“The earth is polluted neither because man is some kind of especially dirty animal nor because there are too many of us. The fault lies with human society —with the ways in which society has elected to win, distribute, and use the wealth that has been extracted by human labour from the planet’s resources.” — Ecologist Barry Commoner, The Observer 9 January 1972.
Quote of the Day
“The earth is polluted neither because man is some kind of especially dirty animal nor because there are too many of us. The fault lies with human society —with the ways in which society has elected to win, distribute, and use the wealth that has been extracted by human labour from the planet’s resources.” — Ecologist Barry Commoner, The Observer 9 January 1972.
Quote of the Day
“The earth is polluted neither because man is some kind of especially dirty animal nor because there are too many of us. The fault lies with human society —with the ways in which society has elected to win, distribute, and use the wealth that has been extracted by human labour from the planet’s resources.” — Ecologist Barry Commoner, The Observer 9 January 1972.
Mental Health and Young Women
Report says women aged 16-34 from poorest backgrounds are five times more likely to harm themselves. Young women are being driven to self-harm as a result of poverty, debt and their struggles to pay household bills.
Its findings, released by the charity Agenda, show a close association between wealth and mental ill-health, and show that young women in poverty are much more likely to suffer psychologically.
NatCen’s research showed that the debate about the recent rise in mental health problems among young women – which often cites social media, exam stress and body image issues as negative influences – took too little account of deprivation.
Its findings, released by the charity Agenda, show a close association between wealth and mental ill-health, and show that young women in poverty are much more likely to suffer psychologically.
NatCen’s research showed that the debate about the recent rise in mental health problems among young women – which often cites social media, exam stress and body image issues as negative influences – took too little account of deprivation.
“It’s devastating to see such high and increasing levels of self-harm among young women, especially those living in poverty and facing deprivation. This is especially concerning as we move into an economic downtown,” Jemima Olchawski, Agenda’s chief executive said. “The increase in self-harm among young women is deeply worrying. Yet the discussion around this issue and women and girls’ mental health is often very narrow, focusing on issues like social media rather than reflecting on wider causes. This research highlights the important relationship between self-harm and poverty.”
There is mounting evidence that self-harm is on the increase in the population as a whole, and that teenage girls and young adult women are the most affected. The proportion of 16- to 24-year-old females who say they have self-harmed rose from 6.5% to 19.7% between 2000 and 2014. The suicide rate among girls and young women aged between 10 and 24 has risen: in 2018 it was the highest on record.
A recent report by Prof Sir Michael Marmot of University College London, called Health Equity in England Ten Years On, found that women in the poorest areas faced the worst health inequalities and that their life expectancy had fallen by 10% in the last decade.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/26/poverty-debt-young-women-self-harm-poorest-backgrounds
Make the rich redundant
US billionaires accrued a huge windfall of more than $434bn in the two months between mid-March and mid-May. This comes at a time when at least 40 million Americans are out of work, struggling to get by, and 265 million people around the world are at risk of dying of hunger.
Jeff Bezos, who has seen his fortune expand by nearly $35bn thanks to the surge in the value of his company Amazon, as people trapped in lockdown have turned to online shopping. It would take an American household earning the mean income of $60,000 a year nearly 2.5 million years to accumulate the estimated $147bn which Jeff Bezos is estimated to be worth… if they did not spend a penny. An Amazon worker on the shop-floor would take more than 4 million years of saving their entire income to assemble their boss’s fortune. These are workers in the world’s richest country. Now try to imagine how long it would take a poor worker in Asia or Africa to make this kind of money.
There are those who defend billionaires, arguing that critics are just envious and that billionaires deserve this success and earned their vast fortunes. Like the original rags-to-riches myth, there is a typical narrative that surrounds billionaires, especially those in the tech industry. It goes something like this:
X, working in their bedroom/garage/dorm, came up with a brilliant idea, against the odds, brought it to market and is now enjoying the fruits of their brilliance.
