Is Brexit the End of the World?

Mel Gurtov

To judge from a New York Times front-page article that appeared two days after the British vote to withdraw from the EU, the entire post-World War II global financial and political structure that the United States led into existence is now imperiled. Western democracy, financial institutions, liberal trade and immigration policies, and alliances are all under challenge now. Right-wing populism is pushing forces opposed to all these arrangements, especially when they are presided over by a supranational structure such as the European Union (EU) that may impinge on national interests. In short, the article contends, Brexit will not only dramatically reduce Great Britain’s influence, economic growth, and even size (if Scotland gains independence); it will turn the world as we know it upside down. I think it is much too early to sound the alarm bell.

To be sure, the impact on the United Kingdom is bound to be severe and long-term. It will now be “on the other side of the negotiating table” from the EU, as one observer said. That means prolonged and potentially painful new trade, travel, and work arrangements that will end up costing British consumers and firms dearly. Both the Conservative and Labour parties will be in turmoil for some time, their leaders blamed for failure at the polls and new leaders struggling to find a way out of a huge mess. Social conflict may escalate, particularly anti-immigrant violence.

But will Britain’s pain extend to others? The EU may well be weakened as it loses a major international player, particularly when it comes to dealing with Russia over Ukraine and Syria, China over human rights and trade, and large-scale economic assistance to troubled economies such as Greece’s. Even more fundamentally, Brexit may be imitated, as nationalist parties in France, Netherlands, and Sweden gain followings for closing their doors to refugees and pulling out of the EU. In the worst case, we might see the renewal of autarky and the emergence of dominant right-wing, neo-fascist parties (look at the recent vote in Austria and Marine Le Pen’s rising popularity in France)—echoes of prewar Europe.

It is far too early, however, to indulge in worst-case thinking. At the least, it remains to be seen whether Britain and other countries embrace trade protectionism or liberalization. It remains to be seen whether the UK becomes “Little Britain,” a bit player on international political and economic issues, or continues to be a strong voice in NATO, the World Bank, and other multilateral organizations. It remains to be seen whether Britain’s economy shrinks badly or, as the chancellor of the exchequer maintains, has in place the tools to weather the coming storm and sustain a strong economy. It remains to be seen if the EU can close ranks, demonstrate the value of integration, and continue to be a prominent international voice on climate change and human rights. It remains to be seen whether the imitation effect of Brexit actually comes about elsewhere in Europe, not to mention in the UK itself. Le Pen may appear to have a clear road to the prime ministership in France, for instance, but she, like Trump, may face strong reactions against the National Front’s thinly disguised racism, France-first sloganeering, and promises to overturn the ideals of multiculturalism and community.

And if you want to think about worst cases, consider the possibility—slight now, but perhaps much greater in coming months—that Brexit causes so much pain for the British people that populism turns against it. According to the Washington Post, three million Brits (and climbing steadily) want another referendum on leaving the EU. That’s very unlikely at the moment, but if negotiations with the EU result in a further dramatic fall of the pound, sliding middle-class income, high unemployment, and other developments that put the British economy in the tank, might not the next British PM have to call for new elections and another referendum?

Key figures in the “leave” EU campaign are already walking back some advertised promises, such as that the approximately £350 million a week that Britain sends to the EU would be used to fund the national health system, or that immigration to Britain would actually go down. An intriguing comment in the Guardian under the name “Teebs” raises another possibility: that David Cameron, having resigned without giving official notice of British withdrawal under Article 50 of the EU treaty, has left his successor with the option of treating the Brexit vote as a nonbinding referendum which Parliament, dominated by “remain” members, can ignore. Well, who knows? Even Boris Johnson, a vociferous Brexit supporter and likely Cameron successor, has said there’s no need to hurry about invoking Article 50. Maybe he wants to see if his optimism about Brexit during the leave-or-remain campaign was actually warranted!

What about the impact of Brexit on the US? Yes, there will be an impact: the Trans-Pacific Partnership may be dead whoever wins the presidential election, since Hillary Clinton had long since promised to renegotiate it and now must contend with Bernie Sanders’ pressure to abandon the TPP altogether. US exports are likely to suffer some (though Britain is not among the top US markets), the US trade deficit will widen some, and Tea Party-ers may feel a surge of energy. But most observers I’ve read do not see a major threat to the US economy from Brexit; and people who believe that Donald Trump’s “America First” message will get a great boost from Brexit are going to be sorely disappointed, since virtually every day he says something that reminds us of just how un-American his message is.

We also ought to consider Brexit’s potential silver linings for the US, at least “silver” from a human-interest point of view. One is that Britain will probably substantially reduce its concrete support of US policy in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Such a shift, though disputed by some leaders of the “leave” campaign, would be desirable, since it might prod the next US president to reassess commitments to endless war in the Middle East. On the US domestic side, ditching TPP and reassessing the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would be welcome news for US workers, unions, and many workers abroad, as well as for the environment. A refocusing of the globalization debate on social and economic justice in the US is sorely needed. Thanks to Brexit, not to mention Bernie Sanders and many progressive nongovernmental organizations, that debate may finally get somewhere.

Is Western Aid Destroying Nigeria’s Future?

Adjoa Agyeiwaa

Bridget Odeh, a Nigerian market vendor living near the border with Cameroon, knows firsthand the pervasive, day-to-day corruption that afflicts her country. Local tax collectors once demanded her cash payments at extortionate rates and left no paper trail of the money as they pocketed the proceeds. So it was hailed as a victory when Bridget’s community was one of 20 chosen in 2016 for a program called the “No Cheating Machine,” which applies technology that automatically deducts the taxes through a bank-card reader.

Bridget’s experience is precisely the kind of feel-good story that foreign governments – in this case, the U.K. – showcase, when defending their aid commitments to nations whose corruption and human rights violations otherwise dwarf those successes. Development NGOs and states alike celebrate well-intended projects and argue the strategic rationale for them, but they fail to obscure the misery inflicted across sub-Saharan Africa by the repressive regimes and kleptocrats they prop up with their aid. If only British officials had a “no cheating machine” to safeguard the hundreds of millions its Department for International Development, which helped to fund a solution for Bridget, gives the Nigerian government every year.

