20. Born with any number of diagnosed maladies, or any expression of “being born on the autism spectrum.” Fragile X or fetal alcohol affective disorder. Or Downs Syndrome.
The luck of the draw is one enormous field of chance, and the outcomes are not just tied to the abilities — emotional, spiritual, economic, personal — of those you call family, but how the society at large and each community gauge the value of life, the value placed on those whose luck of the draw came up short in some areas.
But the world is fragile, and those on some neuro typical scale and those atypically neuro, can we build our culture together, and heal and protect and shelter and engender and facilitate and teach and learn from?
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.
Exclusive: The ‘biggest international crisis in generations’ has rolled back years of progress and been used as a pretext to crackdown on freedoms, says António Guterres
The world is facing a “pandemic of human rights abuses”, the UN secretary general António Guterres has said.
Authoritarian regimes had imposed drastic curbs on rights and freedoms and had used the virus as a pretext to restrict free speech and stifle dissent.
The virus has been used as a pretext in many countries to crush dissent, criminalise freedoms and silence reporting
António Guterres is secretary general of the United Nations
From the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic almost one year ago, it was clear that our world faced far more than a public health emergency. The biggest international crisis in generations quickly morphed into an economic and social crisis. One year on, another stark fact is tragically evident: our world is facing a pandemic of human rights abuses.
Covid-19 has deepened preexisting divides, vulnerabilities and inequalities, and opened up new fractures, including faultlines in human rights. The pandemic has revealed the interconnectedness of our human family – and of the full spectrum of human rights: civil, cultural, economic, political and social. When any one of these rights is under attack, others are at risk.
The virus has thrived because poverty, discrimination, the destruction of our natural environment and other human rights failures have created enormous fragilities in our societies
The number of households living in destitution has more than doubled in 2020. That’s according to new research. It shows nearly half a million two-adult families survive on less than £100 a week. But given what we know about the Tories’ coronavirus (Covid-19) response and pre-existing poverty, it’s hardly surprising.
Destitution: out of control?
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) has looked into UK destitution. It has done this for an episode of Channel 4 Dispatches. The NIESR hasn’t published its research yet. But the Guardian reported on the headline figures. It said that:
Destitution is defined as a two-adult household living on less than £100 a week and a single-adult household on less than £70 a week after housing costs.
It noted that the NIESR found:
there were 220,000 more households living in destitution by the end of last year, potentially more than half a million people.
This is an increase in the number of destitute families from 197,400 to 421,500. The NIESR also found that the amount of destitution was different across the UK. For example, in the North West of England rates were three times higher than the UK figure. But the NIESR research is against a backdrop of increasing social decay.
Poverty: already entrenched in foodbank Britain
The Canary previously reported on growing poverty. So far, there are no official figures for how much it has grown during the pandemic. But one study found that at least 700,000 more people were in poverty than before. The figure included 120,000 more children. This would mean more than 15 million people live in poverty in the UK. Foodbank figures also bear this out.
The Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN) said that it saw an 88% increase between February and October 2020. The Trussell Trust said it saw a 47% increase in “need” between 1 April and 30 September 2020. It gave out 1.2m food parcels. The Trussell Trust said this was its busiest ever half-year. This was despite the previous year being a record one for it. As the Trussell Trust wrote:
2,600 emergency food parcels were provided for children every day on average… during the first six months of the pandemic.
And on top of this, there’s been chaos with the social security system.
Social security chaos
The Canary has been covering Universal Credit during the pandemic. A lot of debate has been about the £20 a week uplift. In April 2020, the DWP increased the rate of Universal Credit by this amount. But ever since, uncertainty has existed over what will happen this April. If the Tories end the increase, people will see the DWP cut £20 per week from their money. Then, on Friday 19 February, ITV Newsreported that the Tories would keep the uplift. But this would only be for another six months.
This won’t solve several basic issues; not least destitution. For example, for around 1.5 million claimants of things like Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), the government hasn’t given any extra support at all during the pandemic. Also, a survey of Universal Credit claimants found the £20 uplift to be “inadequate” anyway. For example, over 50% of new claimants said they either:
Struggled with affording food.
Couldn’t afford fresh fruit and veg.
Fell behind on their housing costs.
Couldn’t keep up with bills/debts.
The pandemic has seen a perfect storm of factors entrenching severe hardship and destitution. But what’s the answer?
We don’t need a new “Beveridge report”
The Guardianreported that Louise Casey, Boris Johnson’s “adviser on homelessness last year”, said the UK needs:
A new Beveridge report. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Government can, if it wants to, do something on a different scale now. The nation has been torn apart, and there’s no point being defensive about that. We’ve got to gift each other some proper space to think. We’ve got to work out how not to leave the badly wounded behind.
The Beveridge Report was a 1942 “blueprint” for social policy, designed to reduce poverty. But Casey saying we need one naively assumes that the Tories want to tackle it. Given that in over ten years, right up until this January, they haven’t bothered, what’s changed? Very little. So, we don’t need another report telling us that Tory-led capitalism causes poverty. We need radical change from the bottom, up. And the sooner that happens, the better.
Madagascar is in great pain. Theodore Mbainaissem, the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) sub-office in Ambovombe, southern Madagascar, says: “Seeing the physical condition of people extremely affected by hunger who can no longer stand…children who are completely emaciated, the elderly who are skin and bone…these images are unbearable… People are eating white clay with tamarind juice, cactus leaves, wild roots just to calm their hunger.”
One third of people in southern Madagascar will struggle to feed themselves over the next few months. Until the next harvest in April 2021, 1.35 million people will be “food insecure” – almost double those in need last year – and 282,000 of them are considered “emergency” cases. Pervasive food insecurity in Madagascar is the result of a variety of factors.
Poverty
Food security is not only caused by a lack of food supply but also by the lack of political and economic power to access food. Thus, access to income is one potential means for alleviating food insecurity. In Madagascar, the majority of the people don’t have proper access to income.
Madagascar is one of poorest countries in the world. In the 2007/2008 United Nation Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index, an indicator that measures achievements in terms of life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income, Madagascar was given the rank of 143rd out of 177 countries.
Madagascar’s economy is tiny. The market capitalization of U.S. tech giant Facebook is more than 40 times Madagascar’s national income. The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, alone is five times richer than the island nation. A large chunk of Madagascar’s minuscule national income is appropriated by the rich, evidenced in the declining consumption capacity of the poor. Between 2005 and 2010, consumption for the poorest households declined by 3.1%.
A COVID-19-triggered economic recession has debilitated an already impoverished people. The combined impact of global trade disruptions and pandemic restrictions is estimated to have resulted in a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contraction of 4.2% in 2020. The poverty rate (at $1.9/day) is estimated to have risen to 77.4% in 2020, up from 74.3% in 2019, corresponding to an increase of 1.38 million people in one year.
Climate Change
Between 1980 and 2010, Madagascar suffered 35 cyclones and floods, five periods of severe drought, five earthquakes and six epidemics. Madagascar’s extreme weather conditions have intensified due to climate change, increasing food vulnerability.
