The Pandemic Changed India

 "you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone" Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

The monsoon officially arrived in Mumbai, India last weekend.

The men who cleared the drains so that the rains don’t cause flooding and water-borne diseases. The electricians who came to fix blackouts caused by wind and rain. The sanitation workers who used to spray neighbourhoods with mosquito repellent before the monsoon to prevent vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and chikungunya. All are missing. Many of these workers and handymen were migrant labourers. For the first time in 125 years, most of the 5,000 dabbawallas have gone home to their villages, defeated by the virus and the lockdown. 1.2 million migrant workers left the city during lockdown.

They fled the city when the pandemic left them destitute and hungry. Before their mass exodus, well-heeled residents had never noticed them. They were always there, cheap cogs labour, their presence visible only when needed to fix a blocked toilet or deliver pizzas, and instantly forgotten. Now their absence is felt. A city already buckling under coronavirus and facing the annual ritual of catastrophic flooding from the rains is realising its dependence on daily wage labourers and informal casual workers.

The labour shortage means business cannot find technicians, electricians, sweepers, packers or assembly-line workers. Foundries, mills, shops and malls are looking for labour. Construction of roads, flyovers and metro lines is delayed. Half-built buildings need to be finished. A survey carried out  for the Economic Times newspaper estimates a labour shortfall of 40–50%.  Employers have sent out “contractors” who, for a commission, scour villages in the states around Mumbai for skilled and semi-skilled workers to work for daily wages.

The chief minister of Maharashtra, Uddhav Thackeray,  has urged employers to hire local workers rather than those from other states. Few want to take him up on this suggestion.

“Migrant workers accept less pay, longer hours and harsher working conditions. Local people will not tolerate this – they have a sense of justice, are rooted in society and enjoy social support. Migrant labourers are herded into factories and hostels and feel cut off and isolated from the society around them,” said DL Karad, national vice-president of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions. “Most of them aren’t coming back. First they were treated like slaves by employers and then they were treated like stray dogs by society during the lockdown. Some, perhaps, may return. But only if they are starving,” said Karad.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jun/19/mumbai-discovers-life-isnt-so-sweet-without-the-workers-it-once-ignored

Remember the economic victims of COVID-19

As fashion outlets have re-opened across England and Northern Ireland, on the other side of the world the workers who stitch and sew the clothes hanging on their racks are losing their jobs and facing starvation.  As shops shut and countries went into lockdown, fashion brands cancelled billions of dollars of clothing orders with their suppliers in the global south, including clothing boxed and ready to be shipped or already on cutting and sewing lines. In Bangladesh, although factories are now reopening, orders are still down by almost 80%. According to the Workers Rights Consortium, British retail brands including Arcadia, Primark and Edinburgh Woollen Mill are among those yet to make a commitment to pay in full for all orders completed and in production with overseas suppliers.

Nazmin Nahar, a 26-year-old garment worker and mother of two in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is living on borrowed rice. She hasn’t had the wages to pay for food or rent for more than two months.

Even though the hours were long and the targets relentless, Nahar had been working at Magpie Knitwear, where she earned £150 a month, making clothes for UK brands such as Burton and H&M. Then, in late March, Bangladesh went into lockdown and the factory closed. When it reopened on 4 April, Nahar was told she had no job to go back to.

“They told us that the foreign buyers are cancelling all our orders,” she says. “That’s why there’s no new work. We haven’t had our salaries for two months now. Our house rent is due. We are buying all our groceries on credit but they won’t give us any more food until we pay our bill. So our landlord managed to get a sack of rice for us and we’re surviving on that.” 

In Bangladesh alone, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers Export Association (BGMEA) estimates that fashion brands have recalled around £3bn of orders they had already placed with suppliers. Rubana Huq, the president of the BGMEA, says that in the last month more than 25,000 workers have lost their jobs. If overseas orders don’t pick up, she says that this could rise to 500,000 in the next six months.

Rojina Begum, who worked at the Ultimate Fashion Ltd factory that supplies Matalan and other western brands, lost her job and her monthly salary of 8,000 taka (£75) after being sacked along with 300 other workers at her factory when Covid-19 hit. Her trade union claims that management told them it was due to cancelled orders from foreign buyers.

“If the fear of the virus wasn’t there, we could have protested strongly,” she says, “but because of the coronavirus, we couldn’t gather our workers and make a strong protest. Whenever four or five workers gathered in front of the factory, they dispersed us. And you can’t build a strong protest alone.”

