Australian mental health report highlights a systemic crisis

Margaret Rees

The Victorian Royal Commission into Mental Health delivered a 680-page interim report last month, describing the state’s system as one of acute crisis but offering nothing immediate to address the catastrophe.

“Consumers, carers and those working in the mental health system, including psychiatrists, are being traumatised by an under-resourced system,” the report stated. It criticised patchworked and fragmented services. “There are service gaps, insufficient services to meet demand and inequities in who can access services.”

While an estimated 3.1 percent of the Australian population lives with severe mental illness, Victoria only offers enough public specialist mental health services for about half that number—an estimated 1.16 percent of the state’s people. The national average is 1.8 percent, which is shameful in itself, but Victoria remains the lowest.

On these figures, the state should be providing specialist clinical services for an additional 105,000 people. To do so, the state Labor government’s mental health expenditure would need to be 107 percent higher.

This situation is the product of deliberate government policy, by successive governments, both Labor and Liberal, including that of Premier Daniel Andrews, who has been in office since December 2014.

If Victoria’s funding had even reached the national average, it would have meant an additional $1.44 billion in 2016–17. The report estimates this would have provided an additional 1,500 medical officers (including psychiatrists), 8,000 more mental health nurses, 2,700 additional diagnostic and allied health professionals and 70 more consumer or family care workers.

The report notes that one expression of the crisis has been a marked shift away from mobile crisis assessment and outreach services toward community-based clinics and hospital emergency departments.

There was an 82 percent increase in mental health-related presentations to emergency departments between 2008–09 and 2017–18, while non-mental health-related presentations increased by only 27 percent. This places an enormous strain on resources and staff in emergency departments.

In contrast to the glaring social need outlined in the report, its recommendations are marginal. They include just 170 additional youth and adult acute inpatient mental health beds by 2021–22; 60 new graduate placements for allied health and other professionals; and 120 additional graduate placements for nurses.

These measures are totally inadequate. The Victorian government’s own “Inspire” report of June 2018 found that 20,000 Victorians attempt suicide every year. A Department of Health and Human survey last year found there were about 460 vacancies in the mental health nursing workforce, with some services reporting a more than 20 percent vacancy rate.

In 2018, there were approximately 4,215 full-time equivalent (FTE) nurses working in the Victorian public mental health system. This represented an increase of 31 percent since June 2003, but Victoria’s population expanded by 34 percent during the same period.

Australasian College for Emergency Medicine President Dr John Bonning said his members remained “concerned about the lack of immediate relief for people presenting in acute need to emergency departments [EDs], as well as the welfare of the health professionals in EDs who are trying to advocate for access to safe and effective care.”

Bonning said previous studies had shown that “across Australia and New Zealand, system-wide failures have resulted in an overdependence on EDs to provide mental health care and services. This is despite EDs not being recognised as integral parts of the mental health service system.”

For almost two decades, Labor and Liberal governments—both federal and state—have been warned about the systemic risks facing the mental health system due to workforce shortages. In December 2003, for example, a report prepared for the National Mental Health Working Group and the Australian Health Workforce Officials Committee stated: “The mental health nursing workforce is experiencing a shortage of adequately qualified employees and the situation is becoming increasingly acute.”

In 2014, Health Workforce Australia predicted that by 2030, across Australia, there would be a shortfall of 11,500 mental health nurses, representing a 61 percent gap of workforce supply. It is no wonder the workforce feels overstretched and unable to cope.

However, this disastrous gap does not affect many wealthier households that can afford private insurance. They can access an array of inpatient and outpatient services that far exceed those in the public system, including lengthier stays as inpatients.

To fund its proposals, the royal commission report proposes that the Victorian government institute a levy or tax. It cites the examples of the Transport Accident Commission, which is funded by a levy on Victorian motorists when they register their vehicles each year, and the Fire Services Levy imposed on ratepayers after the catastrophic bushfires of 2009.

Ominously, it also refers to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which is partly funded by increased Medicare levies on taxpayers. Introduced by the last federal Labor government in 2013, the NDIS has been a vehicle for privatising services, denying decent care to thousands of disabled people.

Such a levy would set another precedent for imposing an inequitable burden on working class households to pay for an essential service. Meanwhile, state Labor government spending is expanding on the police and prisons. The interim report indicates that the average annual growth in expenditure on mental health from 2007–08 to 2016–17 was 3.0 percent, while for corrections services it was 8.9 percent.

The report also ignored obvious underlying issues. Launch Housing chief executive Bevan Warner commented: “It is disappointing to see no mention of housing or homelessness in the interim report’s recommendations. Evidence has shown time and again that unless a person has secure housing, mental health programs will be largely ineffective. People need a stable place to recover.”

The interim report has brought a worsening crisis into plain view, but provided no resolution. To address the disaster would mean impinging on the corporate profit system, which demands ever-lower social spending from the governments, Labor and Liberal, that serve its interests.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed accepts Nobel Peace Prize

Joe Williams

Given that the Nobel Peace Prize was founded by an individual who postured as an anti-war activist at the same time he became obscenely wealthy by developing the most destructive mass-casualty weapons that existed at the time, it is fitting that the award has traditionally been used by the European powers to advance their imperialist interests and accumulate wealth under the guise of promoting peace and human rights.

This tradition continued on December 10, 2019, when Ethiopia prime minister and former military intelligence officer Abiy Ahmed became the latest to accept the award. He now joins a rogues’ gallery of imperialists, militarists, petty bourgeois nationalists, ethnic cleansers, and war criminals that include Barack Obama, Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Kissinger, and F.W. de Klerk. It also includes Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the prize in 1991, but has recently returned to the headlines by defending the Burmese military’s mass murder of Rohingya Muslims.

In a statement that thoroughly falsified Ahmed’s brief tenure in power, the Nobel Committee claimed it was rewarding him because “he spent his first 100 days as Prime Minister lifting the country’s state of emergency, granting amnesty to thousands of political prisoners, discontinuing media censorship, legalising outlawed opposition groups, dismissing military and civilian leaders who were suspected of corruption, and significantly increasing the influence of women in Ethiopian political and community life. He has also pledged to strengthen democracy by holding free and fair elections.”

