At least 100 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to violence, persecution, or other forms of public disorder over the last decade, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. That’s about one in every 97 people on the planet, roughly one percent of humanity. If such war victims had been given their own state to homestead, it would be the 14th largest nation, population-wise, in the world. According to UNHCR,  fewer war refugees and IDPs are able to rebuild their lives. In the 1990s, an average of 1.5 million refugees were able to return home annually. For the last 10 years, that number has dropped to around 385,000. Today, about 77% of the world’s refugees are trapped in long-term displacement situations thanks to forever wars like the conflict in Afghanistan that is now in its sixth decade.

Yet, these numbers, they’re set to be dwarfed by people displaced by another signature story of our time: climate change. So much worse is yet to come, according to experts.

 A recent forecast suggests that, by the year 2050, the number of people driven from their homes by ecological catastrophes could be 900% greater than the 100 million forced to flee conflicts over the last decade.

Predictions now warn of increasing ecological disasters and resource wars supercharging the already surging phenomenon of global displacement. According to a recent report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think tank that produces annual global terrorism and peace indexes, two billion people already face uncertain access to sufficient food — a number set to jump to 3.5 billion by 2050. Another one billion “live in countries that do not have the current resilience to deal with the ecological changes they are expected to face in the future.” The report warns that the global climate crisis may displace as many as 1.2 billion people by 2050.

In 2010, Bassiaka Dao, the president of the confederation of farmers in Burkina Faso, told the United Nations news agency, IRIN, that the impacts of climate change had been noticeable for years and were getting worse. As the decade wore on, rising temperatures and new rainfall patterns — droughts followed by flash floods — increasingly drove farmers from their villages, while desertification swelled the populations of urban centers.

In a report published earlier this year, William Chemaly of the Global Protection Cluster, a network of nongovernmental organizations, international aid groups, and United Nations agencies, noted that in Burkina Faso “climate change is crippling livelihoods, exacerbating food insecurity, and intensifying armed conflict and violent extremism.”

 Burkina Faso can’t deal with the one million people already displaced by conflict. And the world can’t deal with the almost 80 million people already driven from their homes by violence. So how will we cope with 1.2 billion people — nearly the population of China or India — likely to be displaced by climate driven-conflicts, water wars, increasing ecological devastation, and other unnatural disasters in the next 30 years?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/climate-change-future/

U.S jails and prisons are being completely ravaged by COVID-19. Crowded quarters, a lack of PPE, inadequate medical care, an aging population, and unsanitary conditions have contributed to an infection rate 5.5 times higher than the already ballooned average in the U.S. 

As of this writing, over 252,000 people in jails and prisons have been infected and at least 1,450 incarcerated people and officers have died from the novel coronavirus. Evidence suggests these figures are underreported, however. (Wisconsin, for example, isn’t releasing any information to the public.)

In response, incarcerated people have shown strong solidarity, coming together to demand baseline safety measures and advocating for their release, only to be met with brutal repression and punishment. According to a new report by Perilous: A Chronicle of Prisoner Unrest on November 13, incarcerated people in the U.S. collectively organized at least 106 COVID-19 related rebellions from March 17 to June 15. Cook County Jail in Chicago, a site with the largest outbreak of any location in the state of Illinois, rebelled on six separate occasions including one uprising and several hunger strikes.

The analysis found that people rose up inside federal and state prisons, jails, juvenile carceral centers, and Immigration Detention Centers in 39 states. Immigrant Detention Centers rebelled most frequently, with 45 separate events. Thirty-tworebellions took place in private prisons (25 of which had contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement), a disproportionate response as less than 9 percent of prisons in the United States are privately operated. Louisiana, with a rich history of work stoppages, rebellions and an indefatigable support infrastructure, was the state with the highest frequency of COVID-19-related prison rebellions. California and Washingtonwere the second and third most rebellious respectively.

Common demands have included that guards wear masks and that departments provide individuals with protective items like soap, masks, and hand sanitizer.

Duncan Tarr, a researcher at Perilous, tells Truthout, “Since corrections departments and ICE contractors are unwilling to prevent the spread of the virus, prisoners and detainees have been taking action themselves to draw attention to the dangerous situation they find themselves in and to resist the system of incarceration that is killing them.”

