Stealing your vote (2)

 A Republican group is spending millions of dollars in funding from major US corporations such as CitiGroup and Chevron to protect their conservative strongholds on the country.  

Bruce Freed,  Center for Political Accountability president, said, companies don’t consider the consequences of their political spending. “Corporations either turned a blind eye or they didn’t pay attention, but they’re responsible through their spending.”

The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) – which held the key to the GOP’s political takeover a decade ago – launched the Right Lines 2020 campaign last September, taglined: “Socialism starts in the states. Let’s stop it there, too.”

Dave Abrams, the RSLC deputy executive director, said the RSLC and its supporters were leading the fight against “radical leftists”.

 It’s hoping to meet a $125m investment goal in an effort to retain 42 state legislature seats that the group says are key to holding power in the House of Representatives in battleground states including Wisconsin, Texas, Florida and New York. The group recently appointed party strategist Karl Rove and ousted White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to its board.

The RSLC’s goal is to get Republicans elected in down-ballot races. This can mean funding state candidates and campaign materials, including attack ads. For corporations, funneling their money through the group is a simple way to support lawmakers sympathetic to their bottom line and exert political influence.

The RSLC has gone to extreme lengths to undertake its mission, changing the political landscape in the process. In the run-up to the 2010 midterms, it led an unprecedented strategy, the Redistricting Majority Project, or Redmap, to flip legislatures in competitive states. Once in charge, Republicans manipulated district maps to their advantage, a tactic known as gerrymandering. “He who controls redistricting can control Congress,” Rove famously said in 2010. While both Democrats and Republicans gerrymander, Redmap changed the game.

In 2012, Democrats won 1.4m more votes than Republicans, yet Republicans maintained a 33-seat margin in the House. A 2019 USC study found that 59 million Americans now live under minority rule, where the party that receives the minority share of the vote in a state election controls the majority of seats in the subsequent state legislature.

“Redistricting historically was something that occurred behind the scenes in smoke-filled rooms and the people didn’t pay attention,” said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center. “Now it’s something that angers people.”

Rigged maps and their corrosive effects on democracy have drawn fierce protests in states like Wisconsin and Michigan over the past decade. Crowds came out once again last year after the supreme court’s influential ruling drawing a line between political and racial gerrymandering, putting even more pressure on the parties to win control of the redistricting process.

Over half of the RSLC’s $17m contributions at the end of 2019 came from public companies and trade associations, according to an analysis by The Center for Political Accountability (CPA), which tracks corporate political spending. The largest single donor, however, was the conservative dark money group the Judicial Confirmation Network with $1.1m, the same group behind the nomination of conservative supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/22/republican-dark-money-groups-2020-election

Forests Are Not The Cure

Previous studies have indicated that trees have enormous potential to soak up and store carbon, and many countries have established tree planting campaigns as a key element of their plans to tackle climate change. Over the past few years, the idea of planting trees as a low cost, high impact solution to climate change has really taken hold.

However, rather than benefiting the environment, large-scale tree planting may do the opposite, two new studies have found. One paper says that financial incentives to plant trees can backfire and reduce biodiversity with little impact on carbon emissions. A separate project found that the amount of carbon that new forests can absorb may be overestimated.

One new study have looked closely at the financial incentives given to private landowners to plant trees. These payments are seen as a key element of increasing the number of trees significantly. Chile subsidised 75% of the costs of planting new forests. While it was intended not to apply to existing forests, lax enforcement and budgetary limitations meant that some landowners simply replaced native forests with more profitable new tree plantations. Their study found the subsidy scheme expanded the area covered by trees, but decreased the area of native forest. The authors point out that since Chile's native forests are rich in biodiversity and store large amounts of carbon, the subsidy scheme failed to increase the carbon stores and accelerated biodiversity loss.

"If policies to incentivise tree plantations are poorly designed or poorly enforced, there is a high risk of not only wasting public money but also releasing more carbon and losing biodiversity," said co-author Prof Eric Lambin, from Stanford University. "That's the exact opposite of what these policies are aiming for."

A second study set out to examine how much carbon a newly planted forest would be able to absorb from the atmosphere. Up until now, many scientists have calculated the amount of carbon that trees can pull down from the air using a fixed ratio. Suspecting that this ratio would depend on local conditions, the researchers looked at northern China, which has seen intensive tree planting by the government because of climate change but also in an effort to reduce dust from the Gobi desert.

