“The few at the top get richer and richer and the millions at the bottom are trapped in poverty wages.”
That’s the verdict from Oxfam executive director Winnie Byanyima, based on a new report from the humanitarian group, which found that a staggering 82 percent of all wealth generated in 2017 found its way into the pockets of the richest 1 percent around the globe.
The report, titled “Reward work, not wealth”, offers a number of jaw-dropping statistics demonstrating that global inequality, already at staggering levels, is somehow getting even worse.
While the 1 percent raked in four out of every five dollars in new wealth in 2017, the bottom 50 percent of the world’s population, 3.7 billion people, got zero – absolutely none – of that new wealth.
Globally, the richest 42 people now own the same combined wealth as the poorest 3.7 billion.
Last year saw the biggest increase in billionaires in history: one more added every two days. Billionaire wealth is increasing six times faster than the wages of ordinary people. To put that in perspective, the total pay that a garment worker in Bangladesh earns in a lifetime of work amounts to just four days’ worth of compensation for the CEO of one of the top five global fashion brands.
This incredible polarisation is true not only of developing countries, but also advanced industrial economies. In the US, the three richest people now possess as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the population.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos – now the richest person on the planet – made $6.1 billion during just five trading days in January. That’s as much in five days as roughly 3,000 US workers earn on average during their collective lifetimes.
Overall, the world’s top 1 percent saw their wealth increase by $762 billion last year – enough to entirely eradicate global poverty seven times over, according to the United Nations. A global tax of just 1.5 percent on the wealth of just the billionaires could pay for every child on the planet to go to school.
Behind every statistic is a vast well of suffering, exploitation and oppression inflicted on ordinary workers and the poor. Consider the words of Lan, a Vietnamese garment worker quoted in the Oxfam report:
“When I got pregnant, they let me work in the warehouse. There were many boxes full of shoes, and my job was to put the stamp on. Those shoes would fit my son perfectly, they are very nice. I’d like my son to have shoes like these, but he can’t. I think he’d want them, and I feel sorry for him. The shoes are very pretty. You know that one pair of shoes that we make is valued more than our whole month’s salary.”
Stories like these show “how our economies are rewarding wealth rather than the hard work of millions of people”, Byanyima told Reuters Television.
Crucially important in the context of the current #MeToo moment, the Oxfam report points out how poor and working women are suffering disproportionately, not only receiving substandard wages and facing abuse and harassment on the job, but contributing a massive amount – $10 trillion annually – of unpaid labour to the global economy. As the report states:
All over the world, our economy of the 1 Percent is built on the backs of low-paid workers, often women, who are paid poverty wages and denied basic rights.
It is being built on the backs of workers like Fatima in Bangladesh, who works sewing clothes for export. She is regularly abused if she fails to meet targets and gets sick because she is unable to go to the toilet. It is being built on the backs of workers like Dolores in chicken factories in the US, suffering permanent disability and unable to hold their children’s hands. It is being built on the backs of immigrant hotel cleaners like Myint in Thailand, sexually harassed by male guests and yet often being told to put up with it or lose their jobs.
The oppression of women is bound up with how they are exploited. “Dangerous, poorly paid work for the many is supporting extreme wealth for the few”, Oxfam notes. “Women are in the worst work, and almost all the super-rich are men.”
As much as the media pretend otherwise, these statistics are not unrelated facts – they are the consequences of the “normal functioning” of capitalism.
The wealth of the 1 percent exists alongside the poverty of the many – a result of working and poor people across the globe producing massive wealth while being paid a pittance.
And countering the idea that the rich are wealthy because they work harder, invest and take risks in ways that others don’t, the reality is that two-thirds of billionaire wealth is “the product of inheritance, monopoly and cronyism”.
In particular, Byanyima blames “tax dodging” as a major cause of global inequality. The Oxfam report urges world leaders to clamp down on tax havens and plough money into education, health care and jobs for young people. The super-rich are hiding at least $7.6 trillion from tax authorities, according to the report.
Byanyima’s comments were aimed in part at the Trump administration, which is still riding high following the passage of tax cuts that will fuel another massive transfer of wealth from the poor and working class to the rich.
As the New York Times recently noted, while some companies like Walmart and Apple are doling out a small fraction of their estimated tax savings in the form of some limited bonuses or wage increases to low-wage workers, such moves are largely window dressing designed to obscure the overall impact of the legislation – to stuff more cash into the bank accounts of the already obscenely rich.
Once again, take Amazon’s Bezos. He received glowing media coverage for his January announcement that he is donating $33 million in scholarships for DREAMers – with, presumably, a significant tax benefit.
But Bezos could give 100 times that amount and still have nearly half of the $6.1 billion he made in those five trading days in January left over.
