On the eve of  the New Zealand general election it may be instructive to remind voters that  in 2017-2018 the wealthiest 10 percent controlled 59 percent of assets, while the poorest half has just 2 percent. 

The top 1 percent, about 38,000 people, owns 20 percent of all assets, with approximately $NZ140 billion secured in trusts, largely to avoid paying tax.

As in every country, New Zealand’s business and ruling elite have used the COVID-19 pandemic to further enrich themselves at the expense of the working class. The pandemic saw an unprecedented package of $50 billion worth of tax breaks, bailouts and subsidies for big business, and up to $100 billion more being printed by the Reserve Bank to prop up the banking system. 

Yet here are 148,000 children currently living in homes experiencing material hardship, including lack of access to basics such as warm clothing, health care and food. Meanwhile, state housing waiting lists have ballooned to approximately 20,000 people from 5,000 in three years.

The subservience of both parties to big business was underlined last year when the Labour-led government, which included the Greens and NZ First, abandoned plans to implement a Capital Gains Tax in the face of media hostility. Labour and the Greens had campaigned for the tax, saying it was necessary to tackle inequality. Ardern has promised that it will never be revived as long as she is the leader.

Ardern’s climate minister, James Shaw, a Green Party member of the coalition, was responsible for the toothless Zero Carbon Act (ZCA), implemented last year following climate strikes involving tens of thousands of students. It set the goal of making the country carbon-neutral by 2050—three decades from now—and even then contains exemptions for the agriculture industry, New Zealand’s biggest source of emissions. Its main mechanism is an emissions trading scheme—a market-based tool that will do nothing to stop the threat of catastrophic climate change.

Ardern’s defence minister, a NZ First member, in releasing a climate change policy for the armed forces, presented a $20 billion plan to upgrade the military, including new aircraft and navy vessels, as necessary to respond to natural disasters caused by climate change. In fact, the spending is to assist New Zealand’s integration into the US-led war preparations against China.

The World Socialist Party asks fellow-workers not to vote for any of the parties or candidates. 

 Millions of garment workers could lose their jobs as global brands are demanding price cuts and delaying payments to suppliers who are desperate for orders to survive the new coronavirus pandemic, researchers said on Friday. Suppliers said they had already laid off 10 percent of their workers and would have to cut another 35 percent of their labour force if order reductions continued.

Suppliers have been asked to make their prices an average of 12 percent cheaper than last year, research by the Center for Global Workers’ Rights (CGWR) at Penn State University in the United States found, describing such practices as “leveraging desperation”.

“We are seeing a dramatic squeeze down of price, reduced orders and late payment,” said Mark Anner, author of the report and director of the CGWR. “This worries me for the wellbeing of the suppliers and the workers. This will affect the small and medium suppliers first.”

Fashion companies cancelled orders worth billions of dollars earlier this year as the coronavirus shuttered stores worldwide, leading to wage losses of up to $5.8bn, according to pressure group Clean Clothes Campaign.

More than half of the manufacturers surveyed said they would have to close down if the “sourcing squeeze” continued.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/10/16/fashion-victims-garment-workers-risk-losing-jobs-during-crisis

 Robert Smith has admitted to his role in the tax evasion scheme as part of a non-prosecution agreement. Prosecutors said Smith admitted to using a nominee trustee and corporate manager to his involvement in four offshore firms. As part of the agreement, he will pay more than $139m in penalties and taxes. He will also abandon $182m protective refund claims, which were filed partly for charitable contributions. Smith is a founder of Vista Equity Partners in San Francisco, and is the richest African-American investor in the US, according to Forbes. Smith shot to fame last year after giving a speech at Morehouse College’s graduation ceremony, promising to pay all student debt for 2019 graduates.

 The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP)  Cost of a Plate of Food 2020 report highlights the countries where a simple meal such as rice and beans costs the most, when compared with people’s incomes. The price in New York State would be $1.26, just 0.6 percent of someone’s income.

