Much has been claimed about “citizens” capitalism of how mobile telephone apps operated by the likes of Robinhood  makes buying shares easier and along with using social media the small investor can challenge the Wall St giant hedge funds. 

But reality begs to differ. 

Nearly half of Americans own no stock at all.

 Another quarter of the population have 401(k) retirement funds under $23,000. 

With bank account interest hovering around zero percent and at least a third of American families with nothing to invest, there’s little chance that the poorest among us could participate in the passive get-rich savings plan of stock ownership.

The richest 10% of Americans own 84 percent of all stocks.

People who have money can buy stocks, wait for awhile, and ultimately get richer by doing nothing. But low-income Americans have to depend on wages for their fair share of national economic growth—and wages have barely budged in over 50 years

Opinion | The Year of Cheating the Poor (commondreams.org)

 Discussion held online via ‘Discord’ – introduced by Paddy Shannon, 9th December 2020

FAQ What do you get out of being a socialist?

The percentage of U.S. privately owned wealth which is held by the richest 1% has risen from 5% in 1990 to 36% today, more than a seven-fold increase. At this rate of increase the richest 1% are heading to own the entire country by around the year 2035. 

There has been roughly doubling their percentage of America’s privately owned wealth every decade since 1990; and, at that rate, they’d reach 72% by around the year 2030.

America’s Richest 1% Owned 5% in 1990, Own 36% Today — Strategic Culture (strategic-culture.org)

 Many will have read in the Guardian of a secretive government department that conducted intelligence operations against those who could termed political dissidents. 

A Socialist Party member, the late Peter Newell, had did his own research and investigation some years ago into this tool of the police state.

The Information Research Department was formed in 1948. The then junior minister at the Foreign Office in Attlee’s Labour Government, Christopher Mayhew, claims the credit for its creation. 

Ostensibly concerned to combat Soviet “imperialism” and “communism”,  the IRD also actively aided right-wing politicians in the Labour Party and within the trade unions, collaborating with various CIA fronts. It was financed in the same way as the other British spying and security services are funded, with no transparency or accountability to Parliament. The IRD infiltrated and influenced the media and in particularly the BBC. 

Peter Newell references the Information Research Department in two articles. 

Marx, the Cold War and the Spooks: Marx, the Cold War and the “Spooks”

Marx, the Cold War and the Spooks: Secret History – How the British government controls and censors the news

His notes and sources can be read here:

Marx, the Cold War and the Spooks: Information Research Department – Notes and Quotes

 Pfizer has said it expects $15bn (£11bn) of sales this year of the coronavirus vaccine it developed with German firm BioNTech. The vaccine sales represent a quarter of its expected revenue for this year.

Pfizer expects $15bn sales of Covid-19 vaccine – BBC News

Many foreign companies have moved factories from China to Myanmar in recent years to take advantage of lower wages and a pliant work-force. Total trade in goods between Myanmar and the United States amounted to nearly $1.3 billion in the first 11 months of 2020, up from $1.2 billion in all of 2019. Clothes and shoes accounted for 41% of total U.S. goods imports, followed by luggage (Samsonite), which accounted for nearly 30%. LL Bean, H&M and Adidas are among the importers. These corporations were all willing to trade with Myanmar’s military who controlled prominent companies in the country.

(see SOCIALISM OR YOUR MONEY BACK: The Myanmar Army’s Business Network)

Back in 2015, when the world’s media was hailing the arrival of “democracy” in Myanmar, bestowing Aung San Suu Kyi with honours, (then later withdrawing them for her collaboration in the persecution of the Rohingya),  our journal was warning that the Burmese army had not at all ceded political power but that Aung San Suu Kyi only held office as a proxy for the military.

(see Material World: Burma – More Rounds To Go (worldsocialism.org)

Our assessment is supported by this comment on the current situation by Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a human rights activist based in Yangon.

“The military was already in power – even the ruling NLD was covering up their [genocide] in the ICJ [International Court of Justice]. The facade of democracy in Myanmar had now crumbled, she said. “It’s not real, it’s not genuine, we’re not going anywhere with this framework.”