Akhi Akther, who was paid 9,300 taka a month at Sterling Styles, a factory supplying Gap, said she was sacked when she fell ill with Covid symptoms and is now finding it impossible to get another job. She says she is yet to be paid two months of owed wages.

“We can’t go back to our village because we don’t have anything there, what will we do? Our jobs are our only source of earnings. Orders have shrunk, factories are getting rid of workers left and right. I am emotionally and mentally devastated.”

The workers say now shops have reopened, it is crucial that brands honour their financial obligations to their suppliers. 

“We all saw the pictures of queues outside fast fashion stores last week, but these are the same companies that abandoned their workers when they needed them the most,” says Meg Lewis, a campaigner at the Clean Clothes Campaign. “Brands have simply not been held to account for their behaviour over the pandemic. Paying for the orders you placed with a factory isn’t an act of charity. They have protected their profits at the expense of millions of people’s lives.”

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jun/20/we-have-no-money-for-food-or-rent-plight-of-bangladeshi-garment-makers

Dictionary Meanings

Dear Sirs,
I recently bought a copy of The Collins Dictionary & Thesaurus in One Volume as a reference work for my studies. I would like to advise you of a significant factual and historical error it contains.
This concerns the entry under "socialism". There are three definitions given: I refer to the third which states, "(in Marxist theory) a transitional stage in the development of a society from capitalism to communism". This is incorrect. Nowhere in the writings of Marx, nor indeed in those of Engels, are the terms "socialism" or/and "communism" used to describe either a transitional stage or different stages of social development. In this sense Marx used the terms interchangeably to mean a society of common ownership and production for use, and therefore without buying and selling, an exchange economy, classes or the state.
As a matter of historical interest, this separation was first made by Lenin in an attempt to give credibility to the post-1917 situation in Russia, by frequently referring to that society, now generally acknowledged to be state capitalist, by the term "socialism". As a student of Marx's work for nearly fifty years, I assure you that the definition you give is derived from Leninist theory not Marx's as you state.
BILL ROBERTSON

---

REPLY:
Dear Mr Robertson,
Thank you for your letter of 15 August. In it you state that the definition of SOCIALISM (sense 3) refers to Leninist and not Marxist theory. I agree with your assertion as Marx did not describe any intermediate "socialist" stage between the collapse of capitalism and the establishment of communism. He used the terms "communism" and "socialism" interchangeably. It was, as you rightly point out, Lenin who created this distinction to describe the situation in the Soviet Union after the Bolsheviks seized power. Subsequent Soviet leaders, as you are no doubt well aware, also used this distinction, most notably Khrushchev who in the early 1960s described the USSR as a "socialist state" that would "achieve Communism by 1980".
Thank you for taking the trouble to point out this mistake.
Yours sincerely,
ANDREW HOLMES,
Assistant Lexicographer,
Collins English Dictionaries.

Theory and Practice

TOWARDS A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD, IN ORDER TO CHANGE IT.

The world we live in is a world of contradictions. The environment is in a state of decline, yet industry continues to pump pollutants into the atmosphere whilst non-polluting technologies are neglected. Thousands starve, while food stocks remain unused. We can communicate with strangers from all around the globe, yet no-one knows their neighbour. Automation could free us from labour, yet we are chained to the machine. We live amongst vast material possibilities, yet poverty is the universal experience - not just in the narrow economic sense but also in terms of the quality of lived experience.  “Never in history has there been such a glaring contrast between what could be and what actually exists.” [1]

Central to all these contradictions and reshaping all previous antagonisms is the global commodity-capitalist system. A system characterised by the production of commodities, wage labour and the market economy. A commodity is what is produced by the worker under capitalist conditions, its purpose to reproduce and enlarge capital (stored-up labour). The pursuit of ever increasing profits is the driving force behind the whole process – the fulfilment of peoples needs is a secondary and not always occurring result.

Commodities are only available in exchange for other commodities, money being the universal commodity and measure of all others. Since all goods have been turned into commodities and access to non-commodified materials restricted [2], those without the means of producing anything to exchange must sell the only thing they have, their physical or mental labour-power. The logic of the market economy treats this labour like any other commodity; to be bought, sold and discarded as the market dictates. In effect the worker becomes a commodity. This transformation of living activity into an object creates an alienated or estranged world in which humankind does not recognize or fulfil itself, but is overpowered by the dead things and social relations of its own making.