If there’s a hopeful sign to be found in the dismal picture painted by the Oxfam report, it’s the deep desire among the masses of ordinary people around the planet for a different kind of world.
As part of its report, Oxfam surveyed 70,000 people in 10 countries (which together account for 25 percent of the global population). Researchers found that more than three-quarters agree that the gap between rich and poor in their country is too large, and most of them think this needs to be addressed with action.
That need is on display not only in some of the most economically disadvantaged countries, but the richest ones as well.
In a recent unofficial visit to the US, Leilani Farha, the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, witnessed deplorable living conditions in a homeless encampment in San Francisco. “The situation is unacceptable in light of the wealth of the country”, she said as she witnessed a man named Eric Hoch forced to cook on the street in a city where the median home value is $1.3 million.
According to the Guardian’s report, Farha asked Hoch if he knew he had an internationally recognised right to housing – and how he would react if the government offered him somewhere to live with no strings attached.
“That’d probably be something I’d hop, skip and jump to”, Hoch told her.
Farha responded: “That’s something your government is supposed to do. I hate to tell you, you’re being ripped off”.
Once again, both the desperate conditions Hoch faces and the rip-off he’s enduring at the hands of those who are supposed to represent him aren’t an accident. As Oxfam’s Byanyima pointed out, the “billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system”.
Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs is quoted by Oxfam as saying:
“The report will be sure to generate attention and controversy – as this topic should. Sometimes the super-rich call out Oxfam and others for ‘stoking class warfare’, but the truth is that in many societies, including my own, the United States, many of the super-rich have in effect declared war on the poor.”
But there’s been a one-sided class war – of the rich against the rest of us – for a long time, and Sachs himself was one of its leading warriors in the past.
The Oxfam report suggests initiatives to improve this incredibly polarised picture. Among them are limiting dividends and payouts to corporate shareholders and executives with the aim of ensuring that workers for their companies have a living wage; closing the wage gap between working class and poor men and women; and cracking down on tax havens and tax dodging.
“If that means less for the already wealthy, then that is a price that we – and they – should be willing to pay”, said Oxfam director Mark Goldring.
They should – but they won’t.
Depending on the conscience and morality of billionaires to pay their fair share hasn’t ever worked. They will have to be forced, through the struggles of ordinary workers and the poor in every country around the globe, to give back even a fraction of the wealth that we create.

Nicole Colson

How the global elite rips off the world

Everyone knew it was coming. And we knew it would be bad. The question was: how bad would the Trump tax cut program be once it was unveiled?
The answer: really bad.
Rushing to announce his plan before the end of his first 100 days in office, the one-page bullet point plan released by the White House was – like most of what Trump has done so far – short on details and long on grandiose pronouncements.
In its press release, the White House asserted that Trump’s tax cut plan is “good for the American people”. The word they left out was “some” – as in “good for some American people”, those with the biggest bank accounts.
Among the most egregious proposals in the Trump proposal are:
Reducing the number of individual income tax brackets from seven to three – paying at rates of 10, 25 and 35 percent.
Slashing the tax rate for both large and small corporations to just 15 percent from the current top rate of 35 percent (which the vast majority of corporations never actually pay due to loopholes and shelters).
Exempting corporations from paying taxes on foreign profits and instituting a special one-time reduced tax (though the rate has not been not disclosed) to try to lure companies who currently shelter profits in tax havens outside the US (currently estimated at $2.6 trillion).
Lowering the capital gains tax rate – paid primarily on the sale of stocks, bonds or property – from 23.8 percent to 20 percent by eliminating a 3.8 percent tax that currently funds the Affordable Care Act.
Eliminating the inheritance tax, which is only paid by the richest households.
Eliminating the alternative minimum tax, which is also aimed at the wealthy, making it “harder for very rich individuals to game the tax system and pay less tax”, the New York Times reported.
Reverse Robin Hood
In a press conference outlining the bare-bones plan, Gary Cohn, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, touted the plan as “the most significant tax reform legislation since 1986” and “one of the biggest tax cuts in American history”.
“Significant” is right: it’s a significant giveaway to the rich and a significant attack on working and poor people.
If the plan ever becomes law – which is a big “if” – it will almost entirely benefit the already wealthy. Like, conveniently enough, the man currently occupying the Oval Office and his super-rich children. As Mother Jones noted, based on Trump’s leaked 2005 tax returns:
“Without the AMT [alternative minimum tax], Trump apparently would have paid just $7 million in taxes, according to the New York Times – a tax rate less than 5 percent. But the AMT forced him to pony up an additional $31 million that year, raising his tax rate to about 25 percent. Asked at a Wednesday press briefing how eliminating the AMT would impact Trump’s tax liability, secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin dodged the question and abruptly ended the briefing.”
No wonder Trump wants to kill the alternative minimum tax now.
