Millions of people face destitution this year as soaring energy and food prices mean that out-of-work benefit payments may no longer be enough to cover basic essentials, experts have warned.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) said levels of out-of-work benefits may soon fall below the amount required to avoid destitution, meaning recipients would not have enough money to afford necessities like heating, clothing and adequate nutrition.

The Trussell Trust, a food bank provider, reported increasing demand for its emergency food parcels this winter and warned it was “inevitable” that more people would be left destitute.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank expects millions of people to be unable to afford essentials, and “face impossible choices between heating and eating”. Henry Parkes, senior economist at IPPR, explained, “Come April, millions of low-income households are going to be particularly hard hit by spiralling energy bills, with the poorest families spending more than 10p in every pound on heating their home,” Mr Parkes said. “At the same time, those in receipt of universal credit will see their benefit increase by as little as £2 a week – a fraction of the rising costs they face.”

After years of real-terms cuts, jobseeker’s allowance and the basic level of universal credit are now just £74.60 per week for a person aged over 25. When inflation is taken into account, the payment is its lowest level for three decades. Research by the JRF and Heriot-Watt University in 2018 found that a single person living alone needed £70 per week to cover absolute essentials.

With inflation now running at an annual rate of 5.4 per cent and expected to hit as high as 7 per cent this year, the minimum income needed to escape destitution is certain to jump – and increases to benefits are not keeping pace. The JRF said that this point could soon be reached, with energy bills expected to soar by 50 per cent in April before rising again in October.

“If the income level needed to avoid destitution rises above our basic rate of out-of-work benefit for a single adult, we can expect to see a big rise in destitution, which is very worrying,” said Peter Matejic, deputy director of evidence & impact at the JRF.

The UK’s poorest families are expected to see a big hit to their incomes as the value of benefit payments falls this year. This April, social security rates are due to rise by 3.1 per cent, well below the increase in living costs that low-income households face.

“That’s a recipe for disaster for struggling families, said Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group. “In the face of soaring costs, families need help – the priority must be to increase social security by 6 per cent in April.”

The impact of rocketing fuel bills on low-income households would be “scary”, said Garry Lemon, director of policy and research at the Trussell Trust.

“People referred to food banks have often been through a difficult life event like losing a job or family breakdown. But the number one driver is the inadequacy of our benefits system which has seen a decade of cuts, caps and freezes. It is failing to lift people out of destitution.” In October, the government withdrew a £20-per-week uplift to universal credit seen as a lifeline to many families. Food bank managers are seeing the impact of the policy “right now”, said Mr Lemon. “These families are being crushed from different directions. You have the removal of the uplift to universal credit and you have benefits not being uprated as quickly as inflation is rising. The cost of absolute essentials – heating, eating – is rocketing upwards. People caught in the middle of that will suffer the most.”

Benefit payments ‘too low’ to keep people out of destitution as energy bills soar | The Independent

 Claimants will be given just four weeks – down from three months – to find a job within their preferred sector. After that point, if they fail to make “reasonable efforts” to secure a job or turn down any offer, they will have part of their universal credit payment withdrawn under a tightening of the existing Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) policy.

Currently, work-ready unemployment benefit claimants have three months to find a job in their preferred sector – typically their area of expertise – before sanctions are threatened. The new rules mean sanctions could be imposed four weeks after they make their initial claim for universal credit – in theory, even before they receive their first benefit payment.

Unemployed workers will be forced to take up a job in any sector or face swift financial sanctions under a crackdown designed to fill hundreds of thousands of vacancies in sectors from social care to construction. The move is part of an initiative to get 500,000 people into work by June and fill 1.2m job vacancies nationally.

The Way to Work campaign was flagged up as evidence as an attempt to distract from Johnson’s political woes. Cracking down on the unemployed has long been regarded as popular with many voters, although welfare experts said that any rise in levels of benefit sanctions could backfire as low-income families struggle with the cost of living crisis.