Food insecurity affects all regions of the nation, and particularly those in the south, which have a semi-arid climate and are particularly exposed to severe and recurrent droughts. In 2019, a lack of rainfall and a powerful El Nino phenomenon led to the loss of 90% of the harvest and pushed more than 60% of the population into food insecurity.
Interruptions in food supply due to crop failures have resulted in sharp increases in the prices of different items. Some areas have seen the price of rice shoot up from 50 U.S. cents per kilogram in 2019 to $1.05 in 2020.
Extractivism
The extractivist engine of Madagascar’s economy has usurped lands intended for food crops and displaced the people living there. Transnational mining companies in search of new resources have paid increased attention to the significant mineral potential of the country, which is rich in diverse deposits and minerals, including nickel, titanium, cobalt, ilmenite, bauxite, iron, copper, coal and uranium, as well as rare earths. Nickel-cobalt and ilmenite have attracted the majority of foreign direct investment thus far.
Beginning from the early 2000s, multinational mining companies have made the largest foreign investments in Madagascar’s history. Those affected by the large-scale mining operations are subjected to the restrictions on land and forest-use associated with the establishment of the mining and offset projects. Such resource use restrictions affect important subsistence and health-related activities, with critical impacts on livelihoods and food security.
To take an example, villagers living in Antsotso have been heavily impacted by biodiversity offsetting at Bemangidy in the Tsitongambarika Forest Complex (TGK III). They have reported that QIT-Madagascar Minerals (QMM) — a public-private partnership between Rio Tinto subsidiary QIT-Fer et Titaine and the Malagasy government — did not explain to them that they were involved in a offsetting program when they were asked to participate in tree planting and were excluded from accessing the forest.
Constrained resource access due to the biodiversity offsetting measures has seriously impacted food security among Antsotso’s residents, forcing them to abandon rich fields near forest areas and instead grow manioc in inferior sandy soil next to the sea at great distance from their village. All this is the result of the concentrated clout possessed by mining magnates.
Agro-export Firms
Between 2005 and 2008, 3 million hectares were under negotiation by 52 foreign companies seeking to invest in agriculture. These companies form a landscape made up of irregularly placed and privately secured territorial enclaves that are linked to transnational networks but disarticulated from both local populations and national development projects. Since these companies are functionally integrated in a framework geared toward the enrichment of foreign investors, they have little regard for the food security of Madagascans.
In March 2009, the South Korean company Daewoo Logistics signed a 99-year lease in Madagascar for about 1.3 million hectares, or about half of the island’s arable land. It was the largest lease of this type in history and would have supplied half of South Korea’s grain imports. The organization Collective for the Defense of Malagasy Lands (TANY) was established in response to the lease and petitioned the government to first consult with stakeholders before agreeing to foreign land deals. The petition was ignored.
The deal subsequently fell through when political unrest broke out in Madagascar, which led to the fall of the former president, Marc Ravalomana. Daewoo may have been the largest and most-publicized of foreign investment in recent history, but it was not the first. The proposed land deal raised international attention to the land grabs taking place across the globe, particularly given the contemporaneous food crisis.
Monopoly Capitalism
Hunger in Madagascar is the outcome of a confluence of crises. All of them are fundamentally related to capitalism — the system that generates the chaotic drive for ever-greater profits. In the monopoly stage of capitalism, the oppressed people are standing up against a system of generalized monopolies — a structure of power where a tiny clique of plutocrats and their tightly integrated productive apparatuses control the world.
Correspondingly, the Third World has seen its autonomy erode in the face of this neo-colonial onslaught, leading to the dominance of comprador bourgeoisie — a fraction of capitalists whose interests are entirely subordinated to those of foreign capital, and which functions as a direct intermediary for the implantation and reproduction of foreign capital. What we need today is an independent and unified initiative from the Third World, which brings oppressed countries like Madagascar into regional alliances aimed at de-linking from imperialist architectures and pursuing a socialist path.
Madagascar is in great pain. Theodore Mbainaissem, the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) sub-office in Ambovombe, southern Madagascar, says: “Seeing the physical condition of people extremely affected by hunger who can no longer stand…children who are completely emaciated, the elderly who are skin and bone…these images are unbearable… People are eating white clay with tamarind juice, cactus leaves, wild roots just to calm their hunger.”
One third of people in southern Madagascar will struggle to feed themselves over the next few months. Until the next harvest in April 2021, 1.35 million people will be “food insecure” – almost double those in need last year – and 282,000 of them are considered “emergency” cases. Pervasive food insecurity in Madagascar is the result of a variety of factors.
Poverty
Food security is not only caused by a lack of food supply but also by the lack of political and economic power to access food. Thus, access to income is one potential means for alleviating food insecurity. In Madagascar, the majority of the people don’t have proper access to income.
Madagascar is one of poorest countries in the world. In the 2007/2008 United Nation Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index, an indicator that measures achievements in terms of life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income, Madagascar was given the rank of 143rd out of 177 countries.
Madagascar’s economy is tiny. The market capitalization of U.S. tech giant Facebook is more than 40 times Madagascar’s national income. The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, alone is five times richer than the island nation. A large chunk of Madagascar’s minuscule national income is appropriated by the rich, evidenced in the declining consumption capacity of the poor. Between 2005 and 2010, consumption for the poorest households declined by 3.1%.
A COVID-19-triggered economic recession has debilitated an already impoverished people. The combined impact of global trade disruptions and pandemic restrictions is estimated to have resulted in a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contraction of 4.2% in 2020. The poverty rate (at $1.9/day) is estimated to have risen to 77.4% in 2020, up from 74.3% in 2019, corresponding to an increase of 1.38 million people in one year.
Climate Change
Between 1980 and 2010, Madagascar suffered 35 cyclones and floods, five periods of severe drought, five earthquakes and six epidemics. Madagascar’s extreme weather conditions have intensified due to climate change, increasing food vulnerability.
Food insecurity affects all regions of the nation, and particularly those in the south, which have a semi-arid climate and are particularly exposed to severe and recurrent droughts. In 2019, a lack of rainfall and a powerful El Nino phenomenon led to the loss of 90% of the harvest and pushed more than 60% of the population into food insecurity.
Interruptions in food supply due to crop failures have resulted in sharp increases in the prices of different items. Some areas have seen the price of rice shoot up from 50 U.S. cents per kilogram in 2019 to $1.05 in 2020.
Extractivism
The extractivist engine of Madagascar’s economy has usurped lands intended for food crops and displaced the people living there. Transnational mining companies in search of new resources have paid increased attention to the significant mineral potential of the country, which is rich in diverse deposits and minerals, including nickel, titanium, cobalt, ilmenite, bauxite, iron, copper, coal and uranium, as well as rare earths. Nickel-cobalt and ilmenite have attracted the majority of foreign direct investment thus far.
Beginning from the early 2000s, multinational mining companies have made the largest foreign investments in Madagascar’s history. Those affected by the large-scale mining operations are subjected to the restrictions on land and forest-use associated with the establishment of the mining and offset projects. Such resource use restrictions affect important subsistence and health-related activities, with critical impacts on livelihoods and food security.
