Capitalism: A Disease To Be Eliminated

When a person is ill a competent doctor will attempt to identify all relevant symptoms: high temperature, site of aches and pains, loss of appetite, heart-rate, blood pressure, etc. etc. Following diagnosis treatment will be offered in the form of dietary advice, physiotherapy, drugs, surgery or some combination of these or other remedies. If the aim is to cure the illness and prevent its return then the causes of the disease will need to be identified and eliminated. Effective treatment can only follow correct diagnosis of the cause. The doctor will seek to understand family history, working conditions and living conditions. Regular check-ups and preventive care are the surest way to avoid the onset of serious illness and an appropriate regimen leading to a healthy lifestyle will more likely ensure non-return of the previous disease.

Political commentary on and diagnosis of society's ills, however, tend to focus on discussion of how to treat the symptoms with scant regard to eliminating the causes. Reform rather than structural change. There continues to be a plethora of books published both criticising and then offering reforms to the capitalist system; so many, in fact, that it points to the fact that there is a large audience of readers dissatisfied with the status quo, knowing the current system doesn't work for them. An audience aspiring to structural changes?

Treating only the symptoms, i.e. reforming the system, is ultimately doomed to failure in society as in the patient. Capital has no interest in that which is not in its own interest and governments are limited in their ability to implement reforms as they are pulled in various directions by the power of capital's demands and the need to appease their constituents long enough to remain in power in the short term. Markets, money and money markets don't play by rules endorsed by consumers. Whilst claiming to promote human freedom capitalism profits from the denial of freedom, especially of the workers employed by capitalist enterprise.

Social consequences are largely ignored by capital. Evidence of this is everywhere from the countries with the richest economies to dirt-poor nations with all populations exploited or deliberately abandoned for economic reasons by local and global capital. More families and individuals are impoverished, hungry and made homeless each successive year in countries from Africa, Asia and Europe to the Americas and the general public are afraid that they, too, may fall victim to the disease as they tighten their belts and try and take precautions; but we have been taught to see capitalism as a system “too big to fail.” We have also been taught to be afraid of considering the alternative of dismantling the system and some continue to shout “reform.” Yes, many willingly keep taking the palliative medicine rather than working together to eradicate the disease for the benefit of themselves and future generations.

What needs to be recognised much more widely is that the whole set-up of capitalism - the free-market economy and monetarism - is one enormous scam against those who produce the wealth, whether globally or locally. Those who produce the wealth are currently all part of a huge lottery; this year, here and now, in work; next year, maybe out of work. But, just like a game of chance, some manage to stay lucky and others never get a look in. Join the club. If you are one of the multitude who needs to work in order to live, you have been duped. Well and truly.

The cause of the disease has been identified. It's time to remove it completely. Only a structural change will do.

Workers Of The World - 3

The Real Cost Of Low Paid Jobs

A New Jersey woman died earlier this week trying to catch a few hours of sleep between jobs, a chilling reminder of the struggle low-wage workers, particularly women, face making ends meet.
Police found Maria Fernandes dead in her car on Monday night, parked in a convenience-store parking lot in Elizabeth, N.J., according to a police press release. Fernandes, 32, was wearing a Dunkin’ Donuts uniform when she was found. A friend and fellow employees told officials she worked as many as four jobs, said Lt. Daniel Saulnier, a spokesman for the Elizabeth police department.
Authorities are waiting on a toxicology report to determine the exact cause of death, but Hazmat investigators found that fumes in Fernandes’ car were caused by a gasoline can that had spilled in the back, according to the release. Friends told police that Fernandes kept gas in her car to avoid running out of gas when traveling between jobs. And she often slept in parking lots to get a few hours of rest between jobs, authorities said.

 

“It is a very sad story and really tragic,and it shines a light on what is a real problem, particularly for low-wage workers, today,” said Elizabeth Watson, senior counsel and director of workplace justice for women at the National Women’s Law Center.

Fernandes’ death is one of many recent examples of the extreme lengths to which low-income women must go to make a living these days. Shanesha Taylor was charged with felony child abuse in March after she left her two children in the car while she went on a job interview. Debra Harrell was arrested in July after leaving her 9-year-old daughter to play in a park alone while she worked at McDonald’s. Jannette Navarro told The New York Times of the difficulty of her erratic schedule at her $9-per-hour job at Starbucks, which prompted the company to change its scheduling policy.

Low-wage and part-time work has proliferated in the post-recession economy. While jobs in fast food and retail are booming, the middle-wage jobs that disappeared during the recession have been slower to return. Meanwhile, the costs of child care, health care, education and other services have kept rising, adding to the burden on low-wage workers.
These trends have hit women particularly hard, contributing to an “ongoing and growing problem” of women being concentrated in low-wage work, Watson said. Women make up about two-thirds of low-wage workers. Between 2009 and 2013, 35 percent of women's job gains were in low-wage sectors compared to just 18 percent of men's, according to data from the NWLC. Even in these low-wage jobs, women make 90.4 cents to every man's dollar, on average.

 Fernandes worked at multiple Dunkin’ Donuts, including one at Newark Penn Station. Though she wore the same uniform for each, these were technically separate jobs. Dunkin’ Donuts confirmed that the outlets where she worked were owned by different franchisees and that the different owners didn't know she was working at multiple restaurants. Fernandes worked as little as 10 hours a week at one franchise and as many as 40 hours a week at another.

from here

Workers' Unions Denied Access To Corporate-Owned TV

Why has Union membership dropped considerably? Why are workers having a harder time organising? Why is it not being talked about in the media? Who owns this media? Are we going to allow them to dumb us down any further so that we don't even think about it any more?
Workers are the most important people on the planet. We make everything. We grow all our food. We run all our services. We take care of the young, the old, the sick and the dying - we even dispose of the dead. Without us the 0.1% have nothing. This is what we have as our weapon and we are everywhere, living and working on every part of this planet. Together we are strong.


