now imagine a town say we're going underground as derek chervin charged with the murder of george floyd that sparked uprisings across the western world makes his 1st appearance at a court in minneapolis this on the 52nd anniversary of the london arrest of james earl ray guilty of the assassination of dr martin luther king jr which catalyzed the greatest wave of social unrest in the united states since the civil war coming up in the show as protesters in the u.s. and u.k. call for the new liberal governments to tackle the roots of systemic injustice we ask big issue found a lot but how boris johnson was able to all of it sold homelessness overnight in

response to the road a virus that is homelessness has always been in the lead to political choice revealed by covert 1000 making the rich only as strong as society's most vulnerable and while protesters in the u.s. battle injustice against racial capitalism in the hands of a militants police force what has happened to the wealth of billionaires and shops being looted co-author of billionaire bonanza 2020 omar ocampo about have been here there's a profit it all for pandemic while millions hit the bread with all the small coming up in today's going underground but 1st against the backdrop of protests against oppression in the u.k. mirroring the full scale uprisings taking place in the united states the british government's crude a virus response still appears to be falling well short of what is needed with over 60000 deaths and rising while health experts on the alarm on another arguably anemic contact tracing system so is it any wonder that some who have campaigned their whole life. for equality and now looking for

a way to not just recover from grown a virus but to reform the entire system so tragedies on this scale can never happen again one of those campaigners is lord john birt founder of u.k. homeless charity magazine the big issue he has introduced a bill into parliament that aims not only to limit the effects of coronavirus on future generations but to revolutionize society in the manner of climate that is 945 government that suited the creation of the n.h.s. he joins me now via skype from cambridge in england thank you so much for coming back on lord john birt i've got to ask you obviously given that you've a campaign about the big issue the name of your magazine all your life it seems the government was able to solve the big issue overnight when it came to a pandemic does this mean that all these years it was a political decision to have homelessness in this country. it was a political decision it was a decision made in the late 19th fifty's and the 1960 s.

can still not allowing people to be on the streets because of the laws which were cool vagrancy laws which were victorian and made it look as though you were being very hard and tough on the poorest people who ended up on the street sure nobody was allowed to sleep rough argues a rough sleeper time so i know all about that what happened was the laws were not changed but people were politically different lives no we're not going to bring people off streets we're not going to take them to call russia or even for pegging we're going just going to completely ignore it but the problem was they didn't replace it with anything else so what looked like a very liberal well intentioned of look let's not punish the poorest among us they killed them and since then we've had many many deaths on the streets we've had an increasing amount of people on the streets so the oboist spiral of the any chance

has the people with problems of ended up on the streets or mental institutions were closed so that happen children coming out to care in the community look who authorities care often ends up in the street people who served in the armed forces and the police or it's what it was was the streets became a place where people said let's just ignore it let's just not actually engage and lead the pandemic some people realise of course that every speck to your position in the social hierarchy correcting or that if if you are ill you are ill and you could cross on to something else so suddenly the government wakes up to the reality that every last one of those human beings who are on the streets are a band or a vector or vulnerable person who could be parsing disease on to a. so. but of course before they found this on so temporarily will get on to what the government's doing those pandemic already

preparing to but surely and our lord canteen if you said that to any of the lords of any persuasion labor liberal democrat or conservative they would completely refute it was a political decision what do they tell you none of these labor liberal democrat tories that they've never said that they deliberately allowed homelessness i don't know as a warning to people to get on their bikes. well i don't know if it was that kind of on your part it was kind of you if you don't if you don't participate in society and become prosperous then this is what can happen to you but what it was it was the failure of liberalism it was the blindness of shame of so human rights abuse to stop people sleeping on the streets when really the biggest human rights abuse was the pregnant you lets people on the street and people like me who'd been brought sweepers beggars who'd been in the prison system who had been

into all the problem martin problems of modern post-war britain. are people like me was i know we shouldn't be allowing people on the streets we should be providing them every party the labor party the conservative party all of the parties have construed to see it as a question of well people should have the right to stay on the streets and i. would have died on the squeeze the young boy and the young men. decided but i won't decided that i would not allow that action. and as you intimate there average life expectancies are horrendous on the streets here in britain but you call it a human rights abuse britain has so often seen fit to want to make other countries in its own image are you saying that money for all these war is a country where a parent be taking china to task for hong kong there was

