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Anthony Albanese’s Labor government is accusing Greens MPs of standing in the way of solutions to the housing crisis. But under Labor’s plan, the proportion of public housing will drop while rents keep rising.

A residential building and the Sydney Tower Eye in Sydney, Australia, on Monday, April 17, 2023. (Brendon Thorne / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In the middle of the worst housing crisis in Australia’s history, a major national debate has emerged over the Labor government’s proposed centerpiece housing policy, the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF).

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) requires the support of Greens MPs to pass their housing plan through Parliament. However, in its current form, Labor’s plan will see the housing crisis worsen, while doing nothing to support renters. Instead, the Greens have launched a national campaign demanding that Labor directly invests billions in building public and genuinely affordable housing. The Greens are demanding as well that the Labor government coordinate a national two-year freeze on rent increases, followed by 2 percent cap every two years on future rent increases.

So far, Labor has refused and has instead attacked Greens MPs — myself included — for “standing in the way,” while its allies in the media have tried to argue that “something is better than nothing.” In a less-than-veiled threat, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he is willing to let the bill fail and instead take it to the next election.

So, with the PM digging in and with Labor refusing to offer any extra funding toward public housing or move on freezing rents, this begs the question: Why are the Greens holding firm? To explain why, it’s first important to break down exactly what Labor’s Housing Australia Future Fund is. Second, we need to understand it in light of the scale of the housing crisis.

A $10-Billion Gamble

Labor’s plan is to gamble $10 billion on the stock market via the government’s Future Fund — which lost money last year — and to spend a limited fraction of the returns on housing. According to Labor’s proposal, even when the fund does make a return, funding for housing would be capped at $500 million a year. By way of comparison, Labor will spend $30 billion per year on the Stage 3 tax cuts that give a tax break of $9,000 to everyone earning over $200,000. Worse, because the proposed fund will only be allowed to spend money after it has generated an adequate return, at a minimum, it will be 2025 before a single home is completed.

Labor claims the HAFF will finance the construction of 30,000 social and “affordable” homes over five years. So far, they have not defined “affordable,” and at any rate, it’s extremely unlikely their plan will achieve anything near that target. And even if it does, the current national shortage of social and affordable housing is 640,000. And this number is due to increase by another 75,000 homes in the next five years, in part because the ALP is withdrawing funding for 24,000 rentals subsidized under the National Rental Affordability Scheme.

In sum, even if the Greens do pass Labor’s plan, the proportion of social housing in Australia will actually decline to a historical low of 3.4 percent of total housing stock. In comparison, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average is 15 percent. In comparable countries like Austria, over 20 percent of housing is community or public.

If it wasn’t clear already, Labor’s plan won’t even touch the sides of the housing crisis, let alone provide relief for renters. In effect, it doesn’t even maintain the status quo.

Labor’s Neoliberal Housing System

The status quo is the product of a decades-long neoliberal effort by both Labor and the Coalition to transform housing into a major object of financial speculation. At the same time, they have almost entirely outsourced housing provision to property developers, banks, and other for-profit entities.

This neoliberal housing program had three key pillars. The first was the deliberate and chronic underfunding of public housing, both construction and maintenance. The second was large-scale financial deregulation. This included relaxed lending restrictions on banks and floating the Australian dollar. Neoliberal reforms also allowed financial institutions to trade and sell packages of mortgages, that is, allowed the creation of a secondary mortgage market and securitization, leading to a surge in credit and aggressive lending from banks and other mortgage brokers.

The status quo is the product of a decades-long neoliberal effort by both Labor and the Coalition to transform housing into a major object of financial speculation.

The third pillar of the bipartisan neoliberal housing policy is the potent combination of negative-gearing and capital-gains tax concessions. These measures provide massive incentives to property speculators and function as a key driver of housing financialization. Next year alone, they will cost the federal budget $12 billion.

Together, these factors have transformed housing into a lucrative financial asset. The attraction of easy cash and turbo-charged property prices has caused the number of property investors to surge. It is precisely this housing system — created by Labor and the Liberals — that is in crisis. And it is this housing system that both parties are working to protect.

This is why federal Labor and its state counterparts are trying to convince the public that it’s not possible for the government to do more to respond to the housing crisis. And this is the key to understanding the HAFF. It isn’t designed to tackle the housing crisis. It’s designed to make it look like Labor has done something. And once the government has done “something,” they hope it will reduce the social and political pressure on the federal government to actually do something.

Why the Greens Are Holding the Line

It’s important to understand that the government’s power extends beyond the ability to pass laws. Almost as important is the government’s power to frame what is and isn’t politically possible. Once Parliament passes a “plan,” it constrains civil society’s ability to demand more, even if the plan is worse than a Band-Aid.

Consequently, if the Greens were to wave through the HAFF bill, it would foreclose on the possibility of building the social and political pressure needed to force the government to take meaningful action. Partly, this is because Greens support would give tacit endorsement not only the HAFF, but to Labor’s broader argument that this is the best the government can do in the current circumstances. And that is just not true. The consequence would be abandoning millions of people to permanent housing stress, as they struggle to pay rent, wait for social housing, or are forced to sleep in their cars or on the streets. Allowing the HAFF to pass would demobilize the growing section of civil society that is justifiably angry about the degree of poverty and financial stress that exists in such a wealthy country.

