29 Nov 2023

Drastically rising rents fuel growing homelessness in Germany

Tino Jacobson & Markus Salzmann


Rising rents across the country mean the number of homeless people in Germany is also increasing dramatically.

Homeless people under a bridge in the centre of Berlin

According to a press release from the Federal Association for Assistance to the Homeless (BAGW) on November 7, around 607,000 people were homeless in Germany in 2022. Of these, 50,000 were permanently without a roof over their heads. This amounts to an increase of 58.5 percent over the previous year, when 383,000 people were homeless.

The picture is even clearer when you look at the figures as of the reporting date. On June 30, 2022, BAGW counted 447,000 homeless people. The figure was 268,000 exactly one year earlier. That is a gigantic increase of 67 percent. It is important to bear in mind that there are a high number of unreported cases and that the actual figures are far higher.

Foreigners and refugees are particularly badly affected by homelessness. The increase in homeless people with a German passport is 5 percent. In contrast, the number of homeless without German citizenship rose by 118 percent. Twenty-nine percent of people who were recorded as homeless on June 30, 2022 were German. Accordingly, the proportion of non-Germans is 71 percent. Just over one-quarter (26 percent) of the homeless are children and young people.

The number of homeless refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq in particular has skyrocketed. These countries have been reduced to rubble by the NATO wars since the collapse of the Soviet Union. People from Ukraine are also disproportionately affected. There, the leading NATO states and Germany have been constantly intensifying the proxy war against Russia, forcing more and more Ukrainians to flee.

In addition to the flight from war zones, the sharp increase in homelessness is due to rising rents and exploding inflation. According to data from the Documentation System on Homelessness (DzW), 57 percent of homeless Germans lost their dwelling due to a notice to quit, and 21 percent due to rent and energy debts. Twenty percent became homeless due to conflicts in their living environment and 16 percent lost their home due to separation or divorce.

Werena Rosenke, BAGW managing director, commented on the dramatic development as follows: “Inflation, increased costs and rising rents are a burden on low-income households in Germany. This leads to (energy) poverty, rent debts and loss of housing. Particularly vulnerable groups are low-income single-person households, single parents, and couples with many children. The lack of affordable housing is and remains the main reason for the housing shortage in Germany.”

At the same time, the number of social housing units has been falling for years. According to the BAGW, there were still around 1.8 million social housing units nationwide in 1989, whereas there are currently only 1.08 million. That is 40 percent fewer social housing units than almost 35 years ago.

The capital, Berlin, had around 115,000 social housing units in 2016. Seven years later, there are 93,000, and the trend continues to fall. Berlin’s state Department for Urban Development assumes that there will only be around 58,000 social housing units by 2028. This is a social disaster in the making. Around 10 times as many would be needed. Currently, 530,000 households in Berlin have a certificate of eligibility for housing, which—at least in theory—would allow them to obtain social housing.

In addition, all forecasts indicate that rents will continue to rise dramatically, making housing unaffordable for more and more households.

Due to the increased interest rates for building loans, many property companies have little interest in constructing new apartments in Germany. At the same time, existing housing, which is in short supply, is becoming increasingly expensive. According to information from the real estate service provider Savills, the six largest cities in Germany have for the first time recorded an average asking rent for new-build flats of over €20 per square metre. The French bank BNP Paribas, which is heavily involved in the German property market, recorded a rental explosion of 8 percent in the past six months compared to 2021, and even 12 percent in urban areas and for new builds.

Other forecasts paint an even gloomier picture for the future and warn of the social implications. “We are in a property recession the likes of which we haven’t seen for 45 years,” warns building contractor Dieter Becken. “Interest rates have jumped from 0.8 to almost 5 percent, construction prices have also increased dramatically, inflation is high and land is also scarce and expensive. In this combination and in this short space of time, this is unique.”

He added: “We are heading towards an affordable housing emergency. I see enormous socio-political risks because parts of the population simply can no longer find a roof over their heads.” Becken’s prediction: “Rents will rise significantly, very significantly. In new builds, €20 to €30 basic rent per square metre will become the norm.”

In September, the Swedish property company Heimstaden increased rents by more than 20 percent for around 6,500 of its 20,000 flats in Berlin. The rent increases were so high that most of them are even legally invalid, due to the so-called rent cap. A landlord is allowed to increase the rent by a maximum of 15 percent within three years.

Tenants cannot hope for support from the establishment parties. In fact, these parties all work closely with the property sharks and create the legal basis for them to enrich themselves at the expense of tenants. At the same time, the budget for housing is being cut further and further, as more flows into rearmament and boosting the powers of the state at home. The housing companies that are still publicly owned are also shamelessly increasing rents.

This is clearly evident in Berlin. Rents have exploded here more than in almost any other major city in recent years. After the vast majority of Berliners voted in favour of expropriating large housing companies in a referendum in 2021, the state executive—a coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Left Party—did everything it could to prevent this.

In the so-called Alliance for New Housing Construction and Affordable Housing, the Senate worked together with the property sharks to ensure that the profit interests of the corporations were not curtailed in any way. Since the change of state government at the beginning of the year, the grand coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and SPD has intensified its attacks on tenants.

