Fighting for the commons

Freeman’s Wood is an 11-hectare parcel of land on the south-west edge of Lancaster. For years, Lancaster locals treated Freeman’s Wood as common space. Precisely who owned the land has been, for as long as most locals can remember, ambiguous and irrelevant. They treated it as a common – a place formally defined as “pertaining or belonging equally to an entire community, nation or culture”. In its broadest sense, a common can be any kind of resource, a plot of land or even an idea. It can “belong” to a community whether or not this is officially sanctioned. In 2012, locals were incensed when fencing, plastered with “No Trespassing” signs, suddenly encircled the site. No one seemed to know who had built the fence until it was revealed the parcel of land was listed as being owned by The Property Trust plc, an investment firm now headed by PT Holdings, a company registered in Bermuda. The firm owns more than 30 properties in England, and had submitted an informal planning proposal in 2010 to build housing in Freeman’s Wood.

 Now the commoners are fighting back. Council documents record that “local people took exception” to the No Trespassing signs and “they disappeared”. Those signs that remained were subversively mutilated. For instance, “WARNING: Keep Out – Private Property – No Trespassing” became “NARNIA: Kop Out – Prat Proper – Try pissing.” The fence was breached in several places. The intention was clear: no global investment firm was going to bar locals from their shared outdoor space. In Lancaster they are fighting to have Freeman’s Wood designated a village green under the Commons Act 2006. A village green is a type of common used primarily for recreational purposes, and local residents must prove they have done just that for at least 20 years.

In England, commons are often associated with rural agrarian land, mentally welded to the 18th- and 19th-century “enclosure of the commons”, when between 1760 and 1870, about 7 million acres (about one sixth the area of England) were changed, by some 4,000 acts of parliament, from common land to enclosed land. This period was, in effect, the birth of private property as we know it in England – and the consequences have been dramatic. Karl Polanyi saw the enclosure of the commons as “a revolution of the rich against the poor” because enclosing commons was a process of imposing a designation on land from a position of power on a resource that had become a communal space over long periods of local use. The justification for doing so is always economic; however much joy varied use of space might bring to a people, land can always be put to more efficient, profitable use. Today every penny is being squeezed out of every inch of land in England, often through speculative real estate investment by transnational firms such as The Property Trust. In the 18th and 19th centuries, enclosures of the commons were labelled as “improvements”; these days it is known as “redevelopment” or “regeneration”. Today nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06% of the population. But much common land was also preserved during that process. There are still 1.3 million acres of common land in England and Wales.

A New Commons movement has also gained steam in recent years, spearheaded by Duncan Mackay from Natural England and championed by the writer Robert Macfarlane. “The importance of the New Commons movement is that the commons it is envisaging really are new,” says Macfarlane. “They’re not sustained or surviving ancient commons, but actively newly designated land, with all the implications for community involvement, and access and long-term survival that are implied by that hugely powerful designation of a common.”

Syrians - the price they pay

Syria’s national wealth, infrastructure and institutions have been “almost obliterated” by the “catastrophic impact” of nearly five years of civil war. The report notes that “Despite the fact that Syrians have been suffering for … five years, global attention to human rights and dignity for them only intensified when the crisis had a direct impact on the societies of developed countries.”

11.5% of the country’s population have been killed or injured since the crisis erupted in March 2011, the report estimates.

Fatalities caused by war, directly and indirectly, amount to 470,000, according to the Syrian Centre for Policy Research (SCPR) – a far higher total than the figure of 250,000 used by the United Nations. The number of wounded is put at 1.9 million.

Of the 470,000 war dead counted by the SCPR, about 400,000 were directly due to violence, while the remaining 70,000 fell victim to lack of adequate health services, medicine, especially for chronic diseases, lack of food, clean water, sanitation and proper housing, especially for those displaced within conflict zones.

Life expectancy has dropped from 70 yrs in 2010 to 55.4 yrs in 2015. In statistical terms, Syria’s mortality rate increased from 4.4 per thousand in 2010 to 10.9 per thousand in 2015.

13.8 million Syrians have lost their source of livelihood. Poverty rose by 85% in 2015 alone. Health, education and income standards have all deteriorated sharply.

45% of the population have been displaced, 6.36 million internally and more than 4 million abroad. The shrinking of the population by 21% helps explain the numbers of refugees reaching other countries.

Spiritual Capitalism

Yoga guru Baba Ramdev is behind one of India's fastest-growing consumer goods companies. Forbes magazine calls his Patanjali empire the "Indian version of Body Shop". Ramdev sells honey, health drinks, fruit juices, sweets, cookies, spices, tea, flour, muesli, pickles, soap, balms, shampoos and noodles.

Encouraged by Ramdev's commercial success, another guru, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, has unveiled his own line of food products. Better known for his bling and for tacky performances on stage the guru will now also sell pickles, honey, bottled water, and yes, noodles. The guru, who runs a thriving sect, wants the "nation to become healthier" by consuming "organic products". He lists 117 "humanitarian activities" on his website, including efforts to eliminate homosexuality, running an international blood bank, promoting vegetarianism and feeding birds.

In southern India, Sri Sri Ravishankar, a guru popular with the middle and upper classes, has a line of ayurvedic (traditional Indian medicine) products, including toothpaste, protein shampoos, herbal tea, anti-diabetic tablets, balms and syrups, produced out of a "world-class" facility in Bangalore.

The country's most famous woman hugging guru Mata Amritanandamayi, also known as Amma, runs hospitals, a TV channel, engineering colleges and business schools, among other things.

Sri Satya Sai Baba, an orange-robed guru with an afro hairstyle, left behind a multi-billion dollar empire, straddling hospitals, clinics and universities, when he died in 2011.

Indian gurus have long used their followers for commercial gain. Mahesh Yogi, for example, sold yoga and meditation to millions of foreigners. Selling yoga to foreigners is nowadays almost passé.

"Gurus - spurious or genuine - are key players in the business and politics of spirituality," says Lise McKean, anthropologist and author of Divine Enterprise, a book that examines the business side of the Hindu religion. "The activities of many gurus and their organisations in the 1980s and 1990s are related to the simultaneous expansion of transnational capitalism in India and abroad."

The new-age gurus have set their sights beyond their followers and are reaching out to India's growing domestic market, a move that must be making a number of multinational companies skittish. So, their products are now finding buyers even among the non-believers. Spiritual capitalism is alive and well in India. The business empires of devotion are flourishing.

