Of the nearly one million child care workers in the United States, in a recent white paper, 31.2% – basically 1 out of every 3 – experienced food insecurity in 2020, the latest year for which data was analyzed.

 Food insecurity means there is a lack of consistent access to enough food. This rate of food insecurity is anywhere from 8 to 20 percentage points higher than the national average.  High food insecurity is when a person reports reduced quality and variety of diet. Very high food insecurity occurs when a person reports disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.

In Washington state and Texas, one study found 42% of child care workers experienced food insecurity, with 20% of child care workers experiencing very high food insecurity.

Another study in Arkansas found that 40% of child care workers experienced food insecurity.

People who are food insecure are at increased chances of being poor health, with conditions like hypertension, diabetes, asthma, arthritis and depression, among other chronic diseases and health conditions.

This workforce is central to providing high-quality early childhood education to children up to 5 years old.  Despite the fact that the more education child care workers have the higher-quality care they deliver, many states require only a high school diploma or equivalent, and some states do not have any education requirements for entry-level positions.

Low wages and food insecurity may contribute to child care workers’ high-stress levels. When child care workers experience stress, they tend to reduce the amount of positive attention to children and increase their punitive responses to children’s challenging behavior.

Overall, child care workers’ wages are low, with the median hourly wage being $12.24 per hour. This means child care workers make little more than fast-food workers, whose median pay is $11.64 per hour. What child care workers make is not considered a living wage.  Child care workers with a bachelor’s degree average $14.70 per hour, which is just under half the average earnings overall of those with a bachelor’s degree – $27 per hour.

As a result of low wages, more than 53% of child care workers received public assistance, including Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from 2014 to 2016.

When so many child care workers rely on public assistance, it reveals how many of them don’t make enough money to get by.

Nearly all U.S. child care workers are women, and half are people of color.

Opinion | Around 1 in 3 Child Care Workers Are Going Hungry | Colin Page McGinnis (commondreams.org)

 UK dividends jumped by 46.1% last year to a staggering £94.1bn on the back of bumper payouts from mining companies, according to the latest figures.

Payouts from companies in the UK is now at 2017 levels. 

UK dividend income rises to £94bn in 2021 (yahoo.com)

 In an interview with the BBC’s Today programme, Iceland’s managing director Richard Walker said, “I think there are more food banks now than there are branches of MacDonalds.” and added. “This is no exaggeration: there are people out there facing the choice between eating and heating, and we are losing customers to hunger.”

Not to rival supermarkets but to poverty. 

 In an interview with the BBC’s Today programme, Iceland’s managing director Richard Walker said, “I think there are more food banks now than there are branches of MacDonalds.” and added. “This is no exaggeration: there are people out there facing the choice between eating and heating, and we are losing customers to hunger.”

Not to rival supermarkets but to poverty. 

Americans for Tax Fairness on Friday published a report showing that U.S. billionaires donated a staggering $1.2 billion into the 2020 elections.

ATF’s analysis, the distribution of billionaire cash between Republican and Democratic candidates was pretty evenly split in 2020, with 55% of the total going to GOP campaigns.

“In the 2010 election cycle, billionaires gave $19 million to Republicans and $11 million to Democrats,” ATF noted. “By the 2020 cycle, those respective figures were $656 million and $539 million.”

Nearly a third of the billionaire campaign funding in 2020 came from the mega-rich couple Sheldon and Miriam Adelson—former President Donald Trump’s top donors—and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who doled out $152.5 million during the 2020 election cycle, not including the $1.1 billion he spent on his own short-lived White House bid.

Democratic businessman Tom Steyer, his wife Kathryn Taylor, and Republican hedge fund manager Ken Griffin also spent big in 2020, collectively donating over $400 million.

Frank Clemente, ATF’s executive director, said in a statement that the findings lay bare the “disastrous” consequences of the high court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which toppled longstanding campaign finance restrictions and opened the floodgates to unlimited election spending by corporations and rich individuals.

And the reason billionaires have so much cash to give to political campaigns, Clemente stressed, is that they’ve been able to accumulate vast fortunes without any real threat of higher taxes. 

ATF argued that such campaign donations “are a profitable investment: they buy access to politicians and influence over tax and other policies that can save tycoons billions of dollars.”

“While that $1.2 billion ‘investment’ in 2020 was massive, it totalled less than 0.1% of billionaire wealth (and less than one day’s worth of their pandemic wealth growth), leaving almost unlimited room for future growth in billionaire campaign spending,” the group warned.

‘Time for Citizens United to Go’: US Oligarchs Poured $1.2 Billion Into 2020 Elections (commondreams.org)

 It is a truism of moralists that when bad things are done to people it is not only the perpetrators who are to blame but also the bystanders – those wretches who watch and do nothing.

A shocking example of such callousness and passivity was reported by The New York Times on March 27, 1964. Two weeks earlier, according to the report, a young woman had been murdered in the middle of the night in Kew Gardens, a neighborhood of Queens in New York City. For over half an hour, 38 neighbors had peered through their windows as the killer stalked and stabbed her. Despite her cries and screams, no one came to her aid. No one even called the police.

Ten years later, an amateur historian named Joseph DeMay moved into the neighborhood and decided to investigate what had really happened that night.