Rents in state-owned flats are to be raised sharply over the next few years. After a year and a half in which rent increases were ruled out, in 2024 they will be allowed to rise again, by 2.9 percent per year. The Berlin Senate reached this agreement with the six state-owned housing associations. This means that rents are expected to have risen by 9 percent by the end of the legislative period alone.

In addition, the property companies will be allowed to charge €15 per square metre for first-time tenants. The last agreement still stipulated €11.50. In addition, an extra €2 per square metre can be passed on to tenants in the event of energy-efficient refurbishment. With his characteristic arrogance, Senator (state minister) for Urban Development Christian Gaebler (SPD) defended the planned rent increases, claiming these were “not an excessive burden.”

Heightened US-China tensions impact Taiwan’s presidential election campaign

Peter Symonds


Candidates for the presidential election in Taiwan on January 13 were finalised last Friday. The election has taken on global significance as the Biden administration, following on from Trump, has deliberately transformed the island into a dangerous flashpoint for conflict with China, even as it wages war against Russia in Ukraine and backs Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza.

Taiwan's Vice President Lai Ching-te delivers speech at press conference in Taipei, Taiwan, Wednesday, April 12, 2023. [AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying]

The current frontrunner for the presidency is William Lai Ching-te, the country’s vice-president and chairman of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). He took over as DPP chairman from the current president, Tsai Ing-wen, who is ineligible to stand as she has already served two four-year terms. Lai was selected as the DPP candidate in April.

Taiwan’s status is an explosive issue. The US and Western media commonly refer to Taiwan as “self-governing,” also noting that the island has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While true, Taiwan is only separate from China today because the US Navy prevented its takeover following the 1949 Chinese Revolution that forced the Kuomintang (KMT) to flee to Taiwan.

Both the KMT and the CCP claimed to be the legitimate ruler of all China. The US backed the brutal KMT military dictatorship on Taiwan, only ending its diplomatic recognition of Taipei in 1979 after reaching a quasi-alliance with Beijing against the Soviet Union. Central to the new US-China relationship was the One China policy under which Washington de facto recognised Beijing as the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan.

Over the past decade, however, successive US administrations have deliberately undermined the diplomatic protocols underpinning relations with China, which Washington regards as the chief threat to its global dominance. The Biden administration has boosted diplomatic and military ties with an island it formally regards as part of China, increased arms sales to Taiwan and carried out provocative naval operations through the sensitive Taiwan Strait.

As Taiwanese president for the past eight years, Tsai Ing-wen has been a willing partner with Trump, then Biden, in heightening tensions across the Taiwan Strait. She has significantly strengthened the Taiwanese military and welcomed the growing stream of high-profile US visitors to Taipei, including the highly provocative trip by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. At the same time, Tsai did not take steps towards a formal declaration of independence, knowing that Beijing has repeatedly warned that it would respond by forcibly reunifying the island with China.

Lai, however, represents sections of the DPP committed to pursuing independence more aggressively. As premier in 2017, he described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwanese independence.” In 2019, Lai contested the DPP primary for the 2020 presidential election, in what was the first serious challenge to a sitting president, saying he would take responsibility for ensuring Taiwan was not annexed by China. After losing, he accepted Tsai’s offer to become her vice-presidential running mate.

As the DPP candidate, Lai has played down his support for Taiwanese independence and thus the threat of war with China, restricting himself to remarks that Tsai has previously made. While attempting to reassure voters nervous about the danger of conflict, he states that Taiwan is already a “sovereign independent country” and does not need to formally declare itself as such.

At the same time, Lai is determined to build on the close relations established with the US under Tsai. In August, he made two “stop-overs” in the United States on the pretext of an official visit to Paraguay—one of the few countries with diplomatic relations with Taipei, not Beijing—and undoubtedly held discussions with US officials. China regards such visits by top Taiwanese politicians as a breach of the One-China policy.

Lai has also chosen Hsiao Bi-khim, the former de facto Taiwanese ambassador to the US, as his vice-presidential running mate. Hsiao is not only well-connected in political and strategic circles in Washington but is known as a “cat warrior” for responding aggressively to Chinese diplomats branded in the Western media as “wolf warriors.”

Not surprisingly, Beijing has responded to the Lai-Hsiao ticket as a “union of pro-independence separatists” and has branded Lai as a “troublemaker.” Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for the mainland’s Taiwan Affairs Office, warned that “people who pursued Taiwan independence were essentially instigators of war.” She bluntly told a news conference on November 15: “Taiwan independence means war.”

There is no doubt that tensions across the Taiwan Strait will worsen if Lai is elected. US imperialism, however, is chiefly responsible for upsetting the status quo and deliberately heightening the danger of war over the island. It has hyped the threat from China to justify drawing Taiwan closer to Washington and thereby encouraging Lai and the DPP to adopt a tougher stance towards Beijing.

The outcome of the January 13 election is far from certain. Lai has a significant lead over the other two presidential candidates—Hou You-yi from the KMT and Ke Wen-je from the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP)—both of whom favour an easing of tensions and closer relations with China.

The KMT is based largely on the descendants of those who fled the Chinese mainland, in many cases airlifted by the US military, after the 1949 revolution. It claimed to be the government-in-exile of all China, placed the island under martial law and ruthlessly suppressed any opposition. Amid a wave of strikes and protests in the 1980s, the KMT regime gradually relinquished its iron grip on power. The first direct election for president and vice-president was only held in 1996.

