The study from USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project, titled Change the Narrative, Change the World: How immigrant representation on television moves audiences to action, examined depictions of 129 immigrant characters from 97 episodes of 59 scripted narrative TV shows that aired between August 2018 and July 2019 – a time in which several shows, including Orange is the New Black, Madam Secretary and The Conners responded to an increase in deportations and viewer awareness of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) with immigration-based storylines.

The new study assessing the portrayal of immigrants on American television found  a continued over-emphasis of criminality for immigrant characters as well as an over-proportionate focus on those who are undocumented.

One-fourth (22%) of immigrant characters on TV were associated with criminality, and 11% with incarceration down from  2018 but still out of step with real-world numbers. Studies by the Cato Institute and the Marshall Project in 2018 found that immigrants, regardless of documentation status, commit less crime than native-born Americans.

 Of TV characters with an identified immigration status, 63% were undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers, compared to only 24% of American immigrants at large.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/sep/23/immigrant-representation-tv-criminality-study

 Miami-Dade county has the second-biggest gap between rich and poor of all large metro areas in the US, according to a 2019 report – only the New York metropolitan area is more unequal.

 The county’s 33109 zip code – which comprises Fisher Island’s 216 acres and its 800 residences – is the richest not just in the county but in the entire US, according to a Bloomberg analysis from last year. 

Zip code 33034, which covers parts of the rural but quickly developing cities of Homestead and Florida City, plus some unincorporated areas, is the county’s poorest, according to a Miami Herald analysis. For the 23,000 people in its 280 sq miles, the per-capita income is $10,608.

“I’m a Trumper,” said 93-year-old doctor Irwin Potash, speaking from quarantine in his $1.6m condo on Fisher Island, a private island in Florida with a golf course, two marinas and 17 tennis courts that’s just a seven-minute ferry ride from South Beach. If Irwin Potash gets sick, the University of Miami has a health center on Fisher Island. “You can even get a helicopter,” he said.

Forty miles south-west of Potash, in the agricultural community of Homestead, Antonia, a field worker , emigrated from Mexico 30 years ago and is now a citizen. She pools enough to afford a $1,500-a-month apartment where she lives with her daughter, her daughter’s husband and two granddaughters. “I’m voting for Biden,” she said in Spanish, and she thinks her fellow agricultural workers will, too. “We feel rejection and discrimination from the current president,” she said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/23/miami-dade-zip-code-florida-election

 It is time for our American fellow-workers to do a little painful thinking. The American workers knows that this country is owned and controlled by the corporations but they do not realize that the day of opportunity for them to achieve the American dream and join the oligarchy has passed. But still many millions are opposed to socialism, which wishes to destroy their imagined delusion. Although the American workers is disgusted with the dominant Democratic or Republican parties, and if you ask what they think of such-and-such a political candidate, they will say, “Oh, he’s just a lying politician. They’re all alike — they make promises, but they never do anything when they get elected;” although the American workers knows that Congress, the State Legislatures and the City Councils are used by business interests for their own selfish purposes — still they do not know how to answer when told, “Well, if you don’t like your officials, vote for somebody you do like. You are the boss. This is a free country.” They know that the men thee elects to political office are controlled by Big Business but he don’t realize that unless workers, takes away the power of Big Business, they will always be powerless.

Why doesn’t American workers vote Socialist? Probably because they don’t like socialism, which means  a system opposed to “democracy” and “fair play,” which is the way he has been taught to characterize the institutions of this country. They believe voting for the Socialist Party seems impractical. We are told that “the socialists can never win, so it will just be wasting a vote.” They do not see that voting for a candidate who promises and does not deliver is just as much throwing away the vote as voting socialist. American workers do not see to the truth of the society in which they live. They are easily persuaded that all the flaws and abuses of the capitalist system can be corrected by reforms and legislation. They fail to understand that it is corrupt from top to bottom, because the capitalist class controls the sources of wealth.