Welfare experts said the tightening of benefit sanctions would be counterproductive and could force people into worse jobs and damage careers. They said ministers were out of touch with the realities of life on a low income and ignored the evidence about how best to get people into secure, decently paid work.

“Pushing people to apply for any job regardless of its suitability, underpinned by the very real threat of benefit sanctions, is corrosive to relationships between claimants and advisers, and risks pushing people into insecure and unsuitable employment,” said Ruth Patrick, a senior lecturer in social policy at the University of York. “This is not a way to work, it is a way to policy failure. The government is right that people need and deserve good jobs, but these will not be delivered by compelling people to seek any work, and against a context of continuing in-work poverty.” 

The UK’s foremost academic expert on benefit sanctions, David Webster, said that governments often tightened punishments for jobseekers when they were worried about apparently slow uptake of jobs after a recession. But there was no serious evidence that sanctions had ever got more people into work. 

“It is simply wasteful to force people quickly into roles that can lead to bad job matches, and push people into worse jobs, often with lasting ill-effects for their career and earning prospects. You can’t force square pegs into round holes,” the University of Glasgow research fellow said.

The last big sanctions drive occurred between 2010 and 2016 when, at its height, 1 million people a year were sanctioned, leading to widespread poverty and hardship. This was subsequently eased, and sanctions were temporarily suspended under the first lockdown, but in recent months sanctions levels have crept up again.

Universal credit claimants face tough sanctions in UK job crackdown | Benefits | The Guardian

“Gaslighting” means “the action of manipulating someone by psychological means into accepting a false depiction of reality or doubting their own sanity”. Green gaslighting goes beyond greenwashing, which constitutes the use of ecological themes as a marketing tool to cover up the ecological harm of profit-making activities. Gaslighting does more than deceive the public, it also disempowers and undermines the potential to identify the root causes of climate change and ways to address them.

COP26 will probably go down in history as the conference of the “net zero pledges”. There were many of them: from India’s desire to be carbon neutral by 2070, China’s by 2060, to the EU’s goal of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by the year 2030, to US commitments to cut emissions by 50 percent by the same year.

But these are all illusory climate action measures. “Net zero emissions” does not actually mean bringing emissions down to zero. Rather it refers to a set of policies that aim to compensate continued emissions with projects that absorb carbon elsewhere. These policies are supposed to help remove the extra emissions from the atmosphere through measures like tree planting, enhanced forest protection (i.e. preventing deforestation), and costly carbon capture and storage technologies.

The problem is that evaluating compliance with “net zero” goals is extremely difficult, and so is proving the full efficacy of these “carbon offsetting” measures. For example, over the past 20 years of discussions about carbon offsets, no solid solution has been found to the problem of verifying in a transparent manner how emissions reductions are achieved.

Furthermore, offsetting projects can have negative social consequences for vulnerable communities. The push for forest expansion, for example, could result in the mass displacement of peasants and indigenous communities from their ancestral lands and into peri-urban slums where devastating poverty awaits them.

Corporations are already eyeing land in developing countries for lucrative “carbon credit” projects. In a report entitled “Nature and Net Zero” by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and management consulting firm McKinsey & Co, published in January 2021, the “economic feasibility” of land around the world was mapped to establish its “carbon abatement potential”. The report assigns different value to different types of lands and estimated costs of realising “natural climate solutions” (i.e. carbon offset) projects on them.

“High feasibility” lands are considered those which are “low cost” – that is, real or potential agricultural rent from them is low and therefore, they would be more likely to be converted to forests, for example. But while the WEF and McKinsey & Co may consider such areas “cheap land”, for small-scale farmers, pastoralists and Indigenous communities, they are ancestral lands that often have significant cultural, religious and communal value.

Needless to say, the report does not mention the potential social and human cost of displacement and the economic and physical violence acquiring such land is likely to lead to. “Carbon credit accounting” standards that are being set up currently require that a forested area be at least 25 million hectares (roughly the area of the US state of Vermont) to qualify for carbon credits. One can only imagine what a reforestation effort trying to meet this standard would look like and the amount of forced displacement it would take to achieve it.