Looking at 11,000 soil samples taken from afforested plots, the scientists found that in carbon poor soils, adding new trees did increase the density of organic carbon. But where soils were already rich in carbon, adding new trees decreased this density. The authors say that previous assumptions about how much organic carbon can be fixed by planting new trees is likely an overestimate.

"We hope that people can understand that afforestation practices are not one single thing," said Dr Anping Chen, from Colorado State University and a lead author on the study "Afforestation involves many technical details and balances of different parts, and it cannot solve all our climate problems."

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53138178

Stealing your vote (1)

Trump launched a fresh attack on mail-in voting, making a series of false allegations to suggest the 2020 election will be tainted by fraud,  fueling concerns he is laying the groundwork to contest the results of the 2020 election. He put forward a new theory, claiming that foreign countries would print millions of mail-in ballots and mail them to voters. The idea was previously advanced by US attorney general William Barr.

Experts have said that it would be nearly impossible for a foreign country to orchestrate the kind of fraud Trump and Barr are hyping. Trump pointed to the fact that Americans have voted during times of war to suggest that Covid-19 was merely being used as an excuse to “cheat”. But members of the military have long voted by mail and there is a long history of expanding access to the ballot because of war, Alexander Keyssar, a historian who has studied elections, told NBC News in April.

“There are many checks and balances in place to ensure that nobody could just print ‘millions’ of ballots and vote them,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who works with election officials across the country.

“It’s ridiculous. You can’t just print ballots. There is a specific process with vendors or internal to election offices. Ballot tracking is a way that you can add security,” said Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute and a former election official in Denver. “If either Barr or Trump had toured an election office or had advisers that know the process, they would know this is not feasible.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/22/trump-mail-in-voting-fraud-claims

Siberia Warms Up

Temperatures in the Arctic Circle are likely to have hit an all-time record on Saturday, reaching a scorching 38C (100F) in Verkhoyansk, a Siberian town, 18C higher than the average maximum daily temperature in June.

"Year-on-year temperature records are being broken around the world, but the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth," said Dr Dann Mitchell, associate professor in atmospheric science at the University of Bristol. "So it is unsurprising to see records being broken in this region. We will see more of this in the near future."

The Arctic is believed to be warming twice as fast as the global average. But a persistent heatwave this year in the Arctic Circle has worried meteorologists. In March, April and May, the Copernicus Climate Change service reported that the average temperature was around 10C above normal. Earlier in June, parts of Siberia recorded 30C, while in May, Khatanga in Russia - situated in the Arctic Circle at 72 degrees north - set a new May temperature record of 25.4C.

Warming in the Arctic is leading to the thawing of once permanently frozen permafrost below ground. This is alarming scientists because as permafrost thaws, carbon dioxide and methane previously locked up below ground is released. These greenhouse gases can cause further warming, and further thawing of the permafrost, in a vicious cycle known as positive feedback. The higher temperatures also cause land ice in the Arctic to melt at a faster rate, leading to greater run-off into the ocean where it contributes to sea-level rise. There is also an element of positive feedback here, says BBC Weather, because the loss of highly reflective white ice means that the ground and sea absorb more heat. This leads to more warming.

The impact of wildfires are also a consideration. Last summer, they ravaged parts of the Arctic. Although they are common in summer, high temperatures and strong winds made them unusually severe. They typically start in early May before peaking in July and August but by late April this year they were already ten times bigger in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia compared to the same time last year, Russia's emergencies minister said.

"We've upset the energy balance of the entire planet," cautions Prof Chris Rapley of University College London. Year after year we see temperature records being broken, the eminent climate scientist says. "This is a warning message from the Earth itself," he tells me. "We ignore it at our peril."

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53140069

Inequality and the Pandemic

Lower-income households are using savings and borrowing more during the coronavirus lockdown, while richer families are saving more as eating out and trips abroad are banned.

That's according to research from the Resolution Foundation, a think tank.

Lower-income households are twice as likely as richer ones to have increased their debts during the crisis, it said.

"Pre-coronavirus Britain was marked by soaring wealth and damaging wealth gaps between households," said George Bangham, economist at the Resolution Foundation. "These wealth divides have been exposed by the crisis. While higher-income households have built up their savings, many lower-income households have run theirs down and had to turn to high-interest credit."

