COVID-19 – Australia denies non-citizens help

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An estimated 1.1 million people are in Australia on temporary visas and are excluded from the jobkeeper and jobseeker support. 



 They include international students, working holiday makers, skilled work visa holders, asylum seekers and refugees.



Far from being the great leveller it is asserted to be, Covid-19 has laid barethe structural inequalities that exist in Australia. Those who are in Australia temporarily – to study, to work, to pick fruit, to be protected from persecution – have had their second-class status brutally exposed by the extremis of Covid-19. They face the very real prospect of destitution, of being left homeless, of not having enough to eat.



Many work in jobs and industries severely affected by shutdowns. They have lost jobs in their tens of thousands. But they are excluded from all government support measures, including the centrepiece jobkeeper wage subsidy and jobseeker welfare payments. As the government has rolled out massive and unprecedented rescue packages for jobs and businesses – $214bn – for those in Australia on temporary visas there is no safety net at all.



Their treatment reflects a more fundamental conception in Australia that people temporarily in the country – who live among Australian citizens as neighbours, work alongside them as colleagues, catch the bus as fellow commuters, and pay taxes as fellow contributors – are somehow less deserving of the country’s protection. A government’s most fundamental duty, after all, is to protect its people. But who are its people? Who are the people the government should care for and consider its own? Australia’s government has chosen to define that narrowly – as citizens and permanent residents. It has consciously decided that those in Australia on temporary visas are undeserving of support.



These are extraordinary times. The world faces a global pandemic the likes of which has not been seen for a century. There exists an obligation to offer some measure of assistance to people in this country in a time of unprecedented crisis.



Telling people they should “make their way home” is simplistic and impractical. Many simply cannot: they cannot afford flights home; the borders of their country have been sealed shut – even to citizens; transit countries will not allow them to pass through; or they have come to Australia seeking protection and cannot safely go back. Others have lived in Australia for years and have built families and lives and communities here, there is no other “home” to go back to. 



  Portugal has temporarily granted all migrants in the country the rights of its citizens.



https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/apr/23/australias-coronavirus-relief-exclusions-prove-we-are-not-all-in-this-together

COVID-19 and Civil Rights

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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned about ”rising ethno-nationalism, populism, authoritarianism and a pushback against human rights,” in many nations as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.



The UN chief pointed to existing discrimination in the delivery of public services to tackle COVID-19 and the ”structural inequalities that impede access to them.” 



“We see the disproportionate effects on certain communities, the rise of hate speech, the targeting of vulnerable groups, and the risks of heavy-handed security responses undermining the health response,” Guterres said. “The crisis can provide a pretext to adopt repressive measures for purposes unrelated to the pandemic,” he added. 



”Heavy-handed security responses undermine the health response and can exacerbate existing threats to peace and security or create new ones,” Guterres said. ”The message is clear: People and their rights must be front and center.”  



 It did not take long. Three weeks after the outbreak, the Hungarian parliament conferred formidable executive powers on prime minister Viktor Orbán, allowing him to rule by decree. Numerous governments have exploited the pandemic to undermine democratic principles, violate human rights and perpetrate crimes against citizens and migrants.



https://www.dw.com/en/un-chief-pandemic-is-fast-becoming-human-rights-crisis/a-53214547

Capitalism is No Cure for COVID-19

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Everything in the world is connected with something else. The individual is a part of the world interacting in various ways with that world. Separate cultures are not closed, isolated islands. Society lives and functions as long as there is a certain interaction of the elements in these systems or of the systems themselves with other systems. Everything that happens in the world may be attributed to the interaction of things. The unity of the world is achieved through interaction. Nowhere in the world can there be any phenomena that do not give rise to certain consequences and have not been caused by other phenomena. Ours is a world of cause and effect.



“It is unrealistic to expect capitalists to manage any social crisis. Their goal is to accumulate capital, which they do exceptionally well, as evidenced by their enormous wealth in a world where billions struggle to survive.



Capitalists are highly skilled at sustaining their rule. They prioritize military spending in order to defend and expand their wealth. They invest in politicians, scientists, journalists, authors, psychologists, and other ‘experts’ to promote their views and enforce their rules. They excel at finding ways to profit from disaster.

When it comes to protecting human beings, capitalists are absolutely abysmal. They have to be:
Extracting capital from human labor creates massive social and environmental harm. Capitalists cannot reduce this harm without lowering their profits and becoming less competitive. Whether or not they care about the damage they cause, they accept it as ‘the cost of doing business.’

Capitalists will invest in social supports, but only to the minimum necessary to sustain a profit-producing labor force. Whenever possible, they strive to cut costs by shifting responsibility for social care to individual families and charities.

The problem is not only that capitalists fail to meet human needs. That has been clear for centuries. The deeper problem is that the rest of us expect them to behave differently and are surprised and dismayed when they don’t.