World Socialism Party (India)
Email: wspindia@hotmail.com
Website: http://www.worldsocialistpartyindia.org/

'The Levellers and the Diggers' – Wakefield Forum

Another Wakefield Forum has been arranged following the successful one on the 'EU Referendum' back in November.

Saturday, 13 February from 1pm.

The Red Shed,

18 Vicarage St South,

Wakefield WF1 1QX

Here's the line-up for this event:

Ian Brooke (spoke at 2015 Wigan Diggers Festival; author of "England's Forgotten Revolution: 1641-1663); also written a history of Huddersfield Trades Council

Steve Freeman (member of Republican Socialist Alliance and stood in Bermondsey and Old Southwark in General Election; member of Left Unity)

Clifford Slapper (SPGB)

Alan Stewart (Convenor of Wakefield Socialist History Group)

In the chair will be Kitty Rees

UPDATE Clifford Slapper has had to drop out. His place has been taken by Shaun Cohen from the Ford Maguire Society of Leeds.

Admission is free. There is also a free light buffet and an excellent bar with real ale.

Are we really over-crowded?

In 1960, in the US journal Science, a paper by the distinguished physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues declared, “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be squeezed to death.” The paper was titled Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, AD 2026. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/09/is-britain-full-home-truths-about-population-panic

Last year, London’s population reached an all-time peak of more than 8.6 million. By 2050, it is forecast to be 11 million, and possibly as high as 13 million. The rest of the UK’s population is growing, too. The Office for National Statistics expects it to swell by 4.6 million during the 2010s – “the biggest growth in the last 50 years”. In 2014, the latest year for which figures are available, the UK had almost 65 million inhabitants, its greatest ever total. The rate of population growth doubled in the 90s and doubled again in the 00s. It is predicted to be home to more people than France by 2030 and more people than Germany by 2047, which would make this much smaller land mass the most populous country in Europe. This expanding population is almost always talked about in negative terms. In 2011, a Royal Commission on Demographic Change and the Environment concluded: “In practice, there is little government can do to have any real effect on the size of the population over the next 40 years.” The boom’s causes are too interconnected and powerful – and the British state insufficiently authoritarian – for our population trends to be set by Whitehall. The commission recommended instead that governments protect the UK by “improving resource use and influencing consumption patterns”

But Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research thinks alarm is wrong. “We find it hard to be positive about population growth. But it has boosted economic growth. It has made austerity less painful, by increasing total employment and tax revenues. And congestion, pressure on services – they’re considerably easier to cope with, from a collective point of view, than the opposite problems. We’ve forgotten what depopulation feels like.” Between 1975 and 1978, the UK population fell. In 1982, it dropped again. “The population of inner London fell by 20% in the 70s,” says Portes. “Many people said London was basically doomed. It was going to go the way of Detroit. Inner London would become wasteland.” The consequences of depopulation could be bleak: boarded-up houses; miles of urban dereliction; dwindling investment and passenger numbers in and on public transport. In some places, despite the recovery of the population since, this emptied Britain still exists.

Jonathan Portes points out that much of the UK is not crowded anyway. Liverpool and Glasgow have barely half as many inhabitants now as they had at their peaks in the middle of the 20th century. All population statistics are by definition slightly out of date and approximate, but while England has roughly 410 people a sq km – the second highest in the EU – Wales has only 150, Northern Ireland 135 and Scotland 70. Even heaving, stressful London is much less full of people than is widely supposed. “London is the lowest-density mega-city on the planet,” says Danny Dorling. “The densest part of London is four times less dense than Barcelona, a normal, well-planned European city that Britons all want to visit.”

Danny Dorling, a demographer and professor of geography at the University of Oxford argues that the UK’s “overpopulation problem” is really the product of poor land use and social division, of corporate wage squeezes and cuts in state provision. “We’ve managed to organise ourselves so that much of our daily lives is crowded. We have the smallest homes in Europe. Meanwhile, there’s lots of wasted space.” Inner London is increasingly taken up by the huge, little-occupied homes of the super-rich and empty investors’ properties. He thinks the population panic will pass. “I find it hard to believe that we’ll have this gloomy discourse on population in 20 years’ time.” Portes agrees: “You can build more schools and hospitals. Population redistribution is hard, but not impossible. You obviously can’t plonk people in the middle of nowhere, but we built new towns in the 50s. Why not build more within commuting distance of, say, Manchester?” Sooner or later, Dorling points out, the current rise will go into reverse. The British economy will enter a recession and cease to be so attractive to immigrants. The Mediterranean economies will recover. Even the civil wars in the Middle East and Africa, and the resulting refugee crisis, will end. At this point, the size of the British population will depend much more on our fertility rate, which is around 1.9 children a family – one of the highest in Europe, but lower than the 2.1 needed to keep a population stable.

Promising the Earth

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquests over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivatable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of those countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture . . .Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.” ("The part played by labour in the transition from Ape to Man" – Engels)

Obama's plans to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide from US power plants have been stalled by the US Supreme Court. The court ruled that the president's Clean Power Plan could not go forward until all legal challenges were heard. A group of 27 states, utilities and coal mining companies are blocking the proposal in the courts. They argued that the plan was an infringement on states' rights. Under the Clean Power Plan, individual states were due to submit their proposals on how to meet the CO2 restrictions by September this year. That date will be missed. It is also unlikely that all the legal questions over the future of the Clean Power Plan will be resolved before President Obama leaves office next January. If the Clean Power Plan suffer further setbacks in the Supreme Court it may ultimately render it useless and if that was to happen, the ability of the US to live up to its commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement would be in serious doubt.

Capitalism is simply unable to run on green lines, as its motive force is expansion and domination, with no thought for the consequences for the people or the environment. Capitalism is unable to cope with the ecological challenges that lie ahead, from global warming to depletion of resources. If we look at the world around us today we cannot fail to notice the extent to which nature is being ravaged in the name of short-term economic gain. It is all too clear that the prevailing economic system of capitalist competition is quite incapable of seriously taking into account the long-term considerations with which ecology is vitally concerned. Only where the system's immediate objective of profit maximisation is threatened does it become expedient to act upon such considerations.