a there was a mismatch between british foreign policy and british home policy about homelessness . there's been a mismatch since hundreds of years i mean it's or isn't it interesting that the government of her will should was handing over places to the americans and clearing out people from those little islands and so you have these kind of that's her worst and great socialist so you've always got this kind of we are we are progressive and where you have to reopen seeds and unfortunately many many empires have been like that and britain is no different from the united states and is no different from other countries that have been incredibly were actually in africa or another i mean africa was one of the running souls of modern life because even though these kind of oppressions were happening over 200 years we're still paying the cost of

those. of those come situations i don't want to get to logon to the site to talk about history and because i'm a i'm a next i'm an x. racist or the next anti semites i'm the next whatever and when i got out having to go out of poverty and got a crime when i got out i started to look very very seriously at the quality of the society that was around me and i've always found it very lacking and the very fact that you know they allow a kind of underclass of people not have a full life is is quite incredible boris johnson who certainly the british prime minister would certainly refute any. hug him and bit rough sleeping and homelessness was this political his government has pledged 236000000 for rough sleeping and the question is i suppose what do you make of accusations

that his government stripping out any waiting for deprivation out of distributing emergency cash for councils if. we look at the harsh reality the harsh reality is that mr johnson's government was the 1st government to frighten their super lawyers to bring those people indoors now we have to keep those people in goals we cannot decamped back onto the streets and that's one of the person campaigns i got involved in. once we cope in 19 a curfew it started but the next big thing and this is the one that really frightens me i have dealt with on an average of between 2 with private 1000 people here in the united kingdom nearly 30 years 229 years what i'm looking at now is probably in the region of 9 haarp

a 1000000 people according to the local government association how a 1000000 people you imagine how a 1000000 people and 800000 of those coming and saying i want to sell the big issue so what i'm doing aren't forming alliances and she recession alliance which looks 1st of all banning all objections not because it's months as the labor party is saying but to years until become the the economy or rewrite or i'm also calling for the creation of a great government bank which will mock up the bad leases and the bank. and and and and and the mogul just can't be paid what we've got to avoid is people becoming homeless because if you become homeless and your family breaks up then you enter the most expensive part of the british system which is the social intervention system which will cost hundreds of thousands of pounds rather than treat people at home our children and our children's children moving out on the

streets and that will take 50 years to sort out so what we've got to do is keep people in work so we go. create work to job creation schemes that we need to work on and we need to work on concrete pool in their homes so they're not directed unfortunate should say though that what you're proposing is actually quite mainstream in the united states joe biden has supported insurance oh well that's very mainstream. mainstream. you can advocate. the problem is to live the radicals thing is you could add something the revolution resort is actually make this government policy and do it with regard to taking over foreign peoples homes and and such things like those very very on a theological things the problem with ideology is you then immediately set up an

enormous amount of energy that goes into fighting the ideological point and having been through many ideological points i can tell you you can use all your energy it's a pen or having a disagreement with your landlord and going to court and spending millions of pounds and running at the end of the day that neatly you or you'll land a little better off so i don't want to turn down the ideological thank god i want to do it again or be called in and go and play to the galleries what i want to do is do to liberate none of the political parties have ever delivered to the poorest among us ok when i think when we probably did i was playing to any gallery but i'll stop you there more from john but after this break plus heads we win tails we win we investigate how if you're a billionaire coronaviruses maybe hundreds of millions of dollars even if more than a $100000.00 of you killed tens of millions are now out of work some of them on

american streets threatened by bandits and u.s. army division that played a part in killing millions in vietnam awesome all coming i'm about to i'm going underground. dallas. dallas. dallas. dallas dallas what are. we care the music with us. we are here we were dragged here. by you looking to get rid of those who are not go away we will not die quietly.

