If you have opinions about the subject matter of posts on this blog please share them. Do you have a story about how the system affects you at work school or home, or just in general? This is a place to share it.
This is a post from Arnaude Betrand on
X (Formerly Twitter). He publishes quite a lot of interesting material on China.
He is also involved in Traditional Chinese Medicine and his website Me&Qi is here. Here is something from today. His Twitter handle is @RnaudBertrand This is a
forward to a Chinese report on human rights violations in the US. The forward
itself is interesting enough. It gives us some idea of how another world power views the U.S.
They're
extremely detailed about it and often quite spot on. To me the most interesting
aspect about it is that you always hear the US lecture every one about human
rights but never the contrary: this highlights the fact that all countries have
their own human rights issues, and also often brings much needed reflection on
what human rights are.
Let me past the foreword of this year's report:
"The human rights situation in the United States continued to deteriorate
in 2023. In the United States, human rights are becoming increasingly
polarized. While a ruling minority holds political, economic, and social dominance,
the majority of ordinary people are increasingly marginalized, with their basic
rights and freedoms being disregarded. A staggering 76 percent of Americans
believe that their nation is in the wrong direction.
Political infighting, government dysfunction, and governance failure in the
United States have failed to protect civil and political rights. Bipartisan
consensus on gun control remains elusive, contributing to a continued surge in
mass shootings. Approximately 43,000 people were killed by gun violence in 2023,
averaging 117 deaths per day. Police brutality persists and at least 1247 deaths
were attributed to police violence, marking a new high since 2013, yet the law
enforcement accountability system remains virtually nonexistent. Taking up less
than 5 percent of the global population, the United States accounts for 25 percent of
global prison population, earning the title of a "carceral state."
Political infighting intensifies as parties manipulate elections through
gerrymandering, leading to "Speaker crisis "for twice in the House of
Representatives, further diminishing the government's credibility, with only 16
percent of Americans trusting the federal government.
Deep-rooted racism persists in the United States, with cases of severe racial
discrimination. United Nations experts point out that systemic racism against
African Americans has permeated the U.S. police force and criminal justice
system. Due to significant racial discrimination in the healthcare sector, the
maternal mortality rate for African American women is nearly three times that
of white women. Nearly 60 percent of Asians report facing racial
discrimination, with the "China Initiative" targeting Chinese
scientists having far-reaching consequences. Racist ideologies proliferate
across multiple sectors such as social media, music, and gaming, and spill over
across borders, making the United States a major exporter of extreme racism
internationally.
The United States is witnessing intensified wealth inequality, with the
phenomenon of "Working poor" becoming more pronounced, and the
economic and social rights protection system is seen as ineffective.
Long-standing disparities in the distribution of income between labor and
capital have resulted in the most severe wealth gap since the Great Depression
of 1929. There are 11.5 million low-income working families in the United
States, but the federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009. As of
2023, the purchasing power of one U.S. dollar has declined to 70 percent of its
value in 2009. Low-income families struggle to afford basic necessities such as
food, rent, and energy, leading to over 650,000 people experiencing
homelessness, reaching a new high in 16 years. "Working poor" has
shattered the "American Dream" for hardworking individuals, contributing
to the broadest wave of strikes since the beginning of the 21st century,
occurring in 2023.
Women and children's rights in the United States have long been systematically
violated, with constitutional provisions for gender equality remaining absent.
The United States remains the only UN member state that has not ratified the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and
the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In April 2023, the U.S. Senate
rejected a constitutional amendment to guarantee gender equality. In the United
States, approximately 54,000 women lose their jobs annually due to pregnancy
discrimination. Over 2.2 million women of childbearing age cannot access
maternity care. At least 21 states have enacted bans or strict restrictions on
abortion. Maternal mortality has more than doubled in the past two decades.
Sexual violence is rampant in workplaces, schools, and homes. Children's rights
to survival and development are in jeopardy, with many children excluded from
healthcare assistance programs. Gun violence remains a leading cause of child
deaths, and drug abuse is rampant among youth. Forty-six states have been found
to underreport around 34,800 cases of missing foster children.