Despite President Muhammadu Buhari’s 2015 election promises, Nigeria has failed to make real headway on cleaning up corruption or restoring justice to the deeply divided nation. What’s more, the steady drumbeat of political oppression, human rights violations, and reports of extrajudicial killings by Nigerian authorities is increasing – and it’s time for the West to demand an accounting, lest it be held responsible for the theft and murder.

Raising the alarm on Nigeria’s use of aid funds

The U.K. aid commitment to Nigeria has now ballooned to £860 million directed toward the fight against Boko Haram, but what has Buhari achieved? It’s been two years since British counterterrorism experts, joined by their American counterparts, traveled to Abuja after the Nigerian schoolgirl kidnappings to assist Buhari’s predecessor with plans to defeat the Islamist group. Now, Western officials want an investigation into whether the funds that followed are being diverted toward the suppression of Buhari’s own political opponents; in the year since Buhari took power, a number of the former ruling party’s officials have been imprisoned without charge. The arrests are approved by Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crime Commission, with funding from the very same helpful U.K. agency for development.

American officials are calling it a scandal, and warn that Boko Haram remains unchecked even as Nigeria is becoming a police state and Buhari relentlessly pursues his foes. They may be right, but they’re also complicit in the unfolding catastrophe. Nigeria received nearly $600 million from the United States in 2014, with $8 million of that earmarked for military assistance, putting it among the six African nations listed among the top 10 countries in the world who receive the most direct aid support from the U.S. Worryingly, those already important sums are poised to rise even further after the U.S. government announced it would lift restrictions on weapons sales to Nigeria, despite lingering human rights concerns.

In that fight against Boko Haram, the Nigerian military has abandoned all pretense of protecting human rights. Amnesty International reports that babies and children are dying in detention camps where no proof of Boko Haram affiliation is necessary for authorities to incarcerate thousands of people – of whom an estimated 7,000 have died since 2011.

What the West is actually buying is a humanitarian crisis. More than 2.5 million people have been forced to flee their homes in the north, where incessant fighting has disrupted trade and agriculture, leaving 50,000 people to starve. Meanwhile, security continues to deteriorate in the south, according to the International Crisis Group. Clashes between Nigerian authorities and Biafran separatists at the end of May resulted in deaths in several southeastern cities. Elsewhere, Nigerians say their pleas to end the chronic violence of the Fulani herdsmen fall on deaf ears. New extremist groups are emerging, including the Niger Delta Avengers who claimed six attacks on Nigeria’s crucial oil infrastructure last month. With the slumping oil economy – and the structural industry corruption in Nigeria – the news that ExxonMobil is under investigation for a lucrative deal planned in Nigeria brought even more dismay.

End funding for yet another authoritarian African regime

With no relief in sight, the U.K. has announced an additional £32 million in humanitarian assistance to alleviate the suffering in the northeast – this time, to be funneled through the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Still, there are no guarantees that Nigerian officials and local agencies won’t misuse the funds. The Global Fund recently announced it has suspended AIDS funding support after $3.8 million was stolen by Nigerian agency workers, but the far greater loss is to the 1.8 million HIV-positive Nigerians for whom it was earmarked.

The world hoped for better. African development expert Helen Epstein, writing as Buhari took office, said that as long as Buhari honored human rights while ending corruption, Nigeria might reflect a new dawn on a continent scarred by the tyranny of its leaders in the post-colonial era – and, ironically, the Western development aid that “enables African leaders to ignore the demands of their own people, and facilitates the financing of the patronage systems and security machinery that keeps them in power.”

That dawn has not come. More feel-good stories, more money and military aid are destroying Nigeria. So, it appears, is Buhari. It’s time for the West to pull the plug, before its well-intended efforts make another decades-long regime for an African strongman and another opportunity lost to history.

Brexit Pro and Con: the View From Germany

Victor Grossman

How can anyone favor BREXIT? Isn’t European unity a grand idea after so many centuries of warfare? Why should any sensible person want to leave it?

For any traveler moving around in Europe the crossing from one member country to another with no customs or pass controls was indeed a blessing and, even more, that one no longer had to calculate how many thousands of lira equaled ten marks or twenty francs when buying a souvenir. And this from Piraeus to Palermo or Porto, from Valetta to Vilna, from Helsinki to Hoek van Holland. No, stop! That’s where boats leave for Britain and even before BREXIT Britain (like some East European and Scandinavian countries) didn’t use the euro. But it was at least in the EU. Now it quits altogether. Isn’t that a tragedy, maybe even an omen that others might follow suit and wreck it all?

Recent weeks saw hot arguments on this. Strangely enough, both those on the left and those on the right were split among themselves.

Leftist BREXITs explain that the EU idea, beautiful as it seems, was far from altruist from the start. A Frenchman, Robert Schuman, who was briefly a minister in Marshall Petain’s fascist regime after France’s defeat in 1940 and then spent the rest of the war in a monastery, perhaps praying or making plans for uniting Europe, is often called the Father of the European Union. Bur some children are lucky and have many fathers. In the summer of 1948 spymaster Allen Dulles, later head of the CIA, and spymaster William Donovan, head of its predecessor, the OSS, founded an American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), aiming at quick unification of the war-torn continent. Bringing French and German iron, coal and steel companies together would gain more profits while helping Germany to regain acceptance and strength for the Cold War. So they started a new group, the European Movement, with millions from the CIA and the Ford Foundation, and named five honorary presidents: Leon Blum of France, de Gasperi of Italy, Spaak of Belgium, an eager Konrad Adenauer from his new Federal Republic and, crowning it all, Winston Churchill, though voted out of office still full of ambition. It was he who spilled the beans on European brotherliness. This “unofficial counterpart“ of the Marshall Plan must help win the “liberation of the nations behind the Iron Curtain” as a path to “our aim and ideal, nothing less than the union of Europe as a whole.” For him, that meant at least as far as the Ural Mountains.

This remains relevant today. The constant eastward movement then directed against the USSR and its cordon of reliant neighbors, jealously guarded so no hostile powers could advance to its borders, has since the defeats of 1989 to 1993 become a similar constant attempt to surround Russia, seen as a rival, with a tighter and tighter noose, now including Poland, the Baltic trio, Rumania, Bulgaria, and as soon as possible the Ukraine, Moldavia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, with Moscow its future target.

