How much money would it take to bribe you to help kill 212,000 Americans in a single year?

What size incentive would cause you to assist in the theft of $543.6 billion? 

Last year over 500,000 families were destroyed by bankruptcies caused by a family member getting sick

Bernie Sanders and Senator Lindsey Graham had a debate on Fox Nation. Sanders asked:

“In the United States, Lindsey, we spend twice as much per capita on health care compared to the people of any other country, while major countries like Canada, the U.K., Germany manage to supply health care to all their people. Why is that?”

The simple answer is the same reason we have an ongoing climate crisis – the legal bribery of politicians. These are real numbers. The bribery is real, the deaths are real. The bribes are so extensive, so widespread, so lavish that President Biden hasn’t yet even seriously brought up the topic of Medicare For All or something like it.

 The amount spent just last year bribing Congress to keep our healthcare system in place was $689,466,798.00. Almost three-quarters of a billion dollars.

In exchange, the health insurance industry took home $19 billion in profits last year, hospitals took home over $70 billion in profits, and the pharmaceutical industry made similarly huge profits last year: at least $100 billion. These three industries—that have a stake in keeping our healthcare system as broken and dysfunctional as possible—had handed out billions in compensation to their senior executives and board members. Not to mention stockholder dividends.

Health insurance in other nations is a marginal business around the edges used almost exclusively by the very wealthy to get private air ambulances and luxury suites in hospitals.

Drugs cost as little as a tenth of what they do here, and everybody in the other developed nations has health coverage.

A new peer-reviewed study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lays out a damning picture of the damage caused by the roughly $700 million a year the healthcare industry uses to bribe American legislators.

“We estimated,” the study’s authors say in the study’s abstract, “that a single-payer universal healthcare system would have saved about 212,000 lives in 2020 alone.

“We also calculated that US$105.6 billion of medical expenses associated with COVID-19 hospitalization could have been averted by a single-payer universal healthcare system over the course of the pandemic.

“These economic benefits are in addition to US$438 billion expected to be saved by single-payer universal healthcare during a non-pandemic year.”

Opinion | How Many Billions in Profit Is It Worth to Kill 212,000 Americans a Year? | Thom Hartmann (commondreams.org)

“A founding economic principle that everyone is motivated by ‘unlimited wants’, stuck on a consumerist treadmill and striving to accumulate as much wealth as they can, is untrue,” a study published in Nature Sustainability said. “The belief in this principle has also had dire consequences for the health of the planet. Striving to continually increase individual wealth, and pursuing unending economic growth, has come at a heavy cost. As wealth has increased, so too has resource use and pollution.”

Dr Paul Bain, the lead researcher and a reader at the department of psychology at the University of Bath, said that while the figures in the typical responses sound like a lot of money, “when considered that they represent a person’s ideal wealth across their whole life they are relatively moderate”.

“The ideology of unlimited wants, when portrayed as human nature, can create social pressure for people to buy more than they actually want,” he said. “Discovering that most people’s ideal lives are actually quite moderate could make it socially easier for people to behave in ways that are more aligned with what makes them genuinely happy and to support stronger policies to help safeguard the planet.”

Dr Renata Bongiorno, a co-author of the report and social psychologist at Bath Spa University and the University of Exeter, said: “The findings are a stark reminder that the majority view is not necessarily reflected in policies that allow the accumulation of excessive amounts of wealth by a small number of individuals…”

Government figures show the richest 1% of households in the UK each have at least £3.6m. At the other end of the scale, the poorest 10% of households have £15,400 or less, with almost half burdened with more debts than they have in assets, according to data published by the Office for National Statistics.

How much money is needed for ideal life? Most are OK with £8m, study finds | Psychology | The Guardian

At their height in the mid-20th century, one in three workers was a union member, and today, scarcely one in 10 is. All of the downstream damages to the working class — lower relative wages, higher economic inequality, less political power — flow from this decline. 

Liz Shuler, the newly elected president of the AFL-CIO, announced from the convention stage of the formation of the ​“Center for Transformational Organizing,” with the stated goal of organizing at least 1 million new working people in the next 10 years.

Let’s do a little quick math. 

One decade ago, in 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) says there were 14.8 million union members in America, for a union density of 11.8%. In 2021, the most recent year on record, there were 14 million union members, for a density of 10.3%. In raw numbers, 800,000 union members were lost in the past decade. So adding a cool million in the next decade seems pretty good. Right? 