The United States, a country that has historically and presently benefited from
immigration, faces severe issues of exclusion and discrimination against
immigrants. Practices of exclusion and discrimination against immigrants have
been deeply ingrained in the U.S. institutional structure, from the infamous
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the internationally condemned “Muslim Ban” in
2017. Today, the immigration issue has become a tool for partisan gain and
political blame-shifting, with politicians disregarding the individual rights
and welfare of immigrants. Immigration policies are simplified into partisan
positions of "If you support, I oppose," ultimately becoming
political theatrics to manipulate voters. The immigration crisis falls into a
vicious cycle, with immigrants and children subjected to widespread arrests,
human trafficking, and exploitation. The hypocrisy of political polarization
and the hypocritical nature of American human rights are glaringly evident in
the immigration issue.
The United States has long pursued hegemonism, practiced power politics, and
abused force and unilateral sanctions. Continuous delivery of weapons such as
cluster munitions to other countries exacerbates regional tensions and armed
conflicts, resulting in a large number of civilian casualties and severe
humanitarian crises. Extensive "proxy forces" operations undermine
social stability and violate the human rights of other nations. Guantanamo Bay
prison remains open to this day."
On
a misty November morning 21 years ago, I was desperately trying to
remain camouflaged. Concealed in the foliage of an orange grove in
Israel’s rural Galilee, I hurriedly took photos of a drab concrete
building not marked on any map.
Even the original road sign
identifying the site as Facility 1391 had been removed after a local
Haaretz newspaper investigation revealed it housed a secret prison.
I
was the first foreign journalist to track down Facility 1391, most of
it hidden within a heavily fortified complex built in the 1930s to
suppress resistance to British rule in Palestine.
For decades, Israel had secretly held mostly
Arab foreign nationals captive at the site, unknown to the Israeli
courts, the Red Cross and human rights groups. Many were Lebanese
citizens kidnapped during Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern
Lebanon. But there were also Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians and
Iranians.
This site would soon be known as a “black site”, a
term popularised by Washington's invasion of Iraq that year. Drawing on
techniques refined by Israel at Facility 1391, the US would, in the
coming months and years, torture Iraqis and others at Abu Ghraib and
Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo.
No one knew how many captives were held
in Israel’s Facility 1391, how long they had been there or if there were
more such prisons.
However, the first testimonies from
inmates revealed horrifying conditions. For most of the time, they were
kept in a state of sensory deprivation, made to wear blacked-out
goggles, except for when being tortured. In one case that later came to court, a Lebanese captive had been sodomised with a baton by “Major George”, the facility’s torturer-in-chief.
Major George would go on to become head of Israeli police relations with the Palestinian population of Jerusalem.
Another secret prison
It
was difficult not to recall Facility 1391 this month, as CNN published
an investigation into a new Israeli secret prison, Sde Teiman.
This
prison was set up months ago to process not foreign nationals but
thousands of Palestinian men and boys, victims of Israel’s occupation,
seized from the streets of Gaza and the West Bank since Hamas carried
out a one-day attack on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed and
250 were dragged back into Gaza as hostages.
As with Facility
1391, revelations of the horrors taking place at Israel’s new black site
have garnered barely any attention from the western media
establishment.
CNN, known for excising Israeli atrocities
from its coverage on the orders of executives, should be applauded for
finally doing what western media often falsely claims is its role:
holding power to account.
Headlined “Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers”, the lengthy article details the degrading, brutal conditions Palestinians kidnapped from Gaza and the West Bank are being subjected to.
The
number of Palestinians passing through the secretive detention camp,
located in the Negev desert, is unknown. But satellite photos show the
site is rapidly expanding, presumably to accommodate ever more
“prisoners”.
Some Palestinians who have emerged, utterly broken from this incarceration system – where the world saw men and boys being paraded zip-tied, near-naked and blindfolded in Gaza’s streets and stadiums back in November and December – began telling of their experiences months ago.
Predictably, the western media largely ignored the testimonies.