In South Sudan it would cost a staggering 186 percent of a person’s daily income. Seventeen of the top 20 countries featured in the index are in sub-Saharan Africa. If a resident in New York State had to pay the same proportion of their salary for a basic meal, the meal would cost US$393.

Burundi, the price would be $90.73

The price in Haiti with consumers spending more than a third of their daily incomes on a plate of food – the price would be the equivalent of US$74 for someone in New York State.

http://wfp.sixeleven.it/wfp-plate-of-food-2020/dist/en/

“Extreme poverty” is defined as living on less than $1.90 a day. So somebody who has 5 cents more income – $1.95 a day – is no longer living in extreme poverty. Such is the poverty of statistics and its distance from actual reality. 

A  phenomenal rise in extreme poverty has been accompanied by an upsurge in the incomes of the world’s billionaires and the super-rich. The paradox of poverty amidst plenty is being blamed largely on the coronavirus pandemic which has driven millions, mostly in the developing world, into a state of perpetual poverty.

The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer.

The world’s total population is around 7.8 billion, and according to the UN, more than 736 million people live below the international poverty line. A World Bank report last week said extreme poverty is set to rise this year, for the first time in more than two decades, while the impact of the spreading virus is expected to push up to 115 million more people into poverty. The pandemic, which is also compounding the forces of conflict and climate change, has already been slowing poverty reduction, the World Bank said. By 2021, as many as 150 million more people could be living in extreme poverty.

In contrast, the wealth of the world’s billionaires reached a new record high in the middle of the pandemic, primarily as “a rebound in tech stocks boosting the fortunes of the global elite”, according to a report released last week by UBS Global Wealth Management and PwC Switzerland. Providing a sheaf of statistics, the report said total wealth held by billionaires reached $10.2 trillion last July, described as “a new high”, compared with $8.9 trillion in 2017. The number of billionaires worldwide has been estimated at 2,189, up from 2,158 in 2017. The rising earnings were mostly from three sectors, including tech, health care and industry—a trend accelerated by the pandemic.  billionaires have seen their fortunes hit record highs during the pandemic, with top executives from technology and industry earning the most. The world’s richest saw their wealth climb 27.5% to $10.2tn (£7.9tn) from April to July this year, according to a report from Swiss bank UBS.

Professor Kunal Sen, Director of UN University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), told IPS the pandemic is going to push millions of households into poverty, all around the developing world.

The projected rise in poverty has also undermined one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which had targeted the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger by 2030.

Ben Phillips, author of ‘How to Fight Inequality’, told IPS the concentration of wealth amongst a handful of oligarchs, and the spread of impoverishment to hundreds of millions more people, are not the disconnected coincidences that the super-rich claim, but are two sides of the same bad penny. He said COVID-19 has not created obscene inequality, but it has supercharged it. In this systemic crisis, the healing impact of philanthropy will be no greater than a novelty sticking plaster on a gaping wound.

Dereje Alemayehu, Executive Coordinator, Global Alliance for Tax Justice, told IPS inequality is rising in every country; so also, is the income of billionaires. These are causally linked.

“Multinationals and the wealthy do not pay their share of taxes, thus depriving countries the public revenue needed to address inequality.”

http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/10/global-poverty-soars-incomes-worlds-billionaires-hit-new-highs/

 The rights of indigenous communities – including the right to vote – have been systematically violated for generations with devastating consequences for access to clean air and water, health, education, economic opportunities, housing and sovereignty. 

Voter turnout for Native Americans and Alaskan Natives is the lowest in the country, and about one in three eligible voters (1.2 million people) are not registered to vote.

 American Indians and Native Alaskans were the last group in the United States to get citizenship and to get the vote. Even after the civil war and the Reconstruction (13th, 14th and 15th) amendments there was a supreme court decision that said indigenous people could never become US citizens, and some laws used to disenfranchise them were still in place in 1975. In fact first-generation violations used to deny – not just dilute voting rights – were in place for much longer for Native Americans than any other group.  Laws passed specifically to disenfranchise African Americans were also passed in places which didn’t have black people. For example, Idaho put in place felony disenfranchisement around when it became the state, at a time when census data shows there were only 88 black people – it was designed to disenfranchise Native people. Half the states with harshest felony disenfranchisement don’t have many black people, but have big Native Americans or Latino populations.