Will capitalism bring the world to the brink of ecological disaster? It is certainly having a good try. Its pursuit of profits and its competitive pressures to keep costs down have led to all sorts of inappropriate technology being used in production. Why must the planet live under the threat of ecological destruction. It is impossible to deny that the world is a mess and is becoming a bigger and more horrible mess as the days, months and years go by. Many shut their eyes to it, but quite how long they will be able to carry on doing so is only a matter for speculation. Large tracts of the world are a stinking hole and the stench is wafting in all our directions. The only way to stop capitalism plunging the world even deeper into the mire is for the working class to look beyond the confines of the profit system. Under capitalism technology has not been used to secure a peaceful planet but to increase the dangers and consequences of war. Technology has not been used to create a safe energy supply but to develop one which could kill whole populations. To allow world capitalism to continue is to gamble with our future, with the very conditions of life itself. We need to abolish the state of affairs in which the community as a whole exercises little democratic control over society apart from voting for politicians to run the madhouse for another four or five years.

Instead, we need to organise politically to place the means of life — including energy production which is a basic requirement for any society to function — under the democratic control of the whole community and not just governments or groups of experts. We need to abolish the out-moded and old-fashioned division of the world into nation states. Instead we need to cooperate on a world basis to meet our material needs and energy requirements. Only in a socialist society will the community be able to make decisions about energy production which are based on what is safe and in the human interest (including our shared environment) instead of decisions based on, and limited by, economic considerations. Socialism needs mass understanding and support — and then the world will be changed. We have but one policy. We want socialism, and we say we want it now. Sooner or later; socialism, a system of common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use will have to figure on the agenda of the working class if humankind’s collective existence and very survival is not to be put at stake.

The allocation of most resources to the market is incompatible with the realisation of environmental goals. The market responds only to those preferences that can be articulated through acts of buying and selling. Hence the interests of the inarticulate, both those who are contingently so - the poor - and those who are necessarily so - future generations and non-humans - cannot be adequately represented. Moreover, a competitive market economy is necessarily oriented towards growth of capital, and such an orientation is incompatible with a sustainable economy. A non-market system is the only framework within which humans can organize their interaction with the rest of nature in ecologically acceptable ways. As long as production is carried on for making profits and not for needs the same problems of pollution, resource depletion and species extinction will remain.

Before anything constructive can be done, capitalism must go and, with it, the artificial division of the world into separate, competing states. More and more people are becoming aware and concerned about the way the environment is abuse. But campaigning for new laws in regard to protecting the environment is not the answer. The problems cannot be solved by either minor or major policy reforms but only by drastic reconfiguration of the system itself. We need to get rid of a society where a small minority can manipulate nature for their own ends and replace it with one where we all have a real say in how nature is used. The Earth, and all its natural and industrial resources, must become the common heritage of all humanity. A democratic structure for making decisions at world as well as at local levels must come into being. It is to facilitate that process that the World Socialist Movement exist. Our message to the working class is that capitalism’s time has gone. There are plenty of reasons why the task of building a political movement for socialism is more urgent than ever. The choice before us is now “socialism or barbarism”, a progressive move to the next higher stage of social evolution, or a regression from which we may never recover. The choice is yours. 

Shunning refugee children

Thousands of young people who sought refuge in Britain as unaccompanied child asylum-seekers have been deported to repressive regimes and countries partly controlled by Isis and the Taliban, the Home Office has admitted. Over the past nine years 2,748 young people – many of whom had spent formative years in the UK, forging friendships and going to school – have been returned to countries including Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria.

It raises serious concerns about what happens to child asylum-seekers when they turn 18, and at a time when Britain is being urged to help thousands of orphaned child refugees from Syria. Unaccompanied child asylum-seekers arriving in the UK are given temporary leave to remain. But this expires when they become adults, at which point many are sent back to their home country – even if they have taken GCSEs and A-levels, integrated into British society and lost touch with their homeland. They often struggle to start new lives, because their Westernised mannerisms mean they are regarded with suspicion.

Labour MP Louise Haigh observed “These shocking figures reveal the shameful reality behind our asylum system. Children who flee countries ravaged by war in the most appalling of circumstances are granted safe haven and build a life here in the UK, but at the age of 18 can be forced on to a flight and back to a dangerous country they have no links to and barely any memory of. With many more vulnerable young children due to arrive in the UK over the next five years the Government needs to answer serious questions and provide a cast-iron guarantee that vulnerable young people will not be sent back to war zones.” 

Meanwhile, US presidential candidate and demagogue, Donald Trump, says he has “absolutely no problem” with “looking Syrian children in the face” and telling them to leave. “I can look in their face and tell them they can’t come here,” because their parents “…may be Syrian, they may be ISIS, may be ISIS-related,” Trump responded to enthusiastic applause from his xenophobic supporters. 

America Needs Revolution

Capitalism has failed us.  We're overworked, underemployed and more powerless than ever before. Economists Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found in 2014 that the concentration of wealth held by the top 0.1 percent has reached levels not seen since the 1920s. 16,000 Americans hold as much wealth as 80 percent of the nation’s population – some 256,000,000 people – and as much as 75 percent of the entire world’s population. The combined wealth of these 16,000 people is more than $9 trillion. A few billionaires are even wealthier. In the United States, 536 people had a shared net worth of $2.6 trillion at the end of 2015. Fortune 500 CEOs earned about 42 times as much on average as the typical worker in 1980. Today they earn 373 times as much. In fact, seven of this country’s 30 largest corporations paid their CEOs more than they paid in taxes.

American full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20% clocking more than 60. Today, only 11% of American workers belong to a union. Labor union membership has plummeted from a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to fewer than 7 percent today.

The median household income in the United States fell by more than 7 percent between 1999 and 2014. It’s now slightly over $53,000. According to the Census Bureau, median income has dropped by 6.5 percent since 2007. But rents keep going up. As a result, the number of families spending more than half their incomes on rent—the 'severely' cost-burdened renters—has surged from 7.5 million to 11.4 million in the last decade, a stunning 50 percent increase. Billionaire Steve Schwarzman finds the growing anger among voters "astonishing." But his company, Blackstone, is a corporate model for making money at the expense of desperate former homeowners. Since the recession, it has become the nation's leading landlord, buying up tens of thousands of homes at rock-bottom prices, and then renting them back, often to the very people who lost them.

Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than the citizens of any other advanced nation, for example. We also pay more for Internet service. And far more for health care. With the average cost of a year's worth of life-preserving drugs over $50,000, 43 percent of sick Americans skipped doctor's visits and/or medication purchases in 2011-12 because of excessive costs. It keeps getting worse. About half of households age 55 and older have no 401(k) or IRA or other retirement savings.  Trade treaties protect the assets and intellectual property of big corporations but not the jobs and wages of workers. Over one generation, from 1984 to 2009, the net worth of an American under 35 dropped from $11,521 to $3,662, a 68 percent decline, in good part because of debt. In approximately the same time, the percentage of stay-at-home young adults rose from 11 percent to almost 24 percent. Apple makes a $400,000 profit per employee while paying its retail specialists less than $30,000 per year.

From the end of World War II through 1968, the wages for workers in the middle, and even the minimum wage, tracked productivity closely. Then something changed. Between 1979 and 2012, after accounting for inflation, the productivity of the average American worker increased about 85 percent. Over the same period, the inflation-adjusted wage of the median worker rose only about 6 percent, and the value of the minimum wage fell 21 percent. As a country, we got richer, but workers in the middle saw little of the gains, and workers at the bottom actually fell behind. If the national minimum wage had kept pace with productivity it would have been $22 per hour by 2013. Instead it’s $7.25 today. A slightly more conservative says the minimum wage would have been $18.42 per hour in 2015. On the other end of the spectrum most of the nation’s income gains are now going to the top. Income gains for the top 1 percent now dwarf those of other households. In 2011 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that “between 1979 and 2007, income grew by: 275 percent for the top 1 percent of households; 65 percent for the next 19 percent; just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent; and 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent.” And most of the gains since the 2008 economic crisis have gone to the wealthiest among us. The middle-income cost of living has risen significantly. Even after wages are adjusted for inflation, middle-income has failed keep up with increases in such costs as child care, higher education, health services, retirement, and housing – expenses that disproportionately affect middle-income households.

Women earn just 80% of men's pay, and they have barely half the retirement assets of men. But women are acquiring more undergraduate degrees than men, more master's degrees than men, and more PhDs than men.

U.S. oligarchs maximize their wealth and keep it, using the “democratically elected” government to shape policies and laws favorable to the interests of their class. They insist that all of us have the “freedom” to create a business in the “free” marketplace, which implies that being hard-up and poor is our own fault. Wealth and income are more concentrated at the top than in over a century. And that wealth has translated into political power. The economic system is rigged in favor of those at the top. Giant companies have accumulated vast market power. Wall Street banks have more of the nation’s banking assets than they did in 2008, when they were judged too big to fail. Hedge-fund partners get tax loopholes, oil companies get tax subsidies, and big agriculture gets paid off. Low wages increases the profits of Walmart and their ilk, but requires its employees and their families to apply for food stamps and Medicaid in order to avoid poverty – an indirect government subsidy of Walmart. Overall, more than 48 million Americans live in poverty. The U.S. poverty rate for children is over 20 percent, higher than that of all other major developed countries.

Over a third of American troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with some sort of mental disorder. Yet from 1970 to 2002, the per capita number of public mental health hospital beds plummeted from 207 per 100,000 to 21 per 100,000 -- nearly a 90 percent cut! After the recession state funding was cut some more.

In 1971 Congress passed the bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development Bill to establish a multi-billion dollar national day care system for the children of working parents. In 1972, President Richard Nixon vetoed it. In 1972, Congress also passed a bill (first proposed in 1923) to amend the Constitution to grant equal rights of citizenship to women.  Ratified by only 35 states, three short of the required 38, that Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, was declared dead in 1982, leaving American women in legal limbo.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, obliterating six decades of federal social welfare policy “as we know it,” ending federal cash payments to the nation’s poor, and consigning millions of female heads of household and their children to poverty.

The average African American family had readily available liquid wealth of only $200 in 2011, less than $1 for every $100 owned by whites. A middle-aged black person with a graduate degree has about the same odds of being a millionaire as a white person with only a high school diploma.

For every THREE homeless children in 2006 there are now FIVE. For every THREE children on food stamps in 2007, there are now FIVE. And yet spending on children's programs recently declined for the first time in nearly 20 years.

The wealthy are afraid of radical change, the kind that might bring about a popular uprising against Big Business greed. It's too late for gradual change. Real change never comes from the top on down. It comes from the bottom on up. No change unless millions of people become engaged in the political process in a way that we have not yet seen. Re-designing our social and economic system is a massive undertaking and expecting one person or one party to do it is lunacy. Some pessimists say we shouldn’t even try to change the order of things and simply accept the status quo. They think it is foolish to aim for fundamental change and call socialism an impractical pie-in-the-sky goal. This is defeatism. Too many rather not rock the boat. But here’s the problem. There’s no way to reform the system without rocking the boat. There’s no way to get to where we should be without aiming high. Any other political strategy is defeatism. Change will never happened without people championing bold new ideas.

Socialism can be achieved if the people are mobilized for it with determined enthusiasm. There are more people who care than who don't care, it's a matter of working with those that are psychologically afraid of change and showing them why it is necessary. We will start challenging as true proponents for change, and we will start winning. If we don’t try there is no chance of hope. To say otherwise is to encourage a false cynicism that breeds permanent despair. This system is not sustainable. We must end capitalism and make economic democracy work for the many, not just the few. We must try. We have no choice. Which side are you on?

GOOGLE-EYED! (weekly poem)

GOOGLE-EYED!

A Guardian letter writer said he would be contacting

HMRC to arrange to pay less tax--as per Google.

I’m writing to HMRC,

About my rate of tax;

As I’ve heard with their ‘Sweetheart Deals’,

The rate is rather lax!

I would prefer the three percent,

That Google have achieved;

Than pay the social dues of which,  

I’m normally relieved.  

I’ll contact George in Downing Street, (1)

To knock off a few pence;

And make a verbal contract and,

Then shake hands like bent gents.

We’d best avoid a written deal,

Because that’s evidence;

And George prefers to bullshit and, (2)

Then sit upon the fence.

The ‘Don’t be evil’ motto of,

The Google Company; (3)

Is clearly one big corporate sham,

Not unsurprisingly.

There’s clearly laws for rich and poor,

In our society;

And Google’s deal exposes one,

More impropriety.

(1) Google executives met Government ministers 25 times in the last 18 months before settlement.

(2) The tax deal, supposedly was 3% p.a. but £33m of the £130m paid was related to share options.