How often do you see unions represented on corporate-owned television? On the highest-profile public affairs shows, the answer is basically never.
According to a search of the Sunday morning talkshows for this year (January-August), not a single representative of a labor union appeared on any of the four network programs (NBC‘s Meet the Press, ABC‘s This Week, Fox News Sunday and CBS‘s Face the Nation).

Ironically, the one union leader discussed substantively on any of the programs was Ronald Reagan, the famously anti-union former president. He came up as an answer in an ABC “Powerhouse Puzzlers” quiz as the only president to have headed a labor union, the Screen Actors Guild.
And it’s not that the shows couldn’t have used a voice for working people. While normally preoccupied with Beltway politics, these shows touched on issues like poverty, jobs and workers’ rights. There were even discussions of efforts to organize college athletes (Meet the Press, Face the Nation.)

But representatives of organized labor were not part of these conversations. The closest labor came to the Sunday chat show circuit was when Meet the Press aired an excerpt of a Clinton Foundation event that included two quotes from Sara Horowitz of the Freelancers Union, which is not a certified union but a nonprofit organization that brokers health insurance for independent workers.
The Sunday shows did, however, find time to hear the views of corporate America. Guests that were identified as current or former corporate CEOs made 12 appearances, including former AOL head Steve Case (Meet the Press), Apple CEO Tim Cook (This Week,) and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz (Fox News Sunday. Former Hewlett Packard CEO and Republican political candidate Carly Fiorina made four appearances.

Introducing a segment with FedEx chair Frederick W. Smith and former UBS Investment Bank chief Robert Wolf, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace announced:

We got a lot of numbers about the economy this week, but not a clear picture of where we stand. To help sort it out, we brought in two of America’s leading business executives.

None of the Sunday show hosts were ever similarly moved to bring in any of America’s leading labor representatives to give us a clearer picture of where we stand.

from here

I MUST GO DOWN TO CLACTON ON SEA… (poem)

(Apologies to John Masefield for updating his ‘Sea Fever’)



28/8/14. Clacton Tory MP, Douglas Carswell, has resigned and

will re-stand as UKIP’s candidate in the forthcoming by-election.



I must go down to Clacton on Sea, to spout some pie in the sky,

For it’s my task to tell tall tales and talk some blah thereby,

And I’ll kiss babies and engage, in lots of bland handshaking,

And I’ll wear a rictus grin, to show that I‘m not faking.



I must go down to Frinton on Sea, to stem the Tory tide,

With lots of gall and the sort of bull I‘ve previously denied,

And I shall bask in loads of wind and more than just white lying,

And waves of patriotic bilge to really get them crying. 


I must go down to Jaywick and see, sea shanty township life, (1)  

To the Tory way and the Lib-Dem way, where life is rife with strife,

And all I ask is they heed my yarn, to put myself in clover, (2)

And hope they’ll sleep in their bad dream and once again roll-over.  



I must go down to Holland on Sea, where the oldies limp around,

Before their caskets are filled-up, some six-feet underground,

And I shall tell them whilst I try, to block out mocking laughter, 

That they’ll reach UKIP’s paradise, ahead of the hereafter! 



(1) In the Indices of Deprivation 2010, an area of Jaywick was

identified as the single most deprived LSOA in all of England,

out of around 32,000, with unemployment estimated at almost 50%.



(2) During the 2009 expenses scandal, the Daily Telegraph published his

expenses showing he had claimed, amongst other things, a £655 ‘love seat’

and had flipped his second home to avoid capital gains taxation.



© Richard Layton

Labor Day - Why No Meaning For Workers Now

1. There has been a decade of stubborn wage stagnation. The Economic Policy Institute notes:

“According to every major data source, the vast majority of U.S. workers—including white-collar and blue-collar workers and those with and without a college degree—have endured more than a decade of wage stagnation. Wage growth has significantly underperformed productivity growth regardless of occupation, gender, race/ethnicity, or education level. ”

In contrast, the wealthy have been getting a larger share of any income growth:

 “The top 20 percent of the highest income households in the U.S. experienced 60.6 percent of total wage gains between 2005 and 2012…” The top 5% alone took home over a quarter of all the wage gains in those years.

2. EPI observes that the lost decade comes on top of previous decades of wage stagnation, going back to about 1970, which reversed the era of wage growth after World War II:

“This lost decade for wages comes on the heels of decades of inadequate wage growth. For virtually the entire period since 1979 (with the one exception being the strong wage growth of the late 1990s), wage growth for most workers has been weak. The median worker saw an increase of just 5.0 percent between 1979 and 2012, despite productivity growth of 74.5 percent—while the 20th percentile worker saw wage erosion of 0.4 percent and the 80th percentile worker saw wage growth of just 17.5 percent.”

3. Only 11.3% of wage and salary workers belong to unions in 2014. This is down from about 35% at the peak of the movement in 1954, and down from 20% in 1983. This vast decline in unionization is not because workers don’t want the protections of union organization. It is because state legislatures have deliberately passed laws aimed at weakening unionization rights and because large corporations have systematically fired workers who tried to unionize, despite this practice being supposedly illegal.

