Humphreys county in Mississippi has an unemployment rate double the national level. The local economy was already in a shambles when the coronavirus hit. But the pandemic has made things worse. Yet the county’s residents have been targeted by the IRS for claiming a tax credit that aims to lift working parents out of poverty.

Joe Jackson, the mayor of Belzoni, said, “Most people around here are kind of adjusted to the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That’s not surprising to people in our area.” 

The Internal Revenue Service audits Humphreys county taxpayers at a higher rate than anywhere else in America that’s about 12 out of 1,000 tax returns are audited each year in the county. That’s 53% higher than the national average and raises the question of why such a place is the subject of such IRS attention. Why not the haunts of millionaires and billionaires, like Manhattan?

The IRS audits about 300,000 taxpayers who claim the earned income tax credit, or EITC, each year. These taxpayers are targeted more often than high-income and high-wealth taxpayers because the audits of EITC claimants are easier to do, according to a 2019 letter written by the IRS Commissioner. The IRS’s policy has resulted in higher rates of tax audits in poor communities of color than the rest of the country. Eight of the most heavily audited counties in the country are in Mississippi. In Humphreys county, 76% of the 8,000 residents are Black.

The IRS audits most EITC claimants by mail, but wealthy taxpayers are typically audited in person and the audits require more training. In the 2019 fiscal year, about 80% of individual taxpayer audits were done by mail. But 52% of the $6.9bn recovered from these tax audits came from audits done in person, which are typically performed on wealthier taxpayers. 

The IRS commissioner, Charles Rettig, wrote that the IRS needs more money to hire and train auditors in order to balance the number of audits across all income levels. Between 2010 and 2017, the IRS budget was cut by about $2bn. The budget cuts shifted the focus of IRS audits from high-income taxpayers to low- and middle-income EITC claimants.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/18/tax-audit-earned-income-tax-credit-mississippi

  The “Great Barrington declaration” on the COVID-19 pandemic has called for an immediate resumption of “life as normal” for everyone but the “vulnerable”, fuelled these notions by casting doubt on the utility of lockdown restrictions. “We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity”, it stated. The declaration’s core assumption is that population immunity will be achieved by allowing life to go on as normal and shielding only the most vulnerable from the virus.  The thrust of its argument is based on a false opposition between those who argue for lockdown and those who are against it, when in fact lockdowns are one of numerous measures that scientists have called for, and are seen as a short-term last resort to regain control. And shutting away the most vulnerable as life continues as normal is not only inhumane, but impossible: by this measure, the carers, household members and frequent close contacts of vulnerable people would also need to isolate. Moreover, young people with pre-existing conditions they don’t yet know about can be equally susceptible, and “long Covid”, with its debilitating host of symptoms, affects people of different ages.

The signing ceremony had been carefully orchestrated for media attention, with a slick website and video produced to accompany the event. Within hours of its launch, it had seeded political and ideological impact disproportionate with its scientific significance. Its three signatories were later  to be received by Alex Azar, the US secretary of health and human services, and by Scott Atlas, recently appointed as Donald Trump’s health adviser, who tweeted  that “top scientists all over the world are lining up with the @realDonaldTrump #Covid_19 policy”. And on a call convened by the White House, two senior officials in Trump’s administration cited the declaration. The trio of scientists who fronted the declaration were able to put the weight of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions behind their statements – Stanford, Harvard and Oxford – giving the declaration a sheen of respectability. The views of these scientists about lockdown and the pursuit of herd immunity are no doubt sincerely held (though, notably, not published in any peer-reviewed scientific articles)

When scientists disagree, we expect them to provide evidence for their position. Yet the declaration’s many contentious statements are unreferenced – and the manner of its launch seems designed to amplify publicity over substance. If anything, the tactics employed in this performance have serious implications for the public’s trust in scientists.

The truth is that a strategy of pursuing “herd immunity” is nothing more than a fringe view. There is no real scientific divide over this approach, because there is no science to justify its usage in the case of Covid-19.  The president of the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences describes the declaration’s proposals as “unethical and simply not possible”. The science is clear: attaining herd immunity to coronavirus via uncontrolled infection is a fringe view, peddled by a minority with no evidence to back up their position. 

It is already clear that the declaration is being used to legitimise a libertarian agenda. It was a piece of political theatre. Indeed, some authors have questioned if it was ever anything about health, or whether its motivations were always purely economic; as the professor of political economy Richard Murphy put it, the declaration was “the economics of neoliberalism running riot … revealing in the process its utter indifference to the interests of anyone but those who can ‘add value’ within that system”.  