Despite urgent calls for action from public health scientists in The Lancet, the ACLU and countless other organizations, Democratic and Republican politicians alike, from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, have largely refused to reduce prison populations by any meaningful margin. Instead of mass releases, as the U.S. enters its third wave, many departments’ chosen preventative measures continue to be “lockdowns,” or confining people in their cells for 21 to 23 hours a day. It’s estimated that 300,000 people incarcerated in state and federal prisons are in lockdown or solitary confinement conditions. 

https://truthout.org/articles/report-finds-over-100-rebellions-in-jails-and-prisons-over-covid-conditions/

A social media story claims that three thousand people have offered themselves to Nigel Farage (ex-Conservative, ex-European Parliament, ex-UKIP, ex-Brexit) as candidates for presumably local and national elections. The Brexit party is now being turned into the Reform party. It would not be wrong to say that there are many people who are disillusioned with the political parties who dominate the political stage in the UK. Any “success” it achieves, if ever, would be mere crumbs distributed by the capitalist class to keep the workers “happy”. Like a stage magician performing an illusion the reforms sort will turn out to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

The following is taken from an editorial from the October 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard. The three thousand, reformists ,and more, would improve their political education considerably by reading this. (The Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed in June, 1904)

“The basis of modern society is, economically, the holding by one section of the community of the means necessary for producing and distributing the means of living of the whole of the community, i.e. the ownership by a class of the whole wealth of society. As against them there is the vast mass of the people owning nothing but their “labour-power,” their power of working.

The worker being compelled to sell this power of working on the labour market, in return for his means of livelihood, has interests diametrically opposed to those of the employer who buys his activity. Hence two classes with conflicting interests, constantly meeting on the labour market, must necessarily engage in a struggle in which each combatant can gain only at the expense of the other. Such a struggle between classes forms a class war.

Economically, the working class are impotent so long as the employing class has possession of political power. Therefore, the class struggle must manifest itself as a political struggle for class supremacy. The working class can only gain their ends by taking possession of the political machine and using it so as to gain their own economic emancipation. This can be done only by themselves, and the struggle in which they must take part to secure this is a class war—the working class against the employing class.

The basis of a Socialist Party in any country must, therefore, be a recognition of the fact that the material interests of the working class are in entire opposition to those of the employing class, that is, the recognition of the class war. Any party which declares that no class war exists rules itself, by virtue of that declaration, out of court as a Socialist party. It is, necessary, therefore, in forming and organising a Socialist party to have a clearly defined class war basis, and in every action of the party to always keep the class-conscious character of the party clearly to the front. Any action tending to obscure this position, any position keeping the class struggle in the background, is a virtual betrayal of Socialist principles, serving only to confuse the issues in the minds of the workers and to make it more difficult for them to understand their class position and the reasons for it, and to see the road which must be followed if they are to achieve their emancipation—serving only, in brief, to retard the development of their class consciousness.

Any alliance, either permanent or temporary, with a party which does not recognise the class war is therefore out of the question. For does not every such alliance, whether openly avowed or tacitly understood, make less clear the class opposition which exists between the various political parties? How can we claim to be essentially distinct and, in fact, diametrically opposed to all other political parties, if we can find sufficient common objects to make possible any common ground of working? We think that the teaching of our principles is hindered by every such concession to the anti-class war parties, and is, therefore, opposed to the true interests of Socialism. We, therefore, avow ourselves in hostility to all other political parties, and can have nothing in common with them…

Our next objection lies in the fact that any such dependence upon other political parties for their assistance assumes the maintenance of a majority of members on our legislative bodies who are not class conscious representatives of the working class. So long as that remains the case, so long will the legislature be controlled by middle class men, by capitalists. Every such capitalistically controlled legislature secures the control of the administrative and judicial functions by the capitalists…

We have only to study the legislation of the last half of the nineteenth century to find that each of those phases of the economic legislation of the middle class parties plentifully exist. Wo find that the administration of the law being in the hands of the capitalist class, will be carried on by them in such a way as not to be dangerous to their own class interests…

We have to point out further that sometimes it happens that a reform asked for by the working class can be granted them without any serious danger to the capitalist class. In such cases they make graceful concessions and the working class are usually called upon to hail the party granting such a “concession” as their truest friends…

We are, therefore, forced to rho conclusion that the trying to secure measures for the palliation of the evils of the existing class-governed society is useless. The men in control of the legislative, administrative, and judicial machinery of the community can always dodge any such partial attacks upon their position, can always find loopholes to escape from any concession appearing to endanger their position.