Capitalist society is therefore split into two camps, the bourgeois or capitalist class (those who own and control the means of production – the land, equipment, machinery, buildings and raw materials necessary to create the things we need and use every day) and the proletariat [3] (those with “nothing to lose but their chains”). However, both classes are subject to the laws of the market economy [4] - our concern is with the social relation capital not the individual capitalist - the functionaries of capitalism are more and more disposable as individuals. While the rag wearing classical proletariat of Marx’s time has all but disappeared, at least in the developed countries, the fundamental division remains; power and wealth are becoming more rather than less concentrated under the control of a small minority. The modern proletariat is almost everyone; it is the working class which must destroy both alienated work and class.

The “official” history of the working class’s struggle against capitalism is an inversion, what is presented as its greatest triumphs are in reality its most bitter defeats; Leninist “Communism” in the east and reformist “Socialism” in the west where both expressions of a general movement towards state-capitalism. The greatest tragedy of these times is that in the minds of the vast majority of workers the project for the dissolution of the commodity economy became associated with its exact opposite. “So the light darkened that had illuminated the world; the masses that had hailed it were left in blacker night… By usurping the name communism for its system of workers' exploitation and its policy of often cruel persecution of adversaries, it made this name, till then expression of lofty ideals, a byword, an object of aversion and hatred even among workers.”[5]

Though the call for a new society was never thoroughly extinguished; small and often profoundly isolated groups and individuals argued the case for a social reorganization to bring free access and control of the means of production into the hands of the whole of humanity. “From each according to ability, to each according to need!” [6]

The creation of such a society has two preconditions; firstly that technological production techniques have been sufficiently developed to be able to fulfill the material needs of the whole of society and secondly, that the majority of the population have an understanding of what needs to be done and want to carry it through. Revolutionaries are painfully aware that the first requirement has long since been reached but that the second is still far from being realized.

If we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past it will be necessary to develop a theory of revolutionary practice, a theory which seeks to “get to the root of all things” and improve them. It is not a matter of choosing from one of the pre-existing ideologies of the old workers movement and basing our world view around it, but a matter of finding the “moment of truth” in all the theories of the past and synthesising this with our experience of the present.

“Theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.”[7]

DJP October 2008

FOOTNOTES

1. Ken Knabb - “The Joy of Revolution”

2. For a description of how this came to be see Karl Marx - "Capital Vol. 1" Chapter 26

3. "Proletarian": broadly speaking “modern working class” including the un-employed and unemployable. However the proletariat is not to be understood as a sociological category of people in such-and-such income group and such-and-such occupations, but as a social relation of capitalism. It is all those who have little or no means of support other than selling their physical and mental labour-power. The proletariat is the only class capable of ending class society, as it produces the material conditions of its own enchainment.

4. “The propertied class and the proletarian class express the same human alienation. But the former feels comfortable and confirmed in it, recognises this self alienation as its own power and this has the semblance of human existence. The latter feels itself crushed by this alienation, sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.” Karl Marx - "The Holy Family"

5. Anton Pannekoek - "Workers Councils"

6. Often attributed to Marx's 1875 "Critique of the Gotha Programme" though it appears that this phrase was in usage years before. The subtitle to Etienne Cabet’s 1840 work "Travel and Adventures of Lord William Carisdall in Icaria" read “From each according to his capacity, to each according to his work”.

7. Karl Marx –  "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"

DJP

https://www.theoryandpractice.org.uk/library/towards-better-understanding-world-order-change-it

Racial Inequality

Data shows that people of colour are worse off than white counterparts and black households face the biggest deficit.

The ethnicity gap does not stop at pay – the inequality that begins there runs through everything involving money. Almost across the board people of colour are worse off than their white counterparts and, typically, black households face the biggest deficit. Compared with white households they have lower earnings and less cash in private pensions, investments or other assets to draw on.

Data shows that in the last year for which figures are available, black people had the highest unemployment rate of all groups; were most likely to have a household income below £400 a week; and, after Bangladeshi households, were most likely to claim income-related benefits. Only 8% of black pensioner families drew any income from a personal pension.

Research from the Runnymede Trust shows the vast differences in wealth and assets between households of different ethnicity. The figures show that that for every £1 a white British family has, black Caribbean households have about 20p and black African and Bangladeshi households approximately 10p. Accumulated assets offer a safety net when things go wrong and can be passed down through generations.

