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Month: January 2021

R.I.P. MARKUS. A message from your neighbor — to everyone who miss you

Julia V’s neighbour Markus died this month after a long period suffering from mental health problems. His death shows the alienation and loneliness of modern society, but also provoked an outbreak of compassion


19/01/2021

On Friday the 8th of January, 2021, Marco Reckinger, to me known as Markus, passed away in the Herrfurthstrasse in Neukölln, Berlin. He was in his early thirties, struggling with psychological problems, remarkably friendly and charismatic, despite sleeping rough. I live on the street that was his home, nearby to the place where he is now remembered. I would like to share some thoughts with you, other neighbors, and with everyone that cared. 2021 has barely started, we are in lockdown mode, and we should not need to ask ourselves all these questions, alone.

For the last three years, Markus’s shouts were a background to the daily lives of my family, even reaching our colleagues through the now endless work zoom calls, and providing a weird layer over the bedtime stories for our kids. When I first encountered him, years ago, I was suspicious, as who knows what mentally unstable people suddenly might do?

As time went by, we developed a sort of co-existence. We said hello in the morning, and again in the afternoon. The kids ran up to him as soon as they could to give a thumbs up, and if he was mentally present, he would answer with a thumbs up and a big smile.

Before we knew his name, our worried old neighbor referred to him as “unser penner da unten” (translates: our tramp down below) when asking about his health. The word that stuck with me in this description was our. Whoever he was, after years living in our street, Markus belonged with us. I am very sure he was his own, possibly more than anybody, but the fact that Markus was part of our lives was real. That came with a sense of responsibility, and I do not think there is an escape to that. I am not surprised that hundreds of people from the neighborhood have come to say goodbye to him in the last week. An amazing amount of people really cared, but we were not able to organize suitable longterm help. Why?

We called around in summer, when it was too hot to be outside and Markus seemed to be more in distress than usual. The reply we got from whatever place we called was he must come on his own initiative, or we must call the police — they will bring him if he is a danger to someone. Markus was not very present, but definitely not a danger, rather the opposite. In a sense oddly enough I felt safer knowing he was around. After accepting that there was no help to find, we resorted to doing what I believe most people did; to bring tea in winter, occasionally money, dry blankets, clothes and cigarettes.

In the recent weeks he fell ill. I partly witnessed the team from the help for homeless (Obdachlosenhilfe) trying to convince him to come with them to the shelter. The interaction left me quite choked, as the team were not a friendly crew. I can definitely understand why he chose not to come with them. Shortly afterwards I started noticing that it was so awfully quiet outside. Markus had gotten too weak to scream. I started to believe he would not make it. I asked friends what to do, nobody could answer. I could not imagine Markus getting well in an institution. Surely, I had friends who were greatly helped by the mental health care and institutions, but I just did not think it could work for him.

What sort of help would be appropriate? Seeing the obvious support in the neighborhood, I played with the thought of crowdfunding a space for him, but knowing I didn’t have capacity to pull it off right now — neither time to organize, nor people to think it through with — and knowing that even if it would have worked, simply money or a space to live would not have been enough. It is very hard for me to accept this fact — that there was no way that I saw that would offer viable help.

To me his death was political. It touches on systems, on barriers and on culture. I learned the details of Markus previous life through a goodbye speech by his friend last Sunday. What I had imagined was confirmed — in a sense Markus story was a familiar Berlin story, a life path easy to relate to. He was a music producer, a social party animal, arriving here a little lost in his twenties, like many of us did, including me. I am sure we could have danced to the same beat. Berlin does not judge, but it also does not catch you if you slip.

I used to believe that in crisis the only thing that will persist and fix things is community, connections in neighborhoods, between people on the ground. We all knew he needed help, but we did not know how. It leaves me with the chilling feeling that we and our friends, are not safe. It is easy to slip out of a system which is built on many small units. If your unit is broken, or if you yourself are so broken that it is unreasonable for your small unit to carry you, is there a path forward? The state did not fill that function. What sort of structure can take that responsibility? I would like to know.