Even when staff from Sde Teiman started coming forward weeks ago to divulge horror stories, western outlets collectively yawned – apart from CNN.
Pattern of media failure
This pattern of failure has been noted in the pages of Middle East Eye for months.
For
example, the western media establishment has studiously averted their
gaze from Israeli reports that a proportion of those killed on 7 October
were not victims of Hamas but of the Israeli army’s notorious “Hannibal procedure”, a protocol to kill fellow Israelis rather than let them be taken captive.
Western
journalists still mostly avoid highlighting the fact that Israel is
actively starving the entire population of Gaza of food and water, an
unquestionable crime against humanity. Instead, journalists echo their own governments by labelling this Israeli-induced famine a “humanitarian crisis”, as if it were an unfortunate natural disaster.
The
media also obscures the fact that western powers, especially the US and
UK, are directly assisting Israel in its mass starvation of Gaza’s
population – both by denying funding to the UN’s main relief agency,
Unrwa, and by refusing to put any significant pressure on Israel to allow in aid.
Echoing
the Biden administration, the media still hesitates to call Israel’s
actions in Gaza what they are, preferring an occasional mealy-mouthed
assessment that Israel “may be at risk”
of committing war crimes. None point to the bigger picture that all of
these individual “possible” war crimes indisputably amount to genocide.
That
obfuscation has become even harder to maintain with the prosecutor of
the International Criminal Court (ICC) applying this week for arrest
warrants for suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity committed
by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav
Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders.
Nonetheless, the media
have stressed Israel's and the Biden administration's indignation at the
court rather than the substance of its charges, including the
allegation that Israel is exterminating Palestinians in Gaza through
planned starvation.
The media avoids clarity on these topics
because clarity would be inconvenient. Why? Because, as we shall see,
the western media’s purpose is to create a narrative that serves western
governments in pursuing their overarching foreign policy goals in the
oil-rich Middle East, not ending the boundless suffering in Gaza or
holding Israel to account for its crimes.
Used as lab rats
As
a handful of whistleblowers revealed to CNN, Palestinians are
incarcerated for weeks on end in Sde Teiman as they are tortured – both
through formal interrogations and through the conditions they are held
in.
They are forced to sit blindfolded outdoors on a thin mattress
through the desert heat of the day and sleep in the cold of the desert
night. Continuously cuffed, they are forced to remain motionless and
silent. At night, dogs are set on them. Anyone who speaks or moves risks
being savagely beaten till bones are broken.
People’s hands and legs are tightly zip-tied for so long that, according to the report, some have needed limbs amputated.
As
one Israeli whistleblower recounted to CNN, none of these abuses are
about intelligence gathering. “They were done out of revenge,” he
admitted. The inmates are punching bags for the Israeli soldiers and
guards.
But this is about more than simple vengeance.
Understanding what is happening at Sde Teiman provides a clearer picture
of what is happening on a far bigger, even more industrial scale in
Gaza.
Especially revealing are the conditions in a field hospital
at the detention camp, housing Palestinians either maimed in Israel’s
savage destruction of Gaza or injured by beatings from Israeli soldiers.
They are forced to sit blindfolded outdoors on a thin mattress through the desert heat of the day and sleep in the cold of the desert night. Continuously cuffed, they are forced to remain motionless and silent. At night, dogs are set on them. Anyone who speaks or moves risks being savagely beaten till bones are broken.
They
are handcuffed to gurneys in row after row, blindfolded and naked apart
from an adult nappy. They are not allowed to speak.
There they
lie day after day, night after night, in a state of utter sensory
deprivation, with nothing to distract from their wounds and pain. In the
midst of this, Israeli medical interns can use their exposed,
vulnerable flesh as a canvas for experimentation.
According to one whistleblower, the detention centre has quickly gained a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”.
There,
they are allowed to use Palestinians as little more than lab rats and
encouraged to carry out medical procedures they are not qualified to
perform.
A whistleblower told CNN: “I was asked to learn how to do
things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are
totally outside my expertise.”
