Since the attacks on the United States by 15 Saudi Arabian Islamic fanatics on 11 September 2001 — now known as 9/11 — the world has been divided by a “war on terror” with any protest group defined as “terrorists”.
New anti-terror laws have been introduced both in the West and elsewhere in the past 20 years and used extensively to suppress such movements in the name of “national security”.
It is interesting to note that the 9/11 attacks came at a time when a huge “global justice” movement was building up across the world against the injustices of globalisation.
Using the internet as the medium of mobilisation, they gathered in Seattle in 1999 and were successful in closing down the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting.
They opposed what they saw as large multinational corporations having unregulated political power, exercised through trade agreements and deregulated financial markets, facilitated by governments.
Their main targets were the WTO, International Monetary Fund (IMF), OECD, World Bank, and international trade agreements.
The movement brought “civil society” people from the North and the South together under common goals.
Poorest country debts
In parallel, the “Jubilee 2000” international movement led by liberal Christian and Catholic churches called for the cancellation of US$90 billion of debts owed by the world’s poorest nations to banks and governments in the West.
Along with the churches, youth groups, music, and entertainment industry groups were involved. The 9/11 attacks killed these movements as “national security” took precedence over “freedom to dissent”.
Dr Dayan Jayatilleka, a former vice-president of the UN Human Rights Council and a Sri Lankan political scientist, notes that when “capitalism turned neoliberal and went on the rampage” after the demise of the Soviet Union, resistance started to develop with the rise of the Zapatistas in Chiapas (Mexico) against NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and culminating in the 1999 Seattle protests using a term coined by Cuban leader Fidel Castro “another world is possible”.
“All that came crashing down with the Twin Towers,” he notes. “With 9/11 the Islamic Jihadist opposition to the USA (and the war on terror) cut across and buried the progressive resistance we saw emerging in Chiapas and Seattle.”
Geoffrey Robertson QC, a British human rights campaigner and TV personality, warns: “9/11 panicked us into the ‘war on terror’ using lethal weapons of questionable legality which inspired more terrorists.
“Twenty years on, those same adversaries are back and we now have a fear of US perfidy—over Taiwan or ANZUS or whatever. There will be many consequences.”
But, he sees some silver lining that has come out of this “war on terror”.
Targeted sanctions
“One reasonably successful tactic developed in the war on terror was to use targeted sanctions on its sponsors. This has been developed by so-called ‘Magnitsky acts’, enabling the targeting of human rights abusers—31 democracies now have them and Australia will shortly be the 32nd.
“I foresee their coordination as part of the fightback—a war not on terror but state cruelty,” he told In-Depth News.
When asked about the US’s humiliation in Afghanistan, Dr Chandra Muzaffar, founder of the International Movement for a Just World told IDN that the West needed to understand that they too needed to stop funding terror to achieve their own agendas.
“The ‘war on terror’ was doomed to failure from the outset because those who initiated the war were not prepared to admit that it was their occupation and oppression that compelled others to retaliate through acts of terror.” he argues.
“Popular antagonism towards the occupiers was one of the main reasons for the humiliating defeat of the US and NATO in Afghanistan,” he added.
Looking at Western attempts to introduce democracy under the pretext of “war on terror” and the chaos created by the “Arab Spring”, a youth movement driven by Western-funded NGOs, Iranian-born Australian Farzin Yekta, who worked in Lebanon for 15 years as a community multimedia worker, argues that the Arab region needs a different democracy.
“In the Middle East, the nations should aspire to a system based on social justice rather than the Western democratic model. Corrupt political and economic apparatus, external interference and dysfunctional infrastructure are the main obstacles for moving towards establishing a system based on social justice,” he says, adding that there are signs of growing social movements being revived in the region while “resisting all kinds of attacks”.
Palestinian refugee lessons
Yekta told IDN that while working with Palestinian refugee groups in Lebanon he had seen how peoples’ movements could be undermined by so-called “civil society” NGOs.
“Alternative social movements are infested by ‘civil society’ institutions comprising primarily NGO institutions.
“‘Civil society’ is effective leverage for the establishment and foreign (Western) interference to pacify radical social movements. Social movements find themselves in a web of funded entities which push for ‘agendas’ drawn by funding buddies,” noted Yekta.
Looking at the failure of Western forces in Afghanistan, he argues that what they did by building up “civil society” was encouraging corruption and cronyism that is entangled in ethnic and tribal structures of society.
“The Western nation-building plan was limited to setting up a glasshouse pseudo-democratic space in the green zone part of Kabul.
“One just needed to go to the countryside to confront the utter poverty and lack of infrastructure,” Yekta notes.
”We need to understand that people’s struggle is occurring at places with poor or no infrastructure.”
Social movements reviving
Dr Jayatilleka also sees positive signs of social movements beginning to raise their heads after two decades of repression.
“Black Lives Matter drew in perhaps more young whites than blacks and constituted the largest ever protest movement in history. The globalised solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza, including large demonstrations in US cities, is further evidence.
“In Latin America, the left-populist Pink Tide 2.0 began with the victory of Lopez Obrador in Mexico and has produced the victory of Pedro Castillo in Peru.
“The slogan of justice, both individual and social, is more globalised, more universalised today, than ever before in my lifetime,” he told IDN.
There may be ample issues for peoples’ movements to take up with TPP (Transpacific Partnership) and RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) trade agreements coming into force in Asia where companies would be able to sue governments if their social policies infringe on company profits.
But Dr Jayatilleka is less optimistic of social movements rising in Asia.
Asian social inequities
“Sadly, the social justice movement is considerably more complicated in Asia than elsewhere, though one would have assumed that given the social inequities in Asian societies, the struggle for social justice would be a torrent. It is not,” he argues.
“The brightest recent spark in Asia, according to Dr Jayatilleka, was the rise of the Nepali Communist Party to power through the ballot box after a protracted peoples’ war, but ‘sectarianism’ has led to the subsiding of what was the brightest hope for the social justice movement in Asia.”
Robertson feels that the time is ripe for the social movements suppressed by post 9/11 anti-terror laws to be reincarnated in a different life.
“The broader demand for social justice will revive, initially behind the imperative of dealing with climate change but then with tax havens, the power of multinationals, and the obscene inequalities in the world’s wealth.
“So, I do not despair of social justice momentum in the future,” he says.
Republished under Creative Commons partnership with IDN – In-Depth News.
A few days ago, I spoke to a senior official at the World Health Organisation (WHO). I asked her if she knew how many people lived their lives on our planet without shoes. The reason I asked her this question is because I was wondering about Tungiasis, an ailment caused by the infection that results from the entry of a female sand flea (Tunga penetrans) into the skin. This problem has a variety of names in many different languages – from jigger or chigoe to niguá (Spanish) or bicho do pé (Portuguese) to funza (Kiswahili) or tukutuku (Zande). It is a terrible problem that disfigures the feet and makes mobility difficult. Shoes prevent these fleas from burrowing into the skin. She was not sure about the number but presumed that at least a billion people must live without shoes.
Northerners were more likely to die from coronavirus (Covid-19), spent almost six weeks longer in lockdowns, and were made poorer than the rest of England during the first year of the pandemic, official figures have revealed.
English disparity
Academics have analysed government statistics to show just how much worse it affected the North East, North West, and Yorkshire and the Humber compared to the rest of England. Public health experts said much of the blame for the increased mortality could be explained by the higher deprivation levels and worse pre-pandemic health in the North.
People in Newcastle queued to get vaccinated in January (Owen Humphreys/PA)
The report, commissioned by the Northern Health Science Alliance, found:
People living in the North had a 17% higher mortality rate due to coronavirus than in the rest of England, and a 14% higher overall mortality due to all causes.
The North’s care home coronavirus mortality was 26% higher than the rest of England.
In the North 10% more hospital beds were occupied by coronavirus patients than in the rest of England.
On average people living in the North had 41 more days of the harshest lockdown restrictions than people in the rest of the country.
The North experienced a larger drop in mental well-being, more loneliness, and higher rates of antidepressant prescriptions.
Wages in the North, which were lower than the rest of England before the pandemic, fell further, whereas wages increased in the rest of the country.
The unemployment rate in the North was 19% higher than the rest of England.
“Hardest hit”
Dr Luke Munford, a lecturer in health economics at Manchester University, said:
The pandemic has hit us all hard in different ways, but our report shows that people living in the North were much more likely to be hardest hit, both in terms of health and wealth. The fact that over half of the increased Covid-19 mortality and two-thirds of all-cause mortality was potentially preventable should be a real wake-up call.
We need to invest in the health of people living in the North to ensure they are able to recover from the devastating impacts of the pandemic.
Professor Clare Bambra says England has gone through an “unequal pandemic”
Clare Bambra, professor of public health at Newcastle University, said:
Our report shows how regional health inequalities before coronavirus have resulted in an unequal pandemic, with higher rates of ill health, death and despair in the North. The economic impact of the lockdown is also looking likely to exacerbate the regional economic divide.
The Government’s levelling up agenda needs to seriously address health inequalities in the North, for all generations.
The report authors called for the government to boost funding to Northern hospitals to allow them to catch up, including on non-coronavirus care.
Bambra said:
The levelling up agenda needs to be centred on health, it cannot just be about trains and bridges.
She added that the report, which looked at March 2020 to March 2021, showed a higher percentage of people had been vaccinated in the North than elsewhere.
Footballer Marcus Rashford is calling on people to write to their MP about backing recommendations to end the “child hunger pandemic”.
‘Devastating’
The England and Manchester United player said that “devastatingly” child food poverty is getting worse instead of better. The three recommendations Rashford is supporting are part of Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy. They aim to guarantee that every child at risk of going hungry receives enough food every day.
The first recommendation is to expand free school meal eligibility to all children aged 7-18 in all households earning £20,000 or less after benefits, and to children that are undocumented or living in immigrant households with “no recourse to public funds”.
The second is to provide long-term funding for the Holiday Activities and Food Programme, increasing eligibility in line with free school meal expansion.
The third is to expand Healthy Start eligibility to all households with pregnant women or children under five earning £20,000 or less after benefits, and invest in a communications campaign to increase uptake of the scheme which provides free vouchers to buy milk, fruit, and vegetables.
Rashford is calling on the government to urgently support the recommendations and include the funds needed in the Spending Review. This follows his previous campaign, when more than 1.1 million people signed a petition on the parliamentary website.
Marcus Rashford (left) has worked with chef Tom Kerridge (Gemma Bell and Company/PA)
Food insecurity
New data from The Food Foundation shows that more UK households with children aged 17 and under are experiencing food insecurity than in the first wave of the pandemic. A survey of 6,490 UK households found that 15% have experienced food insecurity in the past six months. That’s approximately 27% higher than before the pandemic.
Rashford said:
Whilst we’ve come a long way in the last 20 months, placing the issue of child food poverty at the forefront, devastatingly, the issue is getting worse not better.
The entire nation got behind the national team this summer so let’s put these figures in football terms: You can fill 27 Wembley stadiums with the 2.5 million children that are struggling to know where their next meal might be coming from today. What is it going to take for these children to be prioritised? Instead of removing support through social security, we should be focusing efforts on developing a sustainable long-term road map out of this child hunger pandemic.
I am, today, pledging my support for three recommendations from Part 2 of the National Food Strategy. I hope that we see the required investment pledged during the Autumn Spending Review.
I will be writing to my MP about it, and I would encourage you all to do the same. It will take many of us to stand together on this, and show we care about reaching those most in need in our communities.
Anna Taylor, executive director of The Food Foundation, said:
It’s extremely distressing that now even more children lack a secure, nutritious diet compared with last year.
Despite a sense of ‘normality’ returning, this is no time for complacency – we can’t sit back and allow this damage to our children’s health, learning and life chances, not to mention the heavy burden it bears on our NHS.
We know children from deprived backgrounds have higher obesity rates, worse levels of diabetes, more tooth decay and even impaired height development, compared with their wealthier peers.
This will only get worse if left unaddressed and entrench inequalities deeper. So, today, we are asking Government to act appropriately to protect our youngest citizens.
High-profile
Rashford, 23, waged a high-profile campaign last year to persuade the government to provide free meals to vulnerable youngsters in England throughout the school holidays during the coronavirus pandemic. It forced prime minister Boris Johnson into a U-turn. He also became the youngest person to top the Sunday Times Giving List. He did so by raising £20m in donations from supermarkets for groups tackling child poverty.
The #WriteNow campaign encourages the public to visit Rashford’s campaign website End Child Food Poverty and follow the steps to write to their local MP.
A court case has forced the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to changes its rules. It surrounds the department issuing sanctions and taking money off people. But in reality – it was the DWP not following its own rules in the first place.
Hardship payments
The DWP offers hardship payments to some claimants. As the website Turn2Us noted:
Hardship payments are reduced-rate payments of jobseeker’s allowance (JSA), employment and support allowance (ESA) and universal credit (UC) that are made in limited circumstances, including if you have been sanctioned.
In short, hardship payments are what the DWP gives you if it sanctions but you’re too poor to live without money. For Universal Credit claimants, the DWP calculates a daily rate for hardship payments. In the case of sanctions, Turn2Us noted this as 60% of the sanction amount and that:
Important: Hardship payments… are recoverable so you must pay them back.
But now, a court case led to the DWP admitting this is not necessarily always the case.
The DWP: rogue sanctions
The Public Law Project (PLP) took on the case of a Universal Credit claimant who the DWP had sanctioned six times. As it noted, its client was:
a vulnerable care-leaver with physical and mental health problems and experience of domestic abuse.
The PLP said the DWP “unfairly sanctioned” her. It left her to live “on reduced benefits for over a year and a half”. Some of the DWP’s actions included sanctioning her for:
Not attending an appointment when she was at a funeral.
Missing appointments because she couldn’t afford the bus fare. This was due to Universal Credit’s built-in five week wait for a first payment.
So, the PLP supported the claimant with an appeal in 2020. She won this and the DWP had to pay her back the money. But then, there was another issue.
Waiving debt
During the time the DWP sanctioned her, the claimant applied for and received hardship payments. As the PLP said:
she was left in debt which included [hardship payments] that were taken on to cover her basic needs during the period of sanctioning.
So, the PLP started judicial review proceedings over this. At first, the DWP refused to waive its client’s debt. But after the PLP threatened to take the judicial review further, the DWP caved in. It wrote off the hardship payment debt.
Because of the case, the DWP changed its guidance. And this is the crucial part for countless claimants.
An important move for claimants
The DWP has admitted that its recovery of hardship payments due to sanctions was always discretionary. That is, claimants can ask it to waive the debt caused by them. This is even if a claimant has signed a declaration saying they will pay the DWP back the hardship payments. As the PLP noted:
This choice applies in all cases, including where the individual’s sanction has been subsequently overturned, for example following mandatory reconsideration or a tribunal appeal.
But the DWP’s own guidance did not previously say this. So, it was giving out the wrong information to both claimants and staff.
Thanks to both the PLP and the claimant in its case – everyone claiming Universal Credit should now be aware that the DWP’s recovery of hardship payments is discretionary. And if the DWP still refuses to waive them? Then the PLP said it may be able to help. You can email them via enquiries(at)publiclawproject.org.uk
Ivan Acosta is Nicaragua’s minister of housing and public credit, with responsibility for key aspects of government planning. In July, he presented the country’s new “National Plan for the Fight against Poverty and for Human Development.” This builds on the achievements of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government since it returned to power in 2007 and sets out how they will continue if Daniel Ortega’s government is returned at November’s elections. Ivan Acosta is currently subject to personal US sanctions, along with many other Nicaraguan government officials and their family members.
Codepinks’s Teri Mattson spoke to the minister in a Zoom call and asked him to explain the plan and its background.
The consensus is in — no choice, no life, no job, no nothing, without a passport. That medical, DNA scan, the retina scan, all biological systems covered, that all-encompassing passport that lists every move, every moment, every job, every purchase, every fine, penalty, tax, rental, home, significant or insignificant emotional and economic and familial event, captured in a chip. Americans are spoiled, for sure, as are Europeans, and Canadians. That mostly encompasses the Great White Hopes of those respective “countries.” The rest of us, in these “first world” environs are struggling, even with debit and credit and La-La Land accoutrements ad infinitum.
These new times in the west are old times, bubbling up, really, from the early conquest days of razing Indian families, destroying and taking over and plowing through villages, lands, territories. Entire rooms at elite Ivy League universities and museums with drawers and boxes of Native American skulls, bones, skins, eyes, belongings, sacred objects. It is the way of the Egyptologists, and it is the way of the Crusades. Pillage, set villages on fire, and now, set states and countries on fire with fear and terror campaigns in order to exact total compliancy. Services, labor, debt, future payments, extracted from us, capitalism’s marks. Victims. Useless eaters-breeders-breathers-squatters.