Through the years, Markus became a sort of friend, and it mattered. His death broke some of my defense, the quite stiff barrier between me and the outside of my unit. This system — with every unit on its own — requires my ignorance, it is a prerequisite for me to function in it. Now my defense system is damaged. It is impossible for me to ignore a person, a sort of friend, dying on my literal doorstep. I saw no way to prevent it, but I refuse to ignore it. I would like to keep my defense system broken, stay just a little bit more off guard, allow myself to be a little less indifferent. If Markus’s death can bring me one thing to hold on to, it is this. The preparedness to feel that others matters, also in moments when there is no clear path to make sense of that compassion, also when the road forward is blocked.

The day after Markus died, I found out that he did refuse to enter the ambulance several times. Would he had entered if someone he knew was friendly would have offered to come with him? I will never know. He had the right to choose to move on, it was a fair decision to make. A few years in the cold is already a few years too much.

I hope Markus has found his peace. For me the silence is still unfamiliar, and it is definitely not ours yet. In time it will be.

Rest in peace, Markus.

Update: I received requests for a German version of this text, thanks to T. from the neighborhood it now exists. 🙂

Julia V, writing from the hood, spent the last decade in Neukölln. Passt auf einander auf! ” Twitter: @_headquarters. This article first appeared on Julia’s medium page. Reproduced with permission

Let them Eat Beans

Profiting from Poverty by Punishing the Poor: The UK Free School Meals Food Parcel Scandal


18/01/2021

Social Media Scandal

On 12th January, Twitter user Roadside Mum shared a photo with her Twitter followers. The photo showed a loaf of bread, a tin of baked beans, a few cheese slices wrapped in cling film, a small amount of fruit and veg, a handful of pasta, 2 fruit loaf bars and 3 yoghurt tubes (brand name: frubes).[1] This was the food that had been provided in lieu of free school meals during lockdown, and was supposed to feed her child for a week.

The photo quickly went viral, with other parents sharing the meagre offerings that they had received. Some families even received food parcels with half a tomato or pepper, an inch or two of carrot, food such as tuna and cheese packaged in money bags and expired bagels.[2] Sarah, a mother who received a miserly food parcel containing expired bagels and no fresh food apart from two potatoes, made a valid point: “…they’re getting government funding to do this. Where does the money go if this is what they’re giving people?”[3] Where indeed?

These disgraceful food parcels generated much discussion about free school meal (FSM) provision in the UK during the COVID-19 Pandemic. During the first two lockdowns, parents with children receiving FSM had been issued with vouchers to the value of £15 per week to redeem for food in the supermarket. Predictably there was then much right-wing outrage, including from Conservative MPs, about parents spending the food vouchers on alcohol, cigarettes, crack dens and brothels (yes, really.)[4] After this right-wing storytelling, the government decided to switch to mostly providing food parcels. Never mind that the school meals vouchers had only ever been redeemable for food items.

These school meal food parcels were largely outsourced to catering companies, some of whom apparently saw a way to make a bit of easy cash. Let them eat beans. Like playground bullies stealing lunch money, corporations took food straight from the mouths of hungry children with an approving nod from the bigger bullies in government.

Catering Cronies

The company that provided Roadside Mum’s food parcel, or ‘food hamper’ as they prefer to laughably describe it, was Chartwells, a subsidiary of (FTSE 100 Company) Compass Group. As reported in The Guardian newspaper, since 2016, Compass and its subsidiary have won contracts worth almost £350 million for school catering, typically including free school meal provision.[5] They are the largest school meals provider in the UK. Questions must be asked about how they were awarded these contracts and where all this money has gone. Compass Group has links to the Conservative Party; and its recently retired chairman, Paul Walsh, was a donor to the party and a member of former Prime Minister David Cameron’s business advisory group.

Through their incarnation as Chartwells Independent, Compass also provide catering to private schools. Compare and contrast the fare given to privileged private school kids over those getting local authority free school meals; the discrepancy is vast.[6] It shows complete contempt for working class kids. Working class kids can have some out of date bagels. Private school kids get lavish buffets, gingerbread villages, luxurious patisserie selections and special ‘pancake day’ spreads.[7]

Compass Group has been involved in other scandals involving school meals. In the USA, it was found to have overcharged New York schools for school meals over a period of 7 years, receiving discounts from vendors that it did not pass on to the schools as required by law. Compass Group had to pay an $18 million settlement in this particular case of profiteering from hungry children.[8] In 2013, Compass was found to have supplied horse meat to several schools in Ireland and the North of Ireland.[9] Shareholders in Compass Group have raised concerns over the FSM food parcel scandal, no doubt wishing to protect their investments from the scandal.[10] Other catering companies have also provided FSM parcels (ranging from adequate to appalling) during lockdown, they have largely avoided being named in this scandal.

