Views on the News

THE BIG BUCKS BUSINESS                            

    Capitalism is a complex social system and nowhere more complicated than in the banking business. Recent criminal procedures have exposed such as currency fixing wrangles and the Libor scheme and we now learn that five banks have been collectively fined £2bn by UK and US regulators for failing to control business practices in foreign exchange trading operations. 

                             

    'HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss bank UBS and US banks JP Morgan Chase and Citibank have all been fined. A separate probe into Barclays is continuing. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the US regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)  issued the fines. Separately, the Swiss regulator, FINMA, has penalised UBS 134m Swiss francs.' (BBC News, 12 November) The fines follow a year-long investigation by regulators into claims that the foreign exchange market - in which banks and other financial firms buy and sell currencies between one another, was being rigged. 

                              

    Think how wasteful this social system is. Behind these high-powered organisations with the magic initials - such as FCA, CFTC and FINMA hundreds of highly trained accountants and lawyers will spend years acquiring all the necessary legal and financial skills to trip up their ducking and diving bankers. This is all necessary because of the the tremendous amount of wealth involved in banking.The massive market,in which $5.3 trillion worth of currencies are traded daily, dwarfs the stock and bond markets.                                            

    The FCA fined the five banks a total of £1.1bn, the largest fine imposed by it or its predecessor, the Financial Services Authority. The US regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission,  has fined the same banks a total of more than $1.4bn (£900m). The CFTC said its investigation found certain foreign exchange traders at the banks had coordinated their trading with traders at other banks to attempt to manipulate benchmark foreign exchange rates and all these massive scams occurred between 1 January 2008 and 15 October 2013.        

    'Earlier this year, FCA chief executive Martin Wheatley said that the currency rigging scandal was "every bit as bad" as the manipulation of Libor, the key global interest rate used to price loans, mortgages and set returns on investment products.Several senior traders have already been put on leave and the Serious Fraud Office is in the process of preparing potential criminal charges against those alleged to have masterminded the scheme.'                                          

    Inside a socialist society human beings won't have to waste their lives counting other peoples' money or perpetuating a cheating, lying, pernicious society based on private property. Banks like war, poverty and world hunger will just be a distant unpleasant memory of an out -dated system.

( BBC News, 12 Nov)                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

MARXLESS AND CLUELESS 

                                

    John Gray, political philosopher and author of False Dawn: The Decline of Global Capitalism has written an interesting essay on capitalism, entitled A Point Of View: Why Capitalism hasn't triumphed, but like most political philosophers he has got most it wrong.       

    'In boardrooms, banks and governments the belief has taken root that the advance of capitalism is irreversible. The market-based system that developed in the West has spread to nearly every country in the world. Central economic planning of the sort that existed in the former Soviet Union Mao's China no longer exists as a titled separate economic system.' (BBC News, 8 November) Gray doesn't hold to that view and rather strangely states the most likely upshot is that the future will be like the past, with the world containing a variety of economic systems. He concludes it won't be determined by some imaginary process of social evolution. It will be human decisions, interacting with the uncontrollable flow of events, which lead the world into an unknown future. Like most  philosophers he prefers vagueness to science.  

 

    The basic flaw in Gray's treatise is that he dwells at length on the works of the likes of Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)and completely ignores the works of Karl Marx. As he states the notion that societies and economies evolve isn't new. A version of the idea was presented by Spencer, a Victorian prophet of the unfettered free market whose far-fetched ideas somehow keep re-emerging. Spencer believed that different types of society competed with one another as species do in the natural world, and suggested that two types of society, which he called "militant" and "industrial", were competing in his own day. Spencer was sure the end-result of social evolution could only be that capitalism would prevail. It was only the rise of Bismarck in Germany and the outbreak of the Boer War, that Spencer began to suspect that militant societies might get the upper hand. Perplexed by the course of events, he spent his last years baffled.      

                                 

    The next red herring that Gray pursues is that of  Beatrice and Stanley Webb but they came up with a different notion of  social evolution. Shocked at the scale of poverty in London, Beatrice abandoned belief in laissez-faire and converted to a form of state capitalism that she wrongly described as socialism. She continued to believe that society was evolving - towards central planning. Along with her husband Sidney, she became an ardent admirer of Stalin's Russia and together they produced a book, The Soviet Union: A New Civilization. We all know what a disaster that turned out to be.     

                     

    Gray emphasises that the idea of social evolution still hasn't gone away, and in some quarters it's as strong as ever. He cites the Nobel Prize winning Austrian economist FA Hayek presenting an evolutionary theory similar to Herbert Spencer's when he said that capitalism would prevail because its productivity could support a larger human population than any alternative. Having blundered about trying to explain the development of capitalism and social evolution Gray does have at least one valid point about Darwinian evolution though.      

    "In fact there's nothing Darwinian about the idea of social evolution. The key feature of Darwin's theory is that evolution has no overall direction. As he put it in his Autobiography, there is no more design in natural selection than there is in "the course in which the wind blows". The evolution of species occurs as part of a process of drift, and the same would be true of societies if they also evolved. Evolution isn't going anywhere in particular, and all talk of societies evolving towards some common end-point - whether capitalism, communism or anything else - involves a basic misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution." (Ibidem)  

                                           

    There is nothing preordained about the development of society, but instead of pursuing the foolish notion that the future will be "a variety of economic systems" Gray would have been better pursing a basic examination of Marx's ideas instead of those of Spencer or Webb. The basic Marxist view of the development of society is that it goes through different systems that fundamentally could be classed as Primitve Communism, Chattel Slavery, Feudalism and Capitalism. We hold that the next social change will be one from Capitalism to Socialism. No matter how much we disagree with Gray on his analysis of social development we heartily agree with his conclusion. 'Whatever happens, it won't be determined by some imaginary process of social evolution. It will be human decisions, interacting with the uncontrollable flow of events, which lead the world into an unknown future.'

(Main source, BBC Online, 8 November)                                                                                        

SILICON SPOOKS               

 Capitalism is an astonishingly highly developed technological society but a socially primitive one. Based on competition rather than co-operation it leads to economic rivalry between nations that often leads to military conflict. Even inside a nation this economic rivalry takes place. Thus we have private firms  pursuing means of keeping their internal communications private whilst their government does everything possible to break their codes.  According to the Economist (8 November)

                                               

"Twenty years ago America's National Security Agency developed a special encryption chip for mobile phones, called Clipper, that came with a digital backdoor so spooks and police could listen in. It was meant as a compromise, but abandoned as the NSA and the FBI, at least outwardly, lost the "crypto wars" against a powerful coalition of internet activists and technology companies.  Most prominently, data on Apple's iPhones are now encrypted, with the owner holding the key, so that the firm will no longer be able to unlock the devices even if ordered to do so by a court. Such innovations were in turn partly a reaction to the revelations by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, which showed that the NSA and GCHQ had resorted to widespread digital surveillance.Since the underlying conflict ”the need to protect online privacy with strong encryption versus the authorities need to eavesdrop occasionally" was not resolved, it is now coming back with a vengeance.        