4. Income inequality is greater than at any time since 1928. Workers are taking home a smaller slice of the overall pie, while the wealthy and superwealthy are walking away with the lion’s share. It is not in fact clear that most financiers are more important to you than your plumber, but the former make hundreds of times what the latter does. Pew Research Center remarks,

“U.S. income inequality is the highest it’s been since 1928. In 1982, the highest-earning 1% of families received 10.8% of all pretax income, while the bottom 90% received 64.7%, according to research by UC-Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez. Three decades later, according to Saez’ preliminary estimates for 2012, the top 1% received 22.5% of pretax income, while the bottom 90%’s share had fallen to 49.6%.”

Wealth ownership inequality is even greater than income inequality: “the highest-earning fifth of U.S. families earned 59.1% of all income, the richest fifth held 88.9% of all wealth…”

5. Although there are signs of a halting recovery from the massive job losses that began in 2008 as a result of Wall Street corruption and reckless business practices, the new jobs added pay substantially less than the ones that were lost. USA Today observes,drawing from a report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors and IHS Global Insight,

“The jobs regained since the recession have, as a whole, been lower paying than the ones lost. According to the IHS report, the average annual income of jobs lost between 2008 and 2009 was $61,637, while the average for those gained through the second quarter of 2014 was $47,171. This amounts to a wage gap of 23 percent and $93 billion in lower wage income . . . Jobs in low-income fields such as hospitality, which pay around $21,000 a year, replaced jobs lost in high-paid sectors such as manufacturing, which pay $63,000, the report found. ”

And, you guessed it, the top 5 percent in contrast have made out like bandits in the same period.

 from here

A reminder from yesterday of SOYMB's message: The capitalist world heaps misery upon misery upon backs of the toilers. Capitalism remains what it has been from birth: a system of exploitation of the many for the enrichment of the few. Labor day should remind us of the urgency to move towards socialism.
 The capitalist world heaps misery upon misery upon backs of the toilers. Capitalism remains what it has been from birth: a system of exploitation of the many for the enrichment of the few. Labor day should remind us of the urgency to move towards socialism.

Government and Media Hype - Who Should We Really Be Afraid Of?

“In 1859 Friedrich Engels poked a man in the eye with an umbrella and soon heard from the man's lawyers. 'Needless to say', he wrote, 'these blasted English don't want to deprive themselves of the pleasure of getting their hands on a bloody foreigner.'”

This book is an account of the 'tangled roots' of history that make up our mongrel nation, pointing out that from the amalgamation of Jutes, Saxons, Romans, Danes etc. up to the present time one would be hard-pressed to find a true (pure) Englishman. Immigration, and conversely emigration has been an intricate part of our development. In the 12^th century came French Jews to London, Lincoln, York and Norwich; in the Elizabethan age Italian musicians, German businessmen and the first African slaves; then Protestants from the Low Countries seeking religious tolerance; Huguenot refugees from France 'en masse' in the 17^th century; likewise Greek Christians fleeing from the Turks. In 1768, courtesy of the slave trade, there were 20,000 black Londoners out of a total population of 600,000 and in 1840 400,000 Irish escaping the potato famine came to Manchester, London, Liverpool and Glasgow. By the end of the 19^th century 40,000 Italians and 50,000 Germans had settled here plus 150,000 Jewish evacuees from Tzarist pogroms in Russia. At the time of their arrival most of these groups suffered hostility of varying degrees but as the generations rolled by they were gradually accepted.

Some of the well-known immigrants and their institutions include Rothchilds, Reuters, Marks and Spencer, Trust House Forte, Tesco, Joseph Conrad, Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing, Simon Schama and Linford Christie.

   We imported kings from Germany and Holland, queens from France and Spain and recruited fighting forces from the wide world to support our efforts in WW1 and 2 and then actively recruited large numbers of workers from the colonies post-WW2.

    As a result of intricate research Winder exposes the manipulations, lies and exaggerations of media accounts of more recent waves of immigration and asylum seekers, e.g. in the Thatcher era, with immigrants making up 4% of the population, she gave her vision of what made Britain 'Great' – 9% felt there were too many immigrants before she expounded compared with 21% who admitted to being worried afterwards. Other examples reveal the actual state of monetary and housing benefits to immigrants which are wildly different from the stories abounding in the media.

Poor bloody foreigners – they're just used as a convenient group, easy to label and point the finger at. Instead of falling for the divide and rule tactics which weaken us all, workers should recognise who their real enemy is and work together to defeat the system that enslaves us all.

Book Review: first in Socialist Standard, September 2009

Bloody Foreigners – The story of immigration to Britain

Robert Winder 2004 Abacus

J.S.

Profits And Prosperity Are Incompatible

Profits Without Prosperity

 

Five years after the official end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the recovery. While the top 0.1% of income recipients—which include most of the highest-ranking corporate executives—reap almost all the income gains, good jobs keep disappearing, and new employment opportunities tend to be insecure and underpaid. Corporate profitability is not translating into widespread economic prosperity.
 
The allocation of corporate profits to stock buybacks deserves much of the blame. Consider the 449 companies in the S&P 500 index that were publicly listed from 2003 through 2012. During that period those companies used 54% of their earnings—a total of $2.4 trillion—to buy back their own stock, almost all through purchases on the open market. Dividends absorbed an additional 37% of their earnings. That left very little for investments in productive capabilities or higher incomes for employees.
The buyback wave has gotten so big, in fact, that even shareholders—the presumed beneficiaries of all this corporate largesse—are getting worried. “It concerns us that, in the wake of the financial crisis, many companies have shied away from investing in the future growth of their companies,” Laurence Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, wrote in an open letter to corporate America in March. “Too many companies have cut capital expenditure and even increased debt to boost dividends and increase share buybacks.”
 