Defences and Government Guidance

Chartwells issued a brief statement about Roadside Mum’s food parcel, stating that it had charged the local authority £10.50 for it rather than £15, or £30. They said that they were sorry that the quantity had fallen short “in this instance”, and blamed the substandard quality of its food parcels on the short notice of the government move from vouchers to food parcels.[11]

The catering companies could argue in their defence that the contents of their food parcels are quite similar to the UK government guidance on free school meals parcels, with the government list having only an additional tin of sweetcorn, a litre of milk, and pack of ham or tin of tuna.[12] They could argue that they were just following government guidelines. This would be an inadequate defence as they did not have to sign up to provide such meagre, punishing meals. They could have refused, they could have insisted on providing sufficient nutritious food and they did not. Profiting from hungry children was acceptable to them until they were caught.

It is even less of a defence when we consider the involvement of Stephen Forster. Stephen Forster was involved, as Chair of the school catering professional body LACA, in drawing up the government FSM food parcel guidelines. Forster is also a director at Chartwells.[13] LACA lobbies the government on behalf of school catering firms, is involved in drawing up government guidance on food parcels, then its national Chair is seemingly able to profit from this miserly government guidance under a different role.

Fighting back

Reprising his role of food poverty campaigner, taken on during the first COVID lockdown,[14] the Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford was quick to speak out on this outrage. He labelled the food parcels ‘unacceptable’[15] and set up discussions with the Prime Minister.

Food writer, chef and anti-poverty activist Jack Monroe also campaigned hard on the issue, receiving hundreds of pictures of substandard food parcels from parents and using their public profile to speak up against this shamefully meagre food provision in TV and newspaper interviews. Jack told the BBC that “free school meals had been replaced with a “poverty picnic”.[16]

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer tweeted that the food parcels were “woefully inadequate” and said that the situation “needs sorting immediately”, while Marcus Rashford was discussing the issue with the Prime Minister and making plans with the supermarket Aldi to provide 10 million meals to families in need in 2021.[17] The Labour Party could have been at the heart of this campaign, calling strongly for decent food for all school kids and demanding concessions from the government. Instead it has again been left to footballers, writers, and ordinary people to hold the government and catering contractors to account. I hope that Starmer’s Labour Party start holding the government to account rather than weakly saying “this needs sorting out”. I’m glad they are at least critical of the government over this scandal.

Starmer did raise the similarities between the government guidance on FSM parcels and the inadequate food parcels in parliament but was mocked for his ineffectiveness, with PM Johnson jeering: “I’m grateful to Marcus Rashford, who highlighted the issue and is doing quite an effective job by comparison to [Sir Keir] in holding the Government to account on these issues.”[18]

Johnson and his government are, of course, ultimately to blame for this scandalous failure to support hungry kids. Government ministers decried the food parcels, as if it was not their government that had implemented the FSM food parcels policy or issued abstemious government guidance on the issue. It is this Tory government that has failed its nation’s children during the COVID pandemic; the food parcels scandal being just one instance of failure and neglect. It is a shame that they have been left to get away with it almost unimpeded for so long.

U-Turns Abound

The campaign against these stingy and humiliating food parcels, started on social media by parents and championed by Marcus Rashford and Jack Monroe, lead to a rapid U-turn by the Tory government and a commitment by Chartwells to drastically improve its practices. Other catering companies have kept their heads down. The government has agreed to reinstate its food voucher scheme. From 18th January 2021, parents will again be able to apply for £15 vouchers instead of receiving food parcels. Chartwells have been in discussion with the parent who first raised her concerns on Twitter and have told her that they will make substantial changes to their practice including not billing local authorities for the inadequate food parcels provided, adding more lunch items and also including breakfast items in their parcels and soliciting input from parents and nutritionists on what goes in their parcels.[19] This shows what ordinary people can achieve when they fight. Imagine if they had the backing of a political party consistently fighting alongside them.

