UN Envoy - Abandon Venezuelan Sanctions

  UN envoy said US and EU sanctions on Venezuela were worsening a humanitarian crisis and recommended that the United States relax the measures.

 Alena Douhan, a UN special rapporteur focusing on sanctions, recommended in a preliminary report that the sanctions be lifted, and the Venezuelan government be granted access to funds frozen in the US, United Kingdom and Portugal.

“Unilateral sanctions increasingly imposed by the United States, the European Union and other countries have exacerbated the abovementioned calamities,” Douhan told reporters.

Maduro’s government blames the sanctions for Venezuela’s economic woes.  Once a prosperous OPEC nation,  the economic decline started in 2014 before the imposition of economic sanctions with the downturn in oil prices and that mismanagement and corruption also contributed.

UN envoy draws rebuke for bid to relax Venezuela sanctions | Politics News | Al Jazeera

Some background reading on sanctions

Sanctions: Waging war without bullets – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)

The Yemen Tragedy Continues

 The humanitarian crisis in Yemen has been repeatedly featured in the media headlines for quite some time and still little has been done to alleviate the suffering.

According to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Acute Malnutrition report (pdf), 2,254,663 Yemeni children under five years old are so malnourished that they require medical treatment. 

Of these, 395,195 suffer from severe acute malnutrition, which is potentially fatal,  an increase of 22 percent over 2020.

Additionally, 1,155,653 pregnant and breastfeeding women are "acutely malnourished."

"These numbers are yet another cry for help from Yemen, where each malnourished child also means a family struggling to survive," said David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, which prepared the report with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), UNICEF, and the World Health Organization. "The crisis in Yemen is a toxic mix of conflict, economic collapse, and a severe shortage of funding."

Henrietta Fore, executive director of UNICEF, said that "the increasing number of children going hungry in Yemen should shock us all into action. More children will die with every day that passes without action."

Qu Dongyu, who heads the FAO, added that "families in Yemen have been in the grip of conflict for too long, and more recent threats such as Covid-19 have only been adding to their relentless plight."

For a listen

 Meeting held online via Discord – Glenn Morris, 11th December 2020

 

Why are socialists so few in number?

America's Unequal Health System

 Further to the previous post on Trump's death toll the commission emphasized that the country entered the pandemic with an already degraded public health infrastructure. Between 2002 and 2019, US public health spending fell from 3.21% to 2.45% – approximately half the share of spending in Canada and the UK.

The commission found if US life expectancy was equivalent to the average in the other G7 countries, 461,000 fewer Americans would have died in 2018.

Between 2017 and 2018, the health insurance coverage rate decreased by 1.6 percentage points for Latinos – roughly 1.5 million people – and by 2.8 percentage points for Native American and Alaska native people, while remaining stable for the white population.

US could have averted 40% of Covid deaths, says panel examining Trump's policies | US news | The Guardian

Socialist Sonnet No. 20

 Trading Places

 

Europe is an estranged and foreign land,

Its Union designed to deprive the free

British of their glorious sovereignty:

But then the moment came to make a stand.

A simple vote is all that was involved,

Plus four years of vitriol and rancour,

Until Britannia finally upped anchor

And the ties that bind were, at last, dissolved.

 

Now with power firmly in the national grip,

New economic arrangements are planned,

Tying trade to the Comprehensive and

Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership.

 

Although the furniture’s been rearranged,

For all the bluster and bile, nothing’s changed.

 

D. A.

The Trump Death Toll

 The British medical journal The Lancet after undertaking a comprehensive assessment of the health and environment impacts of Donald Trump’s presidency, estimated that rollbacks of environmental and workplace protections led to 22,000 excess deaths in 2019 alone. The 22,000 additional 2019 deaths occurred largely in states that voted for Trump, while Democratic states such as California and New York had their own laws that acted as a safety net. They also found that 40% of U.S. deaths during 2020 from Covid-19 would have been avoided if the country’s death rate had been closer to that of its G7 peers. 

The report noted that Trump rolled back 84 vital regulations covering everything from toxins in water to the way scientific research gets used by the federal government, with 20 more rule changes still in progress by the end of his term. The resulting increase in airborne particulate matter was the primary cause of the excess deaths, the authors concluded. 

The authors note, for example, that American life expectancy rates have been declining compared to other high-income nations since the 1980s. But instead of moving to solve this decline, the report argues that the former president specifically exploited low- and middle-income White people’s anger over their deteriorating prospects to mobilize the racial animus and xenophobia that propelled his political success. 

The report also emphasizes the racial disparities in health that grew under Trump, including the fact that most of the 2.3 million Americans who lost health insurance while he was in office were minorities.

Trump’s environment policies killed thousands, scientists say | Climate Change News | Al Jazeera

The Eco-Damage of Fish Farms

 Salmon farming is wreaking ruin on marine ecosystems, through pollution, parasites and high fish mortality rates which are causing billions of pounds a year in damage, a new assessment of the global salmon farming industry has found. Taken together, these costs amounted to about $50bn globally from 2013 to 2019, according to a new report. Scotland is one of the biggest producers of farmed salmon in the world, with the industry worth an estimated £2bn a year to the Scottish economy. But the costs in environmental terms alone were reckoned to be £1.4bn from 2013 to 2019, by Just Economics, which carried out the research for the report, entitled Dead Loss.