To take an example, villagers living in Antsotso have been heavily impacted by biodiversity offsetting at Bemangidy in the Tsitongambarika Forest Complex (TGK III). They have reported that QIT-Madagascar Minerals (QMM) — a public-private partnership between Rio Tinto subsidiary QIT-Fer et Titaine and the Malagasy government — did not explain to them that they were involved in a offsetting program when they were asked to participate in tree planting and were excluded from accessing the forest.
Constrained resource access due to the biodiversity offsetting measures has seriously impacted food security among Antsotso’s residents, forcing them to abandon rich fields near forest areas and instead grow manioc in inferior sandy soil next to the sea at great distance from their village. All this is the result of the concentrated clout possessed by mining magnates.
Agro-export Firms
Between 2005 and 2008, 3 million hectares were under negotiation by 52 foreign companies seeking to invest in agriculture. These companies form a landscape made up of irregularly placed and privately secured territorial enclaves that are linked to transnational networks but disarticulated from both local populations and national development projects. Since these companies are functionally integrated in a framework geared toward the enrichment of foreign investors, they have little regard for the food security of Madagascans.
In March 2009, the South Korean company Daewoo Logistics signed a 99-year lease in Madagascar for about 1.3 million hectares, or about half of the island’s arable land. It was the largest lease of this type in history and would have supplied half of South Korea’s grain imports. The organization Collective for the Defense of Malagasy Lands (TANY) was established in response to the lease and petitioned the government to first consult with stakeholders before agreeing to foreign land deals. The petition was ignored.
The deal subsequently fell through when political unrest broke out in Madagascar, which led to the fall of the former president, Marc Ravalomana. Daewoo may have been the largest and most-publicized of foreign investment in recent history, but it was not the first. The proposed land deal raised international attention to the land grabs taking place across the globe, particularly given the contemporaneous food crisis.
Monopoly Capitalism
Hunger in Madagascar is the outcome of a confluence of crises. All of them are fundamentally related to capitalism — the system that generates the chaotic drive for ever-greater profits. In the monopoly stage of capitalism, the oppressed people are standing up against a system of generalized monopolies — a structure of power where a tiny clique of plutocrats and their tightly integrated productive apparatuses control the world.
Correspondingly, the Third World has seen its autonomy erode in the face of this neo-colonial onslaught, leading to the dominance of comprador bourgeoisie — a fraction of capitalists whose interests are entirely subordinated to those of foreign capital, and which functions as a direct intermediary for the implantation and reproduction of foreign capital. What we need today is an independent and unified initiative from the Third World, which brings oppressed countries like Madagascar into regional alliances aimed at de-linking from imperialist architectures and pursuing a socialist path.
The Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) Universal Credit is under the microscope again. This time, a survey of claimants found the benefit left them in chaos. It called the £20 uplift “inadequate”. But the problem is that this isn’t exactly news to the countless people who’ve been struggling on it for years.
The DWP: here we go again
The Canary has been covering Universal Credit during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. A lot of debate has been about the £20 a week uplift. In April 2020, the DWP increased the rate of Universal Credit by this amount. But ever since, uncertainty has existed over what will happen this April. If the Tories end the increase, people will see the DWP cut £20 per week from their money. So far, the Tories have not budged on the issue.
But now, a survey of claimants has found many have been struggling. Most notably, it showed that the £20 a week increase hasn’t made much difference.
Welfare at a (Social) Distance is a research project that’s looked into social security during the pandemic. The Guardianreported the project:
surveyed 6,431 new and existing benefit claimants between May and June, and carried out 74 in-depth interviews between June and September.
The survey’s results were unsurprising.
No surprises here
It found the problems with Universal Credit for new claimants were numerous. The research noted that when they applied for it:
37% had problems with the website.
28% had problems with the phone process:
Then, while people waited for their first payment, many didn’t apply for the built in advance:
28% said it was because they didn’t want to get into debt.
9.3% said it was because they hadn’t heard of it:
If people did apply for an advance, the DWP still didn’t leave them with enough money:
28% had to borrow from a bank, credit card or other financial institution.
28% borrowed money friends:
Also for people who didn’t claim an advance, 42% of them said they either:
Skipped meals.
Fell behind on housing costs.
Didn’t keep up with bills/other debt:
Overall, the DWP hit 41% of new claimants with a deduction, cap, or charge related to their claim:
Where’s the £20 a week gone?
When people did start getting Universal Credit payments, over 50% of new claimants said their income had fallen by more than 25%:
This is while over 50% said their outgoings either stayed the same or increased:
When people were properly on Universal Credit, they said the DWP still didn’t give them enough to live on. For example, almost 5% had to use a foodbank:
Around 62% of people couldn’t even save £10 a month. And roughly the same number wouldn’t have been able to buy something like a fridge if theirs broke:
But these were the “less severe” impacts of the DWP’s level of payments. Over 50% of new claimants said they either:
We should think more ambitiously about what ‘success’ means within our social security benefits system. Yes, the benefits system held up through the first wave of the pandemic, but fundamental issues remain in terms of the adequacy of payment levels, and people’s ability to access and understand the system.
Indeed. Because the report paints a damning snapshot of the current situation. But the problems with Universal Credit have been there since the start.
Systemic issues
Survey after survey has found Universal Credit doesn’t work. Nearly four years ago, the DWP did its own survey. The Canaryreported the findings. For example, they showed that:
25% of people couldn’t complete their claim online.
72% of claimants either financially struggled from “time to time” or constantly, fell behind, or were having “real financial difficulties”.
Around 35% of claimants were in arrears with housing costs.
About 22% of claimants were struggling with both bills/financial commitments and housing costs.
So, it seems little has changed since then. All the Welfare at a (Social) Distance project’s findings for new claimants include the £20 a week uplift. It’s report said that:
our evidence suggests that even with the £20 uplift, benefit levels are inadequate for many claimants
Campaigning to keep the £20 extra isn’t sufficient. Because it’s barely helping many people at the minute anyway. But moreover, it’s because the UK’s social security system is broken beyond repair. We need a fresh start for the welfare state. £20 a week empty gestures are simply not good enough.
Southwest Harbor, Maine – As Congress gets set to debate the Biden Pandemic relief package, one of the favorite Republican lines is the contention that an economic recovery is already well underway. Pouring more money into an accelerating economy is likely to induce seventies style inflation. It is time, they argue, for a little cautionary austerity. However politically efficacious this line may be, rosy portraits of an expanding economy hide the chronic weakness of the US economy and especially the burdens imposed on poor and minority communities.
Fear of inflation on the part of Republicans is insincere and ill timed.
Buenaventura is the main port for Colombian foreign trade and the second largest city in the prosperous state of Valle del Cauca. Historically, the territory has been inhabited by Afro-descendants, indigenous peoples, and campesinos. Despite the diversity and cultural richness of this territory, it is primarily known for its high levels of poverty, difficulties in accessing public services, health, decent housing, and education. These conditions have derailed the lives of the inhabitants to unimaginable extremes.
Violence and threats against the inhabitants of the poorest neighborhoods of Buenaventura have become increasingly commonplace.