As the CCP turned to capitalist restoration, the KMT sought to develop closer relations with Beijing opening the way for Taiwanese corporations to exploit cheap Chinese labour. The KMT continues to adhere to the so-called 1992 Consensus with the CCP under which Taiwan was declared to be part of One China, but disagreed on where legitimate power resided. The DPP has refused to ratify the 1992 Consensus, with Lai declaring that to do so would be tantamount to “relinquishing our sovereignty.”

Lai has consistently polled ahead of both of his rivals: a poll in late October showed Lai with 32 percent of support, Hou Yu-ih with 22 percent and Ko Wen-je with 20 percent. In an election based on first-past-the post, Lai would win the presidency even though he received less than 50 percent of the votes.

A fourth potential candidate—Terry Gou, the multi-billionaire founder of Foxconn, which operates huge electronic assembly plants in China—polled just 5 percent. Gou, who favours closer relations with Beijing, pulled out of the race just hours before nominations closed last Friday.

Last week, the KMT and Taiwan People’s Party engaged in a last-ditch attempt to forge a unity ticket to challenge Lai and the DPP. Negotiations, however, fell apart in spectacular fashion on Thursday when the KMT abruptly walked out of talks being broadcast live on television.

While the issue of relations with China inevitably looms large in the election, domestic issues including low economic growth rates, rising unemployment and social distress will also have a marked impact. Taiwan entered recession in the first quarter of 2023 as GDP contracted by 3.02 percent compared to the same period last year. The economy is expected to grow by just 1.61 percent for the year.

As around the world, workers in Taiwan are being hit hard by inflation, with a sharp drop in real wages in the first quarter. Real estate speculation is fueling a growing housing crisis. While official unemployment figures remain relatively low overall, youth unemployment for those between 20 and 24 is more than 11 percent.

COVID cases in the US have risen 50 percent in four weeks

Benjamin Mateus


On Monday, Biobot Analytics updated their SARS-CoV-2 wastewater dataset, showing that transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19 has risen 50 percent in the last four weeks and is quickly approaching the late-summer peak of the last wave that drove up hospitalizations and deaths across the United States.

The current surge began in early November, with the Midwest now showing a massive acceleration phase. While the Northeast and the West are seeing considerable rise in rates of transmission, the trends in the South have plateaued at a substantial level for now.

This is clearly the beginning of the second wave since the Biden administration unscientifically ended the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) declaration last May, with well over 10,000 Americans succumbing to COVID-19 and tens of thousands more hospitalized or suffering from Long COVID.

On the week ending September 9, 20,678 people were admitted to hospitals for COVID-19. Between August 26 through the end of October, weekly deaths have consistently been above 1,000, with over 5,000 people perishing in the month of October alone. As a lagging indicator, the upward trends in hospitalizations that we are seeing again means that fatalities will climb as well in the weeks ahead.

Although much of the media has remained utterly silent on the issue of COVID, they all eagerly reported on the record number of Thanksgiving travelers last week. According to the TSA, their agents screened 2.2 million passengers on Friday, another 2.6 million on Saturday, and a record breaking 2.9 million on Sunday. In all, close to 30 million or more were screened from November 16-28, while an additional 55 million Americans drove to visit family or friends, meaning that more than a quarter of the US population traveled long distances to see family last week.

Undoubtedly, concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater will surge even more in the weeks ahead, as the impacts of this record travel on viral transmission are fully logged.

Dr. Michael Hoerger of Tulane University, who has been modeling the spread of COVID-19 using the Biobot data, noted on Monday that levels of wastewater now correlate with approximately 886,000 daily infections, or an average of more than 6 million infections in just one week.

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In Dr. Hoerger’s forecast, the figure for daily infections could reach 1.5 million during the Christmas break, when the next massive wave of travelers will take to the air or roads. He warns that in classrooms, lecture halls, restaurants, and other crowded indoor spaces, the chance of encountering someone actively infected with COVID-19 is essentially a flip of the coin.

With masking practically nonexistent and COVID vaccination rates abysmal, combined with the impacts of influenza, RSV, and other viral and bacterial pathogens, the impact on health systems could soon become catastrophic.

The Wall Street Journal in its recent healthcare update almost gleefully begins by stating, “Get ready for more sickness!” After admitting that COVID-19 is “settling in as a wintertime fixture,” they add, “The virus is on a collision course with the seasonal scourges of flu and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, which are circulating again after the pandemic disrupted their spread.”

The report then bluntly charges, “The risk? More infections, more disruptions to schools, work and holidays and more strains on hospitals than before the pandemic. COVID has raised the baseline… It’s going to be a new normal.”

However, this comparison of three viruses is a sleight of hand and outright lie. Since 2022, what amount to baseline rates of hospitalizations for COVID are far above those for flu and RSV, with the brief exception when flu admissions approached those for COVID in the last two months of 2022.

Furthermore, the comparison ignores the tens or hundreds of thousands of patients that will go on to develop Long COVID as a result of infection with SARS-CoV-2 during this current wave, often suffering from significant neurocognitive, cardiovascular or other damage to vital organ systems. Worse, there is growing scientific research showing that COVID-19 can cause dysregulation of the immune system, potentially exacerbating the severity of these other “winter” viruses.