Some of the issues are explained by the demographics of the community: black people are generally younger and live in cities, so may have higher living costs and have had less time to build up wealth. Plus, some pay gap figures reflect inequalities around education and opportunity.

However, two years ago, the Resolution Foundation thinktank found black male graduates were being paid 17% less than white male graduates – the equivalent of £3.90 an hour or £7,000 over a year. For black women, the “pay penalty” was 9%, or £3,000 over a year.

Otegha Uwagba is a writer and the founder of Women Who. She is working on a book called We Need To Talk About Money, which will be published next year. She says people often make the argument that the pay difference is a result of people clustering around low-paid industries. “But even when you compare people with identical qualifications doing identical jobs in the same geographical area, there is still a difference in pay,” she says. “It’s hard to find any other reason for that beyond racism.” She adds: “Why aren’t we doing the same thing with mandatory disclosures around the ethnicity pay gap as we have around the gender pay gap? Racism is a really ugly part of British history that people just don’t want to face up to.”

Most people’s biggest asset is their home and Uwagba says she was shocked when she saw figures showing the low level of property ownership among black Africans. While 63% of families across England own homes, the figure is only 20% among black Africans. “When you think about how people are buying homes, especially in London, and how many are relying on the bank of Mum and Dad, you can see how income disparities are perpetuated through the generations,” she says. “Money begets more money. Discrimination compounds things and wealth and income gaps are passed on to the next generation.” Even when the inequalities in pay are ironed out, it will be some time before all the other gaps are closed. With fewer assets to pass down, the problem grows. It is not only the wealth that accumulates, but also the knowledge about how to make the most of your money.

Among FTSE 100 companies, 62.% of board members are white males and they occupy 84% of executive directorships, according to the DiversityQ FTSE 100 board diversity report 2020. Fewer than one in 10 directors is black, Asian or minority ethnicity.

Cheryl Cole, the editor of DiversityQ says, “People continue to hire in their likeness – they recruit from the same small pool of candidates who went to the same small pool of universities and have the same background.” 

Things are “dire” in fund management, says Cole. Of 100,000 employees, 10% identify as Asian and only 1% as black, and the industry has only 13 black portfolio managers, according to a Diversity Project report.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/jun/20/financial-inequality-the-ethnicity-gap-in-pay-wealth-and-property

The Real Jungle

Three large food factories have closed in England and Wales after about 250 workers tested positive for coronavirus, as the Unite union said it was aware of suspected outbreaks at five other sites across the UK.

The confined working conditions and long periods spent by workers in close proximity – often 10 to 12 hours a shift – mean meat factories are at substantially heightened risk of spreading the coronavirus through human-to-human transmission, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said.

Unions have said the living conditions of many low-paid workers in the factories is another contributing factor, as is time spent by colleagues in communal spaces such as in locker rooms and on shuttle buses.

Bev Clarkson, a national officer at Unite, said there were “major issues” with the health and safety of workers in the meat processing industry and urged employers to implement proper physical distancing and provide adequate protective equipment “to stop further spikes within the sector”.

“Unite has warned time and again that coronavirus outbreaks at meat processing factories throughout the UK were likely,” she said. “The union has been in touch with the management of all three closed factories to insist that staff only return to work when it is safe to do so and when further outbreaks can be prevented.”

The United Food and Commercial Workers union said recently that at least 44 slaughterhouse workers in the US had died from the virus and another 3,000 had tested positive.

Public health officials in Germany are grappling with an outbreak among hundreds of workers at a meatpacking plant in Rheda-Wiedenbrück. At least 730 workers have tested positive at the Tönnies Group plant, it emerged. Germany’s agriculture minister called for an official investigation into the outbreak. Labor adviser Elena Strato says meatpacker Tönnies is cynically trying to pin blame for a coronavirus outbreak on foreign workers. Rather, the problem stems from a network of major companies and their subcontractors, who run a well-oiled system designed to let them shirk their own responsibilities as to the dangerous work and living environments they subject their employees to.