Fish mortality has more than quadrupled, from 3% in 2002 to about 13.5% in 2019, in Scottish salmon farms alone. About a fifth of these deaths are recorded as being due to sea lice infestations, but about two thirds are unaccounted for so the real mortality owing to sea lice – which feed on salmon skin and mucus, effectively eating the fish alive – could be much higher. Mowi, a Norwegian company, produces a fifth of the world’s farmed Atlantic salmon, and is named in the report as showing 50m premature fish deaths from 2010 to 2019, at a cost of about $1.7bn.

The sheer quantity of wild fish used in salmon farms is also a growing concern. About a fifth of the world’s annual wild fish catch, amounting to about 18m tonnes of wild fish a year, is used to make fishmeal and fish oil, of which about 70% goes to fish farms. This is causing problems for fishers in developing countries, who are seeing their stocks depleted in order to feed western consumption of farmed fish, according to the report. Key species such as sardines in west Africa are now heavily overfished for this purpose, and this situation is likely to deteriorate further as fish farmers plan substantial expansion in the coming years. Scotland alone plans to double its farming capacity by 2030, while Norway expects a fivefold increase by 2050, according to the report.

The report also examined the salmon farming industry in Canada, Norway and Chile, the other biggest global producers. It found that of the costs associated with fish farming, about 60% were borne by the producers, especially in the form of fish mortality and the cost of treating sea lice, but about 40% of the costs were borne by wider society, for instance in pollution, loss of fish populations and the impacts on the climate crisis.

Salmon farmers could use oils from algae as a source of Omega 3 for their farmed fish, to replace fish oil from wild fish, but few do so, according to the report. Natasha Hurley, campaigns manager at the Changing Markets Foundation, told the Guardian: “Moving away from using wild caught fish in food would make salmon farming more sustainable, as it is having a huge impact on wild fish.

Global salmon farming harming marine life and costing billions in damage | Marine life | The Guardian

More on Dirty Air

 Yet another report that polluted air risks around six million people aged over 65 in England lung damage and asthma attacks because of toxic air.

Dr Nick Hopkinson, the medical director of the British Lung Foundation estimates that between 30,000 and 40,000 premature deaths each year are caused by exposure to toxic air.

It finds that older people and those with lung disease who are most vulnerable to the effects of pollution are often the most exposed. Air pollution also increases the chances of a person developing lung cancer and cardiovascular disease and may be associated with cognitive decline, including dementia.

They found air pollution blackspots across the country that affected care homes. In 36 local authorities, every single care home is located in areas with PM2.5 levels above the limits recommended by the WHO. These include Epping Forrest, Luton, Thurrock, Reading, Slough, Spelthorne, Broxbourne, Dartford and Watford. It also found that 3,000 hospitals and GP practices are in areas where particulate pollution exceeds WHO recommended levels.

Alastair Lewis, a professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of York, welcomed the report's focus on the impact of air pollution on vulnerable communities.

"The largest inequalities arise based on issues like health and deprivation and deprived communities typically have the worst air quality," he says.

Toxic air puts six million at risk of lung damage - BBC News

Vaccines - Private profit

 

Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, insisted that it remain patent free. Asked who owned the patent 65 years ago, he replied, “The people I would say. There is no patent. You might as well ask, could you patent the sun?”

Making life-saving vaccines, medicines and equipment available, freely or affordably, has been crucial for containing the spread of many infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS, polio and smallpox. Refusal to temporarily suspend several World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property (IP) provisions to enable much faster and broader progress in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic is resulting in the deaths of many and some experts say should be grounds for a International Criminal Court prosecution. Enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRs) is relatively recent. The 1994 WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) greatly strengthened and extended IP transnationally. IPRs have effectively denied access to patented formulas and processes except to the highest bidders.

Vaccine developers expect to be very profitable, thanks to national and transnational IP laws. Thus, IP has distorted research priorities and discouraged cooperation and knowledge sharing, so essential to progress. Wealthier nations are falling out among themselves, fighting for access to vaccine supplies, as IP profits take precedence over lives and livelihoods. ‘Vaccine nationalism’ involves cut-throat contests responding to scarcity due to limited output. Vaccine nationalism has also meant that among the rich, the powerful come first. Consequently, most developing countries and most of their people will have to wait longer than necessary for vaccines, while the powerful and better off secure prior access, regardless of need or urgency.

Although TRIPS now allows such government public health efforts, developing countries remain constrained by compulsory licensing’s complex rules, procedures and conditions. Threats and inducements by transnational corporations and their governments limit its use. Hence, use of compulsory licensing by developing countries has been largely limited to several more independent middle-income countries and HIV/AIDS medicines.

