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Monday, March 30, 2015

End Capitalism - Or the End of the World


Political and social change is scary but the alternative is terrifying. Our planet is in ecological free fall. Where will it stop? When will it stop? Is it too late to stop? There is not an issue that is more critical to our survival. We count on our elected representatives to do everything they can to reverse climate change. And what do they do? They undo what little safeguards we have and support policies that are designed to make matters many times worse. The world cannot continue on their current trajectory if survival is the goal. Our only hope is a transformation of the economic system. And it is quite possible. Those who scream the loudest about change being impossible are usually those who have something to lose when change takes place. Change is constant and inevitable. The only questions are what change will take place.

Capitalism inevitably divides humanity through racism, nationalism and sexism. Socialism is a sensible process of overcoming humanity's divisions and building economic and social democracy, where the resources and productive capacity of the world belong to its people, who use them to meet human needs rather than to generate private profits for a few owners. Reforms can never achieve this goal; the system must be overthrown, and that requires revolution. The capitalist system is designed to stumble from one crisis to the next. Thirty people own 6% of the world's wealth. Meanwhile, 80% of the world's population share 20% of the world's wealth. About 1000 people on the planet, according to Forbes, own roughly 10% of the world's GDP.

The world's richest people (a few dozen billionaires) tentatively agreed to give away to the charities of their choice half of their wealth, which amounts to $3.5 trillion, or just over one-quarter of the EU's GDP. Will global poverty end if the 1000 richest people and the next one million richest donate all their wealth? Of course not! Charity has never been the solution to the problem of unequal distribution of wealth. Philanthropy is not the solution to poverty.

One billion people do not have access to drinking water largely because a handful of multinational corporations, in which the billionaire philanthropists own much of the stock, they own water rights around the world and charge exorbitant utility rates for water that IMF and World Bank insist must be under private ownership as Tim Di Muzio pointed out in his ‘The 1% and the Rest of Us.’

Two billion people are victims of chronic malnutrition and lack of medicine, largely because multinational corporations, in which billionaire philanthropists again own most of the stock, make it unaffordable for people to eat and have medicine.

Water, food, health, education and affordable housing are among the problems that billionaire philanthropists want to address but the political economy which these very same ‘generous philanthropist billionaires, created the aforementioned problems in the first place. Inequality and poverty cannot be eradicated by business interests even with the support of the UN and World Bank whose driving goal is commercial exploitation of natural resources, labour and markets. Most of the programs introduced to combat have been band-aid solutions to patch up the victims

Our foods are polluted. On one hand our food is polluted with herbicides and on the other hand by antibiotics. And then we have hormones and pesticides. The World Health Organization has concluded that the glyphosate in Monsanto’s Roundup, a herbicide widely sprayed on GMO food crops, is a likely causes of cancer in humans and animals.

93% of doctors are concerned about the meat industry’s excessive use of antibiotics, and independent scientists have definite evidence that the growing resistance of bacteria to antibiotics is due to the use of antibiotics as animal feed. 70% of all antibiotics are fed to livestock because it produces weight gain and saves money on feed costs. Scientists at the University of Iowa found Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in 70 percent of farmed hogs. A Consumer Reports investigation found that US meat, regardless of the meat’s source, is full of “pathogens, commensals, and antibiotic resistant bacteria.” Pork tested contained five resistant bacteria strains. As the drug companies have more or less stopped the development of new antibiotics, the protection antibiotics provide against infections is rapidly fading.

The FDA tried in 2008 to ban farm use of cephalosporins (antibiotics like Cefzil and Keflex) because they are needed for pneumonia, strep throat, and other serious human conditions, the egg, chicken, turkey, milk, pork, and cattle industries and the animal Health Institute protested The Animal Health Institute consists of the drug companies who make profits selling 70 percent of their production to meat, egg, and milk producers. The members of the “health” institute are Abbott, Bayer Healthcare, Elanco/Lilly, Merck, Boehringer, Ingelheim Vetmedica, Novartis, etc.  Congress responded not to the health and safety but to campaign donations. In other words profits come far ahead of public health.

While a severe drought in the western US is ongoing, with California reportedly left with one year’s supply of water, the fossil-fuel fracking industry is polluting the remaining surface and ground water.

Dr. Jacqueline Kasun, professor of economics at Humboldt State University in California, observes in her 1988 book The War Against Population that:
1.         No more than 1-3% of the Earth's ice-free land area is occupied by humans.
2.         Less than 11% of the Earth's ice-free land area is used for agriculture.
3.         Somewhere between 8 and 22 times the current world population could support itself at the present standard of living, using present technology.
This leaves 50% of the Earth's land surface open to wildlife and conservation areas.
The lower limit of 8 times the current population (about 44 billion) has been considered as being perfectly workable. According to Dr. Kasun,
"Better yields and/or the use of a larger share of the land area would support over 40 billion persons."
Former Harvard Center for Population Studies Director Roger Revelle estimated that the agricultural resources of the world were capable of providing an adequate diet (2,500 kilocalories per day) for 40 billion people, and that it would require the use of less than 25% of the Earth's ice-free land area. Revelle estimated that the less-developed continents were capable of feeding 18 billion people, and that Africa alone was capable of feeding 10 billion people.

In addition to the fact that many new strains of food have been developed that can boost food production, there are other indications that food would not be a problem. In the September 1976 issue of Scientific American, Dr. David Hopper asserted that the worlds "food problem" does not arise from any physical limitation on potential output or any danger of unduly stressing the environment. The limitations on abundance are to be found in social and political structures of nations and the economic relations between them.

The landmass of Texas is 268,820 sq. miles (7,494,271,488,000 sq ft) So, divide 7,494,271,488,000 sq. ft. by 6,908,688,000 people , and you get 1084.76 sq ft/person That's approximately a 33' x 33' (about 10 x 10 meters = 100 m2) plot of land for every person on the planet, enough space for a town house. Given an average four person family, every family would have a 66' x 66' plot of land, which would comfortably provide a single family home and yard - and all of them fit on a landmass the size of Texas. Admittedly, it'd basically be one massive subdivision, but Texas is a tiny portion of the inhabitable Earth. Such an arrangement would leave the entire rest of the world vacant. There's plenty of space for humanity.

Capitalists make money by exploiting labour and by externalising the costs of the waste products of the manufaturing process by dumping the wastes on the environment. The short-term time horizon of production for profit focused on quarterly profits is destroying the livability of the earth. To deny this is nothing but an apology for capitalist exploitation of labor and the earth. To ensure that ourselves and our children and their children can live through this and next century, we must do what seems impossible. And that’s to have a worldwide united action for socialism. The wealthy 1% is now focused on maximising their wealth; we must show the unavoidable disaster they will inflict upon the planet if they are permitted to pursue their goal of capital accumulation.

The current economic system is not geared toward sustaining global life support systems and is fundamentally flawed. It is clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and future generations will find it increasingly hard to survive. The current system is not concerned with human need, such as stable global ecosystems, but the personal enrichment of a tiny minority, even at the expense of the health of the planet. It is therefore up to people to fight against the exploitation and plunder of capitalism and to set up a society in which the use of Earth’s natural resources can be rationally planned—a socialist society.

Capitalism’s pursuit of profit is destroying life on earth.

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