In reality, Ahmed has already begun to re-impose the state of emergency, beginning with the resumption of internet blackouts. He also criminalized new political groups to replace the ones he legalized, mostly affiliated with the Tigray ethnic group, and purged them from the government. Significantly, the Prize Committee endorsed this racist and anti-democratic crackdown, hailing the mass arrests and dismissals that have taken place without any due process as a war against “military and civilian leaders who were suspected of corruption.”

The emptiness of Ahmed’s supposed achievements was reflected in his acceptance speech. Unlike Martin Luther King, Jr., who saw the award for what it is and used his acceptance speech to deliver an impassioned speech calling attention to the suffering of American blacks, Ahmed’s speech completely ignored the immense suffering of the people of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Instead, he treated the audience to a 20-minute string of empty, simplistic platitudes, such as “Peace is a labor of love,” “It takes only a few to make war, but a village and a nation to build peace,” “nurturing peace is like planting and growing trees,” “when our love for humanity outgrows our love for human vanity, then we will know peace,” and on it went.

Unlike previous winners, Ahmed has declined to give press conferences or take questions from reporters about the award. This caused the ten days of festivities that normally precede the award ceremony to be severely truncated, with most events being cancelled, and others forced to go on with an empty seat instead of the guest of honor. Ahmed shocked even some of his own supporters by refusing to participate in an event sponsored by the Norwegian chapter of Save the Children, in which traditionally school children are invited to ask the winner questions, while the royal family looks on.

After initially defending Abiy’s reclusiveness, the Nobel Committee was eventually pressured by the media into releasing a statement of disapproval. “The Nobel Institute and the Nobel Committee wishes Abiy Ahmed had said ‘yes’ to meeting Norwegian and international press. We have been very clear about this and have clarified that there are several reasons we find this highly problematic,” the statement said.

A review of Abiy’s political history makes it clear why he sees such a need to carefully vet media coverage of his award. Having come to power in April 2018 promising to end the despotism that has historically characterized Ethiopia’s military-backed governments, Ahmed’s tenure as prime minister has been dominated by tension between his government and the military.

Among Ahmed’s promised reforms were expanded freedom of speech and expression, opening up the internet and limiting the military’s role in the government. As a gesture of goodwill upon taking office, he released tens of thousands of political prisoners, ended the internet blackout imposed by the previous government of Hailemariam Desalegn and sacked over 100 generals and other high officers, mostly from the Tigray ethnic group that had dominated the previous regime.

However, this provoked a new round of unrest, both from officers who resent the military’s loss of political power, and from those who see the sackings as a racist attack on the Tigray people. The Tigray are often seen to be collectively responsible for the crimes of the previous regime, and hundreds of thousands of Tigray have been driven from their homes due to racist violence since Ahmed’s rise to power. Nearly 1 million ethnic Gedeos have also been forced to flee their homes in West Guji under Ahmed’s rule. In both cases, the attackers belong to the Oromo ethnic group, of which Ahmed is a member.

Moreover, Ahmed has done nothing to stop the government’s policy of privatizing state assets, and seizing land, usually from ethnic minority groups, and selling it to investors in China and the Arabian Peninsula, who use it for crash crops instead of food. These policies are deeply hated by the Ethiopian people, so Ahmed has been forced to re-impose the internet blackout instituted by his predecessor.

The Nobel Peace Prize is, and always has been, a political award given with the aim of promoting definite policies. The selection was made by a committee composed of five members of the Norwegian Parliament, and its decisions reflect positions prevailing within the European ruling elite as a whole. As the World Socialist Web Site has noted in previous years, it is used by the European powers to influence American internal politics, promote preferred leaders of developing countries, and to pressure rival powers like China, as it did with awards to Liu Xiaobo and the Dalai Lama in years past. Therefore, the fact that Ahmed’s reforms are superficial and are already beginning to erode will have no impact on the European bourgeoisie’s efforts elevate him to the status of a Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi.

From their perspective, Abiy Ahmed deserves to be glorified as a Christ-like peacemaker because he has the potential to stabilize the Horn of Africa, a critical nexus of regional trade and political conflict. Like the previous government, Ahmed’s administration has provided basing for US drone operations and, along with Kenya, is propping up the US-backed regime in Somalia. He has been given credit for completing peace talks with Eritrea that were initiated by his predecessor and has intervened in Sudan to broker an agreement between warring factions. These actions have been invaluable to American and European conglomerates seeking to exploit the oil and mineral resources of the war torn and under-developed region.

At the same time, Ahmed has been wooed aggressively by China, which sees Ethiopia as a critical component of its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, which seeks to build a transportation and trade network that would fully interconnect China and Africa. The European powers likely intend for the Peace Prize to help deter Ahmed from embracing Beijing’s advances.

In a 2012 comment referring to the 2009 decision to award the Prize to Barack Obama, the World Socialist Web Site stated that:

The awarding of the prize to Obama three years ago was particularly bizarre. He had been in office for just nine months and had seamlessly continued the war-mongering policies of his predecessor. Comments at the time described the prize as a “symbolic boost” and “encouragement” for Obama to depart from the course of George W. Bush. In reality, the committee presented Obama with a carte blanche. It signaled that the commander in chief of the most powerful military machine in the world had the support of liberal European public opinion to do what he liked.

This has since been confirmed. Obama has continued the policies of his predecessor. Guantanamo remains open. The president uses drones to assassinate opponents of US imperialism. He has intensified the war in Afghanistan, authored a new war against Libya, and is preparing military intervention in Syria and war against Iran—with the support of virtually all of those who criticised the war policies of the Bush administration.

The gist of this statement could apply equally to Aung San Suu Kyi, who now openly defends mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Burma, a country with a history of ethnic violence and military repression similar to that of Ethiopia, or Ahmed himself. Given Ethiopia’s history of brutal monarchies, dictatorships, war and civil unrest, it is no surprise that many Ethiopians have reacted positively to the chance to reunite with family in Eritrea and other limited reforms. However, Ahmed’s image as a reformer is belied by his antidemocratic purge of the government, gradual re-imposition of internet blackouts and stoking of ethnic tensions, especially against Tigrays. Ethiopian workers must understand the decision to award him the Nobel Peace Prize as the grave warning that it is.