(3) 2005. Michael Howard’s chief of staff, Rachel Whetstone, joined Google as a European director.

2011. David Cameron’s head of strategic communications, Tim Chatwin, became a Google director.

2012. Jeremy Hunt’s adviser, Naomi Gummer, became Google’s UK policy adviser.

2015. Chris Grayling’s adviser, Amy Fisher, was responsible for Google’s policy communications.

2015. Baroness Shields, MD of Google Europe, Middle East & Africa became a Conservative minister.

© Richard Layton

Stealing medicines

This article on the Counter Punch website by Fran Quigley, a professor at Indiana University McKinney School of Law, where he directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic is worth extensively quoting from:

“Along the path toward the creation of a global capitalist system, some of the most significant steps were taken by the English enclosure movement.

Between the 15th to 19th centuries, the rich and the powerful fenced off commonly held land and transformed it into private property. Land switched from a source of subsistence to a source of profit, and small farmers were relegated to wage laborers. In Das Kapital, Marx described the process by coining the term land-grabbing. To British historian E.P. Thompson, it was “a plain enough case of class robbery.”

More recently, a similar enclosure movement has taken place. This time, the fenced-off commodity is life-saving medicine. Playing the role of modern-day lords of the manor are pharmaceutical corporations, which have taken a good that was once considered off-limits for private profiteering and turned it into an expensive commodity. Instead of displacing small landholders, this enclosure movement causes suffering and death: Billions of people across the globe go without essential medicines, and 10 million die each year as a result.

Many people curse the for-profit medicine industry. But few know that the enclosure erected around affordable medicines is both relatively new and artificially imposed. For nearly all of human history, attempting to corner the markets on affordable medicines has been considered both immoral and illegal.

It’s time now to reclaim this commons, and reestablish medicines as a public good…

….As the English enclosure movement proved, exclusivity can be artificially created by literally or figuratively walling off common access. Exclusivity can be undone as well: The modern open-source software movement takes a good that some have tried to make exclusive — software code — and freely shares it, leading to a plethora of creative developments….

….“Letters patent,” meaning open letters, were issued in 14th century England to induce foreign craftsmen to relocate there. Attempts to coordinate global intellectual property rules led to the 1883 Paris Convention and the 1886 Berne Convention, and eventually to the creation of the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization in 1967. But nations who signed on to those agreements retained the ability to determine the length of patents and what products would be covered. For many nations, that flexibility meant excluding medicines from patent protection. For example, Germany’s patent law of 1877 labeled medicines as “essential goods,” along with food and chemicals, and prohibited any attempts to patent them.

 In the middle of the 20th century, several post-colonial nations adopted similar laws. India’s patent law extended only to the processes for creating medicines, not the drugs themselves. The law opened the door for Indian pharmaceutical manufacturers to reverse-engineer patented drugs and then devise different, cheaper production methods. India soon became known as “the pharmacy of the developing world.” Brazil, Mexico, and other Central and South American countries also adopted limits on the patentability of medicines.

European countries like Italy and Sweden didn’t grant pharmaceutical patents until the 1970s, and Spain refused to do so until 1992. Even when medicine patents were given, many nations granted liberal access to compulsory licenses for patented drugs, meaning that generic manufacturers were free to make the drugs and pay a royalty to the patent holders. During the period between 1962 and 1992, Canada granted 613 licenses to import or manufacture pharmaceutical products….

….The enclosed medicine system inflicts additional damage beyond the artificially inflated cost of patented medicines. The resources of for-profit corporations are inevitably concentrated on the development and promotion of medicines that can be sold at a high mark-up to wealthy consumers. “Lifestyle” drugs that address male pattern baldness or sexual performance are exhaustively researched and marketed, yet the past half-century has seen just one drug developed to treat tuberculosis, which kills more than a million people each year. A landmark study published by the British medical journal The Lancet showed that of the 1,556 new chemical entities marketed between 1975 and 2004, only 21 were for tropical diseases….Remarkably, a full 70 percent of the medicine brought to market by the industry in the past 20 years provided no therapeutic benefit over the products already available. Instead, these “me too” drugs were put forward in order to grab a share of an existing lucrative market.

For full article follow link here

It beggars belief

Police are using plain clothes officers to catch people begging on the streets. Sussex Police last year arrested more than 60 people in Brighton. Critics argue that fines routinely imposed for begging offences simply increase the financial burden on rough sleepers, many of whom have issues with drug or alcohol abuse.

A defence lawyer, Ray Pape, who routinely deals with cases involving homeless people and individuals with mental health issues in Brighton said he was dealing with an increasing number of begging cases. “It is difficult to see why it is in the public interest to pursue these cases. I am not talking about aggressive begging or harassment but situations where people have asked for a few pence. I currently have two cases where the arrest was made by plain clothes officers. In one case it was two officers who stood in close proximity to the individual hoping that they would be asked for some change. Is this a good use of public money? We are talking about the cost of officers’ time to make and process these arrests, the cost of detention and the cost of prosecution.”

Jason Knight, a Brighton businessman who works with homeless people in the city, said: “People are effectively being victimised for sleeping rough. We have a ridiculous situation where homeless people are being arrested for asking for a few pennies, fined by the courts and then put back out on the street. These are vulnerable individuals who are being criminalised. Surely the police have something else they could be doing with undercover officers than this?”

The arcane legislation being used to arrest and prosecute beggars is the 1824 Vagrancy Act, which outlaws activities such as fraudulent palmistry and unlicensed trading by “petty chapman”, defines begging as a person “placing himself or herself in any public place, street, highway, court, or passage, to beg or gather alms”. It was introduced nine years after the Battle of Waterloo in part to deal with an increasing problem with jobless soldiers discharged following the Napoleonic Wars. Its original critics included the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, who complained it was too sweeping and failed to take into account individual circumstances. It is a view shared by many of the law’s contemporary detractors, who say its failure to distinguish between aggressive begging or harassment and so-called passive begging, such as simply sitting in the street, makes it an archaic and overly-blunt legal tool. The legislation, which includes a legal definition of the term “incorrigible rogue”, has been entirely repealed in Scotland and was thought to have become defunct in England.