real the hard work we do is the truth. we're told the civil unrest in the united states and beyond is about systemic racism we're told western institutions are values that are inherently fun and. neither really explain the real evidence of social breakdown but is really in play here is an ideology and ideology of some submission. welcome back i'm still here with a big issue found on the should those who have disproportionately suffered from coronavirus those in work i mean you've taken low skilled jobs you were binmen road

sweeper delivery man should the government compensate those people as a the t.s.s. a union is suggesting for the transport workers and compensate and a chest of. well where your going very pleased somebody is thinking along these lines god bless you carry on are can't count very reason i'm a very simple home educated educated person educated in the streets as a street thug an underclass person who got into the middle classes educated themselves became a socialist and a revolutionary and tried desperately hard to talk about what i know the thing is that there's so much ideological crap going all around at the moment this show many bradley co-writers but the simple thing is if we can stop people. and we can give them some kind of work then we have harper 1000000 people grieving

to sell the big issue because it's the only way to ok well some people have said there is ideology or play that boris johnson old etonian school the eton with. educating is children till september because it is government supported while state school pupils have to go back to school this month. i mean is your future generations bill does it address education in that way what has been termed a class war in education in this country there are not many people white men who ever get into a position of anybody listening to them and what i'm saying is what i have observed i went to a catholic roman catholic school after the 2nd world war it was cold at a secondary modern school and what it was was it was time of writing off the last parts of the under under the un skilled and the semi skilled working classes and

what they did was they dumped those people like rained off the top they took 11 percent the people the germy call them comes from they took the 11 percent who put them into the into the grammar schools so they created the social divide if you actually look at the history of british education since the 2nd world war what you'll see is 35 percent of our children are failed school because. they either then take report jobs then the people who took up the air uni if you go into the christian system people like me who wrote school ended up in the prison system we are the long term unemployed we are the people who are ill we are people who are the work in court and it's largely because all of the stuff about whether it's the public school system or whether it's the comprehensive system or whatever whether it's the socialist system or the conserved system every one of those lots of people

have relaxed down the british unskilled working class and not help them out into a more skilled situation the fact that britain was a closed imperialist nation they thought that what they would do if they were just in this middle class sort of way and colors on the working class these people what was best for them and what was best for them was to lead them to stew i can introduce you to. not recovered from the 2nd world war we are now the working poor 3 generations well just finally then the future generations will recommence many initiatives former british chancellor george osborne says we may need austerity in response to this pandemic far from the kind of investment you're talking about we need for the city of london to prosper a huge reduction in our debt to g.d.p.

ratio would you say to those who support our policy. well mr osborne. mr osborne other people who are responsible for many many of the. transgressions that were made in the name of austerity i tend to agree with stiglitz and other people who say that the cost of austerity is greater than what it saves so actually what you have is you have posterity austerity which takes generations and generations to work or austerity is too expensive we can't afford to waste money and what mr osborne should do i know i know very little about him i've never met him or i would say austerity is the worst thing that you can do now we have to do what we did in 19. in order to remain. as an alternative to naziism in europe we had to start spending money

generations and generations so therefore the 2nd world war was not only got 55 years of the 2nd world war the last. world war and we are going to have to dig deep and borrow and borrow and borrow and get ourselves into a situation where in 50 or 60 years time we can sell curried we paid for the corona corrupt cayman 2020 and mr mr. mr osborne unfortunately this is what happens when you get people who are in incredibly privileged positions in society like these people will never shop or from the results of their to see if their policies never stop well we invite george osborne now an editor like you of a london although your editor of an international paper he's the editor of

a london paper not john thank you. thank you very much. well as u.s. protesters demand justice from an arguable racist cabinets to lead from l.a. to new york billionaires with businesses from london to moscow have been allegedly profiteering from the pandemic joining me now from boston is co-author of the institute for policy studies report billionaire bonanza 2020 wealth windfalls tumbling taxes and pandemic profiteers omar ok thanks so much omar for coming on i know there's been protests in boston i'm not sure how they've been there around you but on your report you begin it by saying a billionaire's disproportionately impact us politics culture and the economy itself they have a huge influence over society there one of the things that we said in the report is that inequality in america is a preexisting condition and this statement really reflects the fact that when there

are there is a convulsion in the economy or some type of social problem it does not necessarily impact everyone equally at least not at 1st so in fact households and group with the least amount of resources will be often be disproportionately hit will not be able to recover as easily and we saw that and 2008 billionaires are able to recover and exceed their wealth and within the couple of years and that has not been the case for the median household how well have a amazon's jeff bezos tells those the loan must be bomber shoulder and microsoft how well are they don't have a coronavirus they've done very well i mean for us the most obvious profiteer has been just days i was his wealth has increased it's like it's mind boggling and he started off the year with $115000000000.00 and net worth but when that report was released it was $140000000000.00 as of this morning it was close to $150000000000.00 and so that is like basically