Here, from David Rovics, musician and protestor, with some great stuff on Dissident Voice over the years, just coming back from Denmark (and other countries in his gig line). He embraces progressivism and the forced jabs. He is a good fellow, who interviewed me, and we talked about other things tied to the ugly side of leftists and their canceling culture, censorship, etc., but this conversation about jab/mask/remote lockup mandates has not happened yet. I still have room in my brain to listen to what he says, though he misses so many points here:
Despite the prevalence of disinformation platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube being as popular in Denmark as anywhere else that doesn’t have the good sense to ban them, the anti-vaccine movement and anti-lockdown movement in Denmark never grew to the proportions of such movements in the US, Germany, France and elsewhere. But unlike those aforementioned countries, in Denmark most people have a well-founded reason to trust the government on matters of public health and safety.
In Denmark, if anyone jaywalks, they’re usually either a foreigner or an antisocial type. The overwhelming majority of Danes would never do that. This is also true in Germany and some other countries. Americans and Brits and others visiting from abroad tend to make typically American and British individualistic, antisocial assumptions about this conformist behavior. They see a crowd of Germans or Danes standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the “walk” signal, even if there’s no traffic in any direction, and they see something scary, from Children of the Corn or some other horror movie, a bunch of zombies who can’t think for themselves, or are afraid of getting a ticket. (source — David Rovics)
That’s a whole other set of discussion points from this tour he had in Denmark about what democratic socialism is, what society is, how science and government should be trusted (really?). Jaywalking and shoot, tossing banana peels on the side of the road. How dare us lazy, supercilious and egotistical North Americans! Yankees!
The unfolding global hysteria is congealing into even more lovely by-products of Big Pharma as Dictatorship. It comes in many forms and offshoots, for sure. The main functions of Western society are broken — neoliberal and conservative values (sic) have gutted infrastructure, have thrown trillions of bucks-euros to the few, have propped up this society into a very effective kleptocracy, have imbued a dog eat dog set of beliefs into a slew of folks.
We are at the point where billionaires and their lackeys in high places set the narrative, tone, and write the legislation, laws and force zero delimits on corporations and government in this “we the people” system we supposedly “fought” for. There is collapse, after collapse, after collapse, and it is apparent in the lack of governance over decades, and the adventures of imperial overreach, too.
In daily lives, professional managerial class actors are hitting the middle/upper middle class stratum, economically, through the systems of pain, fines, fees, tolls, penalties, regressive taxation, permits and litigation that eat at us, the 80 percent, from the soul and the brain and the body. We are in a time of most people not being able to navigate “the system,” and that can be any system — school, medical, social security, DMV, courts, and any number of systems of oppression and subjugation. So it is a time of chaos, now Covid Chaos, moving into more Chaos.
“People are fed up,” says Winni Paul, a management consultant whose clients have included campuses and higher-education groups. “The graciousness, the compassion, the ‘we do it for the students, we do it for the work’ — that’s gone.”
And I am with a group of teachers from many states, who are now scrambling to figure out what to do with the forced jabs, the forced proof of jabs, the forced masking, all of that, and many will not submit to the experimental mRNA, many have looked into these DNA-alternating medical devices, and they feel alone, big time. Their AFT (American Federation of Teachers) union has caved, and they see in big cities and small, all venues requiring, soon, a passport, CDC-approved vaccination card.
Delta airlines is forcing non-vaccinated employees to pay an additional $200 a month premium, AKA fine for not being jabbed. Oh, that was yesterday (August 25), and that will not be the end of it. Fools like Thom Hartman advocate ER physicians having the right to refuse treatment to anyone coming in — motorcycle accident, heart attack, broken leg, stroke — who are not vaccinated.
This is the Brave New World already outlined by the eugenicists of the 1920s, of the Modest Proposal of Swift’s time, of the middle passage days of tossing overboard hundreds of sick shackled slaves in one one-way crossing. Multiply that by hundreds of ships, tossing human beings for the sharks, alive, shackled in chains. It is the genocidal policies of empires and their corporate thugs (overlords) in despoiling cultures, murdering millions, and enslaving regions for their rubber, silver, gold, lithium, any number of things the capitalists call loot and booty. Pirates compared to the thieves from history and today seem like Fred McFeely Rogers in comparison.
Even a saint, Fauci, he is a titan of terror in his old man’s way — “over his 50-year career with the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to address the cause, to prevent or cure the exploding epidemics of allergies and chronic disease that Congress charged him with curtailing. The chronic disease pandemic is his enduring legacy. Those ailments now debilitate 54% of American children compared to 6% when he joined NIAD.” (source — RFK Jr.)
In this group of teachers, daily there are emails announcing more and more statewide jab mandates, and the teachers that have to pay twice-a-week tests, if not jabbed, well, it is filling up those school districts; and many now in this group want out, since their email boxes are filling up. Teachers, youngish and not, with no money in the bank, really, and no place to go, since I predict all new rental agreements throughout the land (except in some Breaking Bad locales) will require proof of jab x, jab y, jab z, jab infinity.
The playing field shifts hourly, and while I have a literary reading manana, in Portland, for this hour, at least, the restaurant and community room demands all to be masked. There is no shot record demand, YET, but that’s on the horizon, since Oregon is the first state to reinstate mandatory outside masking policies. But the venue’s other locations, well, the rock and roll and progressives, they want to see vax cards or proof of SARS-CoV2 free tests. The Crystal Ballroom
It doesn’t matter how many millions of people worldwide are not happy with mRNA experimental chemicals forced into the bloodstream and across the blood-brain barrier; not happy with the bioweaponry aspect of Operation Warp Speed; not happy with the therapeutics that have been disavowed and censored, which could have saved millions of lives, possibly. One size fits all, baby. This news aggregator and news maker site, well, it is almost scrubbed from all search engines:
These stories above and below are verboten in the minds of tens of millions, hundreds of millions Westerners — even though there are robust stories on other topics, besides Fauci, jabs and mRNA, and fascism in this places.
I am finding people fighting, for sure, against mandates. Hell, my one time with the doctor recently points to this: “While I did get the vaccination, I am against mandates. I am against forcing people against their will to get this. I am of the mind that people have the right to make up their own minds.” He’s older, maybe 70, is a DO, and I know the university where he adjunct taught and matriculated from, Touro University Nevada (TUN) (a private university in Henderson, Nevada. It is part of the Touro College and University System.Touro University Nevada is a branch campus of its sister campus Touro University California.)
My niece is there, in her second year, and my DO stated, his one word of advice for her is, Cash. “Tell her to write notes to family and friends, and state: ‘please send cash.’” The doctor likes me, and he’s a jokester. He told me reads a lot, and that he did work in Amazonian for years, “saving one life at a time.” He is looking at my recent stress test, and alas, getting a cardiologist on board to maybe do more investigation on some electrical anomalies when I got up to 160 beats per minute, that is another example of the failed capitalist system: there are none here on Highway 101 on the central coast, and getting one to see me could take weeks, out of the cities of Salem or Corvallis. This is the state of medicine, after decades of gutting taxation of the rich and the corporations (who are getting us sick) and years turning medicine into a bizarre insurance scam, where doctors spend more time on the computer screen than with the patient.
So, this next reset is all about pushing more and more people into fewer and fewer public spheres, pushing people away from outliers or those defiant and dissident like me and millions. It is about controlling the masses, setting forth sophisticated bandwagon forms of propaganda, and setting afire all forms of community gatherings and robust discussions of the millions of topics of the day.
With this teachers’ group, the messages are coming in:
Governor Pritzker just announced mandatory vax for all IL teachers
Here is Dr. Peter McCullough talking about the dangers of vaccines, among other things: Basically, the vaxxed are projecting all the havoc they themselves are wreaking even as “life is pretty much back to normal among the vaccinated,” as many are bragging onto the unvaxxed. Many op-eds in publications like WaPo and the NYT are filling their pages with doctors martyring themselves and declaring they won’t treat unvaxxed anymore (to cheers from bots and humans alike in the comments section) and normalizing ending friendships based on vaccination status. But they are the super spreaders. They are the ones making children and Grandma sick. This is scapegoating at its finest.
Some great work is being done by Mike Williams @ Sage of Quay. Also, great Common Law shows being done by Crrow777 Radio Alfonso Faggiola and Lena Pu.
Want to see a man stand up to the controllers? Check out Paul Unslaved . You can also gain a little insight from some of the good First Amendment auditors like Long Island Audit.
California AB455 – this bill, if passed, will mandate the C19 vaccine for all CA employees and for CA citizens to enter any establishment except church and grocery stores:
Lastly, ICYMI – Illinois’ Vax Verify – vaccination verification is tied to Experian – meaning residents will have to go through a one-time verification process through Experian to access their vaccination records. So stating the obvious – this is opening the door increasingly towards a social credit system.
Then this from one of the people on this list wanting the mandates and the draconian measures stopped:
Just a quick note: This Sunday will mark 58 years of me being active in the political sphere. Back in ’64, it was as a Goldwater volunteer. Some 6 years later, i switched sides, a consequence of the Vietnam War, the counterculture, ecological crisis,… And became much more of an activist. I have no love whatsoever for the right. But I’ve also seen the “left” act at critical points as a defender of the capitalist status quo, particularly as a consequence of the dominant tendency within the left to accept the state as if it were an institution acting on behalf of society as a whole, rather than the instrument of class power it has been since it emerged in history thousands of years ago. Both left and right (and “center”) are fully on board with the onrushing police state, while each proclaims itself to be defending the interests of humanity against the others. People need to look to themselves for solutions, and learn from historical movements, including anarchists and anti-statist socialists.
I heartily accept the motto,—”That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—”That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men and women are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
— Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government, 1849
Succinctly, Communist approaches to anti-statism center on the relationship between political rule and class struggle. Karl Marx defined the state as the institution used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. To this extent, the ultimate goal of communist society was theorized as both stateless and classless.
We are at 8 billion, and the planet is run by Blackstone and BlackRock and around 30 financial organizations, and around 140 corporations. The bottleneck is what the planned pandemic was all about — getting people to run away from sanity, common sense, and running into the various insane asylums. For anyone to question why some of us — who are way beyond just coming out from under the Capitalist-Media-Education rock — might doubt the purveyors of capital, scientism, control, policing, finance and corrupt drug companies, well, that is where I am now — “since the majority of people are in line for the jab, what’s your fucking lunatic problem?”
The distortions that go on under capitalism are so obscene it’s hard to wrap your head around it sometimes, on a micro level as well as a macro level. I was riding on the subway and I took a couple of trains and I was looking at the ads. The average American sees about 3,000 ads a day. One ad was for a credit card, and this is the slogan for the credit card—“Less plastic, more human—Discover it is human.” Discover is the card that they were advertising. In other words, you can actually be more human by having this type of credit card. Another ad, and this gets to the quality of life, that I pass by was about online delivery of food—how you can order online instead of having to phone somebody—and the ad read, “You’ve perfected the odds of getting to third base faster. Food delivery date night.” The obscenity and depravity of capitalism knows no depths to which it will not plumb.
This is something that Karl Marx talked about quite a bit. He was speaking at the anniversary of the People’s Paper in 1856, and I think this resonates far more with us now than it did even in his time.
On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire.
That kind of sense of decay pervades our world as it is currently structured. He goes on:
In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.
At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.
John Bellamy Foster on ecosocialism: “Ecological resistance in the twenty-first century has more and more been informed by the development of Marxian ecology and ecosocialism more generally. However, as ecosocialist analysis has grown, various divergent branches of thought have emerged, often in conflict with each other. Based on the conviction that clarity about capitalism’s relation to the environment is indispensable for the strategic understanding of present-day struggles, this talk will present some of the new research within Marxian ecology, bringing together the core issues of the expropriation of nature and the metabolic rift, and seeking to unite the ecosocialist movements of our time.”
Another set of notes from another teacher on this V is for Vendetta Vaccines email group — I’m calling it that as a joke:
I just attended a workshop for religious exemptions, and will forward the email for any of those who wish to attend. I am also happy to share insights and notes I took to help out anyone who wishes to take this route. However, I would like to share some notes and important information discussed in this workshop.
First, if you are part a union or teachers union, Collective Bargaining needs to take place. Many unions did not have a seat at the table and have sent cease and desist letters that could delay the mandates. Remember the unions represent both the majority and the minority of their union members and even if there is only 15 percent against the mandates, those individuals should be represented. It was recommended to call your Labor Relations Representative or Union Rep to see if they have sent a cease and desist letter or are planning on it. Key word is the Collective Bargaining aspect of the unions and you may be able to ask them to do so.
Additionally, I think if you are able to file for a religious exemption it is a good way to buy time. The common law approach may be a good option for those who do not have an option. Realistically, for Californians we are a Right to Work state, and employers have the right to fire and hire at will. With either method there is a possibility of job termination which has to be considered, and I do not know exactly how the outcome has been going for individuals who have filed religious vs. common law approaches. That said I do know there have been many religious exemptions accepted and there is an appeals process if denied. If you are on a timetable and need to be vaccinated by a date that is closely approaching, the religious exemption is probably more likely to be one way to hold onto employment a little longer. My understanding of the common law approach is that it can be more time consuming because legal notices have times frames for notices, responses, and actions to take place and may not work with your deadline which again can lead to termination. Because California is an At Will Work state there may be risk to filing for any unemployment as well, so all these things should be considered before deciding which route to take.
I am not saying one option is better than the other, I am just presenting them as Option A or Option B, because I think we all have differences in our personal situations. One may work better for you personally than the other. That said, we should also have our plan B in place if neither work. Helping each other is essential and it will be good to share with one another what has worked and what hasn’t, and I do not want to argue either method, just help out in any way possible. Our differences in ideology are unimportant to me at this time. I believe there is a good portion of us, who are strong personalities, opinionated and intelligence — and these may be the wonderful unifying qualities that have brought us together at this critical time to fight for our humanity.
Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed,
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need –
new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child…
Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace.
Millions of Afghans have been displaced by the war. Photo: MikrofonNews
Americans have been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban’s return to power in their country – and then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre by U.S. forces that together killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops.
Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury has frozen nearly all of the Afghan Central Bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves, depriving the new government of funds that it will desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide basic services.
Under pressure from the Biden administration, the International Monetary Fund decided not to release $450 million in funds that were scheduled to be sent to Afghanistan to help the country cope with the coronavirus pandemic.
The U.S. and other Western countries have also halted humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. After chairing a G7 summit on Afghanistan on August 24, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that withholding aid and recognition gave them “very considerable leverage – economic, diplomatic and political” over the Taliban.
Western politicians couch this leverage in terms of human rights, but they are clearly trying to ensure that their Afghan allies retain some power in the new government, and that Western influence and interests in Afghanistan do not end with the Taliban’s return. This leverage is being exercised in dollars, pounds and euros, but it will be paid for in Afghan lives.
To read or listen to Western analysts, one would think that the United States and its allies’ 20-year war was a benign and beneficial effort to modernize the country, liberate Afghan women and provide healthcare, education and good jobs, and that this has all now been swept away by capitulation to the Taliban.
The reality is quite different, and not so hard to understand. The United States spent $2.26 trillion on its war in Afghanistan. Spending that kind of money in any country should have lifted most people out of poverty. But the vast bulk of those funds, about $1.5 trillion, went to absurd, stratospheric military spending to maintain the U.S. military occupation, drop over 80,000 bombs and missiles on Afghans, pay private contractors, and transport troops, weapons and military equipment back and forth around the world for 20 years.
Since the United States fought this war with borrowed money, it has also cost half a trillion dollars in interest payments alone, which will continue far into the future. Medical and disability costs for U.S. soldiers wounded in Afghanistan already amount to over $175 billion, and they will likewise keep mounting as the soldiers age. Medical and disability costs for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could eventually top a trillion dollars.
So what about “rebuilding Afghanistan”? Congress appropriated $144 billion for reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2001, but $88 billion of that was spent to recruit, arm, train and pay the Afghan “security forces” that have now disintegrated, with soldiers returning to their villages or joining the Taliban. Another $15.5 billion spent between 2008 and 2017 was documented as “waste, fraud and abuse” by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
The crumbs left over, less than 2% of total U.S. spending on Afghanistan, amount to about $40 billion, which should have provided some benefit to the Afghan people in economic development, healthcare, education, infrastructure and humanitarian aid.
But, as in Iraq, the government the U.S installed in Afghanistan was notoriously corrupt, and its corruption only became more entrenched and systemic over time. Transparency International (TI) has consistently ranked U.S.-occupied Afghanistan as among the most corrupt countries in the world.
Western readers may think that this corruption is a long-standing problem in Afghanistan, as opposed to a particular feature of the U.S. occupation, but this is not the case. TI notes that ”it is widely recognized that the scale of corruption in the post-2001 period has increased over previous levels.” A 2009 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that “corruption has soared to levels not seen in previous administrations.”
