We are living in a time of unrest and disorder, a time of great upheavals. Politicians and parties are flailing around in panic and despair. This is not the time for complacency.

The dyed-in-the-wool reformists, careerists and opportunists have remained committed to the Democratic Party. We are all told “now is the time for action to get Trump out of office.“ So Biden has a program of reforms, watered down as not to scare away any fence-sitting Republican voters. The Democratic Party has never actually been a working-class party (except in rhetoric), and has always been controlled by an entrenched, corporate leadership.

“The state is the executive Committee of the ruling class.” This elementary teaching of Marxism has been freshly confirmed by the electoral sham. Capitalist politicians, whatever their pretensions, cannot act other than in the service of their capitalist bosses. Neither of the two major parties has any serious program for the reconstruction of American society. All their talk has no meaning in the face of the economic and social crisis which lies ahead.

Trump’s autocracy is all too real. He is the barbarian who is now no longer at the White House gate but sitting at a desk in the Oval Office. Not that barbarism is anything new in this world of ours. 

The United States remains divided along racial lines. Biden is seen as the continuation of the Obama presidency. African–Americans more than any other ethnic group understand white supremacy, racism and class exploitation. African–Americans live with state-sanctioned violence and and prejudice. The problems facing-African Americans are class and racial.

Working-class whites who back Donald Trump, see themselves as the victims of reverse discrimination for the lack of income fairness and jobs. They for the most part see Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants as threats. They fear that these groups could wreak “revenge” for what segregation did to them and demand reparations and believe it will come out of their pockets. White fear has always been a tool of the ruling class. They use race-baiting and fear–mongering to get these same whites to circle their wagons around their “white (nationalist) communities”, against black, brown and yellow people. Both parties are indentured to the moneyed interests of Wall St. Of course, the U.S.A is a democracy, the people are free to vote for whomever they like as long as they vote for a capitalist. 

Republican voters have decided that it’s better to be poor, sick and bigoted than prosperous, healthy and open-minded, just as long there is another group of people with a lower status beneath them.

Trump’s victory was not an aberration but instead represent the false consciousness of many white working class because he “identified” with their alienation. We should not underestimate the extent of white supremacist indoctrination. He is redefining the parameters of “legitimate” political discourse. Some have described the Trump’s authoritarianism as “friendly fascism.”

Is there another option that offers a way forward? Isn’t it time now to initiate a wide-ranging popular discussion of an alternative.

The World Socialist Party fully believes that the whole is greater than the part, wastes no time advocating this or that reform, but spend their energies in educating the workers in the fact that in socialism alone lies their emancipation. One reason our membership is so small and does not increase as rapidly as that of some other parties is that we dangle no “red herrings” before our fellow- workers. The fate of those whom a political or economic bait can allure is one to be pitied and abolished and not one to make political capital out of. We denounce leaders because they advocate reforms to prolong the system, and because while capitalism lasts, workers have not the power either to allay those evils, which grow worse with the growth of the system. Above all we oppose these leaders because they urge the workers to place political power in the hands of the masters.

The World Socialist Party of the United States, alone in this country adopts the correct attitude in this respect. We expose the evils and point the only way to remove them. Those who believe that the present system of society is essentially an evil, who condemn private enterprise root and branch, their business is to join with those who are seeking to destroy it

 The Socialist Party of the United States was formed in 1916 in Detroit from a group of comrades who seceded from the Socialist Party of America together with some members of the Socialist Party of Canada and the Socialist Party of North America. They afterwards took the name of the Worker’s Socialist Party of the United States (WSPUS), During the 1920s, the WSP operated under the title Socialist Educational Society (SES) adopted during the Palmer era repression against revolutionaries. The SES returned to the WSPUS again in 1927 which was obliged to later call itself the World Socialist Party due to confusion with another of a similar name. It has conducted study classes, and promoted political education, but admittedly it still lacks anything like a prominent political presence. That sad state of affairs, the WSP intends to change.

 A team of more than 60 scientists from 36 institutions used 14 different models to estimate the changes in the ice sheet under two different greenhouse gas emissions pathways: a pessimistic scenario, where there is no change in current trends, leading to a rapid increase in emissions; and an optimistic scenario, where comprehensive steps are taken to reduce emissions. They projected the changes of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets between 2015 and 2100 under global warming conditions predicted by the latest climate models. The goal of the research was to estimate how much the mass loss of the ice sheets would contribute to the rise in average sea levels beyond what has already been put in motion.

The study found that by 2100, the Greenland ice sheet would raise sea levels by 4 to 14cm under the pessimistic scenario, but only 1.5 to 5cm under the optimistic scenario.