The only thing which will secure the alleviation of our misery and our wage slavery is the propagation of the principles of Socialism and the building up of a class conscious Socialist party, prepared to wrest at the earliest possible moment the whole powers of government from the hands of those who at present control them.

When a strong Socialist party, fighting directly for the establishment of a Socialist regime, and prepared in their progress to secure any advantage which will act as a new vantage ground in their further fight is organised, then the capitalists will be only too ready to offer and to give each and all of those palliatives as a sop to the growing Socialist forces in the country.

We have, therefore, to recognise all the time that it is only possible to secure any real benefit for the people when the people themselves become class conscious, when behind the Socialists in Parliament and on other bodies there stands a solid phalanx of men clear in their knowledge of Socialism and clear in their knowledge that the only way to secure the Socialist Commonwealth of the future is to depend only upon the efforts of themselves and those who have the same class conscious opinions. Therefore we have no palliative programme. The only palliative we shall ever secure is the Socialist Society of the future gained by fighting uncompromisingly at all times and in every season.

The full editorial can found at:

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-futility-of-reform-1904.html

DC

Hopes that Congress will pass another pandemic relief package before the end of the year are growing dim. The federal government estimates 10 million people – including 4 million children – will be pushed below the federal poverty line in late 2020 as unemployment benefits are set to expire in December without further relief from Congress.

Federal data shows nearly 11 percent of adults – including up to 14 percent of adults living with children do not have enough to eat.

Nearly 24 million adults — 10.9 percent of the population — report that their household sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the past week, according to data collected in mid-October. Between 8 and 14 percent of adults with children reported that their kids sometimes or often did not have enough to eat. Compare that to last year, when only 3.7 percent of adults reported their households going hungry during the entire course of 2019. Rates of hunger are much higher among Black and Latino households, where workers are more likely to work in low-income industries that suffered massive job losses due to the pandemic. About 19 percent of Black households and 18 percent of Latinx households reported not having enough food to eat sometimes or often in the past seven days.

 About 1 million people applied for unemployment insurance last week, more than any time during the Great Recession, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Many workers are exhausting their state unemployment benefits as the pandemic drags on – the number of state claims dropped by 436,000 last week – and federal emergency unemployment benefits will expire on December 26 without congressional action. 

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Nearly 80 million adults — about one in three — report not having enough money to cover basic expenses, such as food, rent and medical bills, including 40 percent of households with children. Nearly one in six renters are behind on rent, including 26 percent of Black families and 18 percent of Latinx families, according to the Center’s analysis of federal data.  Attempts by landlords to evict their tenants have been reported across the country.

https://truthout.org/articles/1-in-10-go-hungry-as-trump-and-mcconnell-fixate-on-challenging-election-results/

 Free trade agreements create a “race to the bottom” said Kate Lappin, Regional Secretary for Asia and Pacific, at Public Services International, encouraging governments to compete to have the lowest possible wages and conditions. Instead of signing new rules that favour big business, and harm workers  Lappin said 

The 10 members of ASEAN – Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – will sign the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) together with five additional countries Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea on 15 November.

 India recently withdrew despite spending several years in RCEP negotiations, citing concerns it would not protect its own industries and workers. 

The text of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement is so secretive that even elected representatives have not been allowed to see it, even though it will potentially lock future governments into rules that will limit their abilities to make policies required in times of crisis or to improve access to public services and worker’s rights. Leaked documents have shown that the agreement limits the potential for governments to make policies, including policies to recover from the Covid-19 crisis.  Leaked documents have also shown that it does not mention climate change or make provisions for labour rights, including forced labour or child labour. Many across the region fear that the agreement has been kept secret because it heavily favours large multinational corporations who help draft trade rules, over the local small and medium businesses that are struggling most due to the pandemic.