The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), where the declaration was signed, is a libertarian thinktank that is, in its own words, committed to “pure freedom” and wishes to see the “role of government … sharply confined”. The institute has a history of funding controversial research – such as a study extolling the benefits of sweatshops supplying multinationals for those employed in them – while its statements on climate change largely downplay the threats of the environmental crisis. It is a partner in the Atlas network of thinktanks, which acts as an umbrella for free-market and libertarian institutions, whose funders have included tobacco firms, ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers. Rightwing free-market foundations and institutions have long attempted to savage the public reputation of well-intentioned policies such as those aimed at curbing ecological threats and limiting smoking.

We see at play in the Great Barrington declaration: discredit the scientific consensus, spread confusion about what the right response is and sow the seeds of doubt. It seems that lockdown restrictions aimed at bringing the virus under control are merely the latest target in this rightwing stealth campaign.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/18/covid-herd-immunity-funding-bad-science-anti-lockdown

 Capitalist politicians have only one way of dealing with a crisis: off-loading their burden on to the backs of working people. Why should any working person vote for any of the candidates in November? It is a choice between Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel, the Italian Mafia or the Colombian Cartel?

Peace, freedom and equality are what every ordinary American, black, brown and white, wishes for and needs. The liberation of mankind is the socialist’s task. The World Socialist Party has sometimes been accused of seeking to overthrow the American government using violence. When we are accused of this, our critics are implying that we want to abolish capitalism with minority support, that we want to impose the will of the minority upon the majority. The opposite is the truth. We believe we need to win a majority of the people to support a change in the system. Many people have a stereotyped picture of what a revolution is like. They say a revolution is barricades and insurrection in a armed take-over. It isn’t.

The Democratic and Republican Parties are owned by the capitalist class and stand for the interests of the capitalist class. The two-party electoral system masquerades as democracy in action. We have never really had a chance to democratically vote to change the nature of this capitalist system. Politicians are the goons for the corporations, Wall Street’s bought and paid for professional liars. We know we can be fooled by good actors and it is no coincidence that one president was ex-Hollywood and another ex-reality TV. Money buys power and influence. Think-tanks determine policy proposals. Lobbyists draft the legislation. All to profit the elite few, to protect the wealth and power inequalities, to divide and conquer any resistance. They ensure peripheral policies such as Confederate statues or mixed-gender restrooms take center-stage

To vote in this election is to prop up a corrupt criminal regime. Trump and Biden are perfect for King Capital.

They distract from the real issues confronting people and it allows the media to turn the political discourse into differences in temperament of their respective personalities. Trump and Biden are essentially puppets and figureheads of the real ruling classes; the billionaires, the corporations, and the investor class. The media insist you vote for the face and not the case. And the debate pivots around identity and gesture politics rather than a real anti-capitalist alternative. You take responsibility for your vote. Politicians promise a lot of things, but can any of them deliver? Never under capitalism is the answer. Any politician who sincerely and genuinely wanted to do good within the system is thwarted at every turn. The politician doesn’t change the system. The system changes the politician. After every election the poor get poorer and the rich richer. Politicians never deliver and always fail. Further, any agreement, any compromise, any concession can be undone and rolled back by the next administration.

About half of eligible voters won’t cast their ballot. So in every election the president is not wanted by the majority. People literally refuse to opt for either candidate for president. How can a system based on capitalism be democratic? It’s fundamentally impossible. Nor can one have political democracy without economic democracy.

Society can only progress and evolve with democratic control of the means of production. It’s that simple. All societies that use money have inequality. There are no examples of long lasting peaceful societies that use money. It’s an eventuality that wherever money is used, unnecessary suffering will be sure to follow. Money literally buys the earth in our system, and the people who possess the most money are holding the planet hostage. We are taking part in an election for people who think it is okay to own people and the planet.

The sad truth of the matter is that the vast majority of us are serfs pushed deeper and deeper into debt with various forms of rent that must be paid to landowners, utilities and food corporations. Our employment is to serve the parasitical and ravenous appetites of the rich who use all imaginable methods at their disposal to coerce and dominate us. The capitalist system is a demeaning and degrading master-slave system. On November 3, people will be deciding who holds the whip.

  In 2019, life expectancy at birth in the UK was 82.9 years for a woman and 79.2 years for a man (the average for both was 81.1 years). These numbers look good, especially when compared with historical figures. In 1950, for example, the average life expectancy at birth for a UK citizen was 68.9 years. The combined effects of economic growth, better education and an improved NHS have delivered an extra 12 years of life. Impressive.

That is until you start comparing the UK with other European countries. When you do this, you find we have seen smaller increases in life expectancy than the western European average – 5.3 years compared with 5.7 years.

Spain and Italy, for example, both had an average life expectancy at birth of 83.1 years in 2019. In France, it was 82.9 years, Sweden 82.8 years and Germany 81.2. The western European average life expectancy was a whole one year longer than in the UK.

