The Covid-19 pandemic in Britain’s industrial heartlands and left the jobless rate higher than after the financial meltdown of the late 2000s, a report has found. In the first comprehensive study of its kind, researchers from Sheffield Hallam university have revealed the scale of the setback from twin health and economic emergencies on parts of the UK that went into the crisis lagging behind in terms of prosperity and wellbeing. The report by Christina Beatty and Steve Fothergill warned large parts of the Midlands, the north, Wales and Scotland would continue to struggle when the economy eventually recovers from the pandemic. About one-third of the UK’s population lives in the industrial towns, regional cities and former coalfields covered by the study. It found:

1. In the nine months between the start of the crisis in February last year and November 2020, unemployment rose by 310,000 in older industrial towns, 100,000 in the former coalfields and 140,000 in the main regional cities.

2. Over the same period claimant unemployment among 16-24-year-olds in older industrial Britain roughly doubled.

3. If one-third of the workers on furlough at the end of October were to lose their jobs, redundancies would increase by 230,000 in the older industrial towns, by 80,000 in the former coalfields and by 80,000 in the main regional cities.

4. By late 2020, the economic downturn had pushed the numbers on all out-of-work benefits across older industrial Britain to almost one-in-six of all adults of working age, and in some local authorities – such as parts of Middlesbrough, Knowsley and Blaenau Gwent – as high as 20%.

5. Up to the start of 2021, the rate of confirmed infections in older industrial Britain was on average 10-20% above the UK average, seen by the researchers as evidence of fewer people able to work from home.

6. The cumulative death rate in older industrial towns and the former coalfields was on average 30% above the UK average – a reflection of an older and less healthy population.

David and Victoria Beckham have paid themselves £14.5m – or nearly £40,000 for every day of the year – following the strong performance of the former footballer’s image rights sales.

David Beckham Ventures Limited (DBVL), which manages his brand and partnerships with the likes of Adidas, Haig Club whisky and the Sands hotel group, reported a £600,000 increase in annual revenue to £16.2m.

Beckhams pay themselves £40,000 a day after strong image rights sales | David Beckham | The Guardian

 The term used by German statisticians and politicians to denote foreigners and their descendants has been “people with a migration background.”  That was the label given to people who weren’t born into German citizenship. And to people whose mothers or fathers were not born German citizens. 

Today, that applies to a quarter of the population.

 A specialist commission of 24 politicians and academics appointed by the government has submitted its report to Chancellor Angela Merkel. One of its recommendations is to stop using the terms “migration background” or “immigrant background.” Instead, people should use the term “immigrants and their descendants,” commission chair Derya Caglar said. “In my case, this would mean that I am no longer the migrant, but rather the daughter or descendant of migrants,” as  her parents had immigrated from Turkey but she was born here. “And my children, who are currently defined as having a migration background, would simply be Germans,” she said.

Annette Widmann-Mauz, of the Christian Democrats (CDU), is in favor of the change. The term “migration background” encompasses so many groups now that it has lost much of its meaning.

“Many of the 21 million people to which the term is applied do not feel appropriately described by it,” she said. Widmann-Mauz said nearly one-third of people to whom the term “migration background” is applied were born in Germany. The term, she said, gives the impression “that they would never belong here 100%, that immigration was their defining characteristic.”

Immigration and integration: Germany debates terminology | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 21.01.2021

Jamie Dimon, the billionaire boss of JP Morgan was paid $31.5m in 2020, the bank announced.

JP Morgan paid Dimon a salary of $1.5m, a $5m cash bonus and $25m of restricted stock tied to performance. Dimon has a fortune at $1.7bn.

 He warned that the excesses of capitalism are threatening the foundation of society. In 2019 he told CBS’s 60 Minutes that income inequality is a “huge problem” but dodged questions about his own salary.

He later stated that “A big chunk of [people] have been left behind. Forty per cent of Americans make less than $15 an hour. Forty percent of Americans can’t afford a $400 bill, whether it’s medical or fixing their car. Fifteen per cent of Americans make minimum wages, 70,000 die from opioids [annually].”

We are not surprised that he asserted that socialism was not the answer, saying it produces “stagnation, corruption and often worse”. What else would you expect from a billionaire.

JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon is paid $31.5m after decrying income inequality | Jamie Dimon | The Guardian

 In Brasil, coronavirus is spreading and the death toll is mounting — but what most worries the vulnerable communities is how to feed people now that the government has pulled their main emergency aid. For most of last year, they had received a decent government stipend to survive the pandemic, but that all ended with 2020, unleashing a frenzy of favela requests for food. It was April when Congress first passed a bill that established the monthly $600 real ($112) stipend — a little over half the country’s minimum wage — pledging to tide people over for three months during the pandemic. By July, almost half of the 210 million people who call Brazil home lived with someone who was receiving the aid, government data shows.

Ivone Rocha is cofounder of Semeando Amor (Sowing Love), a non-profit that distributes basic staples to some of the very poorest people in Rio das Pedras, one of Rio de Janeiro’s many favelas.

“People here have no jobs,” Rocha told Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone. “Now the aid has ended. My God, what will happen?”

Even before COVID-19, some 13 million Brazilians were living in extreme poverty and a full quarter of the population was classified as below the World Bank’s poverty line, according to government data. The end of the aid programme will disproportionately hit the poor north and northeast of the country, according to a study by Tendencias Consultoria, a consultancy focused on the economy. Those in favelas in Indigenous communities and in “quilombos” — settlements set up by runaway slaves where Black Brazilians live by old traditions — may suffer still more, campaigners said.

