Socialism Or Your Money Back Blog December 8th

Who has all the wealth? 

The top 1% of households globally own 43% of all personal wealth. The bottom 50% have only 1%

Whence comes  this myopia

that perpetuates this dystopia?

You don’t need 2020 vision

to make an informed decision

From ill used sea to shining sea

There’s none so  blind

as them as will not see

It’s clear as day.

You’ve already been shown the way.

Socialism Marx the spot.

Look to the light you sightless masses!

Throw of the mask of servitude

you don’t have to ask to be free

Tell the bourgeoise that it’s

the final battle of the classes

We owe them no gratitude

for reclaiming what we produce.

Introduce them to the truth

It’s ours not theirs!

It belongs to you and me.

DC

 There is no trickle-down effect from tax cuts. Instead tax cuts for the rich produces inequality without providing much for anyone else.

 David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London studied income, capital and assets in 18 OECD countries over the past half century and found that only those who were directly affected the reduction in taxation benefited, and it did little to promote jobs or growth for all other. 

Their findings counter arguments, often made that policies which appear to disproportionately reward richer individuals eventually feed through to the rest of the economy. 

“Our research suggests such policies don’t deliver the sort of trickle-down effects that proponents have claimed,” Hope said.

Fifty Years of Tax Cuts for Rich Didn’t Trickle Down, Study Says – Bloomberg

 In general, US farmworkers struggle with some of the lowest wages in the country and suffer an above-average rate of workplace injuries. Because many are either undocumented immigrants or in the country on temporary work visas, they do not have access to US social safety nets like health insurance, unemployment benefits or stimulus cheques.

The US Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division conducted more than 31,000 investigations on US farms between fiscal years 2000 and 2019 and levied $63m in civil penalties for workplace violations. Those violations are likely just a fraction of the problem because the Labor Department only investigates about 100 of the US’s 107,000 farm employers every month – which means there is just a 1.1 percent chance that any one of them will be investigated in any given year.

Farm employers in the United States have withheld $76m in wages from 154,000 workers over the past 20 years and wage theft and workplace safety issues in the agricultural sector are likely much, much worse.

Many more violations are likely never reported because the “majority of farmworkers lack an immigration status or have a precarious, temporary status, making them fearful of retaliation and deportation”, Daniel Costa, Economic Policy Institute’s director of immigration law and policy research and one of the report’s authors, told Al Jazeera.  Costa explained. “But that also means that the violations that are investigated and detected are probably just the tip of the iceberg.”

 Farm labour contractors – third-party agencies that recruit and staff workers for farms – are the worst offenders, accounting for some 25 percent of all detected federal wage and hour violations.

“Farms that rely on farm labour contractors are a textbook example of a ‘fissured’ workplace, where the relationship between the worker and the lead employer is fissured, or broken, via the use of a temp agency or subcontractor,” Costa said. “Research has shown that fissuring often results in lower wages for workers, in part because the farm labour contractor keeps a percentage of the wages earned by the workers, and farm operators do not provide the farmworkers who work on their farms with fringe benefits because they are employees of the contractor. ”  Farm labour contractors already account for 14 percent of agricultural employment in the US and their use is rising, major policy change is needed to crack down on violators, Costa said.

The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division’s budget has been slashed, and there is roughly only one investigator for every 175,000 workers, says EPI. In 2019, there were just 780 investigators, fewer than nearly 50 years ago.

US farmworkers suffer stolen wages, safety issues, report finds | Agriculture News | Al Jazeera

 “Food insecurity” across the United States doesn’t refer to the chronic food scarcity and undernourishment, which afflicts more than 800 million people in poor countries, but rather to the disruption of people’s typical food-consumption patterns. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) distinguishes between what it calls low food security (“reduced quality, variability, or desirability of diet”) and the very low version of the same (“multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake”).

 Just before the coronavirus struck, 35 million Americans, 11 million of them children, experienced food insecurity. This year, those numbers are projected to reach 54 million and 18 million respectively. 

In 2018, 4% of American adults reported that at least some members of their family did not have enough to eat; by July 2020, that figure had hit 11%.