By refusing to pass Labor’s housing plan without even a debate, the Greens forced a national discussion about large-scale investment in public housing and a rent freeze. This can help lay the political foundations needed to push Labor into making real, lasting concessions.

After only six months of campaigning, 60 percent of the country now supports a rent freeze, with only 17 percent opposed.

In practical terms, after only six months of campaigning, 60 percent of the country now supports a rent freeze, with only 17 percent opposed. Only a few months ago, the PM dismissed the idea of national renter standards and a rent freeze as “pixie dust.” Now it’s on the table at the National Cabinet. These are small victories given the scale of the crisis — but they are an important first step toward more transformative solutions.

In parliamentary terms, threatening to vote against the HAFF is the only immediate leverage the Greens have to force Labor to take serious action. And just as important, this parliamentary conflict helps create the space for a broader campaign in civil society. By disrupting Labor’s attempts to sandbag the rapidly deteriorating status quo, we are also disrupting their attempt to convince the public that nothing can really change.

Door Knocking for Housing

While Parliament has debated the HAFF, the Greens have also launched a national door-knocking campaign targeted at Labor-held federal electorates. Our aim is to apply pressure on the ground, in turn building a social basis that can strengthen the pressure applied in Parliament. In a basic sense, the purpose is to show Labor that if they don’t agree to invest billions in public housing and to freeze rents, they will lose seats to the Greens at the next federal election. At the same time, door knocking helps us accurately temperature-check the mood of these electorates. And this, in turn, ensures that the parliamentary wing of the Greens remains connected to the people we are meant to represent.

What we’ve found at the doors, unsurprisingly, is that the vast majority of people also want meaningful solutions. For instance, according to data gathered while door knocking, over 80 percent of people we have talked to nationwide agree that the Greens should refuse to support the HAFF until Labor agrees to coordinating a freeze on rent increases and invest billions per year in public housing.

This mobilization is underpinned by an emerging self-conscious renter class who form the core of our organizer and volunteer base, as well as our growing voter base. In other words, as rents skyrocket and house prices continue to surge ahead of wages, growing numbers of people are beginning to contemplate renting for life. In Australia, this means a lifetime of unlimited rent increases, short leases, and unfair evictions. Renters — in coalition with mortgage holders screwed over by increasing interest rates — are becoming a powerful social force capable of winning real and lasting reform on housing.

Labor Is the Party of Property Developers

Labor has largely tried to avoid engaging with Greens’ policy proposals or demands. Instead, they’ve operated on the implicit assumption that the government will never have to concede anything substantial. Consequently, much of the discussion has focused on whether or not the Greens will roll over and support Labor’s housing plan, largely unamended. A compliant media without the time or inclination to interrogate Labor’s plan has helped with this framing, with some notable exceptions.

At the same time, Labor has tried to discredit the Greens, attempting to paint the party as hypocritical for opposing particular private developments. According to Labor, nothing really matters except boosting the supply of private housing. But this assumption is revealing in itself. Instead of addressing the structural inequalities produced by for-profit housing, Labor is effectively campaigning on behalf of multibillion-dollar private developers.

In other words, for Labor — and property developers— the problem is that developers don’t have enough power to build as many homes as they want. They would have us believe that the housing crisis has been caused by NIMBYs and overly tight planning restrictions.

The facts belie this pro-developer narrative. From 1996 to 2018, supply of private dwellings exceeded demand by 500,000 homes. Indeed, from 2015 onward, there were more dwellings being constructed in comparison to the population than at any time in the last sixty years. Yet despite this increase in supply, housing prices have surged in recent years, as have rents. On the night of the 2021 census there were one million vacant dwellings — but this didn’t lower prices.

This is because developers will only “supply” housing if it doesn’t drive down property prices. This often means they will hold up construction if they think extra supply could lower prices. In Sydney, for example, authorities approved 94 percent of development applications over the last nine years. However, one hundred thousand dwellings with approval were never built.

Refusing to build can also be a source of profits for developers. Favorable planning approvals drive up the price of land, allowing developers to make a profit either selling to other developers or land banking.

People vs. Profits

But Labor’s arguments aren’t about facts — they’re about winning public consent to maintain property as a valuable financial asset for banks and property developers.

When you do consider the facts, there are no technical or economic barriers to a nationally coordinated freeze on rent increases. There are no barriers to building massive amounts of good-quality, genuinely affordable public housing. It could be funded by phasing out negative-gearing and capital-gains tax concessions for property investors.

Shortages also aren’t the problem. The ongoing decline of the private construction industry has freed up an excess of skills and construction materials that could be put to work building public and genuinely affordable housing.

And there are clear and successful precedents internationally that we could learn from. Some countries like Austria already run successful public housing systems with selection criteria so broad that 80 percent of people qualify for public housing. This means teachers, nurses, and professors live alongside cleaners and those on benefits, in turn creating a sustainable system where the rents collected can be reinvested in more housing and infrastructure like public parks.

Ultimately, the Greens are pushing hard because there are millions of people in desperate need of real solutions to the housing crisis. During the worst housing crisis in generations, we have a federal Labor government with a progressive majority in the Senate, and excess construction capacity thanks to declining private construction activity.