Such procedures were frequently
done without anaesthesia. Unlike doctors in Gaza, Israeli doctors have
ready access to painkillers. It is a choice not to use them.
Medical staff missing
With
western media so readily colluding in the dehumanisation of
Palestinians, it is important to remember who these “prisoners” are.
Israel
wishes us to believe it is targeting Hamas and those it “arrests” – the
widely accepted euphemism, used by CNN in this article, for those
Israel takes hostage – are Palestinians suspected of ties to the
militant group.
However, one of the most significant
testimonies of abuse from Sde Teiman reported by CNN comes from Dr
Mohammed al-Ran, the grey-haired head of surgery at Gaza’s now-destroyed Indonesian hospital.
He
was “arrested” – kidnapped – by Israel in December and taken to Sde
Teiman. There is no suggestion al-Ran was engaged in armed combat
against invading Israeli troops or was associated with Hamas in any
other way. He was seized, along with other medical staff, while working a
three-day shift at another medical centre, the al-Ahli al-Arabi Baptist
Hospital.
He had been forced to flee the Indonesian hospital after it was bombed by Israel and staff there were severely beaten.
Untold numbers of medical personnel have been murdered or disappeared by Israel during its systematic attacks on Gaza’s hospitals. The destruction of the enclave’s health sector is another glaring crime against humanity the western media has carefully avoided identifying.
The contrast with the media’s unrelenting certainty about Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine a short time ago is stark indeed.
Human
rights groups are desperately trying to track down these Palestinian
hostages with habeas corpus writs, just as they earlier tried to find
the foreign nationals held captive in Facility 1391. The Israeli courts
have been wilfully obstructive.
In one test case, the Israeli human rights group HaMoked, which was central to identifying Facility 1391, has been petitioning
Israel’s supreme court – whose judges include some living in illegal
Jewish settlements in the West Bank – to find a Palestinian X-ray
technician missing since February.
He was seized by Israeli troops at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. The suspicion is that he is being held in Sde Teiman.
According
to HaMoked, more than 1,300 Palestinians from Gaza are missing,
presumed to be in Israeli detention, including 29 women.
Another surgeon, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, is known to be among more than two dozen Palestinians who have died
in mysterious circumstances in Israeli captivity. He was most likely
tortured to death or possibly killed in a failed medical procedure.
‘Unprecedented’ abuses
In
further proof that this wave of violence against prisoners is entirely
unrelated to suspicions that they belong to Hamas or participated in the
7 October attack, details emerged last weekend of relentless and savage
abuses of the most prominent Palestinian prisoner held by Israel.
Marwan Barghouti,
from the Palestinian National Liberation Movement led by Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas – Hamas’s arch-opponents – has been locked up
for the past 22 years. Sometimes referred to as the “Palestinian
Mandela”, Barghouti is considered a potential future leader of the
Palestinian people.
According to fellow inmates and human rights groups, Barghouti is barely recognisable after a series of beatings, one of which has left him struggling to see out of his right eye.
He
is reported to be in constant pain from a suspected dislocated shoulder
resulting from one assault, an injury that has not been treated.
According
to his Israeli lawyer, he has been dragged across the floor handcuffed
and naked in front of other inmates at Ayalon Prison.
Barghouti
has lost significant weight due to the severe food restrictions imposed
on all Palestinian prisoners since October and has been denied access to
books, newspapers and television.
Tal Steiner, of the Israeli
human rights group the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, told
the Guardian that Barghouti was being subjected to “unprecedented”
abuses and that such torture had become “standard” for the 8,750
Palestinians known to have been jailed since October.
The government minister overseeing Israel’s prison service, Itamar Ben Gvir,
belongs to the avowedly fascist party Jewish Power, whose ideological
roots in Kahanism explicitly regard Palestinians as little more than
vermin.
Bargaining chips
The
western media have focused endlessly on the suffering of the 100 or
more Israeli hostages still held in Gaza, though it remains unmentioned
that much of that suffering derives from Israel’s actions.
