Capital Reading Group

 

Open to members and non-members.

 

Capital Volumes 1 and 2 - groups can be organised on-demand – contact spgb.ed@worldsocialism.org to register interest.

 

Capital Volume 3 – starts Thursday 15 July 7.30pm

 

To join this group, you will need to be reasonably familiar with Capital Vol 1. Familiarity with Volume 2 is NOT necessary - there will be a pre-meeting on Thursday 8 July 7.30pm to present Vol. 2 information that is essential to an understanding of Vol 3.

 

Already read Vol. 3? 

You might still benefit by attending. There’s always something new and relevant that we didn’t spot last time around!

 

If you wish to attend or have a query – contact spgb.ed@worldsocialism.org

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Australia's Ageing Population

 Australia’s population is forecast to grow slower and age faster than anticipated.

Many baby boomers are reaching retirement right now. This is contributing to a rapid change in the ratio of working-age people to those over 65.

 In 1981-82, for each person aged over 65, there were 6.6 people of working age.

Today, there are four working-age people.

 By 2060-61, there will only be 2.7.

Because as the population ages, more pressure is put on the health and pension system. Less working-age people means fewer tax dollars to spread around for those services.

Australia’s population forecast to grow slower and age faster than expected | Australia news | The Guardian

The UK Arms Trade to Dictators

 

Between 2011-2020 two-thirds of countries classified as “not free” because of their dire record on human rights and civil liberties have received weapons licensed by the UK government.

The UK licensed £16.8bn of arms to countries criticised by Freedom House, a US government-funded human rights group, new analysis by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT)  reveals. Of the 53 countries castigated for a poor record on political and human rights on the group’s list, the UK sold arms and military equipment to 39.  £11.8bn of arms had been authorised by the UK government during the same period to the Foreign Office’s own list of “human rights priority countries”. Two-thirds of the countries – 21 out of 30 – on the UK government list of repressive regimes had received UK military equipment. Further arms deals are expected in the near future with many of the countries on the Freedom House list expected to send representatives to September’s international arms fair in east London.

 One recipient included Libya, which received £9.3m of assault rifles, military vehicle components and ammunition. It is the focus of international peace talks to stabilise a country where armed groups and foreign powers compete for influence.

“Right now, UK-made weapons are playing a devastating role in Yemen and around the world. The arms sales that are being pushed today could be used in atrocities and abuses for years to come,” said Andrew Smith of the CAAT. “Wherever there is oppression and conflict there will always be arms companies trying to profit from it, and complicit governments helping them to do so.” Smith continued, “Many of these sales are going to despots, dictatorships and human rights abusing regimes. They haven’t happened by accident. None of these arms sales would have been possible without the direct support of Boris Johnson and his colleagues.”

Despite rising tensions and military confrontations, Russia was also among the beneficiaries of UK arms sales – in the last decade, it received £44m of UK arms including ammunition, sniper rifle components and gun silencers.

£17bn of UK arms sold to rights’ abusers | Arms trade | The Guardian

The 'Black Douglass'

A Mural of Frederick Douglass is Edinburgh

 During the recent G-7 summit, Boris Johnson, the UK's prime minister presented the US president, Joe Biden, with a photograph of a mural of Frederick Douglass in Edinburgh, Scotland. Both politicians deserve to be reminded of a genuine advocate of freedom but it is doubtful if either capable of emulating the courage of Frederick Douglass.

It is time for workers who oppose capitalism to step up and speak up.

“The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just.” said Frederick Douglass 

 Frederick Douglass arrived in Scotland on a speaking tour in 1846 from the United States, 13 years had passed since Britain enacted the Slavery Abolition Act.

Colonial slaves had gradually been freed and Britain's slaveowners were financially compensated for their loss of "property".

Douglass's 19-month visit to Britain and Ireland began in 1845; seven years earlier he had fled slavery himself from the US' slave-owning South for the free North.

"One of the things about his travels in Scotland was his Scottish surname," said Alasdair Pettinger, author of the forthcoming book, Frederick Douglass and Scotland, 1846: Living an Antislavery Life. "He picked up the fact that Douglas [or Douglass] was a name that resonates in Scottish history."

