Why are we hungry?

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There are now almost 8 billion people, and yet scientists tell us that more than enough food is produced to be able to feed everyone. Nonetheless, there is hunger. Why?


Hunger stalks the planet because so many people are dispossessed. If you do not have access to land, in the countryside or in the city, you cannot produce your own food. If you have land but no access to seed and fertilizer, your capacities as a farmer are constrained. If you have no land and do not have money to buy food, you starve.

That’s the root problem. It is simply not addressed by the bourgeois order according to which money is god, land – rural and urban – is allocated through the market, and food is just another commodity from which capital seeks to profit.



When modest food distribution programs are implemented to stave off widespread famine, they often function as state subsidies for a food system captured, from the corporate farm to the supermarket, by capital.



Farmers cannot simply take their produce to market; they must sell it into a system that processes, transports and then packages food for sale at a variety of retail outlets. Even this is not so simple, as the world of finance has enmeshed the farmer into speculation.



If there is any shock to the system, the entire chain collapses and farmers are often forced to burn or bury their food rather than allow it to be eaten. As Aime Williams writes in The Financial Times of the situation in the United States, these are “scenes out of the Great Depression: farmers destroying their products as Americans line up by the thousands outside food banks.”



The fact that so many people around the planet, including those living in the richest countries, were going hungry before this crisis is a profound indictment of the failures of capitalism. The fact that hunger is exploding exponentially during this crisis is a further indictment of capitalism.



The fact that so many people around the planet, including those living in the richest countries, were going hungry before this crisis is a profound indictment of the failures of capitalism. The fact that hunger is exploding exponentially during this crisis is a further indictment of capitalism.



Taken from this article

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/05/19/covid-19-hunger-gnaws-at-the-edges-of-the-world/

UK Income Inequality

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The highest paid 1% of British earners received nearly 17% of all the country’s income, according to a study making allowance for the concentration of taxable capital gains among the better off.



Analysis by Warwick University, the London School of Economics and the Resolution Foundation of previously confidential HMRC data showed that the top 1% had a growing and much bigger slice of income than previously thought. The study said that some taxable capital gains were really sources of income and were heavily concentrated among the well off.



Official data showed that in 2017-18 there were £55bn of taxable capital gains recorded – a more than doubling of the figure five years earlier once inflation was taken into account. The majority of the taxable capital gains (£34bn) were received by 9,000 individuals, who each made gains of £1m or more. Once adjustment was made for taxable capital gains, the income share of the top 1% in 2017-18 was 16.8% rather than the 13.8% previously thought. 



 The top 0.1% received 8.1% rather than 5.6%.



Taxable capital gains often related to people’s work, and were more akin to earnings from employment than passive investment returns. They include the £24bn of gains eligible for entrepreneurs’ relief and £2bn of ‘carried interest’ – performance bonuses – for fund managers.



Dr Andrew Summers, assistant professor at the LSE, said: “Capital gains are taxed at much lower rates than regular income, but the legal line between these is very blurred. This means business managers have a big tax incentive to take their rewards as gains instead of salary or dividends. When we look at the types of gain going to people at the very top, that’s exactly what we find. A lot of capital gains are, in fact, just repackaged income going to the already-rich.”



Arun Advani, assistant professor at Warwick University said, “While the share of all income going to the top 1% has remained around 13% since 1997, once gains are included it rises to 17%, with the largest growth towards the very top,”

The report questioned whether capital gains should be taxed at a much lower rate than income given that the benefits went mainly to the rich and there was a pressing need for the government to raise revenue.



https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/may/21/top-1-of-british-earners-get-17-of-nations-income

Time to get militant

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Wildcat strikes, walkouts and protests over working conditions have erupted across the US throughout the coronavirus pandemic as “essential” workers have demanded better pay and safer working conditions. Labor leaders are hoping the protests can lead to permanent change.



Working conditions, low pay and lack of safety protections have triggered protests throughout the pandemic as workers across various industries, including food service, meat processing, retail, manufacturing, transportation and healthcare have come together to protest about issues, many of which were apparent before the coronavirus.



“There are no federal mandates or requirements to implement the social distancing guidance or anything else. It’s only guidance and employers can choose to implement them or not,” said Deborah Berkowitz, director of worker safety and health for the National Employment Law Project. “And that is why, in an unprecedented way, they are walking out to bring public attention to the fact that their companies are not protecting their safety and health.”



Protests were held by truck drivers in southern California, Arizona, Sacramento, California, Lansing, Michigan, Washington DC and Chicago, Illinois, over decreased freight rates and working conditions during the pandemic. Roberto Echiveste, a truck driver in El Paso, Texas, was one of hundreds of drivers who joined in a protest convoy through El Paso on Friday 1 May. During the pandemic, Echiveste and other drivers have seen their freight rates drop from $2-$2.50 per mile to as low as $0.50 per mile.