Those administrations would include the Taliban government that U.S. invasion forces removed from power in 2001, and the Soviet-allied socialist governments that were overthrown by the U.S.-deployed precursors of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the 1980s, destroying the substantial progress they had made in education, healthcare and women’s rights.
A 2010 report by former Reagan Pentagon official Anthony H. Cordesman, entitled “How America Corrupted Afghanistan”, chastised the U.S. government for throwing gobs of money into that country with virtually no accountability.
The New York Timesreported in 2013 that every month for a decade, the CIA had been dropping off suitcases, backpacks and even plastic shopping bags stuffed with U.S. dollars for the Afghan president to bribe warlords and politicians.
Corruption also undermined the very areas that Western politicians now hold up as the successes of the occupation, like education and healthcare. The education system has been riddled with schools, teachers, and students that exist only on paper. Afghan pharmacies are stocked with fake, expired or low quality medicines, many smuggled in from neighboring Pakistan. At the personal level, corruption was fueled by civil servants like teachers earning only one-tenth the salaries of better-connected Afghans working for foreign NGOs and contractors.
Rooting out corruption and improving Afghan lives has always been secondary to the primary U.S. goal of fighting the Taliban and maintaining or extending its puppet government’s control. As TI reported, “The U.S. has intentionally paid different armed groups and Afghan civil servants to ensure cooperation and/or information, and cooperated with governors regardless of how corrupt they were… Corruption has undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fuelling grievances against the Afghan government and channelling material support to the insurgency.”
The endless violence of the U.S. occupation and the corruption of the U.S.-backed government boosted popular support for the Taliban, especially in rural areas where three quarters of Afghans live. The intractable poverty of occupied Afghanistan also contributed to the Taliban victory, as people naturally questioned how their occupation by wealthy countries like the United States and its Western allies could leave them in such abject poverty.
Well before the current crisis, the number of Afghans reporting that they were struggling to live on their current income increased from 60% in 2008 to 90% by 2018. A 2018 Gallup poll found the lowest levels of self-reported “well-being” that Gallup has ever recorded anywhere in the world. Afghans not only reported record levels of misery but also unprecedented hopelessness about their future.
Despite some gains in education for girls, only a third of Afghan girls attended primary school in 2019 and only 37% of adolescent Afghan girls were literate. One reason that so few children go to school in Afghanistan is that more than two million children between the ages of 6 and 14 have to work to support their poverty-stricken families.
Yet instead of atoning for our role in keeping most Afghans mired in poverty, Western leaders are now cutting off desperately needed economic and humanitarian aid that was funding three quarters of Afghanistan’s public sector and made up 40% of its total GDP.
In effect, the United States and its allies are responding to losing the war by threatening the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan with a second, economic war. If the new Afghan government does not give in to their “leverage” and meet their demands, our leaders will starve their people and then blame the Taliban for the ensuing famine and humanitarian crisis, just as they demonize and blame other victims of U.S. economic warfare, from Cuba to Iran.
After pouring trillions of dollars into endless war in Afghanistan, America’s main duty now is to help the 40 million Afghans who have not fled their country, as they try to recover from the terrible wounds and trauma of the war America inflicted on them, as well as a massive drought that devastated 40% of their crops this year and a crippling third wave of covid-19.
The U.S. should release the $9.4 billion in Afghan funds held in U.S. banks. It should shift the $6 billion allocated for the now defunct Afghan armed forces to humanitarian aid, instead of diverting it to other forms of wasteful military spending. It should encourage European allies and the IMF not to withhold funds. Instead, they should fully fund the UN 2021 appeal for $1.3 billion in emergency aid, which as of late August was less than 40% funded.
Once upon a time, the United States helped its British and Soviet allies to defeat Germany and Japan, and then helped to rebuild them as healthy, peaceful and prosperous countries. For all America’s serious faults – its racism, its crimes against humanity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its neocolonial relations with poorer countries – America held up a promise of prosperity that people in many countries around the world were ready to follow.
If all the United States has to offer other countries today is the war, corruption and poverty it brought to Afghanistan, then the world is wise to be moving on and looking at new models to follow: new experiments in popular and social democracy; renewed emphasis on national sovereignty and international law; alternatives to the use of military force to resolve international problems; and more equitable ways of organizing internationally to tackle global crises like the Covid pandemic and the climate disaster.
The United States can either stumble on in its fruitless attempt to control the world through militarism and coercion, or it can use this opportunity to rethink its place in the world. Americans should be ready to turn the page on our fading role as global hegemon and see how we can make a meaningful, cooperative contribution to a future that we will never again be able to dominate, but which we must help to build.
The TV and film star was one of the speakers who addressed a major online conference organised from Glasgow last week, which brought together experts from around the world to discuss the idea of governments guaranteeing a regular minimum income to every citizen.
In a recorded message to the Basic Income Earth Network Congress, Wise, who is appearing in this year’s Strictly Come Dancing, said he enjoyed financial security today thanks to fortunate circumstances.
But he said: “Should accident of birth and luck be the only means not to live a precarious life? “A society is judged by how it deals with its least fortunate members – at least, that is how it should be. So how are we faring?
“Not terribly well. Even pre-pandemic we were seeing a rise in childhood hunger, the fast disappearing secure band of society, the huge gap between most of us and the few super-rich.”
Wise argued that “Victorian thinking” about the ethics of the workhouse and the undeserving poor were still ingrained in society in the UK.
He said an example was his wife, the Oscar winning actress Emma Thompson, appearing on a radio show in which the presenter put forward the idea that childhood hunger was a result of the “fecklessness” of parents.
He said: “Maybe now with the furlough scheme having been seen as essential, we can look again at Universal Basic Income through a different lens, taking whatever toxic Victorian view that we have carried with us and see money given out from the state in a healthier way.”
He added: “Let’s give it a go, let’s try a Universal Basic Income and allow everyone the ability to at least in a small way feel they have some power to navigate, some sense of protection and availability to think beyond just struggling to the end of each month and try and access that principle human right – happiness.”
Scotland has looked at the feasibility of piloting Citizen’s Basic Income, concluding it would be desirable but the powers to run such a scheme lie with Westminster. Last week the Scottish Government announced plans to start work on a minimum income guarantee, which is targeted at those on lower incomes.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon also addressed the conference in a video message, saying the gathering was an opportunity to “make the case” how Universal Basic Income can help create fairer and more equal societies for the future.
She added: “That won’t be an easy task, but the past 18 months have shown us that things that can seem difficult or even impossible can indeed be implemented when we have the will, the imagination and the ambition.”
Experts from around the world shared research and experiences of Universal Basic Income at the gathering, which concluded yesterday.
Simone Cecchini, of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, said many countries in the region had introduced an emergency basic income as a response to the pandemic.
He said extending this into a full Universal Basic Income would be costly, but said it could be done gradually by initially targeting groups such as children, to prevent a “lost generation” as a result of the impact of Covid.
“We think the medium and long-term policy goal is to implement a universal basic income,” he said.
The Biden administration recently announced a record permanent increase in the value of food stamps aid going to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients around the country. The average amount received each month by each of the 42 million Americans relying on SNAP, formerly titled the Food Stamp Program, to put food on the table was $121 before the pandemic hit. It will now increase by $36, or 27 percent, reflecting what the Agriculture Department believes to be a more realistic cost of healthy foods.
This boost is nothing to sneeze at – it constitutes the largest permanent boost in the history of the public benefits program. But to truly end hunger in the United States and address the ongoing economic crises faced by people across this country, it’s vital for the same sort of boost to happen across all U.S. anti-poverty programs, with funds extracted from corporate profits and the ultra rich.
Bernie Sanders, chair of the powerful Senate Budget Committee has proposed just this, putting forward one bill to restore the corporate tax rate to 35 percent, which is where it was until Republicans reduced it to 21 percent in 2017. He has also introduced a second bill to create a progressive estate tax that would kick in on estates valued at $3.5 million and above. Such reforms would generate large sums of money that could be used to expand health care access, to put in place more programs tailored to low-income children, to expand safety net programs to noncitizen immigrants, and so on. These reforms will, however, take time; in the meanwhile, increasing the value of SNAP benefits is a good way to get bang-for-the-buck in reducing hunger, one of the most destructive consequences of poverty.
As with so many of the new social programs and spending being pushed by the Biden administration, the impetus for the recent boost in SNAP benefits came with temporary fixes put in place during the first two waves of the pandemic. Then, with tens of millions of Americans suddenly out of work and unable to meet their basic needs, Congress temporarily increased the value of food stamps aid sent out to recipients by 15 percent. But that boost was initially slated to expire at the end of September.
The GOP critique of these benefits was disingenuous. For even though the original increases were only meant to be temporary, the reality is that the United States has long failed to allocate enough resources to properly provide for the nutritional needs of its poorest residents. The COVID crisis shone a spotlight on the hunger crisis that has long been brewing in the shadows, and the temporary increases in food stamps and unemployment benefits were effective at taking millions of families out of absolute poverty; they showed that targeted government interventions can be dramatically powerful tools to mitigating the worst impacts of economic inequality.
The Biden administration’s permanent increase in food stamps this month is an overdue acknowledgement of this reality. And it stands in stark contrast to the efforts by his predecessor to block emergency SNAP payments to the poorest of recipients at the height of the public health crisis.
In fact, from the earliest days of the Trump administration, SNAP came under sustained fire from a political leadership that saw recipients as spongers and loafers, and viewed cutting SNAP as a key part of its toolkit to further limit the welfare system and further undermine vital anti-poverty programs. In the very first months after Trump’s inauguration, administration officials proposed cutting the program by $191 billion over 10 years. Luckily, that didn’t fly. Then, in late 2019, members of the Trump administration unveiled rules tightening up work requirements for recipients without children — putting the food stamps of roughly 700,000 people at risk. They also sought to make states more rigorously police who could enroll in SNAP, and recalculate income of applicants in a way that made it easier to deny benefits. All told, the Urban Institute estimated that if these reforms were fully implemented, the number of recipients in several states would fall by at least 15 percent in 13 states. Then, during the pandemic, the Trump administration continued to wage war on SNAP, despite private food bank and food pantry networks being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of suddenly hungry people lining up on foot and in cars to access their food supplies.
Thankfully, Trump’s team never really managed to implement its draconian cuts to food stamps. There was no congressional consensus to accept these cuts, and no public support to impose hunger on millions of Americans already living on the margins. In fact, by the time the pandemic rolled around, the administration had been participating in a yearly stunt for three years already, regularly promising huge cuts to food stamps as a way to assuage its anti-government base, while knowing full well that of all the big pillars of the U.S. welfare system, food assistance is the one that has garnered more bipartisan support in Congress — and among the public — than virtually any other part of the social support web outside of social security and Medicare.
Biden came to power last January projecting ambitions to use government in the way Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson had done, as a counterbalance against economic policy that kept millions of Americans in dire poverty. He had, as a result, a dramatically different understanding of the social safety net from his predecessor, and a willingness to put his weight behind huge expansions in government programs ranging from the provision of health care to low-income people to child tax credit payments offered to parents by the federal government.
Biden has ambitions to use the power of government to massively reduce poverty in this country. In particular, he has focused on halving child poverty in the coming years, through direct monthly payments to families, and through a better use of existing programs such as SNAP.
But to truly change the landscape of poverty and inequality in this country, this turn toward state spending can’t just be framed in limited ways as a project to restore consumer spending. And the expansions to public benefits programs can’t adequately be paid for through tax revenues without a targeted effort to redistribute the gross profits that corporations have been hogging in increasing proportions each year.
The U.S. was at its most dynamic economically in the post-WWII decades, when income inequality was lower than at other moments in the country’s history, and when corporate tax rates were higher. Today, wealthy individuals and corporations pay less into the tax pot and, in consequence, public systems and benefits programs are chronically underfunded. The president has the public behind him on the changes needed to tackle poverty in the U.S. Now he needs to marshal his negotiating skills to get the fractious Democratic coalition in Congress to coalesce around this agenda.
When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
It’s become clear to me that almost anyone penning anything that gets stuffed into any number of hundreds of “news” or “opinion” digital dungeons believes that their take on the world, on global affairs, on the political nightmares, on the various financial and military and digital happenings and what have you is, well, somehow theirs is a uniquely formed commentary to add something new and penetrating to the already hundreds of daily articles on Afghanistan or on the Pan-Plan-En-DEMIC.
I’ll give it to them, for sure, but how many pieces containing more or less 90 percent similar views and “facts” on a given subject really do much for humanity. I see the world from a different lens, and sure, it’s fun to rumble in the jungle looking at Biden-Wall Street-MIC-Trump-Celebrity Culture-Scientism-Entertainment-Media-Medicine-Et Al, but when I get down to brass tacks, I look at the ground level stories, sometimes about one person or family or situation at a time, to understand the larger issue of this perverse, predatory and people-killing Capitalism.
Yep, of course, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Earth Charter, and the Golden Rule, those are great starts to abide by. Survival International, looking at and from indigenous communities’ perspectives and needs, that too is A-Okay. Yet, sometimes, it’s one person at a time to understand the fragility of belief systems, or economic systems that not only rape-pollute-colonize land-air-water-soil-life, but put so many of my fellow women and men behind the eight ball, AKA, in the sights of those ruthless elites and their armies of Eichmann’s and thugs.
A mark and sucker and victim and limping along-useless-eater-but-useful-exploitable-breeder may be born every nanosecond in the eyes of the overlords of corporations and the boardroom beasts of banks and Military Everything/Everywhere Industrial Complex, but to winnow through that and spend time with one of those soon-to-be-victims-of-capitalism, for me, that is the narrative flow and truth I am more interested in these days.
Big City Boy in a Townie Coastal Hamlet
It does feel lonely out here, even among the 600 harbor seals just outside our door, on sand spits in their haul-outs after going for the salmon running up and down the Alsea River. A hundred bird sightings, sure, in a month. Green hitting the Pacific. A constant snake of cars and RVs and logging trucks up and down Highway 101. A pretty cool bridge just outside the window on the near horizon.
I’ve written about this area, the original home of the Alsi Tribe, a place, like in most of Turtle Island, which was never given or sold to and rented to the white man. We are, in so many places, entrenched on sacred and holy ground, on burial mounds.
This day, a few days ago, I was kicking up speed on the bicycle when I saw a fellow — big, nice sternum-touching beard — unloading cedar pickets from a truck into a garage. It’s a nice family home on a corner near the USPS, and I have been trying to get help putting up a cedar fence, so, much so that it’s been four months, or three, since the first fellow came out, said he’d do it, and never followed through. Two others came out, and two others failed to follow through.
Let’s call him Clint, and I said hello, and he seemed a bit skeptical of me showing up inside his fence, but soon, we hit it off. I asked about his fence, and he gave me the names and numbers for a landscaping team, father-son, that did his work for him. He made sure to let me know they were not bonded, and, well, that’s the way I want to go. The father-son is Mexican. The son, let’s call him Enrique, went to school with Clint. The middle school in Waldport.
“When he was first here, all he’d do is draw farm equipment and fields of corn. He didn’t speak English, but he did say, ‘I want go home Mexico.’ He’s my friend, and he speaks and read English so well that he helps his father with he contracts and bills and translation.”
While I was anxious to contact Pedro’s Landscaping, I spent time with Clint to learn his story. That is how I roll, and within one 25-year-old’s story the entire country and entire financial and entire educational and political system sometimes are anchored.
He was on a two-month respite before resuming the Alaska fishing he’s been engaged in shortly after he dropped out of high school. He’s got buddies who also dropped out, but who also got hooked into the drug scene, boozing and helping justify the criminal injustice systems of cells, ankle bracelets, militarized cops, overpaid arrogant judges, DAs who lie, and all the attendants in the system.
Clint never got into drugs, and he said his drinking — not super heavy — just interfered with his relationship to his girlfriend who is the mother of their six-year-old daughter. So he quit.
Clint was brought up by an alcoholic mother and never had much to do with a violent and absent father. Clint did not like school, and he says he probably had this or that learning “issue,” but in the end, Clint got his act together, left school at 16, never looked back, and never got a GED. He stated that he bought the house I was at age 22, and that last year he made upwards of $130,000 as a fisherman for Alaskan fleets. For most of his friends who did graduate high school, they are living poor lives, working for minimum wage, still living with parents; and some with college, they are straddled with minimum wage jobs and huge school loan debts.
This story is not the story of those elites from the Ivy League or the top (sic) 100 schools. I know because I have been to a few of them (not getting my degrees from them, however), and I have family that tends to rah-rah those schools, as if they are the Holy Grail. I have met with and interviewed many people (authors, scientists, creatives) from those so-called elite institutions. I have organized for a union at Georgetown U. I have been to a huge conference in Mexico City with higher education people, mostly adjuncts, many of whom come from elite schools. Even in my three degree programs at state colleges/universities, many of my professors were graduates of the elite schools. I was never impressed with those laurels.