Or there’s the fact that Trump’s plan would create a so-called pass-through tax cut for business income that is currently taxed at the business owners’ individual income tax rates rather than the corporate rate. Under Trump’s plan, the tax rate for this wealth would drop to 15 percent. (Americans for Tax Fairness notes that Trump himself has some 500 pass-through arrangements.)
Any one of the Trump tax proposals would be a massive giveaway to the rich – and a subsequent reduction in revenue that will almost certainly mean future cuts in government spending for services and programs that working class and poor people disproportionately rely on.
Reducing the number of individual tax brackets from seven to three would cost at least $1.5 trillion in revenue. Dropping the corporate tax rate would cost $3.7 trillion, and repealing the alternative minimum tax would cost $400 billion.
Overall, the New York Times reported, “Trump’s proposed changes to the tax code could increase the deficit by an estimated $3 trillion to $7 trillion over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group focused on reducing deficits”.
Yet when he and Cohn announced the plan last week, Mnuchin had the nerve to assert that Trump’s tax cut plan would “pay for itself” through increased economic growth.
The Trump administration is also claiming the tax plan would benefit average people, with Cohn telling CBS This Morning, “We’re eliminating the deductions that were added to the tax legislation over the years to favour the wealthy. The wealthy have deductions. Middle income people and lower income people don’t have deductions”.
But as Vox’s Dylan Matthews wrote, “There just aren’t enough deductions in the tax code to make Trump’s plan anything other than a giveaway to the wealthy”. Calling Trump’s plan a “plutocrat’s dream”, the New Yorker’s John Cassidy wrote:
“There is a huge hole on the revenue side. Trump’s advisers have reportedly rejected House speaker Paul Ryan’s proposal for a big new tax on imports, and they haven’t yet settled on which, if any, of the loopholes in the tax code they will close. In the absence of any direct revenue enhancers, Trump’s advisers are relying on faster economic growth to boost tax receipts and prevent the budget deficit from ballooning.”
But that is wishful thinking, to say the least. If there’s one thing that history has shown about tax cuts for the rich, it’s that they don’t translate into increased investment and a booming economy. To use the words of former president George H.W. Bush, that kind of thinking is “voodoo economics”, as he famously termed Ronald Reagan’s tax cut plan before becoming Reagan’s vice president.
Trump’s plan amounts to “Goldman Sachs populism”, Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said in a statement. He added that there “is zero rationale for cutting corporate taxes and zero reason to think that lower taxes will generate more investment”.
Because the plan is so short on actual details, the full scope of the giveaway isn’t clear.
For example, the incentive for companies that currently shelter their profits abroad to bring that money back to the US would have to be staggeringly high. The tech giant Apple currently keeps much of its earnings abroad, but then borrows money from its foreign subsidiaries to pay dividends and make new investments. As the Times notes, “because the interest paid on loans is also deductible, Apple ends up reaping a second tax benefit”.
A lower rate to attract hoarded corporate profits would have to be a giant bonanza to make it worthwhile.
A broken system
All of this is par for the course in America’s tax system – which overwhelmingly benefits the rich at the expense of those who rely on government spending and services.
According to Trump and Co., there’s no money to fund public television or libraries anymore, no money for public housing, none for education or any number of other important programs and agencies whose budgets are now on the chopping block.
But there’s enough to put more money in the pockets of the rich at a time when income inequality is at staggering levels and America is wracked by a deep social crisis that is causing the immiseration of working and poor people.
The US tax system already lets the rich get away with murder while penalising working people and the poor. And Trump wants make the imbalance even greater.
Democrats will try to make political hay out of Trump’s attempt at such massive giveaways to the already wealthy. But as horrendous as Trump’s tax plan is, it has to be pointed out that it was eight years of the Obama administration and the Democrats’ own push for giveaways to Corporate America that set the stage for Trump’s plan today.
Back in 2013, Barack Obama’s “grand bargain” included a proposed tax plan that would have lowered the overall corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent and lowered the effective corporate tax rate for manufacturers to 25 percent in exchange for some job creation programs. Despite his earlier promises, Obama proposed the changes without any push to raise taxes on high income individuals.
As the New York Times noted at the time, the danger was that “while the proposal would raise money for useful purposes in the short run, it would amount to an unjustified corporate giveaway in the longer term” – and that it was “fine in theory but difficult in practice, and especially so because neither the president nor anyone in Congress has specified which tax breaks would be curbed to pay for lower rates”.
As Lance Selfa reported for SocialistWorker.org at the time, Obama’s push for a “grand bargain” was premised on the idea of accepting cuts to vital social services and entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare in exchange for a Republican agreement to some limited increases in other taxes:
“The point isn’t just that … Democrats chase Wall Street money as much as the Republicans. It’s that they, as American capital’s second major party, are committed to carrying out a big business agenda at the heart of which is austerity that’s intended to lower expectations and living standards for the majority of Americans.