The average healthy life expectancy for the UK in 2019 was 68.9 years, meaning that people in the UK spend an average 12.2 years living with some kind of illness.  Britain has the worst healthy life expectancy of any other European country. We come bottom of the league table. We’ve seen a slower improvement in healthy life expectancy (3.6 years) than the western European average (5.8 years).

 And the situation for children is equally bad: the under-five mortality rate in the UK in 2019 was 4.1 deaths per 1,000 live births – one of the worst performances in western Europe, second only to Malta. 

Across the four nations. Scotland has the lowest life expectancy (79.1 years), followed by Northern Ireland (80.3 years), Wales (80.5 years), and England (81.4 years).

The major causes of Britain’s poor health are noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, chronic respiratory disease and dementia. The Global Burden of Disease shows that deaths from alcohol and drug use have increased by 280% and 166% respectively over the past 30 years. And the health of our nation is not uniform across the country. There’s an eight-year difference in life expectancy between the north and the south of the UK. Life expectancy is highest in Richmond (84.5 years) and lowest in Blackpool (76.4 years) – worse than the average for China, Turkey, Thailand, Cuba, Chile, Jordan and even the US.

The lowest 10 expectancies in England skew towards the poorest places in the north-west and north-east of the country: Blackpool, Middlesbrough, Hull, Liverpool, Hartlepool, Rochdale, St Helens, Sunderland, Blackburn and Manchester. 

Is it a coincidence that the worst life expectancies in England track the upsurge in coronavirus?

The virus has exposed the inequalities that divide our society. It is deprived areas such as Bolton and Rochdale where infections have been endemic. It’s no accident that Liverpool, which scores high on the list of the UK’s most deprived places, was the first region to be classified as very high risk in Johnson’s recalibrated approach to Covid-19.

At the beginning of the pandemic, 1.5 million people in England were deemed at sufficiently high risk of coronavirus to require shielding. The unfortunate truth is that far more people in the UK are at risk than this number suggests. As work from University College London revealed earlier this year, when one includes those over 70 years of age, and those who are under 70 but live with chronic diseases such as diabetes or cancer, the actual number at risk in the UK is more than 8 million people.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/18/alarming-data-britain-sick-man-europe-before-covid

Do you own the wealth which you produce? No, you do not. Instead you hand it over to parasitical class. You are the fundamental power of society, and yet you don’t know it. You imagine that you are free, while in fact you are enslaved. You are dependent on your employer for a job. The bosses who own the means of production own your very life. The two parties, the Democratic and Republican parties, have brought the country to the verge of ruin but you still vote for them.

The Republicans and Democrats will, as usual, use the media to whip you into line. Needless to say, the worker has no choice between these two capitalist parties, that  are both pledged to the same system and that whether the one or the other succeeds, he or she will still remain a wage–slave. The working class must get rid of the whole brood of masters and exploiters, and put themselves in possession and control of the means of production. It is therefore a question not of “reform,” the mask of fraud, but of revolution. The capitalist system must be overthrown, class-rule abolished and wage-slavery supplanted by the cooperative industry. We hear it frequently urged that the Democratic party is the “poor man’s party,” “the friend of labor.” There is but one way to relieve poverty and to free labor, and that is by making common property of the means of production.

Is the Democratic Party, which we are assured by those sympathizers of Sanders has “strong socialistic tendencies,” in favor of socialized ownership? Is it opposed to the wage-system, with its endless flood the poverty, misery and wretchedness. The difference between the Republican and Democratic parties involve no issue, no principle in which the working class have very much interest. Between these parties socialists have no choice, no preference. They are one in their opposition to socialism, that is to say, the emancipation of the working class from wage-slavery, and every worker who has intelligence enough to understand class interest and the nature of the struggle in which it is involved, will once and for all time sever our relations with them both.

Several Republican former senators and congressmen have endorsed Biden for president, saying that he is better qualified than Trump to run the country. There is also a large number of intelligence and foreign policy advisers, many who have worked for Republican presidents, also endorsed Biden. Colin Powell is such a person. Former ambassador, John Negroponte, is another one who endorsed Biden. It was Negroponte who funnelled covert funds from the CIA to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua; he was ambassador to the United Nations as the U.S.A. sought to go to war with lies about Iraqi WMD and then ambassador to Iraq during the U.S. occupation of that country. He was the director of national intelligence during Bush torture program. Nobody has ever accused Negroponte of being a progressive yet he is happy to publicly endorsed Biden. Why?