It is true that quite a few billionaires started off with nothing (or at least with a far more modest fortune), and many did exhibit inspiring brilliance in their early careers. However, is the smartness of these entrepreneurs really worth so much more than everyone else’s labour combined while front-line workers risk their health and lives to keep society functioning and care for the sick?
It goes without saying that nobody’s ideas or work ethic or vision are worth thousands or even millions of years of everyone else’s labour. This notion is particularly insulting in this time of crisis, when the people society depends on to function are not tycoons, top CEOs or hedge fund managers but nurses, doctors, emergency workers, care-givers, supermarket staff, delivery people and utility workers.
While there are certainly “good” billionaires and “bad” billionaires, there are no billionaires who made their billions fair and square, without employing ethically dubious practices. These practices may include underpaying or overworking staff, monopolising the productivity gains delivered by their workers, exporting jobs, stifling competition, and even exercising monopolies or near-monopolies via patent and intellectual ownership laws.
Corporate tax rates and taxes on high incomes and capital have hit historic lows, with a de facto regressive tax system increasingly becoming the new normal. In America, for example, the rich saw their wealth rise by over 1,100 percent between 1990 and 2018 yet their proportional tax obligations dropped 79 percent over the same time-scale.
And that is not to mention the tax avoidance schemes which there are many which has the capitalists laughing all the way to the bank, while the rest of are weeping with misery.
The unprecedented mobility of capital and wealthy individuals, facilitated by decades of deregulation and the absence of a global tax regimen or coordination of tax policies, has enabled many corporations and billionaires to transfer their profits to tax paradises, allowing them to dodge their tax burdens and, with them, their social responsibilities. This has also forced a race to the bottom between countries fearful of losing out to tax havens. The IMF estimates that governments are deprived of up to $600bn a year in corporate taxes due to the kind of clever bookkeeping that has been made possible through decades of financial deregulation and walks the fine line between legal “tax avoidance” and illegal “tax evasion”. 40 percent of the profits of multinationals are artificially transferred to tax havens from higher-tax countries, especially in Europe.
To add insult to injury, not only has deregulation devastated the welfare state, but also among the biggest recipients of state welfare are, paradoxically, the richest, who benefit the most from the rescue packages designed to pull us out of crises, especially in the US. This occurred during the Great Recession following the financial meltdown of 2008-2009 and is happening again during the current coronavirus crisis.
Philanthropy by Gates, Buffet and others of the mega-rich is no substitute for social justice. It puts what should be a collective decision-making process on societal priorities in the hands of unelected individuals, who may or may not be concerned about the greater good. This gigantic concentration of wealth gives billionaires the kind of political clout that makes a mockery of the one person, one vote foundation of democracy. We are used to the business class representing a powerful oligarchy in authoritarian and autocratic regimes, such as in Russia or the Arab world. In democracies, the massive lobbying power, both direct and indirect, of the billionaires and corporations erodes democratic governance and undermines the will of the electorate.
What we need are not half-baked efforts to make inequality undesirable – we must make inequality impossible.
Taken and adapted from here
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/deserves-billionaire-200524115936784.html
He who pays the piper drafts the legislation
The Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), a powerful healthcare industry group, gave more than $1m to a Democratic committee backing Governor Andrew Cuomo 2018 campaign. Less than two years later, Cuomo signed legislation last month quietly shielding hospital and nursing home executives from the threat of lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. The provision, inserted into an annual budget bill by Cuomo’s aides, created one of the nation’s most explicit immunity protections for healthcare industry officials, according to legal experts. Cuomo removed a key deterrent against nursing home and hospital corporations cutting corners in ways that jeopardize lives and where more than 5,000 New Yorkers have died from COVID-19.
Cuomo’s critics say he has taken a hands-off approach to regulating the healthcare industry interests that helped bankroll his election campaign. In March, Cuomo’s administration issued an order that allowed nursing homes to readmit sick patients without testing them for Covid-19. Amid allegations of undercounted casualties, the governor also pushed back against pressure to have state regulators more stringently record and report death rates in nursing homes.