“This is why Obama keeps coming back to the ‘grand bargain’ and leading Democrats tout their ‘courage’ in tackling the ‘sacred cows’ of Medicare and Social Security. It’s why the White House has, for years, seemed oddly passive as the recession has ground down millions of workers who have been out of jobs.”
In 2015, Obama proposed his own version of the corporate tax holiday – a one-time, 14 percent tax on the estimated $2.1 trillion in profits piled up overseas by multinationals like Apple, and a 19 percent tax on US companies’ future foreign earnings, far below the supposed corporate tax rate.
Yet that wasn’t enough of a giveaway for the Republicans and Corporate America.
Inequality in America is at unprecedented levels. In our new “gilded age”, the top 1 percent of households earn an average of $1.3 million a year – more than three times as much as in the 1980s, economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman reported in December.
At the same time, average pre-tax national income per person for the bottom 50 percent of the population was $16,000 in 1980 – a figure that hasn’t changed substantially in more than 30 years. For Millennials born in the 1980s, there’s now only a 50 percent chance that they will earn more than their parents did.
With the chief advocate for the new robber barons sitting in the White House, we can expect the picture to get bleaker unless there is a united, organised resistance that not only rejects giveaways to the rich and demands full funding of the programs and services ordinary people need, but that also holds the Democrats to account as they attempt to make deals with Trump.
The rich should be forced to pay their share – but whether they will depends on whether we can build the kind of fighting movement that rejects the scapegoating of the poor and links up the struggles of working people and others to stand firm against Trump’s priorities of profits and power.

Trump’s plan to make the rich even richer

People fleeing violence and oppression are meeting the same from Europe’s rulers – but an alternative to the scapegoating and hate is growing, reports <a href="http://www.SocialistWorker.org">SocialistWorker.org</a>’s Nicole Colson.
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It’s the single image that has crystallised the horror of the refugee crisis in Europe: On 2 September, a photographer took a picture of the lifeless body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee, lying face-down on a Turkish beach.
The toddler was one of at least 12 refugees – including his 5-year-old brother Galip, and their mother Rihan – who drowned during a desperate attempt to reach the Greek island of Kos. They fled their hometown of Kobanê in Syria, and travelled hundreds of miles through Turkey.
The two-mile sea voyage from Turkey to Kos is considered less dangerous than the longer crossing from Libya to Italy that many other refugees make – but it proved deadly for Aylan, who joins the more than 2,500 refugees who have perished in the Mediterranean this year.
Aylan and the others who washed up on the beach have come to represent – as a social media hash tag would term it in Turkish, #‎KiyiyaVuranInsanlik – “humanity washed ashore.”
Compounding the horror is the fact that their deaths were entirely preventable. They are the result of civil war, Western imperialism, crushing poverty and closed borders. More like Aylan will undoubtedly die in the days and weeks to come – unless European governments are pressured to open the gates to those begging for entry – and to provide the resources they so desperately need.
The steady tide of refugees from the Middle East and portions of Africa – many of them fleeing violence and war, as in Syria – has elicited both the worst and best of responses.
The worst: routine violence from police and security forces under orders to maintain control of the borders at all costs; the callous indifference of mainstream politicians who won’t acknowledge their share of political responsibility for the refugees’ plight in the first place, nor their humanitarian responsibility to provide relief; and the vile bigotry of the far right, eager to capitalise on the crisis by scapegoating refugees and migrants to further a conservative agenda.
But the best has also been on display in Europe. There has been an outpouring of solidarity and generosity among people organising to declare that immigrants are welcome in Europe – and to push their governments to open the borders. This show of solidarity can be built on in the coming weeks as more refugees make the desperate journey to Europe.
A global crisis
In the past several months, tens of thousands of people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere across the Middle East and portions of Africa have tried to get to Europe, hoping to gain entry into countries where they and their families will have a chance at a life free from war and poverty.
In the past few weeks, the influx has escalated dramatically, becoming what officials now call the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.
The UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, expects a 40 percent increase this year in the number of people fleeing to Europe by boat. An estimated 310,000 people have already crossed the Mediterranean Sea this year, according to the UN. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) puts the figure even higher, at 350,000 – and reports that at least 2,535 people have died making the crossing so far this year.
Makeshift refugee centres in Greece, Italy and elsewhere have been filled to bursting point for months. Yet more people arrive each day, hoping for a chance at eventual asylum in other parts of Europe.