The Next School Meals Battle

Fresh from its U-turn on substandard FSM parcels and vouchers, the Tory government has again announced that free school meals will not be provided during the upcoming half-term holidays. They did this with previous lockdown school holidays and were forced to U-turn by (de facto opposition leader) Rashford’s campaigning. I cannot understand why they would do this straight after their recent defeat on the issue of feeding hungry children. It’s as though they enjoy the ‘nasty party’ image. Perhaps they think they can keep beating Starmer with the ‘Marcus Rashford is the real opposition’ stick by doing this. Perhaps they just have complete disdain for working class children and cannot fathom feeding them when they don’t ‘have to’. It appears to almost physically hurt them to feed hungry kids.

Lessons

This food parcels scandal has highlighted several lessons: the ease with which companies that have Tory connections get essential services contracts (see also COVID PPE contracts); that despite their rhetoric, these companies gladly have their snouts in the trough of public money; and the lack of concern of both government and these companies for the health and wellbeing of our school children.

It has also highlighted that it is possible to force them into better positions through vocal and persistent campaigning. Compass Group/Chartwells do not want to upset their shareholders while the government perhaps don’t want to openly be seen to endorse profiting from child hunger. At any rate, the scrutiny and negative publicity has been effective at forcing a change of policy from both.

The scandal has also highlighted the contempt that the government and its friendly catering contractors have for working class children. Working class children are seen to deserve only the bare minimum to keep them alive, forget about thriving or good nutrition or variety in diet. Heaven forbid they enjoy a free meal! If they could get away with it, the Tories would probably provide them with gruel. During previous FSM scandals, social media was full of well-off people smugly posting money-saving recipes and budgeting advice for poor people. This attitude towards the ‘undeserving poor’ is fairly prevalent in the UK.

Successive UK governments and their media helpers have consistently portrayed people living in poverty as feckless layabouts who have brought misfortune on themselves. Parents of children who receive FSM have been smeared as bad at budgeting and selfish, spending money on cigarettes and alcohol rather than their kids. The idea of government supporting people in need has been presented as encouraging dependency and applying for state support has been made torturously difficult, humiliating, and punitive.

Even if this myth of the feckless scrounger parent was true and thousands of parents were ‘playing the system’, punishing hungry children would still be completely and utterly inhuman. Every child deserves to have enough varied, good quality, and nutritious food to eat. No child should be humiliated with paltry starvation rations like stale bread and half a tomato because their parents are poor. As a society we must do better than this. We should be angry at the disdain the Tories have for working class kids and use that anger to fight for change. Trust parents to feed their children. Give them money if they are lacking it, not loveless scraps of charity. Our children are worth much more than a miserly tin of beans.

 

Footnotes

1 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/mum-slams-free-school-meal-23301801

2 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/free-school-meal-measly-included-23305830 for one disgraceful example and https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jan/12/what-am-i-supposed-to-make-with-this-uk-parents-on-schools-meagre-food-parcels for more

3 Quoted in https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jan/12/what-am-i-supposed-to-make-with-this-uk-parents-on-schools-meagre-food-parcels

4 https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/oct/24/ben-bradley-under-pressure-to-apologise-over-free-school-meals-tweets

5 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jan/12/school-dinners-row-shines-light-on-role-of-catering-firms-chartwells-compass

6 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/under-fire-free-school-meals-23305741

7 https://www.instagram.com/chartwellsindependent/

8 https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2012/ag-schneiderman-announces-18-million-settlement-compass-group-usa-overcharging-4

9 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/chartwells-free-school-meals-history-b1786258.html

10 https://www.ft.com/content/2162181a-be67-4feb-a5a8-ae63e3e05fce

11 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jan/12/school-dinners-row-shines-light-on-role-of-catering-firms-chartwells-compass

12 https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/free-school-meals-boris-johnson-food-parcels-government-guidelines-pmqs-video-827833

13 https://laca.co.uk/news/laca-update-stephen-forster-3

14 https://foodfoundation.org.uk/vulnerable_groups/government-makes-a-u-turn-on-providing-free-school-meal-vouchers-over-summer-holidays/