Prioritizing COVID-19 vaccinations for people 75 and up can leave out Black Americans, who tend to die younger than their white counterparts. In majority-Black Shelby County, this gap raises questions of how to make the vaccine rollout equitable. Continue reading
On 12 February, 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a resolution in which it criticized the removal of Myanmar’s democratically elected government by the military, locally known as Tatmadaw. The Council also called urgently for the immediate and unconditional release of all persons arbitrarily detained, including State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint and others, and the lifting of the state of emergency.
As the international community condemns the coup and shows support for Suu Kyi, it is important not to whitewash the latter as a savior of the Myanma masses. Neither is she a doyen of democracy nor a courageous anti-military leader; she is the face of an alternative ruling class project which aims to incorporate the Tatmadaw into a new geo-economic architecture. The coup is the culmination of that intra-elite power struggle.
Intra-elite Power Struggle
The military regime that came to power in 1988 under Saw Maung looked to capitalism to provide a solution to the crisis that had led to social upheaval, and thus set in motion a process that aimed at breaking down the old state-owned economy and moving towards greater marketization. Their plan was not to sell off to private capitalists, but to transform themselves into the owners of the means of production. They proceeded to privatize a section of the economy, while holding on to key sectors via their control of the state sector.
Eventually, the military’s plan gave rise to a clique of generals who control, through straw men, Myanmar’s biggest corporations, as well as the lucrative trade in jade and other precious stones, narcotics and timber. Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) tried to re-configure this model of military-dominated capitalism by implementing an aggressively pro-market reform agenda that included mobilizing Western and East Asian investment into regular channels. Her “Myanmar Sustainable Economic Development Plan” allowed foreign capitalists to invest up to 35% in local companies, as well as holding stakes of up to 35% in Myanmar companies traded on the Yangon Stock Exchange.
Defensive Posture
The tussle between the NLD and the military reflected itself in different domains. However, the former always maintained a defensive posture – in the hope that by doing the junta a favour, it would hopefully grant them the minimal democratic reforms it wants. On the one hand, Suu Kyi took over some of the military’s positions — for instance, in the peace process. She also seemed to have taken over the military’s version of establishing a centralized state under the domination of the Bamar-Buddhist majority.
On the other hand, Suu Kyi feared the actions of the military. She avoided convening the National Defense and Security Council (NDSC), the institution responsible for discussing security matters. The 11-member body comprising the highest legislative, executive and military players has the right to take over power during a state of emergency.
Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing repeatedly demanded that Suu Kyi convene the NSCD, while she appointed her own security advisers. The NLD feared being forced to call a state of emergency (e.g. over Rakhine state), which could allow the Commander-in-Chief to take over power and dissolve parliament. Both the NLD and the military unsuccessfully attempted to increase their power in the NDSC by bringing in constitutional amendments that would have altered the organ’s composition in their favour.
Neoliberalism with Ethno-racial Characteristics
Insofar that Suu Kyi wanted to establish the complete hegemony of free market on the soil of Myanmar by striking compromises with the military, she generated a politico-economic framework that had excluded the common people. Positioned between the Tatmadaw and multinational companies, she became impervious to the concrete demands of millions of Burmese.
The majority of Myanmar’s population has not been able to see the prosperity that Suu Kyi promised. One in four remained poor in 2017, according to the World Bank. Nearly half of those polled by the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) in 2019 were worried about losing their livelihood, more than twice as many as in 2015. Some 54% said they were unable to access basic services, such as water, public transport and health care, up from 48% five years ago.
Suu Kyi’s government repressed a surge of labor organizing over the past five years. In particular, garment workers waged a massive organizing drive that was repressed by both the bosses and the government. In May 2020, six labor leaders were arrested for leading a strike that violated COVID-19 regulations in a factory in Yangon’s Dagon Seikkan Township.
The NLD administration also remained quiet over the Tatmadaw’s continued atrocities against the working class. In jade mining sites such as Hpakan, young children are sent to gather jade while facing brutal conditions, including mudslides. An estimated 1.13 million five to seventeen year olds are trapped in child labor in Myanmar. This means one in every 11 children is deprived of their childhood, health, and education.
Failing on the economic front, Suu Kyi used inhumane ethno-racial tactics to divert citizens’ attention from relevant issues. Silent support for increasing mobilization of ultranationalist Buddhist groups contributed to the outbreak of extremist attacks and anti-Muslim sentiments. Hate speech increased, particularly via new social media communities. Sectarian violence and military clearance operations drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh.
Governmental collaborationism with the Tatmadaw ensured that the Rohingya were left with no avenues for justice. One example of this is that the seven soldiers who were convicted and jailed for the death of 10 Rohingya men and boys during the 2017 military operations were released less than a year into their 10-year prison sentences. But the two journalists who reported the killing spent more than 16 months behind bars on charges of obtaining state secrets.
In the absence of the rule of law, the international community called for an independent investigation resulting in accusations of crimes against humanity. In December 2019, Suu Kyi had to defend her country from accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Domestically, both the government and the military used the increasing international criticism to rally their supporters behind them and to forge a unity, which is otherwise lacking in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious country.
On Suu Kyi’s watch, the country has seen a regression in press freedom, expanded usage of anti-defamation laws and a general crackdown on speech. In 2020, independent news organizations such as Karen News, and Rakhine-based Development Media Group and Narinjara News, were banned from local telecommunication operator’s networks by the government for allegedly disseminating “fake news”.
Yangon-based Khit Thit Media, Mandalay-based Voice of Myanmar, and Sittwe-based Narinjara News faced anti-terrorism charges for publishing interviews with the outlawed Arakan Army, which has been fighting for autonomy in the Rakhine and Chin states of western Myanmar. Reporters Without Borders ranked Myanmar 139 out of 180 in its 2020 World Press Freedom Index, while Freedom House categorized Myanmar as “Not Free”.
Defeating the Military
The protest movement that has broken out since the coup took place is the biggest since 1988. But the NLD will not take this movement to its final conclusion; it will stop half-way and maintain its strategy of cooperation with the Tatmadaw. Despite popular demands to amend the existing constitution, which gives too much power to the military leaders, the NLD had largely remained silent on that issue. Even with a majority in parliament and with full authority to make legislation, the NLD continued with its non-confrontational approach.
The NLD leaders instead focused on bringing in foreign investment in an attempt to develop a stable capitalist economy, while letting the military enjoy effective government control. NLD had no confidence that its mass support could overcome the military. The party feared that if they mobilised mass support it could get “out of control” and threaten their pro-capitalist project. Now, the working people of Myanmar are going to pay the price of this failure.
During the 8-8-88 uprising (8 August 1988), Suu Kyi demobilized the militant workers’ and student movements to turn them into a base for her electoral ambitions. At that time, the pro-democracy movement hesitated in ousting the junta once and for all. Now, students and workers must build a mass movement that does not repeat this mistake.
On 12 February, 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a resolution in which it criticized the removal of Myanmar’s democratically elected government by the military, locally known as Tatmadaw. The Council also called urgently for the immediate and unconditional release of all persons arbitrarily detained, including State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint and others, and the lifting of the state of emergency.
