SOME GOOD NEWS

Every day in the newspapers socialists can read all the bad news that capitalism throws up. Millions starve, while food is destroyed: children dying for lack of clean water and lately a 14 year old girl shot in the head by some Pakistan religious zealot because she dared to attend a school. So what is the good news? "The number of people with no religious affiliations is growing at an unprecedented rate, according to research. A third of adults under 30 in the US now say they have no faith. .... The US study was undertaken by the Pew Research Centre, a Washington based think tank. According to the latest British Social Attitude Survey, published last month, religious affiliation among Britons has fallen from 68 per cent in 1983 to 53 per cent in 2011." (Times, 10 October) RD

A LIFETIME OF MISTREATMENT

Having worked all their lives many workers hope that having made it to retirement age they will be able to enjoy some leisure and contentment in their remaining years. Alas for many workers that is not to be. "A former matron and five nurses who worked for a care home have been arrested over "serious allegations" of mistreatment and neglect of "very vulnerable" elderly residents. The arrests follow a five-month police investigation into a number of reported incidents at Hillcroft nursing home in Slyne-with-Hest, near Lancaster. The mistreatment is said to have taken place within the home's challenging behaviour unit which cares for vulnerable adults with advanced Alzheimer's, police said." (Daily Telegraph, 10 October) Needless to say the victims of this harsh treatment are all members of the working class. Members of the owning class can afford the best that money can buy. RD

Fact of the Day

Following on from this fact

More efficient food production and the reduction of food losses would feed an additional billion people and dramatically help maintaining the planet's natural resources and improve people's lives. Researchers in Aalto University, Finland, have proved a valid estimation, for the first time, for how many people could be fed with reducing food losses. The world's population is an estimated seven billion people. An additional one billion can be fed from our current resources, if the food losses could be halved.

Food-free days or a free food new day?

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome, global wheat production is expected to fall 5.2% in 2012 and yields from many other crops grown to feed animals could be 10% down on last year. Prices for wheat have already risen 25% in 2012, maize 13% and dairy prices rose 7% just last month. Food reserves, [held to provide a buffer against rising prices] are at a critical low level.The 2012 global grain harvest in total is expected to be 2,236m tonnes, compared with 2,309m tonnes in 2011, a drop of about three per cent, but this is about four per cent in per capita terms, as 80m people per year are being added to the world population. As a result, corn prices hit eight dollars a bushel in August, the highest level ever recorded.

The US government is expected to announce that drought and heat damage to crops this year has reduced its wheat, maize and soy harvests by more than 10%. Because the US is by far the world's biggest grower and exporter of grains, this is expected to have repercussions around the world. The maize harvest is expected to be the lowest in nine years.

Middle class?

The debate on what constitutes "middle class" turns “philosophical” at times. Some definitions include concepts such as professional status, education, and the variety of cultural and consumption habits

 In Brasil a study says 35 million people rose from the lower to the middle class in the last 10 years, and that the middle class grew from 38 percent of the population in 2002 to 53 percent this year, in this country of 192 million people. The problem is the criteria used to classify who is middle class: a per capita income of between 145 and 510 dollars a month. The definition covers people with very different income levels, living conditions and consumption habits, which should also be taken into account.

 The minimum monthly wage in Brazil is 311 dollars, higher than the threshold set by the government to classify people as middle class! Isn’t someone who earns the minimum salary poor?

Marxism defines class based on who owns or does not own the means of production.