The
hostages, like the Palestinians of Gaza, are under Israel’s rain of
bombs. And like Palestinians, they face sustained food shortages caused
by Israel’s aid blockade. The indiscriminate violence against Gaza
affects both hostages and Palestinians alike.
But based on
reports by CNN and Israeli media, it seems likely that many of the
thousands of Palestinians kidnapped by Israel since October are facing a
far crueller fate than the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Hamas is
invested in keeping the Israeli hostages as safe as possible because
they are valuable bargaining chips for getting the Israeli army out of
Gaza and freeing Palestinians from torture sites like Sde Teiman.
Israel
faces no such pressures. As the occupying power and Washington’s
favourite client state, it can inflict any punishment it chooses on
Palestinians with little repercussion.
That is another facet of the past seven months that the media refuse to acknowledge.
Destroying aid
Meanwhile,
western publics are smeared if they try to name Israel’s crimes as
genocide or articulate how the genocide is unfolding. This echoes the
suspicions of an overwhelming majority of judges at the International
Court of Justice (ICJ) back in January and is implied by the ICC chief
prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants this week.
The
West’s recent, perverse and self-serving redefinition of antisemitism – a
victory for pro-Israel lobby groups – equates Jew hatred with criticism of Israel more so than actually hating Jews.
Under
the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s new definition, it
is antisemitic to draw a parallel between Israel’s actions and the
genocide with which westerners are most familiar: the Holocaust.
Conveniently
for Israel, western establishments can now disavow an all-too-obvious
lesson of history and human psychology: the victims of abuse are quite
capable of committing such abuses themselves.
CNN’s reconstruction
of the field hospital at Sde Teiman shows dehumanised Palestinians –
bound, blindfolded and naked – in rows of gurneys ready to be
experimented on. Why would that not evoke, for western audiences,
memories of Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor who viewed
concentration camp inmates as less than human, mere fodder for his
experiments?
What echoes should westerners feel watching Jewish extremists from Israel’s illegal settlements ambush aid trucks
heading to Gaza, smash up the supplies desperately needed by a starving
population, burn the trucks and beat the drivers – all while Israeli
soldiers and police stand by, allowing the destruction to take place?
How
might it be wrong – antisemitic, no less – to ponder whether a similar
brutal, genocidal racism drove extremists in Germany in 1938 when they
rampaged against Jews on Kristallnacht?
And what about those who
have compared tiny Gaza to a concentration camp during Israel’s 17-year
siege by land, air and water, with encaged Palestinians deprived of
basic freedoms and the essentials of life? Or those who now call Gaza a
death camp as Israel starves the population?
Are such assessments
really evidence of Jew hatred? Or are they proof that these observers
have understood well the lessons of history and the Holocaust? The
systematic degrading and abuse of a people should always be viewed as a
crime against our shared humanity.
The moral duty facing us all is
to stop such atrocities, not to withhold judgement and mutely watch
them play out to their logical conclusion.
Torture chambers
The
current horrors Israel is inflicting on the inmates of Sde Teiman and,
on an even bigger scale, on the Palestinians in the Gaza death camp, are
about much more than simple vengeance for 7 October.
Sde Teiman
is the small torture chamber, mirroring the much bigger torture chamber
of Gaza itself, where bombs and starvation are achieving precisely the
same ends.
Until seven months ago, Israel’s goal was to keep the
Palestinians a subjugated, enslaved, hopeless people, confined to a
series of concentration camps in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
They were expected to remain mute in their suffering and invisible to
the outside world.
Over the long term, it was assumed that
Palestinians would prefer to flee their immiseration in these
permanently occupied, colonised lands.
The slave revolt of 7
October – brutal and ugly as such revolts have been throughout history –
was a devastating shock. Not just to an Israel wedded to its racist,
hands-on colonial project of subjugating the Palestinian people. It was
also a shock to the West’s wider colonial project, into which Israel is
so tightly integrated.
In Washington’s “rules-based order”, the
only meaningful rule is that what Washington and its clients want, they
get. The planet, its resources and peoples are viewed as little more
than playthings by the world’s superpower-in-chief.