No. According to the BLS, America will add 12 million jobs during the 2020s decade, with total employment rising to 165.4 million by the year 2030. One million is only 8% of those. If we very conservatively estimate there will be 166 million total workers by 2032, and we add a million new union members, there would be 15 million union members a decade from now, for a union density of less than 10%. Which is to say: The AFL-CIO’s highly touted organizing plan would represent a continued decline of unions for the next decade, and an acceptance of single-digit union density, which is the last stop before true irrelevance. Rather than ​“unprecedented union growth,” as advertised, this would represent extremely well-precedented degrowth.

 Liz Shuler about explained  this projection. ​“It’s a target, it’s a threshold, that we could get every union in the federation to buy into, which is a feat in and of itself,” Shuler said. ​“The federation has never been seen as the place that does the organizing, it’s the unions themselves. And so if the federation sets a goal, it’s a hollow goal, if you don’t have the unions behind you 100%.” 

high-profileIt is good that they are trying, at long last, to feature new organizing as a high profile priority, and it is good that they are trying to set a goal but the plain facts are that the nation’s largest body of organized labor has announced a goal that represents a decline in the single most important measure of union strength.

Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the AFL-CIO’s largest union, took the view that, ​“It’s important to put a number out there,” she said. ​“Is it too low? Of course it’s too low!” 

Her point was that the decline of unions has been more than a half-century in the making, and any reversal of that would take a long time, and the mere act of having a goal that all of these dozens of disparate unions would agree to was a worthy first step. 

The problem is that the goal is unaspiring and it won’t do much good if achieved.

The AFL-CIO’s Official New Goal: Continued Decline – In These Times

For the first time, researchers have calculated exactly how many people the US could save by acting on the climate crisis. 

A total of 7.4 million lives around the world will be saved over this century if the US manages to cut its emissions to net zero by 2050, according to the analysis. Just 10 US states could save 3.7 million lives worldwide by cutting their emissions to net zero, largely due to their high consumption of fossil fuels. Texas alone could save 1.1 million lives. But even action in less populous states would have a benefit: Idaho is capable of saving about 68,000 lives, Kansas could save 126,000 lives and Hawaii could save about 16,000 lives.

With a net zero America would enable to save the world $3.7tn in costs to adapt to the rising heat. 

The USA has yet to pass any meaningful legislation to tackle the climate crisis. Failure to pass any legislation would leave the USA, and the world, far short in the effort to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. As the world’s second-largest polluter of greenhouse gases, the USA  will in large part decide how many people in faraway countries will be subjected to deadly heat, as well as endure punishing storms, floods, drought and other consequences of the climate emergency.  Rising heat this century will cause an uneven distribution of deaths around the world, mainly focused on areas such as north and west Africa, as well as south Asia. India and Pakistan recently endured a brutal heatwave of temperatures reaching 122F (50C) in some places, which killed several hundred people and was made 30 times more likely by the climate crisis.

“Each additional ton of carbon has these global impacts – there is a tangible difference in terms of death rates,” said Hannah Hess, associate director at the research group Rhodium, which is part of the Climate Impact Lab consortium that conducted the study. “There’s a sense of frustration over the lack of progress at the national level on climate but every action at state or local level makes a difference in terms of lives.”

“People have different abilities to adapt depending on the resources they have to protect themselves from extreme heat,” said Hess. “The hottest places don’t all face equally elevated risk of death; it’s closely tied to economic growth. Within the US there are impacts in places like southern California and Texas, but the US is really eclipsed by poorer regions of the world when it comes to these sort of deaths.”

How millions of lives can be saved if the US acts now on climate | Climate crisis | The Guardian

 The Hawaii islands were once a thriving food forest until colonial settlers in the 18th and 19th century stole the land, water and labor to create industrial monocrop plantations – mostly sugar and pineapples for export. This depleted the soil of its nutrients, carbon and water, and the Maui people of food and climate security. Between 85% and 90% of the food eaten in Maui now comes from imports while diet related diseases are soaring, and the state allocates less than 1% of its budget to agriculture.

Maui is one of the largest islands in Hawaii, a Polynesian archipelago and one of the most remote populated land masses on the planet. It’s a subtropical biodiversity hotspot, where flora and fauna adapted over millennia to a wide range of ecosystems and microclimates, but ecological destruction over the past century or so has also made it the extinction capital of the world.

Rain clouds cover the peaks of the West Maui mountains, one of the wettest places on the planet, which for centuries sustained biodiverse forests providing abundant food and medicines for Hawaiians who took only what they needed. Those days of abundance and food sovereignty are long gone.

Rows of limp lemon trees struggle in windswept sandy slopes depleted by decades of sugarcane cultivation. Agricultural runoff choking the ocean reef and water shortages, linked to over-tourism and global heating, threaten the future viability of this paradise island.