 The combination of IP and vaccine warfare is responsible for more avoidable losses of both lives and livelihoods. Developing nations, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, have been left far behind in most programmes for COVID-19 prevention, containment, treatment and vaccination.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General (DG) Tedros warns “the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure…the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries”. He explains that “the international community cannot allow a handful of companies to dictate the terms or the timeframe for ending the pandemic”; “vaccine nationalism combined with a restrictive approach to vaccine production is in fact more likely to prolong the pandemic … tantamount to medical malpractice on a global scale”

At current rates, more than 85 poor countries will not have significant access before the end of 2023! In 70 lower income countries, only one in ten will be vaccinated. Of the 7.2 billion confirmed sales of COVID-19 vaccine doses, 4.2 billion have gone to the wealthiest nations. With only 16% of the world’s population, high income countries have secured 60% of available doses. Meanwhile, the African Union has only procured 670 million for the continent’s 1.3 billion people.

The IP system discourages, rather than encourages cooperation and sharing, both essential for accelerating progress. Although IP requires sharing research results, no vaccine developer has done so yet. Vaccine developers do not expect to profit much from the poor, so there exists little commercial incentive to provide them with adequate supply.  Many people die needlessly for profit.

Intellectual Property Cause of Death, Genocide | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

Saving Millions of Lives

Research, published in a special issue of the Lancet Planetary Health journal, looked at three scenarios: carrying on the current path, increasing efforts to achieve the Paris goals, and a more ambitious scenario, which put health at the heart of tackling climate change.

 In the UK, implementing policies to meet international climate goals would save 98,420 lives a year by 2040 through better “flexitarian” diets, which involve less meat and more vegetables, legumes and fruit.

Meanwhile, 21,480 lives could be saved by people taking more exercise and 3,458 from reductions in air pollution.

If even more ambitious plans were put in place to make sure health was the focus of climate policy, 100,000 lives a year could be saved through dietary changes, with 50% adopting flexitarian diets and 50% going vegan.

A further 5,770 lives could be saved from cuts to air pollution and 38,440 from more active travel, with 75% of people walking or cycling over the course of a week, the modelling suggests.

 Across nine countries, including the US, China and Brazil, implementing national climate plans which meet the Paris goals could save 5.8 million lives due to better diet, 1.2 million lives due to cleaner air, and 1.2 million lives due to increased exercise. 

And putting explicit health objectives in their plans, known as nationally determined contributions or NDCs under the Paris accord, could lead to a further reduction of 462,000 deaths due to air pollution, 572,000 from diet, and 943,000 from physical inactivity a year by 2040.

The lead author, Ian Hamilton, executive director of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, said: “Unlike the direct benefits of carbon mitigation which are ultimately long-term and understood in terms of damage limitation, the health co-benefits of ambitious climate policies have an immediate positive impact. Not only does delivering on Paris prevent millions dying prematurely each year, the quality of life for millions more will be improved through better health.

Climate action could save 'millions of lives' through clean air, diet and exercise | Climate change | The Guardian

Money Goes To Money

 In 2020 nearly 2 million people died from coronavirus , tens of millions more lost their jobs and countless others faced unprecedented disruption to their daily lives.

Yet for a privileged few, it was a very profitable year.

The world’s top 15 hedge fund managers collectively made $23.2bn (£16.9bn) last year. That is the equivalent of more than six Marks & Spencers or more than the gross domestic product of Iceland or Zambia.

The best performing hedge fund manager, Chase Coleman III, the founder of Tiger Global Management (TGM), made $3bn in performance management fees and gains on his personal investment in the fund. Coleman’s personal pay last year was more than the GDP of dozens of countries including Gambia, Bhutan and Eritrea. It is thought to be the biggest single year’s pay for anyone since another hedge fund manager, John Paulson, made $5bn in 2010. Coleman’s $3bn adds to the $4.5bn fortune he had already amassed. He was born into money and got his start in hedge funds at 24 when Julian Robertson, the founder of Tiger Management, gave him $25m seed money to start Tiger Global. Coleman attracted Robertson’s attention as he was good friends with Robertson’s son Spencer, growing up in the wealthy Glen Head community on Long Island. He married Stephanie Ercklentz, the daughter of banker and industrialist Enno Ercklentz who once said she gave up working for a living because it required “too many hours”.

 The second-highest paid was Jim Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies, who made $2.6bn. Third was Israel Englander of Millennium Management. Also on the list is Bill Ackman, the founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management. Ackman, who according to the list made $1.3bn.

Luke Hilyard, the executive director of the High Pay Centre thinktank, said: “The research shows the extraordinary riches accruing to a tiny number of individuals for speculative financial activities of dubious value to wider society. “It ought to be completely clear that this is a really terrible way for wealth to be distributed, in the midst of a global pandemic with families losing jobs and homes, businesses going under and public services under immense strain.”

World's top 15 hedge fund managers made $23.2bn in total last year | Hedge funds | The Guardian

China's Falling Population

 In China, the most populated country in the world, the birthrate is plummeting, with a 15% fall in 2020. Some cities and regions recorded drops of more than 25%. The number of new birth registrations in 2020 was 10.035m, compared with 11.8m in 2019. The 2019 figure marked the lowest point since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. The government has tried to encourage couples to have more children, but a 2017 study found 50% of families with one child had no intention of having a second.