( see Fears army will tighten grip in Myanmar after Aung San Suu Kyi detained | Myanmar | The Guardian )

The claims by the military that there was widespread fraud in the recent elections were true but not as they would like the world to believe. The Election Commission canceled voting in many areas where parties critical of the government were probably going to win seats. Marginalised ethnic minority groups in conflict-plagued regions of Myanmar, were excluded in their homelands notably in Shan, Kachin and Karen, not to mention the Rohingya in Racine, from the vote.  More than one million people were estimated to have been disenfranchised in a gerrymandered election, fully approved by those now deposed and detained.

Chickens have come home to roost.

Having said all that, the World Socialist Movement cannot condone a military dictatorship of any kind and we condemn the army takeover for depriving our Myanmar fellow-workers of even the most limited liberties that they possessed. But our fellow-workers should also recognise the hypocrisy of those world politicians pretending indignation at the actions of the Myanmar military. 

The U.S. is a failed state, one that is negligent of the health needs of millions of people during a deadly pandemic, unable or unwilling to address the basic needs of tens of millions of its working people, and valuing their labor for its role in creating wealth, but not their lives.

By the end of 2019, total global wealth stood at $399.2 trillion, but just a mere 0.1% of the global population, totaling 175,000 ultra-wealthy people, owned 25% of global wealth.

 Together with another 52 million millionaires, making up the top 1%, they owned 43.3% of all personal wealth. 

Meanwhile billions of people who make up the bottom half of humanity have no personal wealth at all with a pitiful share of just 1% of the global wealth, with the bottom 90% holding only 19%. 

Furthermore, the share of North America and Europe of this wealth in 2019 was 55%, despite those regions comprising just 17% of the global population. That leaves the ‘poor south,’ where 83% of all people reside, with only 45% of total global wealth.

Between the years 1975 and 2018 an astounding, but still conservatively estimated, $47 trillion shifted upwards from the working people in the bottom 90 percentile to the top 1%. 

 Considered on a more acute level, the combined income of a household of two full-time workers in 2018 is barely more than what a single worker would have earned had inequalities remained at the 1975 level. 

By 2020, this financial strip-mining of the bottom 90% had exceeded $50 trillion, or the equivalent of paying every working person in the bottom 90% an additional $13,728 annually. 

In the US, the median male worker had to work 33 weeks in 1985 to pay for healthcare, housing, transportation and family educational expenses and 53 weeks by 2018.

This is organized theft. The U.S. is perhaps the richest society ever in history, yet you wouldn’t know it.  The U.S. has been suffering from “deaths of despair” caused by opioids, alcoholism, depression, and suicides taking the lives of tens of thousands of white middle-aged working people and causing consecutive declines in their life expectancy.

 Personal debt exceeds $14 trillion. 

Some 87 million people lacked adequate healthcare coverage before the pandemic hit. 

62% of personal bankruptcies have been linked to illness. 

40% of the people could not afford $400 in emergency cash, again before the pandemic and the economic depression of 2020. 

Half of all workers lived paycheck to paycheck. 

Student debt went from zero in 1960 to $1.7 trillion by 2020. 

On average, U.S. citizens die holding $62,000 worth of debt.

The Covid-19 pandemic and capitalist logic combined to further exacerbate inequalities and cause suffering.

Between March and November of 2020 in the U.S. the 650 U.S. billionaires grew their wealth by $1 trillion and now own nearly $4 trillion in total, or 3.5% of the estimated $112 trillion of all privately held household wealth in the U.S. 

The top 1% owned $34.23 trillion (30.5%) of this wealth, the top 10% owned $77.32 trillion (69.04%), while the bottom half of the population owned just $2.08 trillion (1.86%).

 Therefore, just 650 people, the billionaires, owned twice as much as the bottom 165 million people combined. 

 Jeff Bezos added $70 billion to his wealth (a 61.4% increase), making his wealth stand at $182.4 billion by November. 

Elon Musk’s wealth surged by a whopping 413% to a total of $126.2 billion. 

Mark Zuckerberg saw 85.9% growth in his wealth reaching a total of $101.7 billion.

 Bill Gates increased his net worth by 21.8% to a total sum of $98 billion. 

