Births in Italy last year hit their lowest level since the unification of the nation in 1861, the national statistics office said this month, with the figure falling for a 12th consecutive year.
There were 404,892 births in Italy last year, the ISTAT statistics office said, down 15,192 from 2019. There were 746,146 deaths in 2020 as the population fell to 59.3 million.
ISTAT said the slump in births had continued this year.
Pope says Italy’s plunging birthrate is a ‘tragedy’ (yahoo.com)
Donald Trump still struts on the American political scene. It seems probable that he will stand again for president in 2024. This article considers one important aspect of his popular appeal – his ‘blue-collar’ image.
In 2018 a book appeared entitled Trump, The Blue-Collar President. The author, financier Anthony Scaramucci, who served as the White House Director of Communications in July 2017, highlights the absurdity of the image he himself helped create by crowning ‘the Billionaire Blue-Collar President.’ Not for a single day has Trump ever been a blue-collar or even a white-collar worker. His only work experience before entering politics was as a dealer in real estate. In office he consistently pursued policies extremely favorable to business and the wealthy.
And yet Trump did to some extent succeed in creating an image of himself as a friend of blue-collar workers. How did he perform this astonishing feat?
One thing he did that helped enormously was tapping into the long American tradition of anti-intellectualism. Let me explain how this works.
Substitute targets
Life as a wage-slave – the humiliation of abject dependence on an employer, the unfree nature of work for a boss, the unending struggle to make ends meet, the pressure of competition – is bound to generate suppressed or open feelings of resentment, anger, and hostility. Politicians and propagandists for the capitalist class strive to prevent such feelings from striking home against their masters by redirecting them toward other targets.
A variety of substitute targets are available. Foreign powers are an old standby, as are ethnic, racial, and religious minorities. In a previous article I discussed the retargeting of hostility against welfare recipients or ‘the poor,’ pictured as feckless parasites living off a hardworking ‘middle class.’ Another substitute target much favored by ‘right-wing’ demagogues is people with higher education, academics, and intellectuals, often lumped together as ‘the liberal intellectual elite’ (obscuring the existence of conservative intellectuals).
Richard Hofstadter, author of a classical study of anti-intellectualism in the United States,[1] speaks of ‘the traditional businessman’s suspicion of experts working in any area outside his control, whether in scientific laboratories, universities, or diplomatic corps.’ In fact, capitalists exert a considerable degree of control even in these spheres: over universities, scientific institutes, and many other organizations by means of financial support and seats on boards of trustees, over diplomacy by means of participation in closed forums like the Council on Foreign Relations. But no doubt anything less than complete and direct control causes them some discomfort. They are fully conscious of themselves as a ruling class, and whatever is outside their control is a potential threat to their position.[2]
One anomaly in the position of the capitalists is that despite their enormous economic and political power they do not monopolize social status or prestige, which can also be won through achievement in science or the arts.[3] In some ways this is a weakness, but it enables capitalists to retarget popular resentment against intellectual and cultural elites that they view as potential rivals.
Is it not a bit risky for members of one extremely wealthy and powerful elite to play the card of anti-elitism against other elites? Might it not suggest questions about their own anti-elitist credentials? Apparently not.
In general, lies are more convincing when they contain a grain of truth. Thus, some welfare recipients do obtain benefits by means of fraud, although their sponging hardly bears comparison with the gross parasitism of the capitalists who denounce them. Here again, the scapegoating of intellectuals works because the poorly educated do have grounds to resent those more highly educated than themselves. They are resented for their pretensions of cultural, intellectual, and moral superiority, because they look down on people who lacked their own educational opportunities. At best they feel patronized, at worst they are mocked and ridiculed. This may hurt even more than economic exploitation.
The special appeal of Donald Trump to the poorly educated has been analyzed in these terms by Janet McIntosh.[4] She criticizes commentators who mock Trump’s style because it lacks polish and is marked by disorganized syntax, spelling and grammatical mistakes, idiosyncratic use of punctuation and capital letters, limited vocabulary, and overuse of intensifiers [words like ‘very’].
Such mockery evokes sympathy for Trump among poorly educated voters, who may remember being ridiculed for similar stylistic shortcomings by sarcastic schoolteachers.
