The 2021 Winter issue of the Socialist Party of Canada’s journal, Imagine, is now out. 

You can access the electronic version by following this link.

Of particular interest is the article by Comrade L. Gambone of Vancouver Island (pp. 3–5), who argues that nowadays the Indigenous and Ecological movements, by ‘directly challenging capital over questions of ownership and control,’ wage ‘a much higher stage of class struggle’ than the business unions, which have agreed to stick to matters like wages and working conditions.

On page 9 there is also a poem, originally published in 1909 in The Western Clarion, by Wilfrid Gribble, a member of the Socialist Party of Canada who crossed the border to Detroit and in 1916 helped to found the Workers’ Socialist Party of the United States (forerunner of today’s World Socialist Party of the United States).

 The poorest half of the population have had their incomes squeezed by £110 since 2019.

 Millions of Americans are working into their senior years because they can’t afford not to have a job.

Over the next decade, the number of workers ages 75 and older is expected to increase in the US by 96.5%, with their labor force participation rate projected to rise from 8.9% in 2020 to 11.7% by 2030, a rate that has steadily increased from 4.7% in 1996.

By 2040, the US population of adults ages 65 and older is expected to increase to 80.8 million from 54.1 million in 2019.

The number of workers who retired during the pandemic was about 2 million more than expected. 50.3% of US adults ages 55 and older said they were out of the labor force due to retirement in the third quarter of 2021, compared to 48.1% in the third quarter of 2019. Though in recent months, the unretirement rate of US workers has gradually increased toward pre-pandemic levels.

As the ageing US population grows, participation in retirement plans has declined since 2000.

 Nearly half of all families in the US have no retirement savings at all and inequality among Americans based on retirement savings is greater than income inequality. 

Over 15 million adults ages 65 and older are economically insecure, with incomes below 200% of the federal poverty line, with Black, Hispanic and women ages 65 and older more likely to live in poverty.

With the average estimated social security retirement benefit in 2021 at $1,543 a month, even with a 5.9% cost of living adjusted increase for 2022, millions of Americans who rely on social security benefits are forced to continue working past retirement age in order to make ends meet.

As the US population ages, with millions of Americans having no retirement savings, the number of older Americans with student debt, either for themselves or for children, is on the rise.

Nearly 9 million Americans ages 50 and older still have student debt, and the amount owed by this demographic is growing faster than any other age group. 

In 2015, 40,000 Americans had their social security retirement benefits garnished for student loans.

‘At 75, I still have to work’: millions of Americans can’t afford to retire | US retirement | The Guardian

 The Committee on Oversight and Reform obtained more than 1.5 million pages of internal company documents, held five hearings, and released eight interim staff reports.

The panel’s chair by Rep. Carolyn Maloney noted in a letter at the beginning of the report. “The investigation has provided a rare glimpse into the decision-making of many of the world’s most profitable drug companies.”

Specifically, as a committee statement detailed, the probe revealed:

Drug companies aggressively raise prices to meet revenue targets, and executive compensation structures create incentives to raise prices;Drug companies target the U.S. market for higher prices and use the Medicare program to boost revenue;Drug companies use strategies to suppress competition and maintain monopoly pricing;Drug companies use patient assistance programs as a public relations tool to boost sales; andResearch and manufacturing costs do not justify price increases.

 According to the National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey, 10.8 percent of Chileans currently live in poverty, which means more than two million people, although social organizations say the real proportion is much higher.

Chile, with a population of 19 million people, is considered one of the most unequal countries in the world, as reflected by the fact that the 10 percent of households with the highest incomes earn 251.3 times more than the 10 percent with the lowest income.

As Chile’s hotly contested election approaches, it is reported that camps made up of thousands of tents and shacks have mushroomed in Chile due to the failure of housing policies and official subsidies for the sector, aggravated by the rise in poverty, the covid-19 pandemic and a rise in immigrants, such as those from Venezuela. Hundreds of homeless tents now line the main avenues of Santiago de Chile

 Senda 23 is one of the five camps that bring together 300 families who occupied public land in Cerro 18, in the municipality of Lo Barnechea, on the east side of Santiago. They have been building shacks with wood and other materials within their reach, which they are gradually trying to improve.