 What adjective best describes a person who will risk someone else's life just to get richer? Ruthless? Unscrupulous? Hungry for money? Willing to disregard human rights, even? The management of Tönnies, Germany's and Europe's largest meat-processing company, could certainly be labeled as such. Why? Because it has known for months how vulnerable its workers, like so many others in the meat-processing industry, are to a potential coronavirus outbreak. Yet, it did nothing to reduce the risk. Workers in this industry, who tend to hail from eastern and southern Europe and are employed by sub-contractors, often endure dismal working and living conditions. It's common for laborers butchering dead animals to work side by side, standing close to each other all day, and to share cramped living quarters, where social distancing is impossible.

Unlike their German colleagues, meat-processing workers from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria earn a pittance — albeit a little more than they would make in most jobs back home. Nevertheless, the dire working and living conditions they have to put up with in Germany effectively make them modern-day slaves.  Tönnies is exploiting these desperate people to turn a profit. More than half the 6,000 workers at its main headquarters are employed by sub-contractors. This allows Tönnies to save labor costs, maximize profits, and enhance its competitiveness. The company has outpriced many global competitors and even exports meat to countries like Romania and China. In the past, the company has exerted considerable influence on regional and local lawmakers, who turned a blind eye to the mistreatment of foreign workers.

 20,000 pigs are slaughtered and cut up each day at Tönnies and when measured by the number of animals slaughtered  a 30.3% market share. The number of animals per farm is increasing, which indicates a growth in factory farming in Germany. Farms with 100,000 hens laying eggs are not rare. EU regulations stipulate that a pig weighing 50 kilograms (110 pounds) to 110 kilograms (242 pounds) needs just 0.75 square meters (8 square feet) of space.

"The purely economic view and the associated intensive farming systems in animal farming are ethically questionable and no longer tolerable," said Thomas Schröder, president of the German Animal Welfare Association.

Meat processing is an important economic sector in Germany. According to the Federal Statistic Office, the turnover for the meat processing industry in 2019 was €42.5 billion ($47.5 billion). Tönnies had by far the highest turnover — with around €6.9 billion ($7.7 billion) — from slaughtering 17 million pigs. In 2019, 59.7 million pigs, cattle, sheep, goats and horses were slaughtered in Germany. Including poultry, companies produced almost 8 million tons of meat. Much more meat is produced in Germany than is eaten. Almost half of it is exported. German pork, offal and poultry are particularly sought after. The biggest buyer of German pork is Italy at 17%, followed by the Netherlands, China and Poland with 9% each.

There have been a number of outbreaks among employees of German meat companies in recent months.  Virologist Isabella Eckerle gives several reasons why. First, working conditions in slaughterhouses are not compatible with the hygiene measures necessary to prevent a virus from being transmitted to others. People work in closed rooms, with no possibility of maintaining social distancing guidelines. Second, the accommodation for foreign laborers is often in cramped apartments, with multiple people sleeping in the same room, meaning the virus can easily spread there as well. Another factor could be the physical strain of the work. Damp hands, gloves, aprons and clothing could promote transmission through smear infections. Many of the workers in German slaughterhouses come from outside the country. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but according to the German government, answering a question from The Left Party, in 2018 almost 50% of workers in slaughterhouses did not hold German passports. Trade unions estimate the migrant workforce currently stands at around 80%. Workers are rarely hired by the meat processing companies themselves, but instead by subcontractors, which mostly hire people in Romania and Hungary before bringing them to work in Germany. Workers received time-limited, labor-specific contracts, which means they receive fewer employment rights than long-term employees. According to the 2018 government figures, they were much likely to work evenings, nights and weekends than employees in other industries.

Officially they are paid the minimum wage, which was introduced to the meat industry in 2014 and is currently set at €8.75 ($9.81) per hour — but unions and campaign groups say workers rarely receive that much. Instead, costs are deducted from their pay for multiple reasons.

"Opaque recording of working hours, unclear costs for accommodation, transport and material leave the impression of being cheated," summarizes Armin Wiese, an executive at Germany's Food, Beverages and Catering Union (NGG).  "They realize they are defenseless against the arbitrariness of their employers."

https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-coronavirus-outbreak-in-german-slaughterhouse-was-preventable/a-53866979

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/19/three-meat-factories-in-england-and-wales-closed-over-coronavirus

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-meat-industry-statistics/a-53876016

https://www.dw.com/en/employees-are-not-to-blame-for-coronavirus-outbreaks/a-53877321

Urban Farming - Allotments For Food

Land set aside for allotments in the UK has declined by 65% from a peak in the "dig for victory" and post-war era. The most deprived areas suffered the worst decline, experiencing eight times the level of allotment closures compared with the most affluent areas.

