Sweden has so far recorded about 341,000 infections and more than 7,600 deaths from the pandemic with one of the highest per capita death rates in the world.

 Nearly 90% of fatalities were of elderly at least 70 years old and half of them were in long-term residential care.

Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven admitted the country’s officials did not adequately care for the elderly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mats Melin, the chair of an  independent commission made up of political scientists, crisis management experts and public health experts, explained, “The government should have taken measures to ensure the elderly care was better equipped to deal with the pandemic.”

The commission concluded that the “ultimate responsibility for these shortcomings rests with the government in power – and with the previous governments.”

The commission said there were “structural shortcomings that have been well-known for a long time” which “led to residential care being unprepared and ill-equipped to handle a pandemic.” Such shortcomings included a lack of protective equipment and delays in testing. The report warned of they described as “fragmentation” in the Swedish healthcare systems. Elderly care is divided between 21 regions and 290 municipalities. 

Coronavirus: Sweden admits lapses in elderly care | Coronavirus and Covid-19 – latest news about COVID-19 | DW | 16.12.2020

 It has been revealed almost half of Singapore’s migrant workers have been infected with Covid-19 in the past nine months.

A quarter of a million New Zealanders held in state care suffered some form of abuse with the true number believed to be higher.

A royal commission into abuse in state care is investigating historic abuse of children, young adults and vulnerable adults by state-run institutions between 1950 and 1999, as well as in affiliated religious institutions, such as church-run orphanages. It is the largest and most complex royal commission ever undertaken in New Zealand.

Those most frequently abused by the state were society’s “most disadvantaged or marginalised segments of the community … particularly from Māori whanau [family], Pacific families, children from impoverished backgrounds, disabled people and women and girls”.

The report found that many children were removed from their homes due to issues related to poverty, but were returned from state care to their families severely traumatised. Māori were over-represented in the number of children entering state care and the number of those who suffered abuse, and the “discriminatory attitudes” of officials contributed to this, the report found. Māori children continue to be over-represented in the state care system, making up 69% of children in state care, and 81% of children abused in care, despite representing only 16% of New Zealand’s population of five million.

Physical and sexual abuse was the most common type of abuse reported to the commission, but abuse also included the use of medication and medical acts [electro-convulsive therapy] as punishment, unjustified solitary confinement and isolation, improper strip searches and vaginal examinations, verbal abuse, racial slurs and “cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment”, as well as widespread neglect.

Those who complained were routinely silenced or abused again as punishment, and the commission also found attempts at active cover-ups.

Glenis Philip-Barbara, assistant Māori commissioner for children, said, “It’d be a mistake to think that what happened in the past is not still happening today.”

At least 250,000 suffered abuse in New Zealand’s state care system, inquiry finds | New Zealand | The Guardian

 More than half a million households have fallen behind on their energy bills since February, taking the total number of billpayers in arrears to more than 2 million.

Citizens Advice said an extra 600,000 households owed payments to their energy suppliers, with the coronavirus outbreak leading to record high redundancies this year.

On average, billpayers who have fallen behind on their payments owe their energy suppliers about £760 for electricity and £605 for gas, according to Citizens Advice.

The findings show that about 16% of homes that use energy prepay meters – or almost 700,000 households – have not been able to afford a top-up since March.

Citizens Advice warned that financial woes were likely to deepen through the colder months and that an estimated 7 million households were expected to struggle to pay their winter energy bills this year.

Alistair Cromwell, the acting chief executive of Citizens Advice, said: “We’re heading into the coldest months of the year and the full financial impacts of the pandemic are still to be felt.”

More than 2m UK households in arrears on energy bills | Money | The Guardian

 FAQ Bread and Circuses pt.1 – introduced by Mike Foster, 11th November 2020

FAQ Bread and Circuses pt.2

Attachment Theory pt.1 – Tim Kilgallon, 13th November 2020

Attachment Theory pt.2

New Atheism pt.1 – Nigel McCullough, 20th November 2020

New Atheism pt.2

A report by the High Pay Centre thinktank  revealed that the chief executive of Ocado, the online supermarket, had the biggest pay gap between those at the top and those on the shop floor.

Tim Steiner, was paid £58.7m last year – which works out at 2,605 times the £22,500 paid to the online grocery delivery company’s staff on average.