That food insecurity has “skyrocketed” shouldn’t come as a surprise. The bigger the hit people took from the Covid-19 recession, the more likely they were to experience food insecurity, 

 Millions of people have lost their jobs. Some have seen their earnings diminished because of furloughs, wage cuts, freezes, or reduced working hours. Others have looked for jobs in vain and finally given up (but aren’t included in official unemployment statistics). Millions of adults have children who no longer receive those free or subsidized lunches because of the switch, in whole or part, to online teaching. Worse yet, as pandemic-induced firings, layoffs, and wage cuts have reduced incomes, and so consumer purchasing power, food prices, especially for meat, fish, and eggs, have only risen. Such costs have increased for other reasons as well. The pandemic has disrupted supply networks, national and international.

Americans high on the income ladder can absorb such extra costs easily enough and, in any case, spend a substantially smaller portion of their income on groceries. According to the USDA, adults with incomes in the top fifth of society spent 8% of their income on food last year; for the bottom fifth, it was 36%. The first group also obviously has a lot more money available to stock up on food than that bottom fifth, so many of whom have also become jobless or seen their paychecks diminish since the pandemic started. In March, for example, 39% of those making less than $40,000 had already lost their jobs or had their paychecks reduced, but only 13% of those who earned $100,000 or more, and that gap continued into the fall.

 In coronavirus-stricken America, only 1% of adults with an annual income exceeding $100,000 surveyed by the Census Bureau this summer responded that, during the preceding week, their household “sometimes or often did not have enough to eat.” Compare that to 16% of those making $25,000-$35,000 and 28% of those earning less than $25,000.

 A USDA report classified 19% of Black households and 16% of Hispanic households as food insecure in 2019, compared to 8% of their white counterparts. By this summer, food insecurity had increased significantly across the board, afflicting 36% of Black, 32% of Hispanic, and 18% of white households. While the pandemic has certainly made matters worse, African Americans had the highest rate among those three groups even before it started. This was especially true of counties — the U.S. has more than 3,000 of them — in which they were in the majority. In 2016, those particular counties accounted for a mere 3% of the national total, but 96% of them had “high food insecurity,” as the Department of Agriculture defines it, as well as a poverty rate more than twice the national average (12.7% that year).

Native Americans have had the worst of it, however, since many of their families lack access to running water and plumbing (58 per 1,000 households compared to three per 1,000 for whites). Nearly 75% of Native Americans must travel more than a mile to reach a supermarket, compared to 40% of the population as a whole, and the disruption of supply chains has only diminished their food security further relative to other ethnic communities.

 In Queens, for instance, one food bank pantry regularly faces a demand so steep that lines can extend for eight blocks. Try to imagine what the waiting time must be. 1.5 million people in the city, unable to buy the groceries they need, rely on food pantries, and New York is anything but unusual.  Food insecurity during the pandemic has varied by location as well. Ten states (and the District of Columbia) had the highest rates, ranging from Mississippi (33.5%), which stood atop this group, to Alabama (27%), which had the lowest. In between, in descending order, were Washington, D.C., Nevada, Louisiana, New York, New Mexico, Florida, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

Feeding America, a non-profit organization that supports 200 food storage centers and 60,000 pantries nationwide, reports that the country’s food banks have provided the equivalent of more than 4.2 billion meals since March.  Food banks, facing a tsunami of demand, have struggled to stay stocked amid rising prices, shortages, reduced donations from big chain supermarkets, and disrupted supply chains. It’s also become even harder for them to raise the money they need to operate. Not a few have buckled under the strain and many have been forced to shut down. 

Hunger in America: On the frontlines of the COVID-19 nightmare – Alternet.org

 At the Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference on December 9, 2020, Blackstone’s billionaire CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, boasted that after the 2008 financial crisis, his firm was able to cash in on the mortgage crisis. At the time, the company was able to buy up foreclosed homes and convert them into rental properties subsequently plagued by accusations of dilapidation and excessive fees — all while it received a big financial boost from the government.  The firm is also now the world’s largest commercial landlord. 

Schwarzman indicated his firm is positioning itself for a similar jackpot from the pandemic economic pain. Schwarzman seemed to insinuate that his firm may buy up even more residential real estate to try to squeeze even more revenue out of renters in the pandemic-ravaged economy.

“You always have winners and losers — Blackstone was a huge winner coming out of the global financial crisis, and I think something similar is going to happen,” he said. 

Blackstone has also been evicting residents during the pandemic, according to court filings compiled by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. And Blackstone has faced a legal showdown with New York tenants at one of the city’s largest rental complexes, which it owns. There, the company has been trying to exempt thousands of units from rent regulation laws. The company has reportedly even kept Manhattan units empty rather than face rent control regulations.

