For Crisis-Hit Pakistan, Elections May Not Lead To A Meaningful Alternative

• by: Pranjal Pandey

Map of Pakistan – Source: nl.wikipedia.org

02-09-2024 The ongoing crisis in Pakistan cannot be resolved simply by swapping one political party for another. Whether it is the arrest and conviction of Imran Khan or economic issues, Pakistan has a long road to recovery.

Scheduled for February 8, the upcoming elections for Pakistan’s National Assembly and provincial assemblies hold significant importance against the backdrop of numerous upheavals in the country. Notably, the recent arrest and conviction of the former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, adds a layer of complexity. On January 31, Khan received a 14-year prison sentence, adding to his existing three-year jail term for corruption. In addition, last month, he was handed a 10-year prison sentence in a separate case filed against him, accusing him of leaking classified state documents.

The nation finds itself entangled in a complex web of economic difficulties, with inflation, unemployment, and a pressing capital crisis casting a shadow over its prospects. The specter of poverty looms large, exacerbating social inequalities and hindering the overall well-being of the population.

How Are Representatives Elected in Pakistan?
Under a parliamentary system of government, Pakistan operates with a two-chambered parliament, consisting of the National Assembly and the Senate. The upcoming elections will decide the composition of the National Assembly and the four provincial assemblies—Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan.

The National Assembly, comprising 336 seats, has 266 directly elected through single-member constituencies using the first-past-the-post system. Additionally, there are 60 seats reserved for women and 10 for minorities. The distribution of women’s reserved seats among parties is proportional to their provincial seat tally, while minority seats are allocated based on each party’s overall seat count.

Following this, members of the provincial assemblies elect 100 members of the Senate, which serves as the upper house of the Pakistani parliament.

The party or alliance securing the majority of seats in the National Assembly gains the privilege of electing its leader, who subsequently assumes the position of prime minister.

Key Parties
The political landscape in Pakistan is marked by several prominent parties, each led by influential figures. The Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) (PML-N) is under the leadership of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, while the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) is headed by former Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. Imran Khan leads the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and Maulana Fazlul Haq leads the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Pakistan (Fazl).

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has refused to grant the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) its designated electoral symbol, the cricket bat. Consequently, a majority of its candidates are now compelled to participate in the election as independents. Imran Khan, the leader of PTI, has been disqualified from participating in the ongoing elections. He is barred from holding any public office for the next decade.

Military Has Its Role and History
Once a figure endorsed by the Pakistan army, Imran Khan has transformed into their primary adversary. The discord originated with the military’s appointment of Lieutenant General Nadeem Ahmed Anjum as the ISI chief against Khan’s wishes along with Khan’s visit to Russia. The latter showed Pakistan’s aggressive neutral position at the beginning of the Ukraine-Russia war, which could have upset the US. Later, Khan’s supporters vandalized one of the generals’ residences after his arrest. The generals aimed to remove him, and now they have accomplished their objective.

However, Pakistan’s political class and its military have historically experienced a complex relationship of collaboration and conflict. Throughout Pakistan’s history, military interventions have been a recurring theme. A pivotal instance occurred in 1958 when President Iskander Mirza declared martial law, nullified the constitution, and shuttered the national and provincial assemblies. General Mohammad Ayub Khan assumed control, marking the onset of military rule. Since then, Pakistan has experienced multiple military interventions.

According to the Pakistan Army Act, the armed forces’ duties include protecting the nation from outside threats and aggression as well as supporting civil authority when necessary. On policy topics, however, differences between the civilian and military governments have frequently occurred. The military has taken power on several occasions by using opposition parties as tools.

Pakistan consistently spends a significant portion of its budget to defense, with the 2022 allocation reaching 17.9 percent of GDP. This is a significant figure, particularly for a country where the per capita income in 2022 stood at $1588.9, equivalent to approximately $4.35 per day.

Key Concerns: Issues Shaping the Election Landscape
In Pakistan, the current economic landscape is characterized by a stark reality as inflation has surged to unprecedented levels, exceeding 30 percent and reaching a 50-year high in the year 2023. In January 2024, it stood at 28.3 percent. This economic turbulence is further underscored by the country’s position in the region, where its GDP, per capita income, and GDP growth are among the lowest. Persistent challenges in terms of high unemployment and inflation rates contribute to the overall economic strain.

According to the UNDP’s Human Development Index, Pakistan is positioned at 161st out of 191 countries, indicating low achievements in crucial areas such as health, knowledge, and living standards. This places Pakistan among the 31 countries globally with the lowest human development levels. The poverty rate in Pakistan was at 39.4 percent in the year 2022.

The situation was further aggravated by the devastating floods experienced in the country in 2022. The floods not only caused widespread damage to agricultural land and critical infrastructure but also had a cascading effect on the overall economy. The aftermath of the floods triggered a surge in inflation, particularly impacting food prices, and increasing the economic hardships faced by the people.