The report also does not address the fact that eviction of small-scale farmers from their “cheap land” might actually result in local food crises, given that a significant portion of the world’s population is fed by small farms. In fact, Oxfam and others have warned that the drive for and monetisation of reforestation may lead to worsening global hunger.

The WEF and McKinsey report, however, does make clear the potential for profit from “natural solutions” that can be monetised as “carbon credits” and “sold” to polluters. Governments and corporations have already jumped at the opportunity. Leading the way on carbon offsets through forest conservation is the Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance (LEAF) coalition, which in November announced that it has met a target of $1bn in commitments to support forest-linked carbon offsetting projects.

Because governments and corporations know that they would never do what is necessary to rein in climate change, they have come up with a few terms to placate the masses: “climate resilience”, “climate adaptation” and “climate mitigation”. All of these refer to our supposed ability to respond to and deal with the effects of climate change and are based on the premise that humanity can actually pull through a climate catastrophe with minimal consequences while maintaining the global economic status quo. No more than buzzwords that drive investment and profit. Unsurprisingly, they were prominently used at COP26, where one of the outcomes was the announcement of various financial pledges for “nature-based solutions for climate resilience”.

These terms also feature in reports by economists praising the monetary value of nature and calling for investment in it. For example, a 2020 report funded in part by National Geographic, found that the economic benefits of conserving 30 percent of the earth’s land and oceans outweigh “the costs by at least 5-to-1”.

The report frames nature’s value as a lucrative asset – “a single underexploited type of asset”, which provides $125 trillion worth of benefits to humanity. Its preservation can prevent economic losses from climate change by building “resilience” and generating profits in the form of booming tourism sectors, growing agricultural and forestry outputs, and regenerated fish stocks, among others. As one of the report’s co-authors concludes, it is time “to finance nature”.

All of a sudden, proposed new real estate, airport, roadway, and shipping developments that increase the anthropogenic impacts on climate and ecological breakdown – are being spun as “green” investments – or climate “impact investments”. All they have to do is claim to “provide climate solutions”, “mitigate” climate change impacts or provide “sustainable living” and voilà… New swish developments are given the “green” light.

One example is Royalmount, a $7bn real estate project under construction in the Canadian city of Montreal, which promises “experiential attractions, retail, office space and accommodations… firmly rooted in nature, rejuvenation and sustainability-minded strategies”. It claims that it will be “carbon neutral”, will reduce energy consumption by 34 percent and plant 450,000 trees, shrubs and perennials.

That pretty landscaping is not the same thing as paying attention to ecology, that the project’s “impact” on Montreal’s residents, already struggling with high rents, will not be a positive one and that “nature” will certainly be better off without this new development are facts carefully obscured by “green investment” proponents. Climate “impact investing” that is meant to “build climate resilience” is no different from investing in traditional asset classes, as there is no way to guarantee that the sought-after “impact” helps nature or local communities. And just like the “net zero emissions” slogan, it is simply a deception meant to make people believe that those most responsible for the climate crisis – rich countries, venture capitalists, and multinational corporations – are in fact the most ecologically-minded.

COP26 illustrated the extent to which these deceptions have captured the global discourse on climate changes.

We need to stop centring attention on the false “solutions” the wealthy and powerful are offering and refocus on the plight of the ordinary people who are already suffering from the climate crisis: the urban poor, peasants and pastoralists as well as Indigenous people. Their needs and struggles need to be central to a genuine ecological response that couples emissions reductions with degrowth, living wages and dignified working conditions, eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and reorganises the global economy away from neocolonial land grabs, resource abuse and underpaid labour and towards social justice. Anything short of this is smoke and mirrors. The people will not be fooled.

Abridged and adapted from here

Green gaslighting: Another face of climate denialism | Climate Crisis | Al Jazeera

 An Illinois-based gun manufacturer is marketing child-sized AR-15 assault rifles designed specifically for children. 

