#whose income comes from government welfare

[statisticalcats2]

Going into the city is fun but now I legitimately get upset seeing buses since my mom went back on her promise about our next move and made the decision for me that I shouldn't take buses.

[quixoticanarchy]

Ok I read a book on degrowth by jason hickel (Less is More) and I still need to read more but. preliminary thoughts:

I appreciate the quantification of by how much current resource and energy consumption overshoots sustainable limits, and the excoriation of the absurd demand for compound growth on a finite planet; and the book has a decent history of capitalism and the violence and dispossession it rests upon. There is some similar quantification for how proposed degrowth measures would affect resource consumption, though (understandably) piecemeal, so it’s unclear what the full impact of these measures would be vis-à-vis climate meltdown and ecological tipping points, or on what timeline the degrowth transition would have to occur.

Degrowth measures - resource use caps, a shorter work week, basic income, healthcare, income caps, re-localizing supply chains, killing planned obsolescence, moving to a shared rather than personal ownership model for things like vehicles, etc. - are broadly “good” and have been promoted and supported outside of a specifically degrowth context already, which speaks to their appeal but also their pitfalls. Implementing all these measures and more has to carry the explicit intention of improving human and ecological welfare, GDP be damned, and has to be tied explicitly to a commitment to reducing growth and capping profits; otherwise, the trap I see is attempting to enact some of these measures while keeping the capitalist edifice intact - which, as Hickel acknowledges, would spur a new ‘fix’ in which some other domain or market is forced open for exploitation so that growth can continue.

This is obviously at odds with degrowth and it isn’t anything degrowth advocates don’t know, but it seems naïve to envision states whose existence and operation are so inextricable from capitalism being capable of doing such reforms to the degree and with the ideological shift necessary. It would be suicide. Which I’d welcome, but just saying we need to tackle corruption and have more real democracy so that governments can serve people’s actual needs does not convince me that these policies could be sincerely and radically adopted by any state that exists today.

The book seems to walk a line between “degrowth is very radical since it would require ditching the demand for economic growth and probably most of the profit motive itself, which is a huge mindset and ideological shift - if not to socialism per se then to post-capitalism” and also “degrowth isn’t that radical/outlandish since what it takes is all these commonsense reforms that people already want anyway”. Sometimes the degrowth policy package sounds a lot like just welfare-state capitalism, except with resource and energy consumption dramatically scaled back, and without the economic growth imperative. So… no longer capitalism as such, but still using many of the master’s tools to retrofit the master’s house.

In principle, a world exists in which wealthy countries consume far less and the rest of the world is freer and not (or at least less) exploited. In principle, degrowth measures could help us realize that world. Saying it’s not a revolutionary process might keep some readers from being scared off, etc, but I’m left wondering then: where does the force come from to make these changes happen? Are wealthy countries and individuals and corporations going to just agree to resource caps and wealth caps and redistribution? The argument that degrowth is a kind of decolonization and requires the demise of the colonial and capitalist view of people and nature is compelling to me, but that seems to conflict with the idea that degrowth can be implemented as a set of reforms to the systems that exist now, without the messiness of revolution and without somehow being co-opted by capitalism or packaged as ‘green growth’ (which Hickel makes clear would be bad and is bullshit). The ideological shift and end to growth is the big ask here - without that, the reforms are just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic, or maybe on the lawn of the master’s house, if you will.

[reason-with-the-underdog]

ningguang & kaveh are interesting foils

thinking about ningguang & kaveh, whose ambitions are literally encapsulated in grand architectural marvels of their own design

both bankrolled & were heavily involved in every step of the construction process

their buildings were destroyed due to choices they made

they chose to rebuild anyways

both care deeply about their impact on the future generations, of which their buildings are a key part of their intended legacy

but their buildings (jade chamber + palace of alcazarzaray) convey entirely different meanings/purposes

jade chamber is ningguang's office, where she conducts both her government and personal business work. it also affords her a birds eye view over all of liyue and figuratively serves as her throne atop the heavens.

she chose to sacrifice it to defeat osial & protect liyue harbor

that choice is made easier for her (but no less important) as ningguang knows that by doing so, she preserves liyue so that it can continue towards a more prosperous future (<- also shown in her being invested in children's education + welfare)

she's satisfied with liyue's current state & thus subsumes her personal ambition temporarily for the sake of liyue's continued progress. importantly, ningguang can and will guide liyue onwards and rebuild her beloved palace amongst the clouds as part of that process

meanwhile the palace of alcazarzaray is kaveh's "magnum opus"-- it represents the pinnacle of his aesthetic ideals in a time where the mainstream in sumeru did not value the arts

the palace's first destruction was at the hands of the withering (which kaveh takes personal responsibility for since he chose its location over a cliff) so its destruction isn't an active investment in continuing the status quo, like the jade chamber's was

the palace's loss represented the difficulty of pushing against the status quo (dori's commission was particularly enticing for kaveh as an incredibly rare opportunity to advocate for the arts at a time when the akademiya's official stance was to shut cultural activities down)

so while kaveh rebuilds the palace of alcazarzaray, much like ningguang rebuilt the jade chamber...

kaveh rebuilds the palace as a swan song-- he put everything he had into reconstruction as if it were his last message to a society that no longer recognised his values. he calls it a "magnum opus" (his greatest work, implying he may never do better, or that nothing else will come after)

ningguang's jade chamber is a monument to her ambition & her desire to shape the continuance of society thru leadership/oversight over liyue

kaveh's palace of alcazarzaray is a monument to his ambition & his desire to build something wonderful in defiance of what society valued

the temporary destruction of those ambitions-as-buildings affect them very differently as a result...

another lens to look at them is through their nation's AQs and themes

liyue's AQ was about humans taking control of their future governance...

while sumeru's AQ was about humans going too far with their pursuit of power/governance & crossing the line against the divine

both ningguang and kaveh are highly influential important people in their nations in positions of power to do great things for their nation and share their ideals/dreams with the public

but ningguang's story has her take charge of her nation and actively defend liyue in crisis

while kaveh is positioned more as an outsider to the akademiya government bureaucracy & as alhaitham asks in the AQ "Where were you when Sumeru needed you most?"

they have other parallels too (having a taste for luxury, being high income earners from their chosen profession, caring deeply for the development of children's education and welfare, having teasing & at-times combative relationships with their romantic partners)

LOOK I JUST REALLY WANT THEM TO MEET... IMAGINE IF KAVEH HAD AN ACTUAL GOOD PATRON INSTEAD OF DORI LORD SANGEMAH BAY

crossposted from twt

[beardedmrbean]

For decades, Britain’s Left-wing elite has looked at Europe’s high-spending social model with a degree of awe.

France, Germany and Scandinavia have long been viewed, perhaps through rose-tinted spectacles, as examples of what the UK could be if governments were not so tight-fisted.

Under Sir Keir Starmer, Labour is determined to give the country a much bigger state. Official projections published alongside the Budget last month show government spending will settle at around 45pc of GDP.

Spending has never been sustained at these levels before, only reaching such highs briefly in the nation’s worst moments – including the pandemic, the financial crisis and the 1970s oil shocks.

So at last the UK has a chance of becoming the high-spending social democracy of Labour dreams.

It is unfortunate, then, that this is the moment Christine Lagarde has chosen to issue an extraordinarily vivid warning: Europe’s social models are utterly unsustainable.

Weak and uncompetitive economies risk running out of money to fund their sprawling welfare states unless they can reverse decades of relative decline and emulate America’s runaway success in tech, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) cautioned.

“Our productivity growth in Europe is progressively slowing, which means that our ability to generate income is diminishing. If left unchecked, we will face a future of lower tax revenues and higher debt ratios,” she said in a speech in Paris.

“We face a rising old-age dependency ratio which will drive up public spending on pensions. And it is estimated that governments will need to spend in excess of €1 trillion (£836bn) a year to meet our investment needs for climate change, innovation and defence.

“If we cannot raise productivity, we risk having fewer resources for social spending.”

Those pressures are only going to mount. Pensions, for instance, are becoming ever more expensive. More than one-fifth of the populations of Spain, Germany and France are now aged over-65. In Italy, almost one-quarter have reached that age. Two decades ago, none had more than 20pc in the cohort.

Projections from the United Nations show even more stark increases to come. In Italy, for instance, more than one-third of the population will be aged 65 or older by 2040.

In Britain, not only is the share of pensioners rising – despite increases to the state pension age – but the generosity of the benefits they receive is also increasing.

The triple lock means the state pension rises by the highest of inflation, wages or 2.5pc each year, meaning benefits paid out in old age are, over time, guaranteed to rise more quickly than the incomes of the people whose taxes cover the cost. Adding to that is the cost of healthcare for those pensioners.

As Lagarde put it: “We face and will continue to face growing expenditure arising from a changing security environment, ageing populations and the climate transition.”

Cutting back any of those benefits is appallingly hard, as successive British governments have found. Not unsurprisingly, voters whose taxes paid for previous generations of pensioners find it galling to be asked to receive less themselves.

Similarly in France, Emmanuel Macron faced widespread protests against his plans to raise the pension age. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally made big gains in this year’s general election, in part on promises to reverse the increase.

Costs are also growing for other age groups, with more generous childcare subsidies on offer in Britain, as well as a rising population of working-age benefits claimants.

Europe is ‘trailing behind’

If Europeans want to keep on enjoying such largesse, they need to find a way to pay the bills, says Lagarde.