 The reasons for the low birthrates include the high costs of housing and education, and growing rejection of marriage among young women. In 2019 the marriage rate hit a 14-year low.

The decline in births has prompted warnings for China’s economy as its population ages quickly without sufficient support for all elderly people. About one-third of the population is predicted to be aged over 60 by the year 2050, and a 2019 report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said the state pension fund was likely to run out of money by 2035.

Prof Peter McDonald, of the University of Melbourne’s school of population and global health, said, the ongoing impact from coronavirus would be relatively small because the birth rate has been falling for years and the total population was already on a downward curve, despite the lifting of the one-child policy in 2016, which brought only a short-lived spike.

“It showed that the China fertility rate was reflecting what was going on in society, and that was that people only really wanted a small number of children,” McDonald said. “Even in areas where the one-child policy was not applied, the birthrate was low.”

Lijia Shang, a writer, journalist and social commentator, said there was a change in attitude and many women – especially urban-living and highly educated – no longer regarded marriage and parenthood as “necessary passages in life or the essential ingredients of a happy life. In another word, it is about choice. Better education, higher income and more career options grant these women the freedom to choose a lifestyle they desire. They are assertive enough to resist the pressure from their parents to produce children. And the society is more tolerant than before.”

Xiong Jing, a feminist activist based in China, said the social support system for new mothers was lacking, with inadequate parental leave, gender discrimination in the workplace, high expense and competitiveness in childcare, and social pressures on women to be the primary carer.

Liang Jianzhang, an economics professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. “If the fertility rate cannot be increased significantly, this decline will not bottom out,” he said.

China birthrate slumps as experts blame changing attitudes | China | The Guardian

Snouts in the trough

 Four Ocado bosses are being handed shares worth £116m after its stock market value soared on the back of the pandemic boom in grocery home shopping.

The company’s chief executive, Tim Steiner, will be granted 2.45m shares, worth £66.2m at the current share price. Minerva, a shareholder adviser, said the scheme could transfer significant equity value to the chief executive and considering Steiner was already a significant shareholder it was hard to accept it was there to “attract, recruit and retain”.

The group’s chief operating officer, Mark Richardson; Luke Jensen, who runs its tech business, Ocado Solutions; and Neil Abrams, the company secretary, will also each receive 600,000 shares, worth £16.2m under the so-called “value creation plan”. 

The pay gap between the Ocado chief executive and the company’s median employee is already the widest of any company in the FTSE 100.

Luke Hildyard of the High Pay Centre said,  “The size of these payouts will prompt debate about governance reforms such as profit sharing schemes or worker representation on boards that would enable some of the company’s 17,000 delivery drivers, warehouse operatives and administrative staff to win a share of the tens of millions lavished on directors.”

Ocado bosses pocket shares worth £116m amid pandemic home deliveries boom | Ocado | The Guardian

Hunger and the Food Industry

 Even before the current pandemic, millions of people in the U.S. went hungry. 

In 2019 the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that over 35 million people were “food insecure,” meaning they did not have reliable access to affordable, nutritious food. Now food banks are struggling to feed people who have lost jobs and income thanks to COVID-19.

As unemployment has risen during the pandemic, so has the number of hungry Americans. Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks, estimates that up to 50 million people – including 17 million children – may currently be experiencing food insecurity. Nationwide, demand at food banks grew by over 48% during the first half of 2020. 

Through 2020, consumer food costs rose by 3.4%, compared to 0.4% in 2018 and 0.9% in 2019.  Research shows that retail concentration correlates with higher prices for consumers. It also shows that when food systems have fewer production and processing sites, disruptions can have major impacts on supply.  In 2020 Christopher Lischewski, the former president and CEO of Bumblebee Foods, was convicted of conspiracy to fix prices of canned tuna. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison and fined US$100,000. In the same year, chicken processor Pilgrim’s Pride pleaded guilty to price-fixing charges and was fined $110.5 million. Meatpacking company JBS settled a $24.5 million pork price-fixing lawsuit, and farmers won a class action settlement against peanut-shelling companies Olam and Birdsong. 

Industry consolidation is hard to track. Many subsidiary firms often are controlled by one parent corporation and engage in “contract packing,” in which a single processing plant produces identical foods that are then sold under dozens of different brands – including labels that compete directly against each other.

Recalls ordered in response to food-borne disease outbreaks have revealed the broad scope of contracting relationships. Shutdowns at meatpacking plants due to COVID-19 infections among workers have shown how much of the U.S. food supply flows through a small number of facilities.

With consolidation, large supermarket chains have closed many urban and rural stores. This process has left numerous communities with limited food selections and high prices – especially neighborhoods with many low-income, Black or Latino households.

Consolidation makes it easier for any industry to maintain high prices. With few players, companies simply match each other’s price increases rather than competing with them. Concentration in the U.S. food system has raised the costs of everything from breakfast cereal and coffee to beer.

 Disruptions in food supply chains forced farmers to dump milk down the drain, leave produce rotting in fields and euthanize livestock that could not be processed at slaughterhouses. Between March and May of 2020, farmers disposed of somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 hogs and 2 million chickens – more than 30,000 tons of meat.