Why are such massive resources being devoted to stock repurchases? Corporate executives give several reasons, which I will discuss later. But none of them has close to the explanatory power of this simple truth: Stock-based instruments make up the majority of their pay, and in the short term buybacks drive up stock prices. In 2012 the 500 highest-paid executives named in proxy statements of U.S. public companies received, on average, $30.3 million each; 42% of their compensation came from stock options and 41% from stock awards. By increasing the demand for a company’s shares, open-market buybacks automatically lift its stock price, even if only temporarily, and can enable the company to hit quarterly earnings per share (EPS) targets.
As a result, the very people we rely on to make investments in the productive capabilities that will increase our shared prosperity are instead devoting most of their companies’ profits to uses that will increase their own prosperity—with unsurprising results. Even when adjusted for inflation, the compensation of top U.S. executives has doubled or tripled since the first half of the 1990s, when it was already widely viewed as excessive. Meanwhile, overall U.S. economic performance has faltered.
 
If the U.S. is to achieve growth that distributes income equitably and provides stable employment, government and business leaders must take steps to bring both stock buybacks and executive pay under control. The nation’s economic health depends on it.
 
From Value Creation to Value Extraction

 

  For three decades I’ve been studying how the resource allocation decisions of major U.S. corporations influence the relationship between value creation and value extraction, and how that relationship affects the U.S. economy. From the end of World War II until the late 1970s, a retain-and-reinvest approach to resource allocation prevailed at major U.S. corporations. They retained earnings and reinvested them in increasing their capabilities, first and foremost in the employees who helped make firms more competitive. They provided workers with higher incomes and greater job security, thus contributing to equitable, stable economic growth—what I call “sustainable prosperity.”
This pattern began to break down in the late 1970s, giving way to a downsize-and-distribute regime of reducing costs and then distributing the freed-up cash to financial interests, particularly shareholders. By favoring value extraction over value creation, this approach has contributed to employment instability and income inequality.

Here ends the free taster written by William Lazonick, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, the remainder has to be paid for here. 
As to value creation, value extraction, capital expenditure, sustainable prosperity and other such terms this writer has no intention of attempting to discuss these aspects of the article. What strikes me, a non-academic, are the column inches devoted here and elsewhere, whole books even, to explaining where the profits are being channeled followed by calls for justice and fair pay and conditions for workers, as if it will make a blind bit of difference. What I and many others see quite clearly and simply is that what's happening is working just as it's meant to for those who are benefiting, those at the very top of the pyramid. Workers are disposable. There's a huge reserve of unemployed growing fast. Outsourcing is just another option. Equality will only come to us when the 99.9% decide enough is enough and remove the 0.1% from their perch.
JS
 
 

Shooting the Messenger

Reuters Reporter Carey Gillam has written about genetic engineering and food for the past 16 years. But Monsanto doesn’t always like what Gillam says, no matter how balanced or well researched.
So the Biotech Bullies recently tried to pressure Reuters into removing Gillam from her beat.
Thankfully, Reuters is standing up to the Biotech Bullies.

As Christina Sarich of InfoWars.com wrote:

What is happening now with journalism, and the scape-goating of Gillam, is no different than what biotech has done in other arenas. Their decades-long history of contaminating this planet and its people with dangerous chemicals is well known, in part due to efforts like those of Gillam, and other writers like myself who are willing to stay staunch when shills and puppets try to take the heat off Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, etc.
             
Gillam, no rookie reporter, has been singled out by her peers for her fair and objective reporting. Civil Eats, an award-winning daily news source focusing on food issues, cited Gillam in an article, "24 Women Food and Agriculture Reporters You Should Know About."

But the biotech bullies don’t want good reporters writing about GMOs. They don’t want anybody writing about GMOs—unless those writers are on Monsanto’s payroll.

Slaves To Technology? The Logical Conclusion? Get Rid Of Capitalism

Below is a brief taster of an article with a strong message of the pernicious, deliberate but largely unnoticed effects of 'free-market-capitalism's' stranglehold on all aspects of our lives, stealing our time and our powers of thinking. Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist who has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries and is understandably reliant on, if not in love with, various kinds of technology.


I feel challenged, at times dumb. I am constantly behind.
And that is where the multi-nationals want me to be. That is how they want me to feel: a total retard, a failure.
Computers are evolving; smart phones, cameras and recorders are changing their operation systems. They are designed that way: a few months or years and into the garbage with them!


Whenever I buy a new phone, new camera or new computer, I have to spend several weeks or months trying to understand their complex manuals. And these days, many manuals are not even printed – they have to be studied online. And then, once I at least master some basics, it is time to get the next generation of the equipment, to throw the old, obsolete one into the garbage, without fully mastering it.
The way new-era-gadgets are designed is that after just 1-3 years they become obsolete: applications cannot be run or downloaded and everything becomes incompatible. Entire systems demand a periodical overhaul, but even overhauls have time limitation, at some point they cease to ‘be allowed’. And so, eventually, new equipment has to be purchased, and, that happens with increasing frequency.

We all know that this is how the ‘market’ works, that this is how ruthless, self-serving ‘entrepreneurship’ is shagging us. We are all bitching about it, but there seems to be nothing that can be done. We have simply become slaves of those vicious, greedy and twisted capitalist companies. We know that they only care about their profits and nothing about the advancement of society and humanity. They are clearly and determinedly robbing creative people, of both time and resources.