Croatia: Right-wing Social Democrat wins first round of presidential elections

Markus Salzmann

The first round of the presidential election in the newest EU member state Croatia was won by the Zoran Milanović, the Social Democratic candidate (SDP). There will now be a run-off vote on January 5, in which Milanović will compete against the right-wing incumbent Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović from the governing party HDZ.

Milanović received about 30 percent of the votes, while Grabar-Kitarović received about 27 percent. The non-party right-wing extremist Miroslav Škoro won 24 percent of the vote and was supported by various nationalist and openly fascist parties. All other candidates, who mostly represented regional or other small parties, lay far behind and played no role.

Although the president’s duties are essentially ceremonial, a defeat for the HDZ would weaken it considerably in the run up to the parliamentary elections next year. Moreover, Croatia will take over the presidency of the European Union from January 1, 2020 and also aims to join the eurozone.

All candidates are deeply hated and discredited among broad sections of the population. Accordingly, turnout in the elections was barely 39 percent.

Grabar-Kitarović’s HDZ forms the government in Zagreb, which under Prime Minister Andrej Plenković stands for a ruthless right-wing course. Brutal “push-backs,” i.e., illegal deportations, across the border to Bosnia-Herzegovina, are unofficially ordered by the government. At home, the government is constantly harassing refugees and foreigners. In recent months, tensions with Serbia have again increased.

In order to meet the demands of the EU and IMF, the HDZ is implementing anti-social reforms. This year, a pension “reform” was passed, labour laws tightened, and further social cuts implemented. At the same time, the government is massively increasing military spending. Currently, 6.7 billion kuna (€900 million) are being spent on the military; the budget is to be increased by 40 percent by 2024. Other NATO demands include the modernisation of equipment.

Most recently, the government, in cooperation with the courts, attacked workers’ basic democratic rights. For example, a strike by road workers was banned. Last year, a strike at Croatia Airlines was banned on the grounds that it would damage the company.

Grabar-Kitarović is now vying for the votes of Škoro and the extreme right in the run-off vote. The folk musician and businessman Škoro was himself a member of parliament for the HDZ for a long time. Like other former HDZ politicians, he came into conflict with the party leadership over the move to join the EU. Meanwhile, he is active in fascist circles that supported his candidacy. Among other things, Škoro has called for soldiers to be stationed at the border to keep immigrants out and to further intensify the already inhumane border policy. He also spoke out in favour of pardoning convicted war criminals.

The acting president deliberately held her final rally in the city of Vukovar, in the east of the country. She is being glorified by Croatian nationalists as a symbol of Serbian atrocities for the siege by Serbian soldiers during fighting in the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. This alone was a clear signal to the extreme right around Škoro.

The HDZ itself is the product of aggressive Croatian nationalism. The party was founded in 1989 under Franjo Tudjmann, who only a few years later took the country into a bloody civil war and, as president and army supreme commander, was personally responsible for the expulsion of 400,000 Serbs from Croatia. Although the HDZ adopted an EU-friendly course, to serve the interests of the narrow upper class, the nationalist forces always set the tone.

The fact that Milanović received the most votes has nothing to do with broad popular support. From 2011 to 2016, the former diplomat headed a social democratic government, which took the country into the EU in 2013. Before that, the social democrats and HDZ had pushed through brutal cuts and privatisation measures fuelling unemployment and social misery.

During this period, the government undertook harsh actions against refugees on the Balkan route. Milanović had the border sealed off and deported refugees to Hungary, knowing full well that the right-wing Orban government had set up concentration camps in the border area. After the election defeat in 2016, Milanović campaigned for the nationalist Kosovar president Edi Rama, among others.

During the election campaign, Milanović promised “normality,” trying to present himself as a moderate candidate who stood against nationalism. Croatia must finally put behind it the war against Serbia, which brought death and devastation to the country from 1991 to 1995, but also independence, he said.

In fact, Milanović stands for the same reactionary nationalist politics as the HDZ. In 2015, he described Serbs as “barbarians” and declared Croatia was “older and wiser.” Before the last parliamentary elections, he held a big military parade in Zagreb to mark the anniversary of the reconquest of Serbian Krajina.

No matter which candidate wins the run-off election in early January, they will speak for the reactionary social and political interests of a ruling elite which, as in other countries, is reacting to the growth of class struggle with a sharp turn to the right.

For a long time, the population has expressed growing rejection of all the establishment parties responsible for the social and political catastrophe. Up to the beginning of December, teachers had been on strike for 36 days and 20,000 people demonstrated in Zagreb. Almost all schools remained closed, and many students joined the protests. It was the biggest strike since the country’s independence almost 30 years ago. Teachers used it to protest against low wages and unsustainable working conditions.

Only after extensive government efforts, with the help of the trade unions, could the strike be stifled. The agreement reached provides for a wage increase of about 6 percent over two years. This will only further consolidate low wages and will not change the bad working conditions and abysmal provision of equipment in schools.

The trade unions, working closely with various party cliques, presented this betrayal as a victory. “We have made a good compromise, which enabled us to achieve what we wanted from the beginning,” said Branimir Mihalinec, head of the teachers’ union NSZSSH.

Premier Plenković was also satisfied with the result. Under no circumstances should the strike continue or be extended, he said, as protests and work stoppages are becoming increasingly frequent in other companies and sectors. Since October, for example, there have also been strikes at the industrial company Djuro Djakovic. The manufacturer of locomotives, freight cars, tanks and other military and construction vehicles has been in financial difficulties for some time.

UK Johnson government launches anti-Gypsy/Traveller/Roma measures

Paul Bond

Among the repressive legislation in the Queen’s Speech of Boris Johnson’s Conservative government are racist measures targeting Gypsy, Roma and Traveler (GRT) communities.