                                                                        

"On November 3rd Robert Hannigan, the new director of GCHQ, Britain's surveillance agency, accused social networks and other online services of becoming "the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals". The same day Michael Rogers, the NSA's new head, raised these questions in a speech in Silicon Valley, albeit in a less strident tone." The statements are a reaction to technology firms reinforcing their products and services with strong cryptography to keep or attract privacy-conscious customers."    Intelligence services and law enforcers certainly want access to communications and content in some cases, particularly to fight terrorism. But it would be a surprise if the NSA had not already found a way to tap, say, WhatsApp, a highly popular messaging service. What is more, the backdoors that agencies would like to see installed could also let  hackers get in too, not least those based in China,  A growing number of foreign firms are already avoiding American providers of cloud computing because they are worried that their data may be siphoned off by the NSA without them knowing about it. " (The full article is here )

Meanwhile commercial considerations run counter to government surveillance.Some sort of compromise between commercial and governments goals will probably be thrashed out. It will be done in secret of course in fact it may have already been done as we live in a secretive double-dealing society.  

                                                                                                                                  

The advance of technology inside capitalism is truly astonishing. 'There is more computer power in some of this years top Christmas toys than the first moon mission experts said. The 12 toys predicted to top children's wish lists feature the most advanced technology available. including voice recognition, photo  editing and video, while some connect directly to the internet and can be controlled via mobile apps and iPads.' (Daily Telegraph, 6 November) Despite these staggering advances this society cannot solve a simple problem like feeding the world's hungry or even providing clean water for millions of dying children - but then there is no profit in that.                

                                                                                                                                                                            

 R. Donnelly

(Glasgow branch)                                                           

  

Eco-Socialism - The Green Revolution

The following is an abridged and adapted version of an article by Richard Smith an economic historian and author of an up-coming book called  ‘To Save the Planet, Turn the World Upside Down’. The World Socialist Movement cannot fully agree with everything he says and actually would apply some of the criticisms he makes of Klein to himself, such as his belief that some sort of hybrid small-scale capitalism can survive alongside a socialized economy. Nevertheless he makes many pertinent observations that require repeating and deserving of a wider audience.

"The American way of life is not negotiable." George H.W. Bush, 1992 Climate Summit

Climate scientists are telling us that unless we suppress the rise of carbon dioxide emissions, we run the risk of crossing critical tipping points that could unleash runaway global warming, and precipitate the collapse of civilization and perhaps even our own extinction. These climate scientists warn that we're "running out of time," that we face a "climate emergency" and that unless we take "radical measures" to suppress emissions very soon, we're headed for a 4-degree or even 6-degree Celsius rise before the end of the century. And not just climate scientists have made warnings, but also mainstream authorities, including the World Bank, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and others. Yet despite the dire warnings and despite record heat and drought, super-storms and floods, and melting ice caps and vanishing glaciers, "business as usual" prevails. Industrialized and industrializing nations are ravenously looting the planet's last resources - minerals, forests, fish, fresh water, everything. If we don't stop looting the world's resources and poisoning the air, land and water with every manner of toxics, what kind of world are we going to leave to our children?

CLICK READ MORE FOR FULL ARTICLE

Cutting the cost of cancer treatment

Up to half the medicines available through the Cancer Drug Fund could be ruled too costly to be given to patients. 

Caitlin Palframan, senior policy manager, saying the emphasis for cost-effectiveness changes the nature of the Cancer Drug Fund. She said: “We're deeply concerned that several very effective breast cancer drugs appear on the list of drugs at risk of delisting due to their high price.

Prostate Cancer UK was concerned that the existence of the fund acted as a “perverse incentive” for the drugs companies to keep prices high because it reduced the pressure to make them affordable.

An average of £13,500 is spent on each of the 55,000 patients whose treatment has been funded by the scheme but some of the drugs cost much more. The most expensive is Kadcyla which costs £90,000 per patient. Patients already receiving drugs will continue to get them but new patients are likely to find the range of medicines available to them reduced. NHS England hopes the review will force pharmaceutical companies to reduce the costs of some of the drugs. Pharmaceutical companies have come under criticism recently for the price of some of the cancer drugs they produce and the charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer has launched a campaign to get them to set “fair prices”.

What is a 'fair' price for prolonging life or enhancing the quality of it during illness?

Potatoes and Palm Oil - Why Import When There's No Shortfall?

There has hardly been a year in memory when farmers have not thrown potato on the streets in protest against low prices. And yet, the government has allowed import of potato for the first time ever. While the official explanation is that the imports are to augment the domestic supplies and curb inflation, the fact remains that production of potato has been almost normal this year with an insignificant shortfall by a mere 2.3 per cent.

While the Ministry of Agriculture has directed Nafed to float tenders to ensure shipments reach by the end of November, potato crop from Punjab is expected to hit the market by the middle of November. The domestic market would be flooded by time the imports come in and I wouldn’t be surprised if farmers are once again forced to dump cartloads of potatoes on the highways. I therefore don’t understand the economic rationale of allowing the import of potato when there is hardly any drop in production. Experts say the Kharif crop has been good, and the winter crop that is expected in mid-November onwards is also expected to be normal. India is the third biggest producer of potato after China and Russia.

But then, under pressure from a strong lobby of economists, food inflation is coming in as a handy excuse to open up the Indian market for import of fruits, vegetables and milk products. This is exactly what European Union is demanding under ongoing negotiations of the bilateral Indo-European Union Free Trade Agreement.

The domestic potato chip, fries and flake industry is now pressing for removal of the 30 per cent import duty on potato to make the imports cheaper. Since Pakistan is not in a position to supply potato this year, and had resorted to duty-free potato imports continuously from India from March onwards with some 3,000 trucks crossing over daily from Wagah border, potato imports into India are expected mainly from Europe and Australia. The Economic Coordination Committee of Pakistan Cabinet has reportedly approved the duty-free imports of potato from India till Nov 15.

How irrational food imports destroy domestic production is evident from the way India deliberately encouraged edible oil imports at the cost of its millions of oilseed farmers. These were small holders in the dryland regions of the country for whom oilseeds was a cash crop. Their livelihood has been snatched for the sake of economic benefit to edible oil producers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil and United States.

It is true that edible oil import bill has multiplied over the past three decades. For the year ending 2012 (edible oil year is from Nov 2011 to Oct 2012, for instance), the imports touched 9.01 million tonnes valued at Rs 56,295-crore. Between 2006-07 and 2011-12, edible oil imports have risen by a whopping 380 per cent. Former Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar often used to stress on the need to increase oilseed production so as to reduce the edible oil imports.

But what was not being told was that India had attained near self-sufficiency in oilseeds production by 1994-95, importing only 3 per cent of its edible oil requirements. After 1994-95, the import tariffs were brought down systematically as a result of which the imports grew. Against a provision of 300 per cent import duties, India allows zero tariffs at resent. Imports are now more than 50 per cent of the domestic requirement. So much so, that after having destroyed its own Yellow Revolution, a strong lobby of economists has been battling for encouraging cultivation of  environmentally-destructive palm oil plantations.