As the international community condemns the coup and shows support for Suu Kyi, it is important not to whitewash the latter as a savior of the Myanma masses. Neither is she a doyen of democracy nor a courageous anti-military leader; she is the face of an alternative ruling class project which aims to incorporate the Tatmadaw into a new geo-economic architecture. The coup is the culmination of that intra-elite power struggle.
Intra-elite Power Struggle
The military regime that came to power in 1988 under Saw Maung looked to capitalism to provide a solution to the crisis that had led to social upheaval, and thus set in motion a process that aimed at breaking down the old state-owned economy and moving towards greater marketization. Their plan was not to sell off to private capitalists, but to transform themselves into the owners of the means of production. They proceeded to privatize a section of the economy, while holding on to key sectors via their control of the state sector.
Eventually, the military’s plan gave rise to a clique of generals who control, through straw men, Myanmar’s biggest corporations, as well as the lucrative trade in jade and other precious stones, narcotics and timber. Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) tried to re-configure this model of military-dominated capitalism by implementing an aggressively pro-market reform agenda that included mobilizing Western and East Asian investment into regular channels. Her “Myanmar Sustainable Economic Development Plan” allowed foreign capitalists to invest up to 35% in local companies, as well as holding stakes of up to 35% in Myanmar companies traded on the Yangon Stock Exchange.
Defensive Posture
The tussle between the NLD and the military reflected itself in different domains. However, the former always maintained a defensive posture – in the hope that by doing the junta a favour, it would hopefully grant them the minimal democratic reforms it wants. On the one hand, Suu Kyi took over some of the military’s positions — for instance, in the peace process. She also seemed to have taken over the military’s version of establishing a centralized state under the domination of the Bamar-Buddhist majority.
On the other hand, Suu Kyi feared the actions of the military. She avoided convening the National Defense and Security Council (NDSC), the institution responsible for discussing security matters. The 11-member body comprising the highest legislative, executive and military players has the right to take over power during a state of emergency.
Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing repeatedly demanded that Suu Kyi convene the NSCD, while she appointed her own security advisers. The NLD feared being forced to call a state of emergency (e.g. over Rakhine state), which could allow the Commander-in-Chief to take over power and dissolve parliament. Both the NLD and the military unsuccessfully attempted to increase their power in the NDSC by bringing in constitutional amendments that would have altered the organ’s composition in their favour.
Neoliberalism with Ethno-racial Characteristics
Insofar that Suu Kyi wanted to establish the complete hegemony of free market on the soil of Myanmar by striking compromises with the military, she generated a politico-economic framework that had excluded the common people. Positioned between the Tatmadaw and multinational companies, she became impervious to the concrete demands of millions of Burmese.
The majority of Myanmar’s population has not been able to see the prosperity that Suu Kyi promised. One in four remained poor in 2017, according to the World Bank. Nearly half of those polled by the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) in 2019 were worried about losing their livelihood, more than twice as many as in 2015. Some 54% said they were unable to access basic services, such as water, public transport and health care, up from 48% five years ago.
Suu Kyi’s government repressed a surge of labor organizing over the past five years. In particular, garment workers waged a massive organizing drive that was repressed by both the bosses and the government. In May 2020, six labor leaders were arrested for leading a strike that violated COVID-19 regulations in a factory in Yangon’s Dagon Seikkan Township.
The NLD administration also remained quiet over the Tatmadaw’s continued atrocities against the working class. In jade mining sites such as Hpakan, young children are sent to gather jade while facing brutal conditions, including mudslides. An estimated 1.13 million five to seventeen year olds are trapped in child labor in Myanmar. This means one in every 11 children is deprived of their childhood, health, and education.
Failing on the economic front, Suu Kyi used inhumane ethno-racial tactics to divert citizens’ attention from relevant issues. Silent support for increasing mobilization of ultranationalist Buddhist groups contributed to the outbreak of extremist attacks and anti-Muslim sentiments. Hate speech increased, particularly via new social media communities. Sectarian violence and military clearance operations drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh.
Governmental collaborationism with the Tatmadaw ensured that the Rohingya were left with no avenues for justice. One example of this is that the seven soldiers who were convicted and jailed for the death of 10 Rohingya men and boys during the 2017 military operations were released less than a year into their 10-year prison sentences. But the two journalists who reported the killing spent more than 16 months behind bars on charges of obtaining state secrets.
In the absence of the rule of law, the international community called for an independent investigation resulting in accusations of crimes against humanity. In December 2019, Suu Kyi had to defend her country from accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Domestically, both the government and the military used the increasing international criticism to rally their supporters behind them and to forge a unity, which is otherwise lacking in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious country.
On Suu Kyi’s watch, the country has seen a regression in press freedom, expanded usage of anti-defamation laws and a general crackdown on speech. In 2020, independent news organizations such as Karen News, and Rakhine-based Development Media Group and Narinjara News, were banned from local telecommunication operator’s networks by the government for allegedly disseminating “fake news”.
Yangon-based Khit Thit Media, Mandalay-based Voice of Myanmar, and Sittwe-based Narinjara News faced anti-terrorism charges for publishing interviews with the outlawed Arakan Army, which has been fighting for autonomy in the Rakhine and Chin states of western Myanmar. Reporters Without Borders ranked Myanmar 139 out of 180 in its 2020 World Press Freedom Index, while Freedom House categorized Myanmar as “Not Free”.
Defeating the Military
The protest movement that has broken out since the coup took place is the biggest since 1988. But the NLD will not take this movement to its final conclusion; it will stop half-way and maintain its strategy of cooperation with the Tatmadaw. Despite popular demands to amend the existing constitution, which gives too much power to the military leaders, the NLD had largely remained silent on that issue. Even with a majority in parliament and with full authority to make legislation, the NLD continued with its non-confrontational approach.
The NLD leaders instead focused on bringing in foreign investment in an attempt to develop a stable capitalist economy, while letting the military enjoy effective government control. NLD had no confidence that its mass support could overcome the military. The party feared that if they mobilised mass support it could get “out of control” and threaten their pro-capitalist project. Now, the working people of Myanmar are going to pay the price of this failure.
During the 8-8-88 uprising (8 August 1988), Suu Kyi demobilized the militant workers’ and student movements to turn them into a base for her electoral ambitions. At that time, the pro-democracy movement hesitated in ousting the junta once and for all. Now, students and workers must build a mass movement that does not repeat this mistake.
In the middle of the holidays, the pipes in my apartment got clogged for the second time this year. On both occasions water was scarce for several days, and when it did arrive it brought so many rocks that the flow got blocked.
I had no option but to call our “community plumber.” In other words, a man that for the past 30 years has fixed issues with pipes in this building and nearby (and lately he’s been as busy as ever).
We’re talking about a good-natured fellow, a lovely guy, one of those who helps you carry bags, preaches about Jesus, sends his regards to the family and suddenly tells you, with a sweet smile: “that will be US $200.” And one can’t help but think “he’s screwing me, but how on earth can I curse such a nice man?”
Four in 10 people who needed financial support to self-isolate at the end of 2020 said they had not been able to access it, research suggests.