15 https://twitter.com/MarcusRashford/status/1348726328930004993

16 https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-55633063

17 https://propermanchester.com/news/marcus-rashford-teams-up-with-aldi-to-provide-10-million-meals-to-hungry-kids/

18 Quoted in https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/free-school-meals-boris-johnson-food-parcels-government-guidelines-pmqs-video-827833

19 https://twitter.com/RoadsideMum/status/1350161736305963008

Israel’s Medical Apartheid begins with the numbers

While the world has been congratulating Israel for the high number of Covid-19 vaccinations, Palestinians are being left out. Yoav Haifawi reports from Haifa about discrimination on a national and international level


17/01/2021

The Covid-19 pandemic posed a harsh “surprise test” for many states as well as local and global organizations and human societies in general. The arrival of the vaccine, though it was long expected, posed another harsh test for our ‘one-but-unequal’ worldwide society.

The first weeks of the distribution of the newly available vaccines exposed the incompetence or indifference of many states in caring for their citizens. But, above all, they exposed an international system of apartheid, where all the supposedly “premium” vaccines from western manufacturers are divided between the western capitalist states. One striking example is the case of Ukraine, that tried to buy vaccine from manufacturers like Pfizer, only to be blocked by an executive order from the USA administration banning its export.

Israel was late to contact Pfizer, which was the first producer to succeed in licensing a Covid-19 vaccine in the EU and the USA. Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu boasted that he talked 17 times on the phone with Pfizer’s president Bourla over the past weeks. Netanyahu secured enough vaccine for all Israel’s citizens above the age of 16 before the end of March. Needless to say – this bargain, one that puts Israel’s citizens before those of the vaccine’s inventors and producers in Germany and the USA – was not blocked by Trump.

This came just in time for the personal ambitions of an embattled Netanyahu, as he tries to avoid a pending trial on several counts of corruption. He caused his divided government to fall by preventing the adoption of a budget, and set elections for March 23. He is hoping to ride the vaccine wave and get a majority in the Knesset that will provide him with legal immunity.

But Israel not only gets top priority in the world-wide apartheid order. It also has its internal deeply established apartheid system. When Israel speaks of vaccinating “all its citizens”, it completely ignores millions of Palestinians who live under its rule as subjects with no rights. Actually, the whole world is adopting this racist Israeli approach. When for example, we read in the papers that “25% of Israel’s population was already vaccinated”, this percentage is calculated out of only some 9 million “citizens” – it leaves aside more than 5 million Palestinians. For them, Israel didn’t even think about their need for the vaccine.

Even independent data providers like “ourworldindata.org” (see figure below), buy into these Israeli Apartheid statistics. The excuse, of course, is the artificial division between the territories that Israel occupied in 1948. That performed an ethnic cleansing of most of the native population, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip that Israel occupied in 1967. The first, 1948 occupied areas, are regarded by many as a legitimate and “democratic” Israel. There the ethnic cleansing and the prevention of the return of the Palestinian refugees ensured Jewish majority in those areas. The 1967 occupation is regarded as “temporary” – ignoring that most of the population there is a second generation to live under this “temporary” rule that deny them all basic human rights.

The reality on the ground has no connection to this illusionary view, in all aspects of life including healthcare and vaccination. Jewish settlers in the West Bank (there are more than half a million of them) of course get the Covid-19 vaccine like any other citizen and are part of the official Israeli statistics. So, the denial of rights, and the wiping out from the statistics, is just in the case that you happen to be Palestinian.

On December 23, 2020, as Israel started its vaccination campaign, 20 human rights organizations published a call to the Israel government to respect its obligation under the international law, to take responsibility for the health of the population under its occupation. They wrote:

“The Israeli Ministry of Health has not yet publicly formulated an allocation policy that includes reserving specific amounts for Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), nor has it established a timeline for the transfer of these vaccines. However, Article 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention specifically provides that an occupier has the duty of ensuring “the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics”. This duty includes providing support for the purchase and distribution of vaccines to the Palestinian population under its control.”