The Interconnected Challenges of Neoliberal Capitalism in Pakistan
The escalating cost of living, rising unemployment, and the specter of stagflation—all intertwined with the limitations of growth—are symptoms of a larger crisis rooted in neoliberal capitalism. This predicament is not exclusive to a particular regime; rather, it stems from the overarching influence of a neoliberal framework that hinders effective crisis management by successive governments. The structural issues at play persist regardless of shifts between political parties or military dictatorships.

The challenges at hand are embedded in Pakistan’s position within the global political economy of neoliberal capitalism. Pakistan finds itself struggling to compete, leading to a significant socio-economic toll.

Pakistan is increasingly becoming the working-class backyard of international capital, with its ability to produce a workforce destined to work abroad, making products that the domestic working class can barely afford. With an annual exodus of over 800,000 individuals seeking employment abroad, a new underclass is emerging within the nation, comprised of individuals keen on obtaining employment that the country is not able to offer.

A significant aspect contributing to Pakistan’s economic challenges is its heavy reliance on foreign loans, often acquired at high interest rates. The country currently operates on these loans, facing the formidable task of repaying a substantial debt amounting to $80 billion within the next three years.

The ongoing crisis in Pakistan cannot be resolved simply by swapping one political party for another. It is intricately tied to deep-seated issues of inequality, concentrated power in the hands of a few, and a lack of commitment from leaders to present a viable alternative. The ability of a new political entity to overcome these challenges remains uncertain. Nevertheless, these elections carry significant weight as the population is enduring hardship, skepticism towards the electoral process is widespread, and the nation appears to be spiraling into an uncertain future with no clear path of recovery.

By Pranjal Pandey

Author Bio: This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Pranjal Pandey, a journalist and editor located in Delhi, has edited seven books covering a range of issues available at LeftWord. You can explore his journalistic contributions on NewsClick.in.

Source: Globetrotter

Cashing In On Racist Bail

• by: Sonali Kolhatkar

Sonali Kolhatkar

02-09-2024 ~ Cash bail is racist. No wonder the GOP loves it and is relying on expanding it as a cynical election-year ploy.

Most Americans have not considered “cash bail” as critical to equality and freedom. The term is an esoteric one but is increasingly central to the ongoing battle over racial capitalism, policing, and mass incarceration, especially in an election year as critical as 2024.

Here’s what cash bail means: When arrested by police on suspicion of committing a crime, everyone in the United States has the right to due process and to defend themselves in court. But in a cash bail system, when judges set bail amounts, those who cannot pay the full amount remain jailed indefinitely—a clear violation of their due process rights—while the rich pay their way out of jail.

Now, Republicans in cities and states around the nation are rolling back efforts to reform cash bail systems and Georgia’s GOP-dominated legislature is the latest to do so. The state Senate and House recently passed a bill expanding cash bail for 30 new crimes, some of which appear to be aimed at protesters, such as unlawful assembly. Further, it criminalizes charitable bail funds that have bailed people out when they cannot afford to do so, restricting such funds, and even individuals, to bailing out no more than three people per year or facing charges themselves.

In Georgia, this is especially significant because of a mass movement that has arisen to oppose Atlanta’s “Cop City,” a massive police training project that is symbolic of everything wrong with our systems of policing, courts, and incarceration.

Marlon Kautz, who runs the Atlanta Solidarity Fund called the system of cash bail “a loophole” in the criminal justice system, allowing courts to indefinitely jail people without charges if they cannot pay exorbitant bail amounts. Kautz, whose organization is a bail fund of the sort that Georgia is targeting, pointed out that the GOP-led bills to criminalize bail funds and expand cash bail “exposes that the loophole is not an accident, it’s the intended purpose of the bail system.”

Kautz added, “Police, prosecutors, and politicians want a bail system which allows them to punish their political enemies, poor people, and people of color without trial.” He’s right. A police officer could theoretically arrest anyone they wanted, and if a judge requires cash bail that is beyond their financial capacity, the person would remain detained indefinitely while awaiting charges and a trial. In fact, Kautz was one of three people affiliated with the Atlanta Solidarity fund to be arrested on what appear to be clearly politicized charges of fraud and money laundering in June 2023.

Given how racist American policing is, the system of cash bail is intended to ensure that people of color who are disproportionately arrested are also disproportionately detained in jails without due process. A 2022 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights examined the impact of cash bail and found that between 1970 and 2015, the number of people jailed before trial increased by a whopping 433 percent, and there are currently about 500,000 such people stuck in jails across the nation who have not been tried or convicted of any crimes.

The report also found “stark disparities with regards to race” in who is impacted. Unsurprisingly Black and Brown men were the group most subjected to higher bail amounts.

There is a growing movement to address such a systemically racist trend. In 2023, the state of Illinois became the first in the nation to entirely abolish cash bail. The state legislature initially passed its cash bail ban in 2021 but implementation was held up by lawsuits from county prosecutors and sheriffs. Now, having survived legal challenges, the cash bail era in Illinois is officially over.