 Today’s democracy is the only exploitative system in which political power (right to vote, to assemble, to publish) are not the monopoly of the ruling class. The working class have the legal right to use their majority of ballots in any way they choose. More importantly, the workers are organized industrially. Therefore, it is essential for the capitalist class than it was for the ancient slave–owners or medieval nobility to convince the masses of people that the state rules on behalf of all citizens. The slave–owners and nobles persuade the slaves and serfs that class rule was right. The more potential political power the oppressed classes possess, the more urgent it is for the ruling class to insure that that potential power is not transformed into actual power. In the United States this is accomplished chiefly by the myth that fundamental differences divide the two major parties. The two-party system is a self-perpetuating trap. It preaches the unity of oppressors and oppressed. The excuse for the Democrats’ move to the right is that an appeal must be made to the conservative base of the Republican Party. The image of an increasingly conservative America is false, but it mirrors the views of the upper-echelon Democrats. The Democratic Party has always had at its core a share of big capitalists. The Democrats are proving once again to be no solution for capitalism’s victims.

The World Socialist Party holds that all government is legalized force, controlled by one class and used against another. For the first time in history, we are creating a legalized force controlled by the working class, the vast majority of the people, and directed against those who have exploited us and enslaved us.

Trump and Biden are competing CEOs of the capitalist system. Biden doesn’t promise to end exploitation and oppression, just to reform things a little. What he talks of reforming is the same old system which guarantees the making of profits and the exploitation of people. This is the same system of capitalism and imperialism that has brought death and destruction throughout the world. Biden is a representative of a certain section of the ruling class, which as a whole has set up a state apparatus to defend and maintain its position. This ruling class is composed of corporate capitalists owning the factories, banks, financial institutions, communications and transportation. They control the lives of every worker. The purpose of the presidency is to maintain the capitalist system. It enforces the rule of the powerful over poor and working people. Biden won’t change all this – or any of this. He is just a representative of this ruling class and won’t have the power to change it. What he can do is run the state apparatus better or worse for the ruling class. Biden’s program amounts to is little more than sugar–coated Republicanism. It doesn’t really solve problems – it just temporarily patches over them.

An estimated 50.8 million individuals were living as internally displaced people (IDPs) by the end of 2019. Many millions more are likely to be forced from their homes in the coming months due to extreme weather and ongoing violence, the report warns.

 Millions of more people were uprooted from their homes by conflict, violence and natural disasters in the first six months of this year, research has found.

Nearly 15m new internal displacements were recorded in more than 120 countries between January and June by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

Cyclones, floods, bushfires and locust infestations – among other natural disasters – accounted for the vast majority, or 9.8m displacements. In terms of numbers alone, Cyclone Amphan accounted for the largest single displacement event in the first half of 2020, triggering 3.3m pre-emptive evacuations in India and Bangladesh. A number of countries in east Africa suffered major floods and a locust infestation that further destabilised regional food security, while in Australia, catastrophic bushfires led to the displacement of tens of thousands of people.

Conflict and violence, primarily in Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burkina Faso, accounted for another 4.8m displacements. Renewed activity by the Syrian military in Idlib in the first three months of the year triggered the most significant displacement in the country since war broke out in 2011, with some 1.5m new displacements by the end of June, according to the report. An additional 1.4m displacements were recorded in DRC and another 419,000 in Burkina Faso, where fighting among criminal gangs, jihadists and local militias has plunged much of the nation into crisis.

“Compounding this is the Covid-19 pandemic, which has reduced access to healthcare and increased economic hardship and protection risks for displaced communities.” Many of those living in areas exposed to disasters expressed reluctance to leave their homes for fear of contracting Covid-19 in evacuation centres, the report claims.

Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council warned that many millions more people could face displacement in coming months as weather systems intensify, and that IDP figures are likely to rise significantly by the end of the year.

“We expect even more people to be displaced in the second half of the year compared to the first, because many of the weather-related hazards like tropical storms and monsoon rains are still to come,” he said. “It’s clear that many governments cannot shoulder the burden of such high numbers of displaced people alone. They don’t have the resources of wealthier countries to provide these social safety nets. This is why we are calling for action by the G20, that are now spending trillions on their own economies, to support the most vulnerable.”