Worldwatch Institute has shown how palm oil monoculture adds to desertification, and also exacerbates global warming by releasing 10 times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than tropical forests. Unmindful of the ecological damage, Ministry of Agriculture plans to bring in 1.03 million hectares of forests – mainly by cutting down lush green  forests in Mizoram, Tripura, Assam, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka – and growing palm oil plantation to produce about four to five tonnes of edible oil. The economic rationale is beyond my comprehension. First destroy the oilseed producers, and then cut down forests to produce edible oils. A remarkable model of development indeed ! 

from here by Devinder Sharma

 

Population Controllers Responsible For Killing Women

Rich country advocates of third world population reduction like to present their programs as benign efforts to offer humane support to poor women who want birth control pills or devices but can’t obtain them. It’s all about filling “unmet demand” they say. There may have been abuses in the distant past, but that’s behind us now.
But when we move from the liberal-sounding fundraisers in the North to actual activity in the South, very different pictures emerge. The population controllers are still  imposing their ideology on the very poorest women, denying them choice and control, and killing many.

In India, populationism is official government ideology, and campaigns to reduce the number of poor people are official government policy. Government programs pay per capita bounties to doctors who sterilize women en masse. Unsafe operations are performed by ill-trained doctors, using poor equipment in unsterile conditions. So-called health-care workers get just over $3 for each woman they persuade to be sterilized, creating a strong motivation for clinics to process large numbers as quickly as possible.
When birth control programs are motivated by population-reduction goals, the inevitable result is a focus on meeting numeric objectives and driving up the totals, regardless of the desires or needs of the ‘targets.’

Blackmail, bribery, and coercion target the very poorest women. In India today, women who agree to the operation are paid the equivalent of $23, which is more than most rural women earn in a month — if they can find work at all. As Kerry McBroom, director of the Reproductive Rights Initiative at the Human Rights Law Network in New Delhi, says, “The payment is a form of coercion, especially when you are dealing with marginalised communities.”

Yet another tragedy, caused by just such population reduction programs, is reported this week in the Guardian.

Eight women have died in India and dozens more are in hospital, with 10 in a critical condition, after a state-run mass sterilisation campaign went tragically wrong.
More than 80 women underwent surgery for laparoscopic tubectomies at a free government-run camp in the central state of Chhattisgarh on Saturday. Of these, about 60 fell ill shortly afterwards, officials in the state said. …
The Indian Express daily said the operations in Chhattisgarh were carried out by a single doctor and his assistant in about five hours.

The death-toll has since risen to ten, and 14 more women are reported to be in serious condition.
This is not an isolated incident. The health ministry admits to paying compensation for 568 deaths resulting from sterilization between 2009 and 2012, a figure that independent observers believe substantially understates the number of women who have actually died to help state officials meet arbitrary population quotas.

Similar programs, with similar results, have killed or maimed poor women on every continent. As David Harvey says, “Whenever a theory of overpopulation seizes hold in a society dominated by an elite, then the non-elite invariably experience some form of political, economic, and social repression.”

taken from here

 

What Changed In The Last 25 Years?

Every three years the Federal Reserve Board conducts a comprehensive survey on American household income and wealth. The latest edition of this Survey of Consumer Finances, with updates through 2013, appeared this past September.
Fed researchers do an official summary for each of these triennial surveys. But these summaries only skim the surface. Deeper insights on the Fed numbers have come from follow-up analyses by scholars like NYU economist Edward Wolff. They’ve dug deep into each SCF data dump and emerged with useful studies that go beyond the Fed’s initial summary.

These insightful analyses are now starting to emerge for the 2013 Fed data. The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, for instance, has just chimed in with a brief paper that tracks household net work by age group — and wealth level — for the quarter century since 1989.

This new CEPR paper essentially compares how Americans in the same age and economic cohorts have fared over recent years.
Let’s say you now fall in the “older prime-aged worker” cohort, the age 45-54 group. How does the wealth of you and your fellow older primes compare with the wealth, inflation-adjusted, that older primes held back in 1989?
Not particularly well. In 2013, the middle class of this age 45-54 cohort averaged $57,400 in net worth, not counting personal residences, a total well below the $74,600 that middle class 45-to-54-year-olds averaged back in 1989.

Authors David Rosnick and Dean Baker run the numbers for every age group from 18-34 to 65-74. The new Fed data, they sum up, reveal an “economy where the bulk of the benefits are going to those at the top of the income distribution.”

from here

Where did the aid go?

The story the media wishes us to believe as that the British involvement in the Afghan war was a mission for good. “We” brought progress for the well-being of the ordinary person. The British worker needs to be re-assured that all the money spent and the lives given made it all worth it.

 Afghanistan has been the world's leading recipient of development assistance as a percentage of its national income, with US$6.2 billion in 2012 alone. Yet that spending has focused on governance and security.

The most recent National Nutrition Survey - the first in the country since 2004 - released late last year, showed that over 40 percent of Afghan children under the age of five suffered from permanent stunting as a result of malnutrition, while 9.5 percent of children suffered from wasting.

The number of children with severe acute malnutrition had more than tripled from 98,900 in 2003 to 362,317, while the estimated number of pregnant and lactating women requiring nutrition interventions had nearly doubled to 246,283. Acute malnutrition typically kills more quickly than chronic malnutrition, which is the world's leading cause of preventable mental disability.

 Under the country's Basic Package of Health Services (BPHS) healthcare system, international NGOs act as contractors to take on the basic provision of health services in a given district. As the Afghan government has faced financial cutbacks the BPHS budget has decreased, undermining malnutrition outreach programmes. In one province, the monthly budget per patient for all services dropped from 7 euros up to 2013 to 4.7 euros per patient per year in 2014, according to a report from ACF.

"The contract has a set amount of money per patient and the nutrition amount is too small to be useful as it doesn't allow for any outreach work to take place," Mark Bowden, the UN Secretary-General's Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan and the Humanitarian Coordinator for the country. "So essentially nutrition has been ignored within the health system."

 "Poverty is the key issue here. Poverty and ignorance - it can be a vicious cycle," said Homayoun Zaheer, head of the Jalalabad hospital.

Franck Abeille, country director at Action Against Hunger (known by its French acronym ACF) said "When you meet donors they say: 'one year is perfect, let's move forward.' When you suggest three or four years they say: 'I am not sure we can find the funds.' So next year we come back with the same problem."

Claude Jibidar, country director at the World Food Programme, said that one route he was pushing for is to fortify wheat - the staple of the Afghan diet - potentially with government subsidies.  "A lot of the micronutrient deficiencies would be immediately dealt with," Jibidar said. "You fortify with a pack of minerals and vitamins dealing with anaemia, iron, vitamin A and vitamin D deficiencies." "People say it has an effect on the price - I am told it would cost about $4-5 dollars additionally per kilo. Even if it is 10 times that the benefit is worth it," he added.Yet such a scheme, while potentially making older Afghans healthier, would only have a limited impact on the youngest.

From here

Does capitalism really work?

Eight hundred and five million of the world's people are chronically hungry, according to estimates by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

But this figure represents only a fraction of the world's population whose lives have been blighted by a lack of adequate nutrition.