“Europe is under pressure. The rapid pace of technological change triggered by the digital revolution has left us trailing behind,” said the ECB president and former managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

“We need to adapt quickly to a changing geopolitical environment and regain lost ground in competitiveness and innovation. Failure to do so could jeopardise our ability to generate the wealth needed to sustain our economic and social model, which the vast majority of Europeans nevertheless hold dear.”

While the US economy roared back from Covid, Europe’s recovery was distinctly underwhelming, with Germany effectively failing to grow at all from its 2019 level. But the problem is not just a lockdown after-effect.

Over the past 20 years, productivity has grown twice as fast in the US as in the eurozone. Output for every hour worked has climbed by more than one-quarter in America compared to less than 13pc in the single currency area.

In Britain the situation is even worse, with productivity up by less than one-tenth.

The world’s largest companies illustrate the problem. By market capitalisation, the biggest five – each worth more than $2 trillion – are all American, led by Apple. All are also tech companies – chip-maker Nvidia, Microsoft, Google-owner Alphabet, and Amazon.

In sixth place, at a mere $1.8 trillion, is the first non-American entry, Saudi Aramco, the state oil company.

Most of the top 20 are American. The first European company is in 25th place – Denmark’s Novo Nordisk, famed for its manufacture of Ozempic and Wegovy, and worth the best part of half a trillion dollars.

The biggest European tech company is SAP, a relatively unsung German titan of business technology, and the 37th-largest listed company globally.

The industries in which Europe was traditionally a world leader are under growing threat.

Germany’s car industry is struggling to compete with cheap electric vehicles from China and fashion and luxury groups are at risk from tariffs if president-elect Donald Trump makes good on his campaign policy to impose border taxes of 10pc or even 20pc on imported goods.

LVMH, the 34th-biggest company and star of French industry, ranks highly on Morgan Stanley’s list of businesses which are exposed to US tariffs, because of the large share of products which the luxuries group sells over the Atlantic.

It is also exposed to any slowdown in trade with China, showing how exposed Europe has become to geopolitical tensions.

Lagarde says the Continent risks a “middle-technology trap”.

“We are specialised in technologies that were mostly developed in the last century. Only four of the world’s top 50 tech companies are European,” she said.

“Unlike in the past, Europe is no longer at the forefront of progress. Our productivity growth – the key factor driving our long-term prosperity – is diverging from the US.”

On top of that come trade wars, and the cost of military wars with Russia the most immediate threat, for which the continent is under-prepared.

As Lagarde notes, it was only wealth that generated the taxes to pay for Europe’s welfare states in the first place.

The sun is setting on European-style welfarism. Sir Keir must take note – growth has to come first.

[capitalism-and-analytics]

Do you believe a trust fund kid who has never worked in their life and whose income comes purely from dividends from their inheritance stored at an index fund, and someone on welfare who has never worked either, are morally equivalent? Or is one worse than the other?

There are a number of variables and caveats to this question, but assuming all things simple and common, I would say the later is worse than the former.

The former is a recipient of voluntary private action; if a parent works hard their whole life and then they choose to give the fruits of their labor to their child, then I have no reservations with that action. In contrast, the later is a recipient of involuntary public action; the government redistributing wealth by force, i.e. taxation, to provide to the later various forms of welfare. The question then becomes which is more likely to be less justified and due to the track record of the government, I would favor the former for being more justified.

Most importantly though, the former will end up paying taxes on their income, therefore funding the welfare of the second person, whereas most forms of welfare are non-taxable.

[pissodeluxe]

Money is so insidious.

Never before have I wished to be wealthy like I do right now. My heart is bleeding every time I see another post, another face, another please do not scroll. I empty everything I can find into fundraisers and sim cards and organisations feeding the hungry.

I've never been wealthy. In all the ways possible in a Scandinavian welfare state, I've been poor. I've grown up hungry and without proper clothes. I've been homeless several times. But I've never wanted to be wealthy. What would I do with money, I always thought. Buy a car I don't wish to drive? Buy a house that I probably won't know how to live in? I once was gifted a lottery scratcher that was a single, final digit away from being the winner and all I remember is the feeling of stress. I don't like money. I was relieved when it wasn't there.

Rock stars fly around in private jets, rich men build rockets and force their workers to piss themselves on the line, my country's subreddits are full of people advising each other on how to become wealthier through becoming shareholders, the famous and the aristocrats waltz around in pointless fashions giving pointless interviews and here we all are on Silly, Pointless Tumblr, half of us are already begging each other for help, for just a single dollar, just anything at all, just enough to feed my dog, just enough to buy my medication, someone please save my cat.

And we're apparently the only place where the cries for help from Gaza and Sudan are even heard anymore. Across the street the owners of the new, fancy apartments with the rooftop gardens whose gentrification has caused five new dog grooming salons to open up in an area that used to be only run down mechanics and car parks, they come here to my government apartment blocks and park their expensive cars, because our parking was always too far away from any place useful to be used like this.

Those people, I see them around. Talking about terrorism and complications, talking about their political views of fiscal responsibility and moral conservatism like they know anything at all about what life is like. They look at me sideways because I'm a filthy homo. They could help but they would never. They need that money, how else would they have their next date night at that Michelin restaurant. How else would they book their next vacation and buy a second Mercedes.

I'd key their disgusting cars except I'm pretty sure they have surveillance built in, and I'm a single parent and I'm already doing my best to find any leftover cash to donate it. I can't afford a fine. But I wish I could hurt them even just a little. Make them think twice before telling anyone who'd listen about how great they're doing. We're not even allowed to have dogs here. Not that I know anyone who would have their dog groomed. We don't even go to the human hair dressers. Five dig grooming shops in an area that I can walk across in twenty minutes.

I hate it.

I want the wealthy to suffer poverty. To feel hunger at night. To be afraid of the end of the month. I want them to feel what it is like to have their rent go up further than their income reaches. I want them to know the desolation having nowhere to go. No home and no family.

I want politicians to become powerless. I want them to become as irrelevant as the victims of their ruthless campaigning. I want them to yell in vain at a world that no longer listens.

I want open borders. I want all of us to weather the coming climate together, I want us to share what we have.

I want Palestine to be free. I want it's people to be compensated and apologised to somehow. I want their olive trees to grow back. I want Zionists to become a ridiculed minority again. I want Jews to be allowed to exist outside of some political nightmare state that claims to speak for them.

I want corporations to become illegal. I want previous metals and whatever else is causing people to be murdered and tortured to be respected and reused. We have enough smart phones, we have enough. I'm ashamed to admit I don't even know what the rest of the current conflicts are really about, because I'm so heartbroken all the time that I'm afraid for my health if I keep reading. I want the world to be safe for Muslims. I want us to get over the stupid, evil racism that's been driving us to murder and maim and torture and starve and kidnap and

I want it to stop. I can't accept that wanting it to stop is "too naive" or "too utopian." I don't care. Let me be childish then, and say that I want it to end. The suffering, the cruelty. I want a just world where everyone is given food and shelter. I want a world where no one gets to just claim the right to hurt their fellow humans.

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that so many have already been killed for pointless reasons and unfair wars. I'm sorry that the protests aren't listed to (yet!) I'm sorry that people feel allowed to turn a blind eye. I feel sick to see my country folk pretend like they don't know anything. I'm sorry I don't have the money to help everyone reach their needs, and I'm sorry I'm centering myself in this rant that my one follower will see. Like my heartbreak matters. Like my exhaustion is worth mentioning.

But I refuse to believe that this is how it will be. I refuse a future where not everyone is allowed to have a happy, safe life. I refuse it. There is too much good in this world. We will be heard. Our childish dreams will be made more and more real until the selfish forget that they ever denied them. We will keep fighting and building and sharing until everyone is cared for, until justice is done. We will learn to take care of each other and the ground that carries us. We will learn to become what we want. We will have clean air, clean water, clean food.

There's been enough pain. Something's gotta give. It's been paid for a thousand times already. This planet is too mathematically unlikely to just end up empty. Injustice is a losers game. Because I said so.

[aquotidianoddity]

I keep seeing posts like this about Finland and homelessness and I wanted to add a comment to correct some misinformation. To be clear, this isn't a criticism of Finland, just the way the information is being presented.

This post doesn't say it, but I've seen others that say that Finland has "ended" homelessness. This is not true. Finland has about 3500 homeless people, about 2/3 of which are living with friends or relatives. Finland has made huge strides in reducing homelessness and poverty-based homelessness is almost non-existent (meaning that homeless people usually have a social problem that prevents housing: debt, drug or mental health issues, or violent living situations).

Finland also doesn't "give you an apartment." The philosophy of "housing first" means that the social services in place are available to you regardless of your situation and their goal is to help you find your own apartment as a first priority. There are no sobriety or health requirements to receive them. The only prerequisite is that you're homeless or about to become homeless.

There are many services available to help you find and keep an apartment: social workers, housing counseling for those who don't know how to look for an apartment, and advice for approaching landlords when you have a mark against your credit, you have debt, or you're unemployed. There is also public housing; however, this can be limited, wait times can be long, and applications are prioritized by need (for example families with children and people who can't get private apartments because they've lost their credit details are prioritized)

There are also other services that are available to everyone, which help prevent both homelessness and poverty. The government pays a housing allowance to everyone whose income is under a certain amount (about 1600€/month). For example, as a student with no income my housing allowance is 313€/month and my rent is 480.

Unemployment benefits have no maximum time limit. There are some higher, wage-based unemployment benefits that have a time limit (300-500 days), but if you don't qualify or you run out of days, you can get the minimum benefit, about 800€/month.