This means that we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to pressure Labor into delivering a national rent freeze and agreeing to invest billions in public and genuinely affordable housing. And a clear majority agrees. Now is the time to stand strong.

Working-class reformer Brandon Johnson is now Chicago’s mayor. The next task, as socialist elected official Anthony Quezada argues in an interview, is to bring more ordinary people into the political process so Johnson can actually pass sweeping reforms.

Socialist Anthony Joel Quezada is the youngest-ever member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. (People for Anthony)

A former public school teacher and union organizer, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson’s stunning defeat of charter school magnate Paul Vallas is a bellwether of the city’s ascendant progressive, socialist, and working-class movements. Alongside Johnson, the democratic socialist bloc on the Chicago City Council not only protected their five seats but also made new gains: organizer Angela Clay won a runoff race in a Northside ward, each of the original socialist alders are chairs of important city council committees, and Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (the sole socialist on the council just years ago) is Johnson’s floor leader.

These victories come on the heels of another socialist win: in November, community organizer and former Ramirez-Rosa staffer Anthony Joel Quezada became the youngest-ever member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, representing some three hundred thousand people. Quezada, the first openly gay Latino elected from the county’s eighth district, also serves as a cochair on Johnson’s transition team’s subcommittee on human rights, equity, and inclusion.

Over coffee at Kosciuszko Park in the Northside neighborhood of Logan Square, Quezada and I discussed how socialist elected officials like him are thinking about keeping people mobilized during the Johnson administration in the face of business attacks, how the Johnson administration and electeds could foster more bottom-up participation in city governance, and his approach as a pro-worker legislator.

Lillian Osborne

Could you say a bit about your role on Brandon Johnson’s transition team and what you’re advocating for?

Anthony Joel Quezada

Our organization on the northwest side, United Neighbors of the 35th Ward, as well as our coalition, worked hard to elect Mayor Johnson. I was asked to serve as a cochair on his subcommittee that is working to strategize and implement the goals he set throughout his campaign around LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, women’s rights, and disability rights.

He has a transformative vision to make sure that Chicago is fully investing in services and programs, like expanding access to health care and housing opportunities to LGBTQ people, to persons with disabilities, working to make sure that we are protecting the rights of LGBTQ people and trans people, and making sure Chicago is a sanctuary for people who need reproductive care and gender-affirming care. And so now our subcommittee members are working to provide guidance on the implementation and the timeline of those goals.

Lillian Osborne

Historically, one goal of pro-worker elected officials has been to bring ordinary people into the political process so government isn’t just run by and for the wealthy. What kind of popular institutions can be built through your office and under the Johnson administration to ensure that working-class people are steering the course of Chicago politics?

Anthony Joel Quezada

In the 35th Ward we have implemented projects of participatory democracy, encouraging people to make decisions in their communities. We have implemented policies like participatory budgeting, where residents ages fourteen years and older, regardless of their immigration status, can decide how we spend $1.5 million in infrastructure improvement funds. Usually that responsibility is the alderman’s alone. But here in the 35th Ward, we encourage all residents to engage in that process.

We need to explore how we can expand participatory democracy across the city.

We also have community-driven zoning and development. So when there are zoning change requests, it’s not just the alderman who’s making those decisions alone, it’s the surrounding community that comes together and makes those decisions collectively.

We need to explore how we can expand participatory democracy across the city.

When budget season comes around, why don’t we put out a survey to the people of Chicago asking, what would you like this budget to reflect? What kind of investment priorities? And then the mayor’s office, as well as the City Council, should implement a lot of those recommendations. How are we bringing more people into the process so they don’t feel like decisions are being made behind closed doors or in the interests of only the ultrarich or the powerful?

I think the best way to secure, expand, and strengthen democracy and democratic socialism is to bring in people to the local decision-making process.

Lillian Osborne

And it’s also strategically important for us to be doing that, because socialists in office can’t just rule from on high. They won’t be able to carry out their agenda if they don’t build a large enough base of support and engage people in the process.

Anthony Joel Quezada

People in our country have been so disillusioned by the failures of government. They’re not brought in, they’re not empowered or invited in to make decisions collectively. It is usually just elected officials and the people who fund their campaigns who make those decisions.

Lillian Osborne

And they feel like government doesn’t work for them.

Anthony Joel Quezada

Exactly. It’s funny, because people don’t know what it looks like for themselves to co-govern with their elected officials, but I think we all have a clear understanding of how elected officials co-govern with the capitalist class.

So I think we need to flip the script. We’ve done that locally and in some of our democratic socialist and progressive wards, but I think now we have an opportunity to co-govern at the city level with Mayor Johnson’s administration.

Lillian Osborne

I think what you’re speaking to is raising working-class expectations. And part of that is creating real substantive ways for people to have a say over how society is run.

Anthony Joel Quezada

A lot of people are so disenfranchised by the democratic process because they don’t see themselves in it. Everyone always says, well I vote and nothing ever changes. But our movement has proven here in Chicago that you can make that happen.

All our democratic socialist incumbents won their elections outright — nobody went to a runoff. That was proof that what we’re doing is a successful model of co-governance. We are a prime example of starting the process of restoring trust in democracy and in elected officials. Our movement is doing that.