The secretive nature of the agreement is  unusual, given that the text was finalised 12 months ago, meaning that it includes no specific updates recognising the extraordinary challenges created byCovid-19 pandemic, said Andrew Dettmer the National President of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.

 Risa Hontiveros, a Senator from the Philippines, said at a press conference organised by Unions for Trade Justice, “This pandemic has shown us that we should never put the economy before our people.”  

“Even parliaments have no idea what the hell is being signed in the name of the people,” Charles Santiago, a Member of Parliament from Malaysia, said. Santiago described how restrictions imposed by international agreements had already prevented some governments from rolling out mass testing: “even in a pandemic the people are being held hostage by big pharma,” he said.

Che Chariya, a Cambodian garment worker  union leader described the real-world consequences that this type of race to the bottom creates. Garment workers in Cambodia have been particularly hard hit by the suspension of major contracts from multinational firms due to Covid-19. However, Chariya said that for many garment workers, including herself, the challenges pre-dated Covid-19. Chariya worked in a garment factory for 18 years until it closed in 2018. She now works in a sweatshop for a piece rate, losing the factory’s minimum wage and social security benefits, despite still making clothes for the same companies. Since the pandemic, she says the cost of living has increased while the piece rate has gone down.

http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/11/secretive-mega-trade-deal-rules-harm-asias-covid-19-recovery/

 Four separate independent monitoring boards, which scrutinise prisons and immigration detention facilities, found that asylum seekers arriving at Dover were being subjected to “inhumane treatment.”

Evidence found that people arriving at Dover were being kept in crowded conditions – with no social distancing – and that serious errors were being included in their documentation. Individuals were moved between detention centres with untreated broken bones, burns and cancer.

 Dame Anne Owers, national chair of the Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs), said in her evidence that monitors “believe that the cumulative effect of the failings amounts to inhumane treatment of detainees which should be urgently addressed”.

Emma Ginn, director of the charity Medical Justice, which works for the health rights of immigration detainees, said:

 “The relentless deportation charter flights feel like a crusade to quickly get rid of victims of war and persecution without having had their history of trafficking and torture being taken into account.”

Some asylum seekers were put on flights before a vulnerability assessment had been completed. One man, who was on constant suicide watch, poured boiling water on his legs just before the flight and was still put on a plane. Others who attempted suicide were taken to hospital just before their flight, then taken from hospital straight to the flight.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/13/asylum-seekers-crossing-channel-face-inhumane-treatment-observers-say

< Part One here

Has Covid 19,  led to an erosion of civil liberties. Or. should that be a further erosion of civil liberties?  Where’s the baseline. Situation Report: Full lockdown in force until December 2nd. Allegedly. Some government ministers have said that this lockdown will end on December second. Others are saying it could be at least Spring 2021 before its lifted. This article doesn’t seek to deny that measures suited to dealing with a pandemic weren’t necessary but is concerned the draconian steps which have been implemented globally and which are doing possibly irreversible damage to the civil liberties which capitalism permits its wage slaves to have.

     Is it an exaggeration to ask whether we are at one minute to midnight where a boot will be stamping on a human face for ever? Will there be no love, no laughter, no art, no literature, no science, no curiosity, no enjoyment, no pleasure?

     Definition of Lockdown. A protocol followed in an emergency that involves confining people in a secure place such as the confinement of prison inmates in cells after a disturbance, or the locking of students and teachers in classrooms after a violent attack. A facility, such as a prison where people considered to be dangerous are locked inside living quarters or otherwise confined. freedictionary.com

      This lockdown will cost the economy one point eight billion pounds a day says a story in the MailOnline of November 2nd. That’s on top of all the money that’s  already been borrowed. Billionaires and corporations are smirking and going “I’m alright Jack!”  There will come a point when government support of the economy will become simply unfeasible. Being a worker in that situation, as opposed to living in a socialist society dealing with a pandemic, will be more than uncomfortable. How many will do the intelligent thing and start educating themselves about the capitalist system and the  only sensible alternative?