And then came Cuomo’s annual budget – which included a little-noticed passage shielding corporate officials who run New York hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities from liability for Covid-related deaths and injuries. The carefully sculpted passage was buried in the state’s annual spending bill expanded that by offering extensive immunity to any “healthcare facility administrator, executive, supervisor, board member, trustee or other person responsible for directing, supervising or managing a healthcare facility and its personnel or other individual in a comparable role”.
GNYHA said it “drafted and aggressively advocated for” the immunity provision. The new law declares that top officials at hospital and nursing home companies “shall have immunity from any liability, civil or criminal, for any harm or damages alleged to have been sustained as a result of an act or omission in the course of arranging for or providing healthcare services” to address the Covid-19 outbreak.
The language immunizing executives from civil and criminal litigation is designed to make it easier for nursing home corporations to profit off unsafe business practices.
“The reason why neglect happens in nursing homes is executives make business decisions that result in the frontline workers not having the tools – in nursing homes, the manpower – to deliver the services those workers are trained to deliver,” said plaintiffs’ attorney Andrew G Finkelstein, “These executives choose how much staffing will be in a nursing home and they know the more staffing that they put in, the more safe the nursing home will be – but the less profits they will make.”
During his re-election campaign, Cuomo promised that he would support requiring hospitals and nursing homes to spend more on staffing, which proponents said would improve healthcare and safety, but could also reduce corporate profit margins. The governor subsequently only initiated a study of the issue – a move that the nursing home industry’s lobbying group lauded.
Andrew Cuomo has appeared on CNN facing some soft-ball questioning from none other than his own brother, Chris Cuomo, and MSNBC has performed little better in holding Governor Cuomo accountable.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/26/andrew-cuomo-nursing-home-execs-immunity
Cuomo’s critics say he has taken a hands-off approach to regulating the healthcare industry interests that helped bankroll his election campaign. In March, Cuomo’s administration issued an order that allowed nursing homes to readmit sick patients without testing them for Covid-19. Amid allegations of undercounted casualties, the governor also pushed back against pressure to have state regulators more stringently record and report death rates in nursing homes.
And then came Cuomo’s annual budget – which included a little-noticed passage shielding corporate officials who run New York hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities from liability for Covid-related deaths and injuries. The carefully sculpted passage was buried in the state’s annual spending bill expanded that by offering extensive immunity to any “healthcare facility administrator, executive, supervisor, board member, trustee or other person responsible for directing, supervising or managing a healthcare facility and its personnel or other individual in a comparable role”.
GNYHA said it “drafted and aggressively advocated for” the immunity provision. The new law declares that top officials at hospital and nursing home companies “shall have immunity from any liability, civil or criminal, for any harm or damages alleged to have been sustained as a result of an act or omission in the course of arranging for or providing healthcare services” to address the Covid-19 outbreak.
The language immunizing executives from civil and criminal litigation is designed to make it easier for nursing home corporations to profit off unsafe business practices.
“The reason why neglect happens in nursing homes is executives make business decisions that result in the frontline workers not having the tools – in nursing homes, the manpower – to deliver the services those workers are trained to deliver,” said plaintiffs’ attorney Andrew G Finkelstein, “These executives choose how much staffing will be in a nursing home and they know the more staffing that they put in, the more safe the nursing home will be – but the less profits they will make.”
During his re-election campaign, Cuomo promised that he would support requiring hospitals and nursing homes to spend more on staffing, which proponents said would improve healthcare and safety, but could also reduce corporate profit margins. The governor subsequently only initiated a study of the issue – a move that the nursing home industry’s lobbying group lauded.
Andrew Cuomo has appeared on CNN facing some soft-ball questioning from none other than his own brother, Chris Cuomo, and MSNBC has performed little better in holding Governor Cuomo accountable.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/26/andrew-cuomo-nursing-home-execs-immunity
We are Cooperative
It is a common belief that the human race is in competition with one another in a selfish struggle for the survival of the fittest. However, new scientific research finds that humanity has a natural tendency to cooperate.
“Humans are quite possibly the world’s best cooperators,” according to a summary by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Scientists have concluded that finding innovative ways to help others crosses all societies.