Mobilize for May-Day

In a capitalist society, only capital matters. Strong unions demand an active and engaged membership. This means participatory democracy, where members actually feel that they are the union, instead of a small clique making all the decisions. Unions are under attack because they aren’t viewed as winning. But there is still time to show that the bosses have misjudged union power if unions mobilise their memberships to defend themselves. A massive show of force is necessary. When the union acts powerfully, the members feel powerful; strong unions defend themselves. And they defend their community against corporate attacks. All unions should be the voice of the people in their ongoing fight against low wages, deteriorating working conditions and rising costs of living. Ultimately, unions must be transformed.

The San Francisco Labor Council, has called upon the AFL-CIO to organize “massive marches in Washington D.C. and on the west coast to defend public services and to call on the Supreme Court to rule against the plaintiffs in Friedrichs v. CTA…” In Oregon SEIU 49 and Portland Jobs With Justice passed a similar resolution, as did the Northwest Oregon Labor Council, which specially called for May 1st to be the day of national action.

Open Letter to the U.S. Labor Movement about the Friedrichs Case

  

To All Labor Union Officers and Rank and File Members:

Our movement faces imminent danger. The Supreme Court has signaled that it plans to rule against unions in the landmark case ‘Friedrichs vs California Teachers Association.’ 

The destruction that such a ruling would cause cannot be exaggerated. Public employee unions could be decimated across the nation, exposing all other unions to deepening attacks. Employers everywhere will be emboldened to take action against us, directly affecting our bargaining power and ability to organize. When Scott Walker attacked unions in Wisconsin, AFSCME’s membership dropped 64%. Similar numbers are possible across the country if we lose Friedrichs. 

In response, the San Francisco Labor Council recently passed a resolution calling for the AFL-CIO to organize “...massive marches in Washington D.C. and on the west coast to defend public services and to call on the Supreme Court to rule against the plaintiffs in Friedrichs v. CTA…”

We, the undersigned, urge all unions to collaborate to make this vision a reality: a nationwide day of action, with mass rallies in every state. On or about May 1st would give us time to fully mobilize before the decision will be announced. 

Massive rallies across the country can become a reality if we fully mobilize our members as well as the broader community. The war on unions is part of the same war against working people in general who are suffering under the insecurity of part-time, low-wage work and cuts to public education and social services combined with rising rents and other costs. Their fight is our fight and ours is theirs. If we fight for them, they will fight for us.

We can also mobilize all the positive sentiment that the public shares towards the public employees who are targeted by Friedrichs, especially teachers, firefighters, and other union members dedicated to public service. 

We encourage all members and officers to sign and forward this letter to others in your local community and/or regional/national affiliates of your union. If necessary, members are encouraged to use the resolution included below to pass in your unions, which is a modified version of the San Francisco Labor Council resolution. 

By uniting the labor movement on this issue and working with our community allies we have the power to affect the Supreme Court's decision.

The fate of the U.S. labor movement is in our hands. 

Draft Resolution to Defend Public Employee Unions and Public Services by Marching on the U.S. Supreme Court

Whereas: Public sector unions have been in the forefront of defending education and other vital public services from cutbacks and privatization; and

Whereas: Right-wing think tanks and state and federal politicians, bankrolled by corporations and billionaires who stand to benefit from workers' inability to defend themselves, are attacking public and private sector unions; and

Whereas: In the first half of 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case brought by a dissident teacher and right-wing legal foundations that seek to impose open shops on public unions, thereby encouraging freeloaders and severely weakening the dues base necessary to provide services; and

Whereas: The severity of the threat is underlined by the fact that Wisconsin AFSCME's membership declined by 64% after Governor Scott Walker stripped public‐sector unions of their bargaining rights and a year later imposed “right to work” laws that stopped all unions, public and private, from requiring membership or fair share payments to sustain the union; and

Whereas: Union members organized to fight are the real power that can stop the assaults on working people’s livelihood;

Be it therefore resolved that [name of union] use political action funds to mobilize members and friends to oppose all manifestations of “right to work;” and

Be it further resolved that [name of union] urge the AFL‐CIO, NEA, and SEIU to work together to organize massive marches in Washington D.C. and in every state on or about May 1st, 2016, to defend public services and to call on the Supreme Court to rule against the plaintiffs in Friedrichs v. CTA; and

Be it finally resolved that [name of union] use its ties to other unions, labor councils, labor federations and to those organizations served by union members to build a united front to educate and apply pressure to counter the threat of right to work laws nationwide.

Act Now or Face Doom

A study from the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern warns that delaying global carbon emission reductions by even ten years will have a profound impact on the long-term.

"The results of our study underscore the urgency of action", says Thomas Stocker, co-author of the study and past Co-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "With every decade of delaying global emission reductions, we lose roughly 0.5°C of climate target". This means that the most ambitious targets already become unachievable within the next few years. 

The agreement hashed out at the COP21 Paris climate talks "leaves a lot of leeway" for countries to postpone making critical cuts to their emission outputs—"more than the climate system allows," said report co-author Patrik Pfister.

Since policy decisions are based on money and profits above all scientists are given a back seat if any at all and the chances of really accomplishing what it takes to save Planet Earth are slim to none. The quest for wealth and "growth" via capitalist economics rules and moulds the future. 

The Great Australian Divide

Sydney – particularly those parts where the richest live – is full of wild beauty. Beaches, harbour coves, houses poking up through native gardens noisy with bird life, and perched on cliffs. According to an AustralianBureau of Statistics report, Sydney has become Australia’s most unequal city, where 11.4% of all income goes to just 1% of residents.

This class of super-rich Australians can be found in Sydney’s CBD, the inner-city areas of Haymarket and the Rocks, and the eastern suburbs Rose Bay, Vaucluse, Watsons Bay, Double Bay and Bellevue Hill – places where more than 22% of all income went to the top 1% of earners.

The cliffs around the eastern beaches of Bronte and Tamarama are favoured eyries for Sydney’s banking and finance community, and high real estate price barriers and a lack of mixed housing means these areas are like gated communities in all but name. You have to go all around the coastline to south Coogee and into Maroubra before you come across any significant pockets of public housing.

In his 2006 book Evil Paradises, Mike Davis edited a selection of essays examining spaces occupied by a super-elite – “phantasmagoric but real places – alternate realities being constructed as ‘utopias’ in a capitalist era unfettered by unions and state regulation. These developments – in cities, deserts and in the middle of the sea – are worlds where consumption and inequality surpass our worst nightmares.”

