Author: ajohnstone

The System is Rotten

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“To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.” Ursula Le Guin, ‘The Dispossessed’

The capitalist system has subjected people all over the world to racism, poverty, inequality, ecological devastation, and militarism. Globally, government have introduced policies to fatten the pockets of those who can’t fit any more money in their already over–stuffed pockets. Meanwhile there is enough food, enough clean water and sufficient resources for every human being on our planet to live with dignity. People are being neglected and abandoned amid abundance. Who’s getting more than their share of that abundance? The never-ending wars and the never-ending flood of resources into armament production. There’s always money for a bigger military but never enough for education and healthcare. 54 cents of every discretionary federal dollar goes to the military, while just 15 cents goes to anti-poverty programs. 

Poverty that is harsh, degrading, and indecent offends dignity. Unnecessary poverty, on the backs of the powerless and to the benefit of the powerful, is unjust. The everyday living conditions of the poor demands the same drastic political and economic responses as the pandemic crisis yet it is not defined as a national emergency. The world of the poor does not feature on prime time television as a catastrophe. Their situation and suffering do not qualify as a national crisis. FEMA is not mobilised for the homeless. When politicians declare that all people matter and that we are “all in this together” it is a lie.

Socialism means unifying, standing shoulder to shoulder empowering each other. Socialism is a people’s movement for a humane and fair society. We have no choice but to dismantle this ridiculous social system and replace it with one that reflects decency and empathy. What comes next? Where we all become more human, equal and free, or the continuance of exploitation. 


Sharing the planet’s resources will lead to a better tomorrow.

Universal Credit – “irrational and unlawful”

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An appeal court ruled that rigid universal credit payment rules that leave tens of thousands of working benefit claimants out of pocket were irrational and unlawful. 
 Solicitor Tessa Gregory said: “The secretary of state committed to a ‘test and learn’ approach in rolling out universal credit, yet refused to listen to these four hard-working mums when they raised this issue over two years ago.”
The case revolved around the Department for Work and Pensions’ refusal to change universal credit assessment period regulations, which have the effect of penalising claimants whose salary is paid towards the end of a month, resulting in fluctuating levels of income.
Danielle Johnson, a school catering assistant who brought the original case, had argued that the DWP’s refusal to allow her to adjust the date of her universal credit assessment period meant she was left about £500 worse off each year, and was therefore subject to cashflow problems and put at risk of eviction. Johnson is paid on the last day of each month, and her universal credit assessment period runs from the last day of the month to the penultimate day of the next month. In some months, due to a weekend or bank holiday falling at the end of the month, her wages are paid into her bank account two days earlier than normal. The universal credit system reads this as her having earned twice as much in one month and none in the next, meaning that her benefit payment amount fluctuates wildly, and cancelling her work allowance in several months, leaving her £500 a year worse off.
A court ruling last year found in favour of Johnson and three other single mothers, concluding that it was “odd in the extreme” that the DWP was unwilling to modify universal credit arrangements even when claimants were perversely affected. Currently around 85,000 claimants are estimated to be affected by the rules.
Between them, the four had been forced into rent arrears, and borrowed money and used food banks to make ends meet. One of the mothers was so exasperated by the system that she gave up work to look for another job that had no clash between her pay date and universal credit assessment period.
The government argued at the appeal that to have to change the way the benefit’s online computer calculation system worked in line with the original court ruling would undermine the principle of universal credit, cost at least £7.5m and require thousands of calculations to be administered manually.
 Lady Justice Rose said she agreed with the original ruling. The DWP had presented no reason why Johnson and the others should lose money simply because of the date in the month in which they had started their claim. The situation faced by Johnson and others was “perverse”, she said.
She said: “This case is, in my judgment, one of the rare instances where the secretary of state for work and pensions’ refusal to put in place a solution to this very specific problem is so irrational that I have concluded that the threshold is met because no reasonable minister would have struck the balance in that way.”