Identity politics
This brings us to another reason why Trump was able to create a ‘blue-collar’ image for himself. The sole alternative to Trump and the Republicans offered by the two-party electoral system and the corporate media is the Democratic Party establishment, represented – as McIntosh notes – by ‘liberal politicians like Hillary Clinton,’ who ignore ‘the economic grievances, wage insecurity, and working and housing conditions’ of workers, especially white workers, thereby driving them into the Trump camp.
Of course, there are other voices, outside the establishment, ours among them, that do not ignore the problems faced by workers. But these voices are excluded from the mass media and are rarely if ever heard by the majority of Americans. The far-reaching alternatives that they offer do not appear ‘practical’ or ‘realistic.’
This problem is exacerbated by the rise of the trend known as ‘identity politics’ and its speech code of ‘political correctness.’ This trend concerns itself with several kinds of social injustice – above all, racism, sexism, the oppression of sexual minorities, and prejudice against the handicapped. The set of issues addressed has expanded over time and will probably continue to do so. An attempt is made to combine the various issues in accordance with the principle of ‘intersectionality.’
Matters of class, however, receive little attention in identity politics. At best, ‘classism’ is tagged on at the end of a list that starts with racism and sexism and includes heterosexism, able-ism, age-ism, and so on, without recognizing that class is central to the whole structure of social inequality, the grid on which other forms of inequality are measured. Usually, however, class is ignored altogether, producing a grotesquely distorted view of society, as when a destitute white heterosexual man is considered more privileged than a wealthy black lesbian. At worst, identity politics merges with the dominant culture in the worship of capitalist ‘success’ and idolization of black, female, and gay celebrities who have ‘made it.’
Many blue-collar workers share Trump’s scornful rejection of ‘political correctness.’ As McIntosh puts it, they feel offended when ‘hyper-educated liberals’ assume that they are prejudiced against nonwhites, women, or gays just because they ‘do not know the new lingo and have not cultivated exquisite verbal sensitivity.’
Effective opposition to demagogues like Trump will never come from the ‘liberal left’ of the Democratic Party establishment and its tame media, but only from a movement that offers the working class a real alternative to capitalism.
Notes
[1] Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, first published in 1966. The most recent edition was released by Vintage in 2012.
[2] However, the anti-intellectualism of ‘the traditional businessman’ is not shared by high-tech entrepreneurs, who are highly educated and may fear that they themselves will become targets of anti-intellectual demagogy.
[3] Academic honors are more prestigious in some countries than others (more in Germany than in the United States, for instance).
[4] Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton, eds., Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 9-18.
Stephen Shenfield
Farmworkers in the US, especially immigrant workers, have few protections. They were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act passed in 1935, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Workers in America’s agricultural fields are regularly subjected to abuses ranging from high occurrences of sexual assault and harassment, wage theft and safety issues including injuries, fatalities on the job, and exposure to hazardous chemicals.
The H2-A visa program is an often used avenue for exploitation of migrant workers in the US, as it ties immigration status to employment on a temporary basis with no pathways to permanent citizenship. Many of these workers are forced to take on debt to recruiters to enter the H2-A visa program, with several cases of debt peonage, forced labor, and human trafficking reported through the program.
“It’s really the structure of the program that facilitates this kind of stuff happening, often with impunity,” said Daniel Costa, director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute.
He cited a severe lack of labor law enforcement in the agricultural industry as a driving factor in widespread abuses of workers, and the lack of regulating recruiters outside of the US who connect migrant workers with temporary jobs. Inspections conducted by the wage and hour division of the US Department of Labor declined significantly over the past few decades due to underfunding, and the low number of inspectors responsible for overseeing a vast number of employers.
“If you’re an agricultural employer, there’s only around a 1% chance that you’ll be investigated for anything in any given year, so they can pretty much get away with not treating your workers the way they should,” added Costa.
In June, farmworkers from Mexico were transported through a trafficking network from Monterey to work on farms in Georgia. They paid the traffickers 20,000 pesos, about $950, loaned from their mother, taking frequent trips back and forth to Monterey, before being told it was safe to leave. Then they were finally transported across the border.