Douglass often connected with Scottish audiences by referring to the "Black Douglas".

"When he addressed audiences, he quite enjoyed the fact that he could make a connection to the 'Black Douglas', which, being black himself, was quite an opportune connection," said Pettinger. 

He was born around 1818 as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. By the time he arrived in Massachusetts as a fugitive, he needed a new name. Nathan Johnson, a free person of colour who gave him shelter, had been reading a narrative poem by the Scottish author Walter Scott - The Lady of the Lake, which had a character named James Douglas.

Douglass impressed Scottish audiences with powerful speeches opposing slavery in the US, which had yet to end the practice. He worked as Scotland's anti-slavery agent from an address in Edinburgh, where there is now a commemorative plaque in his honour, and toured the country's cities and towns - including Glasgow, Paisley, Dundee and Perth - between January and October 1846. Delighting in the warm Scottish welcome, he described a "conglomeration of architectural beauties" in Edinburgh, and even contemplated settling in the capital with his family.

He demonstrated his literary knowledge of Scotland by visiting the birthplace of Robert Burns. According to Pettinger, the first book Douglass bought after escaping from slavery was an edition of Burns, and he was known to quote the 18th-century Romantic poet as another way of engaging with Scottish audiences.

Douglass arrived amid controversy over the separation of the Free Church from the Church of Scotland. The Free Church required funds, which saw it accept donations from pro-slavery churches in the US. Douglass latched on to the issue and denounced the Free Church by repeatedly calling to "send back the money" on his tour. At Edinburgh's Music Hall, 2,000 people attended his talk.

 The Scottish capitalists' appetite for making money fed off the back of human misery. Scottish merchants and doctors often staffed Africa-bound British slave ships that took enslaved African people and transported them to colonies in the Caribbean.  By around 1800, a staggering 30 percent of slave plantations in Jamaica, where there are still Scottish surnames and place names, were owned by Scots. As Scotland's Tobacco Lords reaped great wealth from their investments, Glasgow boomed. Glasgow, street names mark the city's merchants who amassed extraordinary wealth from the transatlantic slave trade, like Glassford Street, named after Scottish Tobacco Lord, John Glassford.  Other connections include Jamaica Street, named after the island where slave plantations saw the city's industrialists grow fat on the proceeds of sugar and rum.  In Edinburgh, Henry Dundas, a prominent Scottish politician who infamously delayed Britain's abolition of slavery by 15 years, is immortalised by a statue in the capital.

As for Douglass, he visited Scotland again between 1859 and 1860. After his first tour, he arrived back in the US in 1847 a free man, after supporters in England made provisions to buy his liberty.

"I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.” he explained in Narrative of the “Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave” (1845)

Most honest observers would concur with Frederick Douglass when he said:

 “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”

Three extracts from ”My Bondage and My Freedom” by Frederick Douglass:

“When Col. Lloyd’s slaves met those of Jacob Jepson, they seldom parted without a quarrel about their masters, Col. Lloyd’s slaves contending that he was the richest, and Mr Jepson’s slaves that he was the smartest, man of the two. Col. Lloyd’s slaves would boast his ability to buy and sell Jacob Jepson, Mr Jepson’s slaves would boast his ability to whip Col. Lloyd. These quarrels would always end in a fight between the parties, those that beat were supposed to have gained the point at issue. They seemed to think that the greatness of their masters was transferable to themselves. To be a SLAVE , was thought to be bad enough; but to be a poor man’s slave, was deemed a disgrace, indeed” .

“Were I again to be reduced to the condition of a slave, next to that calamity, I should regard the fact of being the slave of a religious slave-holder, the greatest that could befall me. For of all slave-holders with whom I have ever met, religious slave-holders are the worst. I have found them, almost invariably, the vilest, the meanest and the basest of their class. Exceptions there may be, but this is true of religious slave-holders as a class”

When Douglas goes to work as a caulker in a shipyard in Baltimore and works besides white wage workers, he writes about the resentment of white workers towards the black slaves:

“In the country, this conflict is not so apparent; but, in cities, such as Baltimore, Richmond, New Orleans, Mobile etc; it is seen pretty clearly. The slave-holder with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, labouring white men against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white men almost as much a slave as the black slave himself. The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to ONE slave-holder, and the former belongs to ALL the slave-holders, collectively. The white slave has taken from his, by indirection, what the black slave had taken from him, directly, and without ceremony. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers.” 

