Well worth a watch for a summary of Murray Bookchin

 Twenty-four American states are raising objections to a bankruptcy proposal for Sacklers to settle lawsuits by paying $4.3bn but family would keep about $7bn.

 The Sacklers, owners of Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of the powerful prescription painkiller OxyContin, seek to surrender part of their immense fortune in return for immunity from further litigation over their part in a drug epidemic that has claimed more than 500,000 lives. The unusual proposition shields the wealth of individual Sacklers family members, seeking bankruptcy only for their company and not for themselves.

Under the proposals, the Sackler family that own Purdue Pharma would settle more than 3,000 lawsuits against the company by paying $4.3bn. But the Sacklers would keep about $7bn which would be personally protected from legal action over the part played by some family members in the illegal drive to mass market OxyContin for which Purdue has been twice convicted of criminal charges, in 2007 and last year.

Critics have accused the family of seeking to buy its way out of accountability while failing to admit the part played by Purdue Pharma in creating the opioid epidemic with an unprecedented marketing drive to sell OxyContin built on manipulated data and false claims that the drug federal agents called “heroin in a pill” had a low risk of causing addiction. Purdue used its wealth to influence politicians and regulators to keep trading even as the evidence grew of an epidemic in the making.

 Critics say that the billions of dollars retained by the Sacklers under the plan would go a long way to provide social services for children left orphaned or forced into foster homes by their parents opioid addiction, and to offset the financial burden caused by the epidemic on health care and policing.

Documents show that the family is worth about $11bn. The Sacklers assets include nearly $1bn in cash with billions more held in trusts. Their vast holdings also include art and property.

The family’s lawyers say the $4.3bn payment is fair because it is less than the Sacklers made from OxyContin after tax. 

Regret but no remorse. Kathe Sackler, a former member of Purdue’s board, she said that while “my “heart breaks for the parents who have lost their children”, the company was not at fault.

“There’s nothing that I can find that I would have done differently,” she said.

US states oppose ‘unjust’ plan to shield Sackler wealth in opioid settlement | Opioids crisis | The Guardian

 After some early speculation, the China’s government has finally released their official population figures. The overall population of China average annual rise was of 0.53% to a 2020,  1.41178 billion. China  missed its growth target set in 2016, to reach 1.42 billion people by 2020.  The annual growth rate of 0.53% is the lowest since the early 1960s when China was dealing with the aftermath of tens of millions killed by famine

The proportion of citizens aged over 65 increased from 8.9% in 2010 to 13.5%, while the proportion of children grew by just 1.35% and the working population stayed steady, highlighting China’s rapidly ageing population. As a consequence the country would phase in a raising of the retirement age, which has remained unchanged for four decades at 60 for men and 55 for women.

“The number of women of childbearing age … was declining, and there is a postponement of childbearing and the rising cost of child raising,” said Ning. “All of these are reasons behind the decline on newborns.” Ning Jizhe, deputy head of the census leading group, acknowledged.

China’s central bank, which in April called for an end to all birth limits, to “fully liberalise and encourage childbirth”, and remove difficulties for women.

China’s population growing at slowest rate in generations | China | The Guardian

Millionaire CEOs in American companies saw an average pay raise of 29% in 2020 while their workers saw a 2% decrease.

The Institute for Policy Studies calculated that the average CEO compensation in 2020 was $15.3m when looking at the 100 companies  with the lowest-paid median wage for workers.

The median worker pay was $28,187. 

This means that CEOs saw a 29% pay raise compared to 2019, while workers saw a 2% decrease. 

Hilton’s CEO, Christopher Nassetta, had a compensation package worth $55.9m in 2020, the highest of the CEOs analyzed in the report, while median pay at the company was $28,608, down from $43,695 in 2019. Since the pandemic affected the company’s expected performance, and thus Nassetta’s expected compensation, the company’s board restructured its stock awards to give its CEO ample pay in 2020.

Chipotle’s board removed the company’s poor financial results from the peak of the shutdown and excluded Covid-related costs when calculating CEO Brian Niccol’s compensation. Niccol received $38m last year, which is 2,898 times more than the company’s median worker pay of $13,127.

David Gibbs, the CEO of Yum Brands, parent company to KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, ended up with a $1.4m cash bonus and stock grant valued at more than $880,000 after the company changed his performance metrics. The bonus was over twice the $900,000 of his salary Gibbs announced he would forgo to fund one-time $1,000 bonuses to the general managers of his company’s restaurants last March. Gibbs’ 2020 compensation was $14.6m while the company’s median pay was $11,377, according to the report.