Milene Maia, an advisor for Instituto Socioambiental, a non-profit that helps Indigenous and quilombola communities, explained, “What they told us is that they either starve to death or die of COVID,” she said.

Brazil’s most vulnerable communities face COVID food crisis | Coronavirus pandemic News | Al Jazeera

Blow the fan-fare trumpets. America has a new president and we should not underestimate the importance. The United States is the most powerful and the wealthiest nation in the world and whatever actions its politicians take has global effect. To the supporters of either side, the 2020 election is described as a struggle between good and evil. The election of politicians to power in a capitalist state is a business in which the expectations of the electorate play an important role. To begin with, the working class like to feel that their leaders are strong men who can control and influence events, even if for most of the time they are not sure of how this is to happen. In many ways this means that something is expected to happen simply because a politician says it will; it is enough for one of them to spout a nationalist slogan like Trump’s Make America Great Again for the problems of poverty, bad housing, social despair, to melt away. At the same time the workers prefer their leaders to have some contact with what they, rather selectively see as reality.

Capitalist parties continually promise to solve the workers’ problems and when they fail, as fail they must, the workers all too often decide that political democracy itself has failed. All capitalist parties stimulate the fallacies of patriotism among their working class. This patriotism is only a short step from extreme nationalism, express ing itself in violence and dictatorship. In this situation, the parties have often fallen into confusion and bitter internal quarrels, heightening the impression that they are crooks and muddlers. As long as capitalism lasts there can be no security for democracy. Capitalism itself provides the tools with which demagogues can undermine democratic rights. The political ignorance by which capitalism lives is always ready to be exploited. Why haven’t the workers in America grasped the fact before now, that the candidates of all the capitalist parties are basically the same? Biden will issue an avalanche of presidential orders but remember, these are only taking the situation back to what it was before Trump. The gloomy prospect is that there will also be a disillusionment with elections and politics as such, that the workers will blame the tools which are misused rather than realise how they misuse them.

BLM protests against some of the symptoms of capitalism was often a bloody, brutal business where the cities erupted into fire and warfare. It was an event almost predictable. Although Biden has made a number of promises such as a wealth redistribution which was a programme to guarantee a minimum basic wage and to increase some income taxes on the rich, none of the changes fundamental, or permanent, they are the stuff of which electoral victories are made and will continue to be made as long as the working class fail to face the real issues but attempts to paper over the deprivations of capitalism.

Biden’s fellow-travellers, the liberal progressives on the US left, work to deceive and confuse workers as to the nature of capitalism, so they are liable to react in a confused and misled manner and to the reorganising their poverty.

 Nearly nine million people had to borrow more money last year because of the impact of coronavirus, government figures show.

 Presidential Address

(Between the Lines)

My fellow citizens, this is my pledge,

Words I’ll never say and you’ll never hear.

I darn well know things aren’t as they appear,

That many of you live close to the edge.

I’ll speak of making our nation healthy,

Of healing divisions, being reconciled,

A people united where none are reviled;

But really I’m just here for the wealthy.

I’ll strive to divide by colour and creed,

Talk job creation, fairness, yet facts are facts,

Profit’s best served by zero hours contracts

And work discipline is imposed by need.

As President, I will without pause or hitch,

Serve the people, stuffed and trussed, to the rich.

D. A.

You may well have not noticed but the world has just banned nuclear weapons.

An international treaty banning all nuclear weapons that has been signed by 51 countries. The treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons (TPNW) outlaws the creation, ownership and deployment of nuclear weapons by signatory states and places obligations on them to assist other victims of nuclear weapons use and testing.

There is no prospect of the world’s leading nuclear powers endorsing it. Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of Nato, said in November the treaty disregarded the realities of global security.

Kate Hudson, CND’s general secretary, called on the UK government “to cease its intransigence and engage constructively with the new treaty.”

We can be sure that the government aren’t listening. 

Recent years have seen a gradual erosion of global nuclear controls, with the 1987 intermediate nuclear forces (INF) treaty, which kept nuclear missiles off European soil, allowed to expire in 2019 amid mutual recriminations from Russia and the US.

The new strategic arms reduction treaty between the US and Russia, which limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers, is due to expire on 5 February.

The new US president is very unlikely to halt the modernisation programme of its older nuclear weaponry. After all, it was not Trump but Obama who authorised the financing for the up-grading to the newer more deadly technology. 

 Inequality in access to land is increasing across the world. Experts are calling for more rules and controls on the sale of land to counteract poverty.

According to the researchers, the richest 10% of the rural population control over 60% of land assets, while the poorest 50% own just over 3%.

Fewer and fewer people around the world own land. The growing gap in land ownership and access is hitting smallholder farmers, women and indigenous and rural communities hardest, according to the Global Land Inequality Report by the International Land Coalition (ILC), which includes organizations like Oxfam and German Agro Action.The study, published at the end of 2020, compares land inequality in 17 countries using traditional census data and tenure, land quality and other indicators. It concludes that the concentration of land benefiting only a few owners. The report points to a growing interest of companies in investing in agricultural land, which it says is the main cause for land inequality.  

“Growing inequality in access to land is a driver of hunger and poverty. Earth belongs to all of us. Land must not be an object of speculation,” Marion Aberle, senior policy advisor at German Agro Action, explained. 

With the rise of corporate and financial investment, land ownership and control is becoming ever more opaque, said Ward Anseeuw, an analyst at ILC and co-author of the report

Dwindling number of Africans own land | Africa | DW | 19.01.2021