If you can't work because you're sick, the government pays you 70% of your wages or a minimum of 800€/month for those with low wages or no job.

If your income isn't high enough to cover your necessary expenses, or if you have no income (perhaps you've temporarily lost your right to unemployment because you didn't apply for 4 jobs per month) and no savings or assets, the government pays you a basic income aid. This includes about 550€/month for food and necessities, the rest of your rent after the housing allowance (up to a certain maximum), plus the exact amount of your water, electricity, renters insurance, and medications. Other urgent and necessary bills can also be covered if they're approved. For example if you're evicted from your apartment and can't afford your new apartment's security deposit.

This is kind of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to welfare in finland, but these are some of the main pillars that most people will use at one point or another. All of these add up to a system that prevents homelessness before it can happen and supports people with issues to get back into a home and maintain it.

This system is unfortunately under attack by our current right-wing government. Health and social services are being underfunded and the conditions for receiving certain benefits have been made less generous and less flexible. The current government has a goal of eliminating long-term homelessness by 2027, but with their policies, I would be surprised if they achieve this.

Also let me know in the replies or my asks if you want to know more about welfare in Finland! It's one of my special interests and I have a lot of experience both working in the field and receiving it myself

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[gatekeeper-watchman]

Let it be known that the situation in South Africa didn’t come about because it is a nation of lazy loafers and ne’er-do-wells and the same mindset has worked its sliminess right back to America. It is the direct result of the inequality of opportunity in income, wealth, education, and due process under the law over these past many years–a carryover of colonization and apartheid. This is what happens in a land where people are suppressed and there is a lack of equal opportunities for all, economically, educationally, and politically. This has been happening in our country over the past half-century–especially in the past thirty-plus years. No one has to tell you about how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. You know it. You are probably among the latter.

As I have pointed out on previous occasions, wages and income (in real terms) are decreasing in our country, and the preponderance of our people is in debt up to their ears (personal as well as national debt). Unemployment is exceedingly high with, current statistics notwithstanding, over twenty million people out of work, and jobs (and money) flowing profusely from our country to nations around the globe. Many just cannot make ends meet. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of our people, go to bed at night hungry. Even more is on some form of welfare or another–our welfare rolls (state of dependency) have exploded. The standard of living for our economy as a whole is in decline, a trend I anticipate will continue for the foreseeable future; and as you might expect, worry, unrest, and discontent among our people is rampant. The sale of firearms and ammunition in our country has increased significantly, and the establishment of internment facilities and massive purchases of ammunition by our government’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security has also been reported (Ref: infowars.com). As if this isn’t enough, our government is politically broken. For all practical purposes, it has become inoperative–almost beyond repair. As just one example, Congress threw $24 Billion into the trash and completely unnecessary government shutdown (small change compared to other travesties in the past). They, also, cut food stamps, despite this plight of our people.

I don’t usually copy other people’s writings in my postings to this blog; but, if you will indulge me, I would like to make an exception and post a recent letter to the editor of a national newspaper. Except for a couple of spelling corrections, I have not edited it one iota. I just want to give you one example of the feeling in this country. It reads as follows:

“The federal deficit has been inching down. And why must deficit reduction always fall on the backs of the least among us? The rich have been left happily alone on their pinnacle of invulnerability, there is about $36 trillion in offshore taxes left UN-pursued, and no one on the right will so much as consider the phrase "raise revenues". You can't turn the clock back to the mid-19th century. When enough people are marginalized and realize that they have no stake in a nation that doesn't give a tinker's curse about healthcare, public education, access to higher education, and has cooperated in building a workforce of terrified serfs at the behest of behemoth corporate interests with no national or ethical boundaries - the peasants will begin rioting, and the baby will go with the bathwater. The rising inequity between the very rich and everyone else, and that includes a frustrated, hard-working middle class whose corpse is being picked over by the corporate rich in this country like a dead pigeon is, I assure you, far more dangerous than the federal deficit. The government can print money any time it likes. But it won't have a fire hose long enough to put out the fire that will eventually ignite from the spreading gasoline pool of failure to thrive among everyone but the rich.”

I think that says it all, folks. That says it all. We need to change our direction before we, too, become like South Africa. We need to take back our government from the Shadow Government of the Corporatocracy and Power Elite. We can only do this with election and campaign financing reform; and by becoming politically active and eliminating private money from the election process, which will never happen if we never get with the program. From: Steven P. Miller @ParkermillerQ,  gatekeeperwatchman.org Tap Pictures Always: Founder of Gatekeeper-Watchman International Groups, Saturday, June 1, 2024, Jacksonville, Florida., USA. X ... @ParkermillerQ #GWIG, #GWIN, #GWINGO, #Ephraim1, #IAM, #Sparkermiller, #Eldermiller1981 Thank you for sharing: Https://gatekeeperwatchman.org/post/751889961062744064/daily-devotionals-for-may-30-2024-proverbs-gods? MY GROUP and Not FACEBOOK/METAS: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Sparkermiller.JAX.FL.USA

[robertreich]

Mr. Fix-It

Joe Biden is embarking on the biggest government initiative in more than a half century, “unlike anything we have seen or done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades go,” he says.

But when it comes to details, it sounds as boring as fixing the plumbing.

“Under the American Jobs Plan, 100% of our nation’s lead pipes and service lines will be replaced—so every child in America can turn on the faucet or fountain and drink clean water,” the president tweeted.

Can you imagine Donald Trump tweeting about repairing lead pipes?  

Biden is excited about rebuilding America’s “infrastructure,” a word he uses constantly although it could be the dullest term in all of public policy. “Infrastructure week” became a punchline under Trump. 

The old unwritten rule was that if a president wants to do something really big, he has to justify it as critical to national defense or else summon the nation’s conscience.

Dwight Eisenhower’s National Interstate and Defense Highway Act was designed to “permit quick evacuation of target areas” in case of nuclear attack and get munitions rapidly from city to city. Of course, in subsequent years it proved indispensable to America’s economic growth.

America’s huge investment in higher education in the late 1950s was spurred by the Soviets’ Sputnik satellite. The official purpose of the National Defense Education Act, as it was named, was to “insure trained manpower of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the national defense needs of the United States.”

John F. Kennedy launched the race to the moon in 1962 so that space wouldn’t be “governed by a hostile flag of conquest.”

Two years later, Lyndon Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty” drew on the conscience of America reeling from Kennedy’s assassination.  

But Joe Biden is not arousing the nation against a foreign power – not even China figures prominently as a foil – nor is he basing his plans on lofty appeals to national greatness or public morality.

“I got elected to solve problems,” he says, simply. He’s Mr. Fix-it.

The first of these problems was a pandemic that’s killed hundreds of thousands of Americans -- Biden carries a card in his pocket updating the exact number -- and its ensuing economic hardship.

In response, Congress passed Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan -- the most important parts of which aren’t $1,400 checks now being mailed to millions of Americans but $3,600 checks a child paid to low-income families, which will cut child poverty by half.

Now comes his $2 trillion American Jobs Plan, which doesn’t just fund roads and bridges but a vast number of things the nation has neglected for years: schools, affordable housing, in-home care, access to broadband, basic research, renewable energy, and the transition to a non-fossil economy.

Why isn’t Biden trumpeting these initiatives for what they are – huge public investments in the environment, the working-class and poor -- instead of rescue checks and road repairs? Why not stir America with a vision of what the nation can be if it exchanges fraudulent trickle-down economics for genuine bottom-up innovation and growth?

Even the official titles of his initiatives – Rescue Plan, Jobs Plan, and soon-to-be-unveiled Family Plan – are anodyne, like plumbing blueprints.

The reason is Biden wants Americans to feel confident he’s taking care of the biggest problems but doesn’t want to create much of a stir. The country is so bitterly and angrily divided that any stir is likely to stir up vitriol.

Talk too much about combatting climate change and lose everyone whose livelihood depends on fossil fuels or who doesn’t regard climate change as an existential threat. Focus on cutting child poverty and lose everyone who thinks welfare causes dependency. Talk too much about critical technologies and lose those who don’t believe government should be picking winners.  

Rescue checks and road repairs may be boring but they’re hugely popular. 61 percent of Americans support the American Rescue Plan, including 59 percent of Republicans. More than 80 percent support increased funding for highway construction, bridge repair and expanded access to broadband.

Biden has made it all so bland that congressional Republicans and their big business backers have nothing to criticize except his proposal to pay for the repairs by raising taxes on corporations, which most Americans support.

This is smart politics. Biden is embarking on a huge and long-overdue repair job on the physical and human underpinnings of the nation while managing to keep most of a bitterly divided country with him. It may not be seen as glamorous work, but when you’re knee-deep in muck it’s hard to argue with a plumber.  

[grison-in-space]

Hey, it's cool that you live in the Global South! You therefore have vastly reduced power to influence US policy decisions, and therefore you ain't my audience. It's also cool that you've declared that the people in your nation-state matter more than the people in mine, uniformly and across the board and regardless of class, ethnicity, background and all those little granular intersectional effects that marginalize other people. Love that for you. Great belief for you! Not my problem, though, because I actually don't accept your premise that the only people who matter are people who live in countries that aren't mine when I talk about voting as a form of harm reduction.