One such study was recently published, providing evidence that the surge in RSV infections last year among children five and under was in large part driven by prior infections with COVID-19. Among a 2022 study population of almost a quarter million children, the risk of RSV rose among those without a prior COVID infection from around 4.3 percent to 6.4 percent in those with a prior COVID infection, or a 40 percent increase in relative risk. These were then corroborated with a 2021 study population of over 370,000 children that found a similar magnitude of increase.

The authors concluded, “Our findings suggest that COVID-19 contributed to the 2022 surge of RSV cases in young children through the large buildup of COVID-19 infected children and the potential long-term adverse effects of COVID-19 on the immune and respiratory system.”

The findings of this study cut through attempts by the media and COVID deniers to claim that these unprecedented numbers of illnesses are a byproduct of some sort of “immunity debt” that children accrued during weeks or months of limited lockdowns in 2020, a preposterous claim without any scientific basis.

Unsurprisingly, those 65 years of age or older face the severest consequences of COVID infections. In a CDC study published last month, they account for 63 percent of all COVID-related hospitalizations recorded from January to August. They constituted 61 percent of intensive care unit admissions for COVID and nearly 90 percent of COVID-related deaths. With more than 53 million adults in this age group, accounting for 16 percent of the US population, one must ask who is showing any concern for their interests?

Worse is that the elderly admitted to hospitals who become infected with COVID can have a mortality rate as high as a 10 percent. In a setting where mask usage among healthcare workers is not mandated and COVID testing is non-existent, the current rates of infections will see the most vulnerable in society pay once more for a disease that is not only easily mitigated, but could be eliminated through the use of technology such as Far-UVC and modern HVAC systems, combined with the full deployment of available public health tools.

Clearly, the financial institutions and political establishment are more than pleased to see life expectancy, especially among working people, on the decline. These early deaths are simply savings in pension payouts for banks and insurance companies. Among the 1.18 million official COVID deaths in the US, those who are 65 and older account for almost 76 percent of all fatalities (almost 900,000 deaths), despite comprising only 17 percent of the population. Such is in mathematical terms the definition of eugenics.

28 Nov 2023

Poverty and Climate Overheating: Flip Sides of One Coin

Phil Wilson



Image by Matt Palmer.

I retired in 2020 after decades as a mental health outreach worker. My job involved going out to my clients’ apartments – usually in sprawling housing projects or in “section 8” apartments in run down neighborhoods. Some of my clients slept in backyard sheds or abandoned factories and I met with them on playgrounds, parking lots or street corners. Poor people are a more diverse group than most of us realize – a few of my clients had a significant number of college credits, and some had been born into relative privilege before the invisible trap door to the bottom opened up. Childhood trauma and later addictions often lubricate the hinges of this portal.

Trauma can mean many different things – a nine year old girl told me, rather matter-of-factly, that she had seen several men knock her neighbor unconscious after he intervened in a domestic dispute. Another child with a swollen lip explained that his step father had slapped him. Anyone can experience trauma, but poor children endure an outsized share.

We hear a lot about upward mobility but little about downward mobility – the much more crowded lane for America’s two way class traffic. There are tens of millions of poor people in America, generally sequestered from the awareness of more fortunate members of the public. The manner in which an enormous and growing segment of the population can be kept from plain sight involves public policy “slight-of-hand.”

In Greenfield, Massachusetts, where I worked, three large housing projects, each with several hundred units, had been discreetly carved into the woods along the bubbling Green River. Two of these were owned by private real estate corporations. One of these privately owned complexes, built in the river valley abutting adjacent hills, had been constructed almost directly beneath the razor wire and concrete structures of “The Franklin County Jail and House of Corrections,” Prisons and housing projects share a similar mystique – both are usually set back from the road and both provoke lurid fears. The children that I worked with would commonly point to the prison and casually name the relatives incarcerated there – “my uncle, my step-dad, my older brother.”

People living in housing projects have little floor space and almost nowhere for storage. One guy had a pile of spare car parts and batteries crammed behind the couch. A profusion of unopened plastic soda bottles often dominated the kitchen areas in the homes that I visited and these would, if necessary, spread out into other rooms. The man with the stashed car parts carefully placed four 2 liter bottles on every step leading to the second floor. You had to carefully tip toe past them. Dollar stores sold these for 79 cents each. It was hard to resist.

Sugar addiction has a choke hold on poor communities and I would typically see Little Debby’s or Hostess pastries piled on countertops. Little Debby’s must hold the world record for cheap calories. One particular frosted bun has 500 calories without a molecule of nutrition, and sells for 50 cents. This poisonous confection contains a wallop of high fructose corn syrup held together with a sprinkle of flour, corn starch, and the notorious, invisible dollop of palm oil – the scourge of both rainforests and poor people  It almost seemed like Little Debby’s had a mandate to hook in impoverished children on behalf of the global corn, palm oil and sugar industries.

Many of my clients had lost all or most of their teeth by age 30. Poor people, famously struggle with sky high rates of obesity and diabetes. One women in my caseload had such severe osteoporosis that, by age 50, she had suffered a hip fracture. Both poverty and high sugar consumption correlate with low bone density Tooth loss is often a harbinger of early mortality, and, life expectancy in the poorest towns in Franklin County is 15 years shorter than in the wealthiest towns of Middlesex County.