Steiner was paid as much as the average Ocado worker’s annual salary for just one day’s work.

In second place was JD Sports, which paid its chief executive, Peter Cowgill, £5.6m, but paid staff an average of only £18,300. That means Cowgill’s pay was 310 times the median average. 

Tesco took third place for paying its outgoing chief executive 305 times the median pay. 

Across the UK’s 100 biggest stock market listed companies, chief executives collect 73 times the amount paid to workers on average. The biggest pay gaps are in the retail sector, where on average bosses are paid 140 times that collected by employees.

Luke Hildyard, director of the High Pay Centre, said, “These findings show that quite low levels of pay are commonplace for large numbers of workers at many of our major companies. ”

Pay gap in Britain between executives and workers ‘obscene’, says union | Business | The Guardian

 Socialism Or Your Money Back Blog December 8th

Who has all the wealth? 

The top 1% of households globally own 43% of all personal wealth. The bottom 50% have only 1%

Whence comes  this myopia

that perpetuates this dystopia?

You don’t need 2020 vision

to make an informed decision

From ill used sea to shining sea

There’s none so  blind

as them as will not see

It’s clear as day.

You’ve already been shown the way.

Socialism Marx the spot.

Look to the light you sightless masses!

Throw of the mask of servitude

you don’t have to ask to be free

Tell the bourgeoise that it’s

the final battle of the classes

We owe them no gratitude

for reclaiming what we produce.

Introduce them to the truth

It’s ours not theirs!

It belongs to you and me.

DC

 There is no trickle-down effect from tax cuts. Instead tax cuts for the rich produces inequality without providing much for anyone else.

 David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London studied income, capital and assets in 18 OECD countries over the past half century and found that only those who were directly affected the reduction in taxation benefited, and it did little to promote jobs or growth for all other. 

Their findings counter arguments, often made that policies which appear to disproportionately reward richer individuals eventually feed through to the rest of the economy. 

“Our research suggests such policies don’t deliver the sort of trickle-down effects that proponents have claimed,” Hope said.

Fifty Years of Tax Cuts for Rich Didn’t Trickle Down, Study Says – Bloomberg

 In general, US farmworkers struggle with some of the lowest wages in the country and suffer an above-average rate of workplace injuries. Because many are either undocumented immigrants or in the country on temporary work visas, they do not have access to US social safety nets like health insurance, unemployment benefits or stimulus cheques.

The US Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division conducted more than 31,000 investigations on US farms between fiscal years 2000 and 2019 and levied $63m in civil penalties for workplace violations. Those violations are likely just a fraction of the problem because the Labor Department only investigates about 100 of the US’s 107,000 farm employers every month – which means there is just a 1.1 percent chance that any one of them will be investigated in any given year.

Farm employers in the United States have withheld $76m in wages from 154,000 workers over the past 20 years and wage theft and workplace safety issues in the agricultural sector are likely much, much worse.

Many more violations are likely never reported because the “majority of farmworkers lack an immigration status or have a precarious, temporary status, making them fearful of retaliation and deportation”, Daniel Costa, Economic Policy Institute’s director of immigration law and policy research and one of the report’s authors, told Al Jazeera.  Costa explained. “But that also means that the violations that are investigated and detected are probably just the tip of the iceberg.”

 Farm labour contractors – third-party agencies that recruit and staff workers for farms – are the worst offenders, accounting for some 25 percent of all detected federal wage and hour violations.

“Farms that rely on farm labour contractors are a textbook example of a ‘fissured’ workplace, where the relationship between the worker and the lead employer is fissured, or broken, via the use of a temp agency or subcontractor,” Costa said. “Research has shown that fissuring often results in lower wages for workers, in part because the farm labour contractor keeps a percentage of the wages earned by the workers, and farm operators do not provide the farmworkers who work on their farms with fringe benefits because they are employees of the contractor. ”  Farm labour contractors already account for 14 percent of agricultural employment in the US and their use is rising, major policy change is needed to crack down on violators, Costa said.

The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division’s budget has been slashed, and there is roughly only one investigator for every 175,000 workers, says EPI. In 2019, there were just 780 investigators, fewer than nearly 50 years ago.