And on the way, any attempt anywhere by working people to take control away from the industrial and financial bosses, domestic and international, must be crushed in the bud. This was accomplished most brutally in Greece, now suffering under a depression worse than in the USA in the 1930’s, and was a warning to all less wealthy member countries to maintain austerity, hitting away at the rights and incomes of working people, pensioners and the others – to the advancement of the Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Goldman-Sachs and big French banks. One might even catch echoes of a similar policy regarding Spain 80 years ago!

Therefore the BLEXIT proponents on the left said: the EU is rotten at the base, completely undemocratic. It cannot be turned upside down; to Hell with it!

What was the answer of other left-leaners? Well, they said, you may be right about its roots. You may also be right about the forces dominating it, whose commissioners make the rules for all the EU, preventing independent decisions and with German bosses like Schäuble ruling the roost, a vulture’s roost. But leaving this amalgam of different countries, now 28 strong, will not only hamper the chances of progressive or working-class movements from crossing the Channel either way, thus weakening both sides, but will open the door to the racist, immigrant-hating, Muslimophobic or foreigner-hating thugs and parties now gaining strength at a frightening pace. They hate the EU if only because its European Parliament occasionally makes good decisions on labor rights, against privatizing water supplies or weakening food and other standards. It may be far weaker than the unelected European Commission which makes most of the  rules, but it is an arena for fighting the fascistic tide which also threatens Britain. And who has been loudest for BREXIT? The racists! Do you want to ally with them?

But, comes the response, it’s the conservative leaders running the show in Brussels and the billionaire forces behind them who enabled the extreme rightists to gain strength. The leaders’ policies, hurting middle and working classes, conducting wars in the Middle East, their neo-colonial exploitation in Africa, which sent waves of desperate people fleeing to Europe, where they become ideal scapegoats for the far right and dividing working-people. There are many parallels to the forces supporting Trump, but the NAFTA,  which sent waves of Latinos northward was pushed through by a Clinton. Now the EU wants to force TTIP down European throats, like TPP on Pacific shores. Both are pushed by Obama and might be pushed through by a second Clinton, who can all too easily slip back to her earlier support.

And so the arguments continued. But now the decision has been made – and hardly seems reversible (though some are trying hard). It is now vital to look at the spin-off. The withdrawal from power of David Cameron is no loss. And he probably has plenty to tide him over, if not in Panama then in the Cayman Islands or some other tropical paradise.

But, far more importantly,  the forces which have long controlled the British Labour Party, the “Blair brigade”, closely tied up with the forces of wealth, were scared out of their wits when a true representative of working people was elected to head a party they saw as their own.  They have been plotting hard to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn ever since, and they now saw their chance. They accused him of being too “luke-warm” in  his support of the EU – which may have some truth to it, for he knew well of the corruption and motivation involved in it. He was not so very active against BREXIT, but had no part in the racist forces who favored leaving. But whatever the excuse, they circled in for the kill; a majority of Labour MPs in the British Commons have withdrawn their support of him – an unprecedented low blow. (But it recalls a few House members from the Blue Dog kennels.) Since Jeremy refuses to give in to their demands that he quit, it remains to be seen whether the majority of Labour which supported him so strongly not long ago will now defy the backstabbing allied with the media attacks.

To my mind, this is even more important than Britain’s (and/or Scotland’s) membership in the EU or outside it. Corbyn is a ray of hope in Britain and Germany and even the USA; if he can lead large numbers of honest people to reject racism and fascism while taking things increasingly into their own hands we can all take some much needed hope!

+++

Now, to end on a very different note: the German Bundestag is currently considering a new Law Regulating Prostitution. While feminists want to forbid it altogether, and organized sex-workers demand basic rights, like pensions and health care, it looks now as if the main victors will be the owners of the big, fancy, quite legal brothels spread around Germany, often using women lured to Germany with many promises. The sex-workers often prefer a tougher word to describe their trade. And then, maybe the word “whore” (similar in German) is not so irrelevant after all when examining current politics.

Birth-Control Wars: Two Centuries of Struggle

David Rosen

The birth-control wars have reached a new level of contestation.  On Monday, June 27^th, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law —Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt — that sought to restrict a woman’s right to an abortion and other birth-control medical services.

The Texas law required women’s abortion-care providers to meet the same building standards as ambulatory surgical centers and that doctors who perform abortions must have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.  The decision could apply to similar restrictive laws being imposed in dozens of other states.

This decision comes only a month after a May decision – Zubik vs. Burvell — in which the Court split four-to-four over another Texas birth-control law involving whether the Affordable Care Act required religious employers to cover contraception coverage.

The decision concerned a further extension of the Court’s 2014 Hobby Lobby decision that affirmed the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act and blocks Obama Care from applying to “religious” employers.  The Act requires employees insurance programs to cover contraceptives among pregnancy prevention services at no extra cost to the employee as some of these birth-control methods can be expensive (e.g., some intrauterine device can cost $1,000).

These decisions will further fuel the increasingly contentious 2016 presidential campaign, with the two presumptive candidates likely becoming even more combative.  Hillary Clinton has been a long-term “feminist,” supporting women’s issues, including birth control and abortion rights. She championed the June Court decision.

In 1999, Donald Trump considering himself “very pro-choice” and, according to some sources, supported partial-birth abortion.  Since then, he’s moved further to the right.  As he reportedly said, “I’ve evolved on many issues over the years. And you know who else has? Is Ronald Reagan evolved on many issues. And I am pro-life. … And I am very, very proud to say that I am pro-life.”

These two Court decisions are but the latest in a long, long history of struggles waged by women (and some men) to secure birth control rights for women.  They reflect the ongoing battle against the Christian right’s efforts to preserve “traditional” values, notably patriarchy.  They are examples of how the “culture wars” are now being played out in their most vindictive manner targeted at the most vulnerable, poor and small-town women and girls living in conservative states.

The battle over birth control – and a woman’s right to control her body — has been fought out over the last two centuries, but especially the half-century since the contraceptive pill was introduced (1960) and the Roe v. Wade decision (1973).  Birth control not only offers a woman greater power over her life — her body and her pregnancy — but also provides a means by which she can enjoy greater erotic pleasure, an experience separate from procreation.

* * *

On October 16, 2016, the U.S. will celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the opening of the nation’s first birth-control clinic.  A century ago, Margaret Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne, both nurses, along with Fania Mindell, a receptionist who spoke Yiddish, opened the clinic on Amboy Street in the predominantly immigrant, Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn.  It dispensed birth control literature, provided helpful information and supplied contraceptive devices (e.g., pessaries, condoms and douching solutions) to the predominately immigrant and working-class women of the neighborhood.