I was acutely aware that my job offered an intimate, panoramic peek into the underbelly of capitalism, but I never thought at all about how the lives of my clients fit into the larger context of climate overheating. If I had thought about it years ago I would have likely dismissed any connection at all. Most of my clients did not drive – having no drivers’ license is often one of the defining features of those living in poverty – and they inevitably had very modest habits as consumers. The story of climate change, we have come to understand, does not entirely center on fossil fuels – the industrial aspiration to build an empire of pseudo-nutrition requires the appropriation of unspoiled habitat. The diseases overrepresented in impoverished communities – obesity, diabetes, emphysema, osteoporosis, HBP, asthma, coronary blockage, mental illness, etc. – are deeply entwined with shrinking habitats and overheated climate. We might even think of poverty and climate as a single, indivisible issue.

Those living below the poverty line have so little that one might easily conclude that there are no resources left to hoover out of people who have already been turned upside down to shake out the last few coins. But that sort of thinking is a disservice to the resourceful persistence of corporate schemes. The increasingly privatized and highly profitable “prison industrial complex” proves that billions of dollars can be squeezed from the poorest communities.

Consider, also, bank overdraft fees that, in 2019, drained over 15 billion dollars from America’s poorest citizens into the coffers of wealthy bankers. My clients sometimes showed me bank statements with savings under a dollar. Those with depleted accounts often have to pay “maintenance fees.” A trickle extracted from each poor person gathers into torrents and oceans of banker profits. Wherever there is rampant, unregulated corporate plunder there is environmental ruin.

The plastic soda bottles on my client’s staircase might be conceptualized as a point on a large circle connecting his obesity and life threatening asthma to Coca Cola profits and rain forest destruction.  65 million acres of moist, tropical lands have been stolen from the carbon absorbing plans of mother nature, and given over to the cause of sugar cane – the essential ingredient in soft drinks and ultra processed foods. It is a lose/lose situation for all of us who are not executives of food conglomerates. While I must emphasize that poor communities suffer the worst injuries from industrial food marketing, it is important to recognize that people from all social classes suffer and die for the bottom line of Cargill

In the homes of most of my clients ( at least for those who could intermittently afford to pay for cable) the TV was almost always on as a sort of semiconscious background murmur. Material wealth is inversely proportioned to TV watching time – thus, a ghastly paradox: those with the least money view the most advertising. The lords of capitalism obviously know that most of their TV addicted targets have no means to purchase Porsches and Rolex watches but have just barely enough to buy meat, fast foods, soda and cheap baked items loaded with salt, palm oil and high fructose corn syrup. Of course, all these things come wrapped in plastic.

Plastic waste is particularly problematic in poor areas, and my clients often stored mountains of empty plastic bottles to return for a couple of dollars. The plastics industry, a branch of the fossil fuels empire, generates nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars in annual, global profits. It is beyond my scope here, to detail the medical and environmental destructiveness of plastic, but these compounds, like climate overheating and nuclear war, represent an existential threat to life on earth.

I think of “free surface hydraulics” as being the most apt metaphor for capitalism. Liquid water conforms to the contours of geological structures and the dictates of gravity – water never exhibits free will. It cannot flow uphill or form lakes where no lakebed exists. So too, capitalism clings to predetermined principles always aligned with the quest to maximize profits and expansion. History has proven that capitalists will exploit child labor, work people to death in systems that grant corporate access to slave labor, or poison the totality of living things with tetraethyl lead unless forced to stop by popular will or governmental decree. Engineers do not beseech water to flow in an advantageous direction – they build canals.

We deceive ourselves if we imagine that capitalists ruminate over moral issues and struggle to find some sort of ethical compromise in which the preservation of the environment and the feeding of humanity can both be accomplished. Capitalism, by nature, kicks ethical constraints aside, just as water runs down hill. The CEO of Hormel is not about to renounce ultra processed foods and reduce profits – there are no belated moral epiphanies. Ebenezer Scrooge does not inhabit the real world. Processed foods are cheap and addictive, and the rain forest is an obstacle to the sugar, fat and beef needed to make them.

Nothing has laid bare the intent and the soul of capitalism like tobacco. Only massive government intervention has slowed the murderous aspirations of big tobacco.  The hydraulic nature of capitalism can be seen in the way that this industry, – blocked from its former commercial domination – hones in (like water seeking a streambed) on the solitary remaining market, poor people. While the US has largely banned tobacco advertising, tobacco products are highly visible in franchised, convenience store chains that hawk what I call, “the addictive trio” – junk food, lottery tickets and cigarettes.

Tobacco and nicotine vaping go hand in hand with Little Debby’s snacks, as poor people – often confined to food deserts – have little choice other than to use convenience stores as a nutritional hub. Most of my clients smoked and several suffered from emphysema and asthma. One of my clients was hospitalized ten times in a single year for asthma, and the prednisone prescribed to treat his lung inflammation added another fifty life-threatening pounds to his frame. The added weight destroyed his knees, and, at age 45 he walked with a cane.

Smoking is overwhelmingly more common among poor people. The tobacco industry may be so renowned for mass murder that we barely give it credit as a source of greenhouse gasses, but annually this industry belches 84 megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere while poisoning ecosystems and occupying lands that would otherwise support dense forests.