Initially, the worker was told they would be working on a blueberry farm, but was sent to a corn-farming operation instead.
“We arrived at the house where we would live and had to clean the rooms ourselves. There were roaches, spiders, mosquitoes, and the mattresses were covered in lice,” the worker said. “The bathrooms and showers were dirty and clogged. The kitchen was horrible. We had no air conditioning in hot weather.”
The worker began work daily at 3 or 4am and worked until 3 or 4pm with just one 15-minute lunch break, making just $225 for 15 days of work. Some of the workers were promised up to $12 an hour in pay but instead were ordered by armed overseers to dig up onions by hand for $0.20 per bucket.
After 20 days at the corn farm, the worker was sent to a cucumber warehouse where they weren’t paid anything for their work and then transferred to Texas before escaping the operation and returning to Mexico in July.
From the December 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard
Today Christians celebrate the birth of their Christ. It is therefore appropriate once again to examine the Christian religion and its relations to socialism and the working class.
Christianity is a comparatively recent religion but it is thick with the debris of man’s earlier superstitions. The pagan influence on the Christmas festival is especially well marked, for December 25th was a holy day long before Jesus Christ was even thought of. Primitive man worshipped the sun because the course of his life was dominated by the yearly round of that planet in the heavens. This practice was widespread but especially in northern countries mid-December was thought to be a critical time, as the days became shorter and shorter and the sun itself weaker. Great bonfires were lit to give the sun god strength and, when it became apparent that the shortest day had passed, there was great rejoicing. Thus the Roman winter-solstice festival, held on December 25th in connection with the worship of the sun-god Mithra, was known as the birthday of the unconquered sun-god.
December 25th was not generally introduced into the Western Church as Christmas day until the fourth century and it was even later before it was accepted in the Eastern Church. Several Christian sects had previously fancied the 24th or 25th of April as a suitable “holy” period—thus arbitrarily connecting Christ’s birth with the vernal equinox rather than the winter-solstice—while still other factions chose alternative solar festivals. However, St. Chrysostum (5th century) gives a very practical reason why December 25th was to be preferred. “On this day the birthday of Christ was lately fixed at Rome, in order that while the heathens were occupied in their profane ceremonies the Christians might perform their holy rites undisturbed.”
Man’s consciousness is a reflection of his material environment. While he was struggling to find his feet in the universe it was understandable that he should interpret phenomena which he could not comprehend in supernatural terms but, in the twentieth century, such irrational relics from the past can be of no value to the working class.
Christians have argued against the materialist conception of history by claiming that the driving force behind the universe is a god’s will and that, while everything else may be subject to change, God and his religion remain constant. Yet the briefest examination of Christ and his theories shows him clearly as a product of his times. For example, he plainly shared the then common belief that disease was due to infestation with demons and he told his followers, “In my name ye shall cast our devils”. Again, religion has always been the willing tool of the ruling class. The church today holds chattel slavery to be immoral. But when Constantine the Great accepted the Christian religion the pope of the time received him with acclamation and no one suggested to him the need to surrender his slaves, of which he held thousands. Similarly, the Christians’ god today dutifully reflects the interests of capital. Thus for hundreds of years the popes excommunicated those who put their money out at usury and denied them Christian burial because of this “grievous sin”. Yet, strangely, since Pope Benedict XIV’s condemnation in 1745, God has not moved his spokesmen to breathe one word against this practice.
We are told that the Bible is God’s word. This being the case, his laconic message could not be clearer—“Thou shalt not kill”. The record of the Christian churches in this century alone illustrates that they have never hesitated to take sides in Capitalism’s bloody quarrels. In the first world war the workers were urged to slaughter one another with God on their lips: “God of our Fathers . . . Be thou the rampart of our costs, the frontline of the battlefield”. And in the second world war Christians intoned in harmony with capitalist interests in both Germany and Britain. “You have every reason to say prayers for the Führer. May God preserve him, because we need an eternal Germany.” (Reported in the Daily Mail, May 9th. 1944.)