Scientists estimated that the lost allotments could have provided 6% of the population with their "five-a-day" fruit and veg diet.

The waiting list for an allotment plot was an estimated 100,000 people in 2013. In recent years, the demand for allotment plots has seen a renaissance, which many younger people wanted to grow their own fruit and veg

 As the urban population was growing, urban land became increasingly valuable to developers. Yet regarding the allotment sites that had been closed, the team found that about a quarter of the land had not been developed for buildings but had been used as another form of green space.

"If the land within this was potentially suitable for reconversion to allotments was changed back to food production, the space available could meet up to 100% of the waiting list demand in the cities," observed Ms Dobson, a PhD student at the university's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences,

Law and Order and the Police

Instead of cities spending a lion's share of their budgets on their police departments, Defund the Police advocates argue that money should support affordable housing, healthcare, child care, mental health treatment and other services. There has been calls for reform following the 1967 uprisings in cities across the US and as a response to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991 as well as to the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014.

The Minneapolis City Council unanimously supported a resolution to determine a community-supported replacement for the city's police force. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti also announced his intention to strip $250 million from the city's police department budget, which tops $1.8 billion, and redirect funds into youth programs, healthcare and other areas. New York City police commissioner Dermot Shea also dissolved a plainclothes unit that has been criticised for pitting police against communities it serves. Following New York's passage of a massive legislative package with sweeping reforms, Governor Andrew Cuomo told protesters: "You won." Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, following the police killing of Rayshard Brooks, also ordered her city's police department to "immediately adopt" deescalation policies, including holding officers accountable for their "duty to intervene" against another officer's use of deadly force.

Mariama Kaba argues that commissions, studies and the "best practices" that emerge from police abuse investigations from as early as 1894 only "served as a kind of counterinsurgent function each time police violence led to protests." "The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence," Kaba writes. "Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers."

A 2017 report from the Centre for Popular Democracy, Black Youth Project 100 and Law for Black Lives found that several major cities have "stripped funds from mental health services, housing subsidies, youth programs, and food benefits programs, while pouring money into police forces, military grade weapons, high-tech surveillance, jails, and prisons".

A 2018 report from the National Institutes of Health determined that a "combined investment in a public health, community-based approach to violence prevention and a criminal justice approach focused on deterrence can achieve more to reduce population-level rates of urban violence than either can in isolation."

Critical Resistance member Kamau Walton  says. "When communities are stable, healthy and thriving, we know there's a lot less harm and violence."

The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, for example, shifted from thinking about transformative justice within "communities" to "pods", which are "made up of the people that you would call on if violence, harm or abuse happened to you", had witnessed, or wanted accountability for.

"Why can't we be the ones taking care of each other, instead of police, who tend to escalate and further traumatise people when that doesn't need to happen?" Walton argues. "Why not invest in people who are going to see you as a neighbour, a cousin, a friend, a loved one, that they care for and want to take care of? That's the idea behind the solutions we want to see, that they need to be based in communities that see people as people, people connected to them and that they're accountable to."

Abolitionists argue that police don't actually stop violence from happening, and that a better administration of justice should come from communities holding people accountable. Addressing the conditions that lead to people committing violence would prevent it from happening in the first place, they argue, while prisons don't inherently repair the health or harms that lead to a person's imprisonment, including their mental health, addiction or abuse.

Rather than public safety spearheaded by police, abolitionists call for the communities themselves to take the lead. Neighbours can learn to de-escalate incidents, respond to mental health issues and hold one another accountable for their communities. Most conflicts could be disrupted through mediation, or defused by social workers or mental health workers and other care providers.

The United States is the world's incarceration capital, housing a quarter of the world's prisoners in a nation that represents only 5 per cent of the global population.

Reformers seek to end its prison system's legacy of racism, from its roots in plantation-era America to its echoes in mass incarceration today. The USA disproportionately jails black people — African Americans make up 13 per cent of the US but more than 40 per cent of prison populations. Following the ending of enslavement at the end of the US Civil War, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery except for those convicted of a crime, allowing the adoption of "black codes" in economically devastated southern states at the end of the war to impose harsh penalties against newly freed black Americans for minor crimes, ensuring their continued "free" labour in prison. "Convict leasing" would go on to provide labour for massive private infrastructure, while legalised segregation and Jim Crow-era terror criminalised black Americans.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/abolish-police-us-prison-reform-defund-13th-amendment-a9571816.html

Not every worker is protected

America's 2.2 million domestic workers, the majority of them women of colour, the crisis is particularly acute.