Other states, such as New Mexico, New Jersey, and Kentucky, have almost entirely ended cash bail requirements in recent years. In California, Los Angeles County has also similarly eliminated cash bail for all crimes except the most serious ones. The trend has been a positive one in a nation that has one of the most racist and punitive criminal justice systems in the world.

And then came the Republicans’ regressive push-back. Reversing progress on bail reform is a new flashpoint in the GOP’s culture wars intended to scare voters into choosing them at the ballot. The Associated Press captured this in a single sentence near the end of an article about Georgia’s cash bail restrictions, saying that “it could be a sign that Republicans intend to bash their Democratic opponents as soft on crime as they did in 2022.”

That same AP story paraphrased Republican state representative Houston Gaines, of Athens, Georgia, as saying “people let out of jail without bail are less likely to show up for court than those who have paid to get out of jail.” But the AP added “national studies contradict that claim.” When in doubt, the GOP can be relied upon to lie its way into justifying harmful policies, and Gaines was adamant in falsely claiming that cash bail reforms in other states have been “an unmitigated disaster.”

His Republican colleagues in states such as Indiana, Missouri, and Wisconsin have introduced numerous bills expanding the use of cash bail. Expanding the racist criminal justice system is a cynical GOP election-era ploy, one that isn’t even terribly original.

Recall George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential election campaign ads centering on a Black man named Willie Horton who, a year before the election, was furloughed while being incarcerated, and escaped. He went on to rape a woman and stab her fiancé, offering Bush the perfect poster child for Democratic failures on crime. The Willie Horton ads are considered a quintessentially racist dog whistle that were intended to generate fear of Blackness among white voters. They helped Bush defeat his opponent.

Sharlyn Grace, an official at the Cook County Public Defender’s office in Illinois said, “It is exceedingly rare for someone who’s released pretrial to be arrested and accused of a new offense that involves violence against another person,” and that “[f]ears about public safety are in many ways greatly overblown and misplaced.” But all that the tough-on-crime crowd needs in order to make the case of rampant crime is that single exception to the general trend.

Republicans in Wisconsin found their modern-day Willie Horton in a Black man named Darrell Brooks Jr. who drove a car into a 2021 parade in Waukesha, killing six people. Brooks had been arrested just prior to the fatal crash for domestic violence and released on a relatively low bail amount of $1,000. The Wisconsin GOP featured Brooks in 2022 campaign ads showing how they are “tough on crime” compared to Democrats. It wasn’t enough that Brooks was eventually sentenced to more than six consecutive life sentences although he says he didn’t intend to drive his car into the parade. His example has served as the ideal foil for election-year fears of people of color and Republican efforts to expand cash bail and win political power.

Election years are a scary time for people of color in the U.S. They are marked by race-based voter suppression efforts, a rise in racist political rhetoric, and even a surge in racist hate crimes. The expansion of cash bail laws is yet another attack on Black and Brown communities—one that must be exposed and confronted.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Source: Independent Media Institute

Credit Line: This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

How Long Has Humanity Been At War With Itself?

• by: Deborah Barsky

Deborah Barsky

02-08-2024 ~ Is large-scale intra-specific warfare Homo sapiens’ condition or can our species strive to achieve global peace?

The famous American astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “You have to know the past to understand the present.” But can we ever know the history of human origins well enough to understand why humans wage large-scale acts of appalling cruelty on other members of our own species? In January 2024, the Geneva Academy was monitoring no less than 110 armed conflicts globally. While not all of these reach mainstream media outlets, each is equally horrific in terms of the physical violence and mental cruelty we inflict on each other.

Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, are known to partake in violent intra-specific skirmishes, typically to preserve privileged access to resources in response to breaches in territorial boundaries. But only humans engage so extensively in large-scale warfare.

Do massive acts of intra- or interpopulational violence conform with Darwinian precepts of natural selection, or is this something we do as a competitive response to the stresses of living in such large populations? Looking back in time can help us find answers to such questions. Evidence preserved in the archeological record can tell us about when and under what conditions the preludes to warlike behaviors emerged in the past. Scientific reasoning can then transform this information into viable hypotheses that we can use to understand ourselves in today’s world.

As archeologists continue to unearth new fossil evidence at an increasing rate, so too are they piecing together the human story as one of complex interactions played out by (a growing number of) different species of the genus Homo that lived during the tens of thousands of years preceding the emergence—and eventual global dominance—of our own species: Homo sapiens. In fact, scientists have recognized more than a dozen (now extinct) species of Homo that thrived over the millennia, sometimes sharing the same landscapes and occasionally even interbreeding with one another. Millions of years of hybridization is written into the genomes of modern human populations.

Although we know very little about what these paleo-encounters might have been like, progress in science and technology is helping archeologists to find ways to piece together the puzzle of interspecific human relationships that occurred so long ago and that contributed to making us who we are today. In spite of these advances, the fossil record remains very fragmentary, especially concerning the older phases of human evolution.