A few months into the pandemic, meat shelves in some U.S. stores sat empty, while some of the nation’s largest processors were exporting record amounts of meat to China. U.S. Senators. Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker, cited this imbalance as evidence of the need to crack down on what they called “monopolistic practices” by Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS and Smithfield, which dominate the U.S. meatpacking industry.  Store shelves are no longer empty for most cuts of meat, but processing plants remain overbooked, with many scheduling well into 2021.

Opinion | Corporate Concentration in the US Food System Makes Food More Expensive and Less Accessible (commondreams.org)

Grenfell - cheaper the better

 

Deborah French,  Arconic's UK sales manager, that made Grenfell Tower's cladding would "by default" sell flammable materials to construction projects, including high-rise buildings.

 Arconic could have sold a fire-retardant product but she said it saw the UK market as preferring a slightly cheaper version, albeit with a greater fire risk. Arconic managers said the "UK was generally a 'PE market'" - PE referring to polyethylene, which is used as the core material of the panel and is highly flammable. A type of product called Reynobond PE panels were 4 to 5 euros cheaper per square metre than the fire-retardant version.  The cladding had not passed the relevant British laboratory test, and had failed several of the European tests on which the certificate was based.

Ms French said it was "very, very, very rare" for customers to ask about fire safety. Ms French insisted throughout her evidence that she was not a technical expert and passed detailed questions on to a technical manager, Claude Wehrle, based in France.

Mr Wehrle is one of three potential witnesses to the inquiry who have refused to give evidence on legal advice that, if they did so, they could incriminate themselves under a law in France. The inquiry was also told that Arconic refused to disclose documents to the inquiry and only did so following a criminal European Investigation Order requested by the Metropolitan Police.

The Invisible Killer

 

Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil was responsible for 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, which was one in five of all people who died that year. The death toll outlined in the study may even be an underestimate of the true picture, according to George Thurston, an expert in air pollution and health at the NYU school of medicine who was not involved in the research.

 The study finding more than one in 10 deaths in both the US and Europe were caused by the resulting pollution.

As well as nearly a third of deaths in eastern Asia, which includes China.

The death toll exceeds the combined total of people who die globally each year from smoking tobacco plus those who die of malaria.

 Without fossil fuel emissions, the average life expectancy of the world’s population would increase by more than a year.

“We don’t appreciate that air pollution is an invisible killer,” said Neelu Tummala, an ear, nose and throat physician at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “The air we breathe impacts everyone’s health but particularly children, older individuals, those on low incomes and people of color. Usually people in urban areas have the worst impacts.”

'Invisible killer': fossil fuels caused 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, research finds | Environment | The Guardian

Long live labour-farm labour unity!

 The farmers’ strike has changed the political picture in India. Many Modi RSS/BJP voters have become disillusioned. The nationalist Hinduvta movement has been stalled. This powerful movement is challenging the Indian government which seeks a new model of farming for India, under international pressure to replicate American or Australian model of farming in India, where the corporations control vast swathes of land for monoculture-style cash-crop farming

But socialists should be wary of placing over-optimistic hopes in the protests and the blockade of Delhi by the farmers. It’s a protest of big and small property-owners against being sold-out to global capitalist corporations, not a workers’ movement. These land-owning farmers in the past have not hesitated to repress the lower caste labourers such as the Dalits when asked for more pay or better conditions. Just because a struggle involves millions of people doesn’t make it a class struggle in the sense of a struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. The protagonists are large-and-medium-sized landowning farmers against a government that wants to introduce measures that will harm their interests and benefit corporate capitalists. It’s not anti-capitalist.

The Indian economy has always been predominantly state-capitalist since independence but it has increasingly relaxed the government control with various privatisations and removing protectionist laws to permit more foreign investment under pressure from the reality of international capital. The farmers’ resistance is combating the consequences and effects of the operation of the economic laws of capitalism. Once again, they place their illusory hopes in the regulatory power of the State to protect them. The present laws have not prevented poverty and land-grabs but they believe that the proposed new laws will exacerbate their problems. It is ultimately a futile fight but if the farmers don’t resist, they may as well roll over and be walked all over.

The proposed new farming laws are said to allow private corporate players a greater role in the farming sector, which the government assures will not hurt farmers’ incomes. They take farmers out of the state-controlled markets, so they can take advantage of higher prices. Socialists need to be aware that many of the farmers unions are not representing the small basically subsistence farmer or the landless agricultural labourers but are acting in the interest of the better-off commercial farmers who perceive a threat to their incomes. Small and marginal farmers with less than two hectares of land account for 86.2% of all farmers and  these 126 million farmers together owned about 74.4 million hectares of land —or an average holding of just 0.6 hectares each.  It is they who lack the political organised clout which is in the hands of the semi-medium and medium land-holding farmers who account for 13.2% of all farmers, but own 43.6% of crop area

These deep structural problems with Indian farming – productivity with other comparable countries show how bad it is. But the problems are very much infrastructure, as in transport, storage, the accompanying wastage but perhaps the most crippling thing is the never-ending debt incurred by farmers, not just from the banks but the traditional money-lenders.