The proposals for the Police Powers and Protections Bill include: “Potential measures to criminalise the act of trespassing when setting up an unauthorised encampment in England and Wales, and the introduction of new police powers to arrest and seize the property and vehicles of trespassers who set up unauthorised encampments.”

At present unauthorised encampments are a matter of civil rather than criminal law. The change is aimed at faster dispersal. The pro-Tory Daily Mail enthused that it “could give police more power to break [encampments] up instead of local residents having to wait for councils to take action.”

Justifying the proposals, Johnson’s office noted that there were 1,098 caravans on unauthorised camps in England and Wales in July 2019, 728 of them “on land without the permission of the landowner.”

This only points to a lack of social provision of adequate transit sites and stopping places—a critical problem for the recognised ethnic GRT groups in Britain. The Criminal Justice Act 1994, introduced by John Major’s Conservative government, repealed the duty of local authorities to provide official sites.

Unlike most European populations of Roma and Sinti, many of Britain’s 63,000 Gypsies, Roma and Travelers still pursue some itinerant life. The proposals would enforce a solution to this question by criminalisation and police repression.

Without enough authorised encampments, the proposal to allow police to seize Travelers’ caravans—their homes—and destroy their property would effectively criminalise the existence of GRT communities. One Gypsy woman, who was too afraid to give her name, told Foreign Policy magazine, “Every single thing of value, financial or emotional,” is in her caravan. Another called it “a legal pogrom.”

Speaking ahead of the election, a member of the GRT community told the Canary, “The violence of me and my family being forcibly destroyed should scare all reasonable people. It’s ethnic cleansing.”

Anti-Gypsy discrimination has long been a component of right-wing populism. The current proposals were contained in the Tory election manifesto, which made the typical fascistic appeal for the legislation “to protect our communities.”

Alongside making “intentional trespass a criminal offence,” the manifesto also pledged to give councils “greater powers within the planning system” aimed at removing groups from the area altogether.

The Welsh Conservative Manifesto went further, promising not just to “tackle unauthorised camps,” but that police would have “more power to break up travelers’ camps” generally.

Michael Gove’s campaign material referred to “illegal traveler incursions.”

The proposal to criminalise trespass and give the police greater powers to seize property and possessions was first floated by Home Secretary Priti Patel early in November. Her consultation outlined the proposals on criminalising trespass and making it illegal to stop alongside or on a road. It also outlined proposals that the police could force Travelers to move to a transit site in a different county, rather than locally, as now. It also proposed banning Travelers from the local authority area for one year rather than the current three months, which would serve to cut off access to homelessness support.

Patel resorted to familiar racist tropes, referring to “reports of damage to property, noise, abuse and littering.” The charity Friends, Families and Travelers (FFT) noted that this focused on “the behavior of a minority, yet tar[s] all Gypsies and Travelers with the same brush.” If this were truly Patel’s concern, FFT pointed out, there is already ample legislation to tackle it. Two-thirds of police forces contacted by FFT said that lack of adequate site provision was the real issue.

Patel’s proposal to make it a criminal offence for Travelers to stop anywhere without prior permission clearly criminalises a whole ethnic group. She sought to give police power to seize the vehicle of “anyone whom they suspect to be trespassing on land with the purpose of residing on it.” She said she wanted to “test the appetite to go further” than her predecessor Sajid Javid’s proposal to “lower the criteria… for the police to be able to direct people away from unauthorised sites.” The police would be authorised to intervene in the presence of two vehicles rather than six, as now.

In 2011, Patel herself acknowledged, “There are not enough authorised sites. If travelers had authorised sites they wouldn’t need illegal sites.”

FFT, commenting on Patel’s consultation, explained, “Criminalisation of trespass would not make unauthorised encampments and nomadic Gypsies and Travelers disappear; it will however compound the stark inequalities experienced by Gypsies and Travelers and raise serious questions about compatibility with human rights protections.”

A recent spate of council injunctions have aimed at preventing Travelers from stopping on public land. Travelers have still been able to challenge this successfully in the courts, although that would change under these proposals.

In May, Bromley council in south London was refused a borough-wide injunction against encampment on 171 tracts of land. Marc Willers QC, who successfully contested the injunction on behalf of the charity London Gypsies and Travelers, said seeking an injunction against “persons unknown” rather than specific individuals was discriminatory and unfairly demonised all Gypsies and Travelers. He reiterated that “the way to reduce the number of unauthorised encampments is to make adequate site provision for Gypsies and Travelers rather than subject them to a continual cycle of forcible evictions which consigns them and their children to a life of misery and deprivation.”

According to the government, money is available to councils to develop authorised sites, from the £9 billion Affordable Homes Programme. No councils have done so since that programme began in 2016. The government has also made £2 million specifically available to help councils “crack down” on unauthorised encampments, indicating where their true priorities lie.

Demonisation of Travelers and Gypsies has resulted in a spate of racist violence and attacks. Caravans were set alight on Traveler sites in Leicestershire and Somerset this year. Recent council discussions in Lincolnshire have been accompanied by threats to firebomb any new site.

Anti-Gypsy racism is endemic within the Tory party. Last year, one council chief in the West Midlands, Mike Bird, called Travelers “parasites” who cause “misery and mayhem.” In 2014, Berkshire Councillor Alan Mellins was suspended after saying that Travelers refusing eviction should be “executed.”

Three years ago, Tory MP Gary Streeter called for Travelers not to be classed as a vulnerable ethnic minority. The press have often evaded accusations of racism by not capitalising Gypsy or Traveler, claiming they are not racial terms. Streeter called Travelers “intruders,” likening them to Genghis Khan.

This year, Sir Paul Beresford MP called Travelers coming into his constituency “a disease.” During the election campaign, the successful Crewe and Nantwich candidate Keiran Mullan led campaigns against Gypsies stopping in a park in Nantwich.

Last year Andrew Selous MP called for caravan sites to be converted to “settled accommodation.” Traveler groups described his bill as an attempt at “forced assimilation.”

Anti-Gypsy racism and legislation must be opposed. They are the thin end of a wedge of more general repressive measures confronting every layer of the working class.