First: I do in fact think that harm done to vulnerable people globally matters—which includes vulnerable people who live in the US. Are you shitting me? Do you sincerely believe that domestic policy in the third-largest country in the world, a country with massive income equality, doesn't meaningfully contribute to global welfare? You genuinely believe that global nationality is more meaningful to outcomes and vulnerability? You are going to sit here and tell me as if butter wouldn't melt in your goddamn mouth that poor working folks in my regional South don't matter to you, that you think it's fine if poor working women of color die of lack of access to reproductive care? You think it doesn't matter if bad things happen to marginalized people if it happens within the borders of an entire fucking continent—because Mexico is part of the Global South and let me tell you our domestic decisions sure affect them—and you think I am misunderstanding the importance of my ability to guide the decisions of the nation I have some control over?

Go fuck yourself. People who aren't far away from me matter, too, and they are absolutely part of my calculus about whose harm matters.

Second: take foreign aid. You do know that the foreign policies of the United States are also shaped by the makeup of our political leadership, right? For example, the United States contributes the most absolute money to foreign aid of any nation on the planet. Do you sincerely think that the quantity of that aid and the direction it is sent are equivalent between political parties? Consider Ukraine: do you know how hard Republicans are trying to throttle the military aid and assistance the US has contributed to that situation? Do you genuinely think that American political parties are the same when it comes to foreign intervention and support?

For fuck's sake, you absolute imbecile, the last time Trump specifically was in office he cut the CDC's infectious disease response team's funding. That meant that when China's own infectious disease team shat the bed because officials were afraid to report the reality of the situation up the chain, there was no one to intervene and help contain the situation as happened with SARS a decade earlier.

Do you sincerely think that COVID is helping anyone in the Global South? Do you think that a new endemic disease notorious for leaving long term disability and morbidity in its wake is helpful to anyone? Even speaking globally, voting and making sure that the government of a truly massive and wealthy state is not asleep at the fucking wheel is a huge factor when it comes to steering the way that that government behaves in foreign affairs, even if the same fucking government is complicit in other interventions that are decidedly less positive.

from the number of asinine complaints about how "voting is NOT a form of harm reduction" because harm reduction is for ADDICTS! ONLY! I'm seeing around... all coming from OP blogs I don't recognize and which otherwise don't have much presence... well, that coordination alongside the timing of US politics sure feels like the Russian troll bots agitating again. (Yes, they absolutely infested Tumblr; I think @ms-demeanor had a great post about what the bots looked and felt like somewhere that I will have to try and track down tomorrow.)

The thing is, if you actually do know harm reduction well, the complaint makes no sense. It's not as if the origin of harm reduction is a secret or especially hard to find out more about. I am not exactly an expert in the field: I have a educated layperson's interest in public health and infectious disease, I'm a queer feminist of a certain age and therefore have a certain degree of familiarity with AIDS-driven safer sex campaigns, and I'm interested in disability history and self advocacy (and I would in fact clarify harm reduction as a philosophy under this umbrella). So I have about twenty years of experience with harm reduction as a philosophy basically by existing in communities whose history is intertwined with harm reduction, which means I know it well from many different angles, and I know how the story of the philosophy is generally taught.

See, this is a story that starts, as so many stories do, in the 1980s with something monstrous President Reagan was doing. In this case, it was the AIDS epidemic, and Reagan refusing to devote any money or time to what eventually became called AIDS (rather than the original GRIDS, which came with its own baked in homophobia). Knowing themselves abandoned by society in this as in all things, and watching as friends and loved ones died in droves, queers and addicts are two communities who see that they are the only resources that they collectively have to save each other's lives. Queers know that sex, even casual sex, is an important part of people's lives and culture... and people aren't going to stop doing it even if there's a disease, so how can it happen safely? Condoms. Condoms every time, freely available, easy and shameless, shower them on people in the street if you have to. (And other things: this is the origin of the concept of "fluid bonding", for example... both of which were concepts that were immediately adopted in response to COVID, like outdoor socially distsnced greetings and masks and "bubbles." That wasn't an accident. Normalizing sexual health tests and seeing hard results on paper before sex was a thing, too.)

Addicts, too, knew that using was going to happen no matter how earnestly people tried to stop. If it was that easy, addiction wouldn't exist. So: how do you make using safer for longer? If you could stop someone getting HIV before they could bring themselves to get clean, that's a whole life right there. If you could stop someone overdosing once, twice, a dozen times, that's more time you're buying them to claw themselves out of addiction and into a better place. Addicts see, right, needle sharing is getting the diseases spread, so cut down on needle sharing. Well, needles aren't easy to get hold of. Their supply is controlled because people who aren't prescribed needles are theoretically junkies, so taking the needles away makes it harder to use, right— and no one is complicit, and also you see fewer discarded needles lying around where they're unsanitary and unsafe, right? Except that people want to do a buddy a good turn, so they share if there's no other option, and they'll keep a needle going until it's literally too blunt to keep using if need be. So fighting needle sharing means making it easier to get needles to shoot up with: finding a place to discard used ones and get as many fresh ones as you need to use safely!

Making free needles available to junkies and free condoms for the bathhouses was not a popular solution with politicians, for perhaps obvious reasons. Nor was routine testing of the blood supply, because that cost money too. But these things work to stop the spread of disease. Thus the principle of harm reduction: policy interventions in response to communities that frequently engage in risky behavior should focus on whatever reduces aggregate harm by reducing the risk rather than by trying to reduce the behavior. The homos and junkies say look, all your societal judgement in the world hasn't stopped us being homos and junkies yet. You ain't going to look after us? We'll look after our own. And this is the form that takes. Not increasing the pressure to act like people who aren't is, but making it safer to be the people we are while we try to be the happiest versions of ourselves. Even if that means being morally complicit in a whole lot of casual sex and drug abuse.

The thing is, harm reduction is a philosophy rooted in the defiance of people who knew that their society thought they deserved to die painfully, young, invisible and alone. This is not the kind of thing that people come up with and get mad if you adapt it and share it, especially if you tell the story of where it came from. And importantly, harm reduction is not purely the child of addiction: that philosophy, from the get go, was cooked up to apply both to substance abuse and casual sex. It didn't just spread from addiction care; it was born straddling addiction care and queer & feminist health care.

So it doesn't make sense to see actual activists who know harm reduction well complaining that this is a term exhibiting semantic drift when we talk about voting as harm reduction. It's actually a good metaphor: you're reducing the overall risk of the worst case scenario metaphors by voting Democrat, at least until future votes can install a system where multiple parties can flourish on the political scheme. (Democrats and Republicans are essentially coalitions of a pack of arguing factions anyway, and those factions are essentially what would be classed elsewhere as a party in its own right; the US essentially just lumps political granularity rather than splitting it in our political system.) And anyone who understands harm reduction itself knows that.

So it's this wildly inorganic complaint being voiced repeatedly by different sources. Sounds like a pretty good flag for a potential psyop to me.

If you want to learn more about harm reduction and its history, especially from an addiction perspective, I cannot recommend Maia Szalavitz's Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction (2022) highly enough. Szalavitz has a history of addiction of her own as well as being a clear and accessible writer with an excellent grasp of neuroscience and history. I have a lot of respect for her work.

[life-on-the-spectrum]

How the Stone Soup Commune Worked:

@solarpunkpositivity​, in response to THIS.

Okay, so what happened was we had a half-dozen families that were at seriously scary levels of poverty. Most of us didn’t know where our next meals were coming from, and there were families driven to some seriously shady shit just to keep the utilities on, assuming they even had a place to live at all. A lot of us were couchdwelling in other people’s houses. Kids were hungry, people were cold, it was BAD. 

This didn’t happen overnight. It would have failed miserably if it had happened overnight. It grew organically, from the lot of us slowly realizing that if we worked together, we could solve one problem at a time and make everyone’s lives easier.

It started with “Stone Soup” dinners, where everyone gathered in a house with whatever scraps they had in their kitchens, and they made whatever food they could for a giant shared dinner. We all helped clean up, and the next day we did it again at a different house. Goal one: everyone’s kids got at least one meal a day. 

After a few days of this, those of us who had anything resembling an education started helping the kids with homework. Most folks didn’t even have high school diplomas. I had an associate’s degree at the time. There was so much math, you have no idea. While the moms made food and cleaned up, I and a couple of others tutored the munchkins. Goal two: help the kids get education so they can get OUT of this mess.

A few weeks later, a woman we’ll call Jenna realized that we could do more. She had not much for formal education, but Jenna had a MASSIVE gift for organization and administration. She made a list of who had what other assets to offer. She started quietly making calls and asking if people could do favors for their friends. I had a car, for example, so I helped make sure that everyone who had jobs could get to them reliably (when I wasn’t tutoring, or working myself). People who didn’t have jobs got asked to babysit, clean houses, or do home repairs for people who did, so they didn’t have to stress so much. Goal three: make it easier for people who could get jobs to keep them. 

No one ever had enough money to actually pay each other. But those who did have jobs started pooling whatever spare money they had. They made sure that everyone had their utilities on, had food in their pantries, had clothing to wear to work, et cetera. We utilized every social safety net we had access to: food pantries, welfare and disability checks, food stamps, all of it. No government assistance was enough to keep a family alive, but working together they kept several going. This wasn’t fraud. Even at our height, nearly everyone in the commune was well below the poverty line income-wise, and a lot of us still didn’t qualify for aid. 

Jenna was actually able to leave her day job, she decided that it would do more good to manage our accidental commune full-time instead. She kept track of who needed what, who could offer what, and who was sleeping on whose couches. That last statistic actually started to grow, because as people got homes of their own, they started taking in others who needed help and the commune grew. 