Often it feels that we are defenseless and unprotected.
The more time and money we spend playing their games, satisfying their gluttony by buying and buying, continuously learning absolutely useless new concepts about ‘operating systems’ or electronic menus, the less time and resources we have left for thinking and working on the improvement of life on our planet.
Of course that is most likely one of the essential parts of their grand design.

The logical conclusion of thinking people would be, “Let’s get rid of capitalism, corporatism and market fundamentalism,” if they had more time to read, study, concentrate and analyze the world that surrounds them.
Therefore, they should be kept busy and confused with indigestible manuals, forced to give up their old gear, to buy new and newer things, and kept constantly occupied with form, instead of substance.

The crimes of market fundamentalists are too apparent and so the leaders of the corporate-political mafia are really petrified that one day, more and more people will open their eyes and will begin to shout just like in that old fairytale: “But the Emperor has no clothes!”
And so they want to make us dumb, as quickly and irreversibly as possible.

After many years of research I have come to the conclusion that some parts of the world, particularly Southeast Asia, were being used as guinea pigs in a lab for experiments on human beings. After some horrifying coups and bloodletting, people have been fully indoctrinated with market fundamentalism. The fetish of gadgets was injected with tremendous force, at the same time as hundreds of millions of people were contaminated with the lowest form of pop culture. Those who resisted were murdered or made irrelevant. Thinking and creativity were discouraged and discredited.
It has worked. And now, the same system is being implemented even in the core of the Empire – in the US and Europe.


The model should be studied in depth, because, it is a toxic, horrifying model. And if we do not fight it with determination and courage, it will soon become the future of our humanity!

There is nothing wrong with computers, phones or cameras. But the way capitalism uses them; they are being converted into extremely dangerous psychological weapons of destruction – weapons that are slowing our thinking, diverting us from real issues, making us as busy as possible as we try to figure out an irrelevant multitude of digits and commands on confusing menus.

  - taken from here

Labor Day Greetings

Labor Day  began in 1882, four years BEFORE Haymarket and eight years BEFORE the first international May Day in 1890.  There are reports of early Labor Day celebrations in Toronto, Canada, in 1872 and in Boston in 1878. The first Labor Day in Australia was celebrated in 1856.

Labor Day brings forth the usual flood of “Labor Day Messages” from all sorts of organizations and individuals but when all is said and done, the workers won’t get much from the Labor Day  sermons and speeches that is all hokus pokus about love of country.

Today, however,  Socialism Or Your Money Back blog celebrates  Labor Day and pledges mutual solidarity fidelity and support to our fellow workers in every battle, economic and political until our fellow worker are free. We are all one— all workers of all lands and climes. We know not color, nor creed, nor sex in the labor movement as we march to the goal where we  will vanquish wage-slavery and humanize the world.

The capitalist world heaps misery upon misery upon backs of the toilers. Capitalism remains what it has been from birth: a system of exploitation of the many for the enrichment of the few. Labor day should remind us of the urgency to move towards socialism.

A Perfect Example Of A Capitalist Abuser

"The Coca-Cola Company is, of course, a capitalist company meaning that its goal is to make money virtually any way possible. It’s good at this. Its market cap today is $168.7 billion according to Forbes.  Since it’s founding in the late 1800’s it is now known to be the most recognized product in the world. Its goal of making money is accomplished regardless of the consequences be it environmental degradation, pollution, abuse of and destabilizing water use, worker assassinations, discrimination in the work place, or the health of individuals drinking its product, to name but a few.  Promoting a product that requires purchase by huge numbers of individuals in order to make a profit necessitates deliberate efforts at creating a positive public image. It’s good at that also but it is simultaneously considered by some as one of the most evil corporations in the world – a designation that suits it well."

So begins a lengthy article by Heather Gray from here charting the company's 'egregious history' and expansion over the globe with in depth coverage of some of the issues mentioned above and including references to its apartheid connections and examples of its generally 'oppressive, arrogant behaviour.'
If you know someone who doesn't seem to be aware of just some of Coca-Cola's tactics and business practices, then this is the article to send to them - after having read it first yourself, of course.

The Truth About Immigration

Opening Thought: Everything negative you’ve heard about immigration is true.

In fact, all the talk-talk-talk about lazy parasites pouring over borders to leech off another nation’s resources doesn’t go far enough in explaining the gravity of this ongoing crisis. Scream it from the mountaintops (or at least on your blog):

Immigrants are destroying any and all hope of for planetary survival.

Illegal aliens are Public Enemy #1. 

Foreigners are terrorists.

If you don’t believe me, just ask any sweatshop worker in, say, Vietnam…

The perfidious colonizers I refer to, of course, are the insatiable transnational corporations setting up camp all across the (so-called) Third World. Whether it be Nike, Wal-Mart, Monsanto, or any other taxpayer-subsidized bloodsucker, these crafty illegal aliens can’t be stopped by constructing a mere wall.

They travel with impunity… on the wings of government subvention and cunning, relentless propaganda. Thanks to decades of conditioning, even the victims of these soulless migrants will voluntarily pay for the right to wear a shirt bearing their corporate logo.

One would not be engaging in hyperbole to characterize these illegal invaders as “terrorists.” Forget color-coded alerts, staged arrests, and manufactured scares. Put aside those times you were forced to remove your shoes at the airport. As defined at Dictionary.com, “an overwhelming feeling of fear and anxiety” and/or an “intense, overpowering fear” characterize brand of the terror I speak of.