US millionaire CEOs saw 29% pay raise while workers’ pay decreased – report | Executive pay and bonuses | The Guardian

The super-rich signify wealth concentration. The rich have become richer and richer. Whatever figures are used, we are dealing with rising inequalities. 

While in 1982 the hundred richest Europeans were worth an average of $230 million each, their average wealth in 2005 was ten times that, namely $2.6 billion. Since 2005, the gap has widened. 

Merrill Lynch’s World Wealth Report tells the story. Its report divides the rich into two groups:

1) High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) and the

2) Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWIs).

By the year 1996, there were about 4.5 million HNWIs with $16 trillion of individual wealth. By 2019, there were five times as many – twenty million – HNWIs with $74 trillion of individual wealth. 

At the same time, the World Bank reports that “more than 40% of the world’s population – almost 3.3 billion people – live below the $5.50 a day poverty line”. 

 In the field of conspicuous consumption, first came  Bentley and Rolls Royce limousines to now the private jet countless “executive” Gulfstream aircraft to about fifty private Boeing 747s and 777s owners, planes that normally carries four hundred passengers. Mega-yachts are experiencing an unprecedented construction boom.

Then there is the art market which also plays a special and especially subtle role in the field of conspicuous consumption. Today, at a Sotheby auction a Picasso can be bought for $95.2 million, or a Monet sold for $5 million.

Taken from here

The Structure of Wealth and the Global Money-Making Apparatus – CounterPunch.org

Five talks have been added to the Audio section of the Party website:–

Industrial Revolutions

Andy Thomas, 26th March 2021

Open Mic Night – A Syndicalist View

Tony, 2nd April 2021

Unwrapping Democracy: What and How?

Leon Rozanov, 9th April 2021

FAQ What reforms might socialists welcome?

Paddy Shannon, 14th April 2021

Dangerous Women – Eleanor Marx

Adam Buick, 16th April 2021

Here’s the text of the talk that Cde. Bill Martin gave at the virtual May Day Rally on 30 April

 “Comrades, friends, thank you for coming along with us to our Mayday celebration. So, my question is, really, why are we celebrating?  I think the simplest thing to say is: because it is our day.  A day that belongs to the people who work: the so called key workers and non-key workers alike by whose labour wealth is generated and our society is kept running.  But, so what, what if it is our day?  Why is that worth celebrating?

Well, let’s just pause a little and – as with all good science, ask what seems an obvious question: what is a day?  That might seem very straightforward, but I wouldn’t have much of a talk for you if I couldn’t pick it apart, just a little.  

Of course, the answer that’s springing to all your minds is that a day is the time it takes the Earth to complete one rotation around its axis, relative to the sun.  Conventionally, we say that that takes 24 hours – but of course, it does, in reality, vary a little due to the way the Earth spins.  But it’s only a matter of second (of course, seconds add up).  Apparently, the exact scientific definition of a day is 86,400 seconds – I could hit you with more detail, but you’re just as capable of reading the Wikipedia entry for day as I am.

But, my point is this, this is a relatively modern definition of day, one born of an industrialised mind-set that measures everything and wants to standardise everything into neatly defined infinitely reproducible and replaceable commodities.  The idea of a day was around long before that.

As we experience it, a day is defined by sun or absence of sun.  By those hours of daylight in which humans, certainly in the pre-electric light days, could be active and safe in the world, as opposed to night, that time of danger and darkness from which we sheltered in our homes and by light of fires.

Some of us experienced this a little during lockdown.  With the options of brightly lit pubs, restaurants or cinemas to go to of an evening, the short daylight hours confined many of to our homes for much of the day: especially women.  Whereas I could go for a walk, friends of mine reported being reluctant due to the darkness and actual attacks in their areas.  During those days, my active hours of daylight became entirely taken over by my hours of work.

So, a day is something other than an arbitrary measure of time, or some objective aspect of a spinning rock in space.  It is a unit of activity.  We have evolved, uniquely, on that rock, with its spin and alternating passages of light and dark.  And in our bodies we feel the effects of that evolution: we sleep in the night.  We give up about eight hours a day (if we’re lucky) to that sleep.  Days are something hard wired into our bodies.

It’s been recently reported that there was a scientific experiment in France.  A group of people were sequestered in a cave, without communication devices, clocks or other pieces of modern paraphernalia (but with electricity, light and cooking equipment).  They were there for forty days with no means of telling the time, and they were asked to perform tasks like to prepare a presentation in three days time.  This was an experiment in isolation and bodily time sense: it will be interesting to hear the results.  It is interesting people are looking at what happens when we are separated from the day/night cycle.  There are obvious implications for space travel and colonisation, because removed from the Earth we lose the obvious thing that marks days.

