Sundays at 19.30 (IST)

Weekly WSP (India) meeting

Friday 3 September 19.30 BST (GMT + 1)

Did you see the news?

Host: Howard Moss

General current affairs discussion

Friday 10 September 19.30 BST (GMT + 1)

Friday 17 September 19.30 BST (GMT + 1)

From socialist calculation to political ecology

Guest Speaker: John O’Neill

Ludwig von Mises claimed that ‘socialist calculation’ (as calculation without money) was irrational. The current ecological crises show that it is capitalist calculation that is irrational and harmful.

Friday 24 September No meeting

Friday 1 October 19.30 BST (GMT + 1)

Did you see the news?

Host: Paddy Shannon

General current affairs discussion

Sunday 3 October 12.00 noon BST (GMT + 1)

Central Branch: Regular first Sunday of the month meeting.

More than 480 million people living in the vast swathes of central, eastern and northern India, including the capital New Delhi, endure significantly high pollution levels, said the report by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC).

“Alarmingly, India’s high levels of air pollution have expanded geographically over time,” according to the EPIC study

Air pollution is likely to reduce the life expectancy of about 40 percent of Indians by more than nine years.

 Air quality has significantly worsened in the western state of Maharashtra and the central state of Madhya Pradesh, it said.

India’s National Clean Air Program (NCAP), could raise the country’s overall life expectancy by 1.7 years and that of New Delhi residents by 3.1 years. NCAP aims to reduce pollution by 20 to 30 percent in the 102 worst-affected cities by 2024 by ensuring cuts in industrial emissions and vehicular exhaust, introducing stringent rules for transport fuels and biomass burning, and reducing dust pollution. It will also entail better monitoring systems.

 Bangladesh could raise average life expectancy by 5.4 years if the country improved air quality to levels recommended by the World Health Organization.

Pollution to cut 9 years of life expectancy of 40% Indians: Study | Climate News | Al Jazeera

An estimated 8.3 million hectares (20.5 million acres) of land in the North Island of New Zealand – nearly 73% of the landmass – as well as almost the entire South Island were taken from Māori through confiscation and inequitable purchases between 1840 and 1939.  Without land, Māori political authority was substantially neutered. 

Leading constitutional lawyer Dr Moana Jackson says this confiscation, and others like them, formed the beginnings of the New Zealand banking system and colonial economy.

“Ministers of the crown became mortgage brokers, if you like, and began offering cheap mortgages to colonisers, or giving them a reward for their part in the wars against our people.”

Beginning in the 1970s, widespread campaigns and occupations began pressuring the government to recognise the grievances of Māori who had been dispossessed. Occupations – although participants call themselves protectors rather than protesters or occupiers – have increasingly cropped up across New Zealand. The value of land to Māori is more than economic. According to Māori myth, the earth is Papatuanuku, the mother. The relationship to Papatuanuku is what makes Māori tangata whenua, or people of the land.

“The whole idea of that relationship with the Earth mother is not some exotic, spiritual thing – it’s actually a very practical thing,” says Jackson. “Without the land, the phrase tangata whenua becomes a poetic expression rather than a statement of belonging.”

In 1975 the Treaty of Waitangi Act established the Waitangi Tribunal. Its purpose was to hear claims of the crown’s violation of the treaty, signed in 1840 and considered New Zealand’s founding document. The treaty is one source of New Zealand’s constitutional system, however the document’s Māori translation has been contentious since its inception.

Most Māori believe that sovereignty was never ceded to the crown. The Māori translation, Te Tiriti, granted governorship to the crown, and promised Māori tino rangatiratanga – a term which can be interpreted as absolute sovereignty – over their land, as opposed to the “exclusive and undisturbed possession” granted in the English translation.

Since the tribunal’s establishment, there have been negotiated settlements worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But the settlement process is not without criticism.

“When the crown enters into negotiations over what they call settlements, I think it’s a misnomer,” says Jackson. “They set the terms of the negotiation, they set the parameters, they even have standard statements of apology that iwi are asked to choose from. That whole process flies in the face of what a treaty is meant to be. Treaties aren’t meant to be settled. They’re meant to be honoured.”

Because much of the land confiscated by the crown was subsequently privatised, many iwi [tribes or clans] are left with no recourse beyond a cash payment. The crown, it says, has no jurisdiction. Land like the plot at Ihumātao is not subject to the Tribunal’s authority and, were it developed, one deed would turn into hundreds, further alienating the traditional owners.

With no ability to reclaim the land through the channels of the tribunal, the owners at Ihumātao, a small pocket of land three kilometres from Auckland’s international airport became the most prominent site of a struggle by Māori, New Zealand’s indigenous people, to reclaim land confiscated by the crown more than 150 years ago.