The Delhi blockade is mainly Punjabi Sikh dominated but the movement is nation-wide, multi-cultural and involves the trade unions acting in solidarity. As with most anti-government protests, grievances spread and become incorporated in a general strike. Circumstances arise that highlights fundamental conflicts of interests between the capitalist class and its subordinate and subjugated subservient suppliers.

When the potential of such struggles transcend sectional interests then we cannot with-hold our solidarity but instead we should reach out with the socialist analysis and answer to the problem. Small farming in Asia is dependent for success on mutual aid, helping each other out on shared schemes such as machinery hire, irrigation and cooperatives. Dog-eat-dog rivalry over a bone between them would be suicidal for survival. They develop their own local customs of decision-making, often outside the State’s officialdom.

It is a rare moment in Indian history that the divisive  barriers of religion, caste and ethnicity is being eliminated as farmers recognise their collective problems and get together in this fight, casting away the caste prejudices  that were deeply entrenched within rural districts. Punjab’s largest farmer union has overcome the caste divide and has begun to support Dalit’s demand for land rights.

It’s increasingly leading to the emergence of a massive united farmers’ front of all the religions, Hindu/ Sikh/Muslim. These protests have also saw the merging of the urban and the rural populations as the general public in the towns express their sympathy with the farmers and extend support, seldom seen in any previous protest movements. Unity is the biggest strength of this movement.  It should be noted how the protesters immediately distanced themselves from the flying of a Sikh separatist flag at the Red Fort and re-emphasised the secularism of the protests. The strike and protests rather than fighting each other has brought a fresh understanding that brought the different communities closer together.  We are very careful not to say what is occurring in India is a socialist movement. But it is contributing to a change in political consciousness within the rural communities, where people are identifying shared problems and engaging in a common cause to resist government policies that they perceive as a threat to their livelihoods and standard of living. In addition, another cultural change is occurring, women have taken on the entire responsibility of managing their farms and households back in Punjab while the men-folk camp-out at Delhi.

The movement is exercising more control over its leadership.  Some reports say this is a relatively leader-free movement, or perhaps multi-leader is better way of describing it, having too many leaders and organisations for any to dominate. It may have its roots in a fairly conservative society but it is reminding all that there is still power in the streets.

 If the farmers are destined to prosper, and remain out of poverty, to improve their lot in life, they must set aside their own sectional interests and adopt the socialist case for the ending of capitalism. The farmer’s position, impoverished or well-off is essentially the same as the worker’s: that of a wage slave. The farmer neither shares in the bounties of the harvests nor benefits from the subservience to the government food ministries. There was no escape for the farmer other than the socialist one.

We know all resistance to the capitalists is eventually doomed if they and their State are determined to prevail and fully incorporate India’s farming into the world market where the global businesses hold the power over food production. It is unstoppable and can only be delayed. India is not the only region facing the exact same attacks on traditional small-holder farming methods. But it is the struggle to fight back which is important as it is in this strike that people are discovering solidarity and unity against the religious and cultural differences which had been used previously to keep people divided. 

An investors' economy?

 Much has been claimed about "citizens" capitalism of how mobile telephone apps operated by the likes of Robinhood  makes buying shares easier and along with using social media the small investor can challenge the Wall St giant hedge funds. 

But reality begs to differ. 

Nearly half of Americans own no stock at all.

 Another quarter of the population have 401(k) retirement funds under $23,000. 

With bank account interest hovering around zero percent and at least a third of American families with nothing to invest, there's little chance that the poorest among us could participate in the passive get-rich savings plan of stock ownership.

The richest 10% of Americans own 84 percent of all stocks.

People who have money can buy stocks, wait for awhile, and ultimately get richer by doing nothing. But low-income Americans have to depend on wages for their fair share of national economic growth—and wages have barely budged in over 50 years

Opinion | The Year of Cheating the Poor (commondreams.org)

Contrasting Policies on Refugees

 Colombia announced that the country would grant temporary protection status to around one million undocumented migrants from Venezuela after which they can apply for a residence visa. Under the new status, the migrants will receive basic services such as access to the national health system and COVID-19 vaccination.

Filippo Grandi, the UN high commissioner for refugees said, “This bold humanitarian gesture serves as an example for the region and the rest of the world.”

Meanwhile, after the European Court of Justice ruled that Hungary's deportation of refugees to Serbia was unlawful, Viktor Orban's government is ignoring the judgement — and continuing to deport refugees. 

The Hungarian government is making no attempt to conceal its violation of the law. These "pushbacks" contravene international treaties to which Hungary is a signatory, such as the Geneva Convention.  Orban, and several members of his government have repeatedly confirmed that they intend to continue the practice.

How Hungary is violating EU law on refugees | Europe| News and current affairs from around the continent | DW | 08.02.2021

Another business opportunity

 Biden is receiving praise from many liberals for imposing certain controls over the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia to ensure they are not used in its involvement in the civil war in Yemen.

However, the UK response is that what the US does is America's business and Britain will continue to provide Saudi Arabia with weapons to be deployed against the Houthis. 