Manufactured by WEE1 Tactical, and dubbed the JR-15, the company states that the assault rifles are 20 percent smaller than a standard AR-15, weigh only 2.2 pounds, and retail for $389.

 The company promises that the children’s assault rifle “looks, feels, and operates just like Mom and Dad’s gun.”

Gun Violence Prevention Groups Condemn Launch of AR-15 Assault Rifles Designed Specifically for Children | Common Dreams

 France’s government pledged to investigate what it called “absolutely revolting” allegations that a world leader in care for older adults has been putting profit before quality, rationing food and other items for nursing home residents. 

Orpea, with more than 1,100 care homes in 23 countries, has been accused of shoddy and rapacious care in an investigative journalist’s book. The journalist, Victor Castanet, said in a television interview that an intermediary offered him 15 million euros ($17 million) to drop the project during his research for “The Gravediggers.” The obsession with cost-cutting in Orpea’s retirement homes is leading to serious “dysfunctions”, according to the book

Quoted in the book was a former Orpea nursing home employee who alleged that sanitary protections for residents were rationed to three a day in the care unit with a “terrible smell of piss” where she worked.

Battle Lines

 Battalions are being moved to the border,

With squadrons of tanks, by martial decree,

Pilots are scrambled, navy’s all at sea,

Young lives determined by the next order.

This is the fault of the other side, of course,

For having the wrong language, flag or friends.

Whichever one attacks, which one defends,

Both will count the dead and share remorse.

How long before there’s common agreement

That the dead are not glorious, just dead?

As long as there are leaders and the misled,

Profit remains decisive of intent.

While capital is allowed to rule, then

There will be war again and again…

D. A.

Unionized workers at Denver-area King Soopers grocery stores approved a new three-year contract on Monday following a 10-day strike by more than 8,000 low-wage employees in Colorado. From January 12 until the strike ended Friday, workers at nearly 80 stores across the Denver metropolitan area, from Parker to Boulder, took to the picket lines to demand a living wage and improved conditions.

“Strikes absolutely work,” said Kim Cordova, president of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7, which organized the work stoppage. “It shows the company that they can’t run without workers.”

“It shows that where the real power is with the people,” added Cordova, “We’re hoping that we set the bar so that other workers in this country follow suit.”

The deal includes pay raises of more than $5 an hour for some employees, which the union called “the most significant wage increase ever secured by a UFCW local for grocery workers.” The contract also creates more full-time employment opportunities and secures better healthcare and pension benefits as well as stronger workplace safety measures.

The strike started after UFCW Local 7 rejected what Cordova called a “grossly unfair” offer from King Soopers management.

That offer coincided with the publication of a report showing that as a result of Kroger’s poverty wages and erratic scheduling practices, two-thirds of surveyed workers couldn’t afford basic monthly expenses, 39% couldn’t afford groceries, and 14% have experienced homelessness in the past year.

Meanwhile, the company’s top brass has thrived during the Covid-19 pandemic, especially CEO Rodney McMullen. After receiving a large bonus in 2020, his total compensation that year reached $22.4 million, which was 909 times what the median worker earned. 

Furthermore, Sanders’ staff director Warren Gunnels pointed out Monday night, Kroger spent more than $1.5 billion on stock buybacks between April 2020 and July 2021 “to enrich its wealthy shareholders.”

‘Strikes Absolutely Work’: Kroger Workers Win New Contract (commondreams.org)

Pay increases are failing to keep up with rising inflation, leading to another year of “wages gloom” for public sector workers, the TUC said.

The union umbrella body said public sector workers were already thousands of pounds worse off after suffering a “lost decade”, during which their pay failed to keep up with price rises. With inflation now forecast to reach 6% or higher in 2022, the situation was set to get worse, it said.

1,100 coal miners in Alabama are still on strike after more than 10 months making it the longest in Alabama’s history.