Malnutrition is believed to be the underlying cause of death for 2.6 million children annually. At least two billion people do not get enough of the micronutrients – vitamins, minerals and trace elements – essential for their cognitive and physiological development, especially during early childhood.

As a result, a quarter of the world's children – the number rises to a third in developing countries – are 'stunted'. They are unlikely to reach their full physical or intellectual potential and are vulnerable to disease due to compromised immune systems. Today, about 170 million children under five are stunted. Four in five of these malnourished children are to be found in just twenty countries. Almost half of Indian children under five are stunted. In Nigeria, over half of the poorest children are stunted, while in China, children in poor rural counties are six times more likely to be stunted than urban children. In Indonesia, a sharp rise in 'wasting' – or acute malnutrition – in the wake of recent food crises has hit children from the poorest households hardest.

Meanwhile, over one and a half billion people are overweight, with over half a billion deemed obese, and hence, more vulnerable to diet-related non-communicable diseases.

From here 

A Poignant Sample From The 11th Day

  (Photo: Jon Bunting;)

As we parade and display poppies in remembrance of the armistice that ended World War I, the war to end all wars, I am reminded of the last stanza of the timeless poem "In Flanders Fields."

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high. 

If ye break faith with us who die 

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow 

In Flanders fields.

John McCrae

Parades and displays of poppies accomplish nothing save to allow the multitude, those who make war easily or ignore completely its insanity and horror, to feign support and appreciation for the sacrifices of the few, those who do the killing and the dying. In reality, parades and displays of poppies are a designation of the few as the purveyors of death and destruction, and a proclamation by the multitude of their status as observer and hence, their innocence, an ablution of culpability and guilt for immoral war and crimes against humanity.
Parades and displays of poppies neither educate nor inform about the nature of war. Rather, they celebrate and perpetuate the myth of honor and glory, encourage war amnesia and provide veterans a false refuge from confronting the realities of their experiences on the battlefield, making healing more difficult if not impossible - 22 veterans commit suicide each day. Just as tragic, parades and displays of poppies inspire and encourage young people to enlist in the military and to become the future cannon fodder and instruments of slaughter for those criminals who benefit and profit from perpetual war.

 continue here for more war poetry and short videos

Capitalism Continues To Subsidise Climate Disaster

Despite pledging in 2009 to phase out public subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, G20 countries have disregarded those promises and are currently spending $88 billion a year in taxpayer money to fund the discovery of new gas, coal, and oil deposits around the world, according to a new report published Tuesday by the Overseas Development Institute and Oil Change International.

The report, titled The Fossil Fuel Bailout: G20 Subsidies for Oil, Gas and Coal Exploration (pdf), found that those explorations risk devastating consequences for world economies and the rapidly warming planet alike. And at $88 billion a year, those states are spending more than double on finding new regions to drill than the top 20 private oil and gas companies—largely with taxpayer money.
As existing wells dry up, discovering new reserves in more remote areas has become costly. In 2013, the world's top 20 oil and gas companies invested just $37 billion in exploring reserves of oil, gas and coal.

"G20 governments' exploration subsidies marry bad economics with potentially disastrous consequences for climate change," write report authors Elizabeth Bast, Shakuntala Makhijani, Sam Pickard and Shelagh Whitley. "In effect, governments are propping up the development of oil, gas and coal reserves that cannot be exploited if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change."
Those countries are creating what the report terms a "triple-lose" scenario: investing financially in high-carbon assets that may cause catastrophic climate effects; diverting potential funds for low-carbon energy alternatives like solar, hydro, and wind power; and undermining prospects for an effective, large-scale climate deal next year.

"The scale at which G20 countries are subsidizing the search for more oil, gas and coal—through national subsidies, investment by state-owned enterprises and public finance for exploration—is not consistent with agreed goals on the removal of fossil fuel subsidies or with agreed climate goals, and is increasingly uneconomic," the report states.
The 2009 pledge, known as the Copenhagen Accord, recognizes that any increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius. But the accord was non-binding—and some of its authors, including the United States, Brazil, and China, are among the biggest financial backers of global fossil fuel exploration. Keeping global temperature increases within 2 C would require leaving almost two-thirds of those untapped reserves in the ground.
"Without government support for exploration and wider fossil-fuel subsidies, large swathes of today’s fossil-fuel development would be unprofitable," the report states. "Directing public finance and consumer spending towards a sector that is uneconomic, as well as unsustainable, represents a double folly... Globally, subsidies for the production and use of fossil fuels were estimated at $775 billion in 2012."

The U.S. has become the world's largest producer of both oil and natural gas, surpassing even Saudi Arabia and Russia. It spends more than $6 billion annually on domestic and foreign fossil fuel exploration projects, mostly through tax deductions, and Congress has rejected every plan to repeal those breaks since President Barack Obama took office, the report notes.
But the Obama administration "also champions the current oil and gas boom as the centerpiece of its ‘All of the Above’ energy strategy, which has been the major driver of the increase in fossil fuel subsidy values," according to the report. And some of the world's largest oil and gas companies, like Exxon-Mobile, Chevron, and BP, "are likely to be benefiting the most from exploration subsidies."

The exact size of this public support is hard to confirm, however, because specific subsidies to individual companies are considered "confidential tax information" in the U.S.
According to the report, every dollar of renewable energy subsidies brings back $2.5 in investments, compared to $1.3 brought by every dollar in fossil fuel subsidies.
"Despite the widespread perception that renewables are costly, our research reveals that finding new fossil fuel reserves is costing nearly $88 billion in exploration subsidies across the G20," Whitley said. "Scrapping these subsidies would begin to create a level playing field between renewables and fossil fuel energy."

 from here

Choices? - Capitalism? Barbarism? Socialism?  


 

Leaving the old to go hungry

More than one million older people in the UK are malnourished says the British Association for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition.

A third of all UK councils have scrapped ‘meals on wheels’ services to their elderly and vulnerable residents due government to spending cuts

Half of all local authorities in the UK expect even further service reductions in the year ahead because social care budgets are being tightened and funding is being slashed, according to the National Association of Care Catering. Community meals are not a statutory local government requirement, which means they are at risk of being cut as councils try to save money and focus on services they are legally obliged to provide.

The total number of meals provided by UK meals on wheels services and lunch clubs has dropped from 40 million to 19 million meals over the past ten years.

The NACC National Chair, Neel Radia, said: “The abolition of community meals services is incredibly short-sighted and cuts a lifeline for many older people who can face social isolation and loneliness.”

Dot Gibson, General Secretary of the National Pensioners Convention, says meals on wheels are a cost-effective lifeline for tens of thousands of older people. “But it’s not just about the food. It’s about the personal contact, relationships and the wider benefit that the service brings by keeping in touch with people and maintaining their wellbeing.”

An Obscene Photo

Get them when they are young

Workers struggle to save

The poorest 20 percent of British households have not been able to save any money since 2002 and are likely to be stuck without "potential savings" until the next decade, a report by the Post Office called Future of Savingswhich was compiled by the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

The study revealed that the poorest families in the UK will have spent this year an average of £1,910 more than they have earned.