Think private islands, gated communities, towers rising out of the desert built by workers imported for the task, who sleep in shipping containers. In 2014, public housing in Millers Point was sold. The state government announced the sale of nearly 300 properties and said with the proceeds it would build new homes further out – in Sydney’s south-east and south-west, the Illawarra region and the Blue Mountains. One of the Millers Point homes was auctioned for a record $4.2m.

Enclaves of wealth, ghettoes of poverty

Fifty percent of Filipino families judge themselves as poor are revealed by the “self-rated poverty” survey figures of the Social Weather Stations in December 2015. This means from a total population of 100 million, 50 million admit to being poor. The much-touted growth in gross national product merely reflects the galloping growth in the income of fictitious persons—known as corporations—and not real people and families. These corporations belong to a mere 1 percent of population.

If you don't ever see poverty, you can convince yourself it doesn't exist. Within half a kilometer from any affluent house in Metro Manila, there is a squatter colony where people live in miserable conditions. This is generally true no matter how upper-class and exclusive one’s residential subdivision is, give or take a few exceptions.

The upper class stay in their manicured landscaped gated communities, driving along roads lined with prosperous businesses, cocooning themselves in the air-conditioned offices. At the weekend they visit the make-believe world of shopping malls, and at home become glued to the fantasy world of television. They live, work, and play in pockets of comfort insulated from the compacted communities of poverty around them without the inconvenience of trespassing upon the dens of squalor of their poor neighbors. But no matter how much the rich isolate their lives from the lives of the poor, pretending that they do not exist, they affect the lives of the privileged in so many crucial ways, nor will the poor go away.

Chinese New Year

February 8 marks the start of the Chinese Lunar New Year

Spending during this season in 2014 on shopping and dining was around 610 billion yuan – about US$100 billion in a country of extreme wealth that is also home to 7% of the world’s poor. This is almost double the amount American shoppers spent over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Migrant workers are the backbone of China’s low-cost and labour intensive economy. They make up an estimated 278m workers who have migrated from rural parts of China to work in the big cities and for many, Chinese New Year is their only holiday. It’s often the only chance they have to spend some time with their entire family, including children who are left with their grandparents. Chinese New Year is believed to be behind the largest movement of people in the world. Up to 2.91 billion trips are expected to be made this year via road, railway, air and water. 100,000 migrant workers stuck in Guangzhou train station in the heart of China’s manufacturing region due to train delays, as they try to make their long journey home for the holiday. Migrant workers bring home their hard earned cash, which is vital to the local rural economy. Earnings from the big cities enable families to move into new and better homes, send their children to school, purchase livestock and other home additions such as new flat screen TVs.

Wealthier Chinese opt to avoid the New Year chaos and social obligations by travelling abroad for their holidays. Last year 5.2m left mainland China over the holiday. The most popular destinations are other countries in East Asia, as well as the US and Australia. China is the biggest outbound tourism spending country, with vast amounts spent on luxury goods. In 2015 Chinese consumers spent more than US$100 billion on luxury goods, accounting for 46% of the world’s total. Around 80% of these sales are made abroad.

Avoiding the tax

Executives and major shareholders of more than 160 listed companies transferred 80 billion baht to children, spouses, parents, siblings, cousins and holding companies

Under the law, inheritors of a legacy will be taxed 10% of the amount exceeding 100 million baht, though the tax rate will be halved to 5% if beneficiaries are donors' direct ascendants or descendants. If the person who created the will is still alive when a bequest worth over B20 million a year is made to heirs who have a direct blood relationship, recipients will be liable to 5% tax for the amount exceeding B20 million. Inheritors with no direct blood line to the donor will be taxed a flat 5% for a legacy worth over B10 million a year. Taxable assets include property, securities such as treasury bills, bonds, shares and debentures as well as investment units, deposits, registered vehicles and financial assets to be described in royal decrees.

Prasert Prasarttong-Osoth, the founder of Bangkok Dusit Medical Services Plc (BDMS) and Bangkok Airways Plc, transferred his stakes in both listed companies with a combined worth of over B10 billion to his wife and children, the SEC report said. Prasert, the richest businessman on the Thai stock market last year, transferred 9.96 billion baht worth of BDMS shares to his wife and children and another 868 million baht worth of Bangkok Airways shares to a daughter.

Wichai Thongtang, dubbed the take-over king, transferred 173 million shares of BDMS worth 3.75 billion baht to his children.

BDMS vice-chairman Chuladej Yossundharakul also passed his shareholding in the luxury hospital chain worth 4.16 billion baht to his family, the report said.

Ichitan Group Plc president and chief executive Tan Passakornnatee transferred 90 million shares to his three children with a combined value of 1.1 billion baht, while his wife Ing Passakornnatee also gave 60 million shares valued at nearly 1 billion baht to her two children.

The new locals

According to the 2011 census, Bognor Regis just over 10% of the town’s 24,000 residents come from the so-called accession countries of the European Union, with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia accounting for by far the largest number. The town hall says that in several areas of Bognor more than 25% of the residents now speak an eastern European language as their first.

“I don’t believe they come for the benefits, not for a minute,” said Robert, 50, a nurse married to a Pole – also a nurse – “We need them; I have a lot of Polish and Lithuanian colleagues and I don’t know how we’d do without them. Plus, it’s a crap benefit system anyway, even for us. I was ill for three months and got no help at all with the mortgage; my wife worked overtime to get us through. She’s never claimed, and never would. It’s really not benefits that brings people here.”

Toms Vimers, 25, a Latvian logistics team operator, said he “never thought once” about benefits when he was planning his move five years ago, and that even now, apart from the £80 child benefit that “everyone gets”, he did not fully understand the system. “Maybe there are things I should be getting,” he said. “I don’t know. No idea.”

Krzysztof Kaplanski, 26, an HGV driver, said he needed all the money he could get to help him pay off the 20 years remaining on his mortgage, but he was not claiming any kind of benefit or tax credit. “I don’t know who they are, all these east European people the government says are doing this,” he said. “My sister is a nurse here, she gets child benefit but that’s all. We come to make a better life for ourselves; how is living on benefits a better life?