For the Antarctic ice sheet, the results point to a greater range of possibilities, from ice sheet change that decreases sea level by 7.8cm, to increasing it by 30cm under the pessimistic scenario, with an increase of 0 to 3cm under the optimistic scenario.

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/antarctica-greenland-ice-sheet-melt-impact-climate-crisis-sea-level-b486394.html

 As of 2015, the Unit­ed States bore respon­si­bil­i­ty for 40% of ​“excess glob­al car­bon diox­ide emis­sions,” finds the analy­sis, authored by Jason Hick­el, an eco­nom­ic anthro­pol­o­gist, author and a fel­low of the Roy­al Soci­ety of Arts. The Group of Eight (the Unit­ed States, the Euro­pean Union, Rus­sia, Japan and Cana­da) is respon­si­ble for 85% of such emis­sions. And the Glob­al North (defined as the Unit­ed States, Cana­da, Europe, Israel, Aus­tralia, New Zealand and Japan) is respon­si­ble for 92%. 

In con­trast, the Glob­al South — which is by far bear­ing the brunt of cli­mate droughts, floods, famines, storms, sea lev­el rise and deaths — is respon­si­ble for just 8% of excess glob­al car­bon diox­ide emissions.

A study released by Oxfam Inter­na­tion­al in 2015 found that the poor­est half of the world’s pop­u­la­tion — rough­ly 3.5 bil­lion peo­ple — are to blame for just 10% of ​“total glob­al emis­sions attrib­uted to indi­vid­ual con­sump­tion,” yet they ​“live over­whelm­ing­ly in the coun­tries most vul­ner­a­ble to cli­mate change.” In con­trast, the rich­est 10% of peo­ple in the world are respon­si­ble for rough­ly 50% of glob­al emissions.

A 2015 paper pub­lished in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports iden­ti­fies ​“free rid­er” and ​“forced rid­er” coun­tries. It explains, “‘Free rid­er’ coun­tries con­tribute dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly to glob­al [green­house gas] emis­sions with only lim­it­ed vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to the effects of the result­ing cli­mate change, while ​’forced rid­er’ coun­tries are most vul­ner­a­ble to cli­mate change but have con­tributed lit­tle to its genesis.”

The fact that the Unit­ed States and Glob­al North bear dis­pro­por­tion­ate respon­si­bil­i­ty for dri­ving the cli­mate cri­sis does not let Chi­na off the hook for cut­ting emis­sions.

Jason Hick­el, an eco­nom­ic anthro­pol­o­gist, explains “If Chi­na does not reduce emis­sions, and fast, then we are all doomed.” 

“We know that the Glob­al South suf­fers more than 90% of the costs of cli­mate break­down, and 98% of the deaths asso­ci­at­ed with cli­mate break­down, due to fires, floods, droughts, famine, dis­ease, dis­place­ment and so on,” says Hick­el. ​“So, just like under colo­nial­ism, the North is ben­e­fit­ting at the expense of the South.”

The lead­er­ship of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty shows reluc­tance to curb the fos­sil fuel pro­duc­tion dri­ving the cri­sis — and hos­til­i­ty to rad­i­cal solu­tions like the Green New Deal. The Unit­ed States has con­tributed only $1 bil­lion to the UN’s Green Cli­mate Fund, meant to help ​“devel­op­ing coun­tries reduce their green­house gas emis­sions and enhance their abil­i­ty to respond to cli­mate change”

https://inthesetimes.com/article/climate-change-wealthy-western-nations-global-north-south-fires-west

 Work-related stress ‘leaves us burnt out by just 32’ was the headline in The Metro (17-9-20)

A study shows that carer burnout is most likely to happen at the age of 32.

Nearly a third of people feel too stressed or exhausted to go on at some stage, with half saying they have taken on too much and 58 per cent blaming longer working hours.

While half of those who get tired of work quit, 29 per cent would consider taking unpaid leave, a poll of 2,000 by flexible workspace provider The Office Group found.

In a world where we produce goods and services for need and not profit this would be a thing of the past.

The way we would run the world without the profit motive would mean our health would be so much better.

EUGENE DEBS

 “… our ancestors, before their emigration to America, were the free inhabitants of the British dominions in Europe, and possessed a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness…” declared Thomas Jefferson in  his “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.” 

Yet the United States has exhibited a shameful history of xenophobia. 