He found that 38 neighbors had indeed been questioned by the police. That was where the suspiciously exact figure of 38 came from. But only two of the 38 had seen the stabbing and only one of those two could reasonably be accused of ‘watching and doing nothing.’ Some of the 38 had not woken up at all. Others had heard something, looked out, and seen a woman lurching down the street, but assumed she was drunk. There was a bar up the street and drunkards were not an unusual sight. 

Two residents, in fact, had called the police. The police hadn’t come. DeMay was unable to find out why not. A third resident, the second of the two eyewitnesses, had wanted the police to come, but was afraid of drawing their attention to himself because he was gay (homosexuality being still illegal at the time). However, he did alert the people next door and one of those ran out, found the victim, and was able to comfort her as she lay dying. 

The article in The New York Times set off a storm of publicity. Dozens of residents were interviewed by journalists but complained afterwards that the press had twisted their words. One journalist concluded that the published account was mostly untrue, but kept this knowledge to himself out of fear of losing his job. 

The corporate media systematically portray ordinary people as worse than we really are – as more competitive, more aggressive, more selfish, less willing to cooperate and help others. That helps to explain why most of us continue to think that socialism is impossible because, after all, ‘you can’t change human nature.’

Source: Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (Little, Brown & Co., 2021), Ch. 9 (The Death of Catherine Susan Genovese)

Stephen Shenfield

World Socialist Party of the United States

No one helped — or did they? | World Socialist Party of the US (wspus.org)

 Elon Musk is asked to prove Tesla vehicles aren’t manufactured with forced labour of Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region Democrat lawmakers have joined Republicans in scolding Elon Musk for opening a Tesla showroom in Xinjiang, where China is accused of slavery and genocide against Uighur Muslims. Two Democratic congressmen who oversee trade wrote to Musk demanding to know whether Tesla sourced its materials and products from forced-labour camps in Xinjiang.

Perhaps the American politicians should also examine their own backyard and the forced labour carried out within the United States

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/23/prisoner-speak-out-american-slave-labor-strike

 In 2022 the world’s population will pass 8 billion. It has increased by a third in just two decades. By 2050, there will be about 9.5 billion. 

Fertility rates in Europe, North America and East Asia are generally below 2.1 births per woman, the level at which populations remain stable at constant mortality rates. 

 The birthrate in Italy is the lowest it has ever been in the country’s history. 

South Korea’s fertility rate has been stuck below one birth per woman for decades despite an estimated $120bn (£90bn) being spent on initiatives aimed at raising it. 

Japan started the century with 128 million citizens but is on course to have only 106 million by 2050. 

China’s population will peak at 1.45 billion in 2030, but if it proves unable to raise its fertility rate, the world’s most populous country could end the century with fewer than 600 million inhabitants. 

The trouble is this trend does not so far include Africa, other than a few individual nations. Overall, low or rapidly declining birthrates remain the exception rather than the rule in most of Africa.

The populations of more than half of Africa’s 54 nations will double – or more – by 2050.

The continent will then be home to at least 25% of the world’s population, compared with less than 10% in 1950.

40% of all Africans are children under the age of 14 and in most African countries the median age is below 20.

African mothers will have about 450 million children in the 2020s. This is projected to rise to more than 550 million in the 2040s, about 40% of all children born worldwide in that decade. 

By 2050, a quarter of the world’s people will be African – this will shape our future | Edward Paice | The Guardian

 The UK’s state pension payment system is not fit for purpose, resulting in the “shameful shambles” of an underpayment scandal that left tens of thousands of pensioners short-changed, according to a scathing report from a committee of MPs, the public accounts committee (PAC).

Last year it emerged that the DWP was estimating it had underpaid 134,000 pensioners, mostly women, a total of more than £1bn of state pension cash that they were entitled to.

The National Audit Office said this long-term underpayment of state pensioners – some problems date as far back as 1985 – was the result of repeated errors that were almost inevitable amid complex rules and outdated IT systems.

It emerged that those affected that the DWP could trace would be paid an average of £8,900 each.

The report stated that the pension payment system “is not fit for purpose”, and set out a series of recommendations.

The committee said the department was now on its ninth go at fixing the mistakes since 2018, and that this “comes at great cost to the taxpayer” – the bill for staff costs alone is expected to top £24m by the end of 2023.

The MPs also said the DWP had “left people in the dark over their entitlement”, adding: “The department also admits that many other pensioners are under-claiming their state pension … these pensioners need clearer information to act or risk missing out on significant sums.”

UK state pension systems not fit for purpose – MPs’ report | Older people | The Guardian

Union membership in the U.S. declined by 241,000 workers in 2021.

 According to figures released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), overall U.S. union membership fell to 10.3% in 2021—down from 10.8% the previous year—even as public approval of unions rose to its highest point in nearly six decades.

Union membership’s return to the historically low 2019 level in 2021 came in a year that also saw a number of high-profile strikes and successful organizing drives.

According to Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker, there were more than 360 strikes nationwide over the course of 2021.

One recent report estimated that the erosion of union membership cost the median U.S. worker $3,250 per year between 1979 and 2017.

The percentage of U.S. workers belonging to a union has been steadily declining for decades as corporate America and its right-wing allies in government—as well as in the judiciary—have waged a coordinated assault on organized labor, a campaign that has included so-called “right-to-work” laws and other anti-union measures.

Fetterman Calls Fall of Union Membership ‘A National Disgrace’ (commondreams.org)