< Part One here

Has Covid 19,  led to an erosion of civil liberties. Or. should that be a further erosion of civil liberties?  Where’s the baseline. Situation Report: Full lockdown in force until December 2nd. Allegedly. Some government ministers have said that this lockdown will end on December second. Others are saying it could be at least Spring 2021 before its lifted. This article doesn’t seek to deny that measures suited to dealing with a pandemic weren’t necessary but is concerned the draconian steps which have been implemented globally and which are doing possibly irreversible damage to the civil liberties which capitalism permits its wage slaves to have.

     Is it an exaggeration to ask whether we are at one minute to midnight where a boot will be stamping on a human face for ever? Will there be no love, no laughter, no art, no literature, no science, no curiosity, no enjoyment, no pleasure?

     Definition of Lockdown. A protocol followed in an emergency that involves confining people in a secure place such as the confinement of prison inmates in cells after a disturbance, or the locking of students and teachers in classrooms after a violent attack. A facility, such as a prison where people considered to be dangerous are locked inside living quarters or otherwise confined. freedictionary.com

      This lockdown will cost the economy one point eight billion pounds a day says a story in the MailOnline of November 2nd. That’s on top of all the money that’s  already been borrowed. Billionaires and corporations are smirking and going “I’m alright Jack!”  There will come a point when government support of the economy will become simply unfeasible. Being a worker in that situation, as opposed to living in a socialist society dealing with a pandemic, will be more than uncomfortable. How many will do the intelligent thing and start educating themselves about the capitalist system and the  only sensible alternative?

     The 1689 Bill of Rights has Cruel and unusual punishment in common law describing punishment that is considered unacceptable due to the suffering, pain, or humiliation it inflicts on the person subjected to the sanction. It can include punishments that are not generally accepted in society. Similar words are to be found in the United States Eighth Amendment to its Constitution. Also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,  European Convention on Human Rights and more. The Marshall Islands Bill of Rights prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment”, defined as: the death penalty; torture; “inhuman and degrading treatment”; and “excessive fines or deprivations” Wikipedia.

     Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption, Lord Sumption, is a former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court between 2012 and 2018. He gave the Cambridge Freshfields Annual Law Lecture on 27 October “Government by decree: Covid-19 and the Constitution.” https://www.privatelaw.law.cam.ac.uk/press/events/2020/10/cambridge-freshfields-annual-law-lecture-2020

“On 26 August the government introduced by decree an offence of “being involved” in a gathering exceeding thirty people, and empowered any policeman in the land to issue a fixed penalty notice of £10,000. This sum, enough to ruin most people, was far in excess of any fine that would be imposed by a court for such an offence.. it has been used to suppress protests against the government’s coronavirus policies. On 30 August, the police served a £10,000 fixed penalty notice on Mr Piers Corbyn for addressing a rally against masks in Trafalgar Square. The regulations contain an exception for political protest, provided that the organisers have agreed a risk assessment and taken reasonable steps ensure safety.””

The Daily Mail. October 14th., Liverpool gym shut down by armed police. Gym owner fined one thousand pounds.

 Lionel Shriver is an American novelist. In the Spectator, October 17. She expressed her anger at the state sanctioned brutality being used against citizens for not “obeying” the edicts coming down from clueless governments

Examples can be found from across the globe of the heavy handed approach by the agents of the State.

     “In Australia this summer, a young pregnant mother was arrested and handcuffed in front of her children merely for supporting a socially distanced lockdown protest on Facebook, while police confiscated all her household’s laptops and mobile phones. In another infamous YouTube video, an Australian officer clutches a slight young woman viciously around the throat, slams her to the ground, cuffs her hands behind her back and then calls in a clatter of reinforcements — all because she isn’t wearing a face mask. After 2020, ‘liberal’ democracy will never be the same. It’s been summarily demonstrated that civil liberties aren’t worth the paper constitutions are printed on. Rights may be rescinded with no warning and without even the fig leaf of parliamentary approval…”

