“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

“We did not leave our country in search of happiness,”  a Syrian asylum seeker, who fled war, imprisonment and torture in his homeland before travelling through several countries and reaching the UK, explained to the Guardian. “Rather, we went out to save our family from a war that does not know the young or the old and does not differentiate between the strong or the weak, in which no one can survive. We walked in the most dangerous country, crossed the desert and crossed the English Channel in a rubber boat, knowing we may die in the sea. Has any official asked themselves what motivated us to risk ourselves … I was ready to die in order to save my family. What Priti Patel is thinking now is to eliminate our families by depriving us of family reunion.” 

It is often male refugees fleeing conflict zones who make hazardous journeys through several countries on foot, in lorries and in small boats across the Channel in the hope of reaching safety in the UK.

They hope to be granted protection and under current rules, they then have the right to bring close family members to join them, such as their partners and children. The family members can travel safely to the UK by plane and can avoid repeating the dangerous journey made by the first family member.  

However, according to Enver Solomon, the CEO of the Refugee Council, new government plans in the nationality and borders bill, currently being debated in the Lords, will severely restrict family reunion and “all but destroy” the main safe route used by refugee families to reunite with loved ones. The government’s New Plan for Immigration aims to restrict family reunion rights for refugees who travelled through a safe third country before reaching the UK. Solomon told the Guardian that the new government proposals will lead to thousands of women and children having no other option but to pay smugglers to board dangerous dinghies to cross the Channel. The plans will reduce rather than enhance the safe and legal routes Patel has been advocating, according to Solomon. 

17,500 refugees, mainly women and children, could be prevented from reuniting with close family members in the UK due to new rules the Home Office plans to introduce, according to analysis by the Refugee Council. Government data shows that over the last five years 29,000 people, over 90% of them women and children, have been able to come to the UK safely under family reunion rules to join a close family member already here and granted protection in the UK.

The Refugee Council has calculated, using this government data, that as many as 3,500 people a year could be prevented from joining loved ones if the proposals in the bill become law – 17,500 people in the next five years.

New rules could prevent thousands of refugees from joining close family in UK | Home Office | The Guardian

 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)

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)

 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. 

 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

 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

 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)

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)