First consider Homo, or H. habilis, so-named because a significant increase in stone tool-making is recognized following its emergence some 2.8 million years ago in East Africa. The evidence for the beginnings of this transformational event that would set off the spiraling evolutionary history of human technological prowess is relatively sparse. But such ancient (Oldowan) toolkits do become more abundant from this time forward, at first in Africa, and then into the confines of Eurasia by around 1.8 million years ago. Throughout this period, different kinds of hominins adopted and innovated stone tool making, socializing it into normalized behavior by teaching it to their young and transforming it into a cutting-edge survival strategy. We clearly observe the positive repercussions of this major advancement in our evolutionary history from the expanding increases in both the number of archeological sites and their geographical spread. Unevenly through time, occurrences of Oldowan sites throughout the Old World begin to yield more numerous artifacts, attesting to the progressive demographic trends associated with tool-making hominins.

Tool-making was a highly effective adaptive strategy that allowed early Homo species (like H. georgicus and H. antecessor) to define their own niches within multiple environmental contexts, successfully competing for resources with large carnivorous animals. Early humans used stone tools to access the protein-rich meat, viscera, and bone marrow from large herbivore carcasses, nourishing their energy-expensive brains. The latter show significant increases in volume and organizational complexity throughout this time period.

But were these early humans also competing with one another? So far (and keeping in mind the scarcity of skeletal remains dating to this period) the paleoanthropological record has not revealed signs of intraspecific violence suffered by Oldowan peoples. Their core-and-flake technologies and simple pounding tools do not include items that could be defined as functional armaments. While a lack of evidence does not constitute proof, we might consider recent estimates in paleodemography, backed by innovative digitized modelization methods and an increasing pool of genetic data that indicates relatively low population densities during the Oldowan.

Isolated groups consisted of few individuals, organized perhaps into clan-like social entities, widely spread over vast, resource-rich territories. These hominins invested in developing technological and social skills, cooperating with one another to adapt to new challenges posed by the changing environmental conditions that characterized the onset of the Quaternary period some 2.5 million years ago. Complex socialization processes evolved to perfect and share the capacity for technological competence, abilities that had important repercussions on the configuration of the brain that would eventually set humanity apart from other kinds of primates. Technology became inexorably linked to cognitive and social advances, fueling a symbiotic process now firmly established between anatomical and technological evolution.

By around one million years ago, Oldowan-producing peoples had been replaced by the technologically more advanced Acheulian hominins, globally attributed to H. erectus sensu lato. This phase of human evolution lasted nearly one and a half million years (globally from 1.75 to around 350,000 years ago) and is marked by highly significant techno-behavioral revolutions whose inception is traced back to Africa. Groundbreaking technologies like fire-making emerged during the Acheulian, as did elaborate stone production methods requiring complex volumetric planning and advanced technical skills. Tools became standardized into specifically designed models, signaling cultural diversity that varied geographically, creating the first land-linked morpho-technological traditions. Ever-greater social investment was required to learn and share the techniques needed to manipulate these technologies, as tools were converted into culture and technical aptitude into innovation.

In spite of marked increases in site frequencies and artifact densities throughout the Middle Pleistocene, incidences of interspecific violence are rarely documented and no large-scale violent events have been recognized so far. Were some Acheulian tools suitable for waging inter-populational conflicts? In the later phases of the Acheulian, pointed stone tools with signs of hafting and even wooden spears appear in some sites. But were these sophisticated tool kits limited to hunting? Or might they also have served for other purposes?

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Amrus Natalsya: The Last, Farewell And Thank You

• by: Tings Chak

Amrus Natalsya – Image: YouTube

02-03-2024 ~ Legendary Indonesian artist Amrus Natalsya passed away at the age of 90 on January 31, 2024, at 7:30 p.m. The artist, who came of age just as his country emerged from colonialism, leaves behind nearly seven decades of creative work. His work bore witness to the tumultuous history of Indonesia’s independence and unfinished revolution, and the long-held aspirations of the Indonesian people.

Amrus was born on October 21, 1933, in the North Sumatran town of Natal (from which his name “Natalsya” was taken). In 1954, after graduating high school, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts of Indonesia in Yogyakarta and began his lifelong commitment to his craft of painting and wood sculpting.

His artistic career was never an individual pursuit but was molded by the situation of his country, which had just gained formal independence on August 17, 1945. As the young Amrus was learning to create new worlds out of paint and wood, so too was the young nation of Indonesia trying to build an independent path out of the ravages of centuries of colonialism.

At a student exhibition on Javanese culture, Amrus’s wooden sculpture entitled “A Forgotten Blind” was purchased by President Sukarno himself. Indonesia’s first post-independence president is perhaps best known for convening the 1955 Bandung Conference. At Bandung, while Amrus was still at the Academy of Fine Arts, leaders of 29 newly or soon-to-be independent countries representing half of the world’s population stood up together against imperialism.

Seeing the August Revolution of 1945 as an incomplete one, many young artists like Amrus set themselves to the task of building an anti-imperialist and independent national culture that would pave the way to a socialist revolution. This was a period when organizations of Left artists were thriving. Lekra ( Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat or “The Institute for People’s Culture”) was one of these organizations, founded on August 17, 1950, just five years into Indonesia’s independence.