And Warren Buffett’s worth reached $88.3 billion, a 30.8% increase during the same period.

 The media often talk about the ups and downs of the stock market as if it reflects the general economic conditions of ordinary workers, however:

 (1) the bottom 50% in the U.S. own just $0.16 trillion in stocks while the top 1% own $14.04 trillion, and 

(2) the top 10% own more than 88% of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares. Such assets comprised about 41% of their overall wealth in the 2nd quarter of 2020. 

Consequently, the rise in the stock market during the pandemic – fueled by the Fed injecting trillions of dollars into the financial markets and slashing interest rates – massively benefited the top 10% and helped further widen the wealth gap.

Tax policies have also contributed to the runaway inequality in the U.S. To give just two examples: The recently deceased Casino magnet, Sheldon Adelson, whose net worth was at least $34 billion, received $560 million in tax breaks from the Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017,

And Charles Koch, with a net worth of $113 billion, received a $1.4 billion tax break.

Meanwhile, in the other America, in 2020, 8 million people slipped into poverty between May and November when the initial aid to mitigate the pandemic suffering and the effects of business closures ran its course without renewal by the governing class. 

A survey of U.S. households released by the US Census Bureau on Dec. 2, 2020 showed that 31% of households had difficulty paying for the usual household expenses; 35.3% worried that an “eviction or foreclosure in the next two months is either very likely or somewhat likely”; 12.7% say “there was either sometimes or often not enough to eat in the last 7 days”; and 31% of adults expected “someone in their household to have a loss in employment income in the next 4 weeks.” 

All this in a year in which from mid-March to mid-October more than 84 million claims were filed for unemployment compensation – that’s more than half the civilian labor force – indicating devastating conditions for the working people.

As of January 29, 2021, there were 25.8 million cases of coronavirus reported in the U.S. with the number of deaths standing at 434,783. 

 To help visualize this insurmountable loss, consider the following. There were on average 1.7 deaths per minute from Covid-19 in the month of Dec. 2020 alone. The nation’s life expectancy at birth is expected to drop by a year for the first time since WWII from 78.8 to 77.7. Each person who has died from Covid-19 was on average deprived of about 13 years of life amounting to more than 5.65 million years of life lost in total (given the number of deaths as of this writing).

 Already more than 3.1 million people have lost a close relative. And these deaths are not evenly distributed, for 1 in 800 blacks have died compared to 1 in 1325 whites.

Biden promises a return to a pre-Trump normality bear in mind that a return to the pre-neoliberal period still poses two serious problems. 

(1) Leaving capital with all its powers and resources intact only guarantees that it will find ways to rollback whatever gains we are able to make, as it in fact has done since the late 1970s.

(2) Capitalism’s very existence depends on an endless process of the accumulation of capital. 

Late Capitalism and Its Runaway Inequality Problem | Dissident Voice

 Bursaries for poorer children to attend private fee-paying schools have been far too scarce to significantly open up access to them to the less affluent. According to new research on social mobility found that the bursaries could not “account for more than a minor share of the participation” of families with lower incomes.

Bursaries and grants “are relatively low in value and distributed to only one in five of families” outside the top 10% richest families, according to the research by University College London’s institute of education.

Bursary programmes have often been cited in response to criticisms that high fees continue to make the schools the preserve of the rich. The findings challenge the idea that such schemes have made a major dent in the exclusivity of private schools. The team also found a link between middle- and lower-income families with children in private education and housing wealth, suggesting booming house prices have helped them get access to private schooling despite higher fees.

“Though income progressive and related to need, bursaries and grants are relatively low in value and distributed to only one in five of families outside the top decile; they cannot, therefore, account for more than a minor share of the participation of these non-income-rich families,” the team concluded. “However, among homeowners, non-rich families with privately educated children have much greater housing wealth than families with children in state schools.

 Britain remained “distinctive” in the significant social and economic divide between private and state school pupils, describing it as “among the highest in the developed world”. While about 9% of adults have been to an independent school, private schooling remained “a significant pathway through which some families obtain long-term advantages for their children”.

The proportion of pupils helped with financial support has not significantly increased, despite the costs of private schooling rising considerably. By 2018, the average annual basic fee was £14,280 for day schools and £33,684 for boarding schools – a 60% real-terms increase from 2000 and three times the 1980 fees.