More than 70% saw their incomes cut or jobs eliminated at the start of the pandemic, according to a survey by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, an organisation that advocates for nannies, housecleaners and home health aides.

With wages that average about $12 (£9.50) an hour, few have robust financial cushions. And because of informal work arrangements or immigration status, many are not eligible for the relief offered by the government.

"We're talking about hundreds of thousands of women who have absolutely no access to protection or support," says Tatiana Bejar, a New York City-based organiser at Hand-in-Hand, a non-profit that advocates for domestic workers.  In the US, many shutdown orders didn't think to address in-home help at all. Official guidance on how to handle return has also been sparse. Hand-in-Hand, which aims its actions at employers, has urged families to keep nannies at home at full pay, but the official ambiguity means figuring out what to do has often been a fraught family-by-family decision.

"Just because domestic work continues to be invisible, therefore employers of them were also invisible," Ms Bejar says

Kenya Williams worked as a nanny in New York for 22 years,  explained "Our profession, I found out during this time, we just don't matter. We have to fight so hard for things that other people get easily," she says. "I would just like to be able to be like, 'Ok, I know I'll be ok to some extent."

The hardship faced by Ms Williams matches global patterns, which show women, minorities and people working in the informal economy have been hit particularly hard by the lockdowns. In the US, the unemployment rates among Hispanic and black women approached 20% last month - nearly double that of white men.

The uneven economic impact is likely to add "significantly to existing vulnerabilities and inequalities", the International Labor Organization warned this spring. It called on governments to respond by increasing efforts to extend social protections to those people, like maids and nannies, whose work often occurs beyond the reach of government rules.

 Haeyoung Yoon, policy director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, pointed out that "The coronavirus pandemic has really put a spotlight on the structural inequities that workers were already living through," Ms Yoon says. "We need to really address these issues at a structural level so that workers are able to have access to good wages and good working conditions. But just because working people are reminded, doesn't mean that our policymakers are going to legislate and change policies to meet the needs," she adds.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53045495

Working People - Sacrificial Lambs

Whether Americans know it or not, their government is not working for them. Their government is working on behalf of capital. Humans are now a mere secondary factor to be considered based on how it affects capital. Capitalism must be protected and nurtured, and the State must draw resources from our entire society in order to help capital survive.  People can be sacrificed—capital is irreplaceable. 

It is no exaggeration to say that tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans will die because the government is prematurely relaxing lockdowns to permit business to resume rather than prioritize human life. They will die because we did not dedicate resources before this pandemic to building an adequate system of public health care, and they will die because we made the decision during this pandemic to put the needs of capital first. Businesses did not keep working people on payrolls, because that would be less advantageous for the owners of capital. The government did not mobilize factories, nor pharmaceutical research, because that would be less advantageous to the owners of capital. And it did not release the prisoners in the jails being ravaged by this disease. What would that do for the stock market? Doctors are getting pay cuts because they are no longer making revenue for their employers with nonessential procedures; nurses are becoming sick and dying because we didn’t stockpile enough cheap plastic masks; grocery workers are forced to beg and plead and strike for a couple of dollars extra per hour, at the risk of their own lives. 

The true beneficiaries of this crisis, from the perspective of those in charge, will be the private equity firms that rush in to buy up distressed businesses, and the hedge funds that pour money into cheap debt, and the investors that scoop up the homes that people will be evicted from. They are the ones that give a transfusion of investment the life-blood of capitalism.

From
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/04/09/plan-save-capital-and-let-people-die?fbclid=IwAR1ennSKy62KFlAFBZqYfpDlmGFK7IEM8GWhJ9WqJBAQ61iPzAz1iao31fE

Japan wants to grow

Much is made of China's artificial islands constructed to lay claim to mineral-rich sea but less is said about other nations' attempts to make use of so-called islands to extend their sovereignty.

 Okinotorishima is an atoll that is 1,740 kilometers (1,081 miles) south of Tokyo that has been reinforced with breakwaters to protect a patch of concrete that measures less than 10 square meters and is just 16 centimeters above the high tide level. This patch of concrete, however, permits Japan to claim an exclusive economic zone covering 400,000 square kilometers of the surrounding waters, which are rich in maritime resources. Surveys have indicated that deposits of valuable natural resources also lie just beneath the seabed.