In a world of constant warfare, angry fascist movements and self serving political regimes, it may be hard to get worked up over palm oil. But palm oil is often the saturated fat of choice to create the desired consistency of sugary, processed, commercial foods like the above mentioned Little Debby’s and it also has an outsized role in deforestation, animal cruelty and human rights abuses of indigenous Indonesian populations.

According to a 2015 investigative piece in the Wall Street Journal, a Malaysian plantation sold palm oil harvested by slave laborers to a number of multinational food conglomerates. It is indeed telling that a powerful institution can spike global carbon, exploit slave laborers, harden arteries of untold millions, and wipe out endangered species, all while getting caught (but not punished) attempting to silently tip toe past the mass media.

All seed oil production – soybean, sunflower, peanut, canola and several others – contributes to deforestation. As ultra processed foods (UPFs) have become one of the primary commodities to increase industrial agriculture’s profits, the urgent impulse to hack away at rain forests increases.

Fast foods – a huge niche in the UPF industry – created two problems for my clients: (1) Venues like McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King sell extremely addictive, high fat, high sugar, low nutrition meals that have been appropriately called heart attack food. (2) The overpriced and addictive offerings of industrial fast food chains put a crushing burden on poor people’s precarious financial status.

The looming possibility of rent default colored almost all family relationships for the people in my caseload – on countless occasions I listened to back and forth accusations directed toward spouses, partners, children, housemates, parents or grandparents who had allegedly imperiled the family solvency with a binge on fast foods.

Keep in mind that a two bedroom apartment in western Massachusetts averages well over a thousand dollars monthly, and that Social Security checks ran along a continuum between $600 and $800 monthly – in single parent households, one check might have to support an entire family. Many disabled people are denied social security and waiting lists for subsidized housing often cause people to languish for five years or more. Against this backdrop of impossible budgeting, poor people struggle with fast food addictions – the cravings for these iconic American menu items may be as potent as those associated with heroin. To make up for the monthly shortfall many of my clients worked “under the table,” but local, informal employers pay only a fraction of the minimum wage.

An average meal at McDonald’s orendy’s costs $13. For my clients, every impulsive indiscretion threatened to bounce back and cause rent default. But the sins of McDonald’s far exceed the ruin that this company brings to the peace of mind and health of their disadvantaged customers. McDonald’s contributes some 53 million metric tons annually of CO2 to the biosphere, and was one of the primary clients of Brazilian farmers who burned down 7.5 million hectares of Amazon rain forest in 2019.

If poverty and climate comprise a single, inseparable challenge to humanity, does that change how we envision the climate movement?  Many climate activists have identified climate mitigation as a call to abolish capitalism. That perspective is here, and here, and here, and here, and here – and I could fill endless pages with links to writings that propose that the absolute first critical step to saving the planet is the destruction of capitalism.

But capitalism has long been seen as the primary cause of poverty and this short piece by noted Marxist economist, Richard Wolff reminds us all that, long before climate change proved that capitalism is even more sinister than we had ever imagined, many had seen the end of a market economy as a precondition to establishing equity, human rights and universal access to adequate housing, nutrition and medical care. Marx did not formulate his economic principles in response to environmental destruction, but as a means to address inequity, exploitation and suffering.

My clients had no political power. Most of them were not even registered to vote, and the few that were usually didn’t. I once asked one woman if she had registered to cast her ballot, and after a long withering look – that I perceived as pitying – she softly uttered, “why?” The population of my caseload represents a great many millions of people nationally, and just recently I have been thinking about an improbable alliance between the very poor and the climate movement. Historically, the most dispossessed and forgotten populations have organized and mounted resistance in Europe. In Greenfield, just a few years ago, a group of homeless people occupied the town green for weeks to protest against unresponsive authorities.

Many activists have argued that the climate movement must broaden its base, form alliances and coalitions, and – this is critical – develop the sort of rhetorical gravitas commensurate with the task of redirecting human fate. If poverty has deep systemic ties to climate catastrophe, does that compel us to expand our collective vision, and to protest all of the hostile societal forces that punish poor people?

Should Extinction Rebellion not merely confront MacDonald’s over the issue of meat, methane emissions, and rain forest destruction, but also for unfair labor practices, excessively high prices, massive profits and the practice of inflicting addictive, ultra processed, carcinogenic, artery clogging poisons upon poor communities? Should housing, universal basic income and universal health care be essential components of the climate activist platform? Is climate change a class issue (with poor people hurt most by climate heating, and more privileged people comprising the base of the movement) and, if so, how can these class issues be addressed? Not that long ago the idea of working class solidarity drove leftist ideology..

How much of an imaginative stretch is it to picture climate activists demanding that MacDonald’s pay reparations to those people harmed by their products in much the same way that tobacco and opiate manufacturers were held accountable for criminal deeds? I believe that these are important things to consider – the climate movement cannot stand alone and expect to make sea changing economic and political transformations. One should be encouraged by Extinction Rebellion’s recent focus on building alliances. I am particularly enthusiastic about Extinction Rebellion’s embrace of “sortition” or citizen’s assemblies – the most democratic institution ever imagined. Sortition is a radical response to class inequity. Climate overheating intersects with many kinds of human (and animal) suffering – these intersections must be the points of contact for alliances.