And there are other countries very happy to supply Saudi's with armaments.

In a statement, the Chinese foreign ministry said China and Saudi Arabia are “comprehensive strategic partners” and “maintain friendly cooperation in all areas, including in the area of arms sales”. 

 Saudi Arabia has a growing share of business with Russia. According to Rostec’s CEO, Saudi Arabia is currently in talks with Russia to purchase the S400 missile systems. This came following a bilateral agreement reached during a visit by Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz to Moscow in October 2017, marking the first visit by a Saudi monarch to Russia.   Russia’s Sputnik also reported that Saudi Arabia would finalise a deal to domestically produce Russian Kalashnikov rifles.

Online talk to listen to

 Discussion held online via 'Discord' – introduced by Paddy Shannon, 9th December 2020

FAQ What do you get out of being a socialist?

They say: It's Time To Put A Price On Our Planet

 The Dasgupta Review, commissioned by The Conservative Government, argues Capitalism should be reformed so the environment is an economic consideration (The Metro, 3/2/21).

The report, by Cambridge University professor Partha Dasgupta , says plants and wildlife should be treated like financial assets and economic gauges such as gross domestic product be replaced by new models.

He has suggested that nations could pay Brazil for protecting the Amazon rainforest.

At an online Royal Society event, David Attenborough said: 'How valuable it would be if economists were able to value an asset that as one value to local people and another globally.'

Prince Charles said crises like climate change and global debt were 'interrelated and their solutions must be too'. 

Boris Johnson added: 'Far from existing in opposition, the economy and our ecology are inseparably intertwined.'

George Monbiot said the review was 'intellectually vacuous'.

In a worldwide Socialist society, which would operate without money, taxes, shares etc., there couldn't be a financial price put on plants and wildlife.

Anything produced would be because it is needed to satisfy our basic needs for food, shelter and health.

There would be no buying and selling. We would produce goods that don't cause damage to the environment.

Anti-Putin protests

 It’s clear who they’re against, but what are they for?

What is the significance of the current Russian protests against the Putin regime? Western media have called them ‘unprecedented’. That is not so.

Mass protests are a frequent occurrence in Russia, though rarely do they attract much attention abroad. Many give voice to local grievances. This January, for example, residents of Ufa protested (successfully) against a big increase in heating charges. In 2019 there were mass meetings in Moscow against an urban renewal programme that threatened people’s homes – meetings larger (so a Russian correspondent tells me) than the anti-Putin protest. However, nationwide protest movements also occur, such as that of 2018 against a ‘reform’ that raised the age at which people could start to draw a pension.

Even focusing solely on protests organised by the anti-Putin opposition, today’s protests are similar in size and geographical scope to those that began in December 2011 and continued into 2012.Those protests were not on a large enough scale to have any chance of toppling the regime, nor are the current protests. They mobilise a much smaller proportion of the population (1 percent at most) than the opposition demonstrations in Belarus did last October (about 5 percent).

Enormous power potential

The Putin regime is not going to collapse any time soon. Its power potential is still enormous. It retains full control over TV – still the medium on which most Russians rely for information -- and print media. Oligarchs connected with the regime (independent ones are no longer tolerated) own most of Russia’s natural resources and heavy industry. The state bureaucracy and armed forces remain loyal.

True, the regime has reason to be concerned about a gradual long-term erosion of popular support. Younger people have access to a wider range of information through the internet and social media. Tens of millions have watched the opposition video Putin’s Palace, about the president’s luxurious residence on the Black Sea coast.  

Polls show that Putin’s approval rating has fallen over the last couple of years to about 60 percent, which is considered too low. This too, however, is not unprecedented. It hovered just above 60 percent from 2011 to 2013. Then in 2014 confrontation with Ukraine bumped it up to 85—90 percent. The annexation of Crimea was especially popular. No doubt the remedy of ‘a short victorious war’ – first recommended as a means of ‘averting revolution’ by tsarist interior minister Vyacheslav Plehve in 1904 – can be applied yet again.

Nature of the ‘Putin regime’

But what is this ‘regime’ that Putin has established in Russia?

The Putin regime is neither a democracy nor an out-and-out dictatorship. It is officially described as a ‘guided democracy’. It can be represented as three concentric circles:

 

· at the core: Putin, his presidential administration and government, and his loyal ‘party of power’ -- United Russia (the opposition calls it ‘the party of crooks and thieves’)

· the ‘intra-system opposition’ of parties that accept Putin as president but advocate their own policies within permitted limits. There are at. present three such parties: the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), Zhirinovsky’s ultra-nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and Just Russia, a ‘social-democratic’ reform party that belongs to the Socialist International

· the ‘extra-system opposition’ of parties and groups that oppose Putin, including Navalny’s ‘Russia of the Future’ (formerly the Party of Progress). Refused registration, they operate under duress and are unable to contest elections

The term ‘opposition’ is therefore ambiguous. In its broad sense it refers to the intra-system as well as the extra-system opposition, in its narrow sense only to the extra-system opposition.