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/sep/23/internal-displacements-reach-15m-in-2020-with-worst-still-to-come-report

 The Tory Party, (in)famously being the traditional hangers and floggers of British politics, promotes strict adherence to every jot and tittle of the law on pain of dire consequence. Suddenly, having become the rabid dogs slavering for Brexit, law has become something that can be cavalierly discarded, when it suits them.

This poem is for them.

Socialist Sonnet 1

It’s when lawmakers become lawbreakers

The centre cannot hold, the slouching beast,

Held in check by jurist’s pen, is released,

Exposing the word of the lie speakers.

Should the first amongst equals set aside

Even one law for convenience sake,

A signal’s been given and no mistake,

Society’s tethers are being untied.

If one can choose, then let all, and dispense

With bothersome rules, shred statutes, commit

Commitments to bonfires of trust, admit

Being deceitful, careless of consequence.

Listen, there’s the sound, so the acute say,

Of soiled Magna Carta being flushed away.

D.A.

Rather than opt for either  prime minister, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party, or the opposition leader, Judith Collins from the National Party, the World Socialist Party (New Zealand) proposes you spoil your ballot paper. Each side calls your attention to the shocking lies now being disseminated by the other. Each will tell you that a vote for the other is a vote for catastrophe. 

Unlike the usual election statements, this is addressed to those who do not a vote as well as to those who do. Its object is to gain, not your vote, but your understanding.

Members of the World Socialist Party on principle will go to the polling booth to ‘spoil’ their ballot paper. This is in fact a long, noble and meaningful practice by those of us who simply wish to reject ‘what’s on offer’ and to say ‘a plague on all your houses.’ whilst registering the importance of the vote itself, and in that regard this makes perfect sense. It is somewhat frustrating therefore that this practice is not given more attention in the media. 

Since a World Socialist Party candidate is not running, you should write the word ‘World Socialism’ across your ballot paper, your vote is spoiled but at any rate you have not signified that you are a willing supporter of capitalism.

We will be chastised about not voting. There will be pressure brought to bear upon those of us who are cynical enough about politicians and governments that we will advocate abstention or in the case of the Socialist Party propose spoiling one’s ballot paper by writing “world socialism” across it. In the media the message will be  “if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain”, or “it is your duty to vote”, or “Whatever you do, just make sure you get out there and vote”. We will be lectured on the virtues of voting for the lesser evil. We have been there over and over again.  Don’t play the game, don’t be forced into a false and hypocritical “choice”. 

In the contest between Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, our advice is to spoil the ballot paper and abstain from voting for either. If you cannot vote now for what you want, it is folly to vote for what you do not want. The vote, like the razor, is an instrument for a purpose. If you cannot for the moment use it to your advantage, it is madness to cut your throat. And by voting for your enemies, for traitors and charlatans, you are surely cutting your throat.

Call us naive and idealists if you wish but the WSPNZ is organised for world socialism and the global class struggle. That should be the message we have to send and we shouldn’t be distracted by squabbles within the capitalist class that doesn’t benefit us as a class. 

 In Greece, the strawberry growing season has left a bad taste in the mouths of the over 8,000 undocumented Bangladeshi migrant men who are the bedrock of this sector.

“Neither the Greek state nor the afentiko (boss) care about our lives or health. Only our cheap labour matters,” says “Ahmed”, an undocumented Bangladeshi migrant strawberry picker.

“Without ‘papers’ (regularised status), we have no healthcare… If any one of us had contracted ‘corona’, all Bangladeshi workers here would have been stigmatised and removed from work,” shared 22-year-old “Mohammad”.

 A few farmers initially dispensed disposable masks and gloves only to small groups of workers. Twenty-year-old “Anwar” stated, “the aftentiko told us, ‘get your own masks.’ At that time, masks were €1.50 each in the market. Till the time we were able to purchase reusable cloth masks, we had no other option but to spend this money every two days.”

Over 90 percent of Greece’s strawberry agribusiness is clustered in a small region commonly known as Manolada, located around the villages of Nea Manolada and Lappa in western Peloponnese. Almost all seasonal labour here is provided by 10,000–12,000 undocumented Bangladeshi men. 