US farmworkers suffer stolen wages, safety issues, report finds | Agriculture News | Al Jazeera

 “Food insecurity” across the United States doesn’t refer to the chronic food scarcity and undernourishment, which afflicts more than 800 million people in poor countries, but rather to the disruption of people’s typical food-consumption patterns. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) distinguishes between what it calls low food security (“reduced quality, variability, or desirability of diet”) and the very low version of the same (“multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake”).

 Just before the coronavirus struck, 35 million Americans, 11 million of them children, experienced food insecurity. This year, those numbers are projected to reach 54 million and 18 million respectively. 

In 2018, 4% of American adults reported that at least some members of their family did not have enough to eat; by July 2020, that figure had hit 11%.

That food insecurity has “skyrocketed” shouldn’t come as a surprise. The bigger the hit people took from the Covid-19 recession, the more likely they were to experience food insecurity, 

 Millions of people have lost their jobs. Some have seen their earnings diminished because of furloughs, wage cuts, freezes, or reduced working hours. Others have looked for jobs in vain and finally given up (but aren’t included in official unemployment statistics). Millions of adults have children who no longer receive those free or subsidized lunches because of the switch, in whole or part, to online teaching. Worse yet, as pandemic-induced firings, layoffs, and wage cuts have reduced incomes, and so consumer purchasing power, food prices, especially for meat, fish, and eggs, have only risen. Such costs have increased for other reasons as well. The pandemic has disrupted supply networks, national and international.

Americans high on the income ladder can absorb such extra costs easily enough and, in any case, spend a substantially smaller portion of their income on groceries. According to the USDA, adults with incomes in the top fifth of society spent 8% of their income on food last year; for the bottom fifth, it was 36%. The first group also obviously has a lot more money available to stock up on food than that bottom fifth, so many of whom have also become jobless or seen their paychecks diminish since the pandemic started. In March, for example, 39% of those making less than $40,000 had already lost their jobs or had their paychecks reduced, but only 13% of those who earned $100,000 or more, and that gap continued into the fall.

 In coronavirus-stricken America, only 1% of adults with an annual income exceeding $100,000 surveyed by the Census Bureau this summer responded that, during the preceding week, their household “sometimes or often did not have enough to eat.” Compare that to 16% of those making $25,000-$35,000 and 28% of those earning less than $25,000.

 A USDA report classified 19% of Black households and 16% of Hispanic households as food insecure in 2019, compared to 8% of their white counterparts. By this summer, food insecurity had increased significantly across the board, afflicting 36% of Black, 32% of Hispanic, and 18% of white households. While the pandemic has certainly made matters worse, African Americans had the highest rate among those three groups even before it started. This was especially true of counties — the U.S. has more than 3,000 of them — in which they were in the majority. In 2016, those particular counties accounted for a mere 3% of the national total, but 96% of them had “high food insecurity,” as the Department of Agriculture defines it, as well as a poverty rate more than twice the national average (12.7% that year).

Native Americans have had the worst of it, however, since many of their families lack access to running water and plumbing (58 per 1,000 households compared to three per 1,000 for whites). Nearly 75% of Native Americans must travel more than a mile to reach a supermarket, compared to 40% of the population as a whole, and the disruption of supply chains has only diminished their food security further relative to other ethnic communities.

 In Queens, for instance, one food bank pantry regularly faces a demand so steep that lines can extend for eight blocks. Try to imagine what the waiting time must be. 1.5 million people in the city, unable to buy the groceries they need, rely on food pantries, and New York is anything but unusual.  Food insecurity during the pandemic has varied by location as well. Ten states (and the District of Columbia) had the highest rates, ranging from Mississippi (33.5%), which stood atop this group, to Alabama (27%), which had the lowest. In between, in descending order, were Washington, D.C., Nevada, Louisiana, New York, New Mexico, Florida, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

Feeding America, a non-profit organization that supports 200 food storage centers and 60,000 pantries nationwide, reports that the country’s food banks have provided the equivalent of more than 4.2 billion meals since March.  Food banks, facing a tsunami of demand, have struggled to stay stocked amid rising prices, shortages, reduced donations from big chain supermarkets, and disrupted supply chains. It’s also become even harder for them to raise the money they need to operate. Not a few have buckled under the strain and many have been forced to shut down. 

Hunger in America: On the frontlines of the COVID-19 nightmare – Alternet.org