If the goal of the climate movement is to replace capitalism – perhaps with a decentralized, grass roots system of worker run cooperatives and farms – this will take an enormous, heroic and almost inconceivable effort to bring working class and poor people into the climate movement, and into leadership roles. I have described my clients in terms of their suffering and poverty, but poor people have a superior sense of community, generosity and altruism. I repeatedly saw people risk eviction in order to take in unhoused family members and even utter strangers. We don’t generally think of poor people as being a critical constituency within the climate movement, but I believe that there will be no climate solution without the participation of those who have been most harmed and alienated by the architects of future extinction.

How We Got to an Era of De-Civilization

Lawrence Davidson



Photo by Dominik Lalic

Human Beings are not showing off their best abilities of late. They appear to have mostly failed when it comes to climate change. For instance, “By 2100, average temperatures in the U.S. are expected to increase by approximately 8°F or more (4.4°C)” if the current high rate of greenhouse gas emissions is maintained. If “immediate and rapid greenhouse gas reductions” are achieved we can keep the warming down to “approximately 2.5°F (1.4°C).” Given our lack of international institutions with the capability of enforcing agreements and treaties, which do you think is more likely?

Actually, we have been coming up short like this for a while. I am going to give you an example that almost no one recognizes. It constituted an opportunity, a window, to transform the planet’s state system and expand its legal code so as to assure relative peace and cooperation into the future. As we will see, nation states actually started down this civilizing road right after World War II. However, they failed to carry through and have landed back in the mire of barbarism and near continuous war. So much for love for our children and concern for their future. 

Here is the story of this lost opportunity:

Historical Background

From 1914 till 1918, the Western “civilized” countries fought World War I. Besides the trench warfare, use of poison gas, and the introduction of such modern killing machines as tanks and machine guns (updated gatling guns), the war was fought as a consequence of alliance entanglements and to realize imperial and colonial ambitions.

As an example of the latter, take the 1917 promise given by the British government of a “national home” in Arab Palestine for Europe’s persecuted Jews. This is known as the Balfour Declaration and is a case of an ambitious Western imperial power (Great Britain) promising a European ethnic group land in the Middle East—land that, at the time, belonged to yet another empire, the Ottoman Empire. This was not as crazy as it seems:

(1) The British saw the Jews as potential wartime allies.

(2) The British were at war with the Ottomans, and planned on winning. (3) Victory would expand their empire so as to include Palestine.

(4) So why not start passing out somebody else’s imperial property which, one hoped, would soon be the spoils of your victory?

At the time, and indeed, throughout the following interwar period, very few in the West saw anything wrong with this imperial sleight of hand. The goal of expanding empire was supported by a centuries-old belief that national greatness was to be measured in terms of lands subjugated, ruled over, and in some cases, colonized. In the West, there was the added assumption that Western rule was beneficent, it spread civilization. Therefore, Western populations in general saw nothing ethically or morally wrong with this situation.

At the time, British leaders tried to explain this logic to the Arabs of Palestine. Winston Churchill, then the British Colonial Secretary, held a meeting with local Palestinian leaders in Jerusalem in April 1921. He told them that Zionism, the movement for a Jewish national home that involved the colonization of Palestine, “would enrich the country and they [the Arabs] shall share in the progress.”* We know now that this was not going to happen, but at the time Churchill probably believed what he said: a rising tide floats all boats.

It is important to note that at this time there were no international rules against imperialism or colonialism. Thus, a European power could proceed to control foreign lands, as Edward Said put it, in “flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority residents.” The assumption was that the natives just did not know what was good for them. 

Europe’s Jews, though long the victims of “Christian civilization,” shared the Western sense of cultural superiority and, predictably, this attitude had consequences when Zionists came to Palestine. Indeed, the Palestinians were about to inherit the status of second-class human beings that Europe’s Jews were trying to throw off. Thus, it was with no ethical or moral qualms whatsoever that, in 1943, Chaim Weizmann, leader of the World Zionist Organization (and the same man to whom Balfour had promised a “national home” in Palestine), categorically told the personnel of the U.S. State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) that “Palestine could never be an Arab land again.”**

The NEA personnel thought this was hubris on Weizmann’s part. Alas, within five years, the fledgling Zionist lobby in the U.S. used its influence with President Harry Truman to have those State Department personnel who disliked Zionism transferred or forcibly retired.

Things Changed After World War II

Now let us step forward to review the status of world affairs from 1945-1950. We are a mere 28 years from 1917, yet now we find that things have radically changed. World War II had largely bankrupted even the winners, and the horrors of Nazi atrocities had seriously scared almost everyone. 

As a consequence of near bankruptcy, imperialism and colonialism lost some of their luster. Impoverished by the war, Western populations were not willing to continue to pay exorbitant taxes to support their empires. This, in turn, led the West’s political leadership, some quicker than others and some only after bloody colonial wars, to start to move in the direction of decolonization. This was particularly true for Great Britain. The British Empire, upon which “the sun never set,” the largest of the Western colonial enterprises, transformed itself into a commonwealth. This act created many new independent states and allowed free movement of labor within the commonwealth. In an unprecedented fashion this transformed England into a multi-racial, multi-ethnic country.