EXPERTS GET IT WRONG AGAIN

Economic "experts" are forever telling us that capitalism is a wonderful society and are always quick to inform us of the latest "trends" in the market. In fact they haven't a clue. "Risks to global financial stability have increased in the past six months despite efforts by policymakers to make the financial system safer, according to the International Monetary Fund. It said little progress had been made in making the system more transparent and less complex, and that confidence in it had become "very fragile". .... On Monday, the IMF downgraded its forecast for global growth. It estimated growth in 2013 to be 3.6%, down from 3.9% in its previous forecast in July." (BBC News, 9 October) Capitalism by its very nature is an unpredictable society based on economic slumps and booms. Rather than listen to the "experts" workers should abolish the whole outmoded system. RD

Fact of the day

Scotland wastes an astonishing £1 billion a year throwing away perfectly good food. As much as one-fifth of the food and drink people buy ends up being dumped in the bin, costing the average Scottish household £430 a year – yet most of it could be consumed.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/environment/revealed-how-scots-throw-away-1bn-worth-of-food-each-year.19076921

much the same there

Scotland recently had Martha Payne, who drew attention to the sad state of school dinners in her blog which the shamed local authority tried to ban .

In eastern Germany more than 11,000 schoolchildren were recently affected by gastrointestinal sickness -- most likely because of what they ate at school. Experts now believe that frozen strawberries from China are behind the massive outbreak of the norovirus

Germany has 11 million children attending 45,000 schools, and the number of them being fed at these schools is rising (a third of all 11- to 15-year-olds already go to school without having had breakfast). As a result, the school catering business is becoming highly competitive and growing at an annual rate of 5 percent. Already today, the five largest school catering companies generate combined revenues of some €160 million ($208 million) in the country. By far the largest of these is the French company Sodexo. The self-described specialist in "quality of life services" offers an extremely broad range of services, from nursing care to cleaning to catering. The company's global sales are estimated at €18 billion, and its 391,000 employees make it one of the 25 largest employers in the world. The family of company founder Pierre Bellon is believed to be the richest family in France. The company and its products quickly fell under suspicion of being at least partially responsible for the mass outbreak of illness in eastern Germany because many of the affected establishments were supplied by its industrial kitchens. Sodexo quickly became sector leaders with rock-bottom prices of €1.55 ($2) per meal and many employees working for low wages, according to the NGG union. Today, 65 Sodexo kitchens supply 200,000 daily meals all across Germany.

The fundamental problem remains the lack of willingness to pay enough for good food. Even Horst de Haan, the head of Sodexo operations in Germany, complains of enormous price pressure "The tendering rules call for an agency to accept the cheapest price," he says.

Berlin's Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district decided that they weren't going to pay more than €2.10 for school lunches. And experts like Ulrike Arens-Azevedo,  professor of nutrition at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, explained "one cannot cook healthy food over the long term for such low prices."

Meanwhile, school children in rich cities, such as Konstanz in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, receive subsidized school lunches that cost roughly €4.50 each, use ingredients from the region and are 40 percent organic. In Gera, on the other hand, a city in the eastern state of Thuringia, meals can't cost more than €2.30, and parents are solely responsible for paying for them. Even the catering companies only receive a fraction of the cost of these low-priced meals. In addition to having to pay all of the 19 percent in value-added tax themselves, they are also responsible for energy, transportation and personnel costs. "Maybe 50 cents of the €2 are left to the caterer to pay for the ingredients," says Polster, the head of the DNSV advocacy association. "That already makes one wonder of what kind of quality they are."

Sarah Wiener, a celebrity chef, calls for schools to receive higher food subsidies. "By having meals at such a low culinary level, we cement a taste for industrial food," she says. "We shouldn't put the profit maximization of a sector over the well-being of our children."

much the same here

InIn America real wages for the bottom 80 percent of households have remained relatively stagnant since the late 1970s. People survived these stagnant wages by working more hours, bringing more family members into the paid labor force, and borrowing more, thanks to easy access to credit. This put enormous stresses on many working families as they got caught on a work-consume-borrow treadmill. But for many, this was the only way to attain or maintain a relative decent standard of living. Overwork and debt masked the reality of falling and stagnant wages.