  “On 26 September the police broke up a demonstration against the government’s measures, whose organisers had agreed a risk assessment and had taken reasonable steps. The police claim to have done this because some of the demonstrators had not acted in accordance with the arrangements made by the organisers. They cleared the square using batons with considerable violence, injuring some 20 people who were guilty of nothing other than attending an apparently lawful protest.”  Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption

“The true function of the police is not to be nice to people (in fact, they are actually paid to be suspicious of us all). They exist to protect private property rights — which means to protect the privileged position of the ruling class of capitalism. Which means, further, to perpetuate the inferior, unprivileged position of the working-class. The fact that policemen are themselves workers makes no difference to this. The capitalist class have to get workers to do their dirty work for them. — workers are not only exploited in the interests of their parasitic masters but are also persuaded to tighten their bonds ever tighter about themselves.”Running Commentary” Socialist Standard September 1979

A zeitgeist snapshot of life in the New Normal taken from the Main Stream Media.

Home Secretary Priti Patel will order police to stop protests involving more than TWO people during lockdown. November 3

Police ARREST qualified nurse, 73, trying to take her 97-year-old dementia-hit mother from care home after nine months to be looked after by her family – and put pensioner in patrol car to be sent back. November 4

Priti Patel orders police to get tough on Covid rule-breakers: Home Secretary ramps up enforcement saying those who ‘flout the law’ must not be allowed to ‘endanger the majority’ Priti Patel told police chiefs they must ‘strengthen enforcement’ of Covid rules. November 4

    With the exactness of Bobby Fischer  inexorably taking control of the chess board Lionel Shriver articulates the powers the State has abrogated to itself (The Spectator. October 17th.)

    “We’ve allowed the state to dictate when our businesses close and whether they may open at all. We’ve acceded to national house arrest. We’ve abdicated the right to travel abroad without submitting to punishing self-incarceration, and we’re currently surrendering the right to travel to different regions of our own country. We’ve empowered the police to issue summonses for picnicking in parks or sitting on a bench. We’ve sat idly by while fines for organising a protest against this very oppression rise to a crippling, potentially life-destroying £10,000. We’ve granted government the right to regulate whether we can see our parents, whom we may invite into our homes, and how physically close we may approach another human being outside our household,…. .We walk out of our own front doors only at the government’s sufferance. “

DC

 Almost three-quarters of frontline care workers – 600,000 –  in England are earning below the “real” living wage, which experts say is the bare minimum to allow families basics such as a secondhand car and a week’s annual UK self-catering holiday, research has revealed.

The proportion of care workers below the threshold is even higher in northern areas, where care homes have been hit hardest by Covid-19. In the north-east, 82% of care staff earned less than the England-wide real living wage of £9.50 per hour, while the proportion was 78% in the north-west.

The figures were calculated by the Living Wage Foundation. The real living wage is calculated based on public consultation about necessities and analysis of the cost of living. It differs from the statutory national living wage which is currently £8.72 per hour for people aged 25 and over. In London only 10% of care workers earn more than £10.85 per hour, which is the threshold in the capital adjusted for the higher cost of housing and transport.

“They’ve put their lives on the line caring for others during this pandemic, so it’s essential we ensure they earn enough to look after their own families,” said Laura Gardiner, the director of the Living Wage Foundation. “The real living wage is the only UK wage rate based on what it costs to live. It ensures workers and their families can meet everyday needs – things like a surprise dentist trip and a new school uniform for growing kids.”

“There’s overwhelming public support for a pay rise for care staff,” said Christina McAnea, the assistant general secretary of Unison, a trade union which represents care workers. “These workers do a skilled job looking after the elderly and disabled people. But many struggle on poverty wages despite their dedication during the pandemic.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/13/three-quarters-of-englands-care-workers-earn-below-real-living-wage

 Taking advantage of good mid-autumn weather, people smugglers have sent hundreds of migrants to sea in the last week, according to charities. The majority of the journeys have ended in tragedy.