Lillian Osborne

Business interests in the city have threatened to sabotage Brandon Johnson’s agenda and his tax plan by pulling investment and relocating. Traditionally, socialists and working-class reformers have argued that you have to counter these threats from business by explaining to the public who’s behind the attacks and mobilizing ordinary people behind your agenda. How do you see this playing out in the coming months?

Anthony Joel Quezada

We cannot demobilize, that’s for sure. Our movement needs to quadruple its efforts in base-building, in political education, in coalition building. We have a lot of work to do to make sure we have a coalition of people across the city that are ready and clear around the agenda that we need to implement.

I believe that the best safeguard is always a mass movement of people, of workers, of poor people. Brandon is the best that we’ve probably ever had to represent the interests of the working class [in the mayor’s office]. In order for him to implement our agenda, we need to be there with him. And he needs to be there with us.

I think we can have a collaborative approach, but at the same time, there are going to be times when we do need to fight back.

We need to tax the rich to implement the policies that we need. We can’t have fully funded schools, affordable housing, good public parks for everyone if we just nickel-and-dime poor and working-class people. The ultrarich and the wealthiest people and corporations in our city need to pay their fair share.

So I think this administration and the city council need to be clear around what their agenda is, and then make sure that we go to people in business, people in the community, people in labor — everyone needs to come together and say, this is what we’re going to do. I think we can have a collaborative approach, but at the same time, there are going to be times when we do need to fight back.

I don’t have all those answers fully, but I do know that we have to be very intentional about our approach.

Lillian Osborne

There are some powerful ways that you can operate in local government, but capital flight is a real risk and partly why we need a broader national movement.

Anthony Joel Quezada

We need to have a social, political, and economic order where all of humanity’s needs can be met. That’s a very big task. We have many steps to get there. So we need to find a sustainable pace in which we take those steps, but also there needs to be international solidarity around the power that multinational corporations have over many things.

When I was running for office, I said this all the time. I said we need to tax corporations, because we can’t just keep nickel-and-diming poor and working-class people. And people would say well, what are you going to do if those corporations leave? Instead of asking, why do corporations have the right to do that? Why do they get to dictate the terms when we hold them accountable? Why do we accept that and not say, hey, it’s wrong when corporations leave and destroy entire communities?

Lillian Osborne

And to that end, what is your thinking about how we keep people engaged and organized around that threat toward Johnson’s policy agenda when an election isn’t happening?

Anthony Joel Quezada

It is consistent organizing. We cannot organize just when there are elections. We need to be constantly engaging poor and working-class people across our city. There are multiple ways we do that. There is labor organizing, there is community and political organizing, and there is political education.

So people who are working in labor organizing should understand, know, respect, and build solidarity with people who are doing ward-level organizing. And they should in turn have relationships and shared goals with the people who are doing mutual aid organizing.

We have a unique and powerful political ecosystem in Chicago. I believe we have the building blocks of a broader mass movement here.

We have a unique and powerful political ecosystem in Chicago. I believe we have the building blocks of a broader mass movement here, but we have just not consolidated that and identified our shared goals. Many people across the city want to see, for example, our mental health care clinics reopen, want to have universal health care, want to see fully funded schools, or public housing or affordable housing. Many of us are doing that same work from all sorts of angles. But we’re not doing it strategically together.

And that is hard to achieve. But we need to be aspirational around how we are building a broader class-conscious movement in our city.

Lillian Osborne

What do you think gets in the way of that?

Anthony Joel Quezada

It can be egos, it can be personalities, or it also can be historical problems. Turf is sometimes a word we use, where people are like, this is our area where we organize and we organize these people alone. So there’s a sense of needing control.

And then I think we’re not taking the time to listen to each other. We do not have the luxury to cross our arms and ignore one another. We need to be very intentional about how we solve these problems. We need to learn how to work together. That doesn’t mean we’re always going to agree on everything. But we need to come together and identify shared goals, and we need to develop a strategy around how we achieve those things.

We do not have the luxury to cross our arms and ignore one another. We have an opportunity where our movement can deliver for working-class people across the city.

Right now, we have an opportunity where our movement can deliver for working-class people across the city. And it is our responsibility to do so because this is an opportunity that we have not had probably ever. People make comparisons to Harold Washington’s administration in the 1980s, but Washington did not have as strong of a progressive and left-wing city council or this broader ecosystem of organizations like Chicago Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), United Working Families, the People’s Lobby, and neighborhood independent political organizations.

We are in a unique moment in our city’s history — and we need to learn how to do the best we can with what we have right now.

Lillian Osborne

If you could get people unified around three priorities, what would those three things be?

Anthony Joel Quezada

Housing, health care, and poverty and economic justice as a whole. That’s very broad, but I think it’s about working to eliminate systemic disinvestment in communities and making sure people have guaranteed housing, like ending homelessness. We can also provide quality health care to people and mental health care especially.

Lillian Osborne

I would say jobs, too.

Anthony Joel Quezada

Yeah. The bread and butter. As Mayor Johnson has said, the safest communities in the United States are the most invested communities; invested communities are healthy communities — they’re happy communities. Why is this such a radical idea?