By the time this had been going on for a year, one family had even managed to buy a house. The place was an absolute shithole, but there were people able to help fix it up and it had a gigantic yard that the family offered up as garden space. Now we all had fresh vegetables for free! The kids could actually get some real nutrition in them!  Goal four: bring everyone out of economic and material destitution. Goal five: start helping others too. Incidentally, this made it even easier for people to get better jobs. So yay!

Now, here’s where it fell apart. 

First, there was never any formal organization or rules. Jenna kept everything going, and she mediated when people had disagreements, but we had no structure. You can be informal as you like when there are only six households. When there are eight, or twelve, and no one knows each other, you need rules.

Second, we got way too big. One person can’t organize a whole community scattered across a dozen houses all over town. Not even Jenna’s administrative superpowers were that good. 

Third, not everyone helped. We accepted people into the commune without really considering if they would contribute, or if they just wanted a free ride. And Jenna was too kind of a person to kick people out when they wanted the benefits without joining in the labor. 

Fourth, and this was a big one, drugs. No one was on the hard stuff that I knew of. But there was a lot of alcohol and pot floating around. Normally I’m cool with both of these things. But they’re expensive, and we had a huge problem with people buying booze/pot then asking for help with rent. One person actually started trying to sell pot at some point. None of us wanted to judge how you paid your bills, but the last thing anyone wanted in that town was the locals (who were already gossiping about commies) deciding that everyone associated with the commune was a drug dealer. 

The Stone Soup Commune only lasted for about five years or so before shutting down.

Communes are threatening to the locals wherever you set up, especially if you’re mostly poor folks. You have got to follow every law that you can, and look as squeaky clean as you can, or the locals will find a way to shut you down. I’d actually recommend being as secretive as possible about it when you set it up. I’m rather certain by now that there were people joining our commune just to start trouble, after all of the arguments that we had with local conservatives. We had rumors going around that we were a cult, which led to harassment from churches as well. 

If you keep it small, though, and formalize rules, and start by solving one problem at a time, I still believe that these organizations work. 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 23, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first humans ever to land, and then to walk, on the moon.

They were part of the Apollo program, designed to put an American man on the moon. Their spacecraft launched on July 16 and landed back on Earth in the Pacific Ocean July 24, giving them eight days in space, three of them orbiting the moon 30 times. Armstrong and Aldrin spent almost 22 hours on the moon’s surface, where they collected soil and rock samples and set up scientific equipment, while the pilot of the command module, Michael Collins, kept the module on course above them.

The American space program that created the Apollo 11 spaceflight grew out of the Cold War. The year after the Soviet Union launched an artificial satellite in 1957, Congress created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to demonstrate American superiority by sending a man into space. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy moved the goalposts, challenging the country to put a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth again. He told Congress: “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

A year later, in a famous speech at Rice University in Texas, Kennedy tied space exploration to America’s traditional willingness to attempt great things. “Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it—we mean to lead it,” he said.

[T]here is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people…. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills….”

But the benefits to the country would not only be psychological, he said. “The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school.” The effort would create “a great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs…new demands in investment and skilled personnel,” as the government invested billions in it.

“To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money…. I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.”

Seven years later, people across the country gathered around television sets to watch Armstrong step onto the moon and to hear his famous words: “That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

President Richard Nixon called the astronauts from the White House: “I just can't tell you how proud we all are of what you have done,” he said. “For every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives…. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man's world…. For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one…in their pride in what you have done, and…in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.”

And yet, by the time Armstrong and Aldrin were stepping onto the moon in a grand symbol of the success of the nation’s moon shot, Americans back on earth were turning against each other. Movement conservatives who hated post–World War II business regulation, taxation, and civil rights demanded smaller government and championed the idea of individualism, while those opposed to the war in Vietnam increasingly distrusted the government.

After May 4, 1970, when the shooting of college students at Kent State University in Ohio badly weakened Nixon’s support, he began to rally supporters to his side with what his vice president, Spiro Agnew, called “positive polarization.” They characterized those who opposed the administration as anti-American layabouts who simply wanted a handout from the government. The idea that Americans could come together to construct a daring new future ran aground on the idea that anti-war protesters, people of color, and women were draining hardworking taxpayers of their hard-earned money.

Ten years later, former actor and governor of California Ronald Reagan won the White House by promising to defend white taxpayers from people like the “welfare queen,” who, he said, “has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.” Reagan promised to champion individual Americans, getting government, and the taxes it swallowed, off people’s backs.

“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Reagan said in his Inaugural Address. Americans increasingly turned away from the post–World War II teamwork and solidarity that had made the Apollo program a success, and instead focused on liberating individual men to climb upward on their own terms, unhampered by regulation or taxes.

This week, on July 20, 2021, 52 years to the day after Armstrong and Aldrin stepped onto the moon, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and four passengers spent 11 minutes in the air, three of them more than 62 miles above the earth, where many scientists say space starts. For those three minutes, they were weightless. And then the pilotless spaceship returned to Earth.

Traveling with Bezos were his brother, Mark; 82-year-old Wally Funk, a woman who trained to be an astronaut in the 1960s but was never permitted to go to space; and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen from the Netherlands, whose father paid something under $28 million for the seat.

Bezos’s goal, he says, is not simply to launch space tourism, but also to spread humans to other planets in order to grow beyond the resource limits on earth. The solar system can easily support a trillion humans,” Bezos has said. “We would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited—for all practical purposes—resources and solar power and so on. That's the world that I want my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren to live in.”

Ariane Cornell, astronaut-sales director of Bezos’s space company Blue Origin, live-streamed the event, telling the audience that the launch “represents a number of firsts.” It was “[t]he first time a privately funded spaceflight vehicle has launched private citizens to space from a private launch site and private range down here in Texas. It’s also a giant first step towards our vision to have millions of people living and working in space.”

In 2021, Bezos paid $973 million in taxes on $4.22 billion in income while his wealth increased by $99 billion, making his true tax rate 0.98%. After his trip into the sky, he told reporters: “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this…. Seriously, for every Amazon customer out there and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart very much. It’s very appreciated.”

—-

Notes:

https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-space-flight-passenger-revealed-wally-funk-2021-7

https://www.businessinsider.com/blue-origin-auction-spacecraft-jeff-bezos-winner-seat-astronaut-2021-6

https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-launches-to-space-blue-origin-first-human-spaceflight-2021-7

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/08/wealthy-irs-taxes/

https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-thanks-amazon-customers-for-paying-trip-to-space-2021-7

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[From comments: “When you’ve been able to amass your money by not paying your fair share of taxes, your “privately funded” venture is a diversion of rightfully public funds. This new space race is publicly funded, but absent public controls and alignment. Socialize the expenses, privatize the profits.”

“After May 4, 1970, when the shooting of college students at Kent State University in Ohio badly weakened Nixon’s support, he began to rally supporters to his side with what his vice president, Spiro Agnew, called “positive polarization."Combined with the unsubtle racism of Nixon's Southern Strategy, thus began the decades long Republican policy of dividing Americans against each other that has led us to what we have today; two Americas that reside in different universes, and our national wealth controlled by a handful of unelected, supremely, in some cases psychotically, self-centered white men.Jeff Bezos could not have existed in Kennedy's America. We must make that so again.”

[historymeetsliterature]

Freedom from fear - Aung San Suu Kyi - 1990

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. Most Burmese are familiar with the four a-gati, the four kinds of corruption. Chanda-gati, corruption induced by desire, is deviation from the right path in pursuit of bribes or for the sake of those one loves. Dosa-gati is taking the wrong path to spite those against whom one bears ill will, and moga-gati is aberration due to ignorance. But perhaps the worst of the four is bhaya-gati, for not only does bhaya, fear, stifle and slowly destroy all sense of right and wrong, it so often lies at the root of the other three kinds of corruption. Just as chanda-gati, when not the result of sheer avarice, can be caused by fear of want or fear of losing the goodwill of those one loves, so fear of being surpassed, humiliated or injured in some way can provide the impetus for ill will. And it would be difficult to dispel ignorance unless there is freedom to pursue the truth unfettered by fear. With so close a relationship between fear and corruption it is little wonder that in any society where fear is rife corruption in all forms becomes deeply entrenched.

Public dissatisfaction with economic hardships has been seen as the chief cause of the movement for democracy in Burma, sparked off by the student demonstrations 1988. It is true that years of incoherent policies, inept official measures, burgeoning inflation and falling real income had turned the country into an economic shambles. But it was more than the difficulties of eking out a barely acceptable standard of living that had eroded the patience of a traditionally good-natured, quiescent people - it was also the humiliation of a way of life disfigured by corruption and fear.

The students were protesting not just against the death of their comrades but against the denial of their right to life by a totalitarian regime which deprived the present of meaningfulness and held out no hope for the future. And because the students' protests articulated the frustrations of the people at large, the demonstrations quickly grew into a nationwide movement. Some of its keenest supporters were businessmen who had developed the skills and the contacts necessary not only to survive but to prosper within the system. But their affluence offered them no genuine sense of security or fulfilment, and they could not but see that if they and their fellow citizens, regardless of economic status, were to achieve a worthwhile existence, an accountable administration was at least a necessary if not a sufficient condition. The people of Burma had wearied of a precarious state of passive apprehension where they were 'as water in the cupped hands' of the powers that be.

Emerald cool we may be_As water in cupped hands_But oh that we might be_As splinters of glass_In cupped hands.

Glass splinters, the smallest with its sharp, glinting power to defend itself against hands that try to crush, could be seen as a vivid symbol of the spark of courage that is an essential attribute of those who would free themselves from the grip of oppression. Bogyoke Aung San regarded himself as a revolutionary and searched tirelessly for answers to the problems that beset Burma during her times of trial. He exhorted the people to develop courage: 'Don't just depend on the courage and intrepidity of others. Each and every one of you must make sacrifices to become a hero possessed of courage and intrepidity. Then only shall we all be able to enjoy true freedom.'