“About half of the firm’s earnings are from a real estate business. Just to give you some idea how this breaks, we pick the good neighborhoods, if you will. Real estate has a lot of different sub-asset classes. And we’ve concentrated in logistics. It’s about 36 percent of all the real estate we own,” he said. “We’re the largest owner of real estate in the private world. And that asset class has boomed with huge increases in rents, almost no occupancies, rent collections from almost everyone.”

In 2018 and 2020, it gave millions to political groups that successfully fought to defeat rent control ballot initiatives in California, where Blackstone has significant real estate investments.

In Britain, Blackstone has become UK’s small businesses’ largest landlord — and the company has been accused of jeopardizing the viability of those businesses by refusing to waive rent when they were forced to shut down during the pandemic.

Blackstone CEO Celebrates “Huge Increases in Rents” as Millions Face Eviction (jacobinmag.com)

 More than half a million people from ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang have been coerced into picking cotton, on a scale far greater than previously thought.

The Xinjiang region produces more than 20% of the world’s cotton and 84% of China’s, but according to a new report  by the Center for Global Policy there is significant evidence that it is “tainted” by human rights abuses, including  forced labour of Uighur and other Turkic Muslim minority people. 

The revelations came as the international criminal court (ICC) said it did not have the jurisdiction to investigate allegations of crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang. China’s treatment of the minority populations – including the mass internment of people in re-education camps, enforced sterilisation of women, technological and human surveillance – has been labelled cultural genocide by analysts. In July, exiled Uighurs delivered a dossier of evidence to the ICC asking it to investigate crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang. On Monday, the office of prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said it was unable to do so because the alleged crimes happened inside China, which was outside the ICC’s jurisdiction.

 China’s labour transfer scheme is purported to be part of the government’s massive poverty alleviation campaign, but growing evidence indicates it targets Uighur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and coerces participation. Areas in the south of Xinjiang – which produce a far larger share of the cotton – remain heavily reliant on manual picking. And while the number of workers brought in from other provinces for the harvest season had dropped, the report found the proportion of local ethnic minority labourers had increased dramatically.  570,000 people came through three minority-heavy prefectures alone – Aksu, Hotan, and Kashgar – and that labor programs in other ethnic minority regions as well as prison labor would probably add hundreds of thousands to the figure.

In September research which was corroborated by Reuters, found authorities in Tibet were massively expanding the labour transfer program, setting quotas to move hundreds of thousands of people off their land and into military-style work training facilities.

Xinjiang: more than half a million forced to pick cotton, report suggests | Xinjiang | The Guardian

Already Americans, Britons and Canadians are receiving coronavirus vaccines. Coronavirus has exposed vast inequities between countries.

“The whole call for global solidarity has mostly been lost,” said Dr. Katherine O’Brien, WHO’s vaccines chief.

Kate Elder, vaccines policy adviser at Doctors Without Borders, said “it’s increasingly looking like the ship has sailed on equitable vaccine distribution”

As more countries in the West authorize the vaccine, “the difference between people in rich countries getting vaccinated and the lack of any vaccines for the developing world will become quite stark,” said Anna Marriott, health policy manager at Oxfam. “And it will only prolong the pandemic.”

COVAX was created to ensure the entire world has access to COVID-19 vaccines. COVAX was set up by the World Health Organization, vaccines alliance GAVI and CEPI, a global coalition to fight epidemics, to avoid the international stampede for vaccines that has accompanied past outbreaks and would reinforce those imbalances.

 But COVAX has secured only a fraction of the 2 billion doses it hopes to buy over the next year, has yet to confirm any actual deals to ship out vaccines and is short on cash.  Some experts say the chances that coronavirus shots will be shared fairly between rich nations and the rest are fading fast. With vaccine supplies currently limited, developed countries, some of which helped fund the research with taxpayer money, are under tremendous pressure to protect their own populations and are buying up shots. Meanwhile, some poorer countries that signed up to the initiative are looking for alternatives because of fears it won’t deliver.

“It’s simple math,” said Arnaud Bernaert, head of global health at the World Economic Forum. Of the approximately 12 billion doses the pharmaceutical industry is expected to produce next year, about 9 billion shots have already been reserved by rich countries. “COVAX has not secured enough doses, and the way the situation may unfold is they will probably only get these doses fairly late.”