Lillian Osborne

What do you think can realistically be won over the next few years, and what challenges do you see ahead?

Anthony Joel Quezada

It’s funny, because I feel like what was once a really high goal has now become the floor. We’ve been working for Treatment Not Trauma, Bring Chicago Home, and youth employment programs and services for a long time. And it’s very possible that we are going to pass these things within a very short amount of time.

So now our movement is actually coming back together and reflecting. We have to push our imagination and push what we thought was possible. So that’s really exciting.

Lillian Osborne

I think that’s the product of grassroots progressive organizations, unions, and socialists expanding what’s politically possible.

Anthony Joel Quezada

I think the thing that might get in the way is fracturing within our coalition, things like not communicating or not working well together. We could be our own barrier to what we’re trying to achieve.

But then also there could be forces within the real estate lobby or within larger corporations or status quo party members that might start interjecting themselves into what we’re trying to achieve. So I think we just need to be really cognizant and constantly aware of the dynamics that we’re in.

Lillian Osborne

This past week you voted no on an important measure. Can you tell us more about that?

Anthony Joel Quezada

We have been contracting with outside agencies to fill some of the vacancies in the Cook County Health system. On Thursday, there was a contract renewal for one of these agencies, for $48 million to hire people to make sure we are fully staffed. I voted no because I was not properly briefed on this proposal, and I have not been presented with a longer-term strategic plan on how we’re moving away from outsourcing.

I was hearing a lot of concerns from workers in Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73 — that the agencies we are paying are headquartered in Florida and Texas and are funding right-wing campaigns and PACs in these states and across the country. And I don’t think we can continue this trend of overreliance on contracting out to agencies, which is undercutting public sector unions.

My personal philosophy is that workers know best. Workers know what they need in their workplaces.

My personal philosophy is that workers know best. Workers know what they need in their workplaces. They know what they need to protect their patients. And so, if there are workers who are telling me we need to have adequate retention bonuses or hiring bonuses, or we need to move away from these agencies because these agency workers don’t know how to navigate the hospitals, they’re not being properly trained, we’re having to train them ourselves, or they’re not doing as much work as we need them to do, those are very real concerns.

I’m very committed to working with my colleagues, the Cook County Health system and with our partners in labor to develop a comprehensive strategic plan to move away from outsourcing and to make sure we are investing in the workers that are here and the workers that we want to start attracting.

Lillian Osborne

You’re sitting on the county board that Toni Preckwinkle runs. She’s also the chair of the Cook County Democratic Party and arguably one of the most powerful politicians in the state of Illinois. Historically, the Cook County Democratic Party was a major political machine run by the Daleys. Have you experienced any political pressure from Preckwinkle or the party yet?

Anthony Joel Quezada

Some of the pressure comes from within, from my own insecurities. My first couple board meetings, I was sitting there, and it felt so surreal. I’m the youngest person in the room. I was like, what am I doing here? [laughs] I went from cleaning tables and washing dishes a few years ago to now being a legislator at the county board.

I’ve been needing to ground myself in my work and remember that I was elected for a reason. As an organizer, I’ve been very committed to fighting for social, racial, and economic justice in my community for a long time. I have built those relationships with trust. So I have to remember that I have the support of many thousands of people who sent me here for a reason.

The other pressure I feel is conformity. I have taken a couple no votes here and there, and I remember the first no vote that I took my heart sank to my feet. I was like, oh my God, I’m so afraid right now because I’m voting no while a majority of my colleagues have voted yes on something. So it made me feel like a black sheep and made me wonder, am I just being oppositional for no reason? But no, I think when you’re an elected official and you’re a legislator, you have the right to vote the way you need to vote.

Toward your larger question, I don’t feel like I’ve been pressured yet by outside forces, like the Democratic Party. If someone has a problem with the way I’m governing or legislating, they can call me. And Madam Preckwinkle has respected me. She doesn’t treat me like a child or as a puppet or anything.

When I need to make votes and decisions, I’m responsible to my constituents and my communities. That’s front and center. I feel very secure and confident and supported by the fact that I work in coalition with social movements across the city that are with me. So I don’t feel alone.

Manlio Dinucci interviene a sostegno del Referendum Ripudia la Guerra. A seguito della giornata per il disarmo di Sanremo, è partita la campagna referendaria “L’Italia per la pace”, organizzata su due quesiti referendari volti ad impedire il continuo e dispendioso …

The post VIDEO – Manlio Dinucci a sostegno del Referendum Ripudia la Guerra appeared first on Global Research.

Workers say Dollar General continues to understaff its stores and pay poverty wages. The alleged violations have gotten so bad that, this week, shareholders defied the company’s board of directors and approved a proposed third-party audit of safety conditions.

Forty-nine people have been killed at Dollar General stores since 2014. (Jeremy Hogan / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)

Kenya Slaughter put up with a lot when she worked at Dollar General. She says her starting pay at the Alexandria, Louisiana, location, one of the dollar-store chain’s nearly twenty thousand shops, was around $9 an hour. A woman once ran into the store with a butcher knife, locking herself in the break room and refusing to leave. Faulty air conditioning was a problem too.