But the point is that I consume so much from the elites’ research, from their books, from their journalism, and from their literature as in fiction. It is a daily reminder of the chosen few either leaving out the 80 percent of the USA population, or writing about us. Writing about Adverse Childhood experiences, ACES. Writing about socio-economic determinates of life, success, failure, perseverance, incarceration rates, poverty, medical health outcomes. The elites writing about high blood pressure, about African Americans’ weathering taking them out earlier than their white counterparts; about racist environmental policies. The elites and chosen ones even write the scripts for Breaking Bad shit, or all the novels and such penned in American Mainstream Literature. The elites take our pulse in the doctor’s offices, in the school offices, in the financial offices. The elites prosecute us, persecute us, penalize us, tax us, redline us, vilify us, joke about us.
So Clint is there, working hard, even offering to help me pick up cedar pickets and the supplies two hours away in Eugene, to save a buck. Clint with his eye toward fixing up the place and selling it. “I want to get out of this town. I’ve lived here my entire life.”
He’s got American Terriers, or bulldogs, what a lot of people mislabel as pit bulldogs. He had Pedro’s Landscaping build a fence, and he had it go six feet tall facing the road for the dogs. Under penalty of Waldport City ordinances, however, it has to be 42 inches, with 48 more or less allowed. The judgment was/is to cut it down to 42-48 inches. The verdict is to fine a $1000 a day for the violation. He was in rough waters in Alaska, fishing for those elites loving their fish fresh. Imagine that, the city code Nazi’s, at a $1000 a day. Similarly, the fine for some elderly disabled woman up the road, in Newport, was $1500 for front yard grass too long. This is the elites’ game. City managers with binoculars, and now drones with CCTV, looking in people’s yards, looking for weeds, or old automobiles propped up on bricks. Looking for fences too high (sic) or buildings on the property bigger than 10 x 20 feet that will need a permit pulled, a permit that, of course, costs money.
[So, this fellow in the trailer above, set up along the beach, in Waldport, and it was in daylight. I am not sure if he intended to camp there for the night, but the City Manager called the rent-a-sheriffs. They forced him off the property. I talked with the two deputies. They say more and more people are “squatting.” They talk about how it is a $3000 bill to the county and cities for removing trailers or broken down RVs. They seemed sympathetic, but at $30 an hour plus double, $60, an hour overtime, the cops are making out like bandits in a county that still pays $13 an hour at checkouts and in hotel rooms as maids.]
That’s an aside, for sure, since it was a day before I met Clint, but it is, again, emblematic of the failures of empire, and I don’t need no stinking commentary to add to the failures of Afghanistan, of the money managers, of the World Economic Forum. Failures of the Trump and Biden camps, spewing bullshit. I don’t need to add to the discourse on how bad Canada is/was with Haiti. Add to the EU’s sickening siding with USA on Venezuela. Do I need to add to the Israel question? Just wading into that muck gets one not only cancelled, but Mossad-ed out, Eighty-Sixed.
If I penned something like this, from Linh Dinh, I’d be Googled out of existence in USA:
When Ichiro played in the Major Leagues, he was always hounded by a mob of Japanese journalists and photographers, starting with the first day of Spring Training.
Sick of this, he told an interviewer he wished they would just disappear.
“From your life?”
“No, from this earth.”
The USA, though, is not being pestered but deformed, debilitated and, well, frankly destroyed by a host of people, many of whom you may not have heard of, so let’s us:
Imagine there’s no George Soros, No Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch or Klaus Schwab, too. No Jeff Zucker, Mark Zuckerberg, Arthur Sulzberger, Jonathan Greenblatt, Larry Fink, David Solomon, Robert Iger, Charles Scharf, Jamie Dimon, Steve Schwarzman, Jeremy Zimmer, Len Blavatnik, Andy Slavitt, Jeffrey Zients, Anthony Fauci, Jessica Rosenworcel, Janet Yellen, Gary Gensler, Betsy Berns Korn, Mort Fridman or, what the hell, Nancy Pelosi also, mostly because she’s so icky.
Even more than most lists, it’s highly incomplete, but you get the idea. Or maybe not. It’s too eclectic, you say, if not confusing. What do they have in common? They are all social engineers, out to remake America in ways that have nothing to do, at least initially, with the wishes of its majority, so there goes your democracy. As new norms are relentlessly propagandized, legalized then imposed, most Americans will learn to embrace their newly cowed, castrated selves.
The point is that Clint has a family, and is dealing with the Man in many forms. Fence too high. Viscous dog ordinance, even though his dogs are not vicious. He even almost got run over by some business woman, while Clint was on his Harley. He posted that fact on the local city Facebook page, and, well, it was taken down. No cussing, no threats, and respectful, but that was too much for the FB administrator.
Like many in his camp, who dropped out of High School and ended up doing something, working hard, yes, in a dangerous profession, Alaska fishing, he wants a few acres out of town, to grow food, raise a family, home school children, and maybe get a rig so he can move logs and such to keep money flowing in. We are talking about age 35 as his goal.
I taught in those schools where he and his Mexican friend, Enrique, went. The K12 system before the planned endemic was bad-bad-bad, and now, it is a complete shit show. This fellow works, his wife works and he is honest. The systems of oppression have not gotten him yet, nor have they gotten him down, and he is a success. And another load of Elites will write about that guy, the white guy, though, as I found out, he is from a Guatemalan Spaniard father.
Elites (white, many identifying as Jewish) writing about poverty, about the white protestant in the USA, about the poor, the druggies, about the criminals, about Latinos and Blacks and Asians. These Elites, the Chosen Ones, have a direct line to publishers, producers and the like. And they will write on and on about all those demographics they themselves are only witnesses to, or somehow involved in from the middle/upper middle/rich class point of view.
Millionaire union heads, like that one with the American Federation of Teachers. Look at her:
[Viewpoint: AFT’s Refusal to Challenge Democratic Establishment Leaves Every Teacher Behind — AFT President and Biden. Lovefest!]
Again, Enrique and Clint, they are the Americans, the ones working hard. Before I shift to Enrique, the final moment in Clint’s driveway was when we both heard a blood curdling scream. A 12-year-old boy was screaming across the street. “Oh, that’s Alan, and he is severely autistic. He lives with his grandmother. His mom was a meth user while she was pregnant, and his father is a piece of shit, violent, a thief.”
It turned out that Alan was messing with a T-ball bat, and hit a rock accidently up to a second story window, and broke it. “No, no, no,” he screamed and cried. “I can’t pay for that. I am in trouble. I can’t pay for that.”
His grandmother came out, and settled the boy down. I recognized Alan (pseudonym) from my substituting up the hill at the middle school, in the special education room. The grandmother was wrinkled before her time, and she had to get to a PT appointment, but had no car, no driver’s license. She told us that the apartment owners will just tell her to pay for a window installer. “The owners do nothing around here for us.”
Autism, drug abuse, all those elite doctors and psychiatrists, all those practitioners, all those TED Talk celebrities, lecturing the world on childhood diseases, all the intellectual disabilities, all the chronic illnesses, chronic depression, chronic poverty, chronic criminality, chronic failures, yep, expect another load of books coming out during this endemic, from the white elites, mostly east coast, many, the Chosen People, making their money and lecturing us, even high-horsing people like me who is just as educated in the college sense, and more traveled, and, hell, more experienced in many more fields than the elites who have podcasts or get onto Democracy Now or CBS or CNN.
Back Breaking But Honest
Enrique and his dad, Javier, came out, and we talked about the fence project. In Spanish. Javier has been in USA for 20 years. Five children, four born in Mexico. His hat was emblazoned with Hildago and the eagle and the serpent. He and I talked a lot about Mexico, since I have traveled all over, and we swapped stories about the jungle, la selva, and places like Palenque, and where his family hails from, Mexico City. He works hard, pays workers $25 an hour, under the table, and we talked about narcos and politicians and why Mexico, with 80 percent of the population good and hardworking, family oriented, how it is that the military, corrupt mayors/governors/senators/presidents and the drug kingpins and their thugs have overtaken the land. All those drugs in the noses and in the veins of North Americans, Europeans!
We talked about Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.
Pancho Villa
If there is not justice for the people, let there be no peace for the government.
I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.
The land belongs to those who work it with their hands. Emiliano Zapata
[The Palenque builders used plaster to obtain a smooth finish, unlike the usual Mayan tooled-limestone construction. However, they used carving on the interior walls; the best examples are on tablets affixed to the walls with plaster. Stucco and terra-cotta images have been found. The elaborate palace complex includes three parallel walls housing two corridors covered with pointed vaults of the Palenque style.]
This is reality, and Javier states that he can’t find young guys to work as landscapers and fence builders. At $25 an hour. “They’d rather work minimum wage in a fast-food restaurant. Inside. Watching their phones. It is not how I grew up.”
Complicated, my relationship with Mexicans, people of the land, manual laborers. They to me, in most instances, are princes, when they are good and loyal and don’t end up drinking and womanizing. In any case, I have more robust conversations with guys like Javier than I do with any number of liberals or Trumpies or friends who identify as woke and hippy.
I have nothing in common with the very people I ended up in a graduate program — regional and urban planning. Code enforcers. The developers’ amigos. Cushy jobs with cities and counties. Beautiful people. Hikers and bicyclists. Professional Managerial Class who travel here and there and talk about walkability, about New Urbanism, about sustainability design. But at the end of the day, they are facilitators of the construction (building and paving) tycoons. They talk a nice game around LEAD Platinum and Climate Change mitigation, but in the end, they, for the most part, are just cogs in the system. Not squeaky wheels. Very disheartening for me.
These fellows — Clint, Enrique and Javier of Pablo’s Landscaping — they are not going to read this blog, they are not going to buy my books, they are not going to attend a literary reading planned for August 27 in Portland. That is the shame and the sham of this Capitalist society — that my bright idea on community spaces, on education, on collectivism, on intentional and shared communities isn’t scaled up — generating the various levels of strata, casts, deplorable people, disposable people, all the useless breeders/breathers/eaters, in the minds of the elites.
Imagine a world where right out the gates we have pre-school in gardens, in teepees, around fires, with others older there, to teach. Outdoor experiences. Learning to grow, fish, harvest, can food. Building tiny homes for the houseless. Doing the work of cutting wood and making woodcut art. All the hands on learning, and the play acting, the art, the music. Real teachers, and real communities, and, from cradle to cradle. No more warehousing of youth. No more jobs just for the shitty health insurance. No more school-to-complaint little or big Eichmann enforcer or follower. No more warehouses for the poor.
Yeah, this is still a land of Bubbas and Sweet Mean Charlottes. A land of ignorance and just plain mean, and racist. But look at Clint. Look at Enrique. Look deeper into the hearts of these people who are for all intents and purposes NOT mainstream subjects for the elites’ studies or projects. Do all people need to write poetry? Well, maybe. Play music? Of course. Create art and sculptures and blow glass and use a potter’s wheel and grow lettuce and learn how to guy fish and poultry, learn how to build a fire on the land, and in the belly. Yep!
Of course, a majority of the 80 percent will respond with dignity, interest and collective knowledge way beyond any cabal of elites determining the futures and histories and lives of us, the lowly Eighty Percent.
Exactly two years ago, I walked with my colleagues from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research through the Camp Marielle Vive (‘Marielle Lives’) outside of Valinhos in the state of São Paulo, Brazil with a great sense of déjà vu. The camp resembles so many other communities of the desperately poor on our planet. The United Nations calculates that one in eight people on our planet – one billion human beings – live in such precariousness. The homes are made of a jumble of materials: blue tarpaulin sheets and bits of wood, corrugated iron sheets and old bricks. A thousand families live in Camp Marielle Vive, named after the Brazilian socialist Marielle Franco, who was assassinated in March 2018.
Sex worker activists are among the most at risk defenders of human rights in the world, facing multiple threats and violent attacks, an extensive investigation has found.
The research, published today by human rights organisation Front Line Defenders, found that their visibility as sex workers who are advocates for their communities’ rights makes them more vulnerable to the violations routinely suffered by sex workers. In addition, they face unique, targeted abuse for their human rights work.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a social and economic disaster of almost unprecedented proportions in recent history. But, for one group of people, last year’s silver linings outshone the hardships.
“When we had the coronavirus supplement, I was able to pay my rent, I could pay my bills on time, I got to pay off debts that I’d had for years, I was able to buy food and clothes,” says current Austudy recipient Teddy White, who was on JobSeeker for most of last year.
White says he was able to buy new winter clothes, pyjamas and bedding for the first time in years.
Without the anxiety of living hand to mouth, he found the headspace to consider his future, escape from a treadmill of unsuitable jobs that exacerbated his health problems, and enrol in university.
Wendy Morgan also had a very positive 2020.
“Last year was fantastic because I didn’t have to make do without electricity at all last year,” says the long-term JobSeeker recipient.
She lost her last stable employment in 2012 and has since experienced evictions, homelessness and being repeatedly cut off from essential utilities. But keeping the lights on is not the only reason why Morgan can now see her crochet properly.
“My lenses alone were over $750 and I just couldn’t afford that on the Newstart payment, and I’d been from 2012 until last year without any new glasses,” she explains.
But the coronavirus supplement that started at $275 a week and ended in March at $75 has been replaced by a permanent increase in JobSeeker of just $25 a week, leaving income support recipients feeling like they’re back where they started the pandemic.
Morgan is once again behind on her electricity payments as she juggles bills.
Wendy Morgan does crochet, not only as a hobby, but also to save money.(ABC News: Simon Goodes)
“After paying my rent, I get just over $400 a fortnight left over and out of that I’ve got to pay electricity and phone, internet is essential – you can’t look for a job without the internet these days, so I need to have a laptop,” she explains.
She also needed to replace her laptop and phone when they were stolen in a break-in a couple of months ago, something she struggled to afford on the regular JobSeeker rate.
But while she lives in a rough neighbourhood, Morgan is lucky to live in relatively low-rent Adelaide. Since the supplements ended, White’s situation in Melbourne is even more desperate.
“I get $580 a fortnight from Centrelink and $520 of that has to go towards my rent each fortnight, which leaves me with $60 to cover literally every other living expense. So food, meds, clothes, transport, everything.”
Sixty dollars a fortnight simply cannot cover all of White’s essentials.
“I can’t buy phone credit, I can’t pay my internet bill, I can’t buy money to put on my Myki [travel card],” he laments.
“There’s just no way to stretch it to cover everything.”
Anglicare and Australians back basic income
It’s experiences like these with the COVID support payments that have prompted charity Anglicare to come out in support of a basic income.
Anglicare’s executive director Kasy Chambers said COVID had highlighted that poverty is a policy choice.(ABC News)
The charity’s executive director Kasy Chambers says the pandemic welfare supplements proved that lifting people above the poverty line was economically possible with political will.
“This clearly showed us it is a choice and, when we made it, the sky didn’t fall in, people didn’t stop applying for work, people still wanted to work,” she tells The Business.
A survey of a thousand people commissioned by the charity shows more than three-quarters of Australians back a basic income guarantee above the poverty line.
In fact, more than half strongly support the concept, while only 3 per cent are strongly opposed.
Kasy Chambers believes the pandemic and associated recession have increased empathy for those who’ve fallen on hard times.
“I think many, many more people who hadn’t previously experienced poverty or didn’t know somebody who was living in poverty now do.”
UBI price tag ‘not chump change’
Sydney University political economy lecturer Troy Henderson wrote his PhD about basic income schemes and is co-director of the new cross-institution Australian Basic Income Lab with colleagues from Macquarie and ANU.
Dr Troy Henderson is co-director of the new Australian Basic Income Lab at the University of Sydney, and wrote his PhD about UBI.(ABC News: Adam Griffiths)
He argues the pandemic has highlighted what’s financially possible for governments when there’s political will.
“Providing a basic income floor for all Australians might cost in the order of $15-40 billion,” he says.
“Now, that’s not chump change, but we’re still looking at an amount of money that is probably only 1-2 per cent of Australia’s GDP and is therefore eminently affordable.”
Kasy Chambers says that could easily be funded by reducing tax concessions and government transfer payments for the better off.
“$68.5 billion went to the top 20 per cent of income earners and only $6.1 billion went to the lowest 20 per cent,” she observes, citing previous research for Anglicare conducted by the Per Capita think tank.
The kind of payment that provides would be $457 a week — around aged pension level — for all those out of work, including some not currently eligible for JobSeeker.
It’s not a truly universal basic income, which, at that level of payment for all adults, regardless of their other income, would cost close to half a trillion dollars a year (although much of this would be taxed back from those earning money from wages, rents, investments or business profits).
Simon Cowan from the Centre for Independent Studies think tank, a critic of the universal basic income (UBI) concept, argues this highlights the “impossible trinity” of a UBI as explained by Canadian economics professor Kevin Milligan.