The results are entirely predictable; capitalists have a 100 percent success rate for creating social problems and a 100 percent failure rate for solving them.

We keep banging our heads against their wall, wanting capitalists to do what they cannot do and be who they cannot be. We point out their errors. We devise better policies for them to enact. We scold them when they fail to do what is needed. We expect them to behave, not as capitalists, but as the benevolent parent-guardians we crave. This is unrealistic.

It’s true; some capitalists are digging deep into their petty cash to counter the pandemic. Jeff Bezos donated $100 million for food banks (less than 0.1 percent of his fortune). Bill Gates is funding research to develop a potentially profitable vaccine. Jack Ma, the richest person in China, pledged $14.5 million of his $44 billion fortune. The world’s richest family, the Waltons, donated $25 million of their $191 billion fortune. This is pure public relations.

Capitalists are not concerned about poor people dying in their own nation or anywhere else. On the contrary, they welcome a reduction in what they consider the ‘surplus population’ (those who cannot be profitably employed) and whose needs they treat as a ‘drain on the public purse.’ This is why people trapped in nursing homes, jails, psychiatric facilities, and immigrant and refugee detention are left to die of disease.

Because profits are their lifeblood, capitalists must prioritize profit-taking even over the need to protect the workers who produce those profits. This is why medical staff are warned not to complain about systemic failures that put them and their patients at risk, why workers who try to protect their co-workers are fired, and why millions of essential workers are denied the legal right to a safe workplace. That is why people go hungry, while mountains of food are destroyed, and why the COVID-19 death count is deliberately minimized to justify resuming production as quickly as possible.

Why are we shocked? To stay in business, capitalists must prioritize their own interests, even when it means throwing humanity under the bus. Their refusal to stop extracting fossil fuels or abandon nuclear weapons proves this.

To the capitalist class, ordinary people are problems: they want more pay; they want social supports; they want equality; they question the rules; they make demands; they demonstrate and strike; they are troublemakers.



Capitalists claim the right to be society’s only problem-solvers. However, they care to solve only one problem – how to accumulate more capital than their competitors.

Capitalists cannot allow workers to solve social problems because they might begin to question why they need a ruling class at all. And yet, the inability of capitalism to meet people’s needs forces workers to solve many problems, every day, in order to survive.

This crisis has revealed who are society’s real problem-solvers, not self-serving capitalist free-loaders, but the legion of workers whose labor is essential to sustain life.

Unlike capitalists, workers have the motivation, skills, and ability to cooperate that would make it possible to end war, inequality, poverty, pandemics, environmental pollution, and climate change. They could do what is necessary, without regard for profit.

We defer to the capitalist class only because we lack confidence in ourselves and each other to manage society without them. The result is mass suffering.

Never have an oppressed majority been more patient with their oppressors! They impose on us the harshest cruelties and deprivations, yet we forgive them again and again.

When is enough, enough?

It’s time to put away our childish fantasies of how things should be, and face how they actually are. It’s time for us to grow up and take collective control of our lives.



Workers are experienced problem-solvers, and the most pressing problem we must solve is how to free ourselves from capitalist rule.

Capitalists cannot save us from this pandemic or any other crisis. We need to escort them to the exit and do the job ourselves.”


Taken and adapted from here
 https://susanrosenthal.com/capitalism/we-cannot-expect-capitalists-to-manage-a-pandemic/




Are the elderly expendable?

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There are reports of an increase in the use of “do not resuscitate”, “do not treat” and “do not convey to hospital” orders for older people during the pandemic.
Under the Equality Act, it is illegal to deny an older person access to healthcare on the basis of their age. 
But a “frailty” tool is being used across the NHS to determine which older people should be asked about limits to treatment, with age making up 50% of the frailty score.



Dave Archard, emeritus professor at Queen’s University, Belfast, said an overburdened service is no excuse for discrimination that would result in a “cull” of older people.



Using age as an indicator of clinical frailty and the likelihood of survival is, he said, crude and unreliable. “And if it is not a marker of something else then it is hard to see why age should be used as the determinative criterion,” he added. “It becomes exposed as wrongly discriminatory because it licences differential treatment based on ‘unwarranted animus or prejudice’ against old people. To discriminate between patients in the provision of care on the grounds of age is to send a message about the value of old people. Such discrimination publicly expresses the view that older people are of lesser worth or importance than young people. It stigmatises them as second-class citizens.

“It would be hard not to think – even if it was not intended – that a cull of elderly people was what was being aimed at.”