“Need-based transfers are a universal human trait,” said Athena Aktipis, assistant professor of psychology at Arizona State University and co-director of the Human Generosity Project. “When people see that someone is in need, and they have the ability to help, very often people spontaneously help without expecting anything in return,” Aktipis said. “This is especially salient during times of disaster.”
She and her fellow researchers observed selfless cooperation everywhere from the Maasai tribe of Kenya to ranchers on the southwestern border, and in locations from Tanzania to Texas, Fiji, and Mongolia.
After they performed in-depth experiments, Aktipis fed the Maasai tribe’s practices into a computer model and found that generosity produced better results than a transactional relationship for everyone, every time—including for the charitable party. This deep-seated drive to cooperate takes its cues from the morality inherent within the broader culture.
“Reputational concerns shape behavior to be prosocial and altruistic,” said Erez Yoeli, the director of MIT’s Applied Cooperation Team.
Much seeming hospitality comes from the expectations, norms, and mores of our peers. Moral suasion renders government coercion unnecessary.
“People tend to be highly responsive to cues of social pressure, and when they see those cues, they increase giving a lot,” Yoeli said. “Without anybody being aware of it, altruism is all happening under the surface.”
We can dismiss the article’s criticism of socialism as the website it is on presents a right-wing ideology and that the sponsors of the research, the Templeton Foundation, was set up for the promotion of religion. However, it does not make the core finding that people are cooperative as a species invalid. It is something socialists have always argued.
https://blog.acton.org/archives/115946-science-human-beings-were-made-for-creative-cooperation.html
Quote of the Day
“I’m beginning to get a feeling that for the first time the nations of the world are beginning to see that survival depends on co-operation. If that happens, that’s going to be a first in human history.” – David Attenborough
Memorial Day
Memorial Day is a holiday in the United States for honouring and mourning the military personnel who have died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. It should be a time for reflection, a time to reconsider priorities, to halt the drift into another conflict and instead contemplate on finding ways to cooperate.
There are 5,800 nuclear warheads in the United States. The United States already has the largest military arsenal and the widest military footprint in the world. According to the most recent data, the U.S. government spent at least $732 billion in 2019 on its military; we say “at least” because there are secret disbursements of funds to the massive intelligence wings that are not publicly available. From 2018 to 2019, the United States increased its military budget by 5.3 percent, the amount of which is the same as the total German military budget. Almost 40 percent of global military spending is done by the United States. The United States has a combined total of more than 500 military bases in almost every country on the planet. The United States Navy has 20 of the world’s 44 active aircraft carriers, while other U.S. allies have 21 of them; this means that the U.S. and its allied states have 41 of the 44 aircraft carriers (China has two and Russia has one). There is no question about the overwhelming superiority of US military force.
The United States is now using its full ability to expand its nuclear and conventional domination into space and into cyber warfare with its Space Command (re-established in 2019) and Cyber Command (created in 2009). The United States has developed an interceptor ballistic missile (SM-3) that it has tested in space, and it is testing such fanciful weapons as particle-beam weaponry, plasma-based weaponry, and kinetic bombardment. In 2017, Trump announced his government’s commitment to such new weaponry. The U.S. government will spend at least $481 billion between 2018 and 2024 to develop new advanced weapons systems, including autonomous vehicles, counter-drones, cyber-weapons, and robotics. The U.S. Army has already tested its Advanced Hypersonic Weapon, which can travel at Mach 5 (roughly 3,800 miles per hour, five times the speed of sound), so that it can reach any place on earth within an hour; this weapon is part of the U.S. military’s Conventional Prompt Global Strike program.
The U.S. military complex has advanced its hybrid war program. This program includes a range of techniques to undermine governments and political projects, including the mobilisation of United States power over international institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the SWIFT wire service) to prevent governments from managing basic economic activity, as well as the use of U.S. diplomatic power to isolate governments, the use of sanctions methods to prevent private companies from doing business with certain governments, the use of information warfare to render governments and political forces to be criminals or terrorists, and so on. This powerful complex of instruments is able – in the plain light of day – to destabilize governments and to justify regime change.