The exploitation of this unfree migrant labour has made Greece the 8th biggest exporter of strawberries in the world. It has also enabled farmers to undertake a scale increase, expand agricultural activity by leasing underutilised farmlands, modernise farming, and market over 85 percent of their produce to wider markets such as Russia, Germany, Switzerland, and the Middle-East. In Greece, agriculture accounts for nearly a quarter of its exports with around 90 percent of its agricultural workers being migrants.

Strawberry workers are paid a daily wage of €23–25 for a workday lasting 10–12 hours. In 2013, protests by Bangladeshi workers against delayed wages led to Greek farmers shooting at them, earning the sobriquet of blood strawberries for Manolada strawberries. The workers won a landmark Human Rights case with the Greek state being forced to pay a total of €588,000 to 42 of them.

The workers created informal community support mechanisms and restrictions. “We relied on herbal remedies such as nimbu-ada cha (lemon-ginger tea). If someone had a fever, we’d check on them and bring painkillers from the pharmacy,” stated “Forid”, who had obtained temporary regularised status after a 2018 fire razed his shanty. 

“Matiur”, a regularised Bangladeshi supervisor said, “we requested our men go to the farm and return straight to their baranga (Bangla colloquial term for the Greek faranga, or tent) after work. Those who were not hired for the day had to stay inside. After all, if any one of us had contracted COVID-19, it would have spread like fire through the barangas.”

This fear was not misplaced as the barangas epitomize inhuman living conditions. The workers are forced to rent unused farmland and build makeshift plastic shanties out of salvaged cardboard, plastic sheets, and reeds. Each cluster of 12–15 barangas easily houses 200-odd workers. There is no provision for potable water, electricity, garbage disposal, or sanitation facilities. Makeshift outdoor latrines and bathing areas are breeding grounds for infectious diseases.

One worker stated, “If I told the afentiko that I would not come for work because of corona, his reply would be, ‘okay, no problem. I will get someone else.’” “There was constant tension – tension about contracting the disease, tension about getting some work during the season, tension about rent and food,” said another. With a reserve army of migrant labour at the farmers’ disposal, the men feared being replaced by other more desperate migrants, creating friction between the men as they jostled for a smaller pool of jobs.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, lobbying by farmer cooperatives resulted in a slew of relief measures, including a fast-track procedure (in place until 30 June) allowing farmers to hire “third country citizens in an irregular situation” who were already present in the country. Greece also waived visa requirements for seasonal agricultural workers coming from neighbouring Albania and arranged charter flights to ferry them. 

No state relief measures for migrant farmworkers has yet been forthcoming. According to Elias Ahmed, president of the Workers Union of Bangladeshi Immigrants in Greece, “the Greek state, with the interest of agribusiness and capital at heart, is enabling the exploitation of precarious migrant workers. It knows that if they remain undocumented, their labour can be easily exploited. If they get ‘papers’ (temporary permits or regularised status under an amnesty), then the state is obliged to be responsible to the workers who will demand fair wages. They don’t have the intention to help migrant workers.”

Ismini Karydopoulou, program officer at G2RED, argues that “first important step (for the Greek state) is to design and implement a proper legal framework that will give access to a legal residence status that will recognize this community. As long as land workers are not legally recognized, any attempt to protect their rights cannot be effective and complete.”

 The current centre-right government led by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has been critiqued for its anti-migrant stance. Greece’s resistance against regularizing undocumented migrants is situated within a larger initiative to avoid more shocks to its fragile agricultural economy, the recovery and profitability of which rests on demand-based flexible migrant labour. Anxieties around holding on to precarious jobs will increase vulnerability to workplace exploitation and abuse. Already, workers prefer acquiescence rather than speaking out due to threats about deportation, unsurprising given that under the controversial European Union–Turkey deportation deal, an overwhelming number of deportees have been Pakistani and Bangladeshi men.