The clinic operated for 10 days, serving some 488 women, before the police closed it down.  Sanger and Byrne were arrested for violating what was known as “Comstock Law.”  The sisters were found guilty and each served 30-days in jail; Byrne went on a hunger strike and was force-fed.

The law was named after Anthony Comstock and was formally known as “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.”  It singled out birth control, targeting “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.”  To enforce the law, Comstock was appointed a special officer of the U.S. postal system and given the power to seize what he labeled as “obscene materials” as well as arrest those he identified as pornographers and birth-control advocates.  It was the most draconian “anti-obscenity” law ever enacted in U.S. history and remained in force until the 1960s; in 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy prosecuted Ralph Ginsberg over Erosmagazine for violating the Comstock Law.

Nine decades earlier, in 1830, the feminist, Francis Wright, along with Robert Dale Owen, son of utopian Robert Owen, opened the Hall of Science in a converted church on 859 Broome Street, New York, where hundreds regularly attended their lectures.  According to one historian, “the first books of reform [female] physiology and birth control were openly distributed.”  So threatening was her message that she was denounced as the “Priestess of Beelzebub” and the “Red Harlot of Infidelity.”   Walt Whitman attended her lectures and fondly recalled, “I never felt so glowingly toward any other woman. … She possessed herself of me body and soul.”

Comstock repeatedly battled feminists and birth-control advocates. In 1878, he targeted New York’s most notorious birth-control supplier, “Madame Restell.”  Born Ann Trow in England and now calling herself Ann Lohman, she made a living as a self-proclaimed physician selling medicinal cure-alls that addressed “female troubles”; she was dubbed “the Wickedest Woman in New York.”  Operating out of an elegant office at Fifth Avenue and East 52nd Street, she sold pills and other products to prevent pregnancy and induce abortion; these concoctions included pennyroyal, savin, black draught, tansy tea, oil of cedar, ergot of rye, mallow and motherwort.  Arrested by Comstock for possessing pamphlets about birth control and some “instruments,” she committed suicide rather than face a trial and likely prison sentence.

In 1902, Comstock went after the feminist writer, Ida Craddock, author of the marriage manual, The Wedding Night.  Initially tried in Chicago for obscenity, she was convicted; the book was deemed so “obscene, lewd, lascivious, dirty” that the jury was prohibited from seeing it.  Upon release, Comstock arrested her for sending the book through the U.S. Mail; she was convicted and faced a 5-year prison.  On October 16, 1902, the day before reporting to Federal prison, Craddock committed suicide by slashing her wrists and inhaling natural gas from the oven in her apartment.  She left a suicide not condemning Comstock.

Birth control fundamentally changed during the 20^th century.  Repeated Supreme Court decisions, technological innovations and the work of Sanger and others remade American sexual culture.

In 1930, Sanger provoked a major confrontation over a woman’s right to birth-control materials, this time as a free speech issue.  She “illegally” imported Japanese condoms, a violation of the Comstock laws.  In 1936, the Supreme Court, in U.S. v One Package of Japanese Pessaries, struck down the prohibition because the material, as information and devices, served medical purposes, protecting the patient’s life.  It ruled that items used to protect the health of a patient did not fall under federal Comstock obscenity laws.

Three decades later, the introduction of contraceptive pill in 1960 and a Supreme Court decision invalidated a Connecticut version of the Comstock Law, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) that prohibited using “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception,” was a violation of the “right to marital privacy.”  From Griswold, it was a steppingstone to Roe.

* * *

Historically speaking, the Christian right is fighting a last ditch effort in the birth-control wars targeting abortion and the healthcare of poor and working-class women.  Looking back to the bitter days of the Comstock Laws, its clear that much has changed.  According to the Guttmacher Institute, nearly all women aged 15–44 who have ever had sexual intercourse have used at least one contraceptive method and nearly two-thirds (62%) of all women of reproductive age are currently using a contraceptive method.

The Internet is further transforming access to birth control.  A handful of website and apps are making it easier for women to secure both prescription and non-prescription products, including pills, patches, rings and morning-after pills.  Among those offering on-line services are Planned Parenthood, Lemonaid, Prjkt Ruby, Nurx and Virtuwell.

Unfortunately, in 2011, nearly half (45% or 2.8 million) of the 6.1 million pregnancies in the U.S. were unintended, down from the 51 percent in 2008.  The rates of unintended pregnancy are declining among both poor and higher-income women.  Between 2008 and 2011, the rate for women with incomes below the federal poverty level fell 18 percent while for higher-income women it decreased by 20 percent.

Hopefully, the most recent Supreme Court decision and Clinton’s election –followed by the likely appointment of a more “liberal” Justice to the Court – will mark a fundamental shift in support of abortion rights and, finally, drive a stake in the heart of reactionary Christian politics.

Lament For Humanity: A 50 Year Reflection

Robert J. Burrowes

Deeply affected by the death of my two uncles in World War II, on 1 July 1966, the 24th anniversary of the ‘USS Sturgeon’ sinking of the Japanese prisoner-of-war ship ‘Montevideo Maru’ which killed the man after whom I am named, I decided that I would devote my life to working out why human beings are violent and then developing a strategy to end it.

The good news about this commitment was that it was made when I was nearly 14 so, it seemed, anything was possible. Now I am not so sure.

Here is my report on 50 years of concerted effort to understand and end human violence.

In 1966 one of my immediate preoccupations was war. The US genocidal war on Vietnam was raging and, as a sycophantic ally of the United States, Australia had been drawn into it some years previously. Trying to understand what this war was really about was challenging, particularly given the limited (mainstream) sources of information available to me at the time.

But I was deeply troubled by another problem too. I had seen a photo of a starving African child in the newspaper when I was ten and I found this most disturbing. Why did adults let children starve? I wondered. And trying to make sense of this by reading newspaper reports or asking those around me was utterly unenlightening.

By the early 1970s the environmental crisis was starting to impact on my awareness too, including through environmental campaigns I heard about and the ‘limits to growth’ literature published by the Club of Rome, which I read at University.

So where are we today?