Henk Van Hulle, the Post Office head of savings and investments, said Britain’s poorest households are to remain in deficit without any ability of boosting their savings until 2020. “We are still in the midst of a savings crunch for a significant number of people – made all the more worrying as their outgoings continue to outstrip their income,” said Hulle.

In addition, the report said the amount of money available for UK families to save, the so-called “potential saving,” is set to fall for the foreseeable future, amid rising cost of living.

On average this year, British households are expected to have £3,630 available to save this year; however, by the end of 2018 the amount will fall to £2,944, a decline of 33 percent. Furthermore, the report found that the savings gap between Britain’s richest 20 percent and the poorest 20 percent of households stands at more than £20,000 a year. The research indicated that the savings gap would shrink in the next couple of years; however, this was not due to poor families becoming better off but because wealthier households are choosing to save less and spend more.

One planet - One people

The European Court of Justice has said member states are within their rights to refuse to give financial help to unemployed EU citizens who move to that country just to claim benefits. It said the right of EU citizens to live and work in other member states - the principle of freedom of movement - did not stop states passing legislation of their own excluding migrants from some non-contributory benefits open to their citizens. The EU directive thus seeks to prevent economically inactive European Union citizens from using the host member state's welfare system to fund their means of subsistence. The ruling only applies to non-contributory benefits, benefits where the claimant does not make a contribution through the tax system. The UK government has already tightened the rules so EU migrants have to wait three months after arriving in the country before they can claim child benefit and child tax credits. Migrants are also barred from claiming jobseeker's allowance after three months if they are not looking for work. Cameron has said he wants to go further.  The court ruling will have wide-ranging implications for how the UK can tighten its welfare system.  Labour also backed the judgement, saying only people who contribute to the economy should be able to fall back on the welfare state. “The ruling reaffirmed the principle of free movement”, said the German Green party parliamentary leader Anton Hofreiter. “It also reaffirmed that people who are prepared to look for work across Europe have a right to draw social benefits”.

A rally was held recently protesting “scapegoating” of the immigrants. The protesters marched to the door of Harmondsworth Detention Centre, where asylum seekers are detained in facilities equal to a high-security prison. The privately-run detention center is the largest one in Europe. Many of the protesters were immigrants who had spent time in detention centers.

“It’s a very racist policy to blame immigrants for the problems. It’s about divide and rule. But in reality…the real motivation from the government is they don’t have any hope for the future of this country,” explained Antonia Bright of the grassroots campaign group Movement for Justice. “They want to cut everyone and the best way to do it is to push the blame in one direction and blame immigrants”.

The reason why Britain (and much of the rest of the world) has been economically devastated has more to do with the City of London and Wall St than Eastern Europeans sweating in back- breaking work backs in the fields and food factories of East Anglia. But the former have much better PR departments. And better lawyers. And, in the end, politicians don’t argue with big money for long. The poor, the vulnerable and the defenceless  – especially those who do not share the same language or customs or religion – have always been a convenient scapegoat for a society’s various ills. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

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A TACTICAL EXTRACTION (a poem)

A TACTICAL EXTRACTION

Retired British Army Officers now admit that in

Afghanistan they were understaffed, under equipped

and had little idea of their objective. The Army’s

withdrawal is officially, “A tactical extraction”.

“A tactical extraction” to,  

Be somewhat indiscreet;

Is not so much a victory,      

But more of a defeat.       

The one objective understood,

To crush the poppy trade;

Was for expediency’s sake, (1)

Indefinitely delayed.

And profits from the opium,

(Although always denied)

Financed some who supposedly,

Were on the Western side. (2)

And this year in Afghanistan,

Despite much ‘do or die’;

The Helmand drug crop reached new heights,

In a new record ‘high’.

Thus poppy seeds aplenty for,

The bastards who have lied;

And poppy wreaths aplenty for,

The poor sods who have died. (3)

(1) Western troops took little action against poppy

farmers to avoid driving them to support the Taliban.

(2) Supposedly friendly local warlords and Afghan officials, as well

as the Taliban, profited from drug sales. Ex-President Karzai’s

assassinated half-brother was suspected of such corruption.

(3) Much is made of the death of 453 British soldiers

but not of the twenty thousand Afghans who’ve died

--many of whom perished as ‘collateral damage’.

© Richard Layton

Low incomes

Wages as a share of UK GDP have fallen by around 10 percentage points since 1973. And we’re now in the seventh straight year of falling real wages.

A single-person household someone earning £33,000 would be in the top third. And a £60,000 salary puts you in the top 10% of earners. So only one person in three will earn more than £30k or its future equivalent; and as for a six-figure salary, it’s a dream only 2% or 3% of people are ever going to realise.

Engelbert Stockhammer, professor of economics at Kingston University, last year using all available data on falling wage shares for 71 countries. He found that over a 10-year period, for the advanced countries, the biggest driver by far was this phenomenon dubbed “financialisation”.
It’s a complex process: first, companies become driven by the short-term demands of shareholders, or by debt-finance takeovers and their only option is to slash wage costs.
Next the composition of the economy shifts – from the factories and heavy industry of the 1970s and 80s to the distribution centre and call-centre work that is common now. Trade union bargaining power is eroded – and this was the aim of both Thatcher and Blair – and the current system of individual secret salaries and precarious jobs is imposed. Finally, to sugar the pill, you can live on the lower wages because credit is endlessly available. From mobile phones to new cars, to overdrafts, capitalism is now structured to turn every consumer into a financial income stream. Long before you bought your gym membership, the gym itself had sold the projected income into the financial markets, to be traded against other streams of interest. When the entire system is based on credit, there is no incentive to call time on anybody. Though everybody railed at Wonga, which mis-sold credit to hundreds of thousands of the poorest people, nobody asked: who benefited? The answer was, of course, the other creditors of the poor: the buy-to-let landlord, the car-loan company, the bank, the arrears-collecting local council. The Wonga lifestyle is to borrow short-term to service long-term debts: financially illogical, but the system is stacked in favour of the lender.

Only one in four workers who were low-paid a decade ago managed to move on to higher pay, says social mobility study showing the extent to which low-paid workers in the UK stay trapped in poverty.  Fewer than one in five workers in the hospitality sector manage any serious pay progression. The findings come in a report by the thinktank the Resolution Foundation commissioned by the government commission on social mobility.

Alan Milburn, the chairman of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, said: “The majority of Britain’s poorest paid workers never escape the low-pay trap. Too many simply cycle in and out of low-paying jobs instead of being able to move up the pay ladder. Any sort of work is better than no work but being in a job does not guarantee a route out of poverty.”

According to latest figures, fraud accounted for just 70p out of every £100 spent on benefits last year but the public perception of fraud is 34 times higher than the reality.
15% of those receiving benefits say they have experienced verbal abuse as a result, while 4% report having been physically abused – this amounts to almost 800,000 and 200,000 people respectively. A further 16% say they’ve had difficulty renting a home, while 18% say they’ve been treated less favourably by a potential employer.