Lekra was likely the largest cultural organization not affiliated with a country to have ever existed. As the cultural front of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), it would grow over the next 15 years to over 200,000 members and, including its supporters, 1.5 million—until its life was cut short by the 1965 coup. The latter was the pretext for the persecution and killings of millions of communists and sympathizers in the months that followed.

Amrus was one of the many artists who were arrested in 1965, only to be released in 1973. Four years before his arrest, he had helped establish the Sanggar Bumi Tarung collective. Joining him were like-minded leftist artists, including Misbach Tamrin and Djoko Pekik. Forming part of Lekra, the collective and its members not only produced new artworks but also developed theory around their creations. One of the key principles that Lekra developed was Turun ke bawah or turba (“descend from above”), which was concretized in the first national congress of Lekra as a theory to guide the artist’s work. This meant going down to the grassroots to work, eat, and sleep alongside laborers, landless peasants, and fishermen. They believed that only with the sharpened feeling and understanding of the life of the people—or rakyat—can an artist adopt a kerakyatan approach, which means creating artwork that serves the people.

Amrus was a firm believer in and practitioner of turba, which he saw as both a source of knowledge and an inspiration for creation. He lived among Central Javanese peasants. In one instance, after learning of a local land dispute that resulted in the deaths of eleven peasants, he created one of his most famous wood sculptures. The work was more than a beautiful object, it became a record of an event, an analysis of class struggle, and an embodiment of the Lekra principle  kreativitas individual dan kearifan massa (“individual creativity and the wisdom of the masses”).

Most importantly, Amrus, like other political artists of his generation, defied the belief that art could be separated from politics. For Lekra artists, “politics was in command,” meaning that the foremost creative task was to create artwork that opposed imperialism and advanced the Indonesian revolution. But, for them, politics must always find its careful balance with artistry and aesthetics, and, like Amrus, an artist must be tirelessly committed to building his or her craft.

Amrus held his last solo exhibition in Jakarta in 2019. The rooms were filled with his signature “wood paintings,” which are intricate, colorful, and captivating. He created worlds with wood, three-dimensional scenes of everyday working-class life—a street market, a festival in Chinatown, a fishing village—where ordinary children, families, and people were always represented in multitudes. Every human being became a protagonist in the collective scenes that Amrus sculpted. As it was his last exhibition, the show was befittingly entitled, “ Terakhir, selamat tinggal dan terima kasih”(“The last, farewell and thank you”).

Amrus’s passing marks the final chapter of over seven decades of making artwork that served his people and an Indonesia whose revolution never saw its completion. Likewise, it has been nearly six decades since the horrors of 1965, when both the PKI and Lekra were effectively erased from political life and living memory. A Lekra poet, Putu Oka Sukanta, said, “Formal organizations can disappear; party organizations can be abolished, but the spirit lives if it is right.” May the spirit of Amrus, of Lekra, of Bandung live on for the artists of today, still seeking the path of making artwork that serves the people.

By Tings Chak

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Author Bio:
Tings Chak is a researcher and art director at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Source: Globetrotter

Can Democracy Survive The Morbidly Rich?

• by: Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann – Photo: en.wikipedia.org

02-02-2024 ~ So, Donald Trump won Iowa. A crazed billionaire who wants to “suspend the Constitution” and claims the right to a murder his political enemies. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Imagine.

Fox “News” shuts down (or just decides to only tell the truth), and most of the steam goes out of the rightwing populist MAGA movement which its billionaire owners helped create in the U.S. Insurrectionist members of Congress find themselves in jail facing sedition charges, as the previous leader of the country is under criminal investigation for taking help from Putin’s Russia. The government begins the process of decriminalizing abortion nationwide. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is overturned and, without the flow of billionaire money directing their votes, Congress begins to actually pass laws that reflect the desires of the majority of the people.

Unless you read international newspapers like The Financial Times, odds are you have no idea that same scenario is now playing out in Poland which, for the previous eight years, had been suffering under a Trump-like administration.

Last summer, progressive Polish politician Donald Tusk promised he was going to clean up that country with an “iron broom.” Few took his promise seriously, but after being sworn into office last month, he’s actually doing it. As Maciej Kisilowski writes for The Financial Times, just a few days after Tusk became prime minister:

“… Poland’s politicized public television station, notorious for its xenophobic, homophobic and racist messages, abruptly went dark. Tusk’s culture ministry summarily dismissed the station’s board and stopped broadcasts to prevent the outgoing leadership from inflaming tensions by airing live the takeover of the group’s headquarters.”

Last week two of the top rightwing politicians in Poland were arrested for abuse of power during the previous regime, while only a few hundred people showed up to protest the end of rightwing programming on the nation’s main television network.