Simon Cowan is research director at the Centre for Independent Studies.(ABC News: John Gunn)
“You can have a broad amount of coverage, you can have a generous payment or it can be affordable,” says Cowan.
“Unfortunately, as Milligan showed, you can really only pursue two of those at once.”
But Troy Henderson argues a slightly more generous and less restricted unemployment benefit would be superior to the one-off welfare top-ups put in place during COVID.
“If we did have that type of scheme in place from the get-go we would not be suffering as we are at the moment from these ad hoc, piecemeal policy interventions that always create a significant number of losers during a time of extreme crisis.”
The two aren’t in total disagreement, with Simon Cowan arguing for a different long-term welfare reform.
“Basically split the unemployment payment into two,” he says.
“Have a relatively contained payment for people who are short-term unemployed, transitioning from one job to the other, which was the original design of Newstart, and then have perhaps a more generous payment for long-term unemployed people.”
‘Catastrophic’ mutual obligation system doesn’t work
Another area where Cowan, Henderson and Chambers all agree is dropping the current blanket mutual obligation requirements for job seekers to submit at least 20 applications a month, including for the long-term unemployed.
“There’s a lot of people who move onto Newstart and cycle off Newstart in a relatively short period of time, they’re actively looking for work and they will find it in the near term,” Cowan observed.
“They don’t need these additional requirements, they don’t need form-filling, they don’t need all of this government bureaucracy, they just need to be allowed to find a new job.
“For those who do need additional support, the general obligation doesn’t actually do much for them either because they’re not really going to get a job without that targeted support, even if they send in a hundred job applications.”
Aside from an increase in payments, those who have been subject to the mutual obligation requirements say it’s the one change that would make the biggest difference to living on JobSeeker.
“It drives your mental health into the ground,” says Wendy Morgan.
Wendy Morgan said she could finally afford a new pair of glasses in 2020, after years without being able to see properly.(ABC News: Simon Goodes)
“You feel hopeless because you’re applying for job, after job, after job and most of the jobs you’re applying for are often jobs that you’re not even qualified for.”
“It’s catastrophic,” agrees Teddy White.
“It’s so bad for anyone’s mental health to be essentially press-ganged into accepting jobs that just will not work for you.”
Kasy Chambers says it is also often counter-productive for the unemployed, with the applications taking up time many would otherwise use to volunteer or engage in community activities.
“So, often it’s actually voluntary work that leads to employment, that links people and locks them into their community and that gives people real meaning and satisfaction in their lives,” she explains, noting that volunteering generally doesn’t count towards Centrelink’s activity tests.
Anglicare’s survey reveals that, aside from paying down debts and saving (38 per cent), the most common behavioural changes in response to a UBI would be volunteering more, spending more time caring for others, spending more time on sports or hobbies, and doing further education.
Anglicare asked people how they would use the extra money provided by a universal basic income (respondents could select more than one option).(Supplied: Anglicare)
The punishment for not applying for enough jobs, failing to comply with your job plan or knocking back any work is a potential suspension of your payment.
“Having your payments stopped is terrifying,” says Morgan.
“Trying to live without payments for up to eight weeks is harder than anyone can imagine.”
Having previously had to sleep in her car for six months after losing her last stable job and rental house nearly a decade ago, homelessness is an experience Morgan never wants to face again.
A new analysis released Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute finds that CEO pay in the United States rose by a staggering 1,322% between 1978 and 2020 — a sharp contrast to the pay increase of the typical worker, which was just 18% during that same period.
In 2020, a year of pandemic and widespread economic dislocation, the top executives at the largest public firms in the U.S. were paid 351 times as much as the typical worker, with CEO pay measured by salary, bonuses, long-term incentive payouts, and exercised stock options.According toBloomberg, Tesla’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk was the highest-paid corporate executive in the U.S. in 2020.
Highlighting the extent to which inequality has soared in recent decades, EPI observes in itsreportthat the CEO-to-worker-pay ratio was 61-to-1 in 1989.
CEOs saw their compensation increase by 18.9% between 2019 and 2020 while the pay of typical workers — those who were able to hold on to their jobs amid mass layoffs stemming from the pandemic — rose just 3.9% over that time, EPI shows.
“Even that wage growth is overstated,” notes EPI, which has been tracking and documenting executive pay trends for years. “Perversely, high job loss among low-wage workers skewed the average wage higher.”
Authored by EPI distinguished fellow Lawrence Mishel and research assistant Jori Kandra, the new report argues that “exorbitant CEO pay is a major contributor to rising inequality that we could safely do away with.” In 2020, EPI finds, a CEO at one of the top 350 public companies in the U.S. was paid $24.2 million on average.
“CEOs are getting more because of their power to set pay and because so much of their pay (more than 80%) is stock-related, not because they are increasing their productivity or possess specific, high-demand skills,” Mishel and Kandra write. “This escalation of CEO compensation, and of executive compensation more generally, has fueled the growth of top 1.0% and top 0.1% incomes, leaving less of the fruits of economic growth for ordinary workers and widening the gap between very high earners and the bottom 90%. The economy would suffer no harm if CEOs were paid less (or were taxed more).”
Other recent research has similarly called attention to the growing disconnect between CEO compensation and measures such as company performance, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In May, the Institute for Policy Studiesfoundthat 51 of the nation’s 100 biggest low-wage employers — including Coca-Cola, Chipotle, Tyson Foods, and YUM Brands — altered their own compensation rules to grant top executives massive pay packages as their workers struggled to get by on paltry wages.
“Common manipulations included lowering performance bars to help executives meet bonus targets, awarding special ‘retention’ bonuses, excluding poor second-quarter results from evaluations, and replacing performance-based pay with time-based awards,” the report showed. “Companies enlisted an army of ‘independent’ compensation consultants in an effort to give all this rule-rigging a veneer of legitimacy.”
In its new analysis, EPI points out that the 1,322% CEO pay jump between 1978 and 2020 far outstripped the 817% growth in the S&P stock market during that same period. The dramatic increase in executive pay has also significantly outpaced the 341% earnings growth of the top 0.1% overall since 1978.
Refuting the notion that skyrocketing executive pay is merely a reflection of “the market for skills” or “talent,” Mishel and Kandra write that “CEO compensation grew far faster than compensation of very highly paid workers over the last few decades, which suggests that the market for skills was not responsible for the rapid growth of CEO compensation.”
To reverse the decades-long trend of soaring CEO pay — which EPI argues is damaging to workers and the broader economy — the report suggests several potential policy solutions, including imposing higher marginal income tax rates on top earners and setting higher corporate tax rates for companies with high ratios of executive-to-worker compensation.
In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)introduced legislationthat would raise the corporate tax rate by 0.5% for companies that report a CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio of 50-to-1. The tax increase would grow to 5% for companies reporting a ratio of 500-to-1 or higher.
“At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, the American people are demanding that large, profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes and treat their employees with the dignity and respect they deserve,” Sanders said upon introducing his bill, which hasgone nowherein the Senate.
On Thursday last week (29 July), Zamekile Shangase, a 33-year-old woman from Asiyindawo in Lamontville, was shot and killed outside her home by the police. Zamekile was the mother of two children aged 6 and 11. She was elected to a position on the local Abahlali council in 2018 and served on the council for a year.
Zamekile was shot while the police were raiding the settlement as part of Operation Show Your Receipt.
Another life has been lost. Another family is in mourning. Two young children must now live without a mother.
If you are poor and black your humanity is not recognised. You are shown to the world as a person who can’t think, and as a criminal. You do not count to society. People will speak about you without seeing any reason to speak to you. You can be brutalised and your dignity can be vandalised without any consequences. You can be killed by the state and if there is no movement (imbutho yabampofu) to insist that your life must be counted as a human life your death will count for nothing. In this system we are left to die like dogs.
This is the second time that the police had come to raid the settlements in this area, and take people’s food. On Thursday they were going door to door, breaking locks, threatening and abusing people, and taking food from people. People got angry and started shouting. Some people started throwing stones at the police and banging on the police van. The police then got angry and started shooting.
A police officer was standing on the road and shooting up the hill into Asiyindawo at random. After Zamekile was shot the police carried on with their operation of seizing people’s food at gunpoint while her body was still lying on the ground.
Colonel Khumalo was at the scene after the murder but refused to engage the leaders in discussion.
We were very concerned to read an article in a major news publication in which it was reported that the police were fired on from all directions by criminals armed with bullets stolen in the riots, that they were forced to return fire and that “a 33-year-old woman was killed”. Another article by the same journalist reported that Zamekile was “caught in the crossfire”. This article saw no need to even mention Zamekile’s name.
The police lied to try and cover up the fact that they killed an unarmed person for no reason. There is no doubt that no one fired on the police. If the journalist had not just taken what the police said as the truth and had spoken to the residents of Asiyindawo, residents elsewhere in the nearby Sisonke settlement (formerly Madlala), and residents in the township (Lamontville) who live near the Asiyindawo he would have found that they all agree that only the police were shooting.
As usual we are spoken about and not spoken too. As usual we are criminalised. As usual our lives count for nothing.
There is a long history of the police lying to cover up their actions, and the media taking their lies as if they were facts without bothering to talk to eyewitnesses.
In the early years of our movement (around 2005 to 2007), when Mike Sutcliffe was the city manager and Obed Mlaba was the mayor, the City always tried to prevent us from marching. When we would march, peacefully and unarmed, in defiance of their illegal bans we would be attacked with rubber bullets, stun grenades, dogs and sometimes water cannons and live ammunition. The police would always tell the media that they had attacked us because they had come under fire. Every time that was a complete lie but the media would report it as if it was the truth and not see any need to ask any of the people who had been on the march what they had seen. It was like they thought that we are just born liars and the police always tell the truth.
Even when someone has been killed the police have often been allowed to lie with impunity. In 30 September 2013 Nqobile Nzuza, a 17-year-old, was killed by the police during a protest in Cato Crest. The police said that they had come under attack from an armed mob and that they would have been killed if they had not fired live ammunition. This was a complete lie but most of the media reported the police statement as if it was true. They saw no need to speak to eye witnesses. When the autopsy was done it showed that Nqobile had been shot in the back of the head. In 2018 a police officer was convicted for the murder of Nqobile and sent to prison. In the trial it became clear that the whole story told by the police, and often repeated as fact by the media, was untrue.
As Operation Show Your Receipt continues, and people continue to be abused, insulted, threatened and have their food stolen by the police, more people will get hurt.
Why is there so much hatred for the poor? When will the time come for our dignity to be recognised?
We have been asking these questions for more than fifteen years. We have not received any answers to these questions, instead we are receiving bullets from the state.
Our humanity is denied. Our dignity is vandalised. Our lives are criminalised. Our existence is criminalised.
When the leadership of Abahlali arrived in Asiyindawo shortly after the shooting, while Zamekile’s body was still lying on the ground, one of the residents asked a very important question to the heavily armed police: “Why must we be killed for food, why must we die for food?”
They did not answer. Others said “Yes, why must we die for a tin of fish?”
In this press statement we are taking this question and putting it to the whole of society.
On one level, the data was entirely counterintuitive. After all, as the COVID crisis has raged the past 18 months, we have witnessed Great Depression-era level spikes in unemployment and unprecedented increases in housing and food insecurity. On the other hand, it oughtn’t to have been entirely surprising, because in 2020 and 2021, Congress, despite its general dysfunction, managed to pass into law several pandemic relief packages worth trillions of dollars — and much of that money ended up flowing, often at speed, to households around the country.
The lesson is clear: Ambitious, outside-the-box government programs and investments can be extraordinarily effective in helping vulnerable Americans escape poverty. The Urban Institute’s research concludes that absent these interventions, the poverty rate at the end of 2020 would have been above 20 percent of the population.
There’s a historical precedent for big-thinking and big-spending government programs successfully driving down the poverty rate: At the height of the “war on poverty,” in the 1960s and early 1970s, the United States also began posting huge drops in the number of residents living in poverty — though at a slower pace than occurred in 2020 and 2021.
From 1964 to 1973, from the year Lyndon Johnson began putting in place the building blocks of his anti-poverty programs to the year that Richard Nixon began shifting the emphasis away from these programs and toward more punitive social policies such as the “war on crime” and the “war on drugs,” poverty in the U.S. declined by 42 percent.
Of course, some of this data should be taken with a grain of salt: For decades, experts have critiqued the government’s definition of poverty, and the threshold that it uses to determine whether individuals and families are income-insecure as failing to fully measure economic hardship. Most poverty measures used by the federal government don’t, for example, fully take into account the high cost of housing in states such as California or New York; nor do they fully recognize that things such as affordable broadband access are now necessities of life rather than luxuries. Certainly, during the Trump era, falling official rates of poverty masked deepening fissures of inequality and deepening financial straits faced by those at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
When the government invests in anti-poverty programs, across-the-board measures of poverty show that these programs can work to improve the financial condition of millions of Americans. Yet, despite that, too often those programs fail to sustain popular support over the long-term.
In fact, historically, across-the-board anti-poverty programs have only ever attracted lukewarm political support from U.S. leaders. Poverty embarrasses those in power. They don’t like to talk about it or admit its durability. In the 1960s, the sociologist Michael Harrington wrote of a poverty that was rendered invisible by the broader affluence that hemmed it in. As a society, we have, over the decades, been remarkably willing to sweep our poverty crisis under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist.
Harrington’s book, The Other America, helped trigger a political and cultural awakening around poverty. It helped open eyes and create the conditions in which it was possible to put in place interventions such as Medicare and Medicaid, an expansion of food stamps, free and reduced school meals, increased job training and housing programs in poor neighborhoods, and so on. But, over time, the public’s appetite for these programs — and the costs of maintaining them — waned, and poverty rates began creeping up again.
Today, in 2021, the country has a huge opportunity. Out of the pandemic, remarkably creative economic and political thinking has emerged about how to reduce poverty. Federally, one-year child tax credits are now in place that will massively reduce child poverty this year. At a state level, states like California are implementing universal pre-K education. Ideas around creating guaranteed income programs are no longer dismissed as being utopian or un-implementable. A dramatic expansion of unemployment benefits was shown not only to be possible, but to be remarkably effective at keeping unemployed people afloat economically.
Yet all of these changes are as fragile as were so many of the programs of LBJ’s war on poverty. Already, Republican states have dismantled their expanded unemployment benefits. Already, Congress and President Biden have allowed the federal eviction moratorium to sunset — despite millions still struggling to pay their rent. Already, there is a political battle underway about whether or not to continue the child tax credits beyond this current year.
Take these tools away, and poverty could all too easily boomerang back up to pre-pandemic levels within months. That would be a tragedy of historic proportions — and an entirely avoidable one at that.
Women who migrated to the Wangjia community participate in local activities at the community centre in Tongren City, Guizhou Province, April 2021.
Confounding news comes from the flagship World Economic Outlookreport of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The report highlights many of the pressing issues facing our planet: disruptions in the global supply chain, rising shipping costs, shortages of intermediate goods, rising commodity prices, and inflationary pressures in many economies. Global growth rates are expected to touch 6% in 2021 and 4.9% in 2022, driven by higher global government debt. According to the report, this debt ‘reached an unprecedented level of close to 100% of the global GDP in 2020 and is projected to remain around that level in 2021 and 2022’. Developing countries’ external debt will remain high, with little expectation of relief.
Each year, IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath highlights the main themes of the report in her blog. This year, her blog has a clear headline: ‘Drawing Further Apart: Widening Gaps in the Global Recovery’. The rift runs along North-South lines, with the poorer nations unable to find an easy path out of the pandemic-induced global slowdown. A range of reasons cause this rift, such as the penalty of relying upon labour-intensive production, the overall poverty of the populations, and the long-standing problems of debt. But Gopinath focuses on one aspect: vaccine apartheid. ‘Close to 40 percent of the population in advanced economies has been fully vaccinated, compared with 11 percent in emerging market economies, and a tiny fraction in low-income developing countries’, she writes. The lack of vaccines, she argues, is the principal cause of the ‘widening gaps in the global recovery’.
Peasant workers till the land in an organic bamboo fungus company, which was established to help lift Longmenao, a village that is officially registered as poor, out of poverty in Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.
These widening gaps have an immediate social impact. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation’s 2021 report, The State of Food Insecurity and Nutrition in the World, notes that ‘nearly one in three people in the world (2.37 billion) did not have access to adequate food in 2020 – an increase of almost 320 million people in just one year’. Hunger is intolerable. Food riots are now in evidence, most dramatically in South Africa. ‘They are just killing us with hunger here’, said one Durban resident who was motivated to join the unrest. These protests, as well as the new data released by the IMF and UN, have put hunger back on the global agenda.