Once again Frederick Douglass makes an insightful observation of society:

“The old master class was not deprived of the power of life and death, which was the soul of the relation of master and slave. They could not, of course, sell their former slaves, but they retained the power to starve them to death, and wherever this power is held there is the power of slavery. He who can say to his fellow man, “You shall serve me or starve,” is a master and his subject is a slave.”

More than a century and a half ago Douglass said: "If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."

Our journal, ‘The Socialist Standard’ could write admiringly of Frederick Douglass in "The Great(er) Emancipator".

 We end this article with Frederick Douglass advising us:

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” 

Adapted from here

The Frederick Douglass commemorative plaque in Edinburgh 

The Anatomy of a conservative's Brain (video)

 

Brazilians can't make ends meet

 Less than 12% of Brazilians are fully vaccinated against the disease, more than 2,000 are dying daily. Experts warn Brazil may be entering its third wave. That is raising concern that those in poor communities will fall even further behind the wealthy.

Brazil has 15 million unemployed. Brazil has 27.5 million poor people, defined as households living on less than one minimum wage ($220). If the federal government ceased its current aid program, that number would go automatically to 34.3 million. That lifeline was first reduced and then suspended at the end of 2020. It was reinstated in April. Bolsonaro announced his administration intends to extend the welfare program for poor and informal workers by at least two months. Economy Minister Paulo Guedes faced accusations of insensitivity after his off-the-cuff proposal to feed the homeless with leftovers.

Some cities have created programs of their own to complement the federal effort. Salvador, the capital of Bahia state in Brazil’s impoverished northeast, has been giving 270 reais ($54) to 20,000 people each month. Sao Paulo state, home to one-fifth of Brazilians, the local government announced on June 17 that it would provide 100,000 needy families with monthly vouchers for cooking gas.

Nestlé donated 500 tons of food and beverages, and brewer Ambev gave $50 to 20,000 street vendors who usually work during Carnival, suspended due to the pandemic. Mining giant Vale announced it would donate a million food kits to 220,000 families in five states by year-end. Rio de Paz, a nonprofit, has delivered tens of thousands of hot meals in favelas.

Central Union of Favelas set out to distribute 500,000 cellphone chips in favelas throughout the country so children can have internet access to online classes. In Paraisopolis, one of Sao Paulo’s biggest favelas, another nonprofit, G10 of Favelas, hired so-called “street presidents” to tutor unschooled children whose parents work.

Brazil scrambles to help the poor, while they barely hang on (apnews.com)

Tax Free Riches

Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, has used a retirement account designed to help ordinary Americans save for their golden years to amass a $5bn tax-free nest-egg.

Thiel, a right-wing libertarian and vocal opponent of higher taxes, is one of a number of ultra-rich Americans to use a Roth individual retirement account (IRA) to amass a tax-free fortune. Roth IRAs were established in 1997 to encourage middle-class Americans to save, tax-free, for retirement. In 2018 the average Roth IRA held $39,108. The proceeds of a Roth IRA are tax-free as long as they are not withdrawn before the account holder reaches 59.5 years old.

Thiel, 53, placed 1.7m shares of then-private PayPal into a Roth IRA in 1999. At the time annual contributions to the plans were capped at $2,000. The shares were valued at just $0.001 per share. Within a year, the value of Thiel’s Roth increased from $1,664 to $3.8m. Thiel then used his Roth to make highly lucrative investments in Facebook and Palantir Technologies, according to tax records and other documents obtained by ProPublica. By 2019, Thiel’s Roth held $5bn “spread across 96 subaccounts”.

Thiel is not the only super-wealthy investor to have amassed a fortune in a Roth IRA. Warren Buffett had $20.2m in a Roth IRA at the end of 2018. Ted Weschler, an investment manager at Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, had $264.4m in his Roth in 2018 and hedge fund manager Randall Smith of Alden Global Capital had $252.6m in his. Robert Mercer, former Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager and one of Donald Trump’s richest backers, had $31.5m in his Roth, ProPublica reported.