Support lacking
Issues included schemes or funding not always being available locally, eligibility criteria being too strict, a lack of awareness about discretionary support, and stigma associated with accessing help, the Red Cross said.
Low earners told to self-isolate by test and trace services across the UK are able to apply for a grant to support them while they stay at home. However, the Red Cross said there are growing concerns about inconsistencies across the schemes, which offer different levels of access to financial support.
One participant felt hopeful after being told by NHS Test and Trace she may be entitled to a £500 payment to help her and her family while they were self-isolating. But when she phoned the council, it said the scheme had not yet been rolled out in her area.
Overall, 43% of those who said financial support would have been helpful said they had been unable to access this support.
Hardest hit
The Red Cross surveyed 2,000 UK adults and conducted 29 in-depth interviews with the public and professionals for its new report: The longest year: life under local restrictions. It covers the period between October and December, when tiered restrictions were in place and several UK nations entered periods of national lockdown.
The report identifies two groups who have been hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic – the “newly vulnerable” who have never needed help before and are struggling with stigma and knowing where to turn for support; and people struggling before the crisis who are now pushed to the brink.
For both groups, a lack of clear information about local rules exacerbated problems and led many to put themselves into “self-imposed” lockdown, limiting interactions with loved ones which compounded feelings of loneliness and isolation. A key lesson coming out of the pandemic must be to “normalise asking for help”, it said.
No confidence
The polling found that 40% of UK adults were not confident about where to go to access financial support for essential items, despite 13% saying this would have been helpful to them under local restrictions.
Half of UK adults (50%) found it difficult to keep up to date with the latest coronavirus restrictions in their area and three quarters (74%) found it easier to limit how much they left home rather than try to keep up with changes to the restrictions.
Of people who are not confident that they can cope with or recover from the changes to their life caused by the pandemic, 71% cited their mental health as a key factor.
Mental health
Norman McKinley, executive director of UK operations at the British Red Cross, said:
Our report shows the inextricable link between financial insecurity and mental health, and that the point at which someone faces hardship is a crucial moment to catch them before they fall into a more desperate situation.
When you feel like your life is spinning out of control, having agency over the small things – like the cereal you buy or the ingredients for your dinner – makes all the difference. We need flexible and easy-to-access cash support to give people back their dignity, while also giving them the breathing room to get back on their feet.
As we come out of the pandemic, we must develop a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be vulnerable and normalise asking for help – whether practical, emotional or financial.
Emergency
The Red Cross is calling for the government to ensure emergency financial support is available and promoted through local welfare assistance schemes, including for people with no recourse to public funds. It said the government should give local authorities in England £250m per year to top up local welfare assistance schemes over the longer term. On top of that, it argued the government should review and “rapidly improve” self-isolation support schemes so eligibility is relaxed and simplified to allow for easier access.
The Red Cross has set up a free and confidential coronavirus support line on 0808 196 3651 for anyone who is lonely, worried, or in need of practical or emotional support during the pandemic.
The legacy of a society is, well, how it treats its young, old, frail, infirm, sick, poor and those hobbled by structural and environmental injustice.
Some in urban planning circles also allude to how safe a community is based on the popsicle test – can a child or two walking from home to a store, get a popsicle without having to cross high speed roads or highways, without having to walk along long stretches of ugly dangerous buildings, and who can find a multitude of stores that sell good food and desserts like Popsicles. How easy it is for the child to walk there? Are the homes-apartments-duplexes-offices looking out toward the sidewalks? Are there porches out front where people linger and lounge? Are there trees for shade? Are there mail boxes? Are there stores and eateries on the ground floor of a stretch of businesses with apartments and housing one and two floors above? Are there people bicycling? Are the stores and businesses set toward the streets and their parking lots pushed to the back of the establishments? Are there scalable hardware stores with windows and many doorways? Are there neighborhood groups that patrol the neighborhoods? Are there mixed neighborhoods with lower economic mixed in with middle class? What are the officers of the peace doing? Are they walking and bicycling their beats, where they live? Are they battened down in huge bulletproof SUV’s with three computers, five assault weapons, and the A/C blaring?
The children, walk or bicycle from their home, and within a few minutes, they get to a place of business, without running through or dodging a gauntlet of racing trucks and autos. Are there elderly and families and business owners and customers there, doing their thing, on a scalable level?
We know that in capitalism, in this free (sic) market society, with the bottom dollar and the bottom line of more and more profits without work or building something as the drivers, we the people – those two children walking to get a fudge bar or organic apple – are not the drivers of the society, the communities, the neighborhoods.
Life in Capitalism is designed for speed, rot, decay, throwaway buildings and throwaway humanity. We have those massive systems of oppression run by real estate, insurance, finance, banks, building and paving, all those entities guarded by the US Chamber of Commerce whose job is to maximize the profits (gouging’s) of the large and medium-sized businesses that have run rough shod over us, the “regular people.”
Now, those old industries are being retrofitted for the next level of exploitation and enslavement vis-à-vis the economies of scale vaunted by the monopolies, the investor class and billionaires. And that scaling up is facilitated by the masters of logarithms and Artificial Intelligence and digital dictators.
Mom and pops – that is, the small family-owned businesses and the mini-chains of this or that service or consumer item – they are now on the cutting block in an amped up destruction of people’s lives, on a scale that would make a steroid using wrestler look like Mother Teresa on bread and water. Any chance of having a small business community have a say in how their communities and neighborhoods and census tracks are developed alongside with how their neighboring communities connect to this urban and rural planning, all of that inclusive and participatory democracy and governance are dwindling ten-fold yearly.
Who makes the decisions? Who puts the brakes on suburban sprawl and rampant car-centric cities? Ahh, the masters of money and masters of stocks and the AI and Digital Dictators will have more and more say in the design (or miss-design) of both the built environment as well as the financial environments. Add to that educational environments, the healthcare environments, the food system environments, the housing environments. We the people do not have control!
Examples by Design
I’m putting in this opening above to help segue into the reality of my work now – one of many hats, but now, it’s social work and case management for adults living with developmental and intellectual disabilities. And some who have had traumatic brain injuries.
If the reader doesn’t have a bead on what the ID/DD community is, well, look it up. In a Western culture with more and more pre-newborns gestating into a slurry of forever chemicals, cortisol loads, heavy metals, stress hormones from mother, and a combination of all of this as a synergetic roulette wheel, coupled with DNA markers from mother and father, well, you can image that young boys and girls with disabilities like Autism Spectrum Disorder or mental retardation or any number of other aspects of life dealt from a genetic and poison deck of cards will be a huge burden on families, medical services, schools, society in general.
Go back to the Popsicle analogy, but this time look at how our cultures deal with the less fortunate – a child born is innocent, no matter what sort of spirituality or religiosity you hold or do not hold. Cases in point for me after more than two decades working with poisoned souls – the children of the storms: fetal alcohol-affected or drug-addicted or hugely malnourished inside the womb – we are barbaric in terms of how we “deal” with the afflicted or the people born into a life of one or multiple deficits.