IMAGES OF INEQUALITY

In the world today, you can’t get much more unequal than Hong Kong, a city that hosts 45 billionaires and home prices over twice as unaffordable to average families as residences in New York. How tight has Hong Kong’s squeeze become? Billionaire Li Ka-Shing’s development company is now marketing to Hong Kong’s beleaguered middle class condos that stretch all of 177 square feet, not all that much bigger, the South China Post helpfully points out, than the size of a typical solitary confinement cell in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison. Only $232,861 each.

from here

A Runaway Transfer of Wealth to the Super-Rich

Our national wealth has grown by an astonishing $30 trillion since the recession, but most of it has gone to people who were already wealthy.

We are living through a massive redistribution of America's net worth to the beneficiaries of a financial industry that has used cunning and money and power to impose their version of economic "freedom" while deregulating any policies that might have stopped the incessant transfer of wealth.

It's getting worse, by the year and by the month. President Obama's claim that "We've recovered faster and come farther than almost any other advanced country on Earth" applies largely to the people whose wealth accumulation has dramatically pulled up the averages. The evidence is staring us in the face, but the super-rich are only watching their portfolios.


1. Kochs and Waltons Took $6.6 Billion of National Wealth -- In Less Than Two Months

We live in a society that allows great portions of its national wealth to go to people who pollute our air and water while blocking any attempts to change their dirty business; or to people who pay their workers so little that average citizens have to use their tax money to provide food.

The 2014 Forbes 400 list came out in mid-September. Since then, in less than two months, the four Waltons made $4.8 billion dollars, and the Koch brothers made $1.8 billion dollars.

$6.6 billion is enough to pay the total food stamp benefits for all 48 million recipients for an entire month.

Warren Buffett made 3.3 billion dollars in less than two months. He may not stir up our passions like the Kochs and the Waltons, but according to a 2011 New York Post story, his company, Berkshire Hathaway, "openly admits that it owes back taxes since as long ago as 2002."


2. 43 People (It Was 47 Last Month) Own As Much As Half of America

It was recently reported that just 47 individuals in the U.S. own more than all 160 million Americans (about 60 million households) below the median wealth level of about $53,000.

But Forbes keeps building up the numbers. As of November 8, 2014 just 43 individuals own as much as the bottom half of America, based on the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook (GWD).

We're drawing closer to the day when the first trillionaire will be 'worth' half of us.


3. American Exceptionalism: $50 Million a Year

They certainly don't want to advertise their good fortune, but 12,000 families around the country have been pulling in anywhere from $40 million to $60 million a year from their post-recession investments. Over 100,000 families have made $4 million per year.

These are incomprehensible numbers for hard-working people for whom wages have nearly flatlined in recent years. The visual evidence is unmistakable, and the next little-mentioned fact makes it clear that wealth is being drained from the middle class...


4. The Median American Net Worth Is Further from the Top Than in Any Other Country except Russia

The numbers are here, and the meaning is that American wealth has been sucked away from the middle to a greater extent than in any major country except Russia.

A revealing study from the Russell Sage Foundation found that:

-----Median wealth has dropped, stunningly, by 43 percent since 2007

-----Only the richest 10% of the country gained wealth since 2003


Are We Helpless?

The "Billion Dollar a Month Club" isn't new, as several Forbes 400 members have averaged close to a billion a month in recent years. But the club is issuing golden tickets as the stock market climbs to new heights.

The rest of us own a smaller and smaller share of a nation that we, and our ancestors before us, all helped to build. Unprincipled members of business and government have taken away the financial regulations and progressive taxes that once protected the majority of Americans. It has been argued that a Financial Speculation Tax might be the best approach to stop the wealth transfer carnage. We have to do something. The splitting of our society is nearly beyond repair.

from here

Can we please stop crying for crumbs from the table? The working people are the ones who produce all the wealth after all. With the means of production and the common wealth within our hands collectively and democratically we have the ability to provide for everyone's needs without recourse to managing money and playing silly financial games. Time to spread the understanding of worldwide socialism.
JS

Can It Really Be Illegal To Be Homeless?

Last week, the city council of Manteca, CA unanimously passed two ordinances aimed at clearing out the homeless population.

One will ban people from sleeping or setting up encampments on any public or private property as of December 4, although the homeless won’t be jailed or fined. It will, however, allow the police to tear down any homeless sleeping areas as soon as they appear without having to be invited by the property owner, as was the case previously.

Explaining why the ordinance is necessary, Police Chief Nick Obligacion said, “The goal is actually to correct the wrong. So, if the correction is them leaving Manteca, then that’s their choice.” He also opposes any sort of shelter for the homeless.

The other ordinance bans public urination and defecation, but also comes after the city temporarily closed public restrooms in a park, a location often used by the homeless to relieve themselves in private.
Manteca is only the latest American city to respond to the problem of mass homelessness by criminalizing it. In 187 cities across the country, there has been an uptick in every kind of ordinance aimed at making it illegal to be homeless, such as banning people from lying down or having possessions with them as in Fort Lauderdale, FL; prohibiting people from sitting or lying down on sidewalks, such as in Honolulu, HI; or making it illegal to sleep in public, such as in Palo Alto, CA.
 Manteca’s ban on encampments is widespread, as 34 percent of cities have bans on camping in public, a 60 percent increase from 2011.
Some have even made it illegal to help the homeless: 13 cities have restricted where people can give them food, and one 90-year-old man in Fort Lauderdale has been arrested for doing just that. And others look as if they are trying to simply ship the homeless elsewhere, as in Waikiki, HI, where 120 homeless people will be given one-way plane tickets to the mainland, or San Diego, CA, which considered giving them one-way bus tickets.

HOWEVER:
Cities that have actually ended homelessness take a very different approach. Phoenix, AZ and Salt Lake City, UT have both ended chronic homelessness among veterans using a “housing first” approach that aims to get the homeless into a home before addressing other issues like mental illness, addiction, or job training. In fact, if the country either gave everyone who needed it adequate rental assistance and/or built enough affordable housing to fill the 5.5 million unit shortage, it could effectively end homelessness once and for all.

from here with links

The final paragraph is evidence of what can be done when there is the will to do it within the current system; however what we can observe from within that system is that conditions imposed by various authorities around the country are actually dead set against any kind of leniency towards or empathy for anyone who is having to live on the streets or even for any citizen who personally chooses to do their own bit in support of such homeless individuals. 
Roll on socialism when housing will be available for all as part of our fundamental principles.
JS

 

The People Left Behind

When a natural disaster strikes, people are sometimes left with no choice but to leave the areas affected. Yet, for some, even this option might not exist. When a natural disaster strikes, people are sometimes left with no choice but to leave the areas affected. Yet, for some, even this option might not exist. In its report, published in 2011 by the Foresight think tank at the U.K. Government Office for Science, the authors warned that “in the decades ahead, millions of people will be unable to move away from locations in which they are extremely vulnerable to environmental change.” Inhabitants of small island states living in flood-prone areas or near exposed coasts. People in these areas might not have the means to address these hazards and also lack the resources to migrate out of the islands. The situation where individuals, families, and indeed entire communities, find themselves unable to move out of harm’s way is not unique to the effects of climate change – it can be other natural hazards such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions or human-induced crises like armed conflict. The international community’s response to people moving in the face of such crises is most often based on giving them a status, such as “internally displaced persons”, “asylum seekers” or “refugees”.