“We can’t even control our own air,” Slaughter told me, echoing a complaint that is pervasive among the chain’s employees. When I spoke to David Williams, another Dollar General worker, last year, he described drinking two bottles of Powerade and a large bottle of water during his shift to ward off dehydration and heat strokes at his store in New Orleans.

There are other issues alleged by workers: rat infestations, fire hazards, and even, according to Slaughter, a lack of running water.

“One of the stores in my district was shut down because it didn’t have any running water,” she says, adding that it took Dollar General a week to close the store. “They put a Porta Potty in the backyard and expected the employees to use that. These executives get to control the air conditioning at their offices, and they definitely don’t have to use a Porta Potty.”

Slaughter was speaking to me by phone from a bus heading to Goodlettsville, Tennessee, where Dollar General is headquartered. The company’s annual shareholder meeting took place on May 31. Dollar General workers, joined by labor organizations such as United for Respect, the Union of Southern Service Workers, and Step Up Louisiana, protested outside the gathering. Slaughter recently left her job at Dollar General to work for Step Up Louisiana.

Her low starting pay at Dollar General isn’t unusual. Williams started at $8 an hour, and a 2021 report from the Economic Policy Institute found that 92 percent of the company’s employees made less than $15 an hour; 22 percent made less than $10 an hour. The company is currently the United States’ fastest-growing retailer, opening around one thousand stores a year and employing more than 170,000 people.

When I asked Slaughter how much she feels Dollar General workers should be paid, she said $25 an hour; at the very least, she said, workers deserve $15. After all, she added, they aren’t just cashiers: with the company’s systematic understaffing of stores, they are janitors, security guards, and managers too.

Alleged low pay and inadequate safety and health measures at stores are the issues that led Dollar General workers to convene in Goodlettsville, just as they did last year. Their demands include safe staffing, paid time off after exposure to workplace hazards such as the frequent robberies at the dollar-store chain, and worker input on all new safety practices. As Slaughter wrote in a 2020 op-ed for the New York Times, “I’m afraid we’ll become more of a target for robberies because everyone knows we don’t have any security and people are getting desperate.” According to CNN, forty-nine people have been killed at Dollar General stores since 2014.

Inside the shareholder meeting, Williams presented a proposal on behalf of a Domini equity fund, calling for a third-party audit on how Dollar General’s policies impact worker well-being.

“This company has expanded so fast, and so recklessly, that on any given day, I might have to deal with a rat infestation, a door that won’t lock, or someone pointing a gun at me with no security to protect me,” said Williams while speaking in favor of the proposal.

I shouldn’t have to feel like I need a bulletproof vest to go to work.

Similar proposals in prior years had been defeated, but this year, shareholders approved the nonbinding resolution despite the company’s board of directors’ recommendation that it be rejected, calling it “unnecessary.”

That change is thanks to the efforts of Slaughter, Williams, and other Dollar General employees, which come at the same time as a wave of fines levied against the megacorporation by the US Department of Labor. Dollar General is currently on the list of “severe violators” compiled by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), which has levied more than $21 million in proposed fines against the company since 2017.

“Dollar General continues to expose its employees to unsafe conditions at its stores across the nation,” said assistant secretary for Occupational Health and Safety Doug Parker in a statement last month.

Efforts by workers to unionize the company’s stores in response to rampant mistreatment have thus far been defeated by the company. In 2020, Dollar General shut down a Missouri store that voted to unionize. In 2021, they retained anti-union law firm Labor Relations Institute, paying consultants $2,700 per day to defeat a union drive at a Connecticut location.

When I asked Slaughter about Dollar General’s negligence regarding worker health and safety, she argued that the key is an unwillingness to safely staff stores and grant workers their preferred number of hours, as both would affect the company’s bottom line. At times, the stores are staffed by only one employee, which leaves them not only unable to keep shelves stocked and customer lines moving, but leaves them vulnerable to violence and robberies too.

“What I need them to realize is that it doesn’t even take sixty seconds for someone to have a heart attack or for someone to get a gun pulled on them,” says Slaughter, who supports demands that Dollar General limit the amount of cash kept at stores and design store layout and infrastructure to prioritize safety. “You shouldn’t have to go to work and worry if you’re going to return home the same way that you arrived at work. The executives certainly don’t have to do that.”

“We’re not even talking about the irate or unwell customers, but about knives and guns being pulled on people while they’re at their place of work,” she adds. “No one should have to deal with that. I’m not a police officer. I’m not a paramedic. I’m not SWAT. I don’t work for the Secret Service. I shouldn’t have to feel like I need a bulletproof vest to go to work.”

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Claims that former Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters deployed antisemitic imagery at recent concerts in Berlin are baseless. The charges are being elevated by media figures and politicians who detest his advocacy for Palestinian liberation.

Pink Floyd cofounder Roger Waters performs at the Olympiahalle in Munich, Germany, on May 21, 2023, as part of his “This Is Not A Drill” tour of Germany. (Angelika Warmuth / picture alliance via Getty Images)

If you’ve been on social media lately, you’ve possibly seen outraged claims about Roger Waters’s recent performances in Berlin. The former Pink Floyd member’s support for Palestinian human rights and calls for peace negotiations in Ukraine have long garnered a litany of demagogic critics. As part of their campaign against him, they’re now disseminating claims that, during the Berlin performances, Waters dressed up as a Nazi SS officer while disrespecting the memory of Anne Frank and those who died in the Holocaust — all while flying a pig balloon emblazoned with a Jewish Star of David.