Fast-food workers with the Fight for $15 and a union campaign have organized one-day strikes and protests in California, Illinois, Florida, Missouri and Tennessee through the pandemic.



“Workers like me are going on strike because McDonald’s and other billion-dollar corporations do not care about us as workers. They don’t care if we’re safe on the job, they don’t care if we’re sick on the job,” said Ieshia Townsend, a McDonald’s worker in Chicago , who has also experienced significant cuts to her work schedule during the pandemic.



 Braden Lauder, a shift manager for one year at an Arby’s in Morris, Illinois went on strike with co-workers over the lack of hazard pay, lack of personal protective equipment, and understaffing.



“We’re understaffed, underpaid and underappreciated,” said Lauder. He makes $12 an hour as a shift manager, and noted several of his co-workers make under $10 an hour. “At the same time, I’m a shift manager so I do the paperwork for the sales that we pull each day and I know for a fact that we’re busier now than we have been at any other point since I started almost a year ago.”
Uber drivers in San Francisco held a caravan protest outside Uber headquarters following the company’s virtual stockholder meeting to demand Uber drop funding for a ballot initiative to repeal Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), which took effect on 1 January 2020. AB5 classifies drivers as employees, granting drivers rights such as minimum wage and access to unemployment and workers’ compensation benefits. Uber has devoted spending at least $30m on the ballot initiative to repeal the law.



“We feel that money could be used to support drivers during this crisis,” said Mekela Edwards, an Uber driver in the San Francisco, California, area for about one year. “This crisis, personally for me, just showed me how vulnerable I am as a driver.” 

Edwards has been unable to work due to her doctor directing her to self-isolate during the pandemic. It took several weeks before she began receiving unemployment benefits and has yet to receive a response to her application for paid sick leave from Uber. “I applied, I submitted the doctor’s note, filled out the application, submitted my paperwork and have still not heard from Uber at all,” Edwards added.



Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, said it was too early to tell if these worker actions around the US will have a lasting impact.
“These walkouts show that essential workers don’t want to be treated any more as if they were disposable. They are demanding a voice in how their companies respond to the pandemic. Having a voice is a life-and-death matter now more than ever,” said Block. “Success will be a matter of whether consumers and policymakers will be inspired by these workers’ courage.”



The Old Order has been exposed

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The Socialist Party visualises the future potential for a new and better world for people and the planet. The Socialist Party seeks to change our imagination and to see that  a new, more just world can emerge. We know the capitalist system is broken. It is leading us down a path of self-destruction. The aversion of the rich, their political servants and media representatives to truth and reality is legendary. The time is now to construct a society we deserve and global solidarity is one of the tool we need. Capitalism cares for nothing nor nobody. Socialism redefines the meaning of progress, the meaning of civilisation and what we mean by happiness. Change doesn’t mean that you’re going to suffer but will bring a more equal relationship with other people. How do we change the world isn’t for any single political party to determine but for all of us collectively. Together we can plan to build a just economy which guarantees a dignified life for all. The current pandemic has shown now that today’s market economy does not value the contributions of countless essential workers. Opportunities now exist to make real change but only fundamental structural systemic change can save humanity. We have the power to stop the approaching climate catastrophe without the need for any technocratic solutions, although some may prove useful and complement.



Can we embrace the socialist alternative to build a more equal and sustainable world going forward?



  Socialism expands justice and equity to all safeguarding us from capitalism’s crises and improving the living conditions of all. Post-pandemic can be the opportunity to address the multiple, intersecting inequalities of gender, race, and class while creating a truly sustainable economy, a win-win for us all. While the majority produces all the wealth in society, a tiny ruling elite controls all the wealth. Production of wealth and control of wealth are separate under capitalism. Working people have no control over the economy that we ourselves built and operate. We are blocked from setting the direction of the economy.



We have seen the rich are getting richer while undermining our own need for survival. We have heard successive governments promise solutions and watched as each failed to deliver, eroding of the conditions of working people and the environment. The pursuit of maximum profit by competing owners of capital necessarily distorts progress and evolution.



We are now done with accepting a system that is willing to sacrifice people in order to maintain economic growth in the interest of accumulating capital and profits. The need has never been greater. A break away from the old way of  doing things presents itself here and now. The need is for people to think and act independently. Great things can be accomplished by relying on ourselves. Do not succumb to the false choices or self-serving agendas promoted by the rich and their representatives. Change cannot be secured by relying on the political parties of the owning class or by going along with what the mainstream media tells us to think. Let us empower the people. The current crises has brought to the fore the many contradictions of capitalism and has provided us with openings that can permit people to go forward if we act in solidary, the opportunities for positive change are great.