Well, the most casual perusal of the state of our world reveals the ongoing (and recently heightened) threat of nuclear war and obliteration (on top of the ongoing and rapidly spreading radioactive contamination generated by Fukushima and the use of Depleted Uranium weapons), ongoing phenomenal levels of military spending and the endless push from corporate and other elite interests for more wars. Hence, we are witness to and, through our taxes, active supporters of an endless sequence of wars, military invasions, occupations and coups, virtually all of them instigated by the US elite and its allies, as well as a sequence of ‘local’ wars, also instigated by western elites and supplied with weapons by western corporations.

The global economy teeters on the brink of collapse and, of course, from the viewpoint of those 100,000 people in Africa, Asia and Central/South America who starve to death each day or those one billion people who live in a state of semi-starvation and abject poverty in many parts of the world, it has already ‘collapsed’. This all happens at the instigation of insane elites who continue to accumulate and hoard their wealth, much of it in illegal offshore tax havens. Given the enormous psychological damage that individual members of the elite have suffered, millions or even billions can never be enough.

And the environmental crisis has only become vastly worse with the synergistic impact of our combined assaults on the environment causing human extinction-threatening strain on the biosphere. These devastating assaults include those inflicted by military violence (often leaving vast areas uninhabitable), the emission of vast quantities of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, rainforest destruction, industrial farming, mining, commercial fishing and spreading radioactive contamination.

We are also systematically destroying the limited supply of fresh water on the planet and inducing the collapse of hydrological systems. Human activity drives 200 species of life (birds, animals, fish, insects, reptiles, amphibians, plants) to extinction each day and 80% of the world’s forests and over 90% of the large fish in the ocean are already gone.

Despite this readily available information, governments continue to prioritize spending $US2,000,000,000 each day on military violence, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and kill fellow human beings, now or in the future.

In addition, you might have noticed the ongoing attacks on everything from our civil liberties and right to privacy to our right to eat healthy food that has not been poisoned and/or genetically mutilated.

So why does all of this happen? Well, 50 years of research and decades of nonviolent activism have had some rewards and particularly the research that Anita McKone and I conducted during our 14 years in seclusion (1996-2010) which fully explained why human beings are violent. In essence, it is an outcome of the visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence inflicted by adults on children. See ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. http://anitamckone.wordpress.com/articles-2/fearless-and-fearful-psychology/

Moreover, this research also gave us enormous insight into the insanity of the global elite and those who serve them in order to maintain this worldwide system of violence and exploitation that is killing us all while destroying the biosphere. Whether it be the politicians who implement elite policies, the academics who ‘justify’ or remain silent about this violence and exploitation, the businesspeople who manage it, the judges, magistrates, lawyers and prosecutors who defend and ultimately enforce it, the teachers and media personnel who teach and promote (or distract us from) it, or the soldiers, private military contractors, police and prison officers who inflict its most direct violence, the global elite is served by a ready stream of witting or unwitting people, many of whom are paid by your taxes to do its bidding. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’.

And just to ensure that you are endlessly frightened into accepting this worldwide system of violence and exploitation, and to support its further encroachment into your life, the global elite conducts an ongoing terrorist campaign against you. See ‘Terrorism: Ultimate Weapon of the Global Elite’ and ‘Why Elites Love Drones’

But there is another huge problem too: Lack of solidarity.

Elites know that they can divide us and that enables them to conquer us. Despite our efforts to build solidarity over recent decades, elites keep finding new ways to emphasize our ‘differences’. We need to start thinking of our selves as ‘We are all each other’. Does it matter if the ‘big’ difference between us is our gender, our race, our class, our religion, our nationality or something else (or even all of these)?

While elites can easily manipulate us, especially via education systems and the corporate media, into projecting our fear and self-hatred onto others who are ‘different’ and then inflicting violence on, or even killing, each other because, in effect, ‘I am an adult and you are a child’, ‘I am a man and you are a woman’, ‘I am non-indigenous and you are indigenous’, ‘I am a Christian/Jew/Hindu/Buddhist and you are a Muslim’, ‘I am working class and you are middle class’, ‘I am white and you are not’, ‘I am straight and you are LGBTQIA’, ‘I am one nationality and you are another’, ‘I am a feminist and you are a socialist’, or even ‘I am human and you are a bird/animal/fish/insect/reptile/amphibian/plant’ then we haven’t even begun to realize that the real issue is that we are all living beings and this insane elite is willing to do anything they can to exploit and, if necessary, kill us all.

Isn’t it time we started to see what makes us the same – victims of violence and exploitation – rather than focusing on what, after all, are the rather less significant differences in our bodily characteristics, in our beliefs or even the causes of our exploitation (which is not meant to diminish the significance of the outcomes of direct and structural violence which undoubtedly have variable impact)? Fear divides us.

One interesting personal outcome of this lifetime of effort, apart from the many arrests, terms of imprisonment (including once in a psychiatric ward where I was forcibly injected with ‘antipsychotic’ drugs), bankruptcy and seizure of my passport that have been direct results of my nonviolent activism, is that Anita and I have been homeless since 1999: conscience has its costs. Moreover, a worldwide search has failed to identify more than a handful of individuals (but pre-eminently my parents, James and Beryl, both veterans of World War II and now 93) or an organization of any kind that is willing to fund our research or our work to end human violence. Of course, there is a psychological explanation for this as well. See ‘Why Don’t We Try to Understand and End Human Violence?’

So what of human prospects? Not good. With an insane elite controlling the US (and other) military/nuclear arsenals and the highly exploitative global economy (with the secret corporate governance deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, designed to further consolidate corporate control of our world), as well as the dominant discourse via the education systems and corporate media, very few people have the emotional and intellectual capacities to critique this world order and then strategically and nonviolently resist the rush to extinction in which we now find ourselves. In short, most human beings are utterly (unconsciously) terrified and remain politically inert despite time and opportunities slipping rapidly away.

And those who do courageously resist this violent world order face a phalanx of violent institutions, ranging from psychiatry – see ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’http://warisacrime.org/content/defeating-violence-psychiatry – and the pharmaceutical – see ‘Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients’http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/17/bad-pharma-ben-goldacre-review – and agribusiness  – see ‘Monsanto, America’s Monster’ http://mediaroots.org/monsanto-americas-monster/ – industries to the corporate media – see ‘Propaganda & Engineering Consent for Empire ’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7HmFH-Wo1s – and the police, legal and prison systems – see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’ – designed to neutralize or stop us, one way or another.