The effort necessary to remain uncorrupted in an environment where fear is an integral part of everyday existence is not immediately apparent to those fortunate enough to live in states governed by the rule of law. Just laws do not merely prevent corruption by meting out impartial punishment to offenders. They also help to create a society in which people can fulfil the basic requirements necessary for the preservation of human dignity without recourse to corrupt practices. Where there are no such laws, the burden of upholding the principles of justice and common decency falls on the ordinary people. It is the cumulative effect on their sustained effort and steady endurance which will change a nation where reason and conscience are warped by fear into one where legal rules exist to promote man's desire for harmony and justice while restraining the less desirable destructive traits in his nature.

In an age when immense technological advances have created lethal weapons which could be, and are, used by the powefful and the unprincipled to dominate the weak and the helpless, there is a compelling need for a closer relationship between politics and ethics at both the national and international levels. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations proclaims that 'every individual and every organ of society' should strive to promote the basic rights and freedoms to which all human beings regardless of race, nationality or religion are entitled. But as long as there are governments whose authority is founded on coercion rather than on the mandate of the people, and interest groups which place short-term profits above long-term peace and prosperity, concerted international action to protect and promote human rights will remain at best a partially realized struggle. There willcontinue to be arenas of struggle where victims of oppression have to draw on their own inner resources to defend their inalienable rights as members of the human family.

The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences ofdesire, ill will, ignorance and fear.

Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and to uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society. Among the basic freedoms to which men aspire that their lives might be full and uncramped, freedom from fear stands out as both a means and an end. A people who would build a nation in which strong, democratic institutions are firmly established as a guarantee against state-induced power must first learn to liberate their own minds from apathy and fear.

Always one to practise what he preached, Aung San himself constantly demonstrated courage - not just the physical sort but the kind that enabled him to speak the truth, to stand by his word, to accept criticism, to admit his faults, to correct his mistakes, to respect the opposition, to parley with the enemy and to let people be the judge of his worthiness as a leader. It is for such moral courage that he will always be loved and respected in Burma - not merely as a warrior hero but as the inspiration and conscience of the nation. The words used by Jawaharlal Nehru to describe Mahatma Gandhi could well be applied to Aung San:

'The essence of his teaching was fearlessness and truth, and action allied to these, always keeping the welfare of the masses in view.'

Gandhi, that great apostle of non-violence, and Aung San, the founder of a national army, were very different personalities, but as there is an inevitable sameness about the challenges ofauthoritarian rule anywhere at any time, so there is a similarity in the intrinsic qualities of those who rise up to meet the challenge. Nehru, who considered the instillation of courage in the people of India one of Gandhi's greatest achievements, was a political modernist, but as he assessed the needs for a twentieth-century movement for independence, he found himself looking back to the philosophy of ancient India: 'The greatest gift for an individual or a nation . .. was abhaya, fearlessness, not merely bodily courage but absence of fear from the mind.'

Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage acquired through endeavour, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions, courage that could be described as 'grace under pressure' - grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure.

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear ofdeath, fear oflosing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.

The wellspring of courage and endurance in the face of unbridled power is generally a firm belief in the sanctity of ethical principles combined with a historical sense that despite all setbacks the condition of man is set on an ultimate course for both spiritual and material advancement. It is his capacity for self-improvement and self-redemption which most distinguishes man from the mere brute. At the root of human responsibility is the concept of peffection, the urge to achieve it, the intelligence to find a path towards it, and the will to follow that path if not to the end at least the distance needed to rise above individual limitations and environmental impediments. It is man's vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity which leads him to dare and to suffer to build societies free from want and fear. Concepts such as truth, justice and compassion cannot be dismissed as trite when these are often the only bulwarks which stand against ruthless power.

[antoine-roquentin]

I think one of the major problems with the modern left is a focus on cultural analysis instead of economics. When I say culture I EXPLICITLY DON'T MEAN racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and Indigenous rights/decolonization.

Stupidpol and their ilk are reactionaries and should be treated as such. What I'm talking about is the focus on things like analyzing TV shows or picking over the latest issues of the NYT op-ed column, the sort a caricatures you see on Chapo.

Zizek is emblematic of this syndrome. He's a theorist of ideology, a film critic, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and complete reactionary on gender and immigration issues, and he's widely considered to be one of preeminent Marxist scholars alive. And, and this is important, Zizek does fuck all actual economic material analysis. Mark Fisher, who was an excellent Marxist theorist, covers almost exactly the same ground from a different perspective, and you can repeat this across academia.

Inside academia the problem has gotten so bad that the best economic analysis is being carried out by the fucking post-humanists. Take, for example, Anna Tsing's excellent Supply Chains and the Human Condition. Tsing is a brilliant theorist but she spends most of her time writing about multi-species interactions between humans and mushrooms. Carbon Democracy, one of the best theories of the carbon economy ever written, is by a left-Foucaldian.

There are some exceptions to this, Andreas Malm's Carbon Capital is wonderful, Riot Strike Riot is great and I have to mention the group I call The Other Chicago School, Endnotes, whose infrequent analysis is a breath of fresh air. But Endnotes isn't particularly well read even inside the academy, which takes back outside the ivory tower in the dismal mess that is what passes for popular left "economics."

I want to go back to Occupy for a second because what happened there is indicative of the problem. Occupy, at least technically, actually had a theory of economics that went beyond "neoliberalism bad, welfare state good." And it's really not as bad as its critics have since accused it of being. Graeber's "the 1% meme" was supposed to be part of an MMT analysis of the ability of banks to create money out of nothing, see Richard A. Werner. The theory then goes with the ability to create money out of nothing the question becomes who should actually have that power. The 1% are the people who control that power and use that it to gain wealth and their wealth to gain power.

This is essentially what happened after 2008 and it relates to an entire analysis of the politics of debt and war that's captured really well in the last chapter of Debt, The First 5000 Years, drawing from Hudson's excellent Super Imperialism. Again, not bad, and not the disaster it became in Liberal hands. But note two things:

1, His work is intentionally detached from the production process- Graeber uses a value theory of labor about the social reproduction of human beings. That theory is really interesting and I'll leave a link to his It is Value that Brings Universes into Being here. But Graeber is an anthropologist, not an economist, and his recent work is mostly composed of a set of theories of bureaucracy.

And, don't get me wrong, I really like Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs, and it's possible to build an economic theory out of them, but almost no one actually does. And this gets us back to my second point about Occupy and economics.

2, Not a single other person I have ever met, including people who were in Occupy, have ever actually heard the theory behind the 1%. Part of this has to do with Graeber’s rather admirable desire to not become an intellectual vanguardist. But, I cannot overemphasize how much of this is a result of the left's retreat into an analysis of consumerism instead of capitalism and its further insistence that the entire fucking global economy can be explained by chapters 1-3 of Capital and this just isn't a "read more theory" rant, it's not like reading the rest of Capital is going to help you here. But even that's better than what's actually happened, which is people reading Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and the Communist Manifesto and trying to derive economic theory from that, or getting lost in a Gramscian or psychoanalytic miasma trying to explain why revolution didn't happen. But we can't keep fucking doing this.

If we do we're just going to keep getting stuck in endless fucking inane arguments, one of which is about which countries are Imperialist or not based on trying to read the minds of world leaders, and the other of which is a bunch of racists trying to argue that they're actually "class-first" Marxists and that if we don't say slurs and be mean to disabled people we're going to lose the "real working class," which is somehow composed only of construction workers banging steel bars.

So let's stop letting them do that. One of the reasons Supply Chains and the Human Condition is so great is that it describes how the performance of gender and racial roles creates the self super-exploitation at the heart of global capitalism. Race and gender cannot be ignored in favor of some kind of "class-first" faux-leftist bullshit. THEY ARE LITERALLY THE DRIVER OF CAPITAL ACCUMULATION.

Most of the global supply chain has been transformed into entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs (see the countless accounts of Chinese garment factory workers who dream of getting into the fashion industry and who attempt to supplement their meager income by setting up stalls in local marketplaces to sell watches and clothes).

The fact that global supply chains have reverted to the kind of small family firms that Marx and Engels thought would disappear is a MASSIVE problem for any kind of global workers movement, because it means that the normal wage relation that is supposed to form the basis of the proletariat isn't actually the governing social experience of a large swath of what should be the proletariat, either because they're the owners of small firms contracted by larger firms like Nike who would, in an older period of capitalism, have just been workers or because the people who work for those firms are incapable of actually demanding wage increases from the capitalists because they're separated by a layer from the firms who control real capital, and thus are essentially unable to make the kind of wage demands that would normally constitute class consciousness because the contractors they work for really don't have any money. These contractors are in no way independent.

Multinational corporations set everything from their buying prices to their labor conditions to what their workers say to lie to labor inspectors. The effect of replacing much of the proletariat with micro-entrepreneurs is devastating.

The class-for-itself that's supposed to serve as the basis of social revolution has decomposed entirely. Endnotes has a great analysis of how this happened covering more time, but the unified working class is dead. In its place have come a series of incoherent struggles: The Arab Spring, the Movement of the Squares, the current wave of revolutions and riots stretching from Sudan to Peru to Puerto Rico- all of them share an economic basis translated into demands on the state. We see housing struggles, anti-police riots, occupations, climate strikes, and a thousand other forms of struggle that don't seem to cohere into a traditional social revolution and WE HAVE NO ANSWER.