That this alleged spectacle took place in the former capital of the Third Reich only makes it more sinister. Waters’s critics are citing this as proof that his criticisms of Israel’s apartheid government are rooted not in support for the Palestinians, but in antisemitism.

The central claims against Waters, however, are a mixture of distortions and outright falsehoods. First, there’s Waters’s own background. When he was just five months old, his father was killed by Nazis while fighting with the British Army during World War II. As a result, anti-fascist and antiwar sentiment has been a continuous motif of his work at least since Pink Floyd’s 1973 single “Us and Them.” Such themes also feature heavily on Pink Floyd’s 1979 concept album The Wall.

Then there’s the matter of what actually happened at his concerts. Since the band’s 1980 tour for The Wall, Waters’s performances have featured a theatrical element in which he assumes the role of a fictional fascist demagogue (the uniform that critics claimed was a literal SS uniform has now been demoted to merely a “Nazi-style costume”); this was true of his 1990 historic performance in Berlin to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall. Waters’s performances have up to this point always been understood as condemning, not exalting, fascism.

As for the balloon, as left-wing British writer Alex Nunns has pointed out, the photographs purporting to show an inflatable pig with a Star of David on it are not from Waters’s Berlin performance. A review of videos of the performance reveal they are not even the same color as the balloon Waters used in Berlin.

Claims that Waters insulted Anne Frank are simply a malicious lie. Waters featured the name of Anne Frank in a montage of individuals murdered by state actors, in many cases due to racial prejudice. This did not occur during the part of his concert that satirizes a fascist rally. Waters’s performance made clear Frank was the victim of the Nazi genocide because of her Jewish identity.

Elevating Disinformation

That false claims are being made about Waters is not the only disturbing aspect of this episode. What is especially troubling is how quickly these claims made it into mainstream media with little fact-checking. Now even politicians and law enforcement are taking them up.

The campaign against Waters was not just the work of low-level, hate-mongering trolls who have come to define everyone’s user experience online. The official Twitter accounts of the states of Israel and Ukraine have amplified them with surreal, juvenile tweets: “Roger Waters . . . Started out as a rock idol — ended up as a rock bottom,” the official account of the Ukrainian government tweeted at the Twitter account of the Israeli government.

The former Pink Floyd member’s support for Palestinian human rights and calls for peace negotiations in Ukraine have long garnered a litany of demagogic critics.

US State Department and European Union officials have also taken to official social media accounts to blast Waters and parrot the claims against him. Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Commission’s coordinator on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life,  accused Waters of deliberately trivializing the Holocaust, noting she felt sickened by the “sarcastic way in which he delights in trampling on the victims, systematically murdered by the Nazis.” Holocaust trivialization, Von Schnurbein noted, was a crime across Europe.

Ambassador Deborah E. Lipstadt used the official Twitter account of the US Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism to retweet the European official, including her not-so-subtle call for prosecution. She wrote, “I wholeheartedly concur with @EUAntisemitism’s condemnation of Roger Waters and his despicable Holocaust distortion.”

The campaign against Waters soon jumped from social media into mainstream media. In early reports, Waters critics’ key claims were parroted without any fact-checking. Some of the articles included pictures of the pig-shaped balloon with a Star of David that allegedly was flown in the Berlin arena. As a result, Berlin police have opened a criminal investigation into Waters. British Labour MP Christian Wakeford is calling for Waters’s performances to be banned, explicitly citing the pig balloon as justification. (Wakeford has since blocked Nunns on Twitter after the writer pointed out that the photo in question was not from the Berlin performance.)

The only word to describe what is happening is disinformation. The impetus behind it is not a specific Waters performance, but an attempt to destroy his character made by those with larger disagreements with his political commitments. Mainstream media, far from acting as fact-checkers, have helped to aid the spread of lies with its early uncritical reporting on Waters’s attackers. Although panic about disinformation has spurred calls for censorship and spawned a cottage industry of experts, the campaign against Waters has conveniently not been viewed through the lens of disinformation.

A Statement Against Fascism

It’s important to understand what really happened during Waters’s Berlin performances and how the reaction fits into the wider campaign against him. During both the May 17 and May 18 Berlin concerts, Waters performed the song “The Powers That Be.” At the start of the song, comic-book dialogue appeared on the screen depicting a conversation about oligarchs, before shifting to images of police violence. At the end, the comic-book dialogue returned: “Wow. Why are they so brutal?” “Because they want to crush our resistance and continue ruling.”

Throughout this song, the names of victims of state violence were interspersed between images of police brutality. The locations of their deaths, “crimes,” and “sentences” also appears. In each case, the “sentence” is death, and the “crime” makes clear they are victims of racist or political violence (for example, George Floyd’s crime is described as “being black”).

The names listed included, among others, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Philando Castile, all black Americans murdered by US police; Adama Traoré, a black man murdered by French police; Mawda Shawri, a two-year-old Iraqi-Kurdish refugee murdered by Belgian police; Stanislav Tomáš, a Romani man murdered by Czech police; Marielle Franco, a Brazilian politician assassinated by two former police officers; Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American journalist murdered by an Israeli army sniper; Mahsa Amini, murdered by Iranian morality police; Rachel Corrie, a US activist crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer; Sophie Scholl, the antiwar, anti-Nazi activist beheaded by the Third Reich; and Anne Frank, the young Jewish teenager who perished at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The only word to describe what is happening is disinformation.