This is underscored by the overlap with the anti-Semitism witch-hunt launched against Labour under Jeremy Corbyn seeking to defame and criminalise anti-Zionist opponents of Israel’s repression of the Palestinians.

In 2007, Blairite Labour MP John—made Baron Mann of Holbeck Moor and the government’s “anti-Semitism Tsar” for services rendered—produced an “anti-social behaviour handbook” for his constituency. This featured a section on Travelers with the bold red headline, “The Police have powers to remove any gypsies or travelers.”

A legal expert on Traveler law and trespass told Travelers’ Times that the legal advice in the booklet was wrong. A Gypsy constituent referred the publication to police, who investigated it as a potential “hate incident.” Mann told police it was no longer in print—around 20,000 were distributed—and police advised him against singling out any community in the event of future reprints.

Mann’s response was to write to his constituent, accusing him of “defamatory comments.”

In 2016, Mann was chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Anti-Semitism, which had been invited to a seminar to discuss racism against Gypsies and Travelers. When other organising groups learned of Mann’s booklet they raised questions about it. The APPG pulled out of the seminar without further explanation.

More than half a million Gypsies were murdered during the Holocaust.

Eric Pickles, similarly, was appointed UK Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues by then Tory prime minister, David Cameron in 2015. That year the High Court found he had discriminated against Gypsies and Travelers in the planning process while Secretary of State for Local Government.

Billionaires’ wealth surged in 2019

Barry Grey

As the second decade of the 21st century comes to a close, its most salient feature—the plundering of humanity by a global financial oligarchy—continues unabated.

Amidst trade war and the growth of militarism and authoritarianism on the one side, and an eruption of international strikes and protests by the working class against social inequality on the other, the stock market is hitting record highs and the fortunes of the world’s billionaires are continuing to surge.

New apartment buildings are under construction overlooking Central Park, Tuesday, April 17, 2018, in New York. (AP Photo - Mark Lennihan)

On Friday, one day after all three major US stock indexes set new records, Bloomberg issued its end-of-year survey of the world’s 500 richest people. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index reported that the oligarchs’ fortunes increased by a combined total of $1.2 trillion, a 25 percent rise over 2018. Their collective net worth now comes to $5.9 trillion.

To place this figure in some perspective, these 500 individuals control more wealth than the gross domestic product of the United States at the end of the third quarter of 2019, which was $5.4 trillion.

The year’s biggest gains went to France’s Bernard Arnault, who added $36.5 billion to his fortune, bringing it above the rarified $100 billion level to $105 billion. He knocked speculator Warren Buffett, at $89.3 billion, down to fourth place. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos lost nearly $9 billion due to a divorce settlement, but maintained the top position, with a net worth of $116 billion. Microsoft founder Bill Gates gained $22.7 billion for the year and held on to second place at $113 billion.

The 172 American billionaires on the Bloomberg list added $500 billion, with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recording the year’s biggest US gain at $27.3 billion, placing him in fifth place worldwide with a net worth of $79.3 billion.

It is difficult to comprehend the true significance of such stratospheric sums. In his 2016 book Global Inequality, economist Branko Milanovic wrote:

A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience of practically everyone on earth that the very quantity it implies is not easily understood… Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the second case.

The vast redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top of society is the outcome of a decades-long process, which was accelerated following the 2008 Wall Street crash. It is not the result of impersonal and simply self-activating processes. Rather, the policies of capitalist governments and parties around the world, nominally “left” as well as right, have been dedicated to the ever greater impoverishment of the working class and enrichment of the ruling elite.

In the US, the top one percent has captured all of the increase in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.

The main mechanism for this transfer of wealth has been the stock market, and the policies of the US Federal Reserve and central banks internationally have been geared to providing cheap money to drive up stock prices. The cost of this massive subsidy to the financial markets and the oligarchs has been paid by the working class, in the form of social cuts, mass layoffs, the destruction of pensions and health benefits, and the replacement of relatively secure and decent-paying jobs with part-time, temporary and contingent “gig” positions.

Since Trump was inaugurated in January of 2017, pledging to slash corporate taxes, lift regulations on big business and dramatically increase the military budget, the Dow has surged by nearly 19,000 points. This year, Trump and the financial markets applied massive pressure on the Fed to reverse its efforts to “normalize” interest rates. The Fed complied. It carried out three rate cuts and repeatedly assured the markets it had no plans to raise rates in 2020.

This windfall for the banks and hedge funds was supported by the Democrats no less than the Republicans. In fact, Trump’s economic policy has been given de facto support by the Democratic Party all down the line—from his tax cuts for corporations and the rich to his attack on virtually all regulations on business. Even in the midst of impeachment—carried out entirely on the grounds of “national security” and Trump’s supposed “softness” toward Russia—the Democrats have voted by wide margins for Trump’s budget, his anti-Chinese US-Mexico-Canada trade pact and his record $738 billion Pentagon war budget.

This has included giving Trump all the money he wants to build his border wall and carry out the mass incarceration and persecution of immigrants.

Trump’s pro-corporate policies are an extension and expansion of those pursued by the Obama administration. It allocated trillions in tax-payer money to bail out the banks and flooded the financial markets with cheap credit, driving up stock prices, while imposing a 50 percent across-the-board cut in pay for newly hired autoworkers in its bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. Obama oversaw the closure of thousands of schools and the layoff of hundreds of thousands of teachers, and enacted austerity budgets that slashed social programs.

Two of those running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are billionaires—Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. The latter, with a net worth of $56 billion, is the ninth richest person in the US. He entered the race as the spokesman for oligarchs outraged over talk from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren of token tax increases on the super-rich.

The oligarchs are not frightened by Sanders and Warren—two longstanding defenders of the American ruling class, who seek to mask their subservience to capital with talk of making the oligarchs pay “their fair share”—a euphemism for defending their right to pillage the population. They are frightened by the growth of mass opposition to capitalism that finds a distorted expression in support for the phony “progressives” in the Democratic fold.