The threat of eviction ceased at the start of the covid pandemic, but the shadow still hangs.

“This used to be a garbage dump and now it is clean and there are houses,” said Salas. “Mine gets a little wet inside when it rains because it is made of wood and because of the strong wind. But I have drinking water, electricity and sewerage thanks to my mother-in-law who lives further up. The neighboring family has neither water nor sewage. They are a couple with three children and one of them, Colomba, was born a week ago.” She explains that her neighbors “use the bathroom at their brother’s place who lives nearby.

In the last two years, the number of families living in 969 of these camps with almost no access to water, energy and sanitation services has increased to 81,643, a survey by the Fundación Techo Chile found.

In Chile, the term “campamentos” or camps has also come to refer to slums or shantytowns known traditionally as “callampas”, such as the one where Salas lives, which are built on occupied land and consist of houses made of light materials, although the neighborhoods are sometimes later improved and upgraded, but still lack basic services. These slums are mainly in Santiago and Valparaíso, 120 kilometers north of the capital, in central Chile. But they are also found in the northern cities of Arica and Parinacota and the southern city of Araucanía.

Celia “Charito” Durán lives in the Mesana camp on Mariposas hill in the port city of Valparaíso, along with 165 other families, and counting. The municipality delivers 3,000 liters of water per week to each house, using tanker trucks.

Durán said, however, that the priority is access “because if there is no road, we are cut off from everything: firefighters, water, ambulances.”

In Mesana there is no sewage system, only “cesspools, septic toilets and pipes through which people dump everything into the creek,” she said

They are home to 57,384 children under the age of 14 and some 25,000 immigrants, mostly Colombians, Venezuelans and Haitians.

 Fundación Techo Chile’s executive director, Sebastián Bowen, explained,  “The 81,000 families living in camps are the most visible part of the problem, but the housing deficit, covering all the families who do not have access to decent housing, exceeds 600,000.” 

Benito Baranda, founder of the Fundación Techo, an organization that now operates in several Latin American countries, believes that the housing policy failed because it focuses on “market-based eradication, forming housing ghettos on land where people continue to live in a segregated manner.”

This policy is also based on a structure of subsidies “born during the dictatorship and which has remained in place because housing is not a right recognized in the constitution,” 

The decision of where people are going to live was handed over to the market. Not only the construction of housing. And the land began to run out and the available and cheap places were in the ghettos,” he explained.

Baranda criticized the policy of “eradication”, “which created ghettos and generated much greater harm for people,” referring to the forced expulsions of slumdwellers and their relocation to social housing built on the outskirts of the cities, a policy initiated during the Pinochet dictatorship and which crystallized social segregation in the capital.

According to Baranda, “in the last four governments there has been the least construction of housing for the poorest families.”

Isabel Serra, an academic at the Diego Portales University Faculty of Architecture, criticized the subsidy policy because these “are transferred to the private sector and what they do is drive up housing prices… and most of them are not used because they are not in line with the price of land and housing.”

“A highly financialized private market has made housing a tool for economic speculation…investors have decided to put their funds into the real estate market,” she said.

Homeless Camps, a Reflection of Growing Inequality in Chile | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 One hundred and sixty-eight of Australia’s biggest companies have paid no tax since 2013 despite reaping profits totalling more than $9.85bn.

Household names: 168 Australian companies have paid no tax since 2013 | Tax | The Guardian

 In November 2020, Walgreens paid a $4.5m settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging that it stole wages from thousands of its employees in California between 2010 and 2017. The lawsuit alleged that Walgreens “rounded down employees’ hours on their timecards, required employees to pass through security checks before and after their shift without compensating them for time worked, and failed to pay premium wages to employees who were denied legally required meal breaks”.