Called absolutely irreplaceable by farmers and “essential workers,” by the state, migrant workers, who form the backbone of this agribusiness, feel they are “like flies swatted away when our use value is over.” Such migrant agricultural workers whose work ensures that we do not have to worry about food shortages, while they constantly juggle worries about just wages and better work and housing conditions as they plant and harvest crops, deserve better.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/pandemic-border/bitter-taste-greek-strawberries/

 Back  in 2019, 181 CEOs of the Business Roundtable issued a statement promised to deliver more corporate responsibility to communities. Some optimists declared it was the beginning of the end to the primacy of the share-holder.

But a study (pdf)  by the Test of Corporate Purpose (TCP) initiative showed that amid 2020’s disastrous public health, economic, social, and environmental challenges—the coronavirus pandemic, massive unemployment and worsening inequality, persistent police violence and racial injustice, and intensified climate crisis—”stakeholder capitalism” has failed to follow through to do more to benefit workers and communities, continuing to “put profits ahead of people” instead. 

TCP’s study, which was conducted with KKS Advisors and supported by the Ford Foundation, summarized it this way: “The interests of stockholders and other stakeholders will not always align.” Their analysis showed that U.S. companies that signed the BRT statement “performed no better than their non-signatory counterparts through the 2020 crises.”

Researchers pointed to stock buybacks, political spending, tax evasion, and unchecked pollution as additional examples of practices reflecting the continued prioritization of shareholder interests despite pledges to pursue “inclusive prosperity” for all stakeholders. 

In the words of the report’s authors, many companies still “campaign for one world while publicly proclaiming a vision of another.”

The report noted that only a handful of the signatories to the BRT statement even submitted it to their companies for approval, which is why some scholars have argued that the promises made by proponents of “stakeholder capitalism” are a public relations gimmick that will not improve social welfare. 

According to the New York Times reporter Peter Goodman, “The study enhances doubts that corporations can be depended upon to moderate their quest for profits to pursue solutions to challenges like climate change, racial injustice, and economic inequality.” 

 Marjorie Kelly, executive vice president of The Democracy Collaborative, argued that the study noted: “Given the enormous influence major corporations have over the trajectory of policy and regulation, no analysis of corporate purpose and its alignment with a stakeholder primacy model would be complete without incorporating an evaluation of companies’ lobbying and political spending activities,” which often contradict the information coming from marketing departments. “Any talk of corporations being responsive to a broad spectrum of stakeholders is just that—talk—as long as stakeholders don’t have power,” said Kelly. “And power means ownership.”

Economists Emily Kawano, former director of the Center for Popular Economics, and Julie Matthaei, co-founder of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, argued that profit-maximization is intrinsic to capitalism and the privately owned corporations that characterize it, so even the “stakeholder” variety is incapable of balancing moneymaking with competing objectives like greater equality and sustainability. 

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/22/study-shows-stakeholder-capitalism-failing-live-promises-corporations-continue

 Palani is one of about 500,000 workers in the Sri Lankan tea industry. Like most of them, she descends from Tamils who were brought to British Ceylon from the Indian mainland in the 1820s. Tea cultivation was introduced to Sri Lanka by the British after coffee cultivation had failed. To get the industry going, plantation owners needed lots of manual labor, and people from India’s southern Tamil regions were recruited into an indentured labor system that tied workers to plantations. Although slavery was outlawed in the British Empire, these workers were unpaid and completely at the will of plantation owners. They arrived indebted and had to pay for their own transportation, until this rule was changed in 1922. Workers lived in crowded shacks, without sanitation, running water, medical facilities or schools for their children. Working conditions were very harsh, with long hours and heavy quotas. When Sri Lanka became independent in 1948, the tea workers were legally designated as “temporary immigrants” and were denied citizenship. In the 1980s, after more than 200 years living in Sri Lanka, the descendants of Indian Tamil indentured servants were granted Sri Lankan citizenship rights. However, they continue to be among the most marginalized and impoverished people in the country. There are few people advocating for the plantation workers, and their living wage remains below €5 a day.