The UN convention that covers legal issues at sea says that "rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life on their own shall have no exclusive economic zone." China, South Korea and Taiwan all insist that Okinotorishima is just a rock that Japan cannot use to extend its EEZ. The Japanese government is also concerned at Chinese encroachment into Japanese waters, with Tokyo submitting a diplomatic complaint to Beijing in January 2019 after a Chinese government survey vessel was detected operating within Japan’s EEZ around Okinotorishima.  Operated by China’s State Oceanic Administration, the vessel may have been attempting to obtain data on natural resources, including oil and gas.

https://www.dw.com/en/japan-takes-the-high-ground-over-its-outlying-islands/a-53617175

Pollutants permitted in water

“We have among the cleanest and sharpest — crystal clean, you've heard me say, I want crystal clean — air and water anywhere on Earth...our air and water are the cleanest they’ve ever been by far,” Trump once said.

 On Thursday, the EPA finalized a rule to roll back regulations of a chemical found in rocket fuel that can cause brain damage in infants. The Associated Press noted, the chemical's danger should not be underestimated to the 16 million Americans under threat of having the contaminant in their drinking water.

Perchlorate can damage the development of fetuses and children and cause measurable drops in IQ in newborns, the American Academy of Pediatrics said last August in urging the "strongest possible" federal limits. Studies cited by the doctors' group included one showing that 9 out of 13 breastfeeding infants were ingesting significant levels of the chemical.

The decision to deregulate perchlorate in public drinking water was described as  "illegal, unscientific, and unconscionable," by Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) senior strategic director for Health Erik D. Olson in a statement. "The Environmental Protection Agency is threatening the health of pregnant moms and young children with toxic chemicals in their drinking water at levels that literally can cause loss of IQ points," said Olson. "Is this what the Environmental Protection Agency has come to?"

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/18/illegal-unscientific-and-unconscionable-despite-risk-brain-damage-infants-trump-epa

The American government protect their masters

 The United States administration abruptly withdrew from international negotiations over how best to tax the profits of multinational corporations such as U.S.-based tech giants Amazon and Google, leading European allies to accuse the White House of torpedoing years-long talks that were close to a resolution.

Several European countries, led by France, have been rolling out digital services taxes, which would fall heavily on American internet companies. Italy, Spain, Austria, and Britain have all announced plans to levy digital services taxes, which impose duties on the online activity that takes place in those countries, regardless of whether the company has a physical presence

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said negotiations were at an "impasse" and threatened to retaliate "with appropriate commensurate measures" against any country that attempts to unilaterally move ahead digital services taxes on U.S.-based companies—a warning that sparked fears of a potentially devastating trans-Atlantic trade war.

Maria Jesus Montero, a spokesperson for the Spanish government, said Thursday that "neither Spain, nor France, nor Italy, nor Britain, no country will accept any type of threat from another country. We are not legislating to damage the interest of other countries," said Montero. "We are legislating so that our tax system is orderly, fair, and adapted to current circumstances."

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire on Thursday denounced Mnuchin's letter as a "provocation for everyone who was negotiating in good faith" and said France will reimpose its currently suspended 3% tax on digital services if OECD nations can't reach a deal on a fair tax system by the end of the year.

"We were inches away from an agreement on digital taxation at a time when the digital giants are the only ones in the world to have benefited immensely from the coronavirus crisis," Le Maire said. "So it is a provocation to all the citizens of the world who say that it is still legitimate for all the digital giants to pay their taxes. It is also a provocation to the U.S. allies. What is this way of treating U.S. allies—the British, Spanish, Italians, French—by threatening us with sanctions?"

Current rules generally allocate corporate profit for tax purposes based on where value is created. But modern multinationals—particularly ones with digital offerings—can sell their products across borders in ways that leave little taxable profit in a country where those products are consumed. Many big European countries say that tech companies should pay more taxes in the countries where their products are consumed, something that could boost their tax revenues by billions of dollars. But the U.S. has opposed any solution that is too targeted at tech companies, where it has more to lose. Tech companies, for their part, have opposed national digital-services taxes like France's, but have supported the OECD process, arguing that they would like to avoid a patchwork of overlapping national initiatives.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/18/us-slammed-rogue-state-withdrawing-global-effort-make-tech-giants-pay-fair-share