On the other hand in the Church of England Newspaper, February 23rd, 1940, we find a thoroughly English god rallying under the Union Jack: “It is to the living God therefore we must look for deliverance in the present hour. He it is Who delivered our fathers from the ‘Invincible’ Spanish Armada; He appeared on our behalf in 1914-18; and He will help us now if we call upon Him with a true heart.”
Capitalism is a dirty business, based as it is upon the misery of the majority of mankind. But it is well served by its priesthood, always ready with the facile lie and the glib distortion to endorse the actions of the bourgeoisie and persuade the workers that their present lot is part of some unalterable, God-given system.
Clearly then the Christian religion is a most versatile creed. Is it possible that it could be adapted again to serve the interests of a socialist society? The answer is no, for at all times Christianity and Socialism are contradictory. Socialism involves a rejection of leadership and the determination that the workers themselves must achieve socialism. Conversely? Christianity is rooted in a blind faith in leaders, both worldly and supernatural. The priests urge their flocks to remain servile and reap the blessings of poverty. They say that it is not up to the workers to consider the system which robs them, throws them into unemployment, subjects them to war and disease; that it God’s province. The Bishop of Barcelona orders: “Have confidence in your Bishops, who have received from God the mission of commanding; learn to obey . . . do not change a word of the directives that the Holy Church gives you through the Bishops. Be obedient!”
Again, within capitalist society there is a continual class struggle which can only be abolished by the establishment of a classless society—socialism. But Christians believe that there is a harmony of interests under capitalism. Pope Leo XIII in his Encyclincal on Labour asserted: “If one man hires out to another his strength or his industry, he does this in order to receive in return the means of livelihood, with the intention of acquiring a real right, got merely to his wage, but also to the free disposal of it . . . Socialists . . . strike at the liberty of every wage-earner, for they deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages.” The good pope has a point—in that socialism will certainly deprive everyone of the “liberty” of wage-slavery. However, with typical Christian charity (towards the bourgeoisie) he chooses to overlook the fact that under capitalism the workers are forced to sell their labour power to the owners of the means of living. This is not, as the pope suggests, a case of fair exchange but is based upon the appropriation of the surplus value created by the workers by the master class.
Yet there are those who still maintain that Socialism and Christianity can somehow by synthesised, given the right leader as a catalyst. The Labour Party has always taken this line and the so-called Christian Socialist Movement lingers on. desperately trying to create some sort of comprehensible amalgam out of conflicting idealist and materialist theories. Their analysis of capitalism is based upon the contention that it is an “evil” system, rooted in sin. But in their literature, we find: “Capitalism has served mankind by accumulating capital, so making large scale production possible and increasing wealth generally . . .” Thus these Christian gentlemen admit that what they call “sin” and “ evil ” have been of service to man. This inconsistency is the inevitable result of trying to accommodate Christianity and Socialism—the utopian and the scientific.
Christmas is supposed to be a time of good cheer when the harsh reality of this world is briefly forgotten. But it is impossible to disregard capitalism even at this time of the year. We address our Christmas message to the working class, about to enjoy yet another wretched holiday under capitalism—the system they chose to perpetuate when they voted for the Labour and Tory parties…
John Crump
As 2022 approaches, with nearly nine billion vaccine doses administered worldwide, public health experts say goals of global vaccine equity have fallen woefully short. Not only has ramped-up vaccine production failed to address shortages in low-income countries, but there remains a long way to go in addressing the myriad challenges related to getting vaccines from tarmacs in low-income countries into residents’ arms.
Meanwhile, the emergence of the Omicron variant, which some widely-used vaccines appear less effective against, could cause even wider upheaval in global supply and delivery.
“By virtually every measure, global vaccine distribution and equity have been an abysmal failure and a deep moral crisis,” Lawrence Gostin, the director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law, told Al Jazeera. “I think that’s unquestionable.”
“We’re now at a point of having more than a billion doses a month of vaccines being produced, but it’s a slow trickle still to get to low-income countries and lower-middle-income countries,” Dr Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, told Al Jazeera. “So we have not solved the supply challenge by any means…”
Former UK prime minister Gordon Brown says the failure to distribute vaccines to poorer countries is a “stain on our global soul”.