In late July, the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council held a high-level political forum on sustainable development. The forum’s ministerial declaration recognised that ‘the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare and exacerbated our world’s vulnerabilities and inequalities within and among countries, accentuated systemic weaknesses, challenges, and risks and threatens to halt or damage progress made in realising the Sustainable Development Goals’. Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the UN member states in 2015. These goals include poverty alleviation, an end to hunger, good health, and gender equality. Before the pandemic, it was already clear that the world would not meet these goals by 2030 as projected, certainly not even the most basic goal of eradicating hunger.
During this bleak period, in late February 2021, China’s president Xi Jinping announced that – counter to this general global downturn – China had eradicated extreme poverty. What does this announcement mean? As our team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research reported last month, it means that 850 million people had climbed out of absolute poverty (the culmination of a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949), that their per capita income had increased to US$10,000 (a ten-fold increase in the last twenty years), and that life expectancy had increased to 77.3 years on average (compared to 35 years in 1949). Having met the poverty reduction SDGs ten years in advance, China contributed to more than 70% of the world’s total poverty reduction. In March 2021, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres celebrated this achievement as a ‘reason for hope and inspiration to the entire community of nations’.
First Secretary Liu Yuanxue speaks with a local villager during routine home visits in the village of Danyang, Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.
Our July study, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, inaugurated a new series called Studies on Socialist Construction, through which we aim to study experiments in the construction of socialist practices from Cuba to Kerala, Bolivia to China. Serve the People is based on ground-level studies of poverty eradication schemes in different parts of China and on interviews with experts who participated in this long-term project. For instance, Wang Sangui, dean of the National Poverty Alleviation Research Institute of Renmin University, told us how the concept of multidimensional poverty is central to the Chinese approach. The concept became a policy through the Communist Party of China’s programme of ‘three guarantees’ (safe housing, healthcare, and education) and ‘two assurances’ (being fed and being clothed). But even here, the essence of this policy is in the details. As Wang put it in terms of drinking water:
How do you classify drinking water as safe? First, the basic requirement is that there must be no shortages in the water supply. Second, the source of water must not be too far, no more than twenty minutes round-trip for water retrieval. Last, the water quality must be safe, without any harmful substances. We require test reports that confirm the water quality is safe. Only then can we say that the standard is met.
Once a policy is crafted, the real work of implementation begins. The Communist Party (CPC) sent out 800,000 cadre to help local authorities survey households to understand the depth of poverty in the countryside. Then, the CPC delegated 3 million cadre out of the Party’s 95.1 million members to be part of 255,000 teams that spent years living in poor villages working towards the eradication of poverty and the social conditions it created. One team was assigned to a village, one cadre to each family.
The studies of poverty and the experience of the cadre resulted in five core methods for eradicating poverty: developing industry; relocating people; incentivising ecological compensation; guaranteeing free, quality, and compulsory education; and providing social assistance. The most powerful lever of these five methods was industrial development, which created capital-intensive agricultural production (including crop processing and animal breeding); restored farmlands; and grew forests as part of the ecological compensation schemes, reviving areas that had become prey to resource over-exploitation. In addition, an emphasis was placed on educating minority populations and women. As a result, by 2020, China ranked first in the world in the enrolment of women in tertiary education, according to the World Economic Forum.
Less than 10% of the people who lifted themselves out of poverty did so because of relocation, which was often the most dramatic instance of the programme. One relocated resident, Mou’se, told us about Atule’er, a village on the edge of a mountain, where he lived before relocating. ‘It took me half a day to climb down the cliff to buy a packet of salt’, he recalled. He would go down the cliff on a rattan ‘sky ladder’, which dangled perilously from the edge of the cliff. His relocation – along with the eighty-three other families who lived there – has allowed him to access better facilities and live a less precarious life.
The eradication of extreme poverty is significant, but it does not solve all problems. Social inequality in China remains a serious problem. These are not China’s problems alone but pressing problems facing humanity in our time. As we move to capital-intensive agriculture that requires fewer farmers, what kinds of habitations will we produce that are neither in rural nor urban areas? What kinds of employment can be generated for people who are no longer needed in the fields? Can we begin to think about a shorter work week, allowing more time to be civic and social?
A local food vendor and user of the Yishizhifu short video platform showcases her cooking in the village of Danyang, Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.
Eradicating poverty is not a Chinese project. It is humanity’s goal. That is why movements and governments committed to this goal look carefully at the achievement of the Chinese people. Many of the projects in motion, however, take a dramatically different approach, seeking to address poverty by transferring income (as several South African research institutes advocate). But cash transfer schemes are not enough. Multidimensional poverty requires more than this. For example, Brazil’s Bolsa Familia programme, implemented by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, made an enormous dent in hunger in that country, but it was not designed to eradicate poverty.
Meanwhile, in the Indian state of Kerala, absolute poverty fell from 59.79% of the population in 1973-74 to 7.05% in 2011-2012 under the governance of the Left Democratic Front. The mechanisms that led to this dramatic decline were agrarian reform, establishing public health and education, creating a public distribution system for food, decentralising political authority to local self-governments, providing social security and welfare, and promoting public action (such as through the Kudumbashree cooperative projects). Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said recently that his government is committed to eradicating extreme poverty in the state. The next study in our series on socialist construction will concentrate on Kerala’s cooperative movement, focusing on its role in the eradication of poverty, hunger, and patriarchy.
From the countryside to Tongren City, Guizhou Province, April 2021.
In March, the UN Environment Programme released its Food Waste Index Report, which showed that an estimated 931 million tonnes of food went into waste bins across the world. The weight of this food roughly equals that of 23 million fully loaded 40-tonne trucks. If we let these trucks stand bumper-to-bumper at the earth’s circumference, they would make a ring long enough to circle the earth seven times, or to go deep into space, where billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson decided to go. The $5.5 billion Bezos spent on a four-minute trip into space could have fed 37.5 million people or fully funded the COVAX programme that would vaccinate two billion people.
The ambitions of Bezos and Branson are not life. Life is the abolition of the harshness of necessity.
Uganda is a southeastern African country neighboring Lake Victoria, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), South Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania. Its population sits below 50 million people and although it has been one of the poorest countries in the world as of 2012, the U.N. determined that it made enormous leaps in eradicating poverty thanks to ambitious ideas and thoughtful programs. For example, Eight, a Belgian pilot project, highlighted the effectiveness of universal basic income (UBI) in places where extreme poverty is a problem. The Borgen Project spoke with Eight, which enacted its first program in 2017 and showed the rest of the world just what Uganda and universal basic income might mean to the fight against global poverty.
How Eight Began
Maarten Goethals and Steven Janssens founded Eight in 2015 after finding poverty in their travels hard to swallow.
“We see a lot of inequality and that is so unfair. A lot of people think poverty is a character problem, but it’s a money problem.” That unfairness inspired them to develop actionable solutions and experiments.
In this case, they launched a basic income pilot program in Busibi, a remote village, in 2017. The idea was simple; give every inhabitant (about 150 people) 16 euros per month and children 8 euros per month. with no strings attached. The money would transfer to mobile bank accounts that the people of Busibi could access by telephone.
While some might believe this to be a futile attempt at utopia, the academic literature supports this kind of unburdened cash transfer system as a means of raising communities out of poverty. The Borgen Project has profiled universal basic income programs in the U.K., India, Iran, Kashmir and other places. All this research leads to one conclusion: when people receive money and freedom of choice, they make remarkably astute decisions. As co-founder Steven Janssens said in his interview with The Borgen Project, “people deserve to be trusted.”
Likely because of the freedom and dignity it allows, UBI yields remarkable results in lifting people out of poverty. Without mandates, universal basic income restores agency and allows people the opportunity to insist on what is right for themselves.
What it Became
Eight’s pilot program took place over the course of two years from 2017 to 2019 and immediately showed the work ethic of the villagers. Inhabitants built businesses and sent kids who would otherwise be working to school. Maarten Goethals noted that “Shops started up in the village and a new dynamism arose.” Free money worked, as Rutger Bregman said in his 2014 book “Utopia for Realists.” It turns out that eradicating global poverty is much easier than many think tanks make it out to be.
Ortrud Lebmann, chair of labor relations at Helmut Schmidt University, conducted landmark research about those who live in poverty and their “restricted opportunity to choose among different ways of life.” His research, in essence, confirms what Eight intended to study. The Eight pilot project proved just how necessary and effective freedom of options are for those with inadequate resources. Janssens noted how bizarre of a concept UBI was to many in Uganda and elsewhere. “The people of Busibi reacted with a kind of disbelief… That they would receive money without conditions. Aid is always project-oriented.” By lifting the onus of conditions, the environment improved.
The Results
After two years, the data appears irrefutable. Most people in the group spent around 50% of their money on food, investments, clothes, health and education. Self-reported happiness improved by 80%.
Only 50% of children in the village went to school before the unconditional cash transfers began compared with 94.7% after. Twenty businesses populated the town compared to the two that stood before the program. All markers of poverty declined with the advent of cash and choice.
Eight now plans to bring its ambitious idea that began with Uganda and universal basic income to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “EIGHT wants to find out if the people from the villages close to a mine can be given more choices.”
The question is not only if it will work (the evidence suggests it will) but how it might work in a place where children work in mines and risk their wellbeing for a dangerous but lucrative practice. Will unconditional cash transfers facilitate less child labor in these mines? Previous experiments tend to predict just such an outcome.
For now, there is a film about Goethals and Jansens’s project entitled “Crazy Money,” set to debut later in 2021. What Eight did with Uganda and universal basic income was nothing short of revelatory. Although UBI is not new, this is further proof it represents an actionable solution against global poverty. Maarten Goethals and Steven Janssens provided more evidence for choice, dignity and compassion for those who live in poverty.
On 25 February 2021, the Chinese government announced that extreme poverty had been abolished in China, a country of 1.4 billion people. This historic victory is a culmination of a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949. The early decades of socialist construction laid the foundation that was deepened during the reform and opening-up period. During this time, 850 million Chinese people were lifted and lifted themselves out of poverty; that is to say, 70 percent of the world’s total poverty reduction took place in China. In the most recent ‘targeted’ phase that began in 2013, the Chinese government spent 1.6 trillion yuan (US$246 billion) to build 1.1 million kilometres of rural roads, bring internet access to 98 percent of the country’s poor villages, renovate homes for 25.68 million people, and build new homes for 9.6 million others.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) plans to introduce a bill that would create a guaranteed income program that would send $1,200 a month to most Americans. The bill, she argues, could be a major step toward ending poverty in the U.S.
The SUPPORT Act would send $1,200 a month to U.S. adults making up to $75,000 a year, or a head of household making up to $112,500 a year, with supplemental income for children, according to HuffPost. The bill would phase out payments at higher income brackets.
The bill strives to include groups that are traditionally left out of government aid like the recent COVID stimulus checks. Undocumented immigrants who file taxes with an ITIN would be included. People without banking accounts or people experiencing homelessness could also access payments through a banking system run by the United States Postal Service.
The SUPPORT Act has been cosponsored by Reps. Cori Bush (D-Missouri), Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), Dwight Evans (D-Pennsylvania) and Jamaal Bowman (D-New York). It faces long odds in Congress.
“Poverty is a choice. For too long we have prioritized endless growth while millions are homeless, hungry or without healthcare,” Omar said in a statement, per HuffPost. “We as a nation have the ability to make sure everyone has their basic needs like food, housing and healthcare met.”
The state of poverty and debt in the U.S. is dire. The gap between the highest and lowest earners is growing, while people working on the dismally low federal minimum wage are struggling to meet their needs. Tax cuts for the rich, meanwhile, have allowed the rich to avoid paying income tax altogether some years, creating a stark contrast between the wealthy and the poor.
A study by the Federal Reserve published in 2019 found that almost 40 percent of Americans didn’t have $400 in savings, leaving them vulnerable if unexpected expenses were to arise.
Omar argues that her bill could help reverse poverty in the U.S., pointing to the stimulus checks sent out earlier this year and last. Indeed, a recent study of the effects of the COVID stimulus bill passed earlier this year found that poverty dropped to the lowest level on record in the U.S. The largest contributor to the reduction in poverty is from the stimulus checks — a similar program to what Omar is proposing.
Not only did the checks reduce poverty, they also helped families stay afloat through the pandemic. Half of Americans used the $1,400 checks sent by the government earlier this year to pay debts. Many others used the checks to pay off bills, relieving a burden from families while the country was, and still is, being crushed by COVID-19.
Universal basic income has been tried before in the U.S. Recently, Stockton, California, experimented with the idea, giving randomly selected members of the public $500 a month with no strings attached for two years. The cash stipends benefitted or increased participant’s financial stability and career prospects. It also helped better the participant’s overall well-being.
Similar programs have had success in other countries. Countries like Finland and South Korea have had similar results from guaranteed income programs, which freed up participants to pursue goals like starting a business or attending school.
Political will and strategic taxation channels could help bridge the yawning divide between the haves and the have nots in South Africa.
The reinstatement by President Cyril Ramaphosa of the Covid-19 social relief of distress grant and its extension to caregivers take us one step closer to a universal basic income guarantee.
The Covid-19 pandemic has placed the idea of a Universal Basic Income Guarantee (UBIG) back on the agenda, as can be seen from the numerous demands from civil society groups and community organisers. This recognises, in the context of a long-standing structural unemployment crisis, that poverty and inequality cannot be addressed only through expanding employment.
However, the SRD grant of R350 per month can, at best, cover only 60% of a person’s minimum required food intake. In the short term, the SRD grant should be increased to at least R585, which is the food poverty line. This would cost an additional R17-billion until March 2022. The inadequate amount and the delays in implementing this are reflective of a government whose social policies have become reactive and crisis-driven.
A permanent UBIG is a chance to close the gaps in South Africa’s social security net. The question is then not about whether a UBIG should be implemented, but rather how it should be designed and financed.
To answer part of this question, the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) has put forward a financing policy brief for a UBIG, outlining 19 recommendations that will allow South Africa to raise funds to tackle poverty. The policy brief serves as a supplement to an earlier one on UBIG published by the IEJ in March 2021 and a summary of further research produced for the IEJ by DNA Economics. The proposals include adjustments to income taxes, consumption taxes, and wealth and property taxes; removal of corporate tax breaks; the reduction of wasteful and irregular expenditure; and the recoupment of expenditure on UBIG through existing value-added tax (VAT).
How much and for whom?
There are numerous suggestions for the amount at which a UBIG should be set. We present a set of options, ranging from the food poverty line of R585 per month to the initial starting level of the national minimum wage of R3,500 per month. These amounts are not, on their own, sufficient to provide a dignified standard of living, but rather seek to address the depth and severity of poverty by meeting people’s most basic needs.
The preferred approach is one of universality, allowing all people between the age of 18 to 59, currently excluded from permanent social security benefits, to be eligible for the UBIG. In tandem, if South Africa is to reach the National Development Plan’s objective of reducing poverty to 0% by 2030, then the child support grant should also be increased to at least the level of the food poverty line.
The universality ensures that lower-income taxpayers will benefit more from the income guarantee than they contribute in new taxes. The net benefit varies according to income brackets. For example, if a UBIG of R585 per month is provided, 84% of taxpayers will be net beneficiaries.
How to finance this?
The IEJ puts forward 19 tax proposals. These are options, and are not necessarily proposed as a package to be implemented simultaneously.
Adjustments to income taxes include:
The implementation of a ring-fenced Social Security Tax on income, operating similarly to Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) contributions. This will generate R67-billion annually. It would be progressively levied upon all income earners — ranging between 1.5 to 3% of taxable personal income;
A resource rent tax levied on excess profits earned by extractive industries, estimated to bring in R39-billion annually. This would redistribute the gains from commodity booms while preserving incentives for investors;
The removal of tax breaks for high-income earners — in the form of medical aid tax credits and the pension fund contribution deduction — could contribute a total of R26-billion annually; and
A halt to the National Treasury’s proposed reduction in the corporate income tax rate. In the context of pressing social needs, this reduction would be deeply irresponsible
Proposed changes to taxes on products consumed include the introduction of a VAT rate of 25% on luxury goods; a temporary increase in excise duties; and an increase in carbon taxes to one-quarter of the European Union standard. We estimate that changes to such consumption taxes will result in an additional R13-billion that can be used to finance a UBIG.
These provide good revenue-raising options but do not tax accumulated wealth. For this reason, we propose a wealth tax. Though South Africa has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality, a wealth tax has historically been excluded from the tax framework. Using the wealth tax simulator from the World Inequality Database, we show that a 1% wealth tax for the top 1%, and a 3% wealth tax for the top 0.1% would generate R59-billion in revenue in the medium to long term. While a wealth tax is not an immediate source of financing, it is an important proposal to ensure the sustainability of a UBIG.
It is also possible to tax the income that derives from wealth, which is also highly unequally distributed. A currency transaction tax (CTT) of 0.005%; raising the Securities Transfer Tax from 0.25 to 0.3%; and a financial transaction tax of 0.1%, would raise R3.68 billion, R1.37 billion, and R41 billion respectively. These tax the buying and selling of different financial assets and have the benefit of reducing stock market speculation.