Between them, Bloomberg and Steyer have already spent $200 million of their own money in an effort to buy the election outright.

The impact of the policy of social plunder is seen in the deepening of a malignant social crisis in country after country. In the US, society is marching backwards, as the crying need for schools, hospitals, affordable housing, pensions, the rebuilding of decrepit roads, bridges, transportation, flood control, water and sewage, fire control and electricity grids is met with the official response: “There is no money.”

The result? Three straight years of declining life expectancy, record addiction and suicide rates, devastating wild fires and floods, electricity cut-offs by profiteering utility companies. And a climate crisis that cannot be addressed within the framework of a system dominated by a money-mad plutocracy.

Not a single serious social problem can be addressed under conditions where the ruling elite—through its bribed parties and politicians, aided by its pro-capitalist trade unions and backed up by its courts, police and troops—diverts resources from society to the accumulation of ever more luxurious yachts, mansions, private islands and personal jets.

Where social reform is impossible, social revolution is inevitable. The solution to the impasse is to be found in the growth of the class struggle. The movement of workers and youth all over the world—from mass strikes in France to strikes by autoworkers and teachers in the US, protests in Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, strikes and mass demonstrations in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and India—reveals the social force that can and will put an end to capitalism.

The watchword must be—in opposition to the Corbyns, the Sanders, the Tsiprases and their pseudo-left promoters—“Expropriate the super-rich!” This is the starting point for the replacement of capitalist private ownership of production with social ownership and international planning—that is, world socialist revolution.

It’s Not Capitalism that’s Driving Ecocide; it’s Civilization

Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

The fact that human beings are causing great damage to life on the planet is not up for debate. Even if one doesn’t buy anthropogenic climate change, it’s all too clear that we’re making a big mess with pesticides, air pollution, plastic in the oceans, nuclear waste, genetic modification, top soil loss, aquifer depletion, urban sprawl, wildlife extinctions, and more.

There’s a word for our collective behavior: ecocide.

We live under the reign of capitalism, so it’s easy to pin the blame there. Some have gone so far as to describe climate change as “capitalogenic” as opposed to “anthropogenic” or to suggest renaming the “Anthropocene” era as the “Capitalocene.”

But though the evils of capitalism are truly terrible, the original and underlying perpetrator of ecocide is civilization, which predates capitalism by millennia. Whereas capitalism goes back to the 16th century (give or take), civilization arose with the ramping up of the agricultural revolution, 8,000-10,000 years ago. One could say that yes, capitalism is indeed problematic but it isn’t the problem.

Why does the distinction matter?

Because things are degrading fast, at an apparently increasing rate and we don’t have time to waste on solutions that won’t work. We must focus on primary causes to the greatest degree we can.

* * *

Many well-meaning and intelligent people who recognize both our ecological crisis and the sins of capitalism want to switch to socialism. But it’s not so simple. Pumping oil out of the ground is an ecological disaster whether the people doing it are the Bush family in Texas or Bolivarian revolutionaries in Venezuela. There’s no difference to the habitat that’s destroyed or the pollution that’s generated.

Under a socialist model, some humans might do better, it’s true. But settling for that is a grievous act of human supremacy. “We have to take care of ourselves first,” it will be said. “Then we can take care of the planet.”

The idea that environmental destruction can be left out of the equation is a perverse invention of contemporary capitalism, where such costs are referred to as “externalities.” While such assumptions remain unquestioned, ecocide will continue unabated.

Some socialists insist that Marxism is inherently environmentalist and they are happy to provide lists of books and articles to prove their point. (In my review of some of this literature, the best I saw was: “Marx and Engels on the Sustainable Society.”) But when I read most of this stuff, I’m reminded of the time I used a staple gun to pound in a nail, or a steak knife to cut a piece of wood, or a shovel with a broken handle to dig a hole. It worked, kind of. Well no, not really. It would have taken a lot less effort and a lot less time if I’d have just done it right to start with. With Marxism and environmentalism, there are too many contradictions to reconcile. Why not start somewhere that’s about the earth first?

Ah, Earth First! Now we’re talking. One of their rallying cries is, “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth!” and that rings my bell a helluva lot harder than the tepid talk of eco-socialism. The call for “no compromise” goes right to the point and flies in the face of the notion of human supremacy.

* * *

At one time in human history, no defense of Mother Nature was needed because there was no attack on her. We were merely another creature on the planet, living in dynamic equilibrium with all the others. We can debate about exactly when that started changing, but a clear and dramatic shift occurred with the Agricultural Revolution, which was underway by 11,500 years ago, at the end of the last period of glaciation. With this transformation, people in the Near East established cities, property, money, bookkeeping and written law. Civilization, in other words.

Patriarchy also dates from this time, and the significance of its role can hardly be over-stated. For it was not just that human females were violently subjugated by human males; at a cultural level, those qualities considered feminine were suppressed by those considered masculine, and this radically altered our relationship to Mother Nature. We traded in cooperation for domination, and embarked on our current course of ecocide. Ice cores show that we were already adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere through deforestation eight thousand years ago and methane with rice cultivation by five thousand years ago.

Patriarchy both enabled civilization—by putting nature under the yoke (literally)—and was also institutionalized by it—through the new structures of government and religion. For example, a law in Mesopotamia in 2500 BC stated that if a wife disagreed with her husband, he was allowed to smash her teeth in with a brick. 

Slavery was another of civilization’s innovations, and it must be pointed out that in Mesopotamian records the word for “female slave” appears earlier in time than the word for “male slave.” 

Patriarchy precedes “class” and is deeper and deadlier. It applies not just to humans and to human behaviors but to the relationship of humans to the planet. So, in the household, a husband rules his wife; in the culture, authority crushes collaboration; and at large, nature is reduced to “resources.” This last heresy was enshrined in the book of Genesis, where “man” is given “dominion” over “every living thing.” This idea has proven very persistent and is not limited to the religious; most of civilization’s secular and intellectual circles believe in it, if often blindly.