Last Thursday there was a march to protest the new progressive prime minister, but the reaction was both tepid and nonviolent. As Kisilowski writes for The Financial Times:

“These decisive, if heavy-handed, actions come at a time when democrats globally are searching for strategies to deal with populists. In the U.S., for example, there is intense debate about whether the protracted legal cases against Donald Trump are serving to boost his campaign to return to the White House. Perhaps Tusk’s approach offers hope.”

Dislodging the death grip the GOP has on American politics will be more difficult than in Poland, in large part because five corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision.

The 2020 election cost over $14 billion. The 2016 election was only $6.5 billion. But in 2008, two years before Citizens United, it hadn’t even hit $1 billion: total spending with a mere $717 million. As the Executive Director of the money tracking opensecrets.org, Sheila Krumholz, said:

“Total outside spending is surprisingly high for this point in the cycle—we’re already at nearly $230 million. That’s more than twice the previous record through this point in the cycle, which was back in 2016. But it’s more than five times as much as was spent by this point in the last presidential cycle in 2020.”

Rightwing fascist-adjacent billionaires have used that open door to severely corrupt our political system, leading to massive gridlock when it comes to anything average people want.

Meanwhile, billionaires got tax cuts and deregulation making them vastly richer at the same time the companies that made them rich refuse to even commit to paying their workers a living wage (fewer than one percent of the world’s top companies have made such a commitment).

As a result, Princeton scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page famously found that the odds of average Americans’ political desires being translated into policy are about the same as “random noise.”

On the other hand, the new American system created by Republicans on our Supreme Court works quite well for the morbidly rich. The people Gilens and Page refer to as the “economic elites” frequently get everything they want from the political class.

They wrote that we still have the “features” of democracy, like elections, but ended their paper with this cautionary note:

“[W]e believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

So, here we are.

If, in a zoo somewhere, a single chimpanzee had risen up and taken all the food from all the other chimpanzees and was hoarding it without being challenged, scientists from all over the world would be trying to figure out what was wrong with that chimpanzee and why the others tolerated his theft.

As Oxfam International pointed out in a report timed to correspond with the kickoff of the billionaire love-fest at Davos this week, the five richest men in the world—four of them Americans—saw their net worth more than doubleover the past three years from $405 billion to $869 billion.

Since those five corrupt Republicans on the Court also ruled in Citizens United that corporations are “persons” with nearly-full access to the Bill of Rights—including the right to use money to pay off politicians (the Republicans on the Court call it First Amendment-protected “free speech”)—the corporations that are producing these billionaires are also gouging American consumers as hard and fast as they can.

As Oxfam noted (keep in mind, “profit” means, essentially, “the money that’s left over after all of our business expenses, including payroll, that we, the owners, get to split up and keep for ourselves”):

“Mirroring the fortunes of the super-rich, large firms are set to smash their annual profit records in 2023. 148 of the world’s biggest corporations together raked in $1.8 trillion in total net profits in the year to June 2023, a 52 percent jump compared to average net profits in 2018-2021. Their windfall profits surged to nearly $700 billion.”

That money isn’t going to workers, though, who’ve seen their real, inflation-adjusted wages fall worldwide in the same period. Instead:

“The report finds that for every $100 of profit made by 96 major corporations between July 2022 and June 2023, $82 was paid out to rich shareholders. … It would take 1,200 years for a woman working in the health and social sector to earn what the average CEO in the biggest 100 Fortune companies earns in a year.”

Thanks to Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking vote in Citizens United, Americas are not getting what they want. Which is another way of saying the morbidly rich and the judges and politicians they’ve bought are actively breaking our democratic republic.

On the eve of the 2016 election of Donald Trump, for example, the Progressive Change Institute did a nationwide survey of likely voters. The results were stark:

— 84 percent want the government to negotiate drug prices.
— 79 percent support expanding Social Security (which Haley and DeSantis both just last week promised to cut).
— 78 percent want “fair trade” that ends shipping our jobs overseas.
— 77 percent want to tax corporations that have moved jobs overseas.
— 77 percent want universal free pre-kindergarten.
— 74 percent want all Americans to be able to buy into Medicare-for-All.
— 71 percent support a massive infrastructure spending program aimed at rebuilding our broken roads and bridges and putting people back to work.
— 70 percent want free college at all public universities.
— 68 percent want a guaranteed minimum income.
— 67 percent want the government to be the employer of last resort to end unemployment (like FDR did).
— 66 percent want the morbidly rich to pay at least a 50 percent income tax (currently the average American billionaire pays around 3 percent).
— 65 percent want the big banks broken up and a return to local banking.
— 64 percent want net neutrality so your billion-dollar corporate internet and email providers can’t monitor everything you do online and sell that information.
— 63 percent want public financing of elections to get billionaire money out of them.
— 60 percent want the Post Office to offer inexpensive public banking.

President Biden and Democrats in Congress got some of the infrastructure work done and tried to end much of America’s nearly $2 trillion in student debt (until they were blocked by Republican lawsuits and six Republicans on the Supreme Court), and a small bit of the “Green New Deal” incorporated into the Inflation Reduction Act, but otherwise there’s a lot that Americans want and deserve that they’re not getting.