Walgreens’ settlement includes attorney’s fees and other penalties, but $2,830,000 went to Walgreens employees to compensate them for the wages that the company had stolen. And, because it is a settlement, that amount represents a small fraction of the total liability. According to the order approving the settlement, it represents “approximately 22% of the potential damages”.

So this is a story of a corporation that stole millions of dollars from its own employees. How much news coverage did it generate? There was a single 221-word story in Bloomberg Law, an industry publication. And that’s it. There has been no coverage in the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, or the dozens of other publications that covered the story of a man stealing a few hundred dollars of merchandise. 

No one at Walgreens has had to take personal responsibility for stealing millions from its employees. Stefano Pessina, who served as Walgreens’ CEO during the majority of the alleged wage theft, saw his compensation rise from $7,133,155 in 2015 to $17,483,187 in 2020. In 2021, Pessina transitioned from CEO to executive chairman. Pessina’s 2021 compensation is not yet available, but the previous executive chairman made $8,797,713 last year. Needless to say, neither Pessina nor any Walgreens employee has had to spend any time in jail as a result of millions in wage theft.

 Walgreens recorded $2.3bn in profits in fiscal year 2021. Walgreens is still a highly profitable business. Meanwhile, the median Walgreens employee makes just $33,396. When the company steals hundreds or thousands of dollars in wages from its employees, it has a real impact on workers who are struggling to make ends meet.

Numerous companies steal billions in wages from workers in the United States each year. It is a crime that is seldom prosecuted – or covered in the media.

 Biden’s new executive order aims for the federal government to run on carbon-free electricity by the end of the decade, a step toward realizing a 65% reduction in emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050. The US government would end purchases of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035, transition to a “net-zero emissions building portfolio by 2045, including a 50% emissions reduction by 2032,” as well as implement a “Buy Clean” policy “to promote use of construction materials with lower embodied emissions.”

Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that “2050 is an extremely weak goal for the federal government to free itself from climate-heating pollution.”

“It ignores existing technology and adds decades to GSA’s own commitment to 100% renewable energy by 2025,” he said, a reference to the U.S. General Service Administration’s April 2021 decarbonization plan.

“This is like a teenager promising to clean their room in 30 years,” Snape added. “We need action now.”

Mitch Jones, managing director of advocacy programs at Food & Water Watch, said that “while this executive order lays out noteworthy investments in solar energy and important changes in transportation and energy efficiency, their effectiveness is undermined by the White House’s failures to address the root cause of the climate crisis: Fossil fuel development. If Biden was actually serious about tackling the climate crisis, he would ban new oil and gas extraction on federal lands like he repeatedly promised to do. Instead, the White House continues to approve new drilling and fracking projects on public lands, and just conducted a massive sale of offshore drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration also seems eager to expand the export of fossil fuels, creating new sources of climate, air, and water pollution at home.”

Jones continued, “The focus on ‘net-zero’ and zero-emissions goals leaves the door open for expensive and dirty energy infrastructure including nuclear and fossil fuel-based hydrogen. We need President Biden to stop pushing policies that will keep us hooked on dirty energy.”

“If Biden wants to be the climate president, it’s time to stand up against the fossil fuel industry, pass executive actions that actually meet the moment of the climate crisis, whip support from every elected official in his own party, and seize this narrow window of opportunity to pass climate legislation while Democrats still have a governing coalition,” Sunrise Movement campaign director Deirdre Shelly said in a statement. “Anything less is a failure.”

‘Like a Teenager Promising to Clean Their Room in 30 Years’: Biden Net-Zero Climate Goal for 2050 Ridiculed (commondreams.org)

  The World Inequality Report, an exhaustive summary of worldwide income and wealth data that shows inequities in wealth and income are “about as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.”

“Indeed, the share of income presently captured by the poorest half of the world’s people is about half what it was in 1820, before the great divergence between Western countries and their colonies,” the report notes. “In other words, there is still a long way to go to undo the global economic inequalities inherited from the very unequal organization of world production between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries.”

In the nearly three decades since 1995, members of the global 1% have captured 38% of all new wealth while the poorest half of humanity has benefited from just 2%.