Inequality and the Pandemic

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Lower-income households are using savings and borrowing more during the coronavirus lockdown, while richer families are saving more as eating out and trips abroad are banned.
That’s according to research from the Resolution Foundation, a think tank.
Lower-income households are twice as likely as richer ones to have increased their debts during the crisis, it said.
“Pre-coronavirus Britain was marked by soaring wealth and damaging wealth gaps between households,” said George Bangham, economist at the Resolution Foundation. “These wealth divides have been exposed by the crisis. While higher-income households have built up their savings, many lower-income households have run theirs down and had to turn to high-interest credit.”
Wealth gaps across the country have also grown, with London and the South East accounting for 38% of all wealth between 2016 to 2018, up from 32% a decade earlier. Wealth inequality remains almost twice as high as income inequality, it adds.

Over-50s Poverty

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Increasing numbers of people aged over 50 in the UK do not have enough money to pay for basic necessities, a study of labour market statistics has shown.

Claims for universal credit, which is available only to households with savings of less than £16,000, from the over-50s have more than doubled since March.

Stuart Lewis, the founder of Rest Less,  a website for the over-50s, said: “Sadly, this is only the tip of the iceberg as many of those unemployed in their 50s will not be eligible to claim universal credit. The surge in older claimants highlights the extremely precarious financial situation that many of this demographic find themselves in today.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/22/uk-reports-rise-in-over-50s-struggling-to-pay-for-necessities

Poverty Plea

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The successful school meal voucher campaign waged by the footballer Marcus Rashford provides only a “sticking plaster” for households living well below the poverty line as a result of Covid-19 job losses, the Fabian Society , a left-of-centre thinktank has said.
 Its research had found a huge gap between benefit payments and the amount needed to escape from poverty despite the increases in universal credit announced by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak.
The research showed that a lone parent without work with one child was left £68 below the £237-a-week poverty line for that family type, while a single parent with three children was having to get by on £142 less than the £393-a-week poverty benchmark.
Andrew Harrop, general secretary of the Fabian Society, said: “Families with children where either parent loses their job during the Covid-19 crisis are finding to their horror that universal credit does not provide enough to meet even basic needs.”
Harrop said more state money was needed.
“During the Covid-19 crisis there can be no possible excuse for punishing families with three children who have just lost their jobs and have no wish to be out of work. There is a safety net required to protect individual households and overall consumer spending during an unprecedented global crisis – our figures reveal its inadequacy.”
The thinktank said its poverty-line figures were a best-case scenario because they assumed that families’ housing and council tax costs were fully covered by other benefit payments, which was almost never the case.

Racial Injustice in the USA

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The US jails hold more than 2.2 million people, or 22% of the world’s prison population, and has a long history of racism in its prison system. Problems with the US justice system go back a long way,



 In 2018, Black people made up 12% of the US adult population but accounted for 33% of people serving a prison sentence, while white people made up 63% of the US adult population, yet just 30% of prison inmates. These figures are drawn from reports by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistics agency of the US Department of Justice. Certain age groups are particularly prominent: in 2018, one out of about 21 Black men aged between 35 and 39 was in prison.



  The 13th Amendment was abused after slaves were liberated following the American Civil War. The amendment states that slavery and forced labor are forbidden in the US — “except as a punishment for crime.” Wealthy white people had lost their labor force in one fell swoop, but had their ways of remedying the situation: In the years after the Civil War, African Americans were arrested for trivial offenses and had to do hard labor as part of their prison sentence.



 Then, in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon announced the “war on drugs.” This campaign against drug-related crime hit the Black community hard — and that was the whole point.  Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman referred to African Americans as being among the “enemies” of the Nixon government. He said that while it was not possible to make it illegal to be Black, it was possible to get the public to associate Black people with heroin. This meant that “we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”



“Mandatory minimums” were also introduced. These meant that long prison sentences could be imposed for minor possession of drugs. For drugs like crack, which was generally less expensive than cocaine and more often found in the possession of Black people, these mandatory punishments were much longer and handed down for smaller amounts than in the case of drugs like cocaine, which was generally more expensive and more often found in the possession of white people. The “mandatory minimums” leave judges with more or less no discretionary power; even if they would like to give the person involved a second chance, they have to hand down decades long jail sentences.