Why? Because the morbidly rich control much of our political process right now, and most of our media.

As former Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously said:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

This year’s election will not only decide whether we’re going to let Trump or a similar Republican end American democracy; it will also, if enough of us show up, determine if Citizens United can be legislatively overturned and we can purge our political system of the cancer of big money.

Democrats almost did it in 2022: the For the People Act would have reversed significant parts of Citizens United and provided for public funding of and more transparency around elections. It passed the House and got enough votes to pass the Senate under the Constitution.

Even the Republican filibuster could have been overcome if we hadn’t been betrayed by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate. Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote. The stakes have never been higher.

By Thom Hartmann

Author Bio:
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of Neoliberalism and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.

Source: Independent Media Institute

Credit Line: This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

2024 Will See Wave Of Minimum Wage Hikes — But The Impacts Won’t Be Felt Evenly

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Jeannette Wicks – Photo: Political Economy Research Institute

02-02-2024 ~Ten million US workers will see wage increases this year, but inflation has eroded our tools for reducing inequality.

On January 1, 2024, the minimum wage increased from coast to coast. Indeed, 22 states and more than 40 cities and counties experienced wage increases in 2024 — most of them approaching $15. More states will follow with minimum wage increases later in the year. Undoubtedly, this is mainly the result of underpaid workers organizing and fighting for a decent living wage over the past decade, but is a minimum wage enough? Moreover, where are the increases in minimum wage taking place?
A look at the map shows that the South still trails behind. Could this be due to racism in the labor market? In the exclusive interview with Truthout that follows, progressive economist Jeannette Wicks-Lim shares her research findings and insights on the politics and economics of increasing minimum wages. Wicks-Lim is a research professor at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and specializes in labor economics with an emphasis on the low-wage labor market.

C. J. Polychroniou: The federal minimum wage is still $7.25, but higher minimum wages went into effect in early January in 22 states, while three more (Florida, Nevada and Oregon) will increase their minimum wages later in 2024. How many and what sort of workers are going to be affected by these wage increases, and how significant are these minimum wage hikes in improving the overall standard of living for low-wage workers?

Jeannette Wicks-Lim: First, to your question about how many and what sort of workers will benefit from these minimum wage increases: An excellent resource for understanding the basic facts of who will benefit from these minimum wage increases is the Economic Policy Institute.

There are two basic types of raises that result from these increases — mandated and ripple-effect raises. Mandated raises are the raises that get workers up to the new, higher minimum wage level. Ripple-effect raises are raises that employers may choose to give workers who are earning a little more than the minimum wage — often these are workers with more experience than the entry-level workers who are more likely to earn minimum wage rates. Employers may do this so that the workers with more experience continue to earn more than entry-level workers after the minimum wage goes up. Overall, about 10 million workers — including both types of raises — will receive wage increases. This represents about 15 percent of the workforces in the states implementing minimum wage hikes. So, the impact — in terms of the share of affected workers — is substantial.

Due primarily to occupational segregation, women are over-represented in low-paying jobs, so they tend to receive a disproportionate share of the raises. Low-wage jobs are particularly concentrated in food services, for example, particularly fast-food restaurants. Workers in other service industries, such as home care aides and child care workers, are well represented among those whose wages rise with minimum wage hikes.

Black, Indigenous, and other workers of color also tend to be overrepresented among the workers who receive raises from minimum wage hikes when looking within the states adopting minimum wage hikes. However, it’s important to note that a majority of Black Americans do not reside in the states raising their minimum wage so that, overall, such workers are underrepresented among pool of beneficiaries from minimum wage hikes. This reflects the fact that southern states, and especially those that formerly made up the Confederate states, tend to have weak labor standards. This is clearly visible when you look at a map of where the minimum wage hikes are happening. The history of racism in the U.S. — especially in how the labor market operates — shows up clearly here.

Next, to your question about how the minimum wage raises affect the living standard of low-wage workers: I know from the multiple studies my colleagues at PERI and I have done in the past that the earnings of minimum wage workers typically contribute 40 percent of their household’s income so that a meaningful raise to these workers pay rates have a meaningful impact on their household incomes. These workers are typically from lower- to middle-income households.

Now, some of the minimum wage hikes that will pass are quite small — they only account for the increase in inflation rather than increasing the wage floor in inflation-adjusted terms. So, it’ll be workers in those states that lift the wage floor in real, inflation-adjusted terms, that can expect meaningful boosts to their living standards. Roughly speaking, about half the states raising their minimum wages are adopting increases in the range of 3 percent — these reflect, generally speaking, inflation-related adjustments. Another quarter of these states have minimum wage hikes in the range of 7 percent, and the remaining quarter are raising their minimum wage floors in excess of 10 percent.