Raise the White Flag

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El Salvador and neighboring Guatemala, two of the poorest countries in the Americas, have borne some of the strictest quarantine measures. Strict coronavirus lockdowns in Guatemala and El Salvador have so battered local economies that hundreds of families are flying white flags outside their homes or waving them in the street: not in surrender, but to seek food and assistance. In towns and villages across the two countries, hundreds of signs have gone up asking for food, and people have taken to the streets to wave white flags in distress. After Guatemala’s government erected the first sanitary cordon around the impoverished municipality of Patzun on April 5 to contain the virus, hundreds of cut-off residents began putting up rags and white cloths in a call for help. A color coding system has developed in Guatemala. Red flags indicate medicines are needed, black alert the police to violence, and yellow ones to attacks on children.



“We’re worried about the virus and food, because if the virus doesn’t kill us, hunger will,” said Jose Rodriguez, 69, a street vendor. “We desperately need things to eat.”



Ana Orellana and three neighbors put up a white flag and a sign asking for food on the graffiti-scrawled concrete boarding house they share in central San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador.  Orellana, a street vendor of coffee, said that since the government ordered people to stay home in March, she has had no income to pay for food or the $75 monthly rent on the room she inhabits alone in the building. Now she takes turns with her neighbors to scavenge throwaway food at a city market. 



“I go looking through the bins where the rubbish is,” the 51-year-old said. 



Micaela Ventura, a 24-year-old shoe seller in Guatemala City, started using a flag about six weeks ago. 



“We put it out because we need food,” she said, “because we have nothing to give our children, and can’t pay for our room.”



https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-guatemala-elsalvad/as-hunger-spreads-under-lockdown-guatemalans-and-salvadorans-raise-white-flag-idUSKBN22X2GP

O’Grady Says

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Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, has had enough of the bombast from Boris. 



 “But if we’re using war analogies,” she says, “there have been times during this crisis which have had the feeling of the first world war, with the army generals camped hundreds of miles from the front line ordering troops over the top.”



 “I think there have been a string of failures,” she says. “We were late on lockdown, late on mass testing and PPE. We’ve got the highest number of deaths in Europe. This was not a success and they’ve got to learn lessons.”



“We now know the real price of inequality,” says O’Grady. “This time working people can’t pay the price for recovery. People will not put up with that. I think the big issue is how do we grow our way out of this and what kinds of industries and jobs will help us do that.”



She says. “We have built hospitals in days, have had to radically transform the way we live and work within days. I think we’ve run out of excuses about creating a carbon-free economy.”



“This crisis has made us question everything,” she says. “It’s shown that we are going to look after our families, but we want to look after our neighbours too. We have to shift the balance of power. It can’t just be a case of the boardroom says, and everybody else does. I think we’ve learned that social solidarity matters.”

Cyclone Amphan

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Cyclone Amphan has made landfall in eastern India and Bangladesh, killing people as it lashed coastal areas with ferocious wind and rain. Trees were uprooted and homes toppled in both countries, including in the Indian city of Kolkata in West Bengal. Nearly three million people were evacuated – most of them in Bangladesh – before the severe storm hit. The storm is the first super cyclone to form in the Bay of Bengal since 1999. It was moving with winds gusting up to 185km/h (115mph). Though its winds have now weakened, it is still classified as a very severe cyclone.   



Tropical cyclones have become more intense around the globe in the past four decades, with more destructive storms forming more often, according to a study that further confirms the theory that warming oceans would drive more dangerous cyclones. Analysis of satellite records from 1979 to 2017 found a clear rise in the most destructive cyclones – also known as hurricanes or typhoons – that deliver sustained winds in excess of about 185km/h. Experts told Guardian Australia the finding was in line with climate model predictions and the knowledge that increasing ocean temperatures gave tropical storms more energy.



Dr Hamish Ramsay, a senior research scientist at CSIRO who studies cyclones, said: “This study confirms what the climate models have been pAmphanredicting for some time – that the proportion of the most intense storms will increase as the climate warms.” Ramsay said as well as increasing the wind speeds in cyclones, warming oceans would also likely see cyclones delivering more rainfall. There was still uncertainty as to whether the numbers of all categories of cyclones would rise or fall under climate change.

Blaming African-Americans

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Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population but have nearly a third of the known coronavirus death toll.



Not because of government incompetence, the Trump administration is arguing, but because Americans are very unhealthy.  The victim-blaming of black Americans has come from the highest levels of government.