Ihumātao contains evidence of New Zealand’s first commercial gardens, where thousands of hectares were planted with kumara, a tropical sweet potato which thrived in the warm and nutritious soil. The adjacent stonefields, today a category one Unesco heritage site, began an occupation in the tradition of those at Whaingaroa, on the west coast, and Bastion Point in Auckland. Pania Newton, a recent law graduate, moved into a caravan on the site in November 2016, determined to stop the planned development. In 2019, the situation escalated. The occupants were served with trespass notices and a large police presence moved in. Thousands gathered in solidarity.  The government bought the land from the property developers, Fletcher, using $30m from the Land for Housing program. New Zealand’s auditor-general found the deal to be unlawful until validated by an act of parliament. 

We await a time in the future that not only Maori land becomes the common legacy but all private property.

Unstoppable movement: how New Zealand’s Māori are reclaiming land with occupations | New Zealand | The Guardian

 World Socialist Party (New Zealand) P.O. Box 1929,Auckland, NI, New Zealand

E-mail: moggiegrayson@gmail.com

Website: World Socialist Party – History (worldsocialism.org)

 In 2015, atheist Mark Janny was released from jail. (The reason he was there is irrelevant to this story.)

 His parole officer, John Gamez, told Janny that if he wanted to remain out of prison, he would have to live at the Denver Rescue Mission, a Christian homeless shelter.  That shelter’s rules required residents to participate in worship services, Bible studies, and faith-based counselling, none of which Janny had any desire to join. And he shouldn’t have had to.

Janny went to the shelter… but didn’t participate in the religious activities. Because of that, Gamez revoked his parole and sent Janny back to jail for five more months

Appeals Court: Atheist Parolee Jailed for Rejecting Bible Study Can Sue Over It | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

 Marx said that history perhaps repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. 

With the withdrawal of American and NATO armed forces, leaving behind to await their fate many of their Afghan allies, farce may be the wrong word. 

However, Engels did write about the British and how they exited their doomed occupation of Afghanistan back in the 19th century.

 It is indeed an echo of current events.

The British occupiers having imposed their puppet ruler upon the Afghan people led to the situation where  “…the Afghans were noways content to be ruled by the Feringhee Kaffirs (European infidels), and during the whole of 1840 and ’41, insurrection followed on insurrection in every part of the country…” Yet the British commander  “declared this to be the normal state of Afghan society, and wrote home that every thing went on well, and Shah Soojah’s power was taking root. In vain were the warnings of the military officers and the other political agents…” The clung deperately to power through a process where “…the Afghan chiefs were subsidized, or rather bribed…to keep them out of mischief…” but the administration “…was informed of the impossibility of going on at this rate of spending money…” The decision was made that “All Afghanistan was to be evacuated…”

Engels concludes his article

“Thus ended the attempt of the British to set up a prince of their own making in Afghanistan.”

Afghanistan by Frederick Engels (marxists.org)

 To loud fanfares, Biden vowed to make the U.S. the world’s vaccine “arsenal,” but of the more than $16 billion that Congress appropriated to strengthen the response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the Biden administration has spent less than 0.01% of it to expand global vaccine manufacturing, according to Playing Fiddle While the World Burns, a new report released Thursday by PrEP4All, a global health justice organization dedicated to increasing access to lifesaving medications. 

The relief package signed by the president in March allocated $16.05 billion to boost the production of coronavirus tests, vaccines, treatments, and other tools to end the public health emergency, PrEP4All found that the Biden administration has so far spent just $145 million—only $12 million of it from the American Rescue Plan—to ramp up vaccine manufacturing.

Most of that money was used to retrofit production lines at Merck, the pharmaceutical company working with Johnson & Johnson to produce Covid-19 vaccines.

 If Biden spent the remaining billions of dollars earmarked for pandemic counter-measures—funding that PrEP4All says is “more than sufficient to build mRNA vaccine production capacity in six months”—the U.S. could make 16 billion doses and “vaccinate the entire world in a single year.”

James Krellenstein, PrEP4All co-founder and managing director, said in a statement. “Unequal access to vaccines threatens lives everywhere. So long as Covid-19 spreads worldwide, even worse variants than Delta will emerge.”

Krellenstein called the Biden administration’s failure to adequately invest in producing a greater supply of doses “inexplicable given the current crisis in global vaccine access,” and he emphasized that time is of the essence.

“It is imperative that the Biden administration immediately scale up vaccine production for the billions of people who don’t have access,” Krellenstein continued. “The health of our nation and the world depends on it.”

Medicare for All advocate Ady Barkan, described the Biden administration’s refusal to develop and implement a comprehensive plan to ramp up global vaccine manufacturing as “probably the most important issue in the world right now.”