a 35. $1000000000.00 increase within 56 months and that is actually larger than the g.d.p. of iceland and i think this is because the pandemic is playing to all of amazon strengths. they're a large corporation they have a massive wealth so they have the resources to weather the initial hit while small businesses closed up shop and all this is happening at the expense of worker safety amazon refuses to say how many people are out how many of their workers are sick and they fire those who are concerns so and they're reversing hazard pay so basis it's literally making billions of dollars while risking the last of his workforce and hasn't one other person that you know that has made the news recently is this person a man arness garcia. you know he's someone who's being currently sued by his shareholders for using a coronavirus as a way to do some inside insider training trading and his wealth has increased over 4000000. march 18th well they all deny wrongdoing jeff bezos then

presumably the great his income boost may be personal in world history it did you get the coverage in the washington post owned by jeff bezos and the report. we have not at least not that i've seen fortunately the coverage. in the print i mean stream press and at least the print media has been really good so we've been in roaders business as side or c.n.n. have not seen anything on washington i'm sure it's a coincidence but you know that's the point the billionaires claim they are great philanthropist they donate private planes to help in this pandemic and in fact they have been their great source of a sucker during this coronavirus pandemic and in fact philanthropy in general has increased over the last few years but what is unique about it is that it's more top heavy which means that most of the given is done by the wealthy yes and that's

because they can pay less in taxes. and i think this differs from the donations that you and i would make to like you know a nonprofit or homeless shelter but when the rich do and they do it for that you know tax write offs and sometimes some of the money sometimes the money that they donate is actually not dispersed and this is usually done through donor advice funds so for example they can put in $100000000.00 into that fund and then get an immediate tax write off and theoretically that money can sit there in that fund indefinitely and it never reaches desired destination basically as you say the word heart of every dollar is at the expense of taxes the democratically accountable to go to social services in any case these tax breaks is also well transfer from the bottom to the top so well and up happening is that you know when you give. a tax break or are cut their taxes what did it do with their money the right wing usually argues that they invest that money into like the productive

sectors of the economy but you know we have noticed that you know they often just invest in financial instruments and speculative behavior and also at the government usually ends up borrowing money from the people they should be taxing and and that and any government repays that that that loan that they get from the burning through taxation through from everywhere every day people could and working class a middle class well if we put entirely legitimate tax havens to one side you explain that before trying taxes on the president like the bush's clinton obama taxes paid by billionaires have gone down by around 80 percent between 192018 yeah absolutely and that is like one of the. most staggering statistics that we actually had. and this is unfortunate because a number of households that we have here that have 0 or negative what they're

actually increasing. so like 37 percent of african-american families and there are 3 percent percent of hispanic families have 0 or negative wealth and that just goes goes to show that you know a rising tide is not lift all boats and you know it decrease in taxes does not actually mean it's better for the economy as a home and that was before trump what do you think billionaires want from joe biden because he's had apparently 100 billionaires donate to his campaign versus 92 for the incumbent donald trump and that's actually a really good question i think the main thing that they want is to protect their privileges and be able to you know lower their taxes i think that that the main issue that you know for the billionaire class that main issue that they want is to not have their wealth threatened by any. means so therefore their party going are pressuring him to make sure that taxes are not racing if they're going to report is

available online just very briefly it not only itemize and explains all of this it does suggest ways out of this you want an emergency millionaire 10 percent income tax surtax and also a pandemic profiteering oversight committee i understand. yes all the damage assuming your income surtax is basically a tax it would be placed on people who make over $2000000.00 a year which is basically just one percent of the population and that to start task and kept in place up what's pandemic we've estimated that we can raise over $600000000000.00 in 10 years and if we can combine this with other taxes which is like a well tax or more progressive the state tax i think it will help expand opportunity by funding education health care and like other new initiatives like the green new deal and i think that congress should establish a pandemic profiteering committee and enact an excess profits tax because the

problem with any economic crisis that large corporations disproportionately benefit because their competition goes out of business or they exploit the crisis by raising prices not quoted to supply and demand principles so that revenues that can be raised from that can be can be given to those who are in need of more of amber thank you thank you very much i think that's over the shoulder we're back on wednesday 135 years to the day the statue of liberty a blazing with the inscription we are tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe free a right to your father until then wash your hands and join me on the road before going off on you tube twitter facebook instagram and so.

we go to work. straight home. or are. you working.