This is how civilization works. Everything in the world, both animate and inanimate, is reduced to a set of things to be divvied up an used. Capitalism is a particularly toxic mode, for sure, but there is no way to do civilization right. Just as capitalism cannot be reformed and must be dismantled, so too must civilization. Our domination of nature cannot continue under any flag or philosophy.

* * *

How do we go about changing?

I’m the wrong person to ask, and so is everybody else who is a civilized human. You don’t ask the addict how to quit drugs. They don’t know. If they did, they wouldn’t be using.

It’s typical of civilization’s hubris to assume that we are the ones who should decide. Nope! It’s time to put aside the old ideas and the dusty books and go outside. We must ask our family members who are still clean what to do. (There’s still a few left!) And then we need to do it.

Now.

The Looming U.S. Water Crisis

Andreea Sterea

According to the World Economic Forum, the global water crisis is the fourth major threat of our civilization. In fact, studies warn that two-thirds of the global population could be living in water-stressed countries by 2025 — just a few short years away.

When we think about water scarcity, many Americans may immediately call to mind countries in Africa, the Middle East, or Asia. But Europe and North America are also facing unprecedented water shortage issues — and the United States stands out of the crowd.

One study published in 2019 in the journal Earth’s Future highlights the fact that states like New Mexico, California, Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska will have to make significant changes to counter severe upcoming water shortage problems.

The study also highlights some issues we all need to take into consideration — one of the most critical being the safety of U.S. water.

One would think that the most powerful country in the world would enjoy clean tap water every day. Yet thanks to inequality and infrastructure decay, millions of Americans drink unsafe tap water from systems that violate health standards — in the same vein of the ongoing violations occurring in Flint, Michigan. Investigative journalists found that more than 30 cities botched water quality testing, following the same flawed procedures that led to criminal charges against government employees in Flint.

Ordinary Americans seem to realize this. A 2017 Gallup poll found that 63 percent of Americans worry a great deal about the pollution of drinking water, while 57 percent worry a great deal about pollution of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.

There’s no use hiding it: America is going through a water crisis, and we’re going to face even more dire times if it doesn’t begin to change soon.

How bad are things, anyway?

While the United States is not yet among the world’s most at-risk countries in terms of water scarcity —  certainly not comparable with the situation in Uganda, India, Pakistan, or Qatar for instance — people and authorities cannot ignore the facts anymore.

According to the Water Research Institute, New Mexico faces the most dire situation of any U.S. state, with its water risk rating as “extremely high.” Its rankings put New Mexico on par with the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East and Eritrea in Africa.

California, a state that has its fair share of water problems, comes next. The drought that began sweeping across the U.S. in the 2010s is still causing huge problems, from California on up to southeast Alaska’s rainforest.

What is even more concerning is that U.S. groundwater is facing depletion, with industries and people digging ever deeper for water that used to come easy.

Water shortages occur when the demand outpaces the supply. According to the Earth’s Future study mentioned above, the U.S. population could grow to over 500 million people by 2100. Naturally, population growth is a predictor of water demand growth.

As supply is concerned, however, things don’t look bright. Besides the current concerns related to water pollution and the authorities’ failure to keep water safe, water supplies will undergo significant variations in response to climate change. Out of the 204 water basins supplying most of the country with fresh water, as many as 96 could fail to meet monthly demand starting in 2071.

Fifty-plus years may sound like a reasonable amount of time to come up with a solution. The problem is we don’t have nearly that long. According to the United Nations report published last year, the infamous 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature rise above pre-industrial levels will occur sometime between 2030 and 2052 if we fail to stop the current rate of global warming.

Even if President Trump does not believe in this warming, scientists do. The correlation is simple to understand: Alongside increased demand from a growing population, we’re likely to see less rainfall and significant evaporation caused by global warming.

The first sector affected by this perfect storm is going to be agriculture. Since agriculture often accounts for roughly 75 percent of the annual consumption of basin water in the United States, those shortages will create severe challenges — including food insecurity.

The climate is changing. Can our politics?

However, if water scarcity and food insecurity will take another 50 years, drinking water safety cannot wait any longer.

It took the Flint water crisis for the U.S. to open their eyes and realize that the “American Dream” shakes on its feet because the infrastructure cannot support it for much longer. The problem in Flint, Michigan, is still unsolved, even after all these years. A mix of anti-democratic tendencies, negligence, racism, and issues ranging from incompetence to manslaughter caused the Flint crisis. Solving it — and others like it — is going to take a significant movement.

According to the American Water Works Association, the country needs to make massive investments in water infrastructure over the coming decades. But such repairs and replacements would cost at least $1 trillion. And when we talk about money, we also talk about politics. For the first time this year, moderators devoted about 12 minutes to tackle climate and water issues during a single presidential debate. Still, most media outlets seem to ignore the crisis.

And while the EPA says that water problems take priority over even climate change, the agency does little to tackle the problem. Earlier this year in Iowa, for example, private wells used for drinking water faced extensive contamination due to agricultural practices. The EPA, however, actually put a halt on the regulation of ion nitrate fertilizer, one of the substances endangering the 300,000 private wells in the state.

This story is just one of many, unfortunately. Poorly protected or downright disregarded communities across the country— like the poor, small town of Denmark, South Carolina, whose mayor actually tried to prevent scientists from testing the town’s bizarre smelling, off-color water — are having to fight hard to keep their right to clean, safe water.

Meanwhile, according to the Environmental Working Group, over 1,000 locations in 49 states have confirmed cases of contamination by highly toxic fluorinated compounds known as PFAS. And the Trump administration is pushing ever harder to dismantle protections like the Waters of the U.S. rule — an effort exports have called “the biggest attack on clean water in our generation.”

Fortunately, the U.S. water crisis hasn’t reached the levels seen in more arid regions of the world. But it is a crisis nonetheless — spreading silently and deadly, accelerated by a broken or corrupt political system.

We have a long way ahead of us finding the right political and economic framework to tackle climate change, infrastructure rehabilitation, well water regulations, water contamination, agriculture challenges, and more — not to mention climate justice for all. Speaking truth to power is the first step. But it needs to be all of us, and it needs to be now.