At its heart, the traditional Hawaiian farming vision is about creating a sustainable relationship between community and agriculture by reestablishing the connection between culture and land. It isn’t just about looking back, but rather mixing ancient regenerative farming practices with modern tools and technologies to meet the climate and food challenges facing Hawaii in the 21st century. The forest is considered akin to an extended family, somewhat unwieldy and unpredictable but resilient and stronger together than apart. The lofty flowering acacia and myrtaceae trees are natural born givers, capturing fog and rain to distribute moisture outwards like a lawn sprinkler and down through the roots to recharge aquifers. While the groundcover plants such as mosses and ferns act like a living mulch and create a healthy ecosystem for all sorts of useful microorganisms.

“We believe that land is the chief, the people its servants,” said Kaipo Kekona, 38, who with his wife Rachel Lehualani Kapu have transformed several acres of depleted farmland into a dense food forest on a mountain ridge. The couple are Indigenous farmers – ancient knowledge keepers – and part of a wider food and land sovereignty movement gaining momentum in Hawaii.

Traditional Hawaiian farmers have to contend not only with historic drought, erratic rainfall and deadly natural pathogens but also the dominance of industrial agriculture and foreign capital in Hawaii. The state became the biotech GMO capital of the US after agrochemical transnationals were welcomed to open research fields with fewer restrictions on potentially toxic pesticides. In Kekona and Kapu’s food forest in Maui there are no pesticides or synthetic fertilisers. Cover crops and tilling are also out.“ Traditional farming is about facilitating natural processes in order to feed the soil so that the land can feed us,” said Kekona. Indigenous farming practices in Hawaii are guided by the lunar cycle and wind patterns, knowledge which was also passed down orally over generations. The 30 moon phases used in the traditional Hawaiian calendar dictate when to plant, weed, water and harvest. “The goal is to knock the empire down and replace those corporate ag guys with something more environmentally sustainable which reflects our values,” said Kekona, who is part of the Indigenous sovereignty movement reconnecting Hawaiians with their lands and traditions.

A canopy system is central to a food forest. On Kekona’s farm, sugar cane, papaya, coconuts, mangoes, coffee and candle nut trees provide shade and absorb water, nutrients and leaf litter, while mosses and ferns help suppress weeds and distract insects. In between are the cash crops such as the starchy root vegetable kalo (taro) – a traditional Hawaiian staple revered as an ancestor – sweet potatoes, breadfruit, turmeric and peppers, while other nutrient-rich crops are mostly used for mulching or fertiliser.

Unlike industrial agriculture, diversity is key: there are nine varieties of avocado and coconuts, three native bananas, six sweet potatoes and 27 types of kalo in orange, purple and brown. Some are coveted for the starchy sweet roots used for porridge, others produce tastier leaves and stems for stews, and one variety smells and tastes just like popcorn. Drought tolerant varieties are becoming increasingly important. Non-native species such as passionfruit, lemongrass, papaya, perennial peanuts and coffee are cultivated to enrich the soil with nutrients such as nitrogen, provide shade or wind cover or just because they taste good.

“It’s a constant cycle, everything existing together at the same time, with crops always feeding the soil and nurturing each other,” said Kekona. “This is the essence of the forest food system, which our ancestors passed down to us over centuries.”

At Hōkūnui farm in the central valley, 37-year-old Koa Hewahewa and his family of foresters mix generational Indigenous knowledge and modern technologies to repair the damage caused by intensive cattle ranching and decades of pesticides and synthetic fertilisers.

“Letting a chemical company pollute the island to feed the world while we suffer food insecurity is beyond ironic,” said Autumn Ness, the Hawaii program director of Beyond Pesticides and co-founder of the Maui Hub, the island’s first farm box scheme which connects small farmers and producers to residents. “What’s stopping Hawaii feeding its own people is not lack of knowledge or skills, it’s the power structure, the ongoing plantation mentality which tips the scales in favour of big ag and developers while rubbishing traditional knowledge. We need to change this narrative because, without radical changes, what will be left of this place in a hundred years?”

The farmers restoring Hawaii’s ancient food forests that once fed an island | Hawaii | The Guardian

Climate talks in Germany have ended in acrimony. At last year’s COP26 conference in Glasgow, island states and developing countries agreed to prioritise cuts to carbon emissions on the back of promises that richer nations would finally set up a compensation process this year. It was a compromise they hoped would pay off. But despite two weeks of discussions here in Bonn, they have been unable to get the issue of a funding facility on the agenda for the COP27 conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in November.

 The amount of children trying to flee conflict, violence and other crises is the highest on record, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said.  Of detected human trafficking victims worldwide, children account for 34%.

The organization said in a statement that 36.5 million children were forced from their homes by the end of 2021.