The Dakotas are the heart of what was the great Sioux Nations. It’s been one of the worst places for suppression of the Native American vote. North Dakota has passed one law after another that made it harder and harder for people to vote. In South Dakota, more than a quarter of the 2016 registered voters in Todd county – which is the Rosebud Sioux – had been purged by 2020. 

Voting by mail is very challenging for Native Americans for multiple reasons. First and foremost, most reservations do not have home mail delivery. Instead, people need to travel to post offices or postal provide sites – little places that offer minimal mail services and are located in places like gas stations and mini-marts. Take the Navajo Nation that encompasses 27,425 square miles – it’s larger than West Virginia, yet there are only 40 places where people can send and receive mail. In West Virginia, there are 725. Not a single PO box on the Navajo Nation has 24-hour access. All the mail sent from post offices off-reservation arrived at the election office within one to three days. Whereas around half sent from the reservation took three to 10 days. South Dakota requires mail ballots to be notarized but there are no notaries on reservations. 

It can make it very difficult for people who live on reservations where many roads don’t have names or numbers – so-called non-standard addresses, which are very problematic in states requiring IDs with residential addresses. A number of states like South Dakota have chosen to make it a felony offense with prison terms and fines if someone votes using an address different to the one given to register, even though unstable housing is a big issue on reservations, and people stay in different places all the time.

Tribal ID has not been accepted in a number of states in the past, including North Dakota and Minnesota. 

 A federal appeals court has rejected a bid to give an extra 10 days after Election Day to count ballots mailed by Navajo Nation members living on the Arizona portion of the tribe’s reservation. Arizona’s requirement that mail ballots be received by 7 p.m. on election night would disenfranchise tribal members.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/16/native-americans-voting-rights-mail-in-ballots-us-elections

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-arizona-elections-courts-voting-2020-57804bf790e99ff158c635d3d6b9eaed

California’s Proposition 22 is a state ballot measure that would exempt gig companies from AB5, a landmark labor law passed in 2019 that extended employee protections to gig workers. In other words, Prop 22 would allow these companies not to treat gig workers like employees.

The official name of the ballot measure is the “Protect App-Based Drivers and Services Act”. The measure, if passed by the majority of voters on 3 November, would apply to app-based drivers, including those who work for Uber, Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash. 

California is the birthplace of the gig economy, and how it is regulated in its home state may have effects on how regulation plays out in the rest of the country, and the world.

The companies behind Prop 22 have indeed made billions on the contractor-based business model. When Lyft went public in 2019, it was valued at $22bn and had 1.9 million drivers working through its app. Uber was valued at $82bn ahead of its initial public offering in May 2019 and had 3.9 million drivers.  The businesses have spent more than $184m on campaigns promoting Proposition 22. Tactics used to promote Proposition 22 have been aggressive and persistent: Uber and Lyft both sent out a number of emails and push notifications within their apps encouraging riders to vote yes. Instacart has encouraged workers to advertise the ballot measure with stickers.

 Positioning gig workers as permanent contractors would pose a major blow to workers’ rights. Drivers and labor groups oppose Prop 22, saying it allows companies to sidestep their obligations to provide benefits and standard minimum wages to their workers. Many drivers say they have created a lot of the value for these companies but have seen very little of the profit. “Uber is paying drivers poverty wages and continues to slash wages while executives make millions,” one driver told the Guardian.

 The Proposition 22 coalition estimated workers would make $25-27 per hour. Another study from Univeristy of California, Berkeley, said earnings could still be well below the minimum wage, at $5.64 per hour. California’s minimum wage will be $15.60 in 2021.