The latest revelations come after ProPublica revealed that the 25 richest Americans paid a “true tax rate” of just 3.4% between 2014 and 2018 despite their collective net worth rising by more than $400bn in the same period. Using legal strategies billionaires including Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk paid $13.6bn in federal income taxes in those five years, ProPublica’s data shows – equivalent to a true tax rate of only 3.4%. Over the same period, the median American household paid 14% in federal taxes.

Billionaire Peter Thiel amasses $5bn tax-free nest egg in retirement account | Peter Thiel | The Guardian

The Big Pharma Lobby

Drug companies are giving groups of MPs and peers that campaign on health issues hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in “hidden” funding that could hand them “undue influence” the medical journal PLOS One has revealed. It uncovered the long history of funding by examining parliament’s register of APPGs and drug company payment disclosure reports. Both sources contain information about big pharma’s funding of APPGs, and also its financing of health charities

The pharmaceutical industry has built up a “hidden web of policy influence” over dozens of all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) at Westminster by making hundreds of “non-transparent” payments to them, as part of the industry’s wider effort to lobby those in power.

“In the context of health-related APPGs, payments from the pharmaceutical industry represent institutional conflicts of interest as they create circumstances where the primary interest, policymaking in the interests of public health, is at risk of being unduly influenced by the secondary interest, the pharmaceutical industry’s goal of maximising profits”, the authors concluded. 

Drug companies can use their close relationship with APPGs to argue for policies that favour their commercial interests and have that reflected in reports, all without the public knowing about those links, according to Emily Rickard and Dr Piotr Ozieranski, from Bath University’s department of social and policy sciences.

16 health-related APPGs received 168 payments from 35 drug firms worth £1.2m in 2012-18 – one-sixth of their total funding

Two APPGs, on health and cancer, accepted more than £600,000 in that time

50 health-focused APPGs received almost another £1m in 304 payments from patient organisations or health charities, which themselves take sums of money from big pharma.

“APPGs have an important role to play in holding the government to account and shaping policy by bringing together voices from across the political spectrum and from a range of stakeholders”, said Dr John Chisholm, the chair of the British Medical Association’s medical ethics committee. “However, it is vitally important that there is full transparency around who is behind these groups and what is driving their calls for change. This is especially important for the development of health policy, which must be underpinned by the principle of improving the health of the population, and not risk being swayed by other conflicting interests.”

Drug firms giving MPs ‘hidden’ funding, research shows | Pharmaceuticals industry | The Guardian

"Green Diesel" ?

 The EU is phasing out palm oil biofuels because of concerns over deforestation.  Research also suggests that making biodiesel from palms grown on newly cleared land increases greenhouse gas emissions instead of reducing them. Undeterred, Indonesia is working to increase the palm component in its biodiesel, which it markets as "Green Diesel," and to develop other palm-based biofuels.

Today there are enough oil palm plantations worldwide to cover an area larger than the state of Kansas, and the industry is still growing. It is concentrated in Asia, but plantations are spreading in Africa and Latin America. Palm oil is everywhere today: in food, soap, lipstick, even newspaper ink. It's been called the world's most hated crop because of its association with deforestation in Southeast Asia. Between 2018 and 2020, almost 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares) of rainforest were cleared in just three countries: Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea, leading to Indigenous communities losing their land.  But despite boycott campaigns, the world uses more palm oil than any other vegetable oil - over 73 million tons in 2020. That's because palm oil is cheap. The plant that makes it, the African oil palm, can produce up to 10 times more oil per hectare than soya.

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, tropical forest clearing for oil palm plantations threatens nearly 200 at-risk species, including orangutans, tigers and African forest elephants. However, the IUCN and many other advocates argue that shifting away from palm oil is not the answer. Since oil palm is so productive, they contend, switching to other oil crops could cause even more harm because it would require more land to cultivate substitutes.

Instead, there are more just and sustainable ways to make palm oil. Studies show that small-scale agroforestry techniques, like those historically practiced in Africa and among Afro-descendant communities in South America, offer effective ways to produce palm oil while protecting the environment.