Erika Lee in ‘America for American, traces the vitriol that greeted each set of newcomers. First, it was Germans (“strangers to our laws and constitutions,” “the most ignorant . . . of their own nation”); then Catholics (“mass of alien voters,” “foreign criminal or pauper”); Chinese (“moral and racial pollution,” “filthy, vicious, ignorant, depraved, and criminal”); Jews, Irish, Italians, and other Southern and Eastern Europeans (“as bad as Negroes,” “moral cripples”); Mexicans (“low-grade Spaniard, peonized Indian, and negro slave mixe[d] with negroes, mulattoes, and other mongrels, and some sorry whites”); Japanese (“enemy within our gates”); then Muslims (“the greatest Trojan horse,” adherents to “a religion that promote[d] the most murderous mayhem on the planet”); and finally, Mexicans again (“criminal aliens”).

 Eighteenth-century German migrants, for instance, initially faced a torrent of abuse. But Anglo settlers came to recognize them as uneasy partners in continental conquest. Westward expansion served as a “safety valve” for the “social problem” of increased European immigration and helped lessen the scourge of wage dependency in favor of the pastoral independence mythologized by Jefferson. In fact, recruiters “directly encouraged and facilitated migration with promises of free land, economic opportunity, religious toleration, and political liberty.” The political imperative to turn a continent peopled by native nations into a laboratory of white self-governance, then, permitted the transformation of Germans into equals.

The bulk of early German migrants may have been perceived as lesser whites, but their Protestantism made them white enough. Chinese men, on the other hand, had both the wrong skin and a deviant culture. Settlers saw them simultaneously as covetous of white women and as sexually transgressive for engaging in “women’s work” (like cooking and laundry).

Lee doesn’t shy away from describing the illiberal deeds of liberals, but one emerges with the impression that their xenophobia was not a feature, of their politics. Yet Bill Clinton drastically militarized the border patrol, expanded the grounds for deportation, and passed legislation that deprived immigrants of social services. Bill Clinton’s senior advisor Rahm Emanuel stressed that the president could “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” Whenever liberals complain of Trump’s  treatment of immigrants, remind them that formal removals of undocumented immigrants increased dramatically under Obama.

Daniel Denvir’s ‘All-American Nativism’ provides a useful complement to Lee’s book. Denvir  focuses on the1965 Hart−Celler Act which although provided some opening of immigration from places like Asia and Africa by allocating roughly 20,000 visas per Eastern Hemisphere country each year, but for the first time put a cap on and effectively criminalized long-standing Western Hemisphere migration patterns from places like Mexico that had much higher rates of entry (the earlier bracero program had allowed as many as 400,000 guest workers from Mexico into the United States each year). Denvir calls particular attention to the pivotal role played by liberals in creating these immigration restrictions.

In his telling, liberals’ genteel embrace of nativist policy comes from a fundamental contradiction—the desperate need for exploitable labor and the impossibility of undocumented labor’s political freedom. Self-interested U.S. citizens recoil at the thought of not just increased migration but potential immigrant power. Democratic leaders attempted to outflank Republicans in hopes of gaining approval from “moderate” constituencies and cooperation from recalcitrant congressional colleagues. Even at the moment of the passage of Hart−Celler, Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy accepted nativist framings of racial order, promising that the “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.” 

Centrists have joined the nativist wing of the GOP to rail against illegal immigration as a way to make the case for legal migration. Looking right, liberals have seen a faction of business elites clamoring for cheap labor and a faction of nativists barely concealing their call for ethnic cleansing. Rather than fighting for the rights and liberties they supposedly hold dear, liberals have mostly sided with the business class. The liberal embrace of conservative positions hasn’t led to compromise but has allowed the right to push for even more. 

Denvir astutely draws on the history of the Great Migration to explain the development of nativist logic in the twentieth century. The massive movement of black Southerners to Northern and Western cities “created a model for resisting immigration: a template of white identity politics organized for territorial defense against the fiscal, criminal and demographic threats posed by racial others.” Under formal (which is to say legal) American apartheid, white Americans required the labor of black workers but rejected their political freedom. That tension has carried on into the postindustrial present: the United States cannot function without undocumented immigrant labor and it cannot function with their freedom either.

In the United States and around the world, in other words, billions are compelled to sell their labor power at an unsustainable price. These are the social conditions that produced the recent politics of popular revolt against established elites. They are also the root of the precarity that often drives migration. 

Full article at 

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-nativist-tradition

 The Home Office has drawn up immigration policies on “anecdote, assumption and prejudice” instead of relying on evidence, the public accounts committee said.

 The influential parliamentary committee has concluded  Priti Patel’s department was unaware of the damage caused by policy failures on “both the illegal and legitimate migrant populations”.