Before facing the ruthless response of European governments, the refugees are typically at the mercy of ruthless profiteers as they try to get to Europe. UNHCR spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told CNN that in some cases, refugees making the Mediterranean crossing have been charged money by smugglers to come out of the ship’s hold to breathe fresh air. Fleming said that one Syrian refugee reported: “We didn’t want to go down there, but they beat us with sticks to force us. We had no air so we were trying to get back up through the hatch and breathe through the cracks in the ceiling”.
The cost to hire a dinghy for the 2-mile trip from Turkey across to Greece that Aylan Kurdi and his family perished on reportedly costs as much as €1,000 per person.
Drowning has not been the only cause of death. In Austria, the bodies of 71 Syrian refugees, including at least three children aged 2, 3 and 8, were found abandoned in a truck alongside a highway. They had suffocated to death as they were being trafficked from Hungary.
International law mandates that refugees in particular have the right to asylum when they flee. But many European countries continue to refuse to allow refugees timely entry.
Last month, there was iconic video footage of the grim consequence: Macedonian police attacking refugees, including families with small children, as they gathered at the border.
Now such scenes are being revealed on a regular basis. On 1 September, hundreds of refugees with paid-for train tickets were expelled from Keleti station, the main train station in Budapest, Hungary, as police attempted to stop the flow of refugees to Germany.
The crowds of refugees, many fleeing the violence of the civil war in Syria, chanted, “We are human! We are human!” – a fact that European Union officials seem slow to recognise. Some 2,000 migrants have taken to living in the open air around the station in what the New York Times termed a “squalid” migrant city-within-a-city. Some of those waiting for the chance to leave say they have gone days without food or water.
“In Europe, they’re treating us like ISIS did, beating us up”, said Ahmad Saadoun, who came from Fallujah, Iraq, one of the cities now under the control of the reactionary fighters that the US government, in alliance with the European Union, has declared war on. Saadoun continued to the reporter: “Either take me to Germany or just send me back. I don’t care anymore”.
Scenes like the one outside of Keleti station are becoming more common across parts of Europe.
Trains going through the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France have been repeatedly delayed as sometimes hundreds of refugees have attempted to cross through the tunnel on foot or by hanging onto the roofs of trains. The British government’s response: new funds for an extra 100 border guards at the Channel tunnel terminal.
Scapegoating
The response of punishment and repression is justified by political leaders with the claim that wealthy Western nations in Europe are being “swarmed” by migrants – as UK prime minister David Cameron characterised it in late July.
But this simply isn’t true. As Eugenio Ambrosi of the IOM said in a statement: “[W]hile there is a crisis in humanitarian terms and in terms of people losing their lives, IOM does not view this as a crisis in terms of numbers, because France, the UK and the EU as a whole have the size, resources and capacity to deal with these relatively low numbers of migrants and asylum seekers”.
In fact, vastly more refugees have fled to other countries in the Middle East. As the IOM reported:
“To understand the current and future situation, it is essential to comprehend the drivers of such movements across dangerous routes … [The refugees] are often individuals fleeing widespread violence and human rights abuses, particularly those coming from Syria and Eritrea. When put into context, the number of Syrians reaching Europe is minimal in comparison to the 4 million refugees in Syria’s neighbouring states, such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.”
As Patrick Kinglsey reported in the Guardian last month:
“There are countries with social infrastructure at breaking point because of the refugee crisis – but they aren’t in Europe. The most obvious example is Lebanon, which houses 1.2 million Syrian refugees within a total population of roughly 4.5 million. To put that in context, a country that is more than 100 times smaller than the EU has already taken in more than 50 times as many refugees as the EU will even consider resettling in the future. Lebanon has a refugee crisis. Europe – and, in particular, Britain – does not.”
But that, of course, hasn’t stopped European leaders from refusing to respond to the crisis – and for some, engaging directly in racist scapegoating.
In Hungary, where the right wing government’s main rival is a far right party with ties to neo-Nazis, prime minister Viktor Orban said on 3 September that the migration crisis was a “German problem”, and that Europe had a moral duty to block migrants from coming.
As the desperate migrants continued to mass outside Keleti station, hoping to leave the country, the New York Times reported that Hungary’s railroad operator had suspended service to Western Europe. When a train with about 500 migrants was stopped in Bicske, about a half-hour west of Budapest, “all Hungarians were told that they could get off, but non-Hungarians remained locked inside the train without drinking water”, the Times wrote. “Riot police officers fended off migrants hanging out of windows and chanting that they wanted to go to Austria and Germany.”
In her not-at-all-vigorous response to Orban, German chancellor Angela Merkel said that “Germany is doing what is morally and legally obliged. Not more and not less”. Merkel signalled her country’s willingness to take in refugees only very reluctantly. In late August, she waited days before finally speaking out against racist anti-immigrant riots led by neo-Nazis and the right in the city of Heidenau.