In the states with minimum wage hikes of at least 10 percent, my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the average worker who receives a raise will be able to boost their household’s income by about 4 percent (10 percent raise x 40 percent contribution to household income). This is a meaningful increase. For a low-income household with three people (say, an income of $35,000), that translates to an annual increase of nearly $1,400. At the same time, given the rate of inflation in the last few years, even the smaller inflation-adjustment raises serve as important safeguards to at least maintaining workers’ living standards.

Why is it that half of the country is raising the minimum wage while the other half is not? In this context, can you talk about the politics behind minimum wage increases? For instance, there have been strong public campaigns to raise wages and end subminimum wages since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I’m not a political scientist, so my views on this are more impressionistic than based on any research I’ve done. What seems to be an important determinant of whether a minimum wage hike passes or not is how directly voters can weigh in on the question.

What I’ve observed is that minimum wage hikes are typically extremely popular at the ballot box. When voters get a chance to directly weigh in on whether their state should strengthen this labor standard, they typically vote in favor in large numbers. It seems that voters see minimum wage hikes as reasonable, fair and potentially beneficial to themselves and the economy. This is a popular issue even across the two major political parties. Take as an example, Florida, in which 71 percent of voters voted in favor of establishing that state’s minimum in 2004. In that same year, the majority of these Florida voters voted for Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.

As we move further away from voters having a direct say, such as minimum wage hikes proposed by state legislators, there seem to be more mixed results and partisan politics appear to play a stronger role. Getting a minimum wage hike through a state legislature dominated by the Republican Party is, it seems, nearly impossible. Again, this isn’t my area of research, but what this suggests to me is that business interests are more successful in lobbying Republican-leaning legislators than Republican-leaning voters. That, in turn, suggests that Republican-leaning legislators benefit more from these business interests than Republican-leaning voters. Still, states have increasingly taken up the role of strengthening this wage floor as the federal rate has stagnated. In 1980, for example, only two states operated with a state minimum age higher than the federal rate — Connecticut and Alaska. Now, as you note, about half the states in the country are increasing their minimum wage rates while the federal rate remains unchanged. I would bet that states that have a higher state minimum wage than the federal level and that typically have Republican-leaning state legislatures got their minimum wage rate through a ballot initiative.

At the federal level, there is no option to put this question directly to the voters. States that operate with the federal rate have seen the long stretches of time with no minimum wage hike — from 1982 to 1989 (eight years), and again from 1998 to 2006 (nine years), and now from 2010 to today (at least 14 years). The last federal increase — in 2009 — as the second step in a two-part increase was signed into law by a Republican president and a Democratic-led U.S. Congress. Since then, none have passed.

Do increases in the minimum wage affect the labor market?

I’ll focus on one of the important ways that the minimum wage impacts the labor market: The minimum wage has played an important role, at least historically, in reducing wage inequality. Prior to 1980, the minimum wage rose roughly in step with worker productivity so that the lowest wages increased in a meaningful way over time. And, because of ripple effect raises, these increases would basically pull up the bottom of the wage distribution closer to the middle. One important feature of the minimum wage to notice is that while these ripple-effect raises extend the benefits of minimum wage hikes to workers earning above the minimum wage, this pool of beneficiaries is really limited to workers at the low end of the wage distribution. High-wage workers, on the other hand, do not get raises from changes to the minimum wage. As a result, minimum wage-induced raises have the effect of compressing the wage distribution — i.e. reducing overall wage inequality. I say historically, because this role has been weakened in recent decades, especially in the states that only operate with the federal minimum, as the federal minimum wage has lost a significant amount of its inflation-adjusted value.

Another major way that the minimum wage, again historically, reduced wage inequality occurred when the Fair Labor Standards Act strengthened the labor standard by expanding which workers would be protected. Prior to 1966, the standard did not apply to a large segment of the low-wage workforce, excluding occupations in which Black workers were overrepresented due to racial discrimination. These occupations included farming and various service sector jobs. In their 2021 study, economists Ellora Derenoncourt and Claire Montialoux found that when these types of occupations became newly protected in 1966, the federal minimum wage reduced the earnings gap between Black and white workers by roughly one-fifth.

The minimum wage is regarded by many economists as an important tool of public policy for combating poverty and inequality. Do minimum wages deliver what they promise?

I’ve already touched on the topic of how the minimum wage impacts inequality so let me focus here on the question of poverty. I think of the minimum wage as being primarily a policy tool that helps low-income to middle-income households. This is because the minimum wage has no statistically discernible impact on employment (positive or negative) and so it is a policy tool that benefits employed workers, most directly. Those who are unemployed, or not in the labor force can only benefit indirectly from minimum wage hikes, e.g. through the earnings of other household members or by maintaining the labor standards of existing jobs so that when such individuals become employed, they benefit from the minimum wage floor. Other policies need to supplement robust minimum wages to effectively tackle poverty. The other policies that I think of include economic policies to move the U.S. economy to full employment, policies that subsidize traditionally unpaid work (e.g. child care and elder care), and policies that reduce wealth inequality so that more households are able to weather financial shocks, such as medical emergencies and spells of unemployment.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Source: https://truthout.org/