So what do I suggest? Well, with the scientific evidence now indicating that near term human extinction is the most likely outcome – see ‘Why is Near Term Human Extinction Inevitable?’https://www.oximity.com/article/Why-is-Near-Term-Human-Extinction-Inev-1 – it is increasingly clear that if we are to end human violence in all of its many and complex manifestations, and prevent human extinction, then we need an integrated and comprehensive strategy for doing so that also provides many meaningful avenues for involvement by individuals and organizations who wish to respond powerfully: token gestures have no value. Over many years I have endeavoured to create this overarching strategy and I invite you to participate in it by doing one or more of the following.

If you are an adult, you might consider dramatically modifying your treatment of children in accordance with ‘My Promise to Children’. http://www.nationofchange.org/my-promise-children-1383835266 You might also find this article useful in better understanding how to do so: ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If these suggestions seem beyond you, then perhaps your own emotional healing should be your priority. Despite its title, this article explains what you need to do: ‘An Open Letter to Soldiers with “Mental Health” Issues’ And remember this: if you don’t believe that you are ‘important’ enough to spend time learning to know yourself more deeply, I disagree. You are important.

Separately from the above, you might like to join those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. http://tinyurl.com/flametree You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com

And if you would like to learn how to make your nonviolent action campaign for a peace, environmental or social justice outcome more strategically effective,  you can do so here: ‘Nonviolent Campaign Strategy’. http://nonviolentstrategy.wordpress.com To nonviolently defend against coups and invasions, remove a dictatorship or conduct a liberation struggle, check out ‘Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy’. https://nonviolentliberationstrategy.wordpress.com

I am not going to get another 50 years to try to create the world of peace, justice and sustainability for which many of us strive but I am going to use every single moment of the time I have left.

Why? Because I love the Earth and everything on it. And you?

Further steps in finding an Earth-like planet outside the solar system

Bryan Dyne

Last month, researchers analyzing data from the Kepler spacecraft announced 1,284 new confirmed exoplanets, bringing the total to 2,373 discovered by this mission. Twenty-one of these confirmed exoplanets are no more than twice the size of Earth and within their parent star’s habitable zone. While no truly Earth-like planet has been found, the prospects of doing so are steadily increasing.

An artist's conception of the Kepler spacecraft as it orbits the Sun

The Kepler spacecraft has been in operation since March 2009, nearly twice its planned mission duration of three and a half years. From 2009 to 2013, it observed approximately 100,000 stars more or less constantly, looking for the subtle but periodic dips in each star’s brightness that would indicate a planet transiting (passing in front of) the star.

Spacecraft mechanical issues in 2013 led to a shift in the spacecraft’s main mission from the ultra-precise measurements needed to find Earth-sized exoplanets to a broader study of stellar objects including supernova explosions and star formation, although the search for exoplanets continued as well.

Planets that are small, of equal or lesser size than the Earth, are the hardest to isolate in Kepler’s observations. Signals from a planet passing in front of a star are often mistaken for noise. Conversely, changes in spacecraft operations or on the star itself can mimic a planetary transit. It takes the labor of hundreds of scientists over years to find and verify the detection of such distant and comparatively tiny objects.

The problem is exacerbated the further away the planet is from its parent star. A planet like Earth orbiting a star like the Sun typically takes about an Earth year to complete its orbit. Since it generally requires three or four orbits to confirm an exoplanet, it takes at least three or four years worth of continuous data to find an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star.

Despite these difficulties, Kepler and the other exoplanet searches have discovered a total 3,422 exoplanets in 2,560 planetary systems, of which 582 are confirmed multiple-planet systems. Many thousands more await confirmation.

A list of Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zone of their parent star

The number and type of exoplanets suggest that they are much more common than previously thought. Even up to 1995, when the first planet orbiting an ordinary star was found outside our Solar System, it was unclear how many stars would have planets around them. We had little more than our own Solar System to base planetary formation models on and had no indication that having such a large planetary family was the normal state of affairs. However, based on Kepler mission data, it is now believed that nearly every star system has at least one planet, whether it be a rocky world like Earth, a gas giant like Jupiter, or any of the myriad types of planets found in between.

In 2013, a team of astronomers took this idea and used the Kepler data to extropolate how many Earth-sized planets there are in the Milky Way galaxy. According to those estimates, there are upwards of 11 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting Sun-like stars in the Milky Way. Based on the statistics, the closest of these is likely within 12 light years, out of reach for travel based on current technology but a stone’s throw on the scale of the galaxy.

Of course, none of these results tell us much about whether or not these planets are Earth-like. While some of the larger exoplanets (those larger than Jupiter) have had their atmospheres imaged, it is doubtful that this is possible for Earth-sized planets with the technology that is currently available. It would take a specialized mission to do so.

Such missions have been proposed but none have succeeded in getting the necessary funding. The European Space Agency proposed the Darwin mission, which would use three-space based telescopes aimed at systems with known Earth-sized planets to cancel out the light of the stars and directly image the planets’ atmospheres. This would allow us to get the composition of the atmospheres and further narrow down which planets could support Earth-like life. A similar mission by NASA, the Space Interferometry Mission, was proposed by NASA in 1998 and cancelled in 2010 after a series of budget cuts by the Bush and Obama administrations.

This has not, however, stopped efforts to model exoplanetary atmospheres. Astronomers from NASA, UCLA and the University of Washington recently demonstrated that a number of possible atmospheres for the planet Kepler-62f, discovered in 2013, could sustain liquid water on the surface of the planet. This involved varying levels of carbon dioxide and water vapor, as well as testing different configurations for the planet’s orbit.

Of course, while studies like these are interesting, they ultimately must be borne out by data. There is no actual observation of Kepler-62f’s atmosphere, its surface gravity, surface topology or its magnetic field strength, all of which are essential to understanding whether or not the planet is “habitable.”

In our own Solar System, there are only four rocky bodies with atmospheres that have the potential for the development of life—Earth, Mars, Saturn’s moon Titan and Neptune’s moon Triton. Only Earth currently supports liquid water at its surface. This small sample size does not really allow for a good comparison between models and reality.

This is not a limitation of technology, but of funding. Plans for space telescopes to directly observe the atmospheres of exoplanets have existed since 1988 but none has been given the necessary resources.

No doubt the atmospheres of exoplanets will be as surprising and varied as the exoplanets themselves. The only atmospheres that have so far been detected have been the extremely hot atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting very close to their parent star. Given how many exoplanets there are, at least some will harbor conditions similar to Earth. But as of now, we can only speculate.