 Since 1997, they found that throughout the period, around 15 out of every 100 pupils received direct financial support. The value of financial support was around £4,900 in 2011–2018, little changed from earlier periods and “thus accounting for a smaller fraction of the fees: 35% compared with 57% in the first period”. 

The paper concludes: “The data could not conclusively support claims that the private school sector has widened access for students from low-income families through more generous financial support.”

Private school bursaries ‘still too scarce’ to tackle inequality | Private schools | The Guardian

Less than £12,000 of a £40m fund set up to compensate Chagos islanders who were forcibly evicted from their homeland by the British government has reached those living in the UK.

Four years after it was announced, the Foreign Office fund has distributed less than 1% of its budget in direct support to islanders forced from their homes in the Indian Ocean.

The limited Foreign Office funding used so far has been spent on interpretation services for Chagossians, many of whom depend on French creole translation, and modest support for community groups.

Money was also spent on scoping visits to the islands by government officials, with several hundred thousand pounds used for “heritage trips”, granting Chagossians short stays on the islands, often to tend to relatives’ graves. Chagossian charity groups have, however, described this use of the support fund as “disingenuous”.

Chagossian charities have been handing out crisis grants of £50 to families who are struggling to buy food or pay for funeral costs but have expressed frustration that the multi-million pound support fund is not being utilised.

The Conservative MP Henry Smith, whose constituency of Crawley in West Sussex is home to most of Britain’s 3,000-plus Chagossian population, said: “The £40m support fund was announced almost five years ago and it has been tortuous to extract money from it ever since…it’s outrageous that next to none of this funding has actually been utilised. The fact that this sort of funding hasn’t been deployed is another failure of Foreign Office promises over half a century to the Chagossian community.”

Just £12,000 of £40m fund for displaced Chagos islanders has been spent | World news | The Guardian

 The Home Office placed hundreds of asylum seekers in controversial military barracks following fears that better accommodation would “undermine confidence” in the system.  Critics say ministers were “pandering to prejudice” and jeopardising health for “political ends”.

Conditions in two Ministry of Defence (MoD) sites – known as Napier Barracks, in Folkestone, Kent, and Penally Barracks, in Pembrokeshire – since they were were repurposed for housing asylum seekers last September prompted campaigners, lawyers and humanitarian groups to report poor access to healthcare and legal advice, as well as concerns over coronavirus safety.

Bridget Chapman, of local charity Kent Refugee Action Network, said the Home Office’s decision to use “inappropriate and isolated” buildings as asylum seeker accommodation was a “deliberate choice to create a narrative of being deliberately tough on those seeking sanctuary”.  

An official document states that destitute asylum seekers are “not analogous” to British citizens and other permanent residents who are in need of state welfare assistance, and that the “less generous” support provided to this group is “justified by the need to control immigration. Any provision of support over and beyond what is necessary to enable the individuals to meet their housing and subsistence needs could undermine public confidence in the asylum system and hamper wider efforts to tackle prejudice and promote understanding within the general community and amongst other migrant groups.”

Sophie Lucas, solicitor at Duncan Lewis, a law firm that has represented a number of asylum seekers who have subsequently been moved out of the barracks, said the document insinuated that a less generous system for asylum seekers was a “legitimate response” to outcry from extremist groups.

“Instead of attempting to combat bigotry and hostility towards asylum seekers, the Home Office have pandered to prejudice. Penalising an already extremely vulnerable group of people in this way is unlawful,” she said. 

Chai Patel, legal director at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), said: “The government implied these cramped and disused barracks were being used as temporary housing because there was no alternative. But this document reveals that Home Office has been jeopardising people’s health for partly political ends – prioritising playing ‘tough’ on migration over the lives of extremely vulnerable people, who’ve been placed in conditions reminiscent of those they were fleeing.”

Naomi Phillips, director of policy and advocacy at British Red Cross, said the sites were “completely inappropriate and inhumane” as housing for refugees, and called for them to be close “urgently”.

Home Office put refugees in barracks after fears better housing would ‘undermine confidence’ in system | The Independent