It said in summary that Home Office’s officials had “no idea” what its £400m annual spending on immigration enforcement achieves.

Meg Hillier, chair of the committee, said: “The Home Office has frighteningly little grasp of the impact of its activities in managing immigration. It shows no inclination to learn from its numerous mistakes across a swathe of immigration activities – even when it fully accepts that it has made serious errors. It accepts the wreckage that its ignorance and the culture it has fostered caused in the Windrush scandal – but the evidence we saw shows too little intent to change, and inspires no confidence that the next such scandal isn’t right around the corner.”

The Home Office does not know whether hostile environment policies deterred illegal migration, while a lack of evidence and significant lack of diversity at senior levels has created blind spots in the organisation, the report said.

Minnie Rahman, campaigns and public affairs manager for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said the report painted a “very accurate picture of a clueless, careless and cold-hearted Home Office. It is but the latest in a slew of reports to slam the Home Office’s working culture and practices.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/18/home-office-policies-based-anecdotes-prejudice-damning-report

The  US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Georgia is reportedly the site of a involuntary sterilization project. 

A whistleblower report published by the non-profit Project South alleges that large numbers of migrant women held at the Irwin county detention center, a privately run facility that imprisons undocumented immigrants, received hysterectomies that they did not want and which were not medically necessary.

A nurse working at the detention center, Dawn Wooten, describes the conditions there and conversations she had with imprisoned women in detail. 

The women say they were not told why they were having hysterectomies, with some saying that they were given conflicting reasons for the procedures or reprimanded when asked about them. Wooten’s account in the Project South report was corroborated by two lawyers, who told NBC News that four women in the facility whom they represent, had been sterilized without medical cause and without their consent. 

Doctors on behalf of the attorneys are examining new records and more women are coming forward to report their treatment.

Dr Julie Graves, a family medicine and public health physician in Florida, called the process “absolutely abhorrent”. 

“It’s established US law that you don’t operate on everything that you find,” she said. “If you’re in a teaching hospital and an attending physician does something like that, it’s a scandal and they are fired.”

 It evokes comparisons to previous government-sanctioned efforts in the US to sterilize people to supposedly improve society – victims who were disproportionately poor, mentally disabled, American Indian, Black or other people of color. Thirty-three states had forced sterilization programs in the 20th century.

Forced sterilizations like the ones that happened to women at the Irwin county center and to women throughout the nation during the 20th century are first and foremost human rights violations, cruel abridgements of those women’s dignity, autonomy and rights to self determination. But they are also statements of white supremacist hostility, an assertion by white racists of the thing they most hate and fear: new Americans of color.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/17/ice-hysterectomy-allegations-us-eugenics-history

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/18/migrant-women-us-detention-center-georgia

The “global war on terror” following al-Qaida’s September 11 attacks have displaced an estimated 37 million people, according to a new report by teams from American University and Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

The 37 million people displaced include 8 million refugees and asylum seekers and 29 million displaced within Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Displacing 37 million people is equivalent to removing all the residents of Texas and Virginia combined or almost all of Canada. The estimate of 37 million displaced is a conservative one. The true total displaced by the US post-9/11 wars could be closer to 48–59 million – more people than in all of England.

The US government is not solely responsible for displacing 37 million people. The UK government and other US allies share responsibility, as do the Taliban, Iraqi Sunni and Shia militias, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, the Islamic State, al-Qaida, and other combatants, governments, and actors.

The eight wars in our study are ones the US government bears significant responsibility for initiating (Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq), for escalating as a major combatant (Libya and Syria), or for fueling through drone strikes, battlefield advising, logistical support, and other military aid (Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines). Displacement across these wars has totaled:

5.3 million Afghans;

9.2 million Iraqis;

3.7 million Pakistanis;

1.7 million Filipinos;

4.2 million Somalis;

4.4 million Yemenis;

1.2 million Libyans;

7.1 million Syrians.

 Evo Morales was the first indigenous president of Bolivia, which has the largest percentage of indigenous population of any country in the Americas. His government was able to reduce poverty by 42% and extreme poverty by 60%, which disproportionately benefited indigenous Bolivians. The November coup was led by a white and mestizo elite with a history of racism, seeking to revert state power to the people who had monopolised it before Morales’ election in 2005.

The racist nature of the state violence is emphasised in  a study by Harvard Law School’s (HLS) International Human Rights Clinic and the University Network for Human Rights (UNHR) released a month ago, including eyewitness accounts of security forces using “racist and anti-indigenous language” as they attacked protesters; it is also clear from the fact that all of the victims of the two biggest massacres committed by state forces after the coup were indigenous.