Here, a composite – Drew was born to a mother who “experienced” drug and alcohol addiction. He was 5 pounds and four ounces at birth. He tested positive for cocaine and opiates at birth. He was in a nursery until moved to foster care in 10 days. His birth mother had several children “taken away or removed from her” because of her addictions.
He was adopted by an old woman, who loved him but died of cancer when Drew was 7. Neighbors reported to the child protective agencies in California that Drew was being neglected and the dying mother was not caring for him properly.
This is a common story in my line of work – multiple foster home placements per individual, lots of behavior issues arising by first year of school, from aggression, to defiance, to tantrums. Quickly he was put under a special education label – independent education plan. His ADHD, Tourette’s Syndrome, and anxiety, depression, aggression, isolating behavior, and poor stick-to-it-ness, all of that and more channeled him into special classes and into the special education network. Hearing voices and magical thinking and fantastical thoughts and paranoia, well, Drew is sort of a ward of the state. His foster/adoptive parents are his financial guardians, and he has county case workers and state ones lined up, along with nonprofit case workers.
I work with a nonprofit, again, as a case worker-employment specialist. My job is to get people like Drew jobs, but that process is holistic, systematic and definitely tied to the whole suite of getting young and not so old people ready to face competitive employment, integrated, no longer stuck in some sheltered workshop.
Those “sheltered workshops” included Goodwill clothing tagging rooms where all workers were those living with developmental disabilities; or even roaming crews of cleaners of office buildings who are all labeled ID-DD. That is a type of cloistering, sheltering from mainstream society.
My nonprofit, of course, is a middleman of sorts, replacing the services states, counties and cities should be providing by taking over the contracts to do the work of providing developmental disabilities safety nets.
Nutshells are the Only Teachable Moments
So, getting someone a job at a hotel to do towel folding or room cleaning, or helping someone land a job as a custodian at a school, and for those with more skills and with more confidence, a place in retail sales, that’s part of my work. Sure, in Portland I worked with lawyers who have cerebral palsy, and true, that type of person deserves an equal shot at being a lawyer or working at the level somewhere. These advocates have their hearts in the right place, to be sure, and no Five F’s for them – filth, factory, food, foliage, fur – because they have graduate degrees.
The reality is, though, someone with a lack of reading skills, with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and all the attending issues tied to the autism in that individual, well, working a cash register is tough (impossible for most), and doing public customer service at any level is tough. Behind the scenes jobs are the norm, and, unfortunately, the filth, food, foliage, fur and factory are the only choices sometimes. Life on the Central Oregon Coast where people retire or vacation, and where a fishing industry thrives, well, those job opportunities dwindle big time.
Aspirational: all people deserve home, health, education, food, work, public transportation choices. Aspirational: sure, we need communities designed for that Popsicle test. Most of my clients, of course, do not drive, or can’t. Most clients have issues with navigating the absurd on-line employment applications. Many clients need me there in the actual job interview.
Many clients need a coach on the job, sometimes for life. Many clients work minimum wage for 20 hours a week to keep a bit of the SSI (social security insurance coming in). We are such a penury and usury society that my clients, even at minimum wage, get a dollar taken away from every two dollars made. This is how the system kills hope, advancement — the state gobbles up shekels after their first $85 is earned.
All the studies and anecdotal evidence show that a job for a person with a developmental disability or a physical disability, or even a psychological disability like schizophrenia, THRIVE with employment for obvious reasons: a sense of belonging, team work, doing something as a member of society, extra money, socialization, using the brain. But here we are again, failing the other Popsicle test – we penalize and penalize and penalize until people are stripped bare.
A few clients have to take urine tests for many jobs, and if they come back positive for cannabis, well, some outfits disqualify the person automatically from a minimum wage job. Even if that person has a medical marijuana card, in a state where pot is legal (it is in OR). Imagine that, all those politicians, those weak-spine things in DC and around state Capitols, and this is what they have legislated and this is how weak they are when it comes to day to day, people to people life-and-death decisions.
Study after study, and again, a million anectodical stories show THC and CBD actually pull patients off prescriptions and actually keep anxiety at bay and amp up focus.
The law enforcers and the bureaucracies and the policymakers are Neanderthals, really (no attack on those people, Neanderthals, but it’s a term of describing how behind the times and backward they are).
My job is to do workarounds, to do magic, and while mom and pop’s along the coast are shuttering daily, the small hotels are now owned by investment groups, and managed by the big daddies of hotel and motel management corporations. Having workarounds with national organizations, sometimes multinationals, well, those conversations never happen, let alone an email gets returned. They are not of, for and by the community. They are in business for the investors and profits.
The chances of having an offspring with one or a number of chronic illnesses or who might end up on the spectrum or might have brain anomalies because of gestational issues, or who are genetically programmed to come out a “certain way,” well, those odds increase monthly.
Yet the systems of oppression and the cops and the legal systems, they still incarcerate, batter and murder people with autism. People in mental health crises are tased and murdered by pigs. The systems of oppression are buttressed by the prejudices of Holly-dirt and the bullies of the world. It can be an overt Trump making fun of a disabled reporter at a press conference when he was first running in 2016, or it could be a Biden who pushed the crime bill, putting untold numbers of people with mental, emotional and situational abuse in chambers of hell – prison.
The spectrum of people who still do not understand why I work in “that field,” under all the pressures of emotionally traumatized and psychologically depleted people and their families, well, they might think of themselves as the beautiful people, the anti-Trumpistas, the LGBTQ folk, the African-American-in-the-VP-office loving folk, but again, they fail the Popsicle test.
Dream hoarders and Not in My Backyard vacillators, and all sorts of other liberal/neoliberal types, they are no friends of the Popsicle Test of a Sustainable, Fair, Resilient Community. They love their first and second homes. They covet a Stock Market hovering around 31,000 points. They love the Netflix mental diabetes junk they consume, and they have no idea why Biden is as bad as Bush or Trump.
And then I have to convince people to shed their prejudices against people that are not appearing “like themselves.” We do not use terms like “neuronormal” to contrast my clients with the mainstream, but in the end, what is normal in a society that shifts baselines almost weekly?
With the new normal full of paranoia, unapproved vaccines, and misleading diseased minds like Fauci and Gates leading the charge for a global forced vaccination program, one can image how paranoid my clients are who live in group homes or in small one-room apartments. TV and few friends ramify their fears. Lockdown is a locking up of the mind!
Some clients do not even want to meet me face to face on a beach with masks on. They are paranoid because of the mass polluting media. One disability on top of another and another. Welcome to America.
What is a disability? I suppose Helen Keller might figure in here:
When she was sixteen, in 1896, she was catapulted to national fame, writes Keith Rosenthal for the International Socialist Review. By 1904, when she graduated from Radcliffe College, she was internationally famous. She joined the Socialist Party of America a few years later and began advocating for revolutionary change. “She noticed the close relationship between disability and poverty, and blamed capitalism and poor industrial conditions for both,” writes Sascha Cohen for Time.
But even though she had strong politics and a national voice, nobody took her opinions seriously. “Newspaper editors would use her disability as a means to dismiss her politics and to dissuade people from taking her seriously,” writes Rosenthal. “Her radicalism, conservative writers would aver, was a product of the political ‘mistakes [which] spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.’”