Revolts to
this order – whether advanced by Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon,
the Houthis in Yemen or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran –
cannot be allowed to become a model. The “rules-based order” must be
restored with a savagery necessary to teach the the colonised and
enslaved their place.
That was the message of Washington’s own
black sites needed in its futile “war on terror”, from Abu Ghraib to
Guantanamo – sites that drew on Israel’s experiences of “breaking”
inmates at Facility 1391.
The complicity of western
establishments in Israel’s current genocide is not an anomaly. It does
not derive from a misunderstanding or confusion. The western political
and media class see the genocide in Gaza as clearly as the rest of us.
But for them, it is justified, required even. The colonised and
oppressed must be taught that resistance is futile.
Sde Teiman,
like the Gaza death camp, is serving its purpose. It is there to break
the human spirit. It is there to turn the Palestinians into willing
collaborators in their own destruction as a people, in their own ethnic
cleansing.
And a subliminal message is being directed at the
western public at the same time: this could also be your fate if you do
not join in cheerleading Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.
[Many thanks to Dr Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
South Africa has a general election today with 28m citizens registered to vote. Since the end of the apartheid regime three decades ago, the African National Congress (ANC) has won all the elections with substantial majorities. But this time there is the possibility that the ANC will poll less than 50% of those voting.
The loss of the ANC majority, if it happens, will not be due to any increase in the vote share of main opposition party, the mainly white-led liberal Democratic Congress (DC), whose strength is concentrated in Cape province. The DC’s vote share is stuck at about 23%, more or less the same as in the last election in 2019.
The potential loss of votes by the ANC is to two supposedly more radical parties, split-offs from the ANC. First, there is the party of ex-President Jacob Zuma called uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) that is polling about 10% and would take votes away from the ANC in the eastern Zulu heartlands. Zuma has been indicted for corruption and abuse of power when president.
The real worry for the ANC and behind them, South Africa’s business elite, is the rise of Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). The EFF appeals to younger voters with its program to strip land from the wealthy, seize assets from the mining companies and spend the proceeds on education, free WiFi and electricity and 24-hour doctors’ clinics. Both the MK and the EFF are showing around 11% of the vote in the opinion polls.
Why is there the possibility that the ANC, the party of South Africa’s overwhelming black majority with the historic legacy of Nelson Mandela, will poll less than 50% of the vote for the first time? When I covered the 2019 election in a post, I wrote that“In those 25 years, the majority have not seen any startling improvement in their living standards, education, health and public services. Indeed, for many, particularly young blacks, things are even worse. Inequality of incomes, wealth and land is extreme; corruption in government and in the party of the black majority, the African National Congress (ANC), is rife.”
Now in 2024, the situation for most South Africans is even worse than in 2019. Since 2019, there has been the brutal experience of the COVID pandemic, the ensuing economic slump and a feeble recovery since. Economic growth has continued to slow almost to a stop. Indeed, real GDP per person is lower than in 2019 and even 2012.
The official unemployment rate is still well over 30% (8m people) and near 60% for job-seekers between 15 and 24 years old.
Manufacturing output is contracting and the deficit on international trade is widening. Government debt to GDP after the experience of COVID has reached a record near 70% of GDP.
In general, life for the majority of South Africans has worsened since 2019. The World Bank has what it calls a Human Development Index (HDI) which measures key factors like life expectancy, health, education etc. South Africa’s HDI has dropped sharply since 2019.
Indeed, South Africa’s HDI level has been rapidly surpassed or equalled by its economic peers globally, like China, Brazil and even Indonesia.
Only the high level US HDI has grown more slowly than South Africa since 1990, when the apartheid regime was coming to an end.
Growth
US
5.9
Russia
10.8
China
63.5
Mex
17.3
Braz
22.6
S Afr
12.9
Indo
35.6
India
48.4
Growth in HDI index since 1990
And then there is inequality and poverty. On World Bank levels, some 64% of citizens are living in poverty. Progress on extending access to basic services (such as water, electricity, and refuse collection) has stalled. Vulnerability to hunger has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic. An estimated 12.9 percent of the population was at risk of hunger in 2022, despite the expansion of social grants.