Older people should be denied treatment for the coronavirus if a younger, healthy person needs help, according to Prof Arthur Caplan, a prominent US medical ethicist and the founding head of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s School of Medicine. Age, he said, was a “valid criterion” to use when making the “terrible choice” of who should receive scarce resources during the pandemic. To the extent to which data supports the risk of failure or the odds of success, age can justifiably be used to ration care if maximisation of lives saved is the overarching goal.” Caplan pointed out that it is already often used to decide who gets care when rationing is unavoidable. “There are two main principles which ground the use of age [in deciding who gets treatment],” he said. “The first is the notion of fair innings – that each existing person ought to enjoy an opportunity to live a life. [The second is if] the overarching principle for rationing is to maximise the number of lives saved.”
Catherine Foot, director of evidence at the Centre for Ageing Better countered, “Chronological age must never be the principle factor that determines a person’s right to care. Medically speaking, it is a poor proxy for a person’s capacity to respond well to intensive care and to recover. And rationing care based on age speaks of a dangerous kneejerk ageism, where the older we get, the less value we have and the less important our lives are to save,” she said.

The Migrants Trump Welcomes

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It is the harvest  season when  tens of thousands of migrant workers from Mexico head to the fields in the United States to do the work that puts food on people’s tables.



 Temporary visa programmes are rife with abuse, from the moment workers are recruited in their communities. They suffer fraud, they are offered jobs that don’t even exist in the United States. It’s a perverse system in which recruiters and employers have all the control. There are systemic flaws that will become more evident now.



Exposed to illegal charges for visa, transport and accommodation costs, labour exploitation, lack of access to basic services and unhealthy housing, Mexican seasonal workers driven from their homes by poverty must also now brave the risk of COVID-19 contagion.



Jeremy McLean, policy and advocacy manager for the New York-based non-governmental organisation Justice in Motion, expressed concern about the conditions in which migrants work.

The way the system works, “it’s not going to be easy to follow recommendations for social distancing. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to come and won’t be able to follow these recommendations, and they will put themselves at risk. It could spell another wave of infection and transmission,” he warned IPS. “This population group has no health services and no medical insurance. If they fall ill in a remote area, what help can they get?”

In response to the pandemic and its risks, 37 organisations called on the U.S. government on Mar. 25 for adequate housing with quarantine facilities, safe transportation, testing for workers before they arrive in the United States, physical distancing on farms and paid treatment for those infected with COVID-19.



The ordeal that migrant workers face will not end with their work in the U.S. fields, because in October they will have to return to their hometowns, which will be even more impoverished due to the consequences of the health crisis, and with COVID-19 in all likelihood still posing a threat.



The Food Crisis Arises

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In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury one million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil. They are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food that they can no longer sell. The closing of restaurants, hotels and schools has left some farmers with no buyers for more than half their crops. And even as retailers see spikes in food sales to Americans who are now eating nearly every meal at home, the increases are not enough to absorb all of the perishable food. The widespread destruction of fresh food — at a time when many Americans are hurting financially and millions are suddenly out of work — is insane. 



The nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day.  About 5 percent of the country’s milk supply is currently being dumped and that amount is expected to double if the closings are extended over the next few months, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.



 A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.



 “It’s heart-breaking,” said Paul Allen who has had to destroy millions of pounds of beans and cabbage at his farms in South Florida and Georgia.



Many farmers have donated part of the surplus to food banks and Meals on Wheels programs, but there is only so much perishable food that charities with limited numbers of refrigerators and volunteers can absorb. Exporting much of the excess food is not feasible either, farmers say, because many international customers are also struggling through the pandemic and recent currency fluctuations make exports unprofitable.



 All around the world food systems are in jeopardy: children have been one school meal away from hunger; countries – one export ban away from food shortages; farms – one travel ban away from critical labour shortages; and families in the world’s poorest regions have been one missed day-wage away from food insecurity, untenable living costs, and forced migration.  The lockdowns and disruptions triggered by COVID-19 have shown the fragility of   people’s access to essential goods and services. Before COVID-19 hit, 820 million people were already under-nourished, with 2 billion people experiencing food insecurity. Many millions more are living perilously close to the poverty line: they lack the economic and physical means to procure food in light of enforced social isolation, movement restrictions, supply interruptions, lost income, and even relatively minor food price spikes. The loss of remittances from other parts of the world where the economy is in recession will deal a further blow to developing countries.  COVID-19 has laid bare the massive vulnerabilities of global food systems.



 All companies—even those with the most enlightened CEOs—are pushed by market competition to prioritize profits above all else. That’s why working people can’t ask “good” corporations to save us. We won’t change things by appealing to the “better nature” of business leaders. We have to save ourselves. The only way to protect the lives and livelihoods of working people is through class struggle, not snuggling up to the bosses.





 https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/hot-bothered-podcast-food-doesnt-cure-hunger-with-raj-patel

Lockdown in Latin America

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“My fear isn’t becoming infected. My fear is my children going hungry,” said  Liliana Pérez, a 43-year-old from Villa Soldati, a pocket of extreme poverty in Buenos Aires and one of more than three million people who live in Argentina’s densely populated villas. “People are more worried about being able to feed their families than they are about the coronavirus.”