Uniting the opposition

The political situation in Russia has changed in one significant respect. Nine years ago the extra-system opposition was deeply divided, as we reported in The Socialist Standard (Material World, July 2012). The three main components of the movement were Russian nationalists, Western-type liberals, and leftists of various sorts. Opposition rallies were enlivened by verbal and even physical clashes between nationalists on one side and anarchists or gay activists on the other.

These internal conflicts have been resolved, mainly due to the rising influence of so-called ‘national democrats’ who claim to combine Russian nationalism with Western-type liberalism. Alexei Navalny, as a. blogger and public speaker, has played a central role in this development. Leftists have been marginalized within the opposition or have abandoned the movement. A group of anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists recently issued a declaration in which they renounce

‘all participation in the political spectacles organised by supporters of the right-wing populist Navalny, sadly renowned for his openly nationalist attacks on immigrants, people from the Caucasus and Jews. Whatever excuses or ‘explanations’ may be offered, joining in their demonstrations would mean turning into an appendage of one of the political gangs waging a dirty and unprincipled struggle for power’ (https://aitrus.info/node/5625).

At the same time, Navalny’s party urge their supporters to vote ‘smart’ – that is, tactically – for the strongest opposition candidate standing in any election, even if that candidate is a ‘communist’ or one of Zhirinovsky’s people. Tactical voting will tend to strengthen the oppositional character of the intra-system opposition and narrow the gap between the intra-system and extra-system oppositions.

The unrelenting campaign against corruption also serves to unite and broaden the opposition. This is a cause that appeals to almost everyone. Who, after all, is in favour of corruption? However, it does not ensure that a regime led by Navalny would be any less corrupt once it came to power.

What does Navalny stand for?

The cruel treatment of Navalny by the Putin regime – his near-fatal poisoning, his arrest on returning to Russia, his two-year prison sentence – have won him much sympathy and admiration. Nevertheless, this should not bias an assessment of opinions he has expressed.

Navalny’s constitutional proposals envision transition from a ‘super-presidential’ to a ‘presidential-parliamentary republic’ with an independent judiciary. His economic platform appeals to capitalists who lack close connections to the regime. He undertakes to transform the existing ‘twisted’ and ‘authoritarian-oligarchic model’ of ‘crony capitalism’ into a fully competitive model of capitalism with a level playing field and a strong high-tech sector. He promises to restart economic growth, reform the pension system, move toward an all-volunteer military, reduce crime, improve roads, transfer authority and taxes to the regional and municipal levels, and refuse to intervene in wars abroad.

Not all of Navalny’s slogans seem compatible. For example, is it really possible to ‘fight corruption’ but also ‘trust people’? And how will he fund all his programmes, including a doubling of state spending on healthcare and education, and at the same time cut taxes? He says he will do this by reducing spending on the security services and ‘bureaucracy’ – but that is easier said than done. Although he criticizes the extreme inequality of wealth in Russia, he does not back the proposal from Just Russia to replace the current flat-rate income tax (13 percent) by a progressive tax (though he does want to make the property tax more progressive).

Closer examination suggests that not all of Navalny’s promises should be taken at face value. He highlights a promise to establish a minimum monthly wage of 25,000 rubles (£242.50 or $325), but further on we learn that this is a goal to be achieved by stages, the pace to be set by regional governments (https://2018.navalny.com).

Dehumanizing ethnic minorities

More alarming, however, is Navalny’s nationalism. Of course, the Putin regime is already nationalistic. But Putin’s is a state nationalism. Navalny’s is primarily an ethnic Russian nationalism. He demands the full assimilation of ethnic minorities: those who wish to live in Russia ‘must become ethnically Russian in the full sense.’

Navalny’s main targets have been the Moslem immigrants from Central Asia (above all, Tajikistan) and the Caucasus. They originally came to Russia to earn some money and return home, but increasing numbers of them have settled in Russian cities, where they have been allowed to build mosques. Even though they do the hardest and dirtiest jobs, they are widely hated and abused. Their position resembles that of Hispanic immigrants in the United States. Like Trump, Navalny has taken full advantage of anti-immigrant sentiment.

In April 2017 Shaun Walker interviewed Navalny for the Guardian. To quote Walker:

‘Several years ago, he released a number of disturbing videos, including one in which he is dressed as a dentist, complaining that tooth cavities ruin healthy teeth, as clips of migrant workers are shown. In another video, he speaks out in favour of relaxing gun controls, in a monologue that appears to compare migrants to cockroaches.

I ask him if he regrets those videos now, and he’s unapologetic. He sees it as a strength that he can speak to both liberals and nationalists. But comparing migrants to cockroaches? ‘That was artistic licence,’ he says. So there’s nothing at all from those videos or that period that he regrets? ‘No,’ he says again, firmly.’ (www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/29/alexei-navalny-on-putins-russia-all-autocratic-regimes-come-to-an-end)

Another example of Navalny’s dehumanization of ethnic ‘enemies’ came during the 2008 invasion of Georgia, which he enthusiastically supported. Indulging in a play on words, Navalny called Georgians (gruziny) rodents (grizuny).

Perhaps it is unfair to compare Navalny with Trump. Unfair to Trump.

STEFAN