The number includes 13.7 million children who are refugees and asylum-seekers, and almost 22.8 million children who have been internally displaced as a result of conflict and violence.

The numbers do not include children who have been displaced by climate and environmental disasters, and also do not include those displaced in 2022, or by the war in Ukraine.

UNICEF says the worldwide refugee population has more than doubled over the past decade, with children comprising nearly half. More than a third of displaced children are in sub-Saharan Africa (3.9 million or 36%), a quarter in Europe and Central Asia (2.6 million or 25%) and 13% (1.4 million) in the Middle East and North Africa.

UNICEF: 36.5 million children displaced by end of 2021, highest number ever recorded | News | DW | 17.06.2022

Agroecology — an approach to farming long practiced by Indigenous and peasant communities around the world — could transform our food systems for the better. Agroecology offers the promise of a win-win, where people nourish themselves while restoring ecosystems and addressing the harms and legacies of colonialism. Agroecology aligns with the food sovereignty movement because it is inherently emancipatory and democratic. Where industrial food production emphasizes scalability and proprietary technology, consolidating and controlling power and wealth, agroecological practices require wealth and power to be held locally. Producers must have the freedom, flexibility and resources to build healthy and just relationships in communities and among the people and the land. 

It is also at the center of the food sovereignty movement, a global constellation of peasant- and Indigenous-led organizations fighting for the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food, produced in a way that is ecologically sound and socially acceptable. Food sovereignty is arguably the single largest social movement in the world. La Via Campesina represents over 200 million farmers in 70 countries. And the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, which operates in 50 countries, is the largest civil society movement on the continent. Agroecological systems are as diverse as the people practicing them and the places where they are practiced. 

There is no doubt that regenerative agriculture and other agroecological practices can help address climate change, including by sequestering carbon in the soil. 

Yet agribusinesses in the Global North are actively looking to agroecology to rebrand and build new markets under the banners of carbon farming and regenerative agriculture. Corporate plans to invest in regenerative agriculture appear to be mere appropriations of agroecological practices, hollowed out of their potential for supporting broad societal transformation.

But, a relentless focus on single outcomes, such as carbon, coupled with industry’s instinct to define and standardize, threatens the transformative potential of agroecology.

lobal food systems are at a breaking point. Not only are they responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, but they are also the top contributors to water pollution and biodiversity collapse. On top of that, many aspects of our food systems are extremely vulnerable to disruptions from climate change. In addition to their immense ecological costs, our food systems are also tremendously unjust. As many as one in four people experience moderate or severe food insecurity. The global expansion of industrial agriculture continues to be a vehicle for the violent spread of colonialism. 

 Crop development through genetic modification is closed off to many by intellectual property laws, patents and the high technological competencies and equipment involved. On-farm domestication and breeding are, by contrast, democratic technologies because they are necessarily open and entirely reliant on local knowledge and sharing.

Beware the Corporate Appropriation of “Sustainable” Farming Practices – In These Times

At Summer School, Brian Gardner will be giving the following talk:

Let Them Do Yoga! – Inequality, Mental Health and Social Revolution

This talk will explore one of the less obvious ways in which capitalism and the class divide impacts negatively on humans. As the profit system turns the screw we are faced with huge and growing mental health challenges such as depression and anxiety.

How much of our this is down to the individual’s biology, and how much is social/political? What does inequality do to our psyches? Why are humans so apparently sensitive to class divisions? And does this provide insight to why inequality is so apparently resistant to political reform?

How will the global collective trauma of COVID play out? And what about the looming existential crisis that is the climate emergency?

Once taboo, we are now encouraged to parade our mental health like some fashion accessory. Are there other ways to regain wellbeing than lunchtime meditation or a friendly chat with HR? Are we just accommodating to the pressures of being both worker and consumer under capitalism?

Or are we seeing signs of humanity growing up? Is our mental environment a key battleground? How might mental well-being influence class consciousness? And what could we reasonably say about mental health inside a future socialist society?

Brian Gardner will explore these questions and more.

Details of more sessions will be announced soon.

 For more information on the event, see here: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/summer-school-2022/

Court Circular

(A Tale of Two Leaders)

One summoned to court in recognition

Of his leadership in commissioning

Bombing, shelling, blasting and reducing

Cities to rubble. True to his mission,

No matter what the human rights and wrongs,

Or the legal opinion of lawyers.

Another, once a lawyer who prefers

The statesman’s mantle and honorary gongs,

Who also had cities blasted and shelled

To wrack and ruin, the dead unreckoned,

Has been duly recognised and beckoned

To appear at the Queen’s court, having excelled,

In profiting from political barter,

To merit the Order of the Garter.

D. A.