“In the U.S., the return of top wealth inequality has been particularly dramatic, with the top 1% share nearing 35% in 2020, approaching its Gilded Age level,” states the report, whose contributors include prominent economists Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman. “In Europe, top wealth inequality has also been on the rise since 1980, though significantly less so than in the U.S.”

At present, the richest 10% of the world’s population grabs more than half of all global income, the researchers found. The billions of people in the poorest half of the global population, meanwhile, get just 8% of the world’s income.

“Global wealth inequalities are even more pronounced than income inequalities,” the report finds. “The poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all, possessing just 2% of the total. In contrast, the richest 10% of the global population own 76% of all wealth.”

 Floods have become increasingly frequent in large Latin American cities, probably due to the effects of global warming and also to local factors, such as the extensive areas of concrete and asphalt that have replaced vegetation.

Extreme weather events are aggravating inequality “in a Latin America that has the most inequitable societies in the world,” said engineer Manuel Rodríguez, professor emeritus at the Universidad de los Andes who served as Colombia’s first minister of environment and sustainable development (1993-1996).

“The poorest of the poor live in shantytowns and slums in the areas most vulnerable to environmental risks, on undevelopable land along riverbanks or in the foothills,” where they are tragically affected by floods and landslides, he explained. 

This is especially important in Latin America, the world’s most urban region, where one in five people live in cities

.A good part of the 1.28 million inhabitants of the “favelas” or shantytowns of São Paulo, according to the 2010 official census, live on low-lying land, often along streams, without sanitation, and they are the first victims of floods. The poor make up 11 percent of the population of São Paulo proper.

In Rio de Janeiro there are also riverside favelas, but the ones built on hillsides or on the tops of hills that separate the city and some neighborhoods are much better known. The risk in these areas is landslides, which have killed many people.

In Brazil’s second largest city, favelas are home to 1.39 million people, 22 percent of the total population, according to the 2010 census.

Lima, which has 10 million inhabitants, and other cities in Peru and Ecuador were victims of El Niño Costero, a climatic phenomenon that warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean but only near these two countries, where it also leads to more intense rainfall.

These and other Andean countries also face the threat of melting glaciers that could deprive the population of the Andes highlands of water, said Rodríguez. In the Caribbean, the biggest threat is hurricanes, which are becoming more frequent and more intense.

 These phenomena hit the poor harder in Latin America, in the world’s most unequal region the poor have fewer resources to overcome the losses caused by the climate crisis, added the Colombian expert.

“Buying a new refrigerator and other appliances damaged each time it floods costs them much more. Poverty is a cause, driving them to disaster, and also a consequence of the disasters themselves,” said Guimarães, a former knowledge management coordinator at UN Habitat, the UN agency for human settlements.

The real estate business drives up the costs of the best, safest sites complete with infrastructure and services. There are too many at-risk areas where the poor “build their homes with their own hands,” without the support of a public policy that ensures them housing with “access to the city,” she told IPS.

 Pushed to the periphery, where land is cheaper, but there are no jobs or public services, nor urbanization, the poor prefer slums near the center

“There is a spatial inequality that results from the low-density expansion model of cities, which pushes low-income families to the periphery, makes access to public transportation difficult and requires long commutes,” said Pablo Lazo, director of Urban Development and Accessibility at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Mexico.

This urbanization model also gives rise to shantytowns in risky areas, “a constant pattern that is repeated in Mexico City, whose eastern neighborhoods are built on hillsides, where water runs off very quickly, fueling landslides,” he said in an interview with IPS via video call from the Mexican capital. Greater Mexico City is home to nearly 20 million people.

Lazo highlighted the need for mechanisms to control the market’s “greed”, such as a requirement that private housing projects include low-cost units.

“In France that proportion is 50 percent,” he said, to illustrate.

Braga said one good possibility for reducing the housing deficit in Rio de Janeiro would be by allocating empty public buildings to social housing. There are many unused state-owned buildings because the city was the capital of the country until 1960.

Climate Crisis Exacerbates Urban Inequality in Latin America | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)