And South Africa remains the most unequal country in the world, having seen a widening gap between the haves and have-nots since the end of apartheid in 1994, according to the World Bank. The bank’s report, titled Inequality in Southern Africa: An Assessment of the Southern African Customs Union (Sacu), released this week, shows that the union is the world’s most unequal region with a consumption inequality over 40 percent higher than the averages for both sub-Saharan Africa and other upper-middle-income countries, the report found.
The World Bank report notes South Africa is characterised by “high wealth inequality and economic polarisation (particularly across labour markets)”. Wealth inequality is higher than income inequality, with estimates showing that the top 10% of the population hold 71% of its wealth, whereas the bottom 60% hold only 7%. This compares with 50% and 13% respectively for the OECD. No other country in the world can compete with South Africa's inequality of income and wealth.
That inequality isn’t only seen in income and wealth distribution; it also manifests itself in unequal access to opportunities—education, health, and jobs—and regional disparities. When the HDI is adjusted for inequality of income and wealth, South Africa looks even worse. The World Bank’s HDI reduces South Africa to the level of India!
The bottom line is that South African capitalism presided over by the ANC has failed. It is decrepit and corrupt, generating power shortages and widespread crime. Crime is estimated to reduce annual GDP levels by 10%.
South African capital may have some large mining companies that make good profits, but the overall profitability of capital but the big gains in profitability that arose after the end of apartheid have faded since the Great Recession of 2008 and ensuing Long Depression experienced globally. South African capital is heavily dependent on world economic growth and trade and is being strangled accordingly.
Source: Penn World Tables 10.01
South Africa’s business elite is desperately hoping that the ANC under President Ramaphosa will manage to survive with a majority in parliament that avoids any forced coalition with the radical EFF. The government is now claiming that it has resolved the electricity power outages, a perennial scourge for the daily lives of South Africans. Eskom, the state electricity provider, has now been able to keep the power on for 50 days. The government plans privatisation of power and transport on the grounds that this will ensure supply. After the election, the business elite will be pushing for more ‘business friendly’ measures on taxes, deregulation etc.
For its part, in attempt to reduce voter support for the radical partes, the ANC has taken the plunge to win votes with a promise to introduce state health insurance for all citizens and a ‘basic income’ grant for the unemployed (but only within four years of winning the election). This would cost $17bn a year, which the ANC says will be funded by higher taxes, without specifying.
There is certainly room to raise taxes on the wealthy. An individual with a taxable income of ZAR100 000 used to pay tax at an effective rate of 33.8% in 1995; they paid tax at 19.8% in 2011 and 18% in 2022, on what the Alternative Information & Development Centre (AIDC) calls“the corporate income tax race to the bottom”. According to AIDC, a progressive net wealth tax of between 3% and 7% on the top 1% of the richest people in the country could raise more than R143 billion in revenue each year, which would cover most of the cost for a universal basic income grant.
However, the ANC seems reluctant to go down that road to fund any basic income, in case the wealthy and foreign investors desert the country. These measures will indeed worry the business elite and foreign investors. But then big business’ own proposed policies of privatization, tax cuts and deregulation are anathema to the electorate.
Indeed, the hopes of business for the improved health of South African capitalism are illusory. The South African economy cannot progress on a capitalist basis, with its massive inequalities, weak productive investment and weakening trade. The best forecasts for annual real GDP growth are for only 1.3% over the next parliament. That will never create enough jobs for unemployed youth (even if they get some ‘basic income’) and nothing is proposed to deal with the massive inequalities. The trade deficit is expected to widen. Public investment is projected to fall further while the government debt ratio will rise to near 80% of GDP.
Current President Cyril Ramaphosa is a former trade unionist who turned himself into a 'businessman' to make millions. He now presides over a corrupt administration in a weak and stagnant economy and a society with extreme poverty and inequality. South African capitalism is a basket case. How long can it hang on without a massive reaction from its people?