It’s also interesting, and telling, that this experiment looked at how people functioned without knowing day nor night.  To get to the meat of this chat: a day is the fundamental unit of human activity.  Our days are defined by what we do, and what we can do is limited by days.  To be able to go on performing tasks efficiently and well, we need to break them up into days and nights with time to sleep, refresh and rest between.

To put this in its basic form: the rough life expectancy of a person in Britain will be about 28,800 days.  I won’t give you that in seconds, because we don’t live life in seconds.  Those twenty eight thousand days are the only ones we will ever have, we never get refunds, we never get do overs, at best we can increase our allotment of days: with a bit of help from medical science.  For someone who works full time, assuming a full career from 18 to 65 working five days a week, they will give over 12,220 of those days to their employers.

OK, that’s just at the raw level of days.  Of course, not every second of each of those days is given over: but usually, the best hours are, the active alert able to perform hours.  Eight hours of each of those days is given over to sleep (preparing for another day of work), another couple of hours each day are spent travelling to and from work, leaving the rest for eating, relaxing or meeting up with friends and family.  But all the other activities are conditioned by being able to turn up to work the next day.

So, here we have the idea of the class struggle.  When we give our time over to our employer, we give it to them to achieve the ends they desire.  In a capitalist society that means producing commodities: good and services, which they can sell with a view to making a profit.  The longer we work for them, the more they can use us, the more we do for the, the more goods and services they can sell for more profit.  Thus, they will want as many days from us as they can get.

But, here’s the thing, the struggle isn’t just over days as such, it is about the very definition of  day: what amounts to a days work?  The number of hours we spend working for them increases how much they can get us to do for them.  The fewer hours we work for them, the more time we have for ourselves, for our friends families and communities.

But it’s not just the length of the day: it can also be about the intensity: working harder during the hours we give over also increases the amount of work and profits we produce for the day buyers.  The harder we work at work, the less we can do in our own time, the more it becomes a time for recovery to return to work.

  Employment contracts are written in the language of abstracted absolute hours, but the reality it is it is what are are capable of doing – or being made to do in a day – that defines what happens to us and our employers.”

The capitalist world is being shaken by the most profound economic disruptions, a global pandemic and the growing crises caused by global warming. Around the world, governments are spending hundreds of billions to protect profits but only pennies on reducing carbon emissions. All previous COPs have been nothing short of disasters, so why would we expect the upcoming Glasgow COP26 to be any different.

Paralysed by policy inertia and beholden to vested interests, too many are unable to join up the dots and solve the connected crises of environment leaving the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth paying the highest price. Climate change summits have increasingly failed to offer concrete solutions which has devastating consequences for millions of people. Despite many fine words politicians have made no difference to the world’s worsening environmental situation. Climate conferences have invariably been ineffectual. Floods, storms, drought and forest fires are already claiming victims around the globe. 

The World Socialist Movement say the reasons for this are rooted in the economic system, an exploitative, destructive market system, that cannot be relied upon to abolish the conditions which endanger our well–being and survival. We view the continual process of international conferences as pointless. Governments and corporations are only committed to finding environmental market-friendly solutions which still maintain investment“ growth.” Politicians side with the bankers and businessmen to create a green capitalist economy concentrating upon assigning prices to carbon, for financial centres to trade in carbon credits which are supposed to encourage a reduction in CO2 emissions such as by paying for the planting of trees as compensation for polluting the air, all at the whim of the market.

We in the WSM speak of the failed world system of  capitalism  that generates the ecological crises which threatens to bring the extinction to many animal species and perhaps the end of human civilisation as we know it where many will become climate refugees with literally nowhere to run.

Many campaigners in the environment movement may agree with the WSM’s scepticism that the world leaders have utterly failed in achieving action on climate change  but they must go one step further and acknowledge the problems is rooted in an economic system that can only see the natural world as a source of materials for the production process, or a land-fill for its waste. A socialist critique of environmental destruction must also accept ending the production for profit, private property system and understand that the continuance of capitalism can only lead to further environmental harm and damage. Environmental activists need to reject the false solutions of green capitalism.