The U.S. government, along with its NATO partners as well as U.S. and European weapons manufacturers, continue to flood the world with the deadliest weapons. The top five arms exporters (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics) are located in the United States. These five firms alone account for 35 percent of the top 100 of the world’s arms dealer sales in 2018 (the most recent figures); the total U.S. arms sales account for 59 percent of all arms sales that year. This was an increase of 7.2 percent over the U.S. sales in 2017. These weapons are sold to countries that should instead spend their precious surplus on education, health, and food programs. For example, in West Asia and North Africa, the greatest threat to the people is not only the terrorist in his Toyota Hilux, but it is also the arms dealer in an air-conditioned hotel room.
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/05/25/covid-19-a-new-appeal-against-preparations-for-war/
Locust Plague Spreads
Further to the article in the current issue of the Socialist Standard concerning the plague of locusts, the situation has now worsened. Heavy rains on the Arabian peninsula in 2019 triggered explosive growth in the locust population, and they began causing problems in India, Pakistan and a number of African countries last year.
Farmers across Pakistan are suffering the worst plague of locusts in recent history, which has caused billions of dollars in damage and led to fears of long-term food shortages. The Pakistani government declared a national emergency this year after the locusts began to decimate winter crops. The first swarm came from the United Arab Emirates in mid-2019, and in the next few weeks time a new infestation is expected to arrive from Iran. Pakistan will incur losses of about £2bn in winter crops, such as wheat, and a further £2.3bn in the summer crops being planted now, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Mir Gul Muhammad, a farmer in Balochistan province, was blunt. “The worst that we have ever seen, ever, in our whole life,” he said of the swarms of locusts that descended on his village of Gharok. “I cultivated around 50 acres of cotton crops and all of them have been eaten and destroyed by locusts,” he said. “Besides cotton, my other crops – onion, chilli and tomato – have been affected badly too. It is a loss of around 10m rupees [£51,000]. As a farmer, it will take years to recover from this loss.”
Farmers across Pakistan are suffering the worst plague of locusts in recent history, which has caused billions of dollars in damage and led to fears of long-term food shortages. The Pakistani government declared a national emergency this year after the locusts began to decimate winter crops. The first swarm came from the United Arab Emirates in mid-2019, and in the next few weeks time a new infestation is expected to arrive from Iran. Pakistan will incur losses of about £2bn in winter crops, such as wheat, and a further £2.3bn in the summer crops being planted now, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Mir Gul Muhammad, a farmer in Balochistan province, was blunt. “The worst that we have ever seen, ever, in our whole life,” he said of the swarms of locusts that descended on his village of Gharok. “I cultivated around 50 acres of cotton crops and all of them have been eaten and destroyed by locusts,” he said. “Besides cotton, my other crops – onion, chilli and tomato – have been affected badly too. It is a loss of around 10m rupees [£51,000]. As a farmer, it will take years to recover from this loss.”
In Sindh province, Moti Lal said his livelihood was destroyed last week in one fell swoop.
“All my green crops, such as wheat and mustard, were attacked and ruined by locusts,” he said. “We had borrowed 40,000 rupees [£400] through micro-financing schemes to invest in farming. Now, all that amount is gone.”
This is economically devastating for a country where agriculture accounts for 20% of GDP and 65% of the population live and work in agricultural areas. Pakistan is already suffering from crippling inflation, which is now at a 12-year high, and the unprecedented economic burden imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. The cost of flour and vegetables had already risen 15% this year, and the locust infestation could make even basic food staples unaffordable.
Ismail Rahoo, state minister of agriculture for Sindh, described the plague as a “dangerous and catastrophic threat to the economy, agriculture and food security in Pakistan”.
“This year it will be ten times worse than last year. They are attacking from three sides,” he said. “The locusts and their eggs have now covered 50,000 square kilometres of farmland. We are expecting them to infest more than 5m hectares. And they are not just attacking Sindh province, but also the agricultural areas of Punjab and Balochistan.”
Muhammad Akram Dashti, a senator from Balochistan, says, it is too late. ‘“Many people will starve,” he said.