Africa: How Palm Oil Became the World's Most Hated, Most Used Fat Source - allAfrica.com

The Lesser of Two Weevils

 

Sanctuary and a refuge?

 Increasing violence towards refugees and migrants held in Libyan detention centres has forced Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to suspend its operations at two facilities, the medical charity said.

MSF said its teams witnessed guards beating detainees, including those seeking treatment from MSF doctors. It said its doctors treated patients suffering from fractures, bruises, cuts and blunt trauma from beatings.

“This is not an easy decision to make, as it means we won’t be present in detention centres where we know people are suffering on a daily basis,” said MSF head of mission in Libya, Beatrice Lau. “However, the persistent pattern of violent incidents and serious harm to refugees and migrants, as well as the risk to the safety of our staff, has reached a level that we are no longer able to accept. Until the violence stops, and conditions improve, MSF can no longer provide humanitarian and medical care in these facilities.” 

MSF said it had received reports of detainees being injured by automatic fire at the Abu Salim centre on 13 June but was not given access for a week afterwards. In April, it reported that one migrant was killed and two were injured when shots were fired into cells after rising tensions between detainees and guards.

Detention centres in Libya have been the repeated focus of allegations of abuse and violence by human rights organisations and charities. The UN has condemned the EU-backed system of using the Libyan coastguard to intercept migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean and return them to detention centres in Libya, which it deems unsafe.  In March the UN said it was concerned by conditions in the centres, with thousands of people “detained in dire conditions with limited access to basic services and overcrowding”.

So far this year 14,000 people have been intercepted and returned to Libya, exceeding the total number in 2020.

Vincent Cochetel, the UN’s envoy for migrant crossings in the Mediterranean, tweeted: “End arbitrary detention in Libya starting now, with all women and children & do not claim it is not possible.”

Africa Duped by Vaccine Pledge

 African Union special envoy Strive Masiyiwa has accused the world’s richest nations of deliberately failing to provide enough Covid-19 vaccines to the continent. Masiyiwa, the union’s special envoy to the African vaccine acquisition task team, said the Covax scheme had failed to keep its promise to secure production of 700 million doses of vaccines in time for delivery by December 2021.

The UK has fully vaccinated 47% of its citizens and the US has vaccinated 45%, less than 1% of Africa’s population have been fully vaccinated. 

“It’s not a question of if this was a moral failure, it was deliberate. Those with the resources pushed their way to the front of the queue and took control of their production assets,” Masiyiwa explained. “Imagine we are in a village and there is drought and there will not be enough bread and the richest guys grabs the baker and they take control of the production of bread and we all have to go to those rich guys to ask for a loaf of bread,” he said.

He continued that if ever there was an inquiry into how vaccines have been distributed, Covax – an initiative by the World Health Organization to enable poor countries to get free vaccines – would be found culpable, “because we were misled”.

“We were led down the garden path…We got to December believing that the whole world was coming together to purchase vaccines, not knowing that we had been corralled into a little corner while others ran off and secured the supplies.” He said that when he met vaccine manufacturers in December, he was told that all production capacity for 2021 had been sold.

“So, the people who bought the vaccines and those who sold them the vaccines, knew that there would be nothing for us,” he said.

Rich countries ‘deliberately’ keeping Covid vaccines from Africa, says envoy | Global development | The Guardian

Repression by Israel and the PA

 According to research from Amnesty International, there has been a “catalogue of violations” committed by Israeli police against Palestinians in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem.

Arab citizens of Israel have been subjected to unlawful force from officers during peaceful demonstrations, sweeping mass arrests, torture and other ill-treatment in detention, and police have failed to protect Palestinians from premeditated attacks by right-wing Jewish extremists.

Palestinians face a culture of increasing repression and violence from the Israeli authorities and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, said Saleh Hijazi, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa.

“There are always periods where the institutionalised structural violence and discrimination against Palestinians becomes severe, but this is the worst it has been in a long time. There is a complete disregard for civilian life,” Hijazi said.