Across Latin America and the Caribbean – where an estimated 113 million people live in low-income barrios, favelas or villas – families are struggling to adapt to coronavirus lockdowns or social isolation orders because of more immediate financial imperatives.



In Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, residents of deprived neighbourhoods have tied red rags to their windows to signal that those inside are going hungry. Riot police last week clashed with residents in Ciudad Bolívar, a sprawling mountainside neighbourhood, who were demanding food supplies promised by the president, Iván Duque.

I’ve got no money and nothing to eat,” complained María Ticona, 44, a mother of five from Villa Copacabana, a deprived corner of El Alto, in Bolivia. Before the lockdown – which is being strictly enforced by Bolivian troops – Ticona sold bread and scraped together perhaps $4 a day. That income has evaporated. “My kids haven’t eaten properly since the quarantine began,” she complained.



“We’re trying to keep safe but it’s very difficult when a whole family lives in only 16 square metres,” said César Sanabria in the 45,000-strong settlement beside Buenos Aires’ exclusive Recoleta neighbourhood. “We’re not really isolating,” he admitted. “You still see a lot of people on the streets.”



Ivan França Jr, an epidemiologist from Brazil’s University of São Paulo’s faculty of public health, said that for isolation orders to work they had to be accompanied by economic aid.



“Social distancing can’t just be: ‘Don’t leave your homes,’” he said. “This is a very elitist and middle-class mindset.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/latin-america-coronavirus-lockdowns-low-income

Around the World in Fifty Earth Days

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It’s been 50 years since the first Earth Day when scientists and activisits rally to help protect the Earth. In the decades since, the environmental problems that sparked thegreen movement have only gotten worse. There has been the continued widespread loss of forests and grasslands, exacerbating the dangers of climate change and contributing to an alarmingly swift decline in animal and plant species. Environmental groups for decades have campaigned to get lawmakers to take action. Fifty years of pushback against vested economic interests have failed to achieve very much success. Humanity’s problems transcend any nation or group of nations. We are seeing how a virus ravages populations globally.



But hope remains. The Socialist Party says what is necessary is a fundamental change in thinking and action which goes well beyond any one day. The Socialist Party envisages the unification of all the peoples of the world in one universal family. World socialism is not only possible will be the next stage in the evolution of mankind





COVID-19 and Capitalist Carnage

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The politics of the pandemic is nasty and divisive. And politicians thrive on it. Working people around the world face an agonising choice; to go to work and risk catching COVID-19 or becoming destitute. Not working can mean hunger and homelessness. Our fellow-workers are feeling this pain right now.



We all live under an economic system that values our lives relative to our ability to produce profits for the owning class. We are measured by our productivity. In this coronavirus pandemic, many are finally awakening to understand its bitter consequences. We are now aware that we do not have access to the resources we need to live decently or, perhaps even to survive. People are now beginning to understand just how badly governments has let us down by their belated and disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Most working people now understand that our problems are more entrenched and that we remain trapped in a social  system that presents us with only limited choices which have already proved unable to solve our problems, even when the solutions are well-known and obvious. The king has no clothes and sits stark naked on his throne, tossing bags of money to his friends in court as he rules over an empire of corruption, inequality, war, poverty and racism. 



The apologists for the capitalist system have always pushed the narrative that homelessness, poverty, and inequality are aberrations in an otherwise healthy society. Recessions we were told are avoidable by the correct economic fiscal policies implemented by governments. Populist demagogues have presented themselves as protectors of the poor. Don’t be fooled. This crisis didn’t start with the coronavirus. Across the world, people need to question capitalism.



It should no longer be possible to ignore the structural crisis of poverty and inequality. Lockdowns reveal how expendable the majority of workers are. While at the same time, it’s ever clearer how many of the most “essential” tasks in our economy are done by the least well-paid workers. The spread of death and disease via the Covid-19 pandemic exposes its disproportionate impact on poor people and people of colour. It is working people who suffer and die while the rich, like the sharks they are circle around, to sieze the opportunities to further enhance their wealth and power.



These crises have highlighted our collective interdependence. Isn’t it time to demand a transformative change in the way we run and organise our society. This crisis demonstrates the way an economy structured around the rich brings death and destruction in its wake.



Capitalism is economic and political system that is structurally incapable of acting for the common good, even when millions of lives are at stake. It is not just failing to solve our problems. It is the problem. We must grow a political movement based on real solutions to the systemic problems of society, directly challenging the powerful interests who control and profit from the status quo. We do not have to accept a dysfunctional profit system with its ever-worsening inequality and poverty. Healing our sick society is the key to a healthy future. We have descended into insane chaos because of capitalist madness.



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