     The 1689 Bill of Rights has Cruel and unusual punishment in common law describing punishment that is considered unacceptable due to the suffering, pain, or humiliation it inflicts on the person subjected to the sanction. It can include punishments that are not generally accepted in society. Similar words are to be found in the United States Eighth Amendment to its Constitution. Also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,  European Convention on Human Rights and more. The Marshall Islands Bill of Rights prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment”, defined as: the death penalty; torture; “inhuman and degrading treatment”; and “excessive fines or deprivations” Wikipedia.

     Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption, Lord Sumption, is a former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court between 2012 and 2018. He gave the Cambridge Freshfields Annual Law Lecture on 27 October “Government by decree: Covid-19 and the Constitution.” https://www.privatelaw.law.cam.ac.uk/press/events/2020/10/cambridge-freshfields-annual-law-lecture-2020

“On 26 August the government introduced by decree an offence of “being involved” in a gathering exceeding thirty people, and empowered any policeman in the land to issue a fixed penalty notice of £10,000. This sum, enough to ruin most people, was far in excess of any fine that would be imposed by a court for such an offence.. it has been used to suppress protests against the government’s coronavirus policies. On 30 August, the police served a £10,000 fixed penalty notice on Mr Piers Corbyn for addressing a rally against masks in Trafalgar Square. The regulations contain an exception for political protest, provided that the organisers have agreed a risk assessment and taken reasonable steps ensure safety.””

The Daily Mail. October 14th., Liverpool gym shut down by armed police. Gym owner fined one thousand pounds.

 Lionel Shriver is an American novelist. In the Spectator, October 17. She expressed her anger at the state sanctioned brutality being used against citizens for not “obeying” the edicts coming down from clueless governments

Examples can be found from across the globe of the heavy handed approach by the agents of the State.

     “In Australia this summer, a young pregnant mother was arrested and handcuffed in front of her children merely for supporting a socially distanced lockdown protest on Facebook, while police confiscated all her household’s laptops and mobile phones. In another infamous YouTube video, an Australian officer clutches a slight young woman viciously around the throat, slams her to the ground, cuffs her hands behind her back and then calls in a clatter of reinforcements — all because she isn’t wearing a face mask. After 2020, ‘liberal’ democracy will never be the same. It’s been summarily demonstrated that civil liberties aren’t worth the paper constitutions are printed on. Rights may be rescinded with no warning and without even the fig leaf of parliamentary approval…”

  “On 26 September the police broke up a demonstration against the government’s measures, whose organisers had agreed a risk assessment and had taken reasonable steps. The police claim to have done this because some of the demonstrators had not acted in accordance with the arrangements made by the organisers. They cleared the square using batons with considerable violence, injuring some 20 people who were guilty of nothing other than attending an apparently lawful protest.”  Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption

“The true function of the police is not to be nice to people (in fact, they are actually paid to be suspicious of us all). They exist to protect private property rights — which means to protect the privileged position of the ruling class of capitalism. Which means, further, to perpetuate the inferior, unprivileged position of the working-class. The fact that policemen are themselves workers makes no difference to this. The capitalist class have to get workers to do their dirty work for them. — workers are not only exploited in the interests of their parasitic masters but are also persuaded to tighten their bonds ever tighter about themselves.”Running Commentary” Socialist Standard September 1979

A zeitgeist snapshot of life in the New Normal taken from the Main Stream Media.

Home Secretary Priti Patel will order police to stop protests involving more than TWO people during lockdown. November 3

Police ARREST qualified nurse, 73, trying to take her 97-year-old dementia-hit mother from care home after nine months to be looked after by her family – and put pensioner in patrol car to be sent back. November 4

Priti Patel orders police to get tough on Covid rule-breakers: Home Secretary ramps up enforcement saying those who ‘flout the law’ must not be allowed to ‘endanger the majority’ Priti Patel told police chiefs they must ‘strengthen enforcement’ of Covid rules. November 4

    With the exactness of Bobby Fischer  inexorably taking control of the chess board Lionel Shriver articulates the powers the State has abrogated to itself (The Spectator. October 17th.)