Natalia Totoriene, 37, the deputy manager of a betting shop, said I work full time; I have three kids. But nobody I know came here for benefits and I don’t think not getting them will stop anyone coming. Maybe one or two. There’s always someone. But I know many, many more British people who live on benefits than east Europeans.” The couple, who have a home and mortgage, receive child benefit and a disability allowance for their eldest son, who is partially deaf, as well as subsidised childcare that allows Natalia to work full time. “The real benefit for us here is the better care our son gets,” Totoriene said. “He has been in a special school, he gets individual classroom support, free hearing aids. But we both work and we pay our taxes. We’re not getting anything we shouldn’t.”

Elezi has been working in the supermarket for three years. Before that, when she arrived in 2008, she did – like almost all newcomers – agency work, in food processing, warehouses, factories, contract cleaning. “I came here to work,” she said. “Before I came, I didn’t even know you could get benefits here. Yes, now we have tax credits and child benefit, maybe £100 a week, but we spend the money on our son, and we save some, for his education.”

Toyubur Rahman, Bognor’s town centre manager, “The people who come here, live here, work here, settle here, whose children go to school here, are part of our modern identity…Our problem street drinkers are not east Europeans. They’re here because there are jobs for them; because they do them well, and at a good rate.

The Price of Pollution (2)

Invisible pollution kills up to 9,000 people a year in the UK capital. But under government plans, from school gates to shopping streets, Londoners will be breathing dangerous air until 2025. The greatest problem is with nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a pollutant that inflames the lungs, stunting their growth and increasing the risk of respiratory diseases such as asthma and lung cancer. Unlike smog of the past, NO2 is a hidden killer. London has an acute problem with NO2, possibly the worst in the world. Putney high street broke its annual emission limits just eight days into the new year, with Knightsbridge, Oxford Street, Earls Court and Brixton all following suit before the end of January. Across the country, the government estimates 23,500 people die prematurely from NO2 pollution. The life-shortening effects of air pollution are equivalent if not greater than the risks of inactivity and obesity and alcoholism. Richard Howard, at the think-tank Policy Exchange found a Londoner’s life expectancy is cut by about 16 months by air pollution with poorer neighbourhoods worst affected.

Prof Sir Malcolm Green, founder of British Lung Foundation and an eminent respiratory physician, is in no doubt about the scale of the issue. “London certainly has significant pollution, enough to have effects on health. It is a hidden killer.” In addition to NO2, particulate matter (PM) remains at double the WHO guideline levels. “It’s like inhaling little particles of tar,” says Prof Green. “They go right down into the lungs and can pass through the membrane into the bloodstream”, increasing the risks of strokes and heart attacks. Though levels in London are close to the higher EU limits for PM, no threshold has yet been established below which harmful effects end.

 1,000 schools in London sit just 150 metres or less from roads on which at least 10,000 vehicles go past. Simon Birkett, director of the Clean Air in London campaign group, says: “Children are ultimately defenceless. They can’t vote but they are lumped with the health effects for life.” His research revealed that one-third of London’s schools are close to busy roads and suffer illegal levels of pollution

NO2 levels are 2.5 times higher inside the vehicle than outside. There’s a concentrating effect of being in a confined space. “The public health message is, you can’t hide from air pollution inside a car,” says Ben Barratt, an air quality expert at King’s College London. “We advise the public to leave the car at home whenever possible. This exposes you and your family to lower levels of air pollution, you’re not contributing to the problem, and you’re also getting the benefits of exercise. That’s tackling three of our biggest public health challenges in one go: air quality, climate change and obesity.” Birkett cites the great smog of London, which killed 4,000 people over the course of a few weeks in 1952. It led to the landmark Clean Air Act of 1956, which rapidly improved air quality, but recent decades have seen air pollution climb again with the rise of diesel vehicles. “We are back where we were in a sense,” he says. “There were 4,000 deaths from the great smog and we did something about it. Now it’s 4,000-9,000 deaths a year in London. We need to ban diesels as we banned coal 60 years ago. That is the only way we can comply with World Health Organization guidelines,” Birkett says. The Ultra Low Emission Zone coming into force in London in 2020 will charge – not ban – more polluting vehicles but it only covers 300,000 people in the capital, not the 3 million living in polluted inner London boroughs.

We Accuse...

More than 60 Australian writers – including Nobel laureate JM Coetzee and Booker prize winners Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey – have condemned the government’s offshore detention policies as “brutal” and “shameful”. The open letter’s  61 signatories include: Coetzee, a South African-born novelist and naturalised Australian who won the Nobel prize in 2003; Booker prize winners Peter Carey and Thomas Keneally; Helen Garner, Gail Jones, Michelle de Kretser, Alexis Wright, and Frank Moorhouse.

Both Nauru and Manus detention centres have seen consistent reports of physical and sexual abuse of men, women and children, as well as acts of self-harm and attempted suicide, including by children as young as seven. Two asylum seekers have died in offshore processing since 2014.

The writers ask: “do we wish to live under a government that routinely treats other humans cruelly? Can we be sure of our own immunity to cruel treatment when such practices are, we know, obviously common, no matter how secretive immigration authorities are about the entire detention system. Not only does our current system bring shame to Australia, in its demonstration of brutal government power and disregard for human dignity it brings shame on us as a nation. We express our outrage at this in the strongest possible terms.”

The letter cited former director of mental health services for IHMS Dr Peter Young, who said conditions on Nauru and Manus meet the threshold for “torture”, and Dr David Isaacs, a paediatrician who formerly worked on Nauru and who describes conditions there as “child abuse”. It also quotes Behrouz Bouchani, an Iranian journalist incarcerated on Manus Island, who wrote of his detention: “How can I describe the pain and suffering? Who can answer our questions and explain what human rights and freedom means? ...nobody can answer my questions and they are treating me like a criminal. We begin the day with pain and we sleep under nightmares.”

Author Thomas Keneally, who won the Booker Prize in 1982 for Schindler’s Ark, explained the lives of children were being used as “pawns” to pursue the government policy’s of stopping boat arrivals. “These children are being forced to endure every pain imaginable short of death, for this stated policy aim of stopping drownings at sea. The best professional advice, and all the medical advice, says that these people, these children in particular, will be damaged by being sent to those places. But the proposition that the only way to stop drownings at sea is to run these punitive camps is not only wrong, it is grotesque. There are other policies, they may be difficult, but there are other more constructive, more humanitarian, and less punitive policies Australia could be pursuing.” He said political discourse over refugees in Australia had been debased by political sloganeering and the calculated dehumanisation and demonisation of asylum seekers.