COVAX’s only confirmed, legally binding agreement is for up to 200 million doses, though that includes an option to order several times that number of additional doses, GAVI spokesman James Fulker said. It has agreements for another 500 million vaccines, but those are not legally binding. The 200 million doses will come from the Serum Institute of India, the company that will likely make a large portion of the coronavirus shots destined for the developing world. CEO Adar Poonawalla says it has a confirmed order for 100 million doses each of a vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca and one from Novovax.

“We don’t have anything beyond that in writing,” he told The Associated Press. “If they want more, they’ll have to place more orders.”

He said the lack of commitment from COVAX will mean a much longer wait for people in developing countries. 

Even with vaccines in hand, the rollouts will take many months, even in rich countries, and many developing ones are facing serious logistical challenges that will add to delays, noted Dr. Gagandeep Kang, an infectious diseases expert at the Christian Medical College at Vellore in southern India.

According to a report GAVI, the alliance itself concluded that the risk COVAX will fail is “very high,” saying it was “established in record time and has to navigate unchartered territory.”

Amid fears COVAX can’t deliver, some developing countries are pulling out entirely or seeking their own private deals. Earlier this month, the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau announced it was abandoning the initiative and would get donated vaccines from the U.S. instead. Other low and middle-income countries, including Malaysia, Peru, and Bangladesh, have stayed in the initiative but also recently inked their own deals with drug-makers as a Plan B.

Anban Pillay of the South African Ministry of Health said that joining COVAX was just a stop-gap measure before signing bilateral deals with pharmaceutical companies.

South Africa and India have asked the World Trade Organization to waive some provisions regulating intellectual property rights to make it easier for manufacturers in poor countries to make COVID-19 drugs and vaccines. But many rich countries are reluctant to do that.

Poor countries face long wait for vaccines despite promises (apnews.com)

More than half of furloughed jobs in the UK are at the highest risk of automation as the Covid crisis accelerates workplace technology change, driving up redundancies and inequality across the country, according to a two-year commission on workers and technology,  organised by the Fabian Society and the Community trade union, found.

As many as 61% of jobs furloughed in the first half of this year were in sectors where automation is most likely to lead to job losses. 5.9 million of the 9.6 million furloughed workers were in the third of sectors with jobs at highest risk of automation, according to analysis of Office for National Statistics figures.

Rapid adoption of technology during the coronavirus pandemic has helped protect jobs as millions of employees work from home. But while employers have used new technologies to survive, the commission said many furloughed jobs would not return as a result. Physical-distancing requirements, remote working and online shopping have driven consumers and firms to make permanent changes to the way they use technology this year, with the pandemic likely to have a lasting impact on business and society. While spending in some physical shops has collapsed, resulting in thousands of job cuts by well-known high street employers, online spending has boomed – benefiting firms with fewer staff and highly automated operations.

The low-paid and disadvantaged workers were more likely to work in jobs at high risk of automation, with women, younger and older workers, people from minority ethnic backgrounds and disabled staff most likely to lose out.

The commission chair, Labour MP Yvette Cooper, commented,  “There’s a real danger of widening inequality, long-term structural unemployment and low pay, as a result of people not being able to benefit from the economic recovery and improvements in technology that we all want to be able to benefit from.”

More than half of UK’s furloughed jobs at risk of automation – report | Business | The Guardian

END THE PANDEMIC – END CAPITALISM

Pre-existing social inequalities contributed to the UK recording the highest death rates from Covid in Europe, Sir Michael Marmot, a leading authority on public health,  said, and also warning that many children’s lives would be permanently blighted if the problem is not tackled.

In ‘Build Back Fairer’, Marmot argued in the new report that families at the bottom of the social and economic scale were missing out before the pandemic, and were now suffering even more, losing health, jobs, lives and educational opportunities. He said these social inequalities must be addressed whatever the cost and it was not enough to revert to how things before the pandemic. 

“We can’t afford not to do it,” he commented, “It is simply unacceptable that we say it’s OK for children to go to bed hungry … we’ve got some incorrect notions about the necessity of austerity … What is the society we want? We want to guarantee the health and wellbeing of all members and the fair distribution of health and well being. We simply can’t afford not to do it. The government debt is no excuse. We know that is incorrect understanding of economics.”