At least 2,150 people – 90% of them Palestinian – have been arrested, most for allegedly insulting or assaulting a police officer or taking part in an illegal gathering rather than for violent offences, while right-wing Jewish extremists have for the most part continued to organise freely. In Haifa and Nazareth police attacked groups of unarmed protesters without provocation, Amnesty reported. Amnesty also documented the torture of detainees who were tied up, beaten and deprived of sleep at a police station in Nazareth and at Kishon detention centre.

 Palestinians critical of the PA have reported mounting pressure to silence them in recent weeks. Nizar Banat, a well-known critic of the PA, died during an arrest by Palestinian security forces in the city of Hebron. A large demonstration in Ramallah in response to his death, calling for PA officials to resign, was met with teargas and the use of metal batons from Palestinian security forces. Banat had planned to run in cancelled parliamentary elections this year and called on western countries to cut off aid to the PA because of growing human rights violations and endemic corruption. Last month, gunmen he claimed were loyal to the PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, attacked his house with bullets, stun grenades and teargas while his wife and children were inside. He had also accused Abbas’s supporters of waging an incitement campaign against him on social media.

Amnesty: ‘catalogue of violations’ by Israeli police against Palestinians | Israel | The Guardian

Do what we say, not what we do

 For the 29th year, the members of the UN General Assembly voted in favor of a resolution demanding an end to the 60-year U.S. economic blockade on Cuba.

184 nations voted for the resolution, while the U.S. and Israel voted against it. (Three nations — Brazil, Colombia, and Ukraine abstained.)

Biden newly declared foreign policy called “rules-based order” actually means the United States-based order.

Talks Online

 The latest audio uploads to the Party website –

FAQ What if we had to start the Socialist Party from scratch? – Paddy Shannon, 12th May 2021

Identity politics – the new communalism – Adam Buick, 13th May 2021. (Hosted by the Oxford Communist Corresponding Society).

Daily life in socialism – Paul Bennett, 14th May 2021. (Due to technical problems the discussion wasn’t recorded).

FAQ Are the rich the problem? – Paddy Shannon, 19th May 2021.

What is social progress? – Pat Deutz, 21st May 2021.

Double bill on Authority – Tim Hart and Carla Dee, 31st May 2021.

Coronavirus and vaccination in India – Abhishek Chowdhury, 4th June 2021

Czech Republic's Labour Shortage

 There were not enough skilled workers in the Czech Republic.

 Many businesses report that the labor shortages that blighted the Czech economy before the pandemic are already an issue again. Joblessness at the end of the first quarter stood at just 3.2%, the second-lowest in the EU after neighbouring Poland.

Despite the import of hundreds of thousands of workers from Ukraine and other selected source markets, the lack of factory hands, builders and drivers — as well as more skilled workers — had become a major brake on economic growth.

A dearth of foreign workers is an issue for other sectors. The supply of Ukrainians and other nationalities invited to Czechia under government visa schemes dried up during the pandemic as embassies and borders closed and those already in the country began to wend their way home. Construction has been particularly hard-hit. Further up the skills ladder, the IT sector's heavy reliance on foreign workers meant that before the pandemic it could take up to two years to fill vacancies. Whether those foreign workers will soon start making their way back to Czechia is not yet clear. Border restrictions and limited transport links persist, while the government is only now discussing restarting its visa easing schemes.

One study by the Mendel University in Brno released in May called for politicians to stop offering the view that immigration is a security threat and instead explain that the country needs a long-term strategy to attract foreign workers. The rhetoric since the migrant crisis of 2015 "actually went hand in hand with the admission of a large number of migrants in the industries that required it," the researchers noted with irony. However, the likelihood that the long-term needs of the economy can push ahead of politics just four months ahead of national elections in October is slim.

Although not Czech-born, Prime Minister Andrej Babis was not shy of using anti-migrant rhetoric to help win the last election in 2017. Now, with his ANO party trailing in polls, the populist billionaire is already beating a similar drum, warning voters that his opponents want to force them to share their houses with migrants.

Labor shortages are back to haunt Czech economy | Business| Economy and finance news from a German perspective | DW | 23.06.2021

More Canadian Stolen Children Graves

 The story of Canada's stolen children continues.  