“People around the world are more or less mobile, depending on a range of factors,” argues Prof Richard Black from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, “but they can become trapped in circumstances where they want or need [to move] but cannot.”According to Black, “it is most likely to be because they cannot afford it, or because there is no social network for them to follow or job for them to do…or because there is some kind of policy barrier to movement such as a requirement for a visa that is unobtainable, in some countries even the requirement for an exit visa that is unobtainable.” For the most vulnerable, climate change could mean double jeopardy – first, from worsening environmental conditions threatening their livelihood, and second, from the diminished financial, social and even physical assets required for moving away provoked by this situation.

One such example, says Black, is the drought in the 1980s in Africa’s Sahel region, when there was a decrease in the numbers of adult men who chose to migrate – the same people who would otherwise leave the area. “Under drought conditions they were less able to do so because that involves drawing on your assets – in the Sahel often assets would be livestock – and the drought kills livestock, which means you can’t convert livestock into cash, and then you can’t pay the smuggler or afford the cost of the journey that would take you out of that area.”

In Guatemala, researchers found that relatively isolated mountain communities could also be facing the risk of becoming stranded by climate change. According to a study published earlier this year, irregular rainfall could be posing a serious threat for the food security and sources of income of communities in the municipality of Cabricán who rely on subsistence rain-fed agriculture.

Hurricane Katrina, which hit the south-east of the United States in 2005, offered a vivid example when the New Orleans’ Superdome housed more than 20,000 people over several days. “That was to do with the fact that an evacuation plan had been designed with the idea that everybody would leave by car, but essentially there were sections of the population that didn’t have a car and were not going to leave by car, and also some people who didn’t believe the messages around evacuation,” says Black. “And those people who were trapped in the eye of the storm were then more likely to be displaced later – so they were more likely to end up in one of the trailer parks, the temporary accommodation put on by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

In the Mekong delta in southern Vietnam, researchers foresee climate change contributing to floods, loss of land and increased soil salinity. Facing these hazards, local residents in an already impoverished region could find themselves unable to cope, and also unable to move away.

“It would generally be income and assets that will determine whether people can stay where they are or need to relocate,” says Dr Christopher Smith from the University of Sussex, who is currently conducting a European Community-funded project assessing the risk of trapped populations in the Mekong delta.

From here

Plenty for all the world - plus some

 Factoid - The entire world’s population, organised in family units of four with a quarter-acre block each, would fit into Queensland with room to spare.

Food production and distribution is not governed by how many mouths there are to feed, but rather by market forces. Under capitalism food is often left to rot or dumped in the ocean if it cannot be sold at a profit. If food production and distribution was planned and distributed in the interests of people, rather than profit, the Planet Earth if need be could easily sustain a population of many billions more.

Join the dots marked out by the Malthusians and you draw an ugly picture of a world where those blamed for environmental problems are not those who do most to cause them, but those who suffer most from their consequences. The birth rate in Mali is 6.29 births per woman.
In the USA it is 2.1. So, if the problem is population, then Mali is where we should start to point our fingers.But let’s look at another statistic: the average person in Mali is responsible for 0.06 tonnes of CO2 per year. The average person in the USA is responsible for 17. So, the average person in the USA is responsible for about 283 times more carbon than the average person in Mali. To put it another way, the average Mailian family is responsible for 1/136th of the carbon of the average American family. In this context, complaining about another Malian baby seems foolish.  if we aspire to a world where Malians have a better quality of life than they do now, then they will each use more resource. And so this will only be possible with a lower population. And largely, they are wrong. It is possible for a society to live well and use less of the world’s finite resources. It just isn’t possible under the current economic system (capitalism).

1. 10 percent of the world’s population, around 700 million people, are responsible for over half of the world’s consumption.
2. The poorest 40 percent consume less than 5 percent of resources.
3. The poorest 20 percent, around 1.4 billion people, consume less than 2 percent.
If the poorest billion people were magically removed there would be hardly any change to global resource consumption. If though the standard of living of the richest 700 million people was reduced to the global average, resource use and pollution would be cut in half.

Talking about population serves to shift blame from the the capitalist system and onto those who are least to blame And when we shift the blame onto poor black people, we are perpetuating white power and the racism in our society. And it shifts the blame on to women. You are not empowering women to have more control over their reproduction if you pre-define the outcome of their family planning. This is like telling people they have democracy so long as they vote for you. It may be that fewer children is what women would choose. But we should give them control over their fertility because they ought to have that control – if they want fewer children, or if they want more. This world props up its racism and its sexism by encouraging us to blame the victims of oppression for the problems they face. Once you point a finger, you can’t control the direction people look.  The population question is a reminder of how concern about the environment does not automatically lead to socially progressive proposals.

The World Socialist Movement is all in favour of giving poor people contraception but our means of  supporting women is to offer free access to all the resources they need to take control of their fertility.

Limiting population growth doesn’t solve any of the world’s environmental and human problems. China’s one-child policy has resulted in huge numbers of biologically female babies being abandoned, aborted or put up for adoption because their patriarchal society favours men. Their one-child policy has also done nothing to limit China’s environmental footprint, which has been growing rapidly even with a stable population.  China’s greenhouse gas emissions are up nearly 200% since the year 2000 in spite of a controlled population. Limiting population growth is a complete red herring.

There might, we suppose, be a theoretical point at which it would be impossible to feed the people on Earth. But we aren’t anything like there. Hunger is an issue of distribution, and of inefficient usage (ie using crops as fodder for animals so people like me can eat meat). The problem is the economic system. Highlighting over-population as the main problem as opposed to those directly linked o those who own and control our economy perpetuates the power structures on which the system depends, and so ultimately do more harm than good – through both the direct harm of the victim blaming oppression, and by deflecting attention from the core issues. Current global problems such as poverty and shortages of food have nothing to do with population. They are caused by capitalism. The latter is due to speculation and distribution not actual shortage. In practice, no famine ever has been the result of a shortage of food, the problem is they can’t afford to,  the problem is poverty – and therefore capitalism is the cause. We could easily feed the world – and many more – with current global food production. Capitalism works by maximising resource use. If there is a capitalist system, and half the population we have now, we would still have all of the problems we have now: resources would still be used to the maximum. For as long as this is true, why talk about population?

The point of combating climate change is to preserve a planet that is able to support high levels of evenly distributed human well-being. Any intended means to that end that do not explicitly challenge existing inequalities in wealth and power — or worse still, fortify those global inequalities by simply following a path of least resistance — are necessarily self defeating.  Doing things about population in our current economic system will only perpetuate the problems we face.

Fred Magdoff in ‘Global Resource Depletion: Is Population the Problem?’ (Monthly Review, January 2013) makes the point that “we are forced to conclude that when considering global resource use and environmental degradation there really is a ‘population problem.’ But it is not too many people – and certainly not too many poor people – but rather too many rich people living too ‘high on the hog’ and consuming too much. Thus birth control programs in poor countries or other means to lower the population in these regions will do nothing to help with the greater problems of global resource use and environmental destruction.”