Modi Has Awakened a Sleeping Giant

Aijaz Zaka Syed

Indians are marching in millions to assert that they remain a united nation and are not prepared to be divided all over again as Hindus and Muslims

I have never felt so proud of my country in a long, long time. Led mostly by students and youth, Indians are marching in their millions across the length and breadth of the country to assert that India belongs to Muslims, as much as it does to anyone else.

Millions and millions of students from schools, colleges and university campuses as well as ordinary people across India have come out on the streets in solidarity with the students of Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University. They are not just protesting against the brutal, unprecedented crackdown unleashed on the students of the two central universities earlier this week, they are also demonstrating against Narendra Modi’s new brazenly fascist and Islamophobic Citizenship law as well as the relentless targeting of Muslims under this order over the past few years.

The nationwide protests and demonstrations that rocked the country on Thursday, December 19, the Martyrs Day by the way, bringing out people on to the streets in every village and city of the country have not been seen in India in a long, long time — perhaps not since the 1974 Emergency. The protests see every section of society united in their opposition to the highhanded actions of the BJP government. As Yogendra Yadav put it, these protests are no longer about one religion or region.

It goes without saying that the majority of these students and protesters happens to be Hindu, naturally reflecting the demographic profile of the country. And they have firmly and resolutely rejected this government’s attempts to do to India’s 200 million Muslims what Hitler’s Nazis did in Germany to the Jewish minority. That is, politically isolate, disenfranchise and disempower the already marginalised Muslims, turning them into non-citizens, like Myanmar’s Rohingya, or worse, like the persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany.

After the stifling darkness and oppression of the past six years, Indians appear to be finally waking up to say enough is enough. They have been resisting and defying the tyranny of the BJP and its deadly duo.

In its hubris and sheer arrogance of power, the BJP has ended up uniting this country, reminding it of the lofty ideals and values that inspired the founding fathers of the nation and their hard-won freedom.

Modi and Shah have managed to awaken a sleeping giant of a nation, not to mention the long docile and voiceless Indian Muslims who have silently suffered over the past few years, taking every injustice and atrocity in their stride.

The BJP managed to ram through the Citizenship Amendment Bill — just as it had rammed through the Triple Talaq Bill, the dismemberment of Jammu and Kashmir — notwithstanding the fact that it does not have enough numbers in the upper house of Parliament. This was chiefly because of the coercive tactics of Modi and Shah and shameful disunity in the opposition ranks.

President Kovind dutifully signed on the dotted line, approving the legislation that openly discriminates against Muslims and strikes at the very heart of India’s secular and liberal Constitution. It appeared as if nothing stood in the way of the BJP’s agenda to turn the Gandhian democracy into a Hindu Rashtra.

Even though people in the Northeast began taking to streets in their thousands against the proposed law, viewing it as an existential threat, even as the bill was being debated in Parliament, for the rest of the country it had been business as usual.

Until our youthful heroes from Jamia Millia and Aligarh decided to rise up in defiance of this black law, provoking the now infamous and unimaginably cruel response from the thugs in uniform who report to Amit Shah.

From raining lathis and firing bullets on peacefully protesting students to molesting girls and destroying Jamia’s historical library, the Delhi Police did everything possible to terrorise and intimidate students.

Many of them sustained serious injuries and broken limbs. Across the world, students are viewed as a nation’s future. Their voices are heard by powers that be with the seriousness that they deserve.

Under this order though, everything is viewed through the twisted prism of fallacies that it has invented for itself. The Dear Leader chooses to see those protesting against the divisive policies and agenda of his government not as Indians but by the clothes they wear. In doing so, he is once again doing what the BJP does best – trying to divide this country by pitting Hindus and Muslims against each other.

The Home Minister is hardly joking when he says that by bringing in the Citizenship law and, its next logical stage, the NRC, which would cleanse India of “termites” (read Muslims) in his own words, the BJP is “correcting the historic wrongs of Partition.”

This is the real agenda of the BJP and its Parivar: 72 years after the catastrophe of Partition, divide the Hindus and Muslims all over again in the name of religion. The CAA-NRC is nothing but yet another shameless attempt to fracture this country along religious lines, portraying the BJP as the sole guardian of the Hindus.

Many of us including this writer had been under the impression that the Parivar has nearly succeeded in this mission. But, no, we couldn’t have been more wrong. The spontaneous protests in the length and breadth of this country against the Jamia and AMU crackdown and the whole injustice of the CAA and NRC prove that all is not lost. There is still hope for India.

The majority of this nation remains steadfast in its belief in the secular and plural ethos that we all inherited. It is beginning to see through the dangerous game that the BJP has been playing to perpetuate itself in power at the cost of the nation and its future and stability.

As Pavan Verma, who has revolted against his party and its president Nitish Kumar’s stand on the CAA, put it, ordinary Hindus in whose name the Parivar has been waging this relentless war on the Idea of India want no part of this perpetual strife created by the BJP. They want peace and stability and simply want to get on with their lives. This is what all Indians except the Parivar of course want. And they have clearly concluded that it is time to speak up. Enough of this regime’s perpetual fighting of phantoms at the cost of real challenges like a floundering economy and deepening unemployment crisis.

Enough of peddling hate and bigotry against minorities, Dalits and women. Enough of lynchings and rapes. Enough of the reign of terror that has brought so much shame and infamy to India. Newspapers around the world have been reporting on their front pages how the BJP is destroying the world’s largest democracy by ramming through its sectarian agenda.

The salutary act of defiance by the students of Jamia Millia, a university that was born out of India’s freedom struggle and founded by Maulana Mohammed Ali Johar, and AMU, has clearly set off a revolution, sparking a million mutinies throughout the land.

Young girls like Ayesha Renna and Ladeeda Farzana, the Jamia students who valiantly took on the might of the Orwellian state, have overnight become heroes or ‘sheroes’, as they are being called by the media, of a nation that desperately wants to return to its original noble self and its all-embracing spirit.

By rising in revolt in solidarity with JNU and AMU students, Indians have demonstrated that they remain a united nation and are not prepared to be divided as Hindus and Muslims all over again.