“This is a massacre at Europe’s borders,” said a spokesperson for Alarm Phone, a hotline for migrant boats in distress. “What else can we say?”

“Is the European Union watching?” MSF wrote on Twitter. “Step the search and rescue capacity up, or let us save lives.”

Four shipwrecks in the space of three days have claimed the lives of more than 110 people in the Mediterranean.  A six-month-old boy was among the victims.

Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, and his defence minister, Linda Reynolds, have forewarned Australians they will be shocked and disturbed by the report of Paul Brereton, the inspector general of the Australian Defence Force, when his redacted version is released.

The long-awaited report into the alleged war crimes of Australian special forces soldiers will be out next week and that the alleged culprits are from Special Air Service and Commando regiments – the most intelligent, highly trained and supposedly disciplined troops in the ranks – will render the findings doubly shocking. Some elite soldiers believed they could operate criminally with impunity.

Brereton’s investigation has already been four years in the making. Meanwhile, news of some of the worst alleged crimes such as the summary execution of Afghan prisoners, has publicly highlighted the gravity of the allegations he was investigating. It appears that his investigation has uncovered a litany of alleged crimes that will tarnish the SAS’s hard-earned reputation as the “best of the best” 

Australian soldiers Harry “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock were executed in 1902 for war crimes in the Boer war.  Australians certainly massacred Arabs and Bedouin in Palestine in 1917, and Arabs in Egypt after war’s end in 1918.  Australia’s world war two record, meanwhile, is replete with accounts of Australian troops murdering Japanese prisoners rather than accepting their surrender. Trophy photographs of Australian soldiers with dead Japanese abound. Helmet cam footage has shown the shooting of an unarmed Afghan civilian in a field.

Sections of the media have rallied around the special forces, attempting to cast doubt about the allegations that arose through often remarkable investigative journalism from the ABC and Nine. The former prime minister Tony Abbott told the Australian newspaper people should be cautious to “judge soldiers operating in the heat of combat under the fog of war by the same standards that we would judge civilians”.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/13/australia-is-in-for-a-shock-as-war-crimes-investigation-brings-reality-of-war-to-the-anzac-myth

 Wales is facing a “rising tide of poverty” which has been worsened by Covid, according to a new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). 

It found low pay, unaffordable housing and a lack of childcare was trapping 700,000 people in poverty, including 180,000 children. The pandemic had hit low-paid workers in Wales particularly hard.

 The 50 richest Americans now hold almost as much wealth as half of the U.S.

 Data from the U.S. Federal Reserve, a comprehensive look at U.S. wealth through the first half of 2020, show stark disparities by race, age and class. The 50 richest people in the country, meanwhile, are worth almost $2 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, up $339 billion from the beginning of 2020.

While the top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion, the poorest 50% — about 165 million people — hold just $2.08 trillion, or 1.9% of all household wealth. 

The Fed estimates the top 10% of U.S. households hold 69% of the country’s wealth, or $77.3 trillion, up from 60.9% share at the end of the 1980s. The very richest Americans are almost entirely responsible for that gain. The top 1% held 30.5% of U.S. wealth in June, up from 23.7% in late 1989. The bottom half’s share, meanwhile, has fallen from 3.6% to 1.9%.

White Americans hold 83.9% of the nation’s wealth, compared with 4.1% for Black households, the data show. While White Americans’ share of the total has dropped somewhat as the nation becomes more diverse, Black people hold the same percentage as 30 years ago in 1990. Of the 25 richest Americans, only one is not White — Eric Yuan, the chief executive officer of Zoom Video Communications Inc., whose fortune has risen almost seven-fold this year to $24.2 billion.

The wealthiest 1% own more than 50% of the equity in corporations and in mutual fund shares, the Fed data show. The next 9% of the wealthiest own more than a third of equity positions — meaning that the top 10% of Americans hold more than 88% of shares.