The inclusion of two victims of Nazism is fitting. It is in line with Water’s universalistic message that ties together victims of state violence across countries and time periods. It is a left-wing vision that embraces solidarity in the face of state, racist, and political violence.

On both nights in Berlin, when Waters returned to the stage after an intermission, he began the second half of his set with “In the Flesh.” Waters originally wrote the song for The Wall; the song depicts a fictional singer named Pink who experiences a psychotic break and envisions himself as a fascist demagogue.

This storyline was put to images in a disturbing but unforgettable sequence in the 1982 movie adaptation of the album. The movie’s scenes clearly drew from a number of real-life far-right and fascist movements. It features conical hats like those of the Ku Klux Klan, armbands like those of the Nazis, and skinheads. The bulk of the imagery, however, seems to be drawn from Britain’s homegrown fascist Oswald Mosley. The film also added its own imagery, crossed hammers used to represent the fictional authoritarian movement.

Waters has performed the song over six hundred times in concert. As part of a performance Waters has been doing since 1980, during the song he adopts, in his own words, the persona of “an unhinged fascist demagogue.” Berlin was no different. During the song, Waters took to the stage in a long leather trench coat with the crossed-hammer insignia made famous by the 1982 film. At his side were two men in black military-like uniforms wearing helmets. Banners just like those featured in The Wall movie dropped from the ceiling, and an inflatable pig floated above the audience. One side read “Steal from the Poor. Give to the Rich.”; the other side, “Fuck The Poor.” The slogans were clear caricatures of right-wing sentiment.

The pig first appeared on the cover of the 1977 Pink Floyd album, Animals, at which point the band incorporated the floating animal into its stage show. On their tour for The Wall, the pig began to make its appearance during those parts of the show dealing with fascism. Following Waters’s notoriously contentious departure from Pink Floyd, an out-of-court settlement with the band gave Waters the exclusive right to use the pig in his stage show. As BBC documented, Waters and Pink Floyd’s use of the pig has transformed into a wider icon, a symbol of protest against dystopian authoritarianism and violence larger than a single album cover.

During a 2013 leg of Waters’s tour, the pig balloon did include a Star of David. At later dates, it would also include a Christian cross and Muslim crescent. The imagery unsurprisingly garnered significant controversy, including from many of the same groups currently attacking Waters. Yet while the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has repeatedly attacked Waters for his support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), it was adamant that the imagery was not antisemitic. In making this conclusion, they stressed the fact that the use of the pig was part of a “concert tradition” where Waters performed a series of songs from The Wall “written from the point of view of the anti-hero, ‘Pink,’ during a hallucination in which he becomes a fascist dictator and turns a concert audience into an angry mob. True to form, Waters appears dressed for the part.”

Attacking Advocacy for Palestinian Rights

The current campaign against Waters has nothing to do with this specific theatrical performance. In 2006, Waters was asked to perform in Tel Aviv, Israel. At the urging of Palestinians, Waters visited the occupied Palestinian territories, and as a result of what he saw, he heeded their call not to perform in Tel Aviv. Waters publicly urged other artists to follow suit. Since then, he has become one of the most high-profile celebrity supporters of the growing BDS movement.

Waters was involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as a teenager, recorded an entire album of songs against the Falklands War, led a campaign to close Guantanamo Bay, supported Occupy Wall Street, and has called for freedom for Julian Assange. But supporters of Palestinian rights face heightened harassment. In 2017, public officials in Nassau County, New York, citing a local anti-BDS law, attempted to have his concert canceled. That same year, a number of German broadcasters refused to carry a Waters concert over his BDS stance. On his current tour, the city of Frankfurt tried to ban Waters from performing over his alleged antisemitism. A court ruled in Waters’s favor.

Waters has become one of the most high-profile celebrity supporters of the growing BDS movement.

In addition to inspiring the ire of pro-apartheid, anti-Palestinian forces, Waters has recently come under fire for his statements on Ukraine. Waters has condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine as illegal, but has also accused Joe Biden of fueling a horrendous war by refusing to negotiate, and has criticized the role of NATO expansion in setting the stage for the conflict. Earlier during the tour, when a CNN interviewer pushed Waters about why he included Joe Biden in the montage of war criminals in his performance (during the song “The Bravery of Being Out of Range,” in which Waters profiles the war crimes of all US presidents since Ronald Reagan), CNN aired a heavily redacted version of his comments on Ukraine. Waters has in the past been criticized directly by the Ukrainian government and has said he’s been added to a Ukrainian kill list. His concerts in Poland were canceled over his views on Ukraine.

Like everyone in a free society, critics of Waters’s political views are welcome to disagree with him. Repeatedly, however, they have sought to censor him; in order to achieve these ends, they have turned to a campaign of disinformation. Although disinformation has been a continuous source of panic in the United States since the 20016 election, disinformation campaigns against critics of US policy seem to get a free pass.

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