I don't have one either, but we're not going to get out of this mess by trying to read the tea leaves of the CCP or analyzing how Endgame is the ruling class inculcating us into accepting Malthusian Ecofascism.

I want to emphasize YOU DON'T NEED TO SHARE MY ECONOMIC ANALYSIS to develop one, I'm obviously wrong on a lot of things and so is everyone else. The point is that we need to start somewhere.

There are other benefits to reading economics stuff even if it can be boring sometimes, like being able to dunk on nerd shitlibs and reactionaries who do the "take Econ-101" meme by being able to prove that their entire discipline is bunk. Steve Keen's Debunking Economics is absolutely hilarious for this, he literally proves that perfect competition relies on the same math that you use to "prove" that the earth is flat.

Or learning that the notion that markets distribute goods optimally is based on the assumption that what is basically a form of fucking state socialism exists, and that the supply demand curve is fucking bullshit. Here's a page from Debunking Economics looking at the socialism claim, it fucking rules, and it's the result of the fact that neo-classical economics and central planning were developed together. Kantorovich and Koopmans shared a Nobel Prize.

But wait, there's more! We can PROVE that THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS DOESN'T EXIST. Do you have any idea how hard you can own libs with facts and logic if you can demonstrate that THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS DOESN'T EXIST?

But seriously, if you go outside of the Marxist tradition there are all sorts of fun and useful things you can find in post-Keyensian circles and so on and so forth. I'm a huge fan of Karen Ho's Liquidated, an Ethnography of Wall Street/Liquidated_%20An%20Ethnography%20of%20Wall%20Street%20-%20Karen%20Ho.pdf) which looks at how the people at banks and investment firms actually behave and, oh boy, is it bad news (they're literally incapable of making long-term decisions which is wonderful in the face of climate change).

Oh, and also, all of the bankers are essentially indoctrinated into thinking they're the smartest people in the world, so that's fun.

This may sound like I'm shitting on Marxism, and I sort of am, but there's Marxist stuff coming out that I absolutely love! @chuangcn is a good example of what I think the benchmark for leftist economics and historical analysis should be.

Chuang responded to the call put out by Endnotes to cut "The Red Thread of History," or essentially to stop fucking arguing about 1917, 1936, 1968 and so forth and look at material conditions instead of trying to find our favorite faction and accuse literally everyone else of betraying the revolution, and then imagining what we would have done in their shoes. The present is different from the past and we need to organize for this economic and social reality, not 1917's.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBvBIVhXYAYlVfj.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBvBM3CXoAA7Qmx.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBvBP0SWkAEl6OX.jpg

Chuang produced an incredibly statically and sociologically detailed account of the Chinese socialist period in issue 1 and the transition to capitalism in the soon to be put online issue 2 that focuses on shifts in production and investment and shifts in China's class-structure and how urban workers, peasants, factory mangers, technicians, and cadre members reacted to those movements and shaped each others decisions and mobilizations. They largely avoid discussions of factional battles of the upper level of the CCP, which dominate liberal and communist accounts of the period and produce, in supposed communists from David Harvey to Ajit Singh, a Great Man theory of history.

Instead, they trace how strikes and peasant protests shaped the CCP's decision making and how the choices of people like Mao and Deng Xiaoping were limited by material conditions, in this case by their production bottleneck.

What's great about Chuang is that their work is so rich in sociological detail that you don't need to agree with them at all about what communism is and so on for their account to be useful, and they force us to think about the world from the perspective of competing classes bound by economic reality, instead of the black-and-white "good state/bad state," "good ruler/bad ruler," discourse that dominates our understanding of both imperialism and the global economy.

I'm just going to end this with a TL;DR: Cut the read thread of history and stop fucking arguing about 1917, use economic theory to dunk on Stupidpol and shitlibs. When you talk about "material conditions" talk about the production process, supply chains, capital movements and so on, not which states are good and bad (the bourgeoisie is a global class friends), recognize that strategies need to be built around current economic and social conditions, WHICH ARE INSEPARABLE FROM RACE AND GENDER, climate change is more complicated than the 100 companies meme (I only touched on this but please read Fossil Capital and Carbon Democracy), and in general try to learn more about different schools of economics and social theory, I swear reading something that wasn't written in 1848 isn't going to kill you.

[chandramurty]

Liberal Economics.

Our GDP statistics are out and are still in negative. The detractors are attributing this to the failure of the present government’s economic policies,handling of the pandemic,GST,Demonetisation and a lack of farsighted policy. Various measures like lowering of personal income taxes,increasing infrastructure spending,cutting rates of interest,ensuring fast and hassle free loans to the priority sector,are being suggested.Banks are flush with lendable funds and they say people are not coming forward to take loans.Banks too,are getting risk averse.The merger of 12 Banks at this crucial juncture,has created an action paralysis.They are concentrating more on keeping the ball well behind the line and so are the Corporates.Due to stringent black money monitoring and stress on digital payments,the good money has driven out the black money from the circulation.A cursory perusal of data on the cash in circulation and cash held with public would confirm that people too are sitting on piles of cash and are afraid of spending it conspicuously.This has resulted in slowdown in the sales of vehicles,under utilisation of high end services sector,slowdown in the FMCG sector,as this sector was heavily dependent on out of books cash dealing. Digital payments are good but an economy,which was having a flourishing parallel cash economy till sometime back and heavy cash transactions was the norm,whose tightening has resulted in squeezing of the cash flow and bringing down the business turnovers and the resultant profits,which again forced the Business Houses to retrench their employees and hence,the resultant unemployment.”Na khaunga,na khane dunga..”might sound good from the election plank but has made for bad economics.As Fanucci requested Vito Corleone..”All I request you to allow me to wet my beak a little..” To this end in view,suppose we come down a bit from our high moral grounds,and put the goal of 100% digital payments on the back burner,bring up the limit of cash payments from 50 thousand to 5 lacs,allow cash purchases of vehicles upto the same 5 lacs,let the FMCG Companies do cash transactions upto a certain limit in remote and rural areas,allow purchases of food articles,dining and staying in Hotels totally free of digital payment restrictions.Personal Income Tax rates be rationalised vis a vis the Corporate Tax and all pending wage revisions of Government employees and Public Sector employees be settled urgently. A welfare Nation should never think like a Nation of Shopkeepers.Let the wisemen sit together and give the ideas a serious thought. We have nothing to lose. These would be done surely sometimes in the future..why not now??

[rusykohli]

From The Bubonic Plague To COVID-19: Impact On The Legal Profession In India

https://www.barandbench.com/author/rusy-kohli

The COVID-19 Pandemic has fundamentally disrupted our social and economic order. It has affected the functioning of most institutions and the Indian Judiciary is no exception. The Guardian of Law now finds itself compelled to guard against this deadly virus, its fraternity and litigants alike. The declaration of lockdown in India was accompanied with Courts across the country restricting functioning to limited matters in order to curb the number of lawyers / litigants entering court complexes. Soon, all hearings were being conducted through videoconferencing only, in order to avoid any human contact whatsoever. However, just like previous health emergencies in India like the Bubonic Plague of the late 19th century and the Spanish Flu of 1918, Corona Virus has made many its victims including the Judiciary, and the legal profession.  In order to fully appreciate the impact of the virus, the author attempts to provide an account of the effect of Covid-19 with reference to historical health emergencies and their impact on the judicial apparatus.

 Pendency in Indian Courts:

 The Indian Judiciary has been over-burdened for several years and COVID-19 is only adding to this menace. As of May 27, 2020, there are approximately 3.24 crore pending cases in India’s subordinate courts[i] and about 48.2 lakh pending cases in the High Courts[ii].

 The Supreme Court via its Notification dated March 13, 2020 restricted functioning of the Court to “ urgent matters ” only ( w.e.f.  March 16, 2020 )[iii], thereby only entertaining bail matters, suspension of sentence matters and the like.

 High Courts too have restricted their functioning to urgent matters. In normal course, a High Court hears north of 400 matters a day. However, since late March, High Courts across the country are hearing anywhere between 10-100 matters a day.[iv]

 Subordinate courts account for over 80 % of the pendency of cases. On April 30, 2020 the Karnataka High Court extended the closure of all District Courts, Family Courts, Labour Courts and Industrial Tribunals in the State until May 16, 2020[v]. On April 29, 2020 the Punjab & Haryana High Court ordered that all the district and sub-divisional Courts in Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh will function “restrictively” from May 1 “till the lockdown / curfew is in force in the respective area”[vi]. These restrictive measures have led to a glut of pending cases, thereby increasing the burden on courts.

 Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied:

 Pendency in India’s courts has always been a hindrance in securing timely justice for people, if not denying justice altogether. As the usual functioning of courts has been disrupted, many under-trials and even many of those whose appeals are pending are left with no recourse. It can hardly be denied that the subject adage has particular force in the criminal sphere.

 In pursuance of the Apex Court’s directions dated March 23, 2020, States and Union Territories have been asked to constitute High Powered Committees “ to determine which class of prisoners can be released on parole or an interim bail for such period as may be thought appropriate. ” Therefore, each State is free to determine its own criteria for granting bail. Further the Supreme Court has clarified vide its order dated April 13, 2020 that it has not directed the States / Union Territories “ to compulsorily release the prisoners from their respective prisons.”[vii] This clarification has allowed High Courts to further restrict the nature of cases in which they are prepared to grant bail.