The Gaza Strip is a densely populated area with 2 million people, most of them refugees from the 1948 ethnic cleansing.The situation is much worse than even in the West Bank. After the bloody oppression of the second intifada (2000-2005) failed to break the resistance, Israel changed its’ tactics. Israel withdrew from within the strip, converting it to a huge open-air prison, controlled from outside by snipers, artillery and drones. This enabled the only semi-democratic elections in the history of the Palestinian Authority in 2006, which was won by Hamas. Under a strict siege by Israel and Egypt, the pandemic was late to invade, but it has flared there. In the Gaza Strip there is hardly any space for social distancing and the health services are deprived of resources due to poverty and the siege.

Israel is cynically using the pandemic to press the Hamas government in Gaza to agree to its terms for a prisoners’ exchange deal. Hamas captured two Israeli soldiers during the invasion of the strip in a bloody massacres campaign in 2014 and two Israeli citizens that entered the strip. Israel claims that both soldiers are dead, after doing its utmost to make sure it is true. Hamas wants the prisoners’ exchange to release as many as possible of the some 5000 Palestinian prisoners that are held by Israel. Now Israel is seeing the pandemic as “an opportunity” to lower the number of Palestinians to be released.

The family of one of the soldiers appealed to the Israeli “high court” to prevent any supply of the Covid-19 vaccine to the Gaza strip until the soldiers are released. In their reply, the Israeli state representatives promised the court that there is no intention to let vaccine to the strip anytime soon. They even claimed initially that the whole Palestine Authority (PA) has no vaccine, but on January 13 “admitted” that Israel passed to the PA 100 doses (!) “for humanitarian reasons”.

It is worth noting that the lawyer that is demanding in court, in the name of the soldier’s family, to prevent vaccination from 2 million people in Gaza is the Dean of Sha’arei Mishpat Law School, Professor Aviad Ha’cohen. He is doing it as part of his university’s “pro-bono” program.

Another especially vulnerable population are the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of them are old. This as Israel imprisons Palestinian to ultra-log periods, with no proportion to what they were accused of. Many of them already suffer from other diseases due to harsh conditions and systematic medical neglect. Israel’s minister of internal security, Amir Ohana, which is responsible to the Prisons’ Authority, is a former Shabak operator. He tries to gain popularity with racist public opinion by loudly refusing to vaccinate Palestinian prisoners. He was told by official legal and health experts that public health policies (like vaccinating all people over 60) should be applied also to all prisoners. Lately he seems to have hardened his stance and now objects to the inoculation of all prisoners. The fate of the prisoners is still hung in court while the pandemic is spreading in the prisons.

Israel’s advanced health services (for those that are entitled to receive them) rely heavily of Palestinian doctors and nurses. But the service is not equally administered in the Arab Palestinian communities (within the green line), from where most of these doctors and nurses come. Human rights organization complained of lack of explanatory materials in Arabic, lack of vaccination centers, etc. This is on top of the chronic problems of poverty, bad infrastructure, lack of public transport and the situation in dozens of unrecognized villages that are not receiving services at all.

All this is a stark demonstration of the nature of the Israeli regime, which B’Tselem recently declared to be a proper Apartheid State. The Covid-19 pandemic exposes this regime in its most ugly manifestations. The struggle for equality and social justice will probably stay with us long after the virus will be defeated.

Yoav Haifiwi runs the blog freehaifa. He wrote this contribution for theleftberlin website.

News from Germany and Berlin: 16 January, 2021

Weekly news roundup from Berlin and Germany


15/01/2021

Compiled by Ana Ferreira

 

NEWS FROM GERMANY

A bad year for the AfD

In the RTL/ntv trend barometer the AfD started the later Corona year on a par with the SPD. Twelve months later, things are not yet better for the Social Democrats, but they look much worse for the right-wing alternative. No other party has lost so much support in the polls over the year: AfD lost five percentage points. The winner of 2020 is clearly the CDU/CSU – although it was unable to maintain the 40% approval rating from the early summer (currently, with 36%). Die Linke and FDP each slipped by one percentage point compared to early 2020. Source: ntv

No significant reform of Hartz IV before the election

The SPD announced it wants to “leave Hartz IV behind.” However, SPD Minister Hubertus Heil has only just presented a draft bill for the reform of basic social security benefits. In essence, the draft is neither about abolishing the cuts in the funds nor about a significant increase in the standard rates. But benefit recipients are to be shown more appreciation. The CDU has already objected to all this. This means that there will probably be no fundamental reorientation of Hartz IV before the federal elections at the end of September. Source: nd