Wealth gaps across the country have also grown, with London and the South East accounting for 38% of all wealth between 2016 to 2018, up from 32% a decade earlier. Wealth inequality remains almost twice as high as income inequality, it adds.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53131643

We Demand Transformative Social Change

Across the world, working people are engaged in civil disobedience, protests, and resistance, not just for one issue. Communities are beginning to imagine what our world can look like without capitalism. The unprecedented turbulent events occurring around the globe now demand solutions. Poverty is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution. The Socialist Party say we have that solution. The dehumanizing darkness of capitalist profit is a structural defect. We have an economic system built for profits over human lives. It keeps working people of all colours scrambling for the bare basics of subsistence living. If we don’t stop capitalism in the next decade or two, it is questionable whether humanity will see the 22nd Century

The ruling class seeks to blame the poor people for their circumstances. The capitalists want us to believe that we are the problem. More and more working people no longer buy into the narrative that poverty is our fault. The Socialist Party is calling for a radical revolution of political and economic power. Everybody is deserving of our planet’s abundance. The worst mistake we have made is to demand too little. The profit system does not value human life nor ecological harmony. Instead, it has prioritizes private, corporate and state interests over our precious natural resources. Until we have a people that understands how capitalism works, how and why class systems exist, societal poverty will persist. The necessities of life – water, food, healthcare and housing chief among them – having been commodified, the capitalist system guarantees that there will be winners and losers, and the “two-party” system guarantees that the winners will never allow the losers to change this. We will never rise to our full human potential until the necessities of life are freely available to all as a birthright. To create real security, we must meet everyone’s basic human needs. Our security will not come from the muzzle of a gun, but from the combined voice of an united movement.

 A just  functional society is impossible when the vast majority of its wealth is in the hands of a privileged few, while poverty remains rampant. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison now hold a combined fortune worth nearly half a trillion dollars, $493.9 billion to be exact and have added a combined $101.7 billion to their net worth since March. Existing governments are designed to facilitate economic growth, they are all capitalist growth enhancers by design and cannot be reformed.

 Dividing working people is a tried and true strategy of our masters. It was President Johnson who said in 1960:

“if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on and he’ll empty his pocket for you.”

Speed the day that is not too distant when the voiceless, the vulnerable, the poor and the subjugated will succeed in their struggles. 

Poverty Plea

The successful school meal voucher campaign waged by the footballer Marcus Rashford provides only a “sticking plaster” for households living well below the poverty line as a result of Covid-19 job losses, the Fabian Society , a left-of-centre thinktank has said.

 Its research had found a huge gap between benefit payments and the amount needed to escape from poverty despite the increases in universal credit announced by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak.

The research showed that a lone parent without work with one child was left £68 below the £237-a-week poverty line for that family type, while a single parent with three children was having to get by on £142 less than the £393-a-week poverty benchmark.

Andrew Harrop, general secretary of the Fabian Society, said: “Families with children where either parent loses their job during the Covid-19 crisis are finding to their horror that universal credit does not provide enough to meet even basic needs.”

Harrop said more state money was needed.

“During the Covid-19 crisis there can be no possible excuse for punishing families with three children who have just lost their jobs and have no wish to be out of work. There is a safety net required to protect individual households and overall consumer spending during an unprecedented global crisis – our figures reveal its inadequacy.”

The thinktank said its poverty-line figures were a best-case scenario because they assumed that families’ housing and council tax costs were fully covered by other benefit payments, which was almost never the case.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/21/rashfords-voucher-victory-only-a-sticking-plaster-for-the-poor

Racial Injustice in the USA

The US jails hold more than 2.2 million people, or 22% of the world's prison population, and has a long history of racism in its prison system. Problems with the US justice system go back a long way,

In 2018, Black people made up 12% of the US adult population but accounted for 33% of people serving a prison sentence, while white people made up 63% of the US adult population, yet just 30% of prison inmates. These figures are drawn from reports by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistics agency of the US Department of Justice. Certain age groups are particularly prominent: in 2018, one out of about 21 Black men aged between 35 and 39 was in prison.

 The 13th Amendment was abused after slaves were liberated following the American Civil War. The amendment states that slavery and forced labor are forbidden in the US — "except as a punishment for crime." Wealthy white people had lost their labor force in one fell swoop, but had their ways of remedying the situation: In the years after the Civil War, African Americans were arrested for trivial offenses and had to do hard labor as part of their prison sentence.