The official “No On Prop 22 Coalition” is made up of four driver groups: Gig Workers Rising, We Drive Progress, Mobile Workers United and Rideshare Drivers United. The Service Employees International Union also joined the fight against Prop 22.Cumulatively these groups represent more than 55,000 workers in California.  The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and a number of California papers including the Sacramento Bee, the Fresno Bee, the Modesto Bee, Merced Sun Star, and San Luis Obispo Tribune have called on voters to reject Prop 22. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have spoken also against it, while Bernie Sanders has also condemned the ballot measure, tweeting: “I’m opposed to Prop 22 because people working full time deserve decent wages and good benefits.”

If Proposition 22 passes, workers will retain their status as independent contractors. They will not be provided health insurance through Lyft or Uber but will get stipends towards insurance. It will also be difficult to change or overturn in the future, because that would require a 7/8 supermajority – difficult to attain in the California legislature.

If Proposition 22 doesn’t pass companies will not be exempt from AB5 and drivers would then be entitled to healthcare, minimum wage, and other employee benefits. However, Uber and Lyft have threatened to pull out of California if the bill is passed

 Most progressives and liberals consider Trump much like a surgeon views a malignant tumor. Cut it out and the patient’s health will improve. But the cancer is capitalism and it has spread to all parts (and parties) of the body politic. Excising Trump is no cure.

Bipartisanship offers what the economic elites like best, namely government policy based on no political principles whatever – not even the phantom principles of Democratic and Republican party platforms – all the better to directly serve the interests of corporate capitalism. The ruling class get on with the business of enriching itself without having to busy itself with actual government policy. Whether the Democratic or Republican parties identifies the “national interest” and “public good” with the needs of investors, bankers and shareholders for maximum corporate profit. Bipartisanship means the two parties working together to screw working people. Government under capitalism does not act to protect a “level playing field” to give working people a fair chance. 

 Corporate interests organize and contend for special favors, subsidies and tax advantages, privileged access to markets — all of which is bought and paid for in political contributions and other forms of (mainly legal) bribery to both parties. The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles. With either of those parties in power one thing is always certain and that is that the capitalist class hold the reins and the working class are under the lash. 

The Republican and Democratic parties are alike capitalist parties—differing only in being committed to different sets of capitalist interests—they have the same principles and are equally corrupt and are united as one in their subservience to capital and their hostility to labor.

The capitalists made no mistake in endorsing Trump. They know him well and he has served them well. They know that his instincts, associations, tastes and desires are with them, that he is in fact one of them and that he has nothing in common with the working class. And Biden is near enough alike in his support for the fundamentals of capitalism to pass for Trump’s twin brother. Both adopt the Wall street brand.

Trump and Biden are both good Republicans, just as they are both good Democrats. The Democratic Party are hopeful of success because of the personality defects of Trump rather than any merits of its own or virtues of Biden.

The capitalists are combined against you. Both Republican and Democratic parties are capitalist parties. There is not the slightest doubt about it. It can be proved in a hundred different ways. There will be no change as long as you continue to support the prevailing capitalist parties.

As long as the votes of working people are divided between the Republican and Democratic parties capitalism has nothing to fear, as both these parties are its equally subservient tools. Whichever of these parties is in power capitalism has nothing to fear. As a matter of fact there is no real difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. Both are supporters of the existing competitive economic system and it is now very difficult to distinguish a Republican from a Democrat by any policy that he or she favors or opposes. Regardless of what some high-profile liberals and progressives might claim it is not going to make a vital difference to the country whether the Republicans or the Democrats win this year.

The World Socialist Party knows neither color, gender nor race. It knows no aliens among the oppressed and downtrodden. It is first and last the party of the workers, regardless of their nationality, proclaiming their interests, voicing their aspirations, and fighting their battles. People are turning with loathing and disgust from the Republican and Democratic parties under whose past administrations appalling conditions have been brought upon the people. The message of socialism, which, for many years  was spurned by these people, increasingly falls today upon eager ears and receptive minds.

Unlike the platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties, the World Socialist Party position is a plain and simple declaration of principles. They were not framed merely with a view to winning votes. There is no ambiguity; no evasion, no attempt to compromise and no effort to maintain the miserable fiction that the interests of labor and capital are identical. The working class will obtain little relief through defeating Republicans simply to elect Democrats in their stead.