Alex Azar, told CNN on 17 May, America “unfortunately” has a “very diverse” population, and black Americans and minorities “in particular” have “significant underlying disease”.



The CNN anchor interviewing Azar, paused asked, surely Azar was not arguing that “the reason that there were so many dead Americans is because we’re unhealthier than the rest of the world?”



Azar doubled down: “These are demonstrated facts.”
In Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy, a white Republican and a medical doctor, had already cast doubt on whether inequities rooted in systemic racism were the reason so many black Louisiana citizens were dying of coronavirus. “That’s rhetoric,” he told NPR in early April. The real answer, the answer backed by science, was that “African Americans are 60% more likely to have diabetes” and that “we need to address the obesity epidemic”.  Blaming dead people of color for being sinful, rather than trying to fix underlying problems, only leads to many more people dying.
Suggesting that people lose weight did not actually make sense, said Finn Gardiner, an advocate at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University. On what time frame were at-risk Americans supposed to become thinner in order to protect themselves from a pandemic already in their communities? But Cassidy’s fat-shaming was familiar, Gardiner said, a way for some Americans to watch the unfolding death while avoiding any responsibility. Americans of all races with larger bodies were left feeling “expendable”, that they were “an acceptable sacrifice”, he wrote.
Blaming black Americans for dying from a novel virus because they had diabetes or high blood pressure was precisely what Azar was doing. Someone had to be held responsible for an American death toll approaching 100,000 people, worse than any other country’s reported deaths. In order for the Trump administration to remain blameless, someone else had to be blamed, and the administration was now blaming the dead.
This impulse to blame other people for getting sick is rooted in fear, said Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University.
“Everyone wants some narrative, to explain the unimaginable level of illness and death and vulnerability that we’re all feeling,” he said. “Everyone wants there to be a logic to this.”
For some wealthy Americans eager to reopen the economy, the motivating fear may be the risk of social change, the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz said.



“The capitalist class, those who benefit most from the unequal system, they know it’s not sustainable,” she said. “They’re desperate not to stay locked down too long, so people get used to fresh air, breathing air without carbon in it,” she said. “People might get ideas of a different kind of world.”
To Dunbar-Ortiz and other historians, Americans’ push to reopen the economy during a pandemic, and some Americans’ willingness to hold armed demonstrations in order to do so, looks like a case of almost psychotic repetition.



It’s not a new idea that thousands of people must die to preserve America’s “business as usual”. It’s not a new assumption many of those people will be brown or black.

The coronavirus culture war is “kind of a petri dish of all the psychoses of US history”, as Dunbar-Ortiz, the author of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, put it.



Today, “who is being asked to die for the market to be open?”  Patrick Blanchfield, the author of a forthcoming 500-year history of American gun violence,  said. “It’s black people. It’s Native American tribal communities.” Blanchfield said. “The very fact that people are dying is taken as both pragmatically offering market opportunities … but also as a theological vindication of your own survivorship.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/21/all-the-psychoses-of-us-history-how-america-is-victim-blaming-the-coronavirus-dead



The WSP(NZ) has the solution

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New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern has suggested employers to consider a four-day working week and other flexible working options as a way to boost tourism and help employees address persistent work/life balance issues.



The prime minister’s comments have excited many New Zealanders, some of whom have wondered whether systemic change will result from the pandemic – or whether life will return to normal with all its associated problems.



The World Socialist Party (New Zealand), however, has a better idea. What about socialism as the answer?



The object of the WSP(NZ) is the abolition of the wage labour and capital relationship and its replacement with socialism, a society of common ownership and free access. Such a revolution can only be brought about by the democratic political action of a majority of class conscious workers.


The WSP(NZ) is not indifferent to such suffering caused by the pandemic; indeed as members of the working class we ourselves experienced, day by day, the indignities and demoralising effects of the consequences. What distinguishes us from other political organisations is that we insist that it is futile to concentrate on just a part of capitalism’s problems. The only effective policy is to campaign exclusively for its abolition and replacement with socialism.





Quote of the Day

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A wonderful quote in Ron Cook’s Yes Utopia.



” It is not any amelioration of the conditions of the most miserable that will satisfy us: it is justice to all that we demand. It is not the mere improvement of the social life of our class that we seek, but the abolition of classes and the destruction of those wicked distinctions which have divided the human race into princes and paupers, landlords and labourers, masters and slaves. It is not any patching and cobbling up of the present system we aspire to accomplish, but the annihilation of the system and the substitution, in its stead, of an order of things in which all shall labour and all enjoy, and the happiness of each guarantee the welfare of the entire community.”



George Julian Harney, 1850, Red Republican

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