Sri Lanka currently produces around 300 million kilograms of tea annually. It is the fourth-largest tea producer in the world, behind China, India and Kenya. But tea workers remain mired in poverty. Tens of thousands of plantation workers throughout Sri Lanka have united in recent years to demand a minimum wage of 1,000 rupees a day (about €5).  The “1000 Movement” is one of the largest mobilizations of Sri Lankan workers.  The last agreement between workers and owners was in October 2018. Companies refused the demand for 1,000 rupees daily. A wage increase from 500 to 700 rupees was tentatively agreed to, although the agreement still needs to be signed by the tea companies. However, taking into account attendance and productivity incentives, the old wage was actually 730 rupees, say workers. These incentives were removed under the new 750 rupees agreement, resulting in an actual increase in wages of only 20 rupees (about 10 cents). 

To earn a daily wage of 700 Sri Lankan rupees (€3.50, $4.15), Palani has to collect a minimum of 18 kilograms (40 pounds) of tea leaves.

https://www.dw.com/en/sri-lanka-tea-workers-and-a-legacy-of-exploitation/a-55006963

 California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has sent hundreds of people to Ice at the end of their prison sentences. Even though the law doesn’t require the transfers, and Newsom positions himself as a leader in the resistance to Donald Trump’s xenophobia, the Democratic governor continues to funnel immigrants into the president’s deportation machine.

In his inaugural speech in January 2019, Gavin Newsom said he would stand up to Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, fight family separation and ensure California remains a “sanctuary for all”. But despite the state’s high-profile “sanctuary” law, intended to limit local law enforcement collaboration with Ice, CDCR has a close working relationship with federal immigration authorities. 

When the governor ordered the expedited release of thousands of prisoners due to Covid, at least 78 people were sent from prisons to Ice. In the first three months of the crisis in northern California, state prisons and jails were the number one source of new Ice detentions (94 people, representing 59% of immigration arrests in the region), according to a study by advocacy group Centro Legal de la Raza.

Some prisoners aren’t aware that they are facing transfers until they happen.

When his release date came on 6 August and his sister was waiting on the other side of the barbed-wire fence to take him home, California prison guards did not let them reunite. Instead, officers handed the 41-year-old over to a private security contractor who shackled his hands, waist and legs, put him in a van and drove off. After 22 years in prison, Kao Saelee, was placed into US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody and flown 2,000 miles to an Ice jail in Louisiana. He is now facing deportation to Laos, a country his family fled as refugees when he was two years old.

 In 2018 and 2019, he worked as an incarcerated firefighter, battling the kinds of blazes that are currently devastating huge swaths of the western US. California has for decades deployed thousands of incarcerated people to respond to wildfires, paying $2 to $5 a day for the grueling work, whether clearing brush or saving lives and property.

“I paid my debt to society, and I think I should have a chance to be with my family,” Saelee told the Guardian in a recent call from the Pine Prairie Ice jail. “What is the point of sending somebody back to a country where they don’t have no family?”

Saelee was born in Laos in 1979, the oldest of four. His parents were farmers and his family is of Mien descent, an ethnic minority that sided with the US during the Vietnam war and faced subsequent persecution. After fleeing to a refugee camp in Thailand, his family ended up in California in 1987.

“His story is similar to that of a lot of south-east Asian refugee youth who got resettled in neighborhoods in California that had really high rates of violence, poverty and incarceration,” said Anoop Prasad, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus (ALC), who is representing Saelee.

Ice issues “detainers” for people in state custody eligible for deportation, which could include undocumented residents, as well as longtime Californians and refugees with green cards who could be deported due to their criminal record. CDCR complies with Ice requests, meaning the state proactively informs the agency about the release dates for prisoners with detainers – and facilitates the transfers.

While the state has no legal obligation to respond to Ice’s requests, Newsom has said this is standard protocol. When asked about the criticisms of this practice, he recently responded that “it’s been done historically” and was “appropriate”.

State data from January through May of this year suggests that CDCR released more than 500 people to Ice custody, according to the Asian Law Caucus. And the state has not backed away from this practice in the wake of mass Covid outbreaks within CDCR, which have claimed 60 lives so far.

Newsom’s policy risks shipping Covid from state prisons to Ice jails, and in some cases, to other nations, advocates said. Ice has been a key domestic and global spreader of the virus, regularly deporting sick detainees.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/22/california-inmate-firefighter-ice-deportation