 Poverty is also punished via the bail bond system. A person charged with a crime who cannot afford bail is required to stay in jail until their trial takes place — often for months or even years. Here, African Americans are also disproportionately affected.



 Cori Bush, a Democrat running for Congress in the state of Missouri, told DW that “instead of us spending so much money on tear gas in our police departments, instead of spending all of this money on military-grade weapons and military-grade gear and vehicles,” cities should invest in schools, health care and job training programs. Diverting money from police budgets to community aid would have direct effects in bringing down the incarceration rate among African Americans, according to Bush. 



 “I’ve been in a place where I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from. I made sure my children ate but I didn’t know what I was going to eat,” Bush said, pointing out that such situations had a negative mental impact on people. She is certain that if there were less poverty, fewer young people without future prospects and fewer hungry children, not as many people would end up in prison.



Siberia Warms Up

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Temperatures in the Arctic Circle are likely to have hit an all-time record on Saturday, reaching a scorching 38C (100F) in Verkhoyansk, a Siberian town, 18C higher than the average maximum daily temperature in June.
“Year-on-year temperature records are being broken around the world, but the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth,” said Dr Dann Mitchell, associate professor in atmospheric science at the University of Bristol. “So it is unsurprising to see records being broken in this region. We will see more of this in the near future.”
The Arctic is believed to be warming twice as fast as the global average. But a persistent heatwave this year in the Arctic Circle has worried meteorologists. In March, April and May, the Copernicus Climate Change service reported that the average temperature was around 10C above normal. Earlier in June, parts of Siberia recorded 30C, while in May, Khatanga in Russia – situated in the Arctic Circle at 72 degrees north – set a new May temperature record of 25.4C.
Warming in the Arctic is leading to the thawing of once permanently frozen permafrost below ground. This is alarming scientists because as permafrost thaws, carbon dioxide and methane previously locked up below ground is released. These greenhouse gases can cause further warming, and further thawing of the permafrost, in a vicious cycle known as positive feedback. The higher temperatures also cause land ice in the Arctic to melt at a faster rate, leading to greater run-off into the ocean where it contributes to sea-level rise. There is also an element of positive feedback here, says BBC Weather, because the loss of highly reflective white ice means that the ground and sea absorb more heat. This leads to more warming.
The impact of wildfires are also a consideration. Last summer, they ravaged parts of the Arctic. Although they are common in summer, high temperatures and strong winds made them unusually severe. They typically start in early May before peaking in July and August but by late April this year they were already ten times bigger in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia compared to the same time last year, Russia’s emergencies minister said.
“We’ve upset the energy balance of the entire planet,” cautions Prof Chris Rapley of University College London. Year after year we see temperature records being broken, the eminent climate scientist says. “This is a warning message from the Earth itself,” he tells me. “We ignore it at our peril.”

Stealing your vote (1)

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Trump launched a fresh attack on mail-in voting, making a series of false allegations to suggest the 2020 election will be tainted by fraud,  fueling concerns he is laying the groundwork to contest the results of the 2020 election. He put forward a new theory, claiming that foreign countries would print millions of mail-in ballots and mail them to voters. The idea was previously advanced by US attorney general William Barr.


Experts have said that it would be nearly impossible for a foreign country to orchestrate the kind of fraud Trump and Barr are hyping. Trump pointed to the fact that Americans have voted during times of war to suggest that Covid-19 was merely being used as an excuse to “cheat”. But members of the military have long voted by mail and there is a long history of expanding access to the ballot because of war, Alexander Keyssar, a historian who has studied elections, told NBC News in April.
“There are many checks and balances in place to ensure that nobody could just print ‘millions’ of ballots and vote them,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who works with election officials across the country.
“It’s ridiculous. You can’t just print ballots. There is a specific process with vendors or internal to election offices. Ballot tracking is a way that you can add security,” said Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute and a former election official in Denver. “If either Barr or Trump had toured an election office or had advisers that know the process, they would know this is not feasible.”