 The New York Times reported on 7 June,  the Organization of American States “flawed” analysis immediately following the 20 October election fuelled “a chain of events that changed the South American nation’s history”. The opposition claimed that there was fraud and took to the streets. The OAS Electoral Observation Mission (EOM) issued a press statement the day after the election expressing “deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results after the closing of the polls”. But it provided no evidence to support these fraud allegations – because there wasn’t any. This has since been established repeatedly by expert statistical studies. But the truth was quite plain and easy to see from data available immediately following the election. And indeed the Center for Economic and Policy Research, where I am co-director, used that data to disprove the OAS’s initial allegations the next day; and followed up with a number of statistical analyses and papers in the ensuing months, including a refutation of its final Audit report.

But after its initial press release, the OAS produced three more reports, including its preliminary audit of the election results, without ever considering the obvious possibility that the later-reporting areas were politically different from those whose votes came in earlier. This is overwhelming evidence that OAS officials did not simply make a mistake in their repeated allegations of fraud, but it appears to have known that their allegations were false. With the original, and politically decisive, allegations of fraud increasingly discredited, the OAS turned to “irregularities” in the election to maintain the assault on its legitimacy. But it turned out that these allegations, like the ones based on statistical claims, could not withstand scrutiny.  According to the Los Angeles Times, “Carlos Trujillo, the US ambassador to the OAS, had steered the group’s election-monitoring team to report widespread fraud and pushed the Trump administration to support the ouster of Morales”.  The White House promoted the “fraud” narrative, and its Orwellian statement following the coup praised it: “Morales’s departure preserves democracy and paves the way for the Bolivian people to have their voices heard.”

Bolivia’s  de facto president, Jeanine Áñez, has called indigenous religious practices “satanic”.  In January she warned voters against “allowing the return of ‘savages’ to power, an apparent reference to the indigenous heritage of Morales and many of his supporters”, according to the Washington Post. Hers was supposed to be a “caretaker” government, but new elections – now scheduled for 18 October – have already been postponed three times because of the pandemic. Trump administration’s support has been over.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/18/silence-us-backed-coup-evo-morales-bolivia-american-states

 Recycling plastic is a scam. The companies making all that plastic have spent millions on advertising campaigns lecturing us about recycling while knowing full well that most plastic will never be recycled.

According to one analysis, only 9% of all plastic ever made has likely been recycled. 

A new investigation by National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) reports that the large oil and gas companies that manufacture plastics have known for decades that recycling plastic was unlikely to ever happen on a broad scale because of the high costs involved.

“They were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material,” Larry Thomas, former president of one of the plastic industry’s most powerful trade groups, told NPR. 

There is a lot more money to be made in selling new plastic than reusing the old stuff. But, in order to keep selling new plastic, the industry had to clean up its wasteful image. “If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Thomas noted. And so a huge amount of resources were diverted into intricate “sustainability theatre”. Multinationals misleading people for profit.

While the plastics industry’s greenwashing will come as no surprise to anyone, the extent of the deception alleged in NPR’s investigation is truly shocking.

The subterfuge around recycling plastic is also an important reminder of just how cynically and successfully big companies have shifted the burden of combating the climate crisis on to individuals. 

This might be best encapsulated in a famous ad campaign that aired in the US during the 1970s with the slogan “People Start Pollution. People can stop it.” The campaign was created by a non-profit group called Keep America Beautiful, which happened to be heavily funded by beverage and packaging companies with a vested interest in convincing people that they were the ones to blame for a polluted planet, not capitalism.

Perhaps one of the most effective bits of propaganda that big business has come up with to shift the burden of combating the climate crisis on to individuals is the idea of the “carbon footprint”. BP popularised the term in the early noughties, in what has been called one of the most “successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever”. 

While oil companies were telling us to fret about our carbon usage they were doing whatever the hell they liked: 20 fossil fuel companies can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, an analysis by leading climate researchers found last year. Chevron, Exxon, BP and Shell are behind more than 10% of the world’s climate emissions since 1965.

 We have been successfully convinced that people start pollution and people can stop it. That if we just fly less and recycle more the planet will be OK. To some degree that is right: there must be a level of personal responsibility when it comes to the climate emergency. 

But individual action is a tiny drop in a heavily polluted ocean; we need systemic change to make a real difference. And, more than anything, we need to change what we value.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/15/most-plastic-will-never-be-recycled-and-the-manufacturers-couldnt-care-less