Remains of 215 children were found at a residential school run by the Catholic Church in British Columbia.

Now more unmarked graves of indigenous children at the site of a similar former residential school in Saskatchewan province.  The Marieval residential school operated from 1899 to 1997 in the Qu'Appelle Valley. Marieval was run by the Roman Catholic Church until Cowessess First Nation took over its operations in 1981.

The Cowessess First Nation began to use ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked graves at the cemetery of the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. The Cowessess called the discovery "horrific and shocking".

With 146 residential schools across Canada, there are likely more undiscovered burial sites. With records being either destroyed or withheld, many children who went to -- and died -- at Canada's residential schools are undocumented.

Niigaan James Sinclair, an Anishinaabe writer and associate professor at the University of Manitoba, says the new discovery of unmarked graves in Saskatchewan confirm stories told in the community for decades. 

"Every Indigenous community in this country has a story of lost children, has a story of children who went to the schools and never came home," he said.

Survivor Elizabeth Sackanay related the abuse she endured at St. Anne's Indian Residential School in Fort Albany, Ont. still haunts her to this day.

"What I went through in residential school, I wouldn’t want anyone to go through," Sackanay said . When she was at the school, Sackanay said kids used to disappear, sometimes overnight, and the priests would tell the other children that they had simply gone home. "How can they go home in the middle of the night?" she said. "When they are going to bed when you go to bed, and they’re gone in the morning?"

It's estimated that more than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend these state-funded schools where they were often subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Under the Indian Act, Indigenous people were forced by the Canadian government to attend residential schools, and the RCMP played a major role in what survivors call kidnappings

Sask. First Nation finds hundreds of burial sites near former residential school | CTV News

Socialist Sonnet No. 39

 Defender

Which white horse – this one or that – is Russian,

Or does it come under Britannia’s rule?

Perhaps the wave could be Chinese, they feel

Compelled to pursue a global mission,

Though the USA will be duty bound

To claim the oceans as rightfully theirs,

Being de facto governor of world affairs,

Setting the seas on democratic ground.

Time to send a gunboat just to make sure

No competitor’s counter claim persists,

Crewed, of course, by highly trained journalists

To make the news territory secure.

As an exercise in futility,

It’s as sensible as bombing the sea.

D. A.

Imagine World Socialism (video, no sound)

 

Union Rights or Property Rights?

 The U.S. Supreme Court decision (pdf) in Cedar Point Nursery vs. Hassid "makes a racist, broken farm labor system even more unequal," said the United Farm Workers of America (UFW). "SCOTUS fails to balance a farmer's property rights with a farm worker's human rights."

The ruling 6-3 that a California regulation granting union representatives access to farms challenges land-owners private property rights. It dealt a significant blow to the rights of agricultural workers to organize. At issue was a California regulation that allows labor organizers to enter private farms to talk with farm workers during non-working times about joining a union.

Chief Justice John Roberts argued that "the access regulation grants labor organizations a right to invade the growers' property."  He characterized it as an appropriation without just compensation because it limited the employers' "right to exclude."

Steve Vladeck, the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law said, as a result of the decision, Vladeck" states cannot authorize unions (or anyone else) to enter private property, even for lawful activities (like union organizing) without compensating the property owners"—an additional cost the labor movement can ill afford.

"Farm workers are the hardest working people in America," UFW explained. "This decision denies workers the right to use breaks to freely discuss whether they want to have a union."

Samir Sonti, assistant professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, described the decision as "an attack on California agricultural workers and their right to organize for better working conditions."

"The 1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (CALRA) was a landmark victory for the UFW and others, which at least in one state confronted the historic injustice of farm worker exclusion from federal labor law," Sonti commented. "That important law has now taken a major hit...Decades of precedents have already undermined the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) as it pertains to union organizers' access to the workplace," he said. "Only under the most exceptional circumstances are private sector workers attempting to form a union able to speak to an organizer while on the employer's property."

Jenny Breen, associate professor of law at Syracuse University, says the decision is setting a judicial precedent with potentially profound consequences.