The World Socialist Party is the only party of the people, the only party opposed to the rule of the plutocracy, the only truly democratic party in the world, the party of an awakening working class. The education, organization and co-operation of the workers, the entire body of them, is the conscious aim and the self-imposed task of the World Socialist Party for the socialist commonwealth. The World Socialist Party, in short, proposes to place the workers in possession of all the wealth they produce

 In 2016, barely half of eligible U.S. voters actually voted.

Texas, for example, only allows absentee voting if voters are 65 or older, disabled, or incarcerated but eligible to vote. Even during COVID, the state won’t expand absentee voting to more of the state’s population, and they’ve fought tooth and nail in court to prevent counties with millions of residents from opening more than one drop-off point.

 Wisconsin requires the signature of a witness on absentee ballots. During the primary, the state threw out 14,000 absentee ballots because they lacked witness signatures. In a general election, those 14,000 votes could swing the entire result.

Eight states require witness signatures—and three even require a notary to sign it.

 Arkansas and Alabama require voters to mail a photocopy of their ID along with their ballots, a burdensome requirement.

 Milwaukee, had only five polling places in the primary. Voters had to stand in long lines and literally risk their lives to exercise their right to vote.

 Already, states like Georgia are seeing 10 and 11 hour lines even for early voting in the general election. Some areas, especially where there are large numbers of voters of color, have few polling places and long lines.

Then there are the ID requirements.

 Wisconsin is among the six states with the strictest photo ID requirements to vote. It’s no big deal if you have a Wisconsin driver’s license, state ID, or passport —  but a very big deal if you don’t. In the 2016 election, in two Wisconsin counties alone, voter ID law kept 17,000 people from voting. Trump won Wisconsin by 22,700 votes.

Elections are held on a Tuesday, when most people work. 

Despite reforms in many states aimed at restoring ex-felons’ voting rights, an estimated 5.2 million Americans will remain disenfranchised and unable to vote in the 2020 elections.  Setbacks in some states have reversed some gains.

“The bedrock of any democracy is the right to vote,” said Amy Fettig, executive director of The Sentencing Project, in a statement introducing the study. “Laws that exclude people from voting have destabilized communities and families in America for decades by denying them a voice in determining their futures. Voting is a vital responsibility of citizenship that must be encouraged and defended.”

According to the new report released by The Sentencing Project—titled “Locked Out 2020” (pdf)—one out of every 44 U.S. adults is disenfranchised due to current or previous felony convictions. The rate of disenfranchisement is highest in Southern states, the analysis found, where ballot restrictions enacted during the Jim Crow era in order to prevent Black men from voting and holding office remain in effect. In three states—Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee—more than 8% of the adult population, or one of every 13 people, has had their right to vote taken away. In seven states—Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wyoming—more than one in seven Black Americans is barred from the ballot box, twice the national average.

The estimated 5.17 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, represent a 15% decline since 2016 due to states enacting measures to restore voting rights. There were an estimated 1.17 million people disenfranchised in 1976, 3.34 million in 1996, 5.85 million in 2010, and 6.11 million in 2016.

One in 16 Black Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate 3.7 times greater than that of non-Blacks. Over 6.2% of the adult Black population is disenfranchised, compared to 1.7% of the non-Black population.

560,000 Latinx Americans, or over 2% of the voting eligible population, are disenfranchised.

1.2 million women are disenfranchised, comprising over 20% of the total disenfranchised population.

Only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow currently incarcerated felons to vote. Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, and Ukraine allow convicted felons to vote, even while they are incarcerated. 

In Florida, for example, nearly 900,000 people who have completed their sentences remain unable to vote despite the passage of a 2018 referendum that restored their voting rights. The following year, Republicans undermined this historic reform by passing a law—later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court—requiring former felons to pay all their outstanding court fees in order to regain the right to vote.

https://commons.commondreams.org/t/nearly-5-2-million-americans-will-be-disenfranchised-in-2020-election-due-to-felony-convictions-study/83206/6