We Demand Transformative Social Change

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Across the world, working people are engaged in civil disobedience, protests, and resistance, not just for one issue. Communities are beginning to imagine what our world can look like without capitalism. The unprecedented turbulent events occurring around the globe now demand solutions. Poverty is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution. The Socialist Party say we have that solution. The dehumanizing darkness of capitalist profit is a structural defect. We have an economic system built for profits over human lives. It keeps working people of all colours scrambling for the bare basics of subsistence living. If we don’t stop capitalism in the next decade or two, it is questionable whether humanity will see the 22nd Century

The ruling class seeks to blame the poor people for their circumstances. The capitalists want us to believe that we are the problem. More and more working people no longer buy into the narrative that poverty is our fault. The Socialist Party is calling for a radical revolution of political and economic power. Everybody is deserving of our planet’s abundance. The worst mistake we have made is to demand too little. The profit system does not value human life nor ecological harmony. Instead, it has prioritizes private, corporate and state interests over our precious natural resources. Until we have a people that understands how capitalism works, how and why class systems exist, societal poverty will persist. The necessities of life – water, food, healthcare and housing chief among them – having been commodified, the capitalist system guarantees that there will be winners and losers, and the “two-party” system guarantees that the winners will never allow the losers to change this. We will never rise to our full human potential until the necessities of life are freely available to all as a birthright. To create real security, we must meet everyone’s basic human needs. Our security will not come from the muzzle of a gun, but from the combined voice of an united movement.

 A just  functional society is impossible when the vast majority of its wealth is in the hands of a privileged few, while poverty remains rampant. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison now hold a combined fortune worth nearly half a trillion dollars, $493.9 billion to be exact and have added a combined $101.7 billion to their net worth since March. Existing governments are designed to facilitate economic growth, they are all capitalist growth enhancers by design and cannot be reformed.


 Dividing working people is a tried and true strategy of our masters. It was President Johnson who said in 1960:
“if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on and he’ll empty his pocket for you.”


Speed the day that is not too distant when the voiceless, the vulnerable, the poor and the subjugated will succeed in their struggles. 




The Pandemic Changed India

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 “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi



 The monsoon officially arrived in Mumbai, India last weekend.



 The men who cleared the drains so that the rains don’t cause flooding and water-borne diseases. The electricians who came to fix blackouts caused by wind and rain. The sanitation workers who used to spray neighbourhoods with mosquito repellent before the monsoon to prevent vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and chikungunya. All are missing. Many of these workers and handymen were migrant labourers. For the first time in 125 years, most of the 5,000 dabbawallas have gone home to their villages, defeated by the virus and the lockdown. 1.2 million migrant workers left the city during lockdown.



 They fled the city when the pandemic left them destitute and hungry. Before their mass exodus, well-heeled residents had never noticed them. They were always there, cheap cogs labour, their presence visible only when needed to fix a blocked toilet or deliver pizzas, and instantly forgotten. Now their absence is felt. A city already buckling under coronavirus and facing the annual ritual of catastrophic flooding from the rains is realising its dependence on daily wage labourers and informal casual workers.



The labour shortage means business cannot find technicians, electricians, sweepers, packers or assembly-line workers. Foundries, mills, shops and malls are looking for labour. Construction of roads, flyovers and metro lines is delayed. Half-built buildings need to be finished. A survey carried out  for the Economic Times newspaper estimates a labour shortfall of 40–50%.  Employers have sent out “contractors” who, for a commission, scour villages in the states around Mumbai for skilled and semi-skilled workers to work for daily wages.



 The chief minister of Maharashtra, Uddhav Thackeray,  has urged employers to hire local workers rather than those from other states. Few want to take him up on this suggestion.



 “Migrant workers accept less pay, longer hours and harsher working conditions. Local people will not tolerate this – they have a sense of justice, are rooted in society and enjoy social support. Migrant labourers are herded into factories and hostels and feel cut off and isolated from the society around them,” said DL Karad, national vice-president of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions. “Most of them aren’t coming back. First they were treated like slaves by employers and then they were treated like stray dogs by society during the lockdown. Some, perhaps, may return. But only if they are starving,” said Karad.



 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jun/19/mumbai-discovers-life-isnt-so-sweet-without-the-workers-it-once-ignored



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