There is absolutely no difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties so far as the working class is concerned. They are exactly alike. They are both committed to the capitalist system. They are both committed to wage slavery, and whether the one or the other wins, you always lose. Your condition remains the same. You have tried these two capitalist parties over and over again, with the same inevitable result. The politicians who used you to vote to perpetuate the system in which you are slaves have no respect for you. They treat you with contempt. And you say “Oh, I have grown wise this year, I am going over to the Democratic Party, over to Biden and Harris.” No matter which of these parties is in power, workers remain in a state of slavery and their lives will be broken. If now and then there is one who escapes it is simply the exception which serves to prove the rule.

The World Socialist Party is the party of the present and the future. Waste your time and your energy no longer. The World Socialist Party is the only party that has a claim upon you. The World Socialist Party is pledged to abolish the capitalist system, class-rule and wage-slavery—a party which does not compromise or confuse, but, preserving inviolate its principles of political and economic freedom.

A divided world has failed to rise to the challenge of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. He explained that far more could have been done if countries had worked together to combat the disease, which has killed more than one million people.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is a major global challenge for the entire international community, for multilateralism and for me, as secretary-general of the United Nations. Unfortunately it is a test that, so far, the international community is failing.”

He said that if coordinated measures were not taken, “a microscopic virus could push millions of people into poverty and hunger, with devastating economic effects in the years to come”.

Guterres also criticised countries for a lack of unity in trying to solve other global challenges including the conflicts in Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria.

“It is a source of enormous frustration,” he said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-un/divided-world-is-failing-covid-19-test-says-frustrated-u-n-chief-idUSKBN2720JB?il=0

  Of almost 4,700 confirmed foreign victims of trafficking,  Of these, 549 adults and just 28 children were granted discretionary leave to remain as trafficking victims, an immigration status that gives people a temporary right to stay in the UK if they have suffered extreme hardship over a four-year-period. For nearly three-quarters (74%) of all trafficking victims granted discretionary leave, the period lasted between seven months to a year. A further 7.8% were given even less, between zero and six months.

The figures have shocked anti-slavery campaigners. The data challenges the claim that Britain is a world leader in tackling modern slavery.

According to an analysis by Swiss bank UBS and consulting firm PwC, billionaire wealth increased to $10.2 trillion through the end of July, setting a new record amid the coronavirus pandemic even as millions of unemployed people fall into poverty. The number of billionaires also rose from 2,158 in 2017 to 2,189 this summer, according to the report.

 Health care billionaires saw their wealth increase by 50%. Technology billionaires saw their wealth rise by 42.5%. Billionaires in the entertainment, financial services, materials, and real estate sectors saw increases of 10% or less. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has seen his wealth rise more than 60% during the pandemic to $195 billion through late August, according to the analysis. Tesla CEO Elon Musk saw his wealth more than triple to $85 billion over that time frame.

Some executives, like Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and Bezos, have profited from a boom in business caused by the lockdowns. Others have profited directly from government aid distributed to their companies. But most billionaires saw their wealth increase due to rising investments, buoyed by a stock market surge propped up by government assistance.

This is not the first time that billionaires profited while millions suffered. 

The Institute for Policy Studies found that the wealthiest 400 billionaires in the US not only recovered from the 2008 recession within three years but increased their wealth by 80% over the following decade. By comparison, the bottom 80% of earners have still not recovered.

 The lack of government action since the spring has resulted in an estimated 8 million Americans falling into poverty since May, according to a study from researchers at Columbia University. The lack of additional stimulus payments and the expiration of enhanced federal unemployment benefits has resulted in 6 million Americans falling into poverty over just the last three months, according to a study from researchers at the University of Chicago and Notre Dame.

The problem has been even worse globally. Between 88 million and 114 million people around the world have fallen into extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 per day, since the pandemic hit, according to the World Bank. There are now more than 700 million people living in extreme poverty and researchers expected that number to keep rising.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/billionaires-rich/

 The pandemic has reportedly intensified food insecurity in India, with the hunger crisis gripping vast swathes of rural hinterland and some urban areas. 

“The food stress existed long before the start of the pandemic. It has now become worse. Many people have lost their jobs, and those with low incomes complain about food insecurity,” Dipa Sinha of the Right to Food Program told DW.

A recent COVID-19 Livelihoods Survey conducted by the Azim Premji University revealed that hundreds of thousands of families in India have been forced to reduce their food consumption during the pandemic.

“Food is scarce in many states, with millions of people unable to make ends meet,” Jean Dreze, a development economist, told DW.

Experts say the hunger crisis is not due to the shortage of food production; surplus food items have been lying in the stores of the Food Corporation of India.

“Stocked food items must now be used to provide relief to millions of Indians,” Himanshu Himanshu, an associate professor at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, told DW, adding that by they will not only help reduce the food surplus but also boost India’s economy by increasing the disposal income of households that are struggling due to the pandemic.

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-exacerbates-indias-hunger-problem/a-55299109