Job centre pays too little for rent

Those who receive Hartz IV benefits are entitled to have their accommodation and heating costs paid for in addition to the standard rate. However, only an “appropriate” amount is paid, and this amount is not clearly defined by law. A woman from Eschwege sued a job centre in 2016 once she had to pay around 375 euros a month for her rent, while it paid her monthly housing costs of 274 euros. Peter Menges, vice-chairman of the unemployed initiative Owei, believes that such judgements will mean a great financial relief for many more welfare recipients. Source: nd

it is time for “Zero Covid”

“Zero Covid”, an initiative of scientists, authors and health workers, demand a “radical change of strategy” and an immediate lockdown in all areas of the economy throughout Europe. “We don’t need a controlled continuation of the pandemic, but an end to it,” says the appeal by the group around philosopher and author Bini Adamczak. The measures are considered to be “(…) based on social solidarity”. For the subsequent loss of wages, the initiative wants a comprehensive rescue package to be passed that guarantees compensation and continued payments. The money for such an intervention is available, the initiative argues. Source: taz

NEWS FROM BERLIN

Riot police attack Luxemburg-Liebknecht demo

About 3,000 people took part in the traditional Luxemburg-Liebknecht (LL) demonstration in Berlin last Sunday. Even before the demonstration could start moving, the riot police attacked. A number of video sequences published on the internet show the officers beating up the demonstrators. Police also used pepper spray. There were a number of arrests and detentions, as well as injuries. Even minors and a wheelchair user were allegedly attacked by the officers. On Twitter, the press office of the Berlin police justified the action by saying some participants wore “forbidden FDJ symbols” and refused to take them off. Source: jW

COVID in Berlin leads to 15km travel restriction

Berlin is set to join other parts of Germany in implementing a 15-kilometer travel restriction for those who live here. Starting on next Saturday, residents will be prohibited from travelling more than 15km beyond the capital limits, based on the pandemic incidence rate. In general, the 15km boundary gets triggered each time a district sees more than 200 new infections per 100,000 people within seven days. Germany’s stricter shutdown, which was extended from January 10 until at least the end of January, requires a valid reason to leave home. Other countries, such as France, restrict people to within one kilometer of their homes. Source: dw

Wir haben es Satt

Demonstrating against Agribusiness


Wir haben es Satt! is an alliance of over 60 organisations. It organizes a demonstration against Agribusiness every January in Berlin at the opening of the world’s largest argriculture fair, the “Grüne Woche”.

The demonstration has been organised by farmers, engaged youth and critical citizens since 2001. In super election year, Wir haben es Satt! is confronting the current government with the following demands:

  • Stop the perishing of farms – support farmers in conversion efforts towards sustainability!

  • No more animal factories – support of corresponding reconstruction of stables & reduction of numbers of animals

  • Fight climate crisis – reduce consumption of meat & protect healthy soil!

  • Finally exit pesticide use & no more genetic engineering – protect health and insects!

  • EU-Mercosur deal in the garbage can – for human rights, against free trade adreements!

Because of Covid-19, this year’s will take place largely online. Organisers ask you to do the following the support the demonstration:

Stay at home and participate in the direct action footprint, our protest from afar. On 16 January we will bring your footprints for the agricultural turnaround to the Federal Chancellery. That’s how we will stand up for a fundamental change of agricultural and nutrition policies. Let’s together kick off the agricultural turnaround!

It’s super easy to participate:

  1. Step on a slip of paper with your foot or shoe, dipped in colour

  2. Add your demands

  3. Share your picture in social media under #AgrarwendeLostreten

  4. Upload you picture here

In Berlin each of your steps will be part of a giant picture put together for a sustainable agriculture and for climate justice. We will present your footsteps in front of the Federal Chancellery, and we will show that lots and lots of people stand up for sustainable agriculture – in spite of the pandemic or rather because of it.

Conventional and ecologically active farmers fight in the Wir haben es satt! alliance shoulder to shoulder with civil society against the fatal consequences of intensive industrial agriculture. Collectively, the alliance demonstrates ways for a rural agriculture which, with more defence of the environment, animals and climate, has a wide consent from the public and offers farms economic perspectives