Trudeau blocks inquiry into Canada’s role in torture of Afghan detainees

Laurent Lafrance

Canada’s Liberal government has formally rejected demands it order a public inquiry into the alleged abuse and torture of hundreds of Afghans detained by Canada’s Armed Forces (CAF) during its decade-long frontline role in the Afghan War. And, it has done so in the light of damning new evidence of Canadian involvement in war crimes.

Earlier this month, the French-language Montreal daily La Presse published a letter from a group of military police officers that accuses high-ranking military police officers of ordering the abuse of Afghan detainees —many of whom were not even Taliban fighters, but rather poor people who had been illegally detained during military sweeps of areas where insurgents were believed to be active. “Nearly 50 percent” of those detained, says the letter, were “people like you and me, husbands, fathers, farmers, who had done nothing wrong.”

The letter further charges that the CAF has systematically covered up and lied about the abuse and torture, actions it bluntly calls “war crimes.”

These revelations are all the more credible and damaging in that they come from people who directly participated in these events, which took place between 2010-11, when Canada’s combat mission in Afghanistan was officially nearing its end.

La Presse has agreed to keep secret the names of the “small number” of military police officers who signed the letter, because they could face severe sanctions, including life imprisonment, for violating military discipline and going public with their accusations.

The letter relates how many of the detainees were victims of a brutal regime of terror, launched on the orders of the high command. In a practice dubbed “dynamic entry exercises,” military police officers staged night-time raids on the prisoners’ cells, during which they manhandled and sometimes physically assaulted detainees, so as to “soften” them up for interrogation. Some detainees were so terrified that they defecated and urinated on themselves.

The letter says that most of the detainees were released for lack of evidence after spending an average of two months in prison. The former Conservative government had claimed that the Canadian military detained prisoners for no more 96 hours.

The dissident military police officers also reveal that the CAF reached “a secret deal with the NDS (the Afghan intelligence agency) so it would appear that the detainees were under their control when they were” in fact in the hands of the Canadian military.

The letter complains that the military police is a “puppet” of the CAF and concludes by noting, “Barely 20 years ago, members of the Canadian Armed Forces tortured an adolescent (in Somalia) to death. It is clear that today more than ever a deviant culture is present (in Canada’s military.)”

Last November the Military Police Complaints Commission of Canada (MPCC), an “independent governmental body,” launched an investigation into these allegations of CAF military police involvement in war crimes. However, the top brass of the military police, which is itself named in the complaint before the commission, has refused to cooperate with the inquiry and is denying the MPCC access to vital documents and recordings.

It should be noted that the dissident military police officers are themselves unflinching supporters of Canadian imperialism. Their concern is that the CAF’s criminal actions proved counterproductive: they antagonized the Afghan population and undermined support at home for the Canadian military and its foreign interventions and wars.

The purpose of their letter is not to indict anyone, but to pressure the military police’s top brass to co-operate with the MPCC investigation.

The day after La Presse published the military police officers’ letter, the Rideau Institute published an open letter to Prime Minister Trudeau calling for a public inquiry into Canada’s complicity in the torture of Afghan detainees. It was signed by 41 “eminent Canadians,” including human rights advocates and current and former MPs. Like an electronic petition to the House of Commons initiated in April by former New Democrat MP Craig Scott, the Rideau Institute-sponsored open letter urges the Liberals to fulfill the demands they made of the previous Conservative government to call a public inquiry.

At first the Liberals remained conspicuously silent; however they were legally obliged to answer the “e-petition.” Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan, who served as a CAF intelligence officer during its Afghan combat mission, answered by whitewashing the military’s criminal activities and bluntly rejecting a public inquiry.

"Throughout military operations in Afghanistan, the government of Canada ensured individuals detained by the Canadian Armed Forces were treated humanely and handled, transferred or released in accordance with our obligations under international law,” claimed Sajjan. “The government of Canada does not believe an independent judicial commission of inquiry is necessary.”

In fact, there is abundant evidence that the Canadian military was complicit in torture and that top-ranking military and government officials were well aware of it. The CAF routinely handed over Afghan prisoners to the NDS, which was itself notorious for its systematic use of torture.

In 2009, Richard Colvin, a Canadian diplomat who served in Afghanistan for 17 months, publicly described Canada's complicity in torture, as well as the indifference and obstruction he encountered from top officials when he raised concerns. Testifying in the fall of 2009 to a parliamentary committee, Colvin said “the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured;” were “beaten, subjected to electric shocks, denied sleep, and raped or otherwise sexually abused.”

Colvin was vilified by the Conservative government, military brass and the media who tried to tar him as a Taliban sympathizer. Months later, Ahmadshah Malgarai, a former CAF interpreter in Afghanistan, also divulged that the army subcontracted torture of Afghan detainees to the NDS.

These revelations followed those made by Amnesty International and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, which estimated that “one in three prisoners handed over by Canadians are beaten or even tortured.” Even the US State Department warned as early as 2006 that torture was widely used in Afghan prisons.

After Colvin’s testimony, pressure mounted for the setting up of a Military Police Complaints Commission (MPCC) inquiry into whether the CAF and government allowed prisoners to be transferred to Afghan authorities knowing that they were at risk of being tortured—a flagrant violation of Canadian and international law and itself a war crime under international law. But the Conservative government did everything it could to obstruct the MPCC’s investigation of the issue and in the end it never heard a single witness.

This was only the one element in the government’s drive to stymie any investigation of the CAF’s treatment of the Afghan detainees. To cover up Canada’s complicity in torture, the government repeatedly flouted parliament. In December 2009, it prorogued parliament so as to derail a parliamentary committee investigation into the treatment of the Afghan detainees. Subsequently, it refused to hand over documents pertaining to the Afghan detainee issue to parliament, resulting in the government being found in “contempt of parliament.”

Ultimately the Conservatives prevailed on the opposition parties to agree to the issue being studied by a tiny, specially-vetted committee of MPs who were sworn to secrecy. It then dumped on the short-staffed committee tens of thousands of pages of documents pertaining to Canada’s intervention in Afghanistan, calculating that those relating to the CAF’s and government’s complicity in torture would be lost in a sea of paper.

Little more than a year later, Stephen Harper and his Conservatives, having secured a parliamentary majority, shut that inquiry down.