Biden’s White House officials say that it is not possible for them to scale up production quickly, in part because of a scarcity of raw materials, and that doing so would take three to five years.

 Dr. Tom Frieden, who directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Obama-Biden administration, dismissed the claim as “nonsense.”

“People say, ‘Oh, it’s going to take months,'” Frieden said. “Well, Covid is with us for years. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today.”

Biden Has Spent Less Than 0.01% of Funds Earmarked to Defeat Covid on Vaccine Manufacturing: Report | Common Dreams News

  The Brazilian scientists were sceptical. They ran different models to check calculations.

“When we got the first results, we wondered if there was a problem in the equations,” said Cassio Bernardino, a project manager for environmental group WWF-Brazil.

The figures checked out.

The country with the most freshwater resources on the planet steadily lost 15% of its surface water since 1991. Gradual retreat in the Brazilian share of the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, left water covering just one-quarter the area it did 30 years ago. And the data only went up to 2020 — before this year’s drought that is Brazil’s worst in nine decades.

“The prospects are not good; we’re losing natural capital, we’re losing water that feeds industries, energy generation and agribusiness,” Bernardino said. Brazil’s “society as a whole is losing this very precious resource, and losing it at a frighteningly fast rate.”

The ongoing drought has already raised energy costs and food prices, withered crops, rendered vast swaths of forest more susceptible to wildfire and prompted specialists to warn of possible electricity shortages.

In Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, water that evaporates then travels on air currents to provide rainfall far afield. But some climate experts argue that the Amazon is headed for a “tipping point” in 10 to 15 years: if too much forest is destroyed, the Amazon would begin an irreversible process of degradation into tropical savannah.

There are more immediate sources of alarm, like possible power rationing this year. Hydroelectric reservoirs have been drained by a decade of lower-than-usual rainfall. Reservoirs in the Parana River basin, which powers the metropolis Sao Paulo and several states, have never before been so depleted, the grid operator said this month.

Brazil’s declining water resources also risk exacerbating fires that people often set during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter to clear pasture, which then rage out of control. Last year, more than one-quarter of Brazil’s Pantanal went up in flames. It was by far the worst annual devastation since authorities started keeping records in 2003.

“Once again, the specter of fires is back,” said Angelo Rabelo, president of a local environmental group that oversees a protected area of about 300,000 hectares. Last year, 90% of his land was damaged by blazes. “The scenario is even worse this year: drier, and with less water,” Rabelo said.

Brazil water survey heightens alarm over extreme drought (apnews.com)

 Starbucks has 670 retail outlets in Mexico, Subway has 900, and Walmart has 2,610 (the largest number in any country after the US), not to mention, 718 Dominos, 19558 Oxxo (a Coca Cola store),  and 400 KFCs, plus McDonald’s, Pizza Huts, Baskin Robbins and Burger Kings, joined by Home Depot, Office Depot, Citigroup, JP Morgan Case, and thousands of factories, from Ford to General Electric.

More and more US transnationals have opened up in Mexico over the past few decades, taking advantage of unfair trade agreements, super-exploitative labor conditions, and cheap utilities. Local restaurants and traditional Mexican markets struggle to compete. The impact of this change in urban landscape and consumption on Mexicans’ identity, lifestyle, and culture, shouldn’t be underestimated.

“There isn’t any equality of conditions, so it isn’t really a competition,” says Iktiuh Arenas, an expert in urban planning and human rights, and a specialist with Mexico’s Secretariat of Agrarian, Land, and Urban Development (SEDATU). Arenas says shopping centers, department stores like Walmart, and transnational chain restaurants have advantages compared to local markets and craftspeople, because they have a big marketing budget. They encourage people to buy products that weren’t produced locally, and they have the money to secure the best locations in squares and main streets  “This policy of urban development is based on copying the US model,” he says.

Walmart in Mexico is the biggest retailer in the country, and it includes other brands, like the smaller Bodega Aurrerra supermarkets, the wholesale Sam’s Club, MaxiPali, and Superama. In 1994, it had just 25 stores in Mexico, but the NAFTA agreement (1994-2020) meant it could easily sell hundreds of products imported from the US, without paying customs taxes. Department stores, shopping centers, and fast food joints from the US displaced local businesses , like the tlapalerias [Mexican stores selling paint and hardware goods.]

With NAFTA’s removal of tariffs and trade barriers, these companies also benefit from some of the highest rates of exploitation in the world. While a Mexican worker in the US will earn US$1,870 per month on average, in Mexico the figure drops to US$291.

NAFTA also saw a mass displacement of rural workers in Mexico, and Arenas says public policy has abandoned rural areas in favor of cities. He argues that “classism and racism towards rural workers” have also been a factor. As more and more farmers moved to the cities, they became the new cheap labor.