    “We’ve allowed the state to dictate when our businesses close and whether they may open at all. We’ve acceded to national house arrest. We’ve abdicated the right to travel abroad without submitting to punishing self-incarceration, and we’re currently surrendering the right to travel to different regions of our own country. We’ve empowered the police to issue summonses for picnicking in parks or sitting on a bench. We’ve sat idly by while fines for organising a protest against this very oppression rise to a crippling, potentially life-destroying £10,000. We’ve granted government the right to regulate whether we can see our parents, whom we may invite into our homes, and how physically close we may approach another human being outside our household,…. .We walk out of our own front doors only at the government’s sufferance. “

DC

< Part One here

Has Covid 19,  led to an erosion of civil liberties. Or. should that be a further erosion of civil liberties?  Where’s the baseline. Situation Report: Full lockdown in force until December 2nd. Allegedly. Some government ministers have said that this lockdown will end on December second. Others are saying it could be at least Spring 2021 before its lifted. This article doesn’t seek to deny that measures suited to dealing with a pandemic weren’t necessary but is concerned the draconian steps which have been implemented globally and which are doing possibly irreversible damage to the civil liberties which capitalism permits its wage slaves to have.

     Is it an exaggeration to ask whether we are at one minute to midnight where a boot will be stamping on a human face for ever? Will there be no love, no laughter, no art, no literature, no science, no curiosity, no enjoyment, no pleasure?

     Definition of Lockdown. A protocol followed in an emergency that involves confining people in a secure place such as the confinement of prison inmates in cells after a disturbance, or the locking of students and teachers in classrooms after a violent attack. A facility, such as a prison where people considered to be dangerous are locked inside living quarters or otherwise confined. freedictionary.com

      This lockdown will cost the economy one point eight billion pounds a day says a story in the MailOnline of November 2nd. That’s on top of all the money that’s  already been borrowed. Billionaires and corporations are smirking and going “I’m alright Jack!”  There will come a point when government support of the economy will become simply unfeasible. Being a worker in that situation, as opposed to living in a socialist society dealing with a pandemic, will be more than uncomfortable. How many will do the intelligent thing and start educating themselves about the capitalist system and the  only sensible alternative?

     The 1689 Bill of Rights has Cruel and unusual punishment in common law describing punishment that is considered unacceptable due to the suffering, pain, or humiliation it inflicts on the person subjected to the sanction. It can include punishments that are not generally accepted in society. Similar words are to be found in the United States Eighth Amendment to its Constitution. Also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,  European Convention on Human Rights and more. The Marshall Islands Bill of Rights prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment”, defined as: the death penalty; torture; “inhuman and degrading treatment”; and “excessive fines or deprivations” Wikipedia.

     Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption, Lord Sumption, is a former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court between 2012 and 2018. He gave the Cambridge Freshfields Annual Law Lecture on 27 October “Government by decree: Covid-19 and the Constitution.” https://www.privatelaw.law.cam.ac.uk/press/events/2020/10/cambridge-freshfields-annual-law-lecture-2020

“On 26 August the government introduced by decree an offence of “being involved” in a gathering exceeding thirty people, and empowered any policeman in the land to issue a fixed penalty notice of £10,000. This sum, enough to ruin most people, was far in excess of any fine that would be imposed by a court for such an offence.. it has been used to suppress protests against the government’s coronavirus policies. On 30 August, the police served a £10,000 fixed penalty notice on Mr Piers Corbyn for addressing a rally against masks in Trafalgar Square. The regulations contain an exception for political protest, provided that the organisers have agreed a risk assessment and taken reasonable steps ensure safety.””

The Daily Mail. October 14th., Liverpool gym shut down by armed police. Gym owner fined one thousand pounds.

 Lionel Shriver is an American novelist. In the Spectator, October 17. She expressed her anger at the state sanctioned brutality being used against citizens for not “obeying” the edicts coming down from clueless governments

Examples can be found from across the globe of the heavy handed approach by the agents of the State.

