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)

 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

 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

 The UK’s state pension payment system is not fit for purpose, resulting in the “shameful shambles” of an underpayment scandal that left tens of thousands of pensioners short-changed, according to a scathing report from a committee of MPs, the public accounts committee (PAC).

Last year it emerged that the DWP was estimating it had underpaid 134,000 pensioners, mostly women, a total of more than £1bn of state pension cash that they were entitled to.

The National Audit Office said this long-term underpayment of state pensioners – some problems date as far back as 1985 – was the result of repeated errors that were almost inevitable amid complex rules and outdated IT systems.

It emerged that those affected that the DWP could trace would be paid an average of £8,900 each.

The report stated that the pension payment system “is not fit for purpose”, and set out a series of recommendations.

The committee said the department was now on its ninth go at fixing the mistakes since 2018, and that this “comes at great cost to the taxpayer” – the bill for staff costs alone is expected to top £24m by the end of 2023.

The MPs also said the DWP had “left people in the dark over their entitlement”, adding: “The department also admits that many other pensioners are under-claiming their state pension … these pensioners need clearer information to act or risk missing out on significant sums.”

UK state pension systems not fit for purpose – MPs’ report | Older people | The Guardian

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)

The 10 wealthiest billionaires in the U.S. have added roughly $1 billion to their collective fortune every day—or around $12,600 per second—since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

 The combined net worth of the 10 richest people in the U.S. has more than doubled since March 2020, reaching $1.35 trillion this week.

 An analysis covering more than 200 countries and territories published in The Lancet says antimicrobial resistance (AMR).is killing more people than HIV/Aids or malaria. Many hundreds of thousands of deaths are occurring due to common, previously treatable infections because bacteria that cause them have become resistant to treatment.

It has become a leading cause of death worldwide and is killing about 3,500 people every day. More than 1.2 million – and potentially millions more – died in 2019 as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.  In the western Europe region, which includes the UK, more than 51,000 people died as a direct result of AMR.HIV/Aids and malaria have been estimated to have caused 860,000 and 640,000 deaths, respectively, in 2019.

“These new data reveal the true scale of antimicrobial resistance worldwide, and are a clear signal that we must act now to combat the threat,” said the report’s co-author Prof Chris Murray, of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

The new Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (Gram) report estimates deaths linked to 23 pathogens and 88 pathogen-drug combinations across 204 countries and territories in 2019 using more than 470m individual records.

Regionally, deaths caused directly by AMR were estimated to be highest in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, at 24 deaths per 100,000 population and 22 deaths per 100,000 population respectively. In high-income countries, AMR led directly to 13 deaths per 100,000 and was associated with 56 deaths per 100,000. 

Tim Jinks, the head of the drug-resistant infections programme at Wellcome Trust, said, “Like Covid-19, we know what needs to be done to address AMR, but we must now come together with a sense of urgency and global solidarity if we are to be successful.”

Antimicrobial resistance now a leading cause of death worldwide, study finds | Antibiotics | The Guardian

 The common prosperity we desire is not egalitarianism,” China’s president Xi told delegates. “We will first make the pie bigger and then divide it properly through reasonable institutional arrangements. As a rising tide lifts all boats, everyone will get a fair share from development, and development gains will benefit all our people in a more substantial and equitable way.”

He continued to say that the country is still open to investment from overseas.

 Britain’s “porous” safety net has left the poorest households inadequately protected against major economic disruption, in a major report, the Resolution Foundation claimed.

 A “weak” welfare system is “almost unrecognisable” to that created in the aftermath of the Second World War and William Beveridge’s seminal report.

It warns that cuts to cost-based benefits since 2010 “mean Britain goes into the 2020s with a porous safety net that leaves too many in poverty and offers little, and highly variable, insurance for workers whose jobs are affected by economic change”.

The authors of the report highlight that government’s “extra spending has not been driven by more generous income support, which has consistently fallen further behind average earrings.”

Unemployment support is set to “fall to its lowest real-terms values in just over three decades this April, at just £77.29 a week”.

Karl Handscomb, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, said:

 “Our social security system has seen huge change over the last 75 years, leaving us with a benefits system that makes little attempt to provide basic levels of income support, but doing more to support households with specific costs like housing and children.

“With even those cost-related benefits cut back over the past decade, we go into the 2020s with a porous safety net.

He added: “The result is the poorest members of society are being left further behind, while many are left with little by way of insurance if their jobs are threatened by economic change. These flaws were exposed on the eve of the pandemic, and forced the Chancellor to radically reinvent our welfare system at very short notice.”

Alex Beer, programme head at the Nuffield Foundation, added: “As this research shows, over time the protection given to people who lose their jobs has fallen to a level that only just enables them to avoid destitution and that is damaging not only to the people affected but also to the ability of our society to respond to economic change.”

‘Porous’ safety net fails to protect poorest against economic disruption, think-tank warns | The Independent

 Arthur Draws the Sword from the Stone

(Or, the labour theory of value)

Arthur quarried and gathered the dun stone,

Felled the oak and beech for his charcoal pit,

Fashioned a furnace by hand and fired it,

Then loaded ore into its clay-bound cone

To smelt and run out the molten iron

Into the rough casting modelled in sand,

Cooling into the form for what he planned.

Still brittle then, much remained to be done:

Heat and hammer, heat and hammer to force

Imperfections out, shaping, tempering

And honing until, with blade appearing,

Pommel and guard gilded and fixed, the course

Of manufacture was complete. From stone

By Arthur, king of his craft, the sword was drawn.

D. A.