There are indications that sustaining nine billion people on the planet under capitalism may be problematic, but that tells you nothing about how many people could live sustainably under a different system such as socialism. The real issue is not about the numbers of people we want to see but what type of economic system we need.

Adapted from here

What is on the menu?

The World Socialist Movement does not hold an official position on what people should eat or wear. Some members are vegetarians or vegans, but others are not. We have never seen a reason to take a stand on this issue as a party, however strongly some individual members may feel. Whether you may be a meat-eater, vegetarian or vegan will not determine your socialist credentials. Without a global revolution in the way society collectively owns and controls its resources people are never going to get the luxury of choice over this or any other resource question. Unless and until the welfare and humane treatment of humans is first attended to the question of the ethical treatment of animals must remain an issue waiting for its moment.  The advocacy of animal rights needs to become part of a wider movement that challenges the economic system and all its accompanying hierarchies, domination and exploitation.

But we do think that when we reach a socialist society this topic will quickly be raised to the forefront of discussions on how we produce our food to feed the world. We do not need to eat meat or animal products in order to live, therefore we may choose not do so. Vegetarianism is not sufficient, since the production of both milk and eggs involves cruelty (e.g. cows must constantly be kept pregnant in order to provide milk). Veganism, which involves making no use of animal products at all, may form the foundation of daily practice.

The author of Animal Farm, George Orwell, commenting on the genesis of this work, stated: “Men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat”.  Just as slavery involved some humans being the property of others and hence treated just as means to the end of the owners, so animals are under the power of humans. They are bought and sold, kept and killed in appalling conditions, experimented on, and used to provide milk, meat and eggs. This is speciesism, vegans will argue, little different from the other unwelcomed isms of racism and sexism. In February 1926 the Socialist Standard  wrote “Cruelty to animals will go the way of all forms of cruelty, when a real civilised existence becomes a possibility to everyone”

The journalist, Chris Hedges has produced an article with some views and facts that will be an interest to many.

Animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all worldwide transportation combined—cars, trucks, trains, ships and planes. Livestock and their waste and flatulence account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock causes 65 percent of all emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Crops grown for livestock feed consume 56 percent of the water used in the United States. Eighty percent of the world’s soy crop is fed to animals, and most of this soy is grown on cleared lands that were once rain forests. All this is taking place as an estimated 6 million children across the planet die each year from starvation and as hunger and malnutrition affect an additional 1 billion people. In the United States 70 percent of the grain we grow goes to feed livestock raised for consumption.

A person who is vegan will save 1,100 gallons of water, 20 pounds CO2 equivalent, 30 square feet of forested land, 45 pounds of grain and one sentient animal’s life every day.

The natural resources used to produce even minimal amounts of animal products are staggering—1,000 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of milk. Add to this the massive clear cutting and other destruction of forests, especially in the Amazon—where forest destruction has risen to 91 percent—and we find ourselves lethally despoiling the lungs of the earth largely for the benefit of the animal agriculture industry. Our forests, especially our rain forests, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and exchange it for oxygen: Killing the forests is a death sentence for the planet. Land devoted exclusively to raising livestock now represents 45 percent of the earth’s land mass.

Richard A. Oppenlander in his book, “Comfortably Unaware: What We Choose to Eat Is Killing Us and Our Planet,” notes that we can save more water by refusing to eat a pound of beef—which takes more than 5,000 gallons of water to produce—than by not showering for a year and that half the water in the United States is used to sustain livestock. “How can we best use our resources?” Oppenlander asks in “Comfortably Unaware.” “What foods will have the very least effect on our planet? Which foods best promote our own human health and wellness, and which are the most compassionate? Do we really need to slaughter another living thing in order for us to eat? Or, sadly, is it because we want to?”

In the United States alone, chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows in factory farms produce over five million pounds of excrement per minute. These are the animals raised each year so that people can continue eating meat, and they produce 130 times more excrement than the entire human population in our country. This manure sewage is responsible for global warming, water and soil pollution, air pollution, and use of our resources. The waste produced by the animals raised for food includes with it all the antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and other chemicals used during the raising and growing process. Accompanying this is methane released by the animals themselves, as well as the carbon, nitrous oxide, and additional methane emissions produced during the whole raising, feeding, and killing process.

On any given acre of land we can grow twelve to twenty times the amount in pounds of edible vegetables, fruit, and grain as in pounds of edible animal products. We are essentially using twenty times the amount of land and crops and hundreds of times the water, as well as polluting our waterways and air and destroying rainforests, to produce animals to kill and eat.

“So many more people have a connection to animal agriculture, both in society and government, than have a direct connection to the oil industry,” Keegan Kuhn  co-director of “Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret,” a new documentary that examines the power of the animal agriculture industry, said.said. “The oil industry employs, relatively speaking, a very small percentage of people and is controlled by a very small percentage of people. The agricultural industry, both animal agriculture and commodity grains fed to those animals, involves a much bigger demographic. Politically it is a lot more challenging. Corporations such as Cargill, one the largest commodity food corporations in the world, is able to create U.S. policy. The government says it needs to have affordable food, which means giving massive subsidies to these corporations. The belief is that we have to eat animal products to survive. It is not something that is even questioned. The fossil fuel industry is more easily challenged with the argument that there are alternatives. People do not feel there is an alternative to eating animals.”

“Hiding the animals, hiding the farms, hiding the entire issue is a marketing tool that is used by the industry,” Kuhn explained  “Their attitude is, if you can’t see it, it’s not there. There are upwards of 10 billion farm animals slaughtered every year in the United States. But where are these 10 billion animals? We live in a country with 320 million humans. We see humans everywhere. But where are these billions of animals? They are hidden away in sheds. It allows the industry to carry out these atrocities, whether it’s how they treat the animals or how they treat the environment.”

The animal agriculture industry has used the excuse of national security, public safety, trade agreements and the need for business secrets to pass laws that prohibit the photographing or filming of how we handle our livestock in what are known as ag-gag laws in about a dozen states and, on the federal level, the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, all enhanced with anti-terrorism laws to criminalize anyone who investigates or challenges the industry. It is illegal under the Patriot Act to issue statements or carry out actions that harm the profits of the animal agriculture industry.

You also have the marketing of grass-fed animals on smaller farms,” Kip Andersen, who co-directed “Cowspiracy” said, “and while it initially appears better, it is actually worse. The factory farming is horrific for the animals, but it is better for the environment than pasture-fed beef because of methane emissions, feces excretion and all the horses and wolves that are killed so cattle can graze on public land, which we pay for with our public dollars. We didn’t focus in the film on the factory farms. Everyone knows about that. We wanted to look at these so-called sustainable farms, as if this so-called humane farming is the answer. In most situations, these farms are worse for the environment, although it is better for the animals.”

Don’t expect politicians, bought off by agro-business money, to advocate for a diet that can have a massive impact on global warming. And don’t expect the mass media, which depend on advertising dollars from the industry, to inform us about what this industry is doing to the planet. The animal agriculture industry is one of the most powerful industries on the planet. There can be no dispute that animals are treated abominably under capitalism due to its demands for profit and for constantly cheapening the costs of production.