Unlike low-wage service workers. many upper-middle class professionals are working from home, watching their retirement accounts rise in value after the U.S. Treasury and Fed pumped stimulus into the economy and markets. 

Another key reason for the wealth disparity is that the vast majority of Americans aren’t benefiting from rising stock prices. The bottom 90%’s exposure to the stock market has been dropping for almost two decades. Since peaking at 21.4% in 2002, upper middle class Americans have seen a 10 percentage point decline in their equity interest in companies. A similar pattern is seen among the bottom half.

 The Millennial generation, born between 1981 and 1996, control just 4.6% of U.S. wealth even though they are the largest in the workforce with 72 million members. Young Americans’ wealth is concentrated in just a few hands. Three Millennials — Facebook Inc. co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, along with Walmart Inc. heir Lukas Walton — personally control one out of every $40 held by their generational cohort. Baby Boomers hold the majority of U.S. wealth, with $59.6 trillion, twice Generation X’s (those born between 1965 and 1980) $28.5 trillion and more than 10 times Millennials’ $5.2 trillion.

 Among the biggest beneficiaries of the Covid-19 economy is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. His fortune, the world’s biggest, has jumped 64% in 2020 to $188.5 billion. On Wednesday alone, Bezos added more than $5 billion to his net worth.

The prospect for rolling back US capitalism and reforming the conditions of the working class is bleak if it is seen to depend on the Democratic Party. A whole generation of Democrats now believe]that their political survival depends on being even more bellicose on both domestic and foreign affairs than Republicans. Capitalism bends both parties to its will. There are no vital issues between the two parties. The only political issues permitted in American life have been those involving the interests of one section of big business as against another section. Great social issues affecting the lives of the people – such as the issue of war or peace, or the issue of socialism versus capitalism – these have never separated the two parties.  Reforms make their appearance only as vague campaign pledges never to be redeemed. Political patronage and public plunder persist regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

 

There exists disillusionment and disenchantment with the Siamese twin set–up of the two-party system. Solutions will not come from the swamp of the two capitalist parties. If the American people understood the facts before them, they would convince them that this nation is run by the corporations, and that the corporations control both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Those in public office are all the political creatures of the wealthy. The Democratic and Republican Parties are themselves only factions of Wall Street’s party, maintained by the wealthy to oppose labor’s interests and to advance the interests of the wealthy, at home and abroad. The capitalist two-party system and its ability to mislead the people depend in large measure upon deception, upon the fiction that there are major and decisive differences between the Republicans and Democrats. Over the years the differences between the two parties and their candidates have tended to dwindle to a narrow margin, if not to vanish altogether. Both parties have common war policies, both support Wall Street’s economic programs, both are united in support of the most reactionary governments in the world. Today the political parties of big business are united on one program: to place squarely upon the backs of the workers the burden of the recent wars and costs of the pandemic.

Candidates promises and campaign platforms are not especially important. The current needs of big business always comes first with both old parties. The personality of a president is unimportant to the capitalists, easily indicated by amiable buffoon, Biden and the pompous property billionaire, Trump. Congress, state legislatures, and municipal councils as a rule legislate wholly in the interest of the ruling capitalist class. Courts of justice, so-called, decide cases of importance not upon their merit, but in the interest of the ruling class. Ministers of the gospel are subject to the same influence and their sermons are molded to serve the same purpose.

 The aim of any electoral work engaged in by the World Socialist Party is not primarily to amass votes, but to reach the maximum audience with our ideas, to bring the message of our party to fellow-workers. It aims to establish economic equality by making all owners in common of the means upon which all depend for employment, and without which there can be no “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.” This insures economic freedom for every human being. As no one would have private property in that upon which another depended for employment, industrial mastery and slavery would disappear together and competition for profit would give way to cooperation for use. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party stand for essentially the same system of exploitation, and a worker realizes that it makes precious little difference whether they are exploited by a few great capitalists or an innumerable brood of small ones. They propose to put an end to exploitation entirely by abolishing the system and transferring the means of production from private hands to the collectivity and having them operated in the interest of all alike. 