Merkel in particular has pushed for the refugees to be distributed more evenly among various European countries or processed in refugee centres at their points of entry. But why shouldn’t the wealthiest Western governments – particularly Germany and Britain, whose political and economic policies have helped fuel the wars in the Middle East that are driving the refugee crisis – now provide for those who are suffering?
As for Britain, data released by the government in late August revealed that only 216 Syrian refugees – out of some 4 million total refugees and the hundreds of thousands who have fled to Europe – have qualified for the government’s official relocation program. An additional 5,000 have received asylum after travelling to Britain on their own.
This is by design. British political leaders and the media routinely characterise migrants and refugees as scroungers seeking to take advantage of a supposedly generous welfare state. UK foreign minister Phillip Hammond was typical when he claimed in August that Europe “can’t protect itself” from African migrants and called for the repatriation of “marauding” refugees.
To defeat the Arab Spring revolutions, the US government and its allies in Europe stoked and supplied the counterrevolution in the Middle East. Now the victims are landing on Europe’s doorstep – and European leaders want to pull the welcome mat out from under them.
Solidarity from below
The images and testimonies of the nightmare endured by refugees are gut-wrenching. But there is another picture and another story: The determination of the refugees to fight for their rights, as best they can – and the solidarity from many Europeans who are organising against their leaders to declare that immigrants and refugees are welcome.
Their numbers and resources are still too small to turn the tide, but their example shows the potential for an alternative to Fortress Europe.
Thus, while German leaders have suggested they can’t “handle” the influx of refugees, the German population has decided otherwise. A recent poll by the German public broadcaster ZDF found that 60 percent of people said that the country – Europe’s biggest economy – is capable of hosting asylum-seekers.
Some people are putting that sentiment into practice. German soccer clubs, pushing back against the far right, organised the display of banners welcoming refugees at matches across the country last week. Soccer club Bayern Munch announced that it would donate €1 million to refugee charities and that players would take the field for upcoming games by walking hand-in-hand with refugee children.
The Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), whose independently run rescue boats in the Mediterranean have saved more than 10,000 people, said it has seen a 15-fold increase in donations in the 24 hours after the pictures of Aylan Kurdi were published. “People are saying they don’t want to be bystanders anymore”, MOAS’s director Martin Xuereb told the Guardian.
Other charities and aid organisations are likewise reporting a huge influx of donations. Calaid, a charity which coordinates aid to refugees in Calais, the northern French city at the end point of the Channel Tunnel, reported that carloads of donations are arriving each day, along with growing numbers of people volunteering to help on the ground with distribution.
In the German city of Munich, after officials announced that 590 refugees had arrived and tweeted, “Anyone who wants to help is welcome”, the outpouring of toys, food and other donations was so great that within hours, police reported being overwhelmed with too many items.
Meanwhile, more and more people are questioning their governments’ inadequate response and calling for more to be done. A petition demanding that the British government “accept more asylum-seekers and increase support for refugee migrants” got 280,000 signatures in just a few days – more than 100,000 of them came in the day following Aylan Kurdi’s death.
Across the continent, thousands of individuals and families have offered to open their homes to host refugees and migrants – a stark answer to the paltry numbers that governments have pledged to give asylum to. In Iceland, after the government announced in August it would give asylum to just 50 Syrian refugees, more than 12,000 people said they would offer their own homes, after prominent author Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir called for ordinary people to help.
People are taking to the streets to make their point as well. In Dresden – the main base of support for Germany’s Islamophobic PEGIDA movement – some 5,000 people turned out on 29 August for a rally in defence of immigrant rights called by the Anti-Nazi Alliance. Holding a banner reading “Prevent the pogroms of tomorrow today”, protesters chanted, “Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here!”
On 1 September, some 20,000 marched in Vienna, Austria, in a “welcome” rally for refugees. Their signs read, “I don’t want Europe to be a mass grave”. The demonstrators cheered as trains carrying refugees arrived in the city.
A European day of action for refugees has been called for 12 September, and tens of thousands across the continent are expected to march under the banner “Refugees welcome”. In London, a Facebook page for the demonstration had 56,000 people signed up to attend – to prove to government officials, as organisers put it, that people in Britain won’t let “thousands die trying to reach the EU and their legal right to claim asylum”.
The solution to the refugee crisis lies in these examples of solidarity – of ordinary people organising to hold their governments accountable, and to declare that immigrants are welcome in Europe.
[First published at <a href="http://www.SocialistWorker.org">SocialistWorker.org</a>.]

The horror and the hope for refugees in Europe

Protest have swept the United States in the wake of a grand jury decision that again affirmed that cops can kill Blacks with impunity. Eighteen year old African American Mike Brown was killed by police in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, on 9 August. Brown had his hands raised in surrender and shouted “Don’t shoot!” when officer Darren Wilson shot the unarmed teen multiple times.