In the wake of Colvin’s revelations, the Liberals pushed for a public inquiry into the treatment of the Afghan detainees, hoping to embarrass their Conservative opponents. When Harper prorogued parliament to shut down the parliamentary committee investigation, Liberal MP Ralph Goodale, now Trudeau’s Public Safety Minister, denounced it as a means of covering up “what the Conservatives knew, and when they knew it, about torture in Afghanistan.”

Now that the Liberals are in power, they are adopting the same position as Harper and his Conservatives and for the same reasons: to reassure the military top brass that they have the government’s full and unqualified support and to protect the false image of the CAF as a “defender of international law.” The Liberals are determined that there should be no impediments to pushing through military spending hikes and using the CAF to aggressively assert the interests of the Canadian ruling elite on the world stage.

No doubt, the Liberals, like the Conservatives before them, are also anxious to cover up their own complicity in war crimes. It was the Liberal government of Paul Martin which in 2005 negotiated the first agreement with the Afghan government to transfer prisoners to its control, ignoring warnings raised by a diplomat that they would be at risk of torture.

While the NDP is now associating itself with the call for a public inquiry into the detainee issue, it is no more willing than the Liberals to tell the truth to the Canadian people—that the Canadian military’s and government’s involvement in war crimes is not due to excesses, but is rooted fundamentally in the neo-colonialist character of the wars Canada waged in Afghanistan and continues to wage in the Middle East. All the parties in parliament supported Canada’s leading role in the Afghan counter-insurgency war and support Canada’s participation in the US military-strategic offensives in the Middle East and against Russia and China.

One in six Australians experience food insecurity

Michelle Stevens

Crisis levels of food insecurity have been reached among low income families in Australia. In the last 12 months it is estimated that just over one in six people (18 percent of the population or more than 4 million people) experienced a period when they didn’t have enough food for themselves or family members and could not afford to buy any. Of those, 28 percent (more than 1.1 million) report that going without food is a regular occurrence.

Earlier this month, Australia’s largest food relief organization, Foodbank,supplier of over half of the food used by charities to provide food relief, released its annual Hunger Report 2016 prepared with the assistance of Deloitte Access Economics.

The report brought together two areas of research. For the first time with the assistance of Galaxy Research, a survey was conducted in February 2016 of food relief recipients from front-line charities and community groups. Secondly, the annual Foodbank Welfare Agency Survey conducted between December 2015 and March 2016 provided information from the 2,400 charity groups and community organisations that Foodbank supplies.

The Hunger Report estimated the number of people seeking food assistance in 2015 increased by 8 percent overall. Almost half of those who reported food insecurity, 49 percent or more than 2 million people, sought food assistance from a charity. Those aged 18 to 34 were almost twice as likely to experience food insecurity.

Monthly, over 644,000 people of which 34 percent were children, accessed food relief from Foodbank agencies, an increase of 25 percent from 2014.

Of the charities surveyed, 60 percent reported an increase in the number of people seeking assistance in the past year. The increase was 6-15 percent for 23 percent of agencies, 16-30 percent for 13 percent of charities, and over 30 percent for 9 percent of agencies.

The report revealed that 75 percent of charity groups and community organizations were unable to meet the rising demand for food assistance. As a result, it estimated 43,000 people, of whom 32 percent were children, were turned away empty-handed every month.

The unemployed and low income families were the highest recipients of food relief, closely followed by single parent families. The most common reasons why people did not have enough food were: not enough money in the first place, unexpected or large bills and having to pay rent or a mortgage.

Of the recipients surveyed, 93 percent said that food insecurity impacted on their emotional wellbeing and reported feeling stressed and depressed, embarrassed and ashamed, and when there were children in the household, guilt.

One respondent declared: “I felt incredibly scared and rocked by the experience of not having enough food for myself and my family.” Another respondent explained: “When I didn’t have enough to buy food I lived on plain pasta, porridge with no milk and 2 minute noodle seasonings in water to try to make my body think I had eaten.”

The Foodbank report pointed to growing social inequality. “Over the past two decades, Australia has experienced strong economic growth and performance,” it stated, adding: “This positive economic environment has created an opportunity for Australia to reduce inequality within the population; however, disadvantaged Australians still face significant challenges with respect to affording basics such as food.”

The report concluded that “results from the 2016 Foodbank surveys highlight again that the demand for food relief is rising, irrespective of the growth and performance of the economy.” It identified the high prevalence of “bill shock”—unexpected or large bills—experienced by low economic resource households, that is households with both low wealth and low income.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) states that in 2013–14, just over 4 million of Australia’s estimated population of 23.1 to 23.5 million lived in low income households—830,000 were children under 15 years, These were households with a weekly equivalised disposable income of between $205 and $511, which is below the official poverty line.

Two-thirds of those in low income households relied on welfare payments as the main source of household income, with 24 percent identifying employment payments as their main source of income.

The average household wealth for low wealth households in 2013–14 was $35,600 and for middle wealth households $462,500, there was little change in wealth in each of these groups between 2011–12 and 2013–14.

The Foodbank report also points to rising inflation. The overall rate of inflation as measured by the consumer price index (CPI) has increased by around 30 percent from 2004 to 2014, with the cost of utilities, health and education increasing by “more than the overall rate of inflation.”

The report illustrates the real impact of the rising cost of living on low income families, citing a 2013 survey by the Deutsche Bank (2013). The survey “found that the cost of a loaf of bread in Sydney rose from $2.60 to $6.63 between 2003 and 2013. Compared to the percentage change in the CPI over this time period, the average price of bread has risen nearly five times as much as CPI.”

As the current election campaign draws to a close, both the Liberal/National Coalition and the opposition Labor Party are seeking to reassure the corporate and financial elite that they are committed to implementing austerity measures. Despite election promises to the contrary, the next government, whichever parties form it, will further gut health, education and welfare while boosting military spending by almost $500 billion over the next decade.

Rising unemployment and the increasing casualization of the workforce particularly among young workers, cuts to welfare payments and downward pressure on real wages all mean that many more people will struggle to put food on the table for themselves and their families. In a growing number of instances, they will simply go without.

This appalling situation is a damning indictment of the profit system and successive Coalition and Labor governments that are responsible for growing levels of poverty and social inequality. There are more than enough resources to feed the population of Australia and the world, but the dictates of profit ensure that many people cannot buy enough food, are compelled to rely on charities or go without altogether.