As Marx explained:

 “a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, [beneficiaries] and, like boni patres familias ,[good heads of households] they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”

The socialist vision is one of a self-administered economy where a variety of inter-locked democratic bodies (whose officials are elected and subject to recall) at the local, regional and worldwide levels with delegates from both factories and neighbourhoods where decisions will be taken at the level at which they can most easily be implemented. And they should be taken at the level where the greatest percentage of people actually affected by them can be involved in the decision-making process. Such a inter-connected network would be empowered to draw up the basic outlines of the economic and environment plans and have the ability to implement them. Redirecting the productive capacity to human needs will require a variety of economic methods and experiments. There could be a combination of central planning (not centralised planning such as the command economies of the former state-capitalist countries), and local coordination. Rational planning will replace anarchy. Coordination and planning of production  will aim at building an economy that will benefit the people.

Some critics of the WSM proposition of free access based on material abundance so to end scarcity would place an unbearable strain on the physical resources of the planet and lead to an ecological problems. The WSM points to the scale of socially wasted resources under  capitalism. The abolition of the military and the accompanying arms industry alone would free up tremendous resources for socially useful production built upon renewable energy sources, and environmentally safe technologies, etc. that could provide an adequate standard of living for the bulk of the world’s population without imposing new demands upon the capacities of the earth. Factories and other productive facilities will be modernised to eliminate backbreaking labour and ecological damage.

 US health insurance companies reported billions in profits in the first quarter of 2021, after making a windfall in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth Group, reported $4.9bn in profits in the first quarter of 2021 compared to $3.4bn in the same period in 2020 – a 44% increase. The higher than anticipated profits prompted the company to raise its projections for the year.

Anthem also beat estimates in its report of $1.67bn in profits in the first three months of 2021, a 9.5% increase from the same period last year. Humana’s net income was $828m in the first quarter, a 75% increase from the same period the year before.

CVS Health, which owns the Aetna health insurance provider and drugstores, reported $2.2bn in profits, up from $2bn in the same quarter a year before.

Cigna raised its forecasts for the year.

Health insurers have been insulated from this stress because there were sharp declines in expensive, elective procedures, such as hip replacement surgery. People also delayed or skipped doctor’s appointments because of fears of Covid-19’s spread or concerns about the cost of medical care during a recession.

CVS Health’s chief financial officer and executive vice-president, Eva Boratto, said in an earnings call this week: “Covid-19 is expected to have a minimal impact on consolidated financial results for the year.”

Small healthcare providers such as independent doctor’s office and rural hospitals have been in a financial crunch, or closed, during the pandemic. Emergency medical service systems and some larger hospitals have also been under severe financial pressure.

US health insurers report billions in first quarter as small providers face stress | Healthcare industry | The Guardian

 California, America’s Golden State, suffered its first ever annual population fall. It reflects a worldwide trend of population declines. Overall,  the number of babies born in the country in 2020 dropped to the lowest level in more than four decades. 

Japan marked Children’s Day by announcing that the number of under-14s in the country had fallen for the 40th consecutive year to a record low. 

Last year, Italy, the population of Europe’s fourth biggest economy dropped by the equivalent of a city the size of Florence. Since the “baby boom” years of the 1960s, the annual number of births in Europe’s fourth biggest economy has fallen by more than half. The decline gathered pace in 2010 and then, last year, Covid-19 struck, contributing to new records for low births.

Paul Ehrlich author  of The Population Bomb (1968), predicted imminent mass starvation due to overpopulation, but this overly-pessimistic view has failed to happen although many still adhere to the idea, strangely enough even within the environmentalist movement which prides itself in following the science. Despite projections suggesting otherwise, the over-populationists maintain that there will be too many people for the planet’s resources to sustain the numbers.

The UN thinks that population growth will peak at the end of this century, but others think it will peak sooner. Researchers at the University of Washington predicted last year that it would hit a maximum of close to 10 billion around 2064, then slightly decrease to around 9 billion by 2100.

 The discrepancy of two billion people by century’s end between the two predictions is explained by the latter’s assumption that there will better access to contraceptives and female education in Africa. And that is bearing out for many African nations (albeit not every one) where family sizes are already dropping.

 Previous declines in the number of humans on the planet have been through disease or disaster. This would be the first time that it is reduced by low birthrate, after cheap and widely available contraception allowed women to control the size and timing of their families. But there is a threat to women’s rights, when governments that have failed to encourage more people to voluntarily have more children  try to force up birthrates by limiting access to birth control and abortion.

 The end to global population growth could indeed relieve pressure on the environment, particularly because the decline is centred on carbon-emitting wealthier nations.

It may also help a shift in hostile attitudes to migration, as countries which currently have  anti-immigration policies start competing to attract newcomers to bolster the workforce and care for the elderly.