Then, in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon announced the "war on drugs." This campaign against drug-related crime hit the Black community hard — and that was the whole point.  Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman referred to African Americans as being among the "enemies" of the Nixon government. He said that while it was not possible to make it illegal to be Black, it was possible to get the public to associate Black people with heroin. This meant that "we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news."

"Mandatory minimums" were also introduced. These meant that long prison sentences could be imposed for minor possession of drugs. For drugs like crack, which was generally less expensive than cocaine and more often found in the possession of Black people, these mandatory punishments were much longer and handed down for smaller amounts than in the case of drugs like cocaine, which was generally more expensive and more often found in the possession of white people. The "mandatory minimums" leave judges with more or less no discretionary power; even if they would like to give the person involved a second chance, they have to hand down decades long jail sentences.

Poverty is also punished via the bail bond system. A person charged with a crime who cannot afford bail is required to stay in jail until their trial takes place — often for months or even years. Here, African Americans are also disproportionately affected.

Cori Bush, a Democrat running for Congress in the state of Missouri, told DW that "instead of us spending so much money on tear gas in our police departments, instead of spending all of this money on military-grade weapons and military-grade gear and vehicles," cities should invest in schools, health care and job training programs. Diverting money from police budgets to community aid would have direct effects in bringing down the incarceration rate among African Americans, according to Bush. 

"I've been in a place where I didn't know where my next meal was coming from. I made sure my children ate but I didn't know what I was going to eat," Bush said, pointing out that such situations had a negative mental impact on people. She is certain that if there were less poverty, fewer young people without future prospects and fewer hungry children, not as many people would end up in prison.

Over-50s Poverty

Increasing numbers of people aged over 50 in the UK do not have enough money to pay for basic necessities, a study of labour market statistics has shown.

Claims for universal credit, which is available only to households with savings of less than £16,000, from the over-50s have more than doubled since March.

Stuart Lewis, the founder of Rest Less,  a website for the over-50s, said: “Sadly, this is only the tip of the iceberg as many of those unemployed in their 50s will not be eligible to claim universal credit. The surge in older claimants highlights the extremely precarious financial situation that many of this demographic find themselves in today.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/22/uk-reports-rise-in-over-50s-struggling-to-pay-for-necessities

Wake Him Up When It's Over

Capitalist and TV Star Alan Sugar has urged the Government to lift lockdown restrictions -- because he knows no one who has died from the Coronavirus (The Metro, 19-6-20)

      The current deaths in the U. K. according Gov. UK is 42, 632.

 He has been in Florida with his wife during the lockdown (that must have difficult for him).

  'Look I'm not a Doctor [classic line] and I don't want to give advice.'

 ' I have been in Florida for six months, so I have lived through the crisis, the shortage of ventilators, masks and hospital beds being full up . . .'

 'I have seen the transition of restaurants, tennis courts, golf clubs opening. This has been going on now for six weeks.'

 'We've come out of this so-called lockdown. Who's dead ? I'm still alive. My wife, thank God is still alive, so is everyone I know. It's a clue that maybe we've reached  a peak.'

 According to Centres For Disease Control & Prevention the U. S. A. has 119, 615 deaths.

For Alan Sugar as long as he, his family and friends are  well it's okay. He doesn't want to talk about the  working class deaths worldwide, he wants business as usual.

We don't want to live in your world. We want a world without buying and selling, a world without money and profits. We want production for need.

We want a world without leaders and capitalists.

          

To Extinction Rebellion

I hope all is well with you. Thank you for keeping me in touch with XR.

I have been to a few of Kington’s meetings and also Brecon, Cardigan and other groups. Whilst I absolutely understand and agree with the aims of XR what seems to be missing, to me at least, is when XR says ‘system change’ what exactly does this mean; that is to say what system does the movement intend to put in its place?

I have occasionally tried to raise this issue but have been met with blank looks, if I had to guess it would seem that there is no clear idea of what this new system would be.

The idea that to continue with Capitalism is a non-starter as a system predicated on growth and profit at the expense of the environment and people is destined to destroy itself and probably any reasonable form of life. (as can now be clearly seen as the government are pushing to restore the economy despite scientists warning against this, proves the point - the economy will, under Capitalism, always come first).

The answer is World wide change and this will only happen when the majority of people want to end Capitalism and, more to the point, know why it will fail us and be clear about what to put in its place.