The World Socialist Party is necessarily an international party. It is as wide as the domain of capitalism.

The prospect for rolling back US capitalism and reforming the conditions of the working class is bleak if it is seen to depend on the Democratic Party. A whole generation of Democrats now believe]that their political survival depends on being even more bellicose on both domestic and foreign affairs than Republicans. Capitalism bends both parties to its will. There are no vital issues between the two parties. The only political issues permitted in American life have been those involving the interests of one section of big business as against another section. Great social issues affecting the lives of the people – such as the issue of war or peace, or the issue of socialism versus capitalism – these have never separated the two parties.  Reforms make their appearance only as vague campaign pledges never to be redeemed. Political patronage and public plunder persist regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

 

There exists disillusionment and disenchantment with the Siamese twin set–up of the two-party system. Solutions will not come from the swamp of the two capitalist parties. If the American people understood the facts before them, they would convince them that this nation is run by the corporations, and that the corporations control both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Those in public office are all the political creatures of the wealthy. The Democratic and Republican Parties are themselves only factions of Wall Street’s party, maintained by the wealthy to oppose labor’s interests and to advance the interests of the wealthy, at home and abroad. The capitalist two-party system and its ability to mislead the people depend in large measure upon deception, upon the fiction that there are major and decisive differences between the Republicans and Democrats. Over the years the differences between the two parties and their candidates have tended to dwindle to a narrow margin, if not to vanish altogether. Both parties have common war policies, both support Wall Street’s economic programs, both are united in support of the most reactionary governments in the world. Today the political parties of big business are united on one program: to place squarely upon the backs of the workers the burden of the recent wars and costs of the pandemic.

Candidates promises and campaign platforms are not especially important. The current needs of big business always comes first with both old parties. The personality of a president is unimportant to the capitalists, easily indicated by amiable buffoon, Biden and the pompous property billionaire, Trump. Congress, state legislatures, and municipal councils as a rule legislate wholly in the interest of the ruling capitalist class. Courts of justice, so-called, decide cases of importance not upon their merit, but in the interest of the ruling class. Ministers of the gospel are subject to the same influence and their sermons are molded to serve the same purpose.

 The aim of any electoral work engaged in by the World Socialist Party is not primarily to amass votes, but to reach the maximum audience with our ideas, to bring the message of our party to fellow-workers. It aims to establish economic equality by making all owners in common of the means upon which all depend for employment, and without which there can be no “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.” This insures economic freedom for every human being. As no one would have private property in that upon which another depended for employment, industrial mastery and slavery would disappear together and competition for profit would give way to cooperation for use. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party stand for essentially the same system of exploitation, and a worker realizes that it makes precious little difference whether they are exploited by a few great capitalists or an innumerable brood of small ones. They propose to put an end to exploitation entirely by abolishing the system and transferring the means of production from private hands to the collectivity and having them operated in the interest of all alike. 

The World Socialist Party is necessarily an international party. It is as wide as the domain of capitalism.

 Four million US citizens are deprived of having a vote on who will be America’s president. They are the residents of America’s colonies. 

An example is the island of Guam. They vote for a local legislature, a governor, and a delegate to the US House of Representatives – a delegate who cannot vote – but their choice for president, marked on the same ballot, carries no weight. It is a straw poll: a non-binding four-yearly exercise that serves merely as a barometer on who Guamanians would wish to be in the White House.  It is of symbolic value.

An American citizen living abroad is eligible to vote by absentee ballot unless he or she chooses to live in one of the sixteen US Territories such as Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and US Virgin Islands.

As well as not being able to vote for the president  their representatives to the US Congress do not have a voting power. The islands’ representative can introduce bills and push for the territory’s agenda at the congressional committee level, but has no vote on the floor.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/the-us-election-that-doesnt-count-guam-goes-to-the-polls-but-votes-wont-matter