Workers started the unfair labor practice strike over claims of bad faith bargaining by Warrior Met Coal over a new union contract. In the previous contract settled in 2016, miners accepted several concessions, including a $6-an-hour pay cut and reductions in health insurance and other benefits as the mines switched employers in the wake of a bankruptcy. Since Warrior Met Coal took over the mines, the company has reported billions of dollars in revenue. A tentative agreement was reached in the first week of the strike, but overwhelmingly rejected by workers, and a new agreement has yet to be reached.

Over the past 10 months, they have held rallies and extended protests to the Alabama state capitol to criticize the use of public resources for state troopers escorting strikebreaking replacement workers to the mines throughout the strike. Miners have also held rallies in New York City outside the offices of BlackRock Investment Group, the largest shareholder of Warrior Met Coal. 

“What they’ve said openly in negotiations is that they’re just going to starve us out. They’ve said … and this on record, that ‘we have the money to pay what you’re asking, we do not have the desire to.’ That’s the kind of company these guys have been working for,” said Haeden Wright, president of the United Mine Workers of America auxiliary for two of the striking locals and the wife of a striking miner. “Though the journey, most of us are still holding out and trying to hold on, but it is hard… For it to last this long and to have state troopers and to watch your tax dollars escort scabs into your job, that’s a hard pill to swallow,” added Wright. “That’s hard to watch and not be able to do anything about.”

The unions’ auxiliary has focused on receiving and distributing weekly groceries to miners and their families throughout the strike and assisting families with needs such as bills. It recently organized a Christmas gift drive for miners’ families to ensure their children were taken care of over the holidays.

 Warrior Met Coal has filed several court injunctions throughout the strike to severely limit or prevent striking miners from picketing outside the mines. Several union members and supporters have reported incidents where vehicles have hit or nearly missed individuals on the picket lines. The injunctions have been characterized as a rare move, an attempt by Warrior Met Coal to circumvent the NLRB and instead seek rulings from favorable local courts.

Alabama coalminers on strike for 10 months vow not to be ‘starved out’ | Labour | The Guardian

“What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter,” Martin Luther King Jnr is widely quoted as asking, ​“if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?” 

As Black History Month approaches, the blog is not trying to claim MLK as one of its own. We merely wish to draw attention to the fact that he recognised that socialism is required for the deeper solutions to the inequalities facing working people, especially the African-Americans of the United States. 

In 1952 a 23-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. as a first-year undergraduate at Boston University of Theology described his views toward America’s economic system. ​“I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he admitted to his then-girlfriend, concluding that ​“capitalism has outlived its usefulness.” He explained capitalism ​“has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”

 15 years later in his  book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, his opinion remained the same: ​“Capitalism has often left a gap of superfluous wealth and abject poverty and has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few.”

In his 1967 Riverside Church speech, King included in his sermon the observation: ​“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Speaking to the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)  in 1966, King said that ​“something is wrong … with capitalism” and ​“there must be a better distribution of wealth” in the country. ​“Maybe,” he suggested, ​“America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

 In an interview with the New York Times in 1968, King described his work with the SCLC as ​“In a sense, you could say we are engaged in the class struggle.”

In Where Do We Go From Here, he outlines how economic inequality can circumscribe civil rights. While the wealthy enjoy easy access to lawyers and the courts, ​“the poor, however, are helpless.” 

 In Where Do We Go From Here, MLK called the victories of the movement up that point in 1967 ​“a foothold, no more” in the struggle for freedom. Only a campaign to realize economic, as well as racial justice, could win true equality for African-Americans. In naming his goal, King was unflinching: the ​“total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.”

 He pointed out that in the USA, we ​“compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity,” 

MLK’s project, the Poor People’s Campaign, shows his dream included a future of both racial and economic equality. In King’s words, as soon as he demanded ​“the realization of equality” — the second phase of the civil rights movement — he discovered white liberal ‘middle class’ suddenly indifferent.

For King, the only solution to America’s crisis of poverty was the redistribution of wealth. In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, King declared, ​“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

From 

The Forgotten Socialist History of Martin Luther King Jr. – In These Times