He said people were realising coronavirus would “come back to haunt” every country, without a push to get the whole world vaccinated next year. Brown said the uneven distribution of Covid vaccines “is one of the greatest policy failures of our times” and had been caused by wealthy countries hoarding and stockpiling vaccines.
He predicted another five million people could die from the virus worldwide if better vaccine access was not achieved soon.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimated more than 21 million Americans didn’t have enough to eat in early December as pandemic relief payments run out and grocery prices rise. Low-income families may soon face more pressure with monthly child tax credit payments ending.
The number of households in which there was sometimes or often not enough to eat reached 9.7% this month, a five-month high, according to data collected between December 1 and 13 by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. That figure in households with children sunk from 11% to 7.8% in August, after the first child tax credit monthly payments went out.
Grocery prices in the U.S. are up 6.4% from a year earlier.
Food banks are also seeing a rise in demand, and clinics meant to help malnourished and underfed children have seen an increase in patients.
Hunger in US is on the rise as pandemic relief dries up | Food News | Al Jazeera
Nurses, care home staff and police officers working on Christmas Day will be thousands of pounds worse off than they were a decade ago as a result of wages failing to keep pace with prices, Trades Union Congress analysis has shown.
Police sergeants and constables have had the biggest reduction, with inflation-adjusted pay £5,595 a year lower than a decade ago. Nurses have had an effective wage cut of £2,715 and local authority care workers a cut of £1,661, the report found. A chef would be earning £1,050 more a year this Christmas had pay kept pace with price rises, while a waiter would be £859 better off, the TUC said.
The coming year is expected to bring a fresh squeeze on living standards. Annual inflation is running at 5.1% and is expected by the Bank of England to peak at about 6% in the spring.
Frances O’Grady, the TUC’s general secretary, said: “Many of the key workers who are bracing themselves for another surge of Covid cases are earning less in real terms than they were a decade ago. That is not right…thousands of key workers will be hard at work on the front line, many of them dealing with staff shortages as a result of the Omicron variant. But their pay awards are falling way short of what they should be, especially in a cost-of-living crisis…”
Essential workers thousand of pounds worse off than a decade ago, TUC says | Pay | The Guardian
200,000 children are at risk of being left homeless this winter, charity Shelter said.
A poll carried out by YouGov for Shelter found that 104,000 families in privately rented homes received eviction notices in the last month, or were behind on their rent and were in danger of losing their homes. Shelter estimated that 55,000 children, along with their families, have already been evicted in the last three months.
Shelter’s research also showed that 71% of renting families would struggle to find another home this winter, and 21% say their children knew they were struggling to pay the rent. Of those surveyed, 11% said their children worried about becoming homeless.
Shelter’s chief executive, Polly Neate, said: “No child should have to worry about losing their home this Christmas, let alone 200,000. But so many families will spend every day with the threat of eviction looming over them, not knowing if they will still have a home next year.
“Eviction notices have started dropping on doormats and our services are working round the clock to help families who have nowhere else to go.”
200,000 UK children could be made homeless this winter, warns Shelter | Homelessness | The Guardian
South Korea’s total population of nearly 52 million is set to decline 0.18% by 2021 year-end, for the first time since the country began collecting census data, according to figures released by Statistics Korea.
The country’s fertility rate is the lowest in the world at 0.8 children per woman.
The government institution in charge of statistics and census data also mapped out a worst-case scenario, according to which the present population will drop to around 12 million by 2120 — around 23% of today’s population.
Moreover, Statistics Korea predicted that the average age of the population is set to rise, from a median of 43 in 2021 to 62 by 2070.
The combination of an aging population and falling birth rates spells trouble for renewing the workforce, while the country faces a bigger spending burden in the form of tax revenue and health care.
$188 billion, €167 billion has been spent in the decade up until 2020 on financial incentives for couples to have children. But so far, the increased spending has had little effect in boosting birth rates.
Figures released by the Seoul Metropolitan Government on December 16 show that the number of marriages in the city has fallen by 43% in the last 20 years, down from 78,745 in 2000 to 44,746 last year. The average age of first marriages was 33 in 2020, up from 29 two decades ago.