     “In Australia this summer, a young pregnant mother was arrested and handcuffed in front of her children merely for supporting a socially distanced lockdown protest on Facebook, while police confiscated all her household’s laptops and mobile phones. In another infamous YouTube video, an Australian officer clutches a slight young woman viciously around the throat, slams her to the ground, cuffs her hands behind her back and then calls in a clatter of reinforcements — all because she isn’t wearing a face mask. After 2020, ‘liberal’ democracy will never be the same. It’s been summarily demonstrated that civil liberties aren’t worth the paper constitutions are printed on. Rights may be rescinded with no warning and without even the fig leaf of parliamentary approval…”

  “On 26 September the police broke up a demonstration against the government’s measures, whose organisers had agreed a risk assessment and had taken reasonable steps. The police claim to have done this because some of the demonstrators had not acted in accordance with the arrangements made by the organisers. They cleared the square using batons with considerable violence, injuring some 20 people who were guilty of nothing other than attending an apparently lawful protest.”  Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption

“The true function of the police is not to be nice to people (in fact, they are actually paid to be suspicious of us all). They exist to protect private property rights — which means to protect the privileged position of the ruling class of capitalism. Which means, further, to perpetuate the inferior, unprivileged position of the working-class. The fact that policemen are themselves workers makes no difference to this. The capitalist class have to get workers to do their dirty work for them. — workers are not only exploited in the interests of their parasitic masters but are also persuaded to tighten their bonds ever tighter about themselves.”Running Commentary” Socialist Standard September 1979

A zeitgeist snapshot of life in the New Normal taken from the Main Stream Media.

Home Secretary Priti Patel will order police to stop protests involving more than TWO people during lockdown. November 3

Police ARREST qualified nurse, 73, trying to take her 97-year-old dementia-hit mother from care home after nine months to be looked after by her family – and put pensioner in patrol car to be sent back. November 4

Priti Patel orders police to get tough on Covid rule-breakers: Home Secretary ramps up enforcement saying those who ‘flout the law’ must not be allowed to ‘endanger the majority’ Priti Patel told police chiefs they must ‘strengthen enforcement’ of Covid rules. November 4

    With the exactness of Bobby Fischer  inexorably taking control of the chess board Lionel Shriver articulates the powers the State has abrogated to itself (The Spectator. October 17th.)

    “We’ve allowed the state to dictate when our businesses close and whether they may open at all. We’ve acceded to national house arrest. We’ve abdicated the right to travel abroad without submitting to punishing self-incarceration, and we’re currently surrendering the right to travel to different regions of our own country. We’ve empowered the police to issue summonses for picnicking in parks or sitting on a bench. We’ve sat idly by while fines for organising a protest against this very oppression rise to a crippling, potentially life-destroying £10,000. We’ve granted government the right to regulate whether we can see our parents, whom we may invite into our homes, and how physically close we may approach another human being outside our household,…. .We walk out of our own front doors only at the government’s sufferance. “

DC

 Almost three-quarters of frontline care workers – 600,000 –  in England are earning below the “real” living wage, which experts say is the bare minimum to allow families basics such as a secondhand car and a week’s annual UK self-catering holiday, research has revealed.

The proportion of care workers below the threshold is even higher in northern areas, where care homes have been hit hardest by Covid-19. In the north-east, 82% of care staff earned less than the England-wide real living wage of £9.50 per hour, while the proportion was 78% in the north-west.

The figures were calculated by the Living Wage Foundation. The real living wage is calculated based on public consultation about necessities and analysis of the cost of living. It differs from the statutory national living wage which is currently £8.72 per hour for people aged 25 and over. In London only 10% of care workers earn more than £10.85 per hour, which is the threshold in the capital adjusted for the higher cost of housing and transport.

“They’ve put their lives on the line caring for others during this pandemic, so it’s essential we ensure they earn enough to look after their own families,” said Laura Gardiner, the director of the Living Wage Foundation. “The real living wage is the only UK wage rate based on what it costs to live. It ensures workers and their families can meet everyday needs – things like a surprise dentist trip and a new school uniform for growing kids.”

“There’s overwhelming public support for a pay rise for care staff,” said Christina McAnea, the assistant general secretary of Unison, a trade union which represents care workers. “These workers do a skilled job looking after the elderly and disabled people. But many struggle on poverty wages despite their dedication during the pandemic.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/13/three-quarters-of-englands-care-workers-earn-below-real-living-wage