In the early 1900’s the World Socialist Party was founded and they, since then, have been unwavering in their aims to rid the World of Capitalism and not try to reform it. With climate breakdown and the Covid outbreak if ever there was a time to change things it is now. Please check this website out, I think the word ‘socialism’ is problematic, not because of the true meaning but because most people think of China or Russia when, in fact, true socialism has never existed but that tends to be lack of knowledge and the pressure of the media/governments to encourage people to think otherwise.

Climate breakdown, like species loss, warfare, starvation, homelessness, poverty and even Covid 19 are all symptoms of this dreadful society (Capitalism) Reformism just will not work. I think that if XR members were to read very carefully the aims of the World Socialist Party they would realise that all of XR’s aims and more would be met with true socialism.

I would respectfully ask you to read this email at your meeting please.

Kind regards to all,

Glenn Morris.

http://www.worldsocialism.org.spgb

Speculating on Health

A company set up by a hedge fund, with no background or expertise in pharmacology, arranged to get rights to a drug that was developed by researchers at Emory University on a $16 million contract with the government. 

The drug, EIDD-2801, is thought to be a potential treatment for the coronavirus. 

Shortly after arranging to buy the rights to the drug, the company turned around and sold them to Merck, presumably for a substantial profit. 

Neither the United States of America nor the United Kingdom have agreed to share the fruits of research with the world, leaving open the possibility that one or more of their drug companies will take advantage of research that was widely shared to develop a vaccine or treatment on which they will claim a patent monopoly, and then charge very high prices.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/20/patents-and-pandemic-again

Common ownership and the cooperative commonwealth

The long history of racism in the United States has held back black Americans for generations. 

Around the time the United States formally abolished slavery in 1865, African Americans owned 0.5% of the United States’ wealth. Today they own under 3%, even though around 13% of the population is defined by the U.S. census as “black or African American.” This isn’t an accident of history – it’s a result of government policies and institutional bias.

Slavery lasted for nearly 250 years – almost equivalent to the time from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 until today. University of Connecticut Professor Thomas Craemer estimates the present value of unpaid wages for just the 89 years after independence to be nearly $20 trillion using a 3% interest rate. Use a 6% rate, and that reparations bill rises to almost $7 quadrillion. That is around 50 times global GDP.

An 1865 order set aside land for black households, the promise of “forty acres and a mule.”  The “40 acres and a mule” promised to formerly enslaved Africans never came to pass. There was no redistribution of land, no reparations for the wealth extracted from stolen land by stolen labor. 

A Roosevelt Institute report by Duke University Professor William Darity and writer Kirsten Mullen estimates that at least 40 million acres should have been allocated. If the value grew at a 6% compound interest rate, it would today be worth over $3 trillion – more than the market capitalizations of Amazon.com and Apple combined.

The proportion of the United States under black ownership has actually shrunk over the last 100 years or so.

At their peak in 1910, African American farmers made up around 14% of all U.S. farmers, owning 16 to 19 million acres of land. By 2012, black Americans represented just 1.6% of the farming community, owning 3.6 million acres of land.

 Another study shows a 98% decline in black farmers between 1920, and 1997. This contrasts sharply with an increase in acres owned by white farmers over the same period.

In a 1998 report, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ascribed this decline to a long and “well-documented” history of discrimination against black farmers, ranging from New Deal and USDA discriminatory practices dating from the 1930s to 1950s-era exclusion from legal, title and loan resources.

Lost land and wages are only the beginning. Add compensation for racist segregation laws, mass incarceration, employment discrimination and exclusions in government programs.

 In 2017, the racial homeownership gap was at its highest level for 50 years, with 79.1% of white Americans owning a home compared to 41.8% of black Americans. This gap is even larger than it was when racist housing practices such as redlining, which denied black residents mortgages to buy, or loans to renovate, property were legal.

A 2017 report found that the median net worth for non-immigrant black American households in the greater Boston region was just US$8, but for whites it was $247,500. This was due to “general housing and lending discrimination through restrictive covenants, redlining and other lending practices.”

Nationally, between 1983 and 2013, median black household wealth decreased by 75% to $1,700 while median white household wealth increased 14% to $116,800.

Households that identify as black or African American have roughly $800,000 less in mean net wealth than their white counterparts. Apply that to the population, and the wealth gap comes to over $13 trillion.