The decision to not indict Wilson comes after a series of killings in recent years, all of which have provoked outrage and demonstrations. In recent months, Ferguson, which is a predominantly Black neighbourhood in St. Louis, has been gripped by mass unrest as the community has mobilised again and again. In this article from US site <a href="http://www.socialistworker.org/">SocialistWorker.org</a>, Nicole Colson and Alan Maass outline the events.
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Darren Wilson has gotten away with murder – and the American injustice system sent the message once again that Black lives don’t matter.
It was long after dark on 24 November when St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch marched to the microphone and announced that a grand jury had refused to indict the Ferguson, Missouri, police officer on any charge at all for killing 18-year-old Mike Brown on 9 August.
This was the result that millions of people expected, but it was shocking anyway: a white cop who shot more than a dozen bullets at an unarmed African American teenager, killing him, was not only off the hook, but was being portrayed as a victim.
After days of rising tensions as the long-awaited grand jury decision didn’t come, people in Ferguson and around the country erupted in bitter protest. Even while Barack Obama followed McCulloch onto the airwaves to make his own statement urging peace, police fired their first volleys of tear gas and smoke grenades in Ferguson.
The media bemoaned the “violence” in Ferguson when a police car was wrecked and local businesses set on fire – without the slightest recognition of the violence that African Americans living in a city like Ferguson endure on a daily basis, directly at the hands of racist police and indirectly as a result of endemic poverty and unemployment.
Tory Russell, the co-founder of Hands Up United, <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/tv/ferguson-activist-to-cnn-police-are-the-ones-who-need-to-keep-calm/">responded firmly when asked in a CNN interview</a> if he was “urging calm” after the decision. Russell replied, “I am urging calm. I’m urging calm for the police officers to not pepper spray me, tear gas me, mace me and shoot rubber bullets … People need to urge the police to be calm. Stop hurting kids, stop traumatising our communities.”
The media vultures had their cameras trained on Ferguson, but there were angry demonstrations around the country after the grand jury decision was announced. In Chicago, hundreds of protesters took over Lake Shore Drive. In Oakland, California, in the largest protest in the Bay Area, the hastily organised solidarity demonstration drew more than 1,000 people who marched through downtown and later blockaded Interstate 580, one of the major routes through the city. Nearly 1,000 turned out to Times Square.
When McCulloch spoke late Monday, he didn’t act like a prosecutor, but a defence attorney … for Darren Wilson.
McCulloch began by complaining about supposedly “inaccurate” speculation on social media, the “trying circumstances” under which law enforcement had to conduct its investigation, and the “unfounded, but growing concern” that the investigation wouldn’t be full or fair. Then he attacked the credibility of numerous eyewitnesses to Mike Brown’s killing, going out of his way to smear any account that differed from Wilson’s, while highlighting those that corroborated Wilson’s.
All to promote the absurd claim that Wilson was under assault by Mike Brown and feared for his life.
According to the story as Wilson and his lawyer McCulloch tell it, the unarmed Brown was pulled over for walking in the middle of the street – and within 15 seconds or so started punching a cop. After being shot at twice, Brown struggled free and ran away from Wilson, but then inexplicably turned around and “charged” at the officer, forcing him to fire a volley of bullets that stopped him. Brown, now hit half a dozen times, “charged” at Wilson again, leaving the cop no choice but to shoot him dead.
Generally, McCulloch’s office presents a grand jury with a specific recommendation for an indictment and an explanation for why the evidence supports the charge. Not this time, though. McCulloch didn’t recommend a charge – and he essentially dumped every shred of physical evidence and testimony onto the grand jury to make their decision. It was a clear sign that the prosecuting attorney was washing his hands of any responsibility in holding Darren Wilson to account.
At his sanctimonious press conference, McCulloch declared that no indictment should be levelled because of “public outcry or political expediency”. Tell that to the Central Park Five – the youth of colour railroaded to prison for a sensational crime amid a lynch mob atmosphere in New York City in the late 1980s.
On the other hand, there are the cases where it’s expedient for the prosecutor to cover up for law enforcement – something McCulloch has some experience with, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-ferguson-tragedy-becoming-a-farce/2014/09/12/e52226ca-3a82-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html">as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reported in September</a>:
“During [McCulloch’s 23-year] tenure, there have been at least a dozen fatal shootings by police in his jurisdiction (the roughly 90 municipalities in the county other than St. Louis itself), and probably many more than that, but McCulloch’s office has not prosecuted a single police shooting in all those years. At least four times he presented evidence to a grand jury but – wouldn’t you know it? – didn’t get an indictment.”