While the corporate media obscures the real terror and trains its focus on the latest battle between god’s country and ISIS (or whomever the villain of the day is), the primary conflict on the planet remains unchanged: globalization from above vs. globalization from below.

“Immigrants” like the World Trade Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and transnational corporations and “agreements” like the TPP are elements of a mutant form of remote control imperialism. The United States doesn't always have to send armies into other countries. It sends in Disney and McDonalds with the (usually) unspoken threat of military force backing them up.

Closing Thought: Globalization is not intrinsically a bad idea.

In fact, it’d be ideal if -- instead of exploitation, repression, and ecocide -- we were globalizing equity, solidarity, diversity, and environmental balance. As Arundhati Roy once declared: “In the present circumstances, I’d say that the only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”

Mickey Z from here

Nothing Will Change Until We Decide

The Sun King, Louis XIV of France, was born in September 1638. He dedicated his life to glorious wars against his neighbours.
During his reign two successive famines killed more than two million Frenchmen. The figure is known thanks to the mechanical calculator invented by Blaise Pascal half a century earlier. The cause, too, is known thanks to Voltaire who later wrote, 'Good policy relies on this secret: knowing how to let die of hunger the people who allow the rest of us to live.'

(amended from Eduardo Galeano's 'Children of the Days')

Sad to say that some things are very slow to change. With all the knowledge, science and technology available to us there is little commitment to put a stop to the numerous appalling events resulting in hunger happening around the world on a non-stop basis. Desperate hunger for millions every day, in countries both 'rich' and 'poor'. Although most citizens of the world would want to see an end of this, with governments tied ever tighter to the global capitalist system there is no possibility of reaching the ever-receding humanitarian 'goals' which are cynically updated every few years. 
Nothing will change until we decide, together, that the system must change in order for it to work for us all. That's what socialism is about.
JS

Farmers - A Dying Breed Heading For Extinction?

91 per cent of all farm households in the US rely on multiple sources of income. No farmer wants his children to take up farming in North America.

This is happening in a country where the Farm Bill 2014 makes a provision for $962 billion of federal subsidy support for agriculture for the next 10 years.

 In Europe, the situation is equally alarming. Despite 40 per cent of the European annual budget being devoted to agriculture, one farmer quits agriculture every minute. In Canada, the National Farmers Union has in a study shown that while the 70-odd agribusiness companies are raking in profits, farmers are the only segment of the food chain incurring losses. As I have been saying for long, more than 80 per cent of the agricultural subsidies in America and Europe actually go to agribusiness corporations.

Farmers are a dying breed. Writing in Newsweek magazine, Max Kutner says: “For decades, farmers across America have been dying by suicide at higher rates than the general population. The exact numbers are hard to determine, mainly because suicides by farmers are under-reported (they may get mislabelled as hunting or tractor accidents, advocates for prevention say) and because the exact definition of a farmer is elusive.” Well, what is happening in America is not an isolated development; farmers are dying across the globe.

According to news reports, nearly 80 per cent of the 2,800,000 rural people who take their own lives every year in China are victims of farm land acquisition. In India, almost 300,000 farmers have ended their lives since 1995. Again, like in the US, farmer suicides are also under-reported in India with some states now trying to hide them by shifting these deaths to some other categories. Even in Europe, which provides massive subsidy support under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the serial death dance continues unabated. In France, 500 suicides have been reported in a year. In Ireland, UK, Russia, and Australia farmers, are a dying breed.

In India, although we keep on saying that agriculture is the mainstay of the economy, in reality it isn’t. Employing some 52 per cent of the population, the share of agriculture in the country’s GDP has been progressively on the decline. It is less than 14 per cent now. I have been saying for long that small farmers have to get into multiple jobs to keep their chulas burning. Such is the pathetic state of Indian agriculture that some studies point to roughly 58 per cent farmers relying on MNREGA, which provides 100 days guaranteed employment.

Still worse, the people who feed the country actually sleep hungry themselves. More than 60 per cent go to bed hungry every night. Nothing can be a worse illustration of the great tragedy on the farm.

It’s not because of any unexplained natural calamity or the attack of a virus that the farms across the globe are dying. It is part of a global economic design to move farmers out of agriculture, and by doing so to shift food production into the hands of heavily subsidised and environmentally destructive agribusiness companies. It is generally believed that for any country to grow economically, the share of agriculture in the GDP must be brought down. In US, agriculture is only 4 per cent of its GDP. In India, it is less than 14 per cent now. By the end of 2020, I am sure it would be brought down to less than 10 per cent. Small scale agriculture is, therefore, deliberately being strangulated.

Such is the plight of Indian agriculture that in six years — from 2007 to 2012 — 3.2 crore (32 million) farmers have abandoned farming and moved into the cities looking for menial jobs. According to census 2011, every day 2,500 farmers quit agriculture. Some other studies have shown that roughly 50,000 people migrate from a village (and that includes farmers) into a town/city every day. As per a NSSO study, 42 per cent farmers want to quit if given an alternative.

In Punjab, which is the frontline agricultural state in the country, 98 per cent rural households are under debt. Studies have shown that the average outstanding debt per household is about Rs4.5 lakh per year which accounts for 96 per cent of the yearly income. If farming is in such a terrible state in Punjab, the state of affairs in the rest of the country can be well imagined.

In my understanding, the unwritten economic prescription is to make farming non-viable so that farmers are left with no other choice but to quit. In a quest to keep food prices low, which comes in very handy to freeze the minimum support price for farmers the predominant economic thinking supports large agribusiness conglomerates. This is being made much easier by the growing demand for amending the newly enacted land acquisition law. More and more land will now pass on into the hands of industry and real estate, forcing farmers to do menial jobs in the cities. The demise of the farmer therefore is predetermined. It’s only a matter of time before the farmer as a species goes extinct.