The idea of collective ownership has a long history in the United States. Even during slavery, a piece of ground was granted by slave masters for enslaved African subsistence farming. The Jamaican social theorist Sylvia Wynter called this land “the plot.” Wynter has explained how that these parcels of land were transformed into communal areas where slaves could establish their own social order, sustain traditional African folklore and food– growing yams, cassava and sweet potatoes. Plots were often called “yam grounds,” so important was this staple food. With the end of slavery, these plots disappeared.

The principles of collective land ownership evolved in post-slavery black America. It was central to civil rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms, a cooperative model designed to deliver economic justice to the poorest black farmers in the American South. In Hamer’s view, the fight for justice in the face of oppression required a measure of independence that could be achieved through owning land and providing resources for the community.

The idea of a black commons as a means of economic empowerment formed a focus of W.E.B. DuBois’ 1907 “Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans.” DuBois believed that the extreme segregation of the Jim Crow era made it necessary to ground economic empowerment in the cultural bonds between black people and that this could be achieved through cooperative ownership.

The political economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard has noted in reference to black credit unions and mutual aid funds, “African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefited greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.”

 In a 2018 statement, the  nonprofit Schumacher Center for a New Economics proposed to adopt a community land trust structure “to serve as a national vehicle to amass purchased and gifted lands in a black commons with the specific purpose of facilitating low-cost access for black Americans hitherto without such access.”

While recognising that cooperation and social ownership is the way forward, the World Socialist Movement suggests that common ownership and free access to the wealth of society should be the vision for the future, not only of African Americans but for all peoples. The WSM calls for the cooperative world commonwealth.

Stealing the vote

 A federal judge denied an effort to expand the number of polling places in Kentucky.

There will be fewer than 200 polling places, down from 3,700 in a typical election year.

Most of the state's 120 counties will have just one polling location. 

That includes the most populous county, Jefferson, home to Louisville. About 1 in 5 residents in the county is African American, the largest black population in the state. Jefferson County has a population of roughly 767,000 and will have just one polling location. It is 54 miles long with poor public transit so how will people get to vote?

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/20/voting-rights-advocates-warn-impending-disaster-kentucky-after-bid-increase-slashed

Peru's Community Pot

The ’’community pot,” is a phenomenon that’s spread across Peru in recent months as coronavirus quarantines and shutdowns have left millions of poor people with no way to feed their families.

 Soup kitchens and community pots have become a symbol of the conundrum facing a region where most of the working population labors outside the formal economy.

Economic shutdowns have forced poor Peruvians, Argentines and tens of millions of others to fall back on community-based efforts unseen in large numbers since crises like Peru’s 1990s civil war or Argentina’s financial crash two decades ago.

“I barely have anything to eat at home,” Clara Arango, a single mother of two, she lost her job as a janitor when her employer closed his shopping mall in Lima’s wealthiest neighborhood due to the antivirus shutdown that began on March 16.  said. ’’Here I have a community pot and I can pool my resources with my neighbors and we can support each other and work together.

In Peru, thousands of community pots are steaming at breakfast and lunch in neighborhoods at levels not seen since inflation topped 7,000% in 1990 in the middle of the civil war with Shining Path Maoist guerrillas. More than a third of Peru’s 32 million people have had to engage in some form of community cooking due to lack of money, 

Without unemployment benefits or the ability to work from home, a cut-price  bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, some lentil stew or noodles in tomato sauce for lunch, and leftovers for dinner aren’t proving enough to keep poor Latin Americans from leaving their homes each day to earn a living as construction workers, street vendors or other types of day laborers. The inability to keep people at home is proving a major factor in the spread of the coronavirus around the continent, where new cases and deaths are rising unchecked as an unbent curve of infection pushes intensive care wards to their limits.

Despite some of the strictest antivirus measures in the region, Peru has diagnosed 237,000 cases of coronavirus and counted 7,000 deaths, the highest number of cases per capita in the region and the second-highest per capita count of deaths.

At the same time, Peru is facing a 12% drop in gross domestic product this year, one of the worst recessions in the hemisphere, according to the World Bank.  2.3 million other Lima residents also lost their jobs by April, out of a working population of roughly 16 million nationwide. The figure is expected to leap again when May numbers are released.

 Estéfany Aquiño, 11, who is helping her mother raise her 2-month-old sister after a cesarean section that left the woman unable to leave her house to look for food. Estéfany said the community pot is her only defense against a hunger that’s become a constant feature of life.

“Your stomach starts to hurt, to grumble, and then to talk to you,” the girl said.

https://apnews.com/259e35cdd2eb479d0b49cfcfb0cc936a