When you consider the fact that, according to government statistics, <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/ferguson-michael-brown-indictment-darren-wilson">US attorneys were successful in winning grand jury indictments in 99.999934 percent of prosecutions in 2010</a>, McCulloch’s trouble getting them against cops looks like more than bad luck.
It remains to be seen what kind of tone the political establishment will adopt now that the grand jury decision has been announced in the Brown case.
On the one hand, sneering racists like former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani will be happy to engage in more victim-blaming. On an appearance on Meet the Press alongside Black commenter Michael Eric Dyson, Giuliani attacked Dyson for not talking enough about Black-on-Black crime. “White police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other”, Giuliani declared.
Among liberals, pleas for nonviolence and patience were the watchwords – including Barack Obama, who appeared at a press conference following McCulloch’s vile grandstanding to repeat his call for calm.
Obama did raise a few facts that the mainstream media ought to acknowledge every once in a while. After celebrating the progress in racial relations in the US over a period of decades, Obama admitted that “what is also true is that there are still problems and that people of colour are not just making this up … and that the law too often feels as though it’s being applied in a discriminatory fashion”.
But the media’s main takeaway from Obama’s speech was no doubt what the president intended. “There’s never an excuse for violence”, Obama declared, echoing the mantra of the press that while peaceful protest should be respected, no one should “throw bottles” or “damage property”.
On the ground in Ferguson, however, there was no sign that police or politicians understood that “there’s never an excuse for violence”.
A full week before the grand jury decision was announced, Missouri’s Democratic governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency in the city, mobilising the National Guard in the hopes of choking off another explosion of anger like what happened immediately after Mike Brown’s killing – which, of course, only guaranteed such an explosion.
It was no surprise when McCulloch’s press conference was followed by clashes with police and clouds of tear gas in the streets of Ferguson once again.
The essential point missing from all the media babble last night and for many long weeks before is simple: people who suffer under the heel of police brutality and racism have a right to be angry.
They should be furious when a white police officer guns down an unarmed Black teenager and isn’t even being arrested, much less indicted and put on trial. They should be incensed at a prosecutor who pleads the case for the defence when it comes to indicting killer cops. They should be outraged at the state’s ruthless suppression of peaceful dissent and the demonisation of protesters for nothing more than exercising their rights.
And because they did erupt in protest after Mike Brown was shot down in the streets, no one is likely to forget the name of Ferguson for many years to come. The police murder of an unarmed teenager – and especially the mass uprising in protest against it – has changed the way millions of people think about racism and the police. And it has further radicalised a new generation determined to do something about it.
That was clear from the solidarity demonstrations around the US when the grand jury decision was announced.
There were protests around the Bay Area, but the largest was in Oakland – the home of Oscar Grant, murdered on a BART train platform on New Year’s Day in 2009. Swelled by contingents of students from the nearby University of California at Berkeley, where a struggle is taking place over tuition hikes, more than 1,000 people marched through the city’s downtown, chanting “Ferguson, we have your back!”
In Chicago, hundreds of people gathered, despite the frigid temperatures, taking over Lake Shore Drive for a time while chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot!” In New York City, hundreds of people had already come out to Union Square hours before the grand jury decision was announced.
The demonstrations were angriest in Ferguson itself, of course. When some protesters apparently smashed the windows of a police cruiser and later set it on fire, a phalanx of riot police surrounded, racking what appeared to be shotguns before pointing them at the demonstrators.
In a statement, Mike Brown’s parents said, “We are profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequence of his actions … While we understand that many others share our pain, we ask that you channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change. We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen.”
A glimpse of that positive change has already been seen – in the days and weeks since Mike Brown was killed, among those who came to Ferguson and St. Louis to take action against racism and police brutality. They were participants in a fight that won’t be forgotten.
As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, wrote on social media before the decision:
“As we await the grand jury’s decision, I want to take this opportunity to say thank you – a deep, heart-wrenching thank you – to all the organisers and activists who took to the streets following Michael Brown’s killing and who refused to stop marching, raising their voices, and crying out for justice. It is because of them – their courage, boldness, vision and stamina – that the world is paying attention to what is happening in a suburb called Ferguson.
“The world is not watching because an unarmed Black man was killed by the police. That’s not news. What made this police killing different was that the people in Ferguson – particularly the young people – rose up and said We Will Not Take It Any More. Our Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. And their cry has been heard around the world.
“No matter what the grand jury does, let us remember that true justice will come only when our criminal injustice system is radically transformed: when we no longer have militarised police forces, wars on our communities, a school-to-prison pipeline, and police departments that shoot first and ask questions later. True justice will be rendered not when a single “guilty” verdict is rendered in one man’s case, but when the system as a whole has been found guilty and we, as a nation, have committed ourselves to repairing, as best we can, the immeasurable harm that has been done.”
[Todd Chretien, Danny Katch and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field contributed to this article.]

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