 On March 29, 2020, the Insolvency And Bankruptcy Board Of India announced the insertion of regulation “ 40 C ”, which laid down that the period of lockdown imposed in the wake of COVID19 shall not be counted for the purposes of the time-line for any activity that could not be completed due to such lockdown, in relation to the corporate insolvency resolution process ( CIRP )[viii]. While this move has come as a relief for companies undergoing the CIRP, it has left creditors waiting for repayment of dues for longer than the mandated 330-day period. NCLT benches across the country are hearing only urgent matters until the lockdown is lifted. This has left many other matters, which do not qualify as urgent, pending. [ix]

 Plight Of Advocates:

 A PIL was filed in the Supreme Court urging that non-payment of rent for professional premises belonging to advocates should not be made a ground for eviction, during lockdown.  However, on April 30, 2020 the Apex Court refused to entertain the plea remarking that it was "not going to enter into this issue," and dismissed the petition as withdrawn. [x] Further on May 8, 2020 a three- Judge bench of the Supreme Court dismissed a plea urging the court to direct the government to formulate a uniform welfare scheme for lawyers affected across the country.[xi]

 Daily appearances in court are the main source of income for most advocates, and cash flow has come to a drip, if not completely dried up. In the month of April, 82,725 cases were filed in India’s courts as compared to 8,80,000 cases in March [xii]. This steep decline in cases filed has consequently resulted in a significant dip in court fee, besides Lawyers’ income.

 Younger lawyers are left with little or no work. Today, a senior lawyer has the time, and the need to address minor matters, if any, personally, rather than refer them to a junior, which may have been done prior to the lockdown.

 A petition was filed in the Madras High Court, seeking a direction to the State and the Bar Council to release Rs. 50,000/-  to advocates, in order to compensate for the loss of work[xiii]. However, the Bar Council Of Tamil Nadu & Puducherry has resolved to disburse only Rs. 4000/- each to needy lawyers. The Bar Council was not in a position to release any more money because of limited resources.[xiv]

 Law Firms:

 Law Firms have also been severely affected. Many partners have either chosen to renounce salaries this financial year or agreed to take significant pay cuts.  Firms which charged clients anywhere between Rs. 20,000 and Rs 75, 000 per hour, our now renegotiating their fee, since cash-strapped clients are no longer willing to pay exorbitant sums. Moreover, clients are questioning the actual amount of time that firms are spending on their matters, thereby making firms consider implementing technology that would track the number of hours spent by an executive on a client’s job, in order to provide proof to clients[xv]. This is great innovation; however, it comes with a significant cost in a day and age when law firms are suffering unprecedented lows in business.

 Prisoners:

 Corona Virus cases have already sprung up in various jails across India. Amongst other jails, there are over 180 cases in Mumbai’s Arthur Road Jail[xvi]. Authorities have been compelled to take drastic measures such as - release a large number of inmates, shift inmates to different prisons and designate temporary places as jails for keeping new undertrials.

 By end February, nearly the cases (233 of 565) of COVID-19 reported in Wuhan, China, were from the city’s prison system.[xvii] This fact is reflective of just how dangerous prisons are today.

 Indian prisons have historically been overcrowded and may potentially become breeding grounds when threatened by a contagion like Covid19. Considering the difficult living conditions and lack of hygiene, which is an unfortunate reality of our prisons, containing the spread would become nearly impossible.

 Coping With This Challenge:

 We are now in the age of what has come to be known as “Virtual Courts ” which function through videoconferencing, e-filing, telephonic mentioning of urgent matters and online payment of court fees. These are not bereft of teething problems. Perhaps, the biggest drawback of this new system is the inability to provide public access to courtroom proceedings. Virtual proceedings are being held in camera, and are therefore not open to public which is discordant with what has been held in Naresh Shridhar Mirajkar v State of Maharashtra[xviii], where the Apex Court observed that the public has a right to be present in court and to watch proceedings.

 Lawyers are facing problems with basics such as uploading petitions on the Supreme Court website, since the data restrictions put in place are just 5 MB for a petition and 2 MB for additional documents, thereby compelling lawyers to break up the file into multiple volumes.[xix]

 Déjà Vu

 Historically, the Bubonic Plague of the late 19th century and Spanish Flu of 1918 are two points of reference when the entire framework of judiciary was disrupted on account of a health emergency.

 The arrival of the Bubonic Plague in Bombay ( now Mumbai ) in 1896, brought courts to a grinding halt. A J C Mistry, a managing clerk at the Bombay law firm, Wadia Ghandy & Co. has given a grim account of the situation in early 1897. Mistry noted that the judges of the Bombay High Court “had no work to do.” The staff of the firm returned to work after four months, however over the next decade three members fell victim to the plague and died.

Mahatma Gandhi on page 72 in his book -  The Law and The Lawyers[xx], while discussing an appeal which was to be heard in Veraval in Gujarat, writes that there were as many as fifty cases heard daily ( a lot of cases for that day and age ) in the Court at Veraval which had a population of about 5,500 people, however at the time of writing the “plague was raging ” and it was “ practically deserted ”. This anecdote bears a striking semblance to the scenario today.  

 Property which was seized in discharge of debts those days included pots, pans, utensils, bedding etc. These items were regularly hauled in and out of court. Legal historian Mitra Sharafi on page 48 in her book - Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947, writes that this practice of bringing property inside court rooms had become a “ particularly unsavoury phenomenon when the bubonic plague swept through the city. ”

 When the Spanish Flu arrived in 1918, the judiciary was hit once again. Jurors, lawyers and assistants of the Calcutta High Court were severely affected. The Court was functioning on somewhat similar lines of how the courts are functioning today, thereby causing consequent pendency issues. [xxi]

 Even in Bombay, law offices were bought to a standstill. In late June 1918 the Times Of India reported,

 “ Nearly every house in Bombay has some of its inmates down with [influenza] fever and every office is bewailing the absence of clerks. ”

 The flu soon found its way into jails and a need was felt to decongest prisons as inmates began to fall sick and the jails were short-staffed. The District Magistrate of Bijapur particularly wanted to release sick prisoners from jail, but the then Government was not ready to cooperate.[xxii]

 It may be relevant to mention here that an eminent lawyer by the name of, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was himself laid down with the Spanish flu with a faltering heartbeat. However, destiny had charted out a different path for him, and India.

 Conclusion:

This piece has only covered some of the ramifications of COVID-19 on the legal profession and there are other areas such as legal education which also need to be addressed on a priority. The existing delays in the legal system will only be exacerbated by the impediments COVID-19 will inevitably present to the progress of investigations, charging decisions, pre-trial processes etc. It appears that Corona Virus is here to stay, and the Judiciary needs to cope with it. We have been through a pandemic before and have come out of it as well. Normal functioning or rather “ New Normal ” functioning of courts is going to take its own time. Hopefully, it shouldn’t take too long, lest Lady Justice will soon have to, along with a blindfold, sword and scales, be adorned with — a mask.

 Rusy Kohli

The author is a Post Graduate from Punjab University and a keen student of current affairs with context to lessons from history.

 [i] “ Pending Dashboard ”: National Judicial Data Grid (District and Taluka Courts of India).

[ii] National Judicial Data Grid For High Courts.

[iii] Supreme Court Notification, March 13, 2020.

[iv] Data collected from Daily Cause Lists of various High Courts.

[v] Vide Notification No. DJA.I/550/1993, dated April 30, 2020.

[vi] Vide Order No. 13/Spl./RG/Misc. , dated April 29, 2020.

[vii] Suo Motu Writ Petition (Civil) No.1 Of 2020 ( In Re : Contagion Of Covid 19 Virus In Prisons ): Order dated April 13, 2020.

[viii] Vide Notification No. IBBI/2019-20/GN/REG059 Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (Insolvency Resolution Process for Corporate Persons) (Third Amendment) Regulations, 2020. , dated March 29, 2020

[ix] NCLT Notice dated April 20, 2020.

[x] Writ Petition (Civil) Diary No.11055/2020 ( ALJO K. JOSEPH Vs. UNION OF INDIA & ANR.): Order dated April 30, 2020.

[xi] Writ Petition (Civil) Diary No(S). 11049/2020 ( Abhinav Ramkrishna Vs. Union Of India & Ors. ): Order Dated May 8, 2020

[xii] “ How lockdown has hit judiciary, in numbers — April cases fall to 82k from 14 lakh avg in 2019 ”: The Print, May 4, 2020.

[xiii] W.P.No.7419 of 2020: ( Dr.A.E. Chelliah vs. The Chairman and Members of the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry and an. )

[xiv] Bar Council Of Tamil Nadu & Puducherry: Press Release Dated 08-05-2020

[xv] Covid-19 Fallout: Pressure on hourly fee of top consultants, lawyers: The Economic Times, May 1, 2020

[xvi] “ After 180 cases from Arthur Road Jail, Maharashtra to release half the state’s prisoners ”: The Indian Express, May 12, 2020.

[xvii] Mainland China adds 573 coronavirus infections, eyes risks abroad: Reuters.com, March 1, 2020

[xviii] (1966) 3 SCR 744

[xix] “ ‘ Public hearing fundamental to democracy’: Lawyers on SC hearings via video conference ”, The Print, April 20, 2020.

[xx] The Law and The Lawyers By: M. K. Gandhi

[xxi] Pandemic or poison? How epidemics shaped Southasia's legal history by Mitra Sharafi: Himal Southasian, April 20, 2020.

[xxii] GD 353, 1918 GOB to District Magistrate, Bijapur, 13 November, 1918.