Marmot’s report painted a grim picture, underscored by statistics that showed the most-deprived families are worst hit. Men and women living in overcrowded conditions in the most deprived areas of the country are the most likely to die from Covid. Carers and those who work in the leisure and service industries have the highest death rates under the age of 64. People from black, Asian and ethnic minority groups who work as taxi drivers, bus drivers, security guards, carers and other low-paid occupations have a higher risk of death. High rates of unhappiness or depression, particularly among young people. Young people were also at greater risk of losing jobs in the pandemic.

Children and young people living in deprived areas had suffered disproportionately from lockdown, he found. “One of the effects of the pandemic was to increase the educational divide,” said Marmot. In the least deprived schools, few children were behind as a result of closures. In the most deprived, children were reported as four to six months behind. There had been “dramatic increases in food insecurity.” Marmot explained.

The government had already failed to act on his report in February showing austerity policies had already damaged health and cut life expectancy in England.

“Before the pandemic, life-expectancy increase had stalled, inequalities were increasing, and life expectancy for the poorest people was going down,” he said. “That was a measure that society wasn’t doing well. And then the high excess mortality during the pandemic is simply a measure of society not doing well.” The recommendations from his report addressed the reasons, he said, relating to governance and political culture as well as the widening gulf between those who have power, money and resources and those who do not. “We have to reverse the reduction in spending on public services – as I said we were ill prepared. We were unhealthy coming into the pandemic. Which means that we have to put the fair distribution of health and wellbeing at the heart of all government policy.”

Funding for public health had been slashed during the austerity years. “The budget for Public Health England was cut after its foundation in 2012 by 40% and the spending on public health in local government was cut by about £800m.

“So back in February/March, when we should have been setting up a national test, trace and isolate system, public health should have organised it,” he said.

But it did not happen that way. First of all, the policy was not to do it at all, he said, and then it was to hand it to a private company “and it doesn’t matter if the person running it doesn’t have any expertise, because we know private solutions are always better than public solutions so we’ll give it to the private sector to manage.

“Colossal error. We should have used public health, local public health – fund them properly, get them to do it.”

Jennifer Dixon, the chief executive of the Health Foundation, said there was no doubt the pandemic would be taking a toll for years to come. “Mitigating the damage caused by the pandemic to education, employment and income must be at the heart of the government’s plans for recovery and levelling up.

“It is absolutely unacceptable that in a country of such means there is such a strong divide between the richest and poorest in society.” she stated.

Pre-existing inequality led to record UK Covid death rate, says health chief | World news | The Guardian

 2.7 billion people have not received any public financial support to deal with the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Oxfam said

 The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown measures to contain it have hit millions of people hard, with poverty set to increase sharply in almost every country for the first time in decades unless action is taken now, according to a new report by Oxfam. o a new report by Oxfam. Hundreds of millions of people have lost their jobs and income.

Eight out of 10 countries not having given any financial support to even half their population, “women workers in low- and middle-income countries in particular are suffering, as they work in the worst-affected sectors, such as garments, services and domestic work,” the report said.

“The income of informal women workers dropped by 60 percent during the first month of the pandemic. In almost every country, unless action is taken now, poverty is set to increase sharply for the first time in decades,” it added.

There is a vast discrepancy between what wealthy nations have managed to do for their population and what the poorer nations – with more limited resources – could spend, the report said.

In total, countries around the world have raised $11.7 trillion in additional spending this year to cope with the fallout of COVID-19. Of this amount, 83 percent has come from 36 rich countries while 39 lower-income nations have raised $42bn, 0.4 percent of the total.

 G20 countries have infused $9.8 trillion into their economies, including measures to support workers and the general population. For social protection programmes, 28 rich countries have spent at the rate of $695 per person in comparison to $4 to $28 per person spent by 42 low- or middle-income countries, the report said.

While the richest will bounce back from this crisis quickly and with no help, poorer families will take years to get back on their feet, the report said.

With many countries dealing with a second wave of the pandemic and continued economic hardships, there is an urgent need for governments to implement universal social protection measures to support their people including with unemployment benefits, payments to the elderly, financial support for children and families, measures that would provide a “vital lifeline,” the report said.

“To prevent a terrible increase in global inequality, a huge investment in universal social protection is needed,” it said.

It also urged rich nations to step up financial support to poorer countries through the urgent provision of more aid and the cancellation of debts.

2.7 billion people did not get state aid during pandemic: Oxfam | Coronavirus pandemic News | Al Jazeera