"Employers continue to wield property rights as forms of their "sole and despotic dominion" (in the words of Blackstone, quoted approvingly by the court) over their employees, with no meaningful check by the court. It is truly incredible that the court interprets a regulation impacting a workplace employing thousands of workers in the same manner it would interpret a regulation impacting your backyard. There is no justification for such an extreme commitment to ignoring reality." She continued,  "This decision does not bode well for the fate of labor regulations—or any other government regulations that could conceivably impact private property rights—in future cases to reach this court."

Breen warned of a return to the Lochner era, a pre-New Deal period when the Supreme Court routinely shot down regulations and defended employers' right to exploit workers without state interference.

Right-Wing SCOTUS Majority Rules Union Organizing on Farms Violates Landowners' Rights | Common Dreams News

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” ― Warren Buffett

When Crime Pays

Billionaires have armies of lawyers and accountants to devise tax circumvention schemes that adhere to the letter (though not the spirit) of the law, allowing them to pay a pittance in taxes compared to the riches they’re reaping.

George W Bush  declared that “most people in America understand that the rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to necessarily pay all the taxes” 

He cut the IRS units that audit the wealthy expecting everyone not to realize the connection between the IRS departmental cuts and the tax evasion.

Analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, showed that roughly $380bn of owed taxes goes unpaid every year.

A report from Harvard University researchers showing that about three-quarters of that tax gap is from underpayment by the wealthiest 1%.

The Center for Equitable Growth finding that more than one-fifth of the top 1%’s income is going unreported to tax authorities.

The takeaway: the richest 1.6 million households are pilfering somewhere between $175bn and a quarter-trillion dollars of owed-but-unpaid taxes every single year – and they are apparently getting away with it.

We are told that while their tax avoidance schemes to reduce tax liability may be immoral, the tactics are all perfectly legal. Billionaires may occasionally be depicted as greedy fat cats– but no longer portryed as robber barons.

Why does anyone make such a generous and charitable assumption? The legal presumption of innocence is questionable. The answer is class bias from both government and the media.  White-collar crime is almost never prosecuted, crime is seen by the government as something that only poor people do. Through this lens, grand larceny is presumed to be just shrewd accounting rather than lawbreaking. News outlets quick to convict the poor via sensational headlines are hesitant to do the same to billionaires who can weaponize media law.

 They bankroll the political and media system itself.  They are the owners of television stations and newspapers. They are the benefactors of thinktanks and universities who employ the pundit class. They pay intellectuals for defense speeches. They take cases to court with unlimited resources, bankrupting news outlets that cross them. They are the donors who finance the politicians to get themselves legislative favors .

After using a one-time gift of free tuition to generate positive headlines for himself, the Vista Equity Partners billionaire Robert Smith last year settled a massive criminal case over tax evasion.  Robert Smith was granted a non-prosecution agreement, giving his firm necessary cover to continue managing workers’ pension money. 

 UBS, Credit Suisse, HSBC and KPMG have paid fines to settle justice department cases uncovering their roles in rampant tax evasion – and in the process, some of them have confessed to criminal wrongdoing. Bank executives money-laundering for drug cartels, facilitating dictators looting their state treasuries never entails jail-time.

These schemes were not isolated incidents: as prosecutors noted in the emblematic Credit Suisse case, the bank “knowingly and willfully aided and assisted thousands of US clients in opening and maintaining undeclared accounts and concealing their offshore assets and income from the IRS”.

The banks and accounting firms in the aforementioned tax evasion cases were given deferred prosecution agreements. Both Credit Suisse and UBS were granted government waivers from laws that could have barred them from managing retirees’ money.

For decades,  officialdom has been tough on crime drum for the working class, while actively helping the wealthy cheat the system. Trump preached about “law and order” while gutting the IRS enforcement budget and trying to shield corporations from consequences when they violate foreign laws. 

The IRS now audits low-income beneficiaries of the earned income tax credit at twice the rate as it audits corporations, the IRS audit rate for those making more than $1m has plummeted, and the agency has been referring a record low number of cases for criminal prosecution.

Adapted from here

We’re told billionaire tax avoidance is ‘perfectly legal’. But is it? | David Sirota | The Guardian