People are abandoning the street markets and going to supermarkets because of their status. When a family goes to McDonald’s, it’s because they want to look like they are upper class. Working people are sold the idea of junk food as a way to feel modern. Many Mexicans feel the need to put on appearances. That involves pretending their living conditions are better than the poverty they face, as well as imitating the US or European ways, and buying products or brands from there. For hundreds of years, colonization has taught people that their culture and way of life were inferior.

 Consumers buy things they don’t need as part of aspiring to be something better. “It strengthens those issues of classism and loss of identity,” Arenas points out. Mexican people are rejecting their indigenous roots, and instead they imitate US culture. Being indigenous is stigmatized. 

Tianguis markets were a key part of people’s culture and way of life, and they continue to exist in some form today in towns like Cuetzalan, Tianguistengo, Otumba, Tenejapa, Chilapa, Zacualpan, and more. In Walmarts, you exchange money with someone, but you don’t exchange knowledge, you don’t have real interactions. Instead of relying on interactions in the street and squares stores like Walmart have now increasingly adapted to selling online. Walmart’s profits in Mexico and Central America increased to 162 billion pesos in 2020, from 148 billion in 2019.

“Mexico is dominated by the US … culturally, economically, and they even choose our presidents so that they can keep sending their companies here and enjoying cheap labor … and with that comes a policy of making people reject their culture, and that means rejecting themselves,”  Bertha Meléndez, a lifelong activist and well-known musician says.

This is nothing less than a cultural conquest.

Opinion | Walmartland: How US Stores Colonizing Mexico Are Displacing Local Culture | Tamara Pearson (commondreams.org)

 Rochester, New  York has a cost of living that’s closest to the national average across 509 U.S. metropolitan areas.

 A single adult living in Rochester needs at least US$30,000 a year to cover the cost of housing, food, transportation and other basic needs.

San Francisco is the U.S. city with the highest cost of living, affording just the basics costs $47,587, mainly due to significantly higher taxes and rents.

The city with the lowest cost of living is Beckley, West Virginia. Even there, a childless worker still needs to earn about $28,200 to make essential ends meet. 

Costs add up quickly for households with more than one person. Two adults in Rochester need over $48,000 a year, while a single parent with one child needs more than $63,000. In San Francisco, a single parent would need to earn $101,000 a year just to scrape by.

 At least 27 million U.S. workers don’t earn enough to hit that very low threshold of $30,000. This is a conservative estimate and that the number of people with jobs who earn less than what’s necessary to afford the necessities of life is likely much higher.

The majority of those 27 million workers are concentrated in two industries: retail trade and leisure and hospitality. These two industries are among America’s largest employers and pay the lowest average wages.

For example, the median salary for cashiers was $28,850 in early 2020, with 2.5 million of the nation’s 5 million cashiers earning less than that. Or take retail sales. There, 75% of workers – about 1.8 million – were earning less than $27,080 a year. Close to a million waiters and waitresses were earning less than the median income of $23,740.

The federal poverty line is unrealistically low – only $12,880 for an individual. The official poverty line was created to determine eligibility for Medicaid and other government benefits that support low-income people, not to indicate how much a person needs to actually get by.

Unless Congress and the Biden administration act quickly, 7.5 million people are set to entirely lose unemployment insurance (UI) aid on Labor Day, Sept. 6, the official nationwide expiration date of Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA). The looming UI expiration is the largest cutoff of unemployment benefits in history.  Another 3 million unemployed workers will lose the $300-per-week federal boost provided through the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) program. Twenty-six states — all of which are led by Republicans except Louisiana — ended federal pandemic benefits early, heightening the economic desperation of millions of people.

Millions of US Workers Can’t Afford Food & Rent as Supreme Court Strikes Down Eviction Moratorium – Consortiumnews

7.5 Million Americans to Lose Jobless Benefits on Labor Day – Consortiumnews

Air pollution is linked to the increased severity of mental illness, according to the most comprehensive study of its kind involving 13,000 people in London.  The findings were likely to apply to most cities in developed nations, and cutting air pollution could benefit millions of people.

 A relatively small increase in exposure to nitrogen dioxide led to a 32% increase in the risk of needing community-based treatment and an 18% increase in the risk of being admitted to hospital.

Prof Kevin McConway of the Open University, who was not part of the study team, said, “it’s not easy for people to avoid pollution. Reducing air pollution in cities needs communal action on a broad scale.”

A separate new study has shown that heart attacks rise as the level of air pollution rises. The research examined data from southern Lombardy in Italy, an area with 1.5 million inhabitants.

Air pollution linked to more severe mental illness – study | Air pollution | The Guardian