Despite this, she was a leading light of the American socialist movement, Rosenthal writes. Among many other causes, she championed pacifism and the U.S. staying out of World War I. Source:Smithsonian Magazine
Eventually, in dog-eat-dog, kill your competition capitalism, we all become each other’s competitor, enemy. A few billion dollars here and there for hundreds of millions of struggling people is birdseed, yet the systems of oppression and suppression, along with the mass murdering media, cull agency, gumption, and the ability of people to stand up to the oppressors and the authorities and multiple graduate degree certificate holders.
What do the people I serve and the so-called “normal majority” have in common? There are variations on a Dystopian theme, whether it’s Blade Runner or Minority Report or Brave New World or 1984. Almost everyone in this country is confused, shattered, see-hear-speak no evil tied to their specific coalitions and ways of thinking. My amazing clients are enmeshed in fear and the outside world, thanks to the conflation of SARS-CoV2 to a body-eating zombie virus, eating them alive and culling them all eventually. No more hide and seek — it’s all duck and cover and mask and hide and isolate.
What that gives me as a worker are many people who deserve integrated employment but who are hobbled and shackled to the gestalt of a warped society. Do they have other ways of thinking and seeing and hearing? Of course. Do they have their own methods of surviving paranoia, depression, anxiety, hypervigilance, magical thinking, shattered executive functions, functional or complete illiteracy?
Of course. Of course. But again, the Popsicle test fails each time. Imagine, a job, 4 pm to 8 pm, in a town 15 miles from where they live. Can you see the public transportation system beautiful and timely and regular? Nope. Can you see all these taxi and shuttle services for free getting people to work and from work who can’t-won’t-never will drive? Where is that dreamland in Capitalism?
Yet every minute and every second of a 24-hour news cycle or 24 hours of a million channels broadcasting thousands of novellas, soap operas or series and movies, all are occupied with the stories and travails of the rich and famous, the idiotic heroes or pig crime dramas or Marvel Comic Book drivel. Rarely do Americans see what they live out personally, or view what they struggle with daily, or get to watch people like themselves in this battle to get the oppressors and Eichmann’s to bend to their/our will and begin to apply the tenants of the Popsicle Theory.
Otto Zehm
I can end with story after story of humanity hog-tied or knee-butted to death by the cops. Add to that demographic people living with psychological-intellectual-developmental disabilities.
You do not have to surf the internet long to find a few cases of autistic men and women or boys and girls getting pepper sprayed and handcuffed and body slammed by the pigs.
There is that case of Otto Zehm, and then Alien Boy which I wrote about here at DV. “Watching Brian Lindstrom’s Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse, I am reminded of my forty plus years in and around cops, with mentally distressed clients, as a social worker with homeless and re-entry and veteran clients, and as a teacher in many alternative high school programs, community college, prisons, with military students, and with adults living with developmental disabilities.”
I think that most of us instinctively avoid people with mental illness.
I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa’s dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between “us” and “them” to arrive at a “we.”
—Brian Lindstrom, documentarian
Zehm was 32 years old when the Spokane cops killed him by putting him on the ground and forcing a cop’s weight onto his back while Otto’s diaphragm collapsed. He was a custodian, and back in 2006, the Spokesman Review deemed him as a mentally disabled custodian.
He went into a mini-mart for soda. It took almost a decade to find the pig guilty of murder. And this is how the DA and cops think of “mentally disabled custodians” —
Zehm either “attacked” the officers or at least refused to comply with their commands. Police Chief Jim Nicks said Tuesday that Zehm “immediately engaged” the first officer.
“Whether he lunged or turned quickly on him, whatever the case may be, the officer clearly felt there was a risk there,” Nicks said. “The suspect had a large two-liter bottle of pop. The officer had to take all those things into consideration as far as what level of threat this might be.
“But the bottom line is they had a duty and an obligation to detain and control him.” — Spokesman Review
I’ve been down this road many times over the years. My first police encounter as a newspaper reporter was in Ajo, Arizona. A very long time ago. Pima County Sheriff responds to a mother’s call about her Vietnam War veteran son having a mental crisis out front in the desert front yard. Fenced in. He needed some meds. The cops show up. And, while the veteran was on his mother’s property, which essentially was being paid for through the vet’s job and benefits, the deputy pulled his gun on the other side of the property line. He tells the 38 year old to drop the small knife.
A knife brandished by a shirtless and barefoot fellow in his OWN front yard.
Justified-six-shots-to-the-torso homicide. I was 19, and back then, I had this gig as a newspaper reporter, the so-called “sexy” cop beat, and, while I pushed my editors to allow some of my secondary interviews into the piece (interviews I did from a USC criminal justice reforming professor, another from a police chief in Akron) well, those were cut from the published article. Those two sources discussed how police are ripe for this sort of homicide, and how the system is rigged to defend civilian killing cops. That was 43 years ago.
I spent time with the vet’s mother and his ex-wife, and in reality, this guy was pretty cool, a great rock hound, three years at the university in hard rock geology, but his PTSD was way too much. PTSD wasn’t even the terminology back then in 1976.
I think of Otto Zehm all the time now. I knew of him and said hello to him a few times while I lived and taught in Spokane. He cleaned at the Community Building where I did a lot of gigs as a poet and teacher. I had my radio show in that building, and I ran into Otto a lot.
There is no way in hell Otto could have done harm to a cop.
The irony is that in 2006 I wasn’t working yet directly in the field of developmental disabilities. Sure, I had students who had psychological disabilities, and some students with accommodations. Many students who came back from the killing mountains of the Middle East.
I ended up working with adults with developmental disabilities in Portland and the three-county area 8 years later.
Now I am back at it, and, I think about some of my very verbal and far-thinking men and women with autism disorders. I think of their defiance and their questioning and their inability “to get” that cops or pigs or sheriff deputies just are itching for a bruising. They expect instant compliance. That is compliance from a disabled person, or from a three star black general or a Mexican American female attorney.
You can read about the extrajudicial killings this country’s allows. And that, again, is the Popsicle Test failure Number 999,999.
All those promises for reform. With the Portland Police Bureau. Seattle PD. Spokane PD. A thousand other PD’s blemished overtly with police brutality, police coverups, police maleficence.
No Popsicles for the People. Including the Developmentally Disabled.
The end of 2020 brought the sharpest rise in the U.S. poverty rate since the 1960s, according to a new study.
Economists Bruce Meyer from the University of Chicago and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame found that the poverty rate increased by 2.4 percentage points during the latter half of 2020 as the U.S. continued to suffer the economic impacts of COVID-19.
That percentage-point rise is nearly double the largest annual increase in poverty since the 1960s. This means an additional 8 million people nationwide are now considered poor. Moreover, the poverty rate for Black Americans is estimated to have jumped by 5.4 percentage points, or by 2.4 million individuals.
![A demonstrator from the Occupy Wall Street campaign seen with a dollar taped over his mouth as he stands near the financial district of New York September 30, 2011 [File: Lucas Jackson/Reuters]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/2b5cde192e7f444da69355329cfe6a5a_18.jpeg?resize=770%2C513)
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