Devinda Sharma from here

 

Average Weekly Working Hours Well Over 40

Adults employed full time in the U.S. report working an average of 47 hours per week, almost a full workday longer than what a standard five-day, 9-to-5 schedule entails. In fact, half of all full-time workers indicate they typically work more than 40 hours, and nearly four in 10 say they work at least 50 hours.

The 40-hour workweek is widely regarded as the standard for full-time employment, and many federal employment laws -- including the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" -- use this threshold to define what a full-time employee is. However, barely four in 10 full-time workers in the U.S. indicate they work precisely this much. The hefty proportion who tell Gallup they typically log more than 40 hours each week push the average number of hours worked up to 47. Only 8% of full-time employees claim to work less than 40 hours.

These findings are based on data from Gallup's annual Work and Education Survey. The combined sample for 2013 and 2014 includes 1,271 adults, aged 18 and older, who are employed full time.

While for some workers the number of hours worked may be an indicator of personal gumption, for others it may be a function of their pay structure. Hourly workers can be restricted in the amount they work by employers who don't need or can't afford to pay overtime. By contrast, salaried workers generally don't face this issue. And, perhaps as a result, salaried employees work five hours more per week, on average, than full-time hourly workers (49 vs. 44, respectively), according to the 2014 Work and Education survey.
 

Another factor in lengthening Americans' work week is individuals taking on more than one job. According to past Gallup data, 86% of full-time workers have just one job, 12% have two, and 1% have three or more. However, even by restricting the analysis to full-time workers who have only one job, the average number of hours worked is 46 -- still well over 40.


read more here

Scotland's Referendum: Some Choice

Some choice

In recent days capitalists in Scotland have been coming out in favour of a YES or a NO in the coming referendum in Scotland. The split is revealing. It's more or less the same as in the UK over the EU, with smaller capitalist concerns catering for the home market favouring breaking away and bigger concerns producing for export favouring staying. From today's Times (29 August):

"Sir Brian Souter, chairman of Stagecoach, Ralph Topping, the former chief executive of William Hill, and Paddy Crerar, the founder of Crerar Hotels, were among those prepared to swing their entrepreneurial weight behind a "yes" vote on September 18.
Their push came just a day after 130 influential businessmen, including Douglas Flint, the chairman of HSBC, and Andrew Mackenzie, who runs BHP Billiton, signed a similarly firm No missive to The Scotsman, warning that the case for independence had still not been made."

As someone from Edinburgh University's School of Business explained:

"Professor MacKay said that his research suggested that business attitudes towards independence tended to be dictated by where their customers were primarily located."

So it's buses, hotels and betting shops versus international banks and mining companies. Consumer goods industries v producer goods industries. Big capitalists v smaller capitalists. Marx's Dept I v Dept II. Some choice.

Best for workers to abstain and leave the capitalists to settle the matter amongst themselves.

The World's Biggest 'Democracy' - Home To 28.5% Living In Destitution

The 2014 global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) by researchers at the University of Oxford covers 108 countries: 

31 Low-Income Countries, 67 Middle-Income Countries and 10 High-Income Countries. These countries have a total population of  5.4 billion people , some 78% of the world's population. 

The MPI assesses poverty at the individual level.  If someone is deprived in a third or more of ten weighted indicators, the global index identifies them as ‘MPI poor' , and  the extent – or intensity – of their poverty is measured by the number of deprivations they are experiencing . Those indicators are based on health, education and living standards and comprise the following factors: years of schooling, school attendance, levels of nutrition, child mortality, access to cooking fuel, sanitation (open defecation, for example), access to water, ownership of assets, access to electricity and flooring material (eg, dirt). 

Based on a rural-urban analysis,  of the 1.6 billion people identified as MPI poor, 85% live in rural areas . This is significantly higher than estimates of 70-75% in poverty, where income is used as the basis for determining poverty.

Poverty reduction is not necessarily uniform across all poor people in a country or across population subgroups. An overall improvement may leave the poorest of the poor behind.  The highest levels of inequality are to be found in 15 Sub-Saharan African countries and in  Pakistan ,  India ,  Afghanistan ,  Yemen  and  Somalia . 

The researchers have paid special attention to the situation of the destitute, or what they term the  poorest of the poor .  Over half of the world's poor are classed as destitute .    

Countries which have reduced MPI poverty and destitution the most in absolute terms were mostly Low Income and Least Developed Countries, with Nepal making the fastest progress. 

The situation in India

Eradicating poverty in India requires every person having access to safe drinking water, sanitation, housing, nutrition, health and education. According to the MPI, out of its 1.2 billion-plus population, India  is home to over 340 million destitute people  and is the second poorest country in South Asia after war-torn Afghanistan. Some 640 million poor people live in India (40% of the world's poor), mostly in rural areas, meaning an individual is deprived in one-third or more of the ten indicators mentioned above (malnutrition, child deaths, defecating in the open).

In South Asia, Afghanistan has the highest level of destitution at 38%. This is followed by India at 28.5%. Bangladesh and Pakistan have much lower levels. The study placed Afghanistan as the poorest country in South Asia, followed by India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal. 

 

taken from an excellent article here by Colin Todhunter

Certainly GDP has been soaring in recent years but that says nothing about the lives, livelihoods and living conditions of the vast majority of the country. It is a statistic relevant only to capitalists thinking of the bottom line and investment opportunities.