Simultaneously, the horrors of World War II, ranging from the Holocaust to the use of nuclear weapons, encouraged an effort to put limits on the behavior of nation states. As a consequence, international law was rapidly expanded:

1. Treaties and “universal declarations” were drawn up, outlawing the behaviors of the Nazis. By treaty, genocide was outlawed and eventually made a crime against humanity.

2. The Fourth Geneva Convention was created to “deal with humanitarian protections for civilians in a war zone.”

3. An International Court of Justice at the Hague was established. Now complemented by the ICC.

4. Finally, there was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, according to Eleanor Roosevelt, represented “a great event in the life of mankind.” It guaranteed, among other things, the right of every individual to “live their lives freely, equally and in dignity.”

In essence, Nazi crimes had so shook up the public and its leaders that the result was international laws and declarations that offered a guide to a better world—a set of new standards of civilized behavior. Unfortunately, hopes for enforcement through the new United Nations would prove a serious problem. The UN was hobbled by the Security Council veto of World War II’s victors and it lacked an independent source of income.  At the time there was an innovative suggestion that sovereignty over the oceans and their resources be given to the UN, but this never came about. Instead, the UN had to rely on state membership dues.

The Unforeseen Contradiction

Almost immediately, this new world potential would be undermined by an inherent contradiction—the colonial ambitions of World War II’s principal victims. This takes us back to the Zionist movement and British promise of a national home. In 1948, the Zionists achieved their ends and declared the State of Israel. Unfortunately, the founding of a European settler state, and Israel’s subsequent behavior, contradicted the post-World War II spirit of decolonization, though few but the Arab states noticed. Eventually, the contradiction would prove fatal to the post-World War II reforms.

One can speculate that there existed a slim chance that Israel’s leaders would overcome the contradiction by following the path laid out by the new treaties and declarations. There were Jews known as “cultural Zionists” who wished to establish a religious and cultural center for Jews in Palestine while urging the founding of a democratic bi-national Jewish-Palestinian state.

As It turned out the Zionists who led Israel chose not to pursue this path. Why not? Their recent history made them ethnocentric to a fault—driven back upon themselves by horrible discrimination, reaching the point of genocide. Under these circumstances it made no difference that the Palestinians, and Arabs in general, had nothing to do with this near fatal period of European Jewish life. The “new Jewish personality” to be bred in Zionist Israel was to be aggressive and exclusionist. So, these incoming Europeans had (and still have) the goal of creating a state for their group alone. 

This was the exact opposite path of the one represented by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Fourth Geneva Convention. Surrounded by an indigenous “other,” the only way you can achieve your exclusive state is through discriminatory practices and laws. Thus, Israel became a state that saw international law as a danger, something to be defied and overcome. More often than not, this effort was supported by Israel’s major ally, the United States—which had its own settler/colonial history.

Palestine and Our Future

In the post-1948 era, Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonialism became seen in the West as terrorism. And sometimes it was. But keep in mind, as a general principle, it is the tactics of the oppressor that creates the context for the tactics of the oppressed. The disproportionate acts of revenge carried out by Israel in response to early cross-border incursions of the Palestinians, together with Israel’s massive advantage in weaponry which made impossible a classic guerrilla war, led to the acts of terrorism used at certain periods of Palestinian resistance.

Nonetheless, what most Palestinians have always desired, besides a state of their own, is racial-ethnic equality, and religious freedom under the rule of law—The same things post World War II treaties and declarations stood for. Thus, symbolically at least, the Palestinian struggle stands for that better world that so many—including the Jews—said they wanted at the end of World War Two.

The Israelis, through their exclusion and persecution of the Palestinians, have taken a definitive stand against such a better future. Indeed, there is now an ongoing effort—an ongoing Zionist project, to move the world backward so that past colonist/racist practices are once more acceptable.

The unsettling truth is that in its effort to turn the clock back, Israel seems to be having its way. In the rest of the world, particularly the Western world, government and diplomatic bureaucracies are either silent about Israeli behavior or actively supporting it. Such positions erode international laws and conventions—exactly what the Zionist Israelis desire.

Conclusion

As the Israelis drag the world backward into a racist pre-progressive era, the U.S. follows and financially subsidizes the effort. American taxpayers are therefore helping to pay for a process of de-civilization. 

Some readers might think this is hyperbole, but it is not. Israel’s present genocidal action in Gaza should clearly demonstrate just how low the Zionist state has fallen. Its behavior is so far beyond a reasonable reply to Hamas’s October 7 attack (which itself was an act of revenge for Israel’s impoverishment policies of Gaza) that it is simply self-imposed blindness to deny its criminal nature. Israel’s mass destruction in Gaza is one of the worst criminal acts committed by a state since World War II. 

For those illogical enough to think it is anti-Semitic to point out such enormous Zionist sins, I would point to the growing number of Jews in the Diaspora who condemn Israel’s actions. I take my stand with them. Israel is not representative of all Jews. And Israel’s goals and leadership arguably represents a betrayal of the best of Jewish values. In this strange convoluted way, the real enemy of the Jews are the Zionists.

Let’s end by taking a quick look at a list of 74 countries adhering to the UN charter. This is the so-called Multilateralism index and it ranks how these countries adhere to the United Nations’ Charter and its goals. Guess who is at the very bottom? You got it, the United States of America. Guess who is second to last? Right again. It is Israel. Enough said.