An increase in the estate duty tax would mean higher taxes when wealth is passed on after someone’s death. The proposal would align the tax to personal income tax rates, ensuring greater equity across the tax system. Given the skewed nature of accumulated wealth under apartheid, this seems necessary.
This combination of taxes on wealth and income that derives from wealth would add R48-billion to government revenue.
In addition, we propose scrapping ineffective corporate tax breaks — such as the employment tax incentive — and redoubling efforts to tackle tax evasion. The IEJ tax proposals target a 25% reduction in profit shifting of multinational corporations. Combined, this would free up a total of R18-billion in additional revenue. We also target a 30% reduction of irregular expenditure reported by the Auditor-General, freeing up R36.4-billion. A further reduction of wasteful expenditure in Cabinet and government departments would provide an additional R1.85-billion.
Spill-over effects
A UBIG would spur a host of positive spill-over effects in the economy, including shifting unspent funds from the wealthy and corporates to poor households, thus injecting spending into the economy that favours locally produced goods. This would also increase tax revenue as the economy grows. These all need to be investigated. One easy element to calculate is that around 12% of any expenditure on a UBIG would be recouped back by the state via VAT.
This array of financing proposals shows that implementing a UBIG progressively and sustainably is feasible in the short term. Furthermore, some funds could be raised through additional debt, or other avenues.
A UBIG is an important component of a broader package of social support that a capable state should ensure for all. The urgency of the moment, in addition to the longstanding persisting patterns of poverty and inequality, needs to be recognised and reflected in the debate around the implementation of a UBIG. Addressing extreme poverty is therefore not simply about financing constraints, but rather about willingness to take the immediate measures that this moment demands.
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About the Authors: Aliya Chikte is a Research Associate at the Institute for Economic Justice, where Gilad Isaacs is the Director.
The most comprehensive study yet of the federal response to the pandemic shows huge but temporary benefits for the poor — and helps frame a larger debate over the role of government.
The huge increase in government aid prompted by the coronavirus pandemic will cut poverty nearly in half this year from prepandemic levels and push the share of Americans in poverty to the lowest level on record, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of a vast but temporary expansion of the safety net.
The number of poor Americans is expected to fall by nearly 20 million from 2018 levels, a decline of almost 45 percent. The country has never cut poverty so much in such a short period of time, and the development is especially notable since it defies economic headwinds — the economy has nearly seven million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic.
The extraordinary reduction in poverty has come at extraordinary cost, with annual spending on major programs projected to rise fourfold to more than $1 trillion.
Yet without further expensive new measures, millions of families may find the escape from poverty brief. The three programs that cut poverty most — stimulus checks, increased food stamps and expanded unemployment insurance — have ended or are scheduled to soon revert to their prepandemic size.
While poverty has fallen most among children, its retreat is remarkably broad: It has dropped among Americans who are white, Black, Latino and Asian, and among Americans of every age group and residents of every state.
“These are really large reductions in poverty — the largest short-term reductions we’ve seen,” said Laura Wheaton of the Urban Institute, who produced the estimate with her colleagues Linda Giannarelli and Ilham Dehry. The institute’s simulation model is widely used by government agencies. The New York Times requested the analysis, which expanded on an earlier projection.
The finding — that poverty plunged amid hard times at huge fiscal costs — comes at a moment of sharp debate about the future of the safety net.
The Biden administration has started making monthly payments to most families with children through an expansion of the child tax credit. Democrats want to make the yearlong effort permanent, which would reduce child poverty on a continuing basis by giving their families an income guarantee.
Progressives said the new numbers vindicated their contention that poverty levels reflected political choices and government programs could reduce economic need.
“Wow — these are stunning findings,” said Bob Greenstein, a longtime proponent of safety net programs who is now at the Brookings Institution.
“The policy response since the start of the pandemic goes beyond anything we’ve ever done, and the antipoverty effect dwarfs what most of us thought was possible.”
Conservatives say that pandemic-era spending is unsustainable and would harm the poor in the long run, arguing that unconditional aid discourages work and marriage. The child tax credit offers families up to $300 per child a month whether or not parents have jobs, which critics call a return to failed welfare policies.
“There’s no doubt that by shoveling trillions of dollars to the poor, you can reduce poverty,” said Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. “But that’s not efficient and it’s not good for the poor because it produces social marginalization. You want policies that encourage work and marriage, not undermine it.”
Poverty rates had reached new lows before the pandemic, Mr. Rector added, under policies meant to discourage welfare and promote work.
To understand how large the recent aid expansion has been, consider the experience of Kathryn Goodwin, a single mother of five in St. Charles, Mo., who managed a group of trailer parks before the pandemic eliminated her $33,000 job.
Without the pandemic-era expansions — passed in three rounds under both the Trump and Biden administrations — Ms. Goodwin’s job loss would have caused her income to plunge to about $29,000 (in jobless benefits, food stamps and other aid), leaving her officially poor.
Instead, her income rose above its prepandemic level, though she has not worked for a year. She received about $25,000 in unemployment benefits (about three times what she would have received before the pandemic) and $12,000 in stimulus checks. With increased food stamp benefits and other help, her income grew to $67,000 — almost 30 percent more than when she had a job.
“Without that help, I literally don’t know how I would have survived,” she said. “We would have been homeless.”
Still, Ms. Goodwin, 29, has mixed feelings about large payments with no stipulations.
“In my case, yes, it was very beneficial,” she said. But she said that other people she knew bought big TVs and her former boyfriend bought drugs. “All this free money enabled him to be a worse addict than he already was,” she said. “Why should taxpayers pay for that?”
The Urban Institute’s projections show poverty falling to 7.7 percent this year from 13.9 percent in 2018. That decline, 45 percent, is nearly three times the previous three-year record, according to historical estimates by researchers at Columbia University.
The projected drop in child poverty, to 5.6 from 14.2 percent, amounts to a decline of 61 percent. That exceeds the previous 50 years combined, the Columbia figures show.
In addition to there being nearly 20 million fewer people in poverty, the institute projects about 10 million fewer in “near poverty,” with incomes of 100 to 150 percent of the poverty line. Under the yardstick the Urban Institute used (the government’s Supplemental Poverty Measure), the poverty line for two adults and two children with typical housing costs is about $30,000.
“The decline in ‘near poverty’ is significant because families in that income range, like people in poverty, suffer high rates of food insecurity and other hardships,” said Elaine Waxman, an Urban Institute researcher.
Poverty fell across racial and ethnic groups but most for people who are Black and Latino, meaning the gap with white Americans narrowed. The Rev. Starsky Wilson, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, credited the racial protests of the past year for prompting lawmakers to act. “It’s no coincidence that the effort at mobilizing resulted in investments that reduced poverty and narrowed disparities,” he said.
Poverty fell less among Asian Americans, leaving them more likely than Black Americans to be poor. The institute found that was partly because they tended to live in more expensive areas.
Jessica Moore of St. Louis said the expanded aid helped her make a fresh start.
A single mother of three, Ms. Moore, 24, lost work as a banquet server at the pandemic’s start but received enough in unemployment insurance and stimulus checks to buy a car and enroll in community college. She is studying to become an emergency medical technician, which promises to raise her earnings 50 percent.
“When you lose your job, you don’t expect benefits that are more than you were making,” she said. “It was a pure blessing.”
Payments also went to people who kept their jobs, which helps explain why “near poverty” fell. The beneficiaries included John Asher of Indianapolis, who once served prison time for selling drugs but is now sober and earning $500 a week as a maintenance man. With $3,200 in stimulus checks, Mr. Asher, 49, was able to leave a boardinghouse, rent an apartment and take custody of an autistic son, who he feared would go to foster care.
But he said he distrusted “the crooked government” and urged poor people to help themselves. “If you want to change your life, you have to get up and do something — not sit home and get free money,” he said.
Leah Burgess, who also kept her job, drew the opposite lesson from the help she received. A part-time chaplain at a school outside the District of Columbia, Ms. Burgess, 43, is studying for two master’s degrees at Howard University. With three children, she and her husband, who was also a student, received about $18,000 in stimulus checks and expanded food stamps.
The aid helped them eat better and worry less, said Ms. Burgess, who called the support a foundation for a more just society. “If our resources in a pandemic could change millions of people’s lives, then what’s stopping us from continuing to do that?” she said.
The institute projected spending on core programs would more than double, to about $13,900 per family from $5,700 in 2018. The stimulus checks removed more than 12 million people from poverty. Food stamps ended poverty for nearly eight million people and unemployment aid for nearly seven million.
Critics said the aid was poorly devised, noting that many people received more from unemployment benefits than they had earned on the job. “We spent like we’ve never spent before and we reduced hardship for most people quite dramatically,” said Bruce D. Meyer, an economist at the University of Chicago. “But this came at a very high and unnecessary cost.”
While Democrats and Republicans remain divided over future safety net spending, a bipartisan group of senators agreed Wednesday on about $550 billion in new spending for roads, bridges and physical infrastructure projects, and the Senate advanced the package in an initial vote.
How Government Relief Might Have Helped Two Different Families
At the request of The New York Times, the Urban Institute illustrated the safety net’s effects on two hypothetical Pennsylvania families. The first shows that increased aid would lift a single mother out of poverty in 2021 even if her earnings fell in half. The second shows that the aid would lift a married couple out of “near poverty” even if their earnings remained the same.
Measuring poverty is contentious, and some conservatives accuse the left of exaggerating the recent poverty reduction to justify more spending. They say the government’s methodology undercounts the benefits people receive and overstates what it takes to meet basic needs. The Urban Institute modified the government’s approach to correct for undercounting, but Ms. Wheaton said methodological issues did not change the conclusion that poverty fell since “we are applying a consistent measure to both years.”
If there are biases in the institute’s methodology, they lean in offsetting directions. Using a 2018 baseline may modestly overstate the recent poverty reduction, since poverty was lower when the virus hit. But the study, which was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, also understated the poverty reduction by omitting several large new programs, including $45 billion in rental aid.
Robert Doar, the president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, warned that the poverty numbers were being used to attack a successful social compact established a quarter-century ago with the overhaul of the welfare system. Under a new system of time limits and work requirements, payments to poor people without jobs fell, but subsidies for low-wage workers grew. Mr. Doar noted that while liberals warned child poverty would grow, by 2019 it had hit a prepandemic low.
“We required work, we rewarded work, and poverty rates were lower than had ever been,” he said. “The Democrats want to ignore all that and just send everybody a check.”
The evidence of falling poverty in 2021 may seem at odds with reports of increased hunger and other pandemic-era hardships. But the trends can coincide, as Ms. Goodwin’s experience shows. That is because poverty is based on annual income, and help has fluctuated greatly from month to month as a result of policy changes and administrative bottlenecks. Many families have swung between moments of surplus and desperation.
After six years on the job, Ms. Goodwin was shocked to find herself laid off (“that was really a slap in the face”) and distraught when her request for unemployment benefits went unanswered for a month. Fearing she might lose the children to foster care, she drove them 800 miles to Niagara Falls with thoughts of them all jumping in.
Since then, her jobless benefits swung from a high of $920 a week (much more than she had received on the job) to a low of $320 (much less) as federal policy changed. She lost food stamps for several weeks and fed the children smaller portions. She waited months for stimulus aid after the payment went to a closed bank account.
“It was all very unreliable,” she said.
A low point came last fall, when her jobless benefits bottomed out. The trailer park where she once had worked evicted her.
Ms. Goodwin said she had been looking for work but it was harder than the “Help Wanted” signs would suggest. Fast-food chains say she is overqualified, and the pandemic-era closure of child care centers complicates her logistics. (She previously worked at home.) She started a sideline making church T-shirts and is an apprentice at a nail salon, where she hopes to get hired.
At once a beneficiary and critic of aid, Ms. Goodwin said the safety net, however imperfect, had lived up to its name. “It enabled us to stay out of poverty — that’s absolutely safety,” she said.
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Article originally appeared in New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/us/politics/covid-poverty-aid-programs.html
A report has raised human rights concerns regarding decades of failed government privatisation in the UK. A campaign group said it identified potentially ‘serious human rights breaches’. And one of its authors, former UN investigator Philip Alston, is no stranger to criticising UK political agendas. Indeed, it was Alston who wrote a damning report on poverty in the country in 2018.
“Public Transport, Private Profit”
Alston is the former special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. His 2018 report was scathing in its criticism of the UK government. Now, he’s helped put together another damning assessment.
The new report is called Public Transport, Private Profit: The Human Cost of Privatizing Buses in the United Kingdom. It looks at the state of bus services across the UK since Margaret Thatcher’s government privatised them in 1985. Alston co-authored the report with Bassam Khawaja and Rebecca Riddell. They are co-directors of the Human Rights and Privatization Project at New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. They’ve pulled together facts and figures and collected testimony from passengers across the country.
Alston: a “master class in how not to run” a public service
Over the past 35 years, deregulation has provided a master class in how not to run an essential public service, leaving residents at the mercy of private actors who have total discretion over how to run a bus route, or whether to run one at all.
In case after case, service that was once dependable, convenient, and widely-used has been scaled back dramatically or made unaffordable.
The absence of a strong public bus system affects a great many people’s economic opportunities, but also their means to participate in their communities, travel to football matches or libraries, and visit family and friends.
These comments were just the tip of the iceberg. Because the report itself detailed how the UK’s bus network is failing the poorest people the most.
Spiralling financial chaos
There are overarching problems with the services. For example:
Average bus fares have risen by 403% since 1987. Yet the government has frozen fuel duty on cars for the past 11 years.
Prior to 2013, bus companies made an average profit of £297m a year. But they only reinvested between 0.2-1.5% of turnover into services.
As of 2019, the public was paying for 42% of funding for bus services in England, to the tune of £2bn a year.
Since 2009, local authorities have cut more than 3,000 bus routes in England which they were subsidising.
The end result of all this? A service that’s falling apart.
Unreliable
As the report summed up:
Deregulation has failed to provide a reliable bus service. Passengers said buses were frequently late, did not show up at all, or often broke down.
The report didn’t document the statistics for bus punctuality and reliability. But the latest government figures show:
“Frequent” bus services in England were on average 1.7 minutes late in 2018/19.
This lateness varied across local authorities. For example, in Gloucestershire it was 6.1 minutes. A lot of local authorities did not report their data.
Meanwhile, “non-frequent” bus services in England (outside London) were only on time 83.5% of the time in 2018/19.
Again, the local authority figures for this varied. For example, in Leicestershire only 63% of non-frequent services ran on time.
The report was clear on where the blame lies for this run-down industry.
Deregulation has made it impossible to run the type of integrated network of services that is taken for granted in many countries around the world. The government argued in 1984 that a free-market approach would outperform an integrated, regulated system, confidently predicting that “informal measures of co-operation between operators will develop to ensure that their services connect. But deregulation of bus transport has led to a deeply fragmented system that would shock those not accustomed to it: multiple private bus operators competing in the same areas and sometimes on the same routes, timetables that do not line up between operators or other modes of transportation, and multiple ticketing options that add needless complication to bus journeys.
So, what is the effect on passengers?
Passengers at the sharp end
The report found multiple failures in bus services for passengers. For example:
Between 1982 and 2016/2017, passenger journeys on local bus services dropped by 38% in England (outside London), 45% in Wales, and 43% in Scotland. Yet under the government-regulated Transport for London in the capital, they rose by 89%.
A 2012 study found that 19% of workers turned down a job offer because of “the quality of bus service”.
Almost 300,000 children cannot reach a secondary school within 30 minutes using public transport.
Less than 50% of rural households live within a “13-minute walk of an hourly bus service”.
By 2019, over 3 million people couldn’t “reach any food stores within 15 minutes by public transport”.
And bus privatisation has hit poor and disabled people the hardest.
Poor people
The report noted that around 40% of “low-income” people don’t have a car. Yet as it said:
those on lower incomes take the highest number of bus trips.
Such individuals can face severe barriers to public transport and are heavily impacted by rising costs and service cuts. They often have worse bus access, may not be able to afford it, work non-standard hours, and are more likely to rely on the bus as their only option. An inability to afford transportation can prevent people from accessing necessary services, limit access to work, reduce quality of life, increase health inequalities, and lead to social isolation.
Disabled people
For chronically ill and disabled people, the law says buses have to have at least one wheelchair space. But this doesn’t mean buses are fully accessible. A 2019 report found numerous barriers for chronically ill and disabled people in London. These included:
Ramps not working.
Bus drivers prioritising pushchairs over wheelchairs.
Some buses only having one wheelchair space.
Also, up until last year, the government had not made accessibility a legal requirement on rail replacement bus services. Figures showed that six out of 10 of the vehicles train operators used did not comply with accessibility requirements. Moreover, England’s disabled person’s free bus pass only permits off-peak travel. So if chronically ill and disabled people want to travel at busier times of the day, they have to pay. In 2019, only 60% of disabled people in England (excluding London) were happy with bus services.