Workers Of The World - 2

Who Is The Real Enemy?

Here is a much condensed tale of farmers, family farmers growing soy beans, from the US and Brazil. It's taken from a long chapter in Raj Patel's 'Stuffed and Starved' about the many questions pertaining to a very contentious issue, that of agribusiness's role in the production of soy and the manufacture and distribution of the resultant products.

One family farmer from the US, Emelie Peine, who farms 400 acres in Up State New York took time out to visit farmers of similar or smaller sized farms in Brazil and subsequently discussed her findings with Patel. He summarises her observations thus 'the misconceptions of realities on both sides of the Panama Canal, north and south, seem systematic. US farmers find it easy to believe that all Brazilians are socially and ecologically corrupt slave drivers and Brazilian farmers believe their US counterparts to be suckled on taxpayer dollars' drawing attention to 'countless articles in farming periodicals of the US Midwest and Great Plains - - -and likewise fuelled in Brazil.'

The chapter reveals differences in approach in Brazil between the small family farmers who care about their land and want to have something to leave their children and the mega farms run by giant corporations. But, to home in on the Brazilian misconception about US farmers reaping big payouts from government subsidies, 'since the 1996 farm bill, rich farmers and corporations systematically received more than the majority of US farmers. The trend has continued: from 1996 to 2010 the top 10% of farms received 75% of total farm subsidy payments. The average annual payment to the top 10% is $30,751, while the bottom 80% receive only $587 per year and nearly two thirds of American farmers collected no subsidy payments at all in 2010.

Emelie Peine: 'It's not just that there are some farmers who need to understand each other better. But farmers need to understand why they're competing with each other. The thing that made me realize this most is that Cargill is not only the largest exporter of US soybeans but also the biggest exporter of Brazilian soybeans. So then what's the conflict of trade rules about? Farmers need to understand that every independent producer of tradable commodities in every country is being squeezed by the same companies – and that the root of the problem is the corporate structure of the global agricultural economy, not one country's subsidies or another's environmental practices.'

Some salient soy facts:

• Brazil's biggest soy producer is Blairo Maggi, former governor of Mato Grosso, with a 'family farm' of 350,000 acres, half of it under soy and with plans to triple its size by now.
• ILO estimates numbers of workers in conditions of slavery in Brazil as between 25,000-40,000, (Maggi's farm having been found to be one of them)
• Cargill, ADM and Bunge finance 60% of Brazilian soy production and own ¾ of all European processing facilities for whole bean exports from Brazil.

Although we recognise the realities of the huge problems faced by workers and the public in general from the enormous power wielded by multinational corporations, this is only one of many ongoing world problems and regular readers will be fully aware of SOYMB's position on who the real enemy is and that is the capitalist system itself.

Wealth Concentration - US

Access to wealth in the U.S. is very unequal, as recent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street (OWS) reminded us. Wealth can be measured as:
1. net worth: total assets less total debts; or
2. financial wealth: non-housing wealth such as stocks, bonds, retirement accounts, savings accounts.

In 2010:
1. the top 1% of wealth owners held more than 34% of net worth;
2. the top 1% of financial asset owners held more than 35% of financial wealth.

Wealth and Income
To better understand wealth concentration, it can be helpful to compare income and wealth ownership. In contrast to wealth (defined above), income refers to flows of money into the household as in wages, salaries, government transfer payments, and gifts.
An individual's religious participation and affiliation can have both direct and indirect effects on asset ownership and wealth accumulation. Cultural patterns that accompany religious participation often produce behaviors that in turn have consequences for wealth inequality.

from here


Figure 1: Religion and Median Net Worth

Data comes from the NLSY 1979 Cohort. Median 2007 net worth by childhood religion

from here

Searches for above sectors by % of total population show less than 3% Jewish.

 

For-Profit Universities Lack Advantage

For-profit universities lure students in with promises of an education.

However, it turns out most of them only deliver higher debt and worthless degrees. A new study by the organization CALDER found that graduates of for-profit universities have no better chance at getting an interview than people who never even went to college.
The researchers sent out about 9,000 fake resumes to businesses and found "little evidence of a benefit to listing a for-profit college relative to no college at all." Community college grads actually fared a little better off, but the authors of the study said that the difference was too small to draw a conclusion. However, these for-profit universities often charge students much higher tuition, and use private funding that excludes students from federal repayment assistance programs.

from here

The Ruling Elite

As if we needed to be told that our society is class-based.

Small elites, educated at independent schools and Oxbridge, still dominate top roles, suggests the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission study. Britain is "deeply elitist" because people educated at public school and Oxbridge have in effect created a "closed shop at the top". Elitism was so embedded in Britain "that it could be called 'social engineering'".


Those who had attended fee-paying or independent schools included:
71% of senior judges
62% of senior armed forces officers
55% of permanent secretaries (the most senior civil servants)
53% of senior diplomats.
50% of the House of Lords
45% of chairmen and women of public bodies
44% of the Sunday Times Rich List
43% of newspaper columnists
36% of the Cabinet
33% of MPs
26% of BBC executives
22% of the Shadow Cabinet

In sport, 35% of the England, Scotland and Wales rugby teams and 33% of the England cricket team also went to private schools.

This compares with 7% of the UK population as a whole.

Those who went to Oxford and Cambridge:
75% of senior judges
59% of the Cabinet
57% of permanent secretaries
50% of diplomats
47% of newspaper columnists
38% of the House of Lords
33% of the shadow cabinet
24% of MPs

Less than 1% of the whole population are Oxbridge graduates while 62% did not attend any university.

From here