2021 bus strategy for England doubles down on the role of private companies to deliver a public service, without addressing the reasons they have failed in the past or meaningfully expanding options for public ownership and control.
The proposed reforms do little more than tinker with the existing system. The strategy does not commit the government to legalizing new municipal bus companies or removing the severe barriers to achieving bus regulation that local authorities face. It does not address power imbalances between local transportation authorities and bus operators. And it does not impose an obligation on local authorities to provide a minimal service, leaving the core of the deregulated system fully in place.
The report also compared the aims of bus privatisation according to Thatcher’s government with what the UK government now says about it. This essentially shows the government admitting that privatisation has failed:
The UK government says…
The government disagreed with the report’s conclusions. As the Guardianreported, a spokesperson for the Department for Transport said the new bus strategy would “completely overhaul services”, and:
Services across England are patchy, and it’s frankly not good enough.
They added:
We will provide unprecedented funding, but we need councils to work closely with operators, and the government, to develop the services of the future.
But overall, it seems that little is going to change. This is despite the UN already expressing concerns over the UK’s public transport system. And as the report notes, it’s not just the detailed issues around bus services which are the problem here.
There is currently no right to a minimum level of public transportation set out in UK law or policy. And public transportation is not traditionally regarded as a right in and of itself. Yet it is abundantly clear that lack of transportation has severe impacts on people’s ability to live a decent and fulfilling life, including their access to work, education, healthcare, and food.
It also noted:
The privatization of public transportation raises significant human rights concerns. There is a strong case to be made that human rights law requires States to directly provide public services or ensure the provision of public services by a public body where the service is essential for realizing one’s rights—and that increased privatization of rights-related services undermines human rights.
There is only one conclusion to take from this report – the government must urgently amend bus legislation and provide proper support to councils to move towards public control and ownership. There are now just months left before England’s National Bus Strategy locks us into bus deregulation for another generation. Failure to act will leave the UK on the wrong side of history – and the government in serious breach of its human rights obligations.
The United Kingdom is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and can afford a world-class bus system if it chooses to prioritise and fund it. Instead, the government has outsourced responsibility for a vital public service, propping up an arrangement that prioritises private profits and denying the public a decent bus.
Given the UK government previously ignored UN reports into its human rights violations against chronically ill and disabled people, it will probably not heed this report’s findings. But Alston and the team’s report provides a valuable and much-needed insight into the state of bus provision in the UK. It’s one that campaign groups and trade unions can use to drive the narrative around our public transport system forward. And hopefully, the report will lead to change in the future.
Rates of hunger are more than 150% the national average in one out of every six local authorities, according to researchers who created a map showing where millions of UK residents struggle to access food.
The University of Sheffield Institute for Sustainable Food modelled data from the Food Foundation and for the first time was able to identify food insecurity at a local authority scale.
This new analysis of the national data collected during the pandemic breaks down experiences of food insecurity into three distinct groups.
Three groups of food insecurity
Firstly, those who are hungry but were unable to eat food because they could not afford it, or were unable to access food in the previous month.
Secondly, those who are struggling to access food, including those who may have sought help within the last month with access to food, have cut back on meals and healthy foods to stretch tight budgets, or indicated that they struggled to access food in some way.
Data showed that in some places, 28% of adults were struggling.
And thirdly, those who worry about food insecurity or being able to continue to supply adequate food for their household.
Highest and lowest areas of food insecurity
The map shows it is England where the areas with the highest and lowest rates of food insecurity are located.
At one end of the scale, the majority of local authorities in Yorkshire and the Humber are in the top 20% of local authorities with the greatest percentages of adults going hungry, while in the East of England, the majority of local authorities are in the 20% that have the lowest percentages.
The areas worst hit by food insecurity are Wycombe, in Buckinghamshire, with 14% of people estimated to be hungry and nearly 30% of people struggling to access food.
The area also has high estimates for numbers of people who are worried about having enough food (22%).
This is followed closely by Hull, with 13% of people being hungry and more than one in five adults who struggled to access food.
The locality with least hunger, struggle or worry was St Albans.
The research found that in one out of every six local authorities, rates of hunger were more than 150% (one-and-a-half times) the national average.
And in one in 10 local authorities, the rate was almost double.
“We must address this problem”
Dr Megan Blake, from the University of Sheffield Institute for Sustainable Food, said:
This new map, for the first time, makes visible the patterns of food insecurity across the UK.
While no-one should have to go hungry, struggle to get or worry about having enough food, in some places it is at proportions that are especially shocking, particularly as we are a wealthy country.
If we are going to recover from Covid-19 we must address this problem.
She added:
We hope this clear breakdown of the data will be a useful resource for local authorities and the Government to use to address the challenges facing all people living with food insecurity, and that help can be tailored and targeted to those communities who need it, as the answer is not as simple as opening more food banks.
Food insecurity is undermining our chances of recovery after Covid-19. We need to urgently address this issue that pervades so many of our communities. No-one should have to be hungry.
According to data from the Food Foundation, in January 2021, 4.2% of adults across the UK reported that during the previous month they had been hungry but unable to eat at least once.
Almost half of local areas in the north of Ireland and in Yorkshire and the Humber had very high percentages of people who were hungry in January.
The data from the Food Foundation was from an online survey of 4,231 adults in the UK conducted on January 29 to February 2 this year.
A Government spokesperson said:
We have spent billions to help those most in need and combat food insecurity throughout the pandemic.
This includes the £429.1 million Covid Local Support Grant, which was created to help families with food and fuel bills.
MPs have “blood on their hands” over their vote to cut foreign aid. That’s the view of one campaign group, as the impact of the decision becomes clear. But is the budget all that it seems in the first place?
Foreign aid: MPs revolt
As PA reported, chancellor Rishi Sunak put forward a plan that will see a reduction in aid funding from 0.7% of gross national income (GNI) to 0.5%. It’s a cut of around £4.4bn this year. The government wrote the commitment to 0.7% into law. The Tories then restated it in their 2019 manifesto. But the government has now ditched it in a supposed attempt to save money in response to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.
So, on Tuesday 13 July, the change came to parliament. MPs voted by 333 to 298, a majority of 35, to cut foreign aid. But it wasn’t entirely smooth sailing for the government. 24 Tory MPs joined opposition parties to vote against the plan. Both Boris Johnson and Sunak said that the cut was only temporary. Under the new system, funding will only return to 0.7% if the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) believes the UK is not borrowing to finance day-to-day spending and underlying debt is falling. The chancellor noted that:
Whilst not every member felt able to vote for the Government’s compromise, the substantive matter of whether we remain committed to the 0.7% target – not just now but for decades to come – is clearly a point of significant unity in this House.
Today’s vote has made that commitment more secure for the long term whilst helping the Government to fix the problems with our public finances and continue to deliver for our constituents today.
But Sunak may well be performing an economic sleight of hand.
The devil is in the detail
As PA noted, foreign aid will only return to 0.7% if the OBR allows it. The existing OBR forecasts run to 2025/26. In no year does the OBR forecast that the current budget will be in surplus. Moreover, it says net debt will not start to fall until 2024/25. In other words – the government will not return foreign aid to 0.7% any time soon.
It’s important to note that for many of the MPs who rebelled, foreign aid may not necessarily be about supporting the world’s poorest people. Some people believe that the government uses aid as ‘soft power’; that is, pushing British imperialist aims abroad. Socialist Appealcalled foreign aid “the smiling face of imperialism”. Anthony Oakland noted that governments do not always use the budget to support the world’s poorest people. Instead, they said that foreign aid was:
used as a lever to encourage ‘trade liberalisation’. This of course means better access to profitable markets for corporations.
those defending the aid budget don’t care a single jot about the world’s poor either. For them, foreign aid is merely a tool for exerting the ‘soft power’ of British imperialism.
This fact was revealed in a letter to the Financial Times, signed by big business groups… In it they stated that reducing the aid budget would “reduce the UK’s credibility” (on the world stage), and “hamper gains made on social and economic development, which are prerequisites for businesses to trade”…
In other words, if Britain’s diplomatic standing on the world stage declines further, these gentlemen’s bottom lines stand to suffer!
Even the archbishop of Canterbury said of foreign aid:
British aid efforts increase the UK’s soft power. They stabilise and support people in areas of instability. They strengthen the rules-based international order.
Soft power versus no power?
Even through the prism of foreign aid being about the British exerting influence abroad, the cut still seems illogical by Tory capitalist standards. As the British Academy wrote, the government:
should be aware that short-term gains in terms of improving a budget deficit will create long-term damage by withering the very assets on which soft power rests, whether at home or inside international organisations. International cultural relations are a long game and a matter of strategic relationship-building rather than short-term tactical advantage. There is thus the world of difference between using foreign aid, say, to buy influence or win contracts – both of which are dubious practices from all points of view – and investing in the institutions and practices which provide a platform for intelligent, constructive diplomacy.
“Blood on their hands”
Daniel Willis, campaigns and policy manager at Global Justice Now, noted the use of foreign aid as soft power. He said in a press release:
When the inevitable death and suffering from aid cuts hits the news, each and every MP who has voted to sever the UK’s 0.7% commitment should know that blood is on their hands.
The kind of chicanery this government has used to dodge its international responsibilities lays bare the myth that these cuts are needed to balance public spending during the pandemic. 0.7% was already proportional. This bill only commits the government to deeper cuts…[t]oday, claims of Global Britain ring hollow.
Charities previously warned that the funding reduction meant they were stripping back services. Now, we wait to see how the government’s cut of billions of pounds will further affect people globally. Moreover, it will be interesting to see how the changes will effect Britain’s capitalist soft power.
Boris Johnson’s latest video about England’s Euro 2020 journey is short and to the point – to the point of making you feel nauseous, that is. But it also hints at a broader issue in our society.
Johnson: England flag-shagger-in-chief
The PM has once more indulged in nationalistic flag-shaggery over the England team’s performance in the Euros. As many people prepare to watch them take on Italy in the final on Sunday 11 July, Johnson made his own contribution to the nation’s excitement. It was enough to put you off football (and the English flag) for life.
Johnson spouted:
Best of luck to England tonight. It’s been an incredible journey so far. But we’re all hoping you can go one better and bring it home tonight.
We’re all hoping you can go one better and bring it home tonight @England.
Of course, much of Twitter wasn’t having any of Johnson’s bandwagon-jumping bullshit.
As several users pointed out, Johnson initially didn’t call out fans who booed the team when some of them took the knee. Nor did he endorse the players’ stand against racism:
Meanwhile Barbara thought Johnson may be trying to distract us from other issues:
All in @10DowningStreet are hoping you can bring it home for me so I can distract you from 150,000 dead…tens of thousands suffering from long Covid & I have the 'feel good factor' before I swan off on another free holiday from an anonymous donor during recess.
Others questioned whether the PM was really a footie fan, while doing some neat photoshopping:
Yet more vacuous gesture politics from a PM that doesn't believe in gesture politics! You'd probably expect them to win by a wicket or a try! pic.twitter.com/XMVDz036Mh
One person made a point about the cost of Johnson’s flag-shaggery:
Have you got any idea how all your flags, your bunting, your personalised football shirt appears to someone Universal Credit? You’ve probably spent more on all that than a person on UC gets to live on in a month! Sickening display of ignorance and thoughtlessness.#levellingup ? https://t.co/LvFOIbNYfF
Former Labour Party general secretary Jennie Formby cut through the bluster of football. She highlighted that:
Horrible statistic that when England win, domestic violence increases by 26%; when they lose it increases by 38%. 24 hour National Domestic Violence helpline 0808 2000 247 pic.twitter.com/4mG7HVfgLA
This is the bittersweet reality of national pride in football. The establishment pushes the narrative that the country is all behind the England team. For many of us, it is a source of pride, excitement, and pleasure. A lot of the time, the country does appear to rally behind a unifying cause in football. But it’s a shame that that’s all we tend to unite over.
Tory policy killing sick and disabled people in their tens of thousands; homelessness skyrocketing; millions of children going hungry; over 150,000 possibly preventable deaths from coronavirus; and older people not being able to heat their homes in winter. The list of things that should unify us as a society goes on and on. Yet, none of it ever cuts through.
If we could channel that common passion for football into changing society for the better, then maybe many of the issues that blight England, and the rest of the world, could be solved. Sadly, unless there’s a ball and a flag involved, that seems unlikely to happen.
Labour MP Richard Burgon is asking people to sign a petition, which he’ll later present to parliament. And given the subject matter, there’s no reason for most people not to get involved. Because Burgon wants to properly tax the “super-rich”.
Burgon is back
The former shadow justice minister under Jeremy Corbyn is not messing about. As he tweeted:
I'll soon be presenting a new petition in Parliament for higher taxes on the super-rich
It calls for: A Wealth Tax A Windfall Tax on those that made super-profits out of the crisis A new 55% tax on income of £200,000+ per year
He’s doing it with the group Labour Assembly Against Austerity. The petition says on its website:
We call on the House of Commons to introduce higher taxes on the super-rich as a step to tackling the widespread poverty and inequality that scar our society.
This crisis has not only shone a spotlight on the huge inequalities in our society – it has deepened them.
Indeed. Because since the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, the situation for millions of people in the UK has become even more desperate.
The pandemic: chaos for some, a money-spinner for others
As The Canary has documented, inequality and poverty have got worse since March last year. For example:
The number of households living in destitution more than doubled in 2020.
A parliamentary report suggested more people died of coronavirus and suffered unnecessarily during the pandemic due to historical Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) cuts.
People using foodbanks rose even more; 33% for the Trussell Trust alone.
But the story wasn’t the same for everyone. For example:
The number of UK billionaires increased by 24%. Their wealth increased by 21% – collectively to over half a trillion pounds.
House prices increased by 13.4% – the largest rise since 2004.
Average FTSE 100 CEOs had already earned the median UK wage within the first 34 hours of the working year.
The chasm between the lives of the rich and the poor was already wide. Now, the pandemic has created a gulf. So, Burgon has three ways to begin addressing this.
Starting conversations
As the petition states, he’s calling for:
A Wealth Tax that would raise tens of billions from the wealthiest in our society.
A Windfall Tax on those corporations that have made super-profits during this crisis.
A More progressive income tax system including a new 55% income tax rate on all income over £200,000 per year; a 50% income tax rate for those on over £123,000 and 45% rate for income over £80,000.
It remains to be seen how far Burgon’s plans will go in parliament. The Labour Party is unlikely to support them. The Tories certainly won’t. What Burgon is doing, however, is starting a conversation around the gaping inequality that plagues our society. And any increase in awareness and conversations around this issue can only be a good thing. So, get involved – you can sign the petition here.
China’ overwhelming objective is clearly economic development, a policy to which it has hewed closely and which it declares for its future. That is no surprise; it is the dream of every developing nation. It is “The Chinese Dream.”
If such goals were no more than words on paper, there would be no problem. But China is succeeding as is widely acknowledged now. Its economy surpassed the U.S. in terms of GDP (PPP) in November of 2014 according to the IMF and is growing faster. Over 700 million have been brought out of poverty, with extreme poverty eliminated in 2020. The middle class now comprises over 400 million people. The retail market is enormous and the ecommerce market by far the world’s largest. China is the world’s largest manufacturer and trader.
Inflation is on course to increase above 4% in the coming months. This would reduce average household incomes by £700, research suggests.
The Resolution Foundation said higher than expected inflation poses more of a challenge to household incomes than to the Bank of England.
Findings
The think tank said UK inflation has mirrored trends in the United States when the rate is increasing.
It added that near-term inflationary pressures in the UK are less stark than the US.
The Foundation’s analysis showed that while the UK is unlikely to experience the same inflation peaks seen in the US, if commodity prices remain at their current levels, inflation could rise above 4% later in 2021. This is more than double the rate of inflation forecast by the Bank of England for the third quarter.
‘The Government cannot afford to ignore it’
James Smith, research director at the Resolution Foundation, said:
With the US experiencing the fastest rise in inflation in nearly half a century, and the UK also experiencing sharp increases, many people are getting increasingly worried about a possible price spiral.
While UK inflationary pressures are nothing like as stark as the US, we could still see inflation breaching 4% this summer, a figure well in excess of the OBR and Bank’s expectations.
The temporary nature of this inflation spike means the Bank can look through it and avoid premature rate rises, but the £700 hit to living standards it will bring means households and the Government cannot afford to ignore it.
‘Squeeze on household incomes’
Smith went on to add:
The Chancellor can start by cancelling the planned cut to Universal Credit this autumn, which will only add to families’ financial pressures.
A squeeze on household incomes later this year, even if temporary, is a significant threat to the strength of our current recovery.
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(@atulharia) 
A Wealth Tax