The total amount of credit card debt exploded, thanks in part to aggressive “debt pushing.” In 2006, there were 6 billion credit card solicitations sent out.The majority of home financing was for second mortgages, not new home acquisitions. Access to easy credit was the drug that enabled millions to live beyond their means.  The consumption engine driving the economic boom between 2000 and 2008 was based on borrowing, not real wage increases. When the economy seized up in 2008 and access to easy credit ground to a halt, so did the consumption engine. Millions of people lost their jobs or a significant household income.

Adapted from here
http://www.alternet.org/books/most-us-will-not-have-better-life-unless-we-turn-tables-super-rich?paging=off

food for thought

New data from the United Nations reveals that there has been progress in reducing the number of hungry people worldwide. But an estimate that nearly 870 million people, one in eight, suffered from chronic undernourishment over the last two years. The vast majority of these people, 852 million, live in developing countries, which means that 15 percent of the developing world suffers from hunger, while 16 million people are undernourished in developed countries.

The FAO estimates that childhood malnutrition causes the deaths of more than 2.5 million children every year.

The situation is particularly bad in Africa, where the number of hungry has grown in the last twenty years from 175 to 239 million.

Food is transported all across the world. Even though according to researchers we currently produce food for 11 billion people there exists food shortages and millions starve.  Yet 1.3bn are obese, condemned to artificially cheap, calorie-rich, nutrient-poor processed food. Today's hunger is permanent and global. It is hunger by design. This does not mean that those who design the contemporary   food systems intend to create hunger. It does mean that creation of hunger is built into the capitalist structure of industrial  production and globalised distribution of food for profit. The dominant myth of big agro-buiness is that it produces more food and is land-saving. However, the more industrialised agriculture spreads, the more hungry people we have. And the more commercial agriculture spreads, the more land is grabbed.

"Hunger and malnutrition is manmade. It is in the design of the industrial chemical model of agriculture. And just as hunger has been created by design, producing healthy and nutritious food for all can be designed through food democracy." writes environmental activist Vandana Shiva.

Much of her argument is for ecological and sustainable systems of food production that work with nature and not against and  has value, yet as socialists frequently encounter, when those social scientists deem technology as a root cause they overlook the economic imperative to create profit for a particular class which according to ourselves is the real root cause. Unless this is addressed directly then no amount of campaigning for reform will change the reality producers and consumers face. Food production reformers talk within an economical and  political vacuum with no real attention given to genuine solutions.

ANOTHER MEDIA ILLUSION

One of the illusions that is presented by the media about the working class is that they are lazy, work-shy and always ready to take a day off work if they think they can get away with it, but the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's recent report seems to prove that this is a media illusion. "Millions of workers are 'too frightened' about losing their job to take time off work when they are sick, even if they are very ill, a report reveals today. The authoritative report says a culture of 'presenteeism' is sweeping Britain as workers decide to come into the office, rather than stay home in bed. A third of bosses have seen an increase in the number of workers 'who struggle into work when unwell' over the last year, according to the report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development." (Daily Mail, 9 October) RD

There's gold in them thar hills...

Scotgold has predicted that jewellery buyers will pay a premium for gold from the firm’s Cononish mine near Tyndrum, where production is set to begin in early 2014. 15 to 20 major Scottish jewellers had shown an interest in the mine, which will be capable of producing around 5,000 ounces of gold a year.

Chairman John Bentley urged Scottish institutional investors to “put their hands in their pockets” and support the project, which will be Scotland’s first commercial gold minehe firm has other prospects in Argyll and Bute, including the River Vein area and Sron Garbh, where it has encountered some “very interesting” signs of platinum, although chief executive Chris Sangster stressed this work was at a very early stage He said: “The level of geological data in Scotland, and probably the rest of the UK, is worse than Burkina Faso, Ghana or Mali. Geophysics for the UK was done in 1955, and we suffer from a lack of fundamental data.”

Fundamentally....

“God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell...There’s a lot of scientific data that I found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I believe that the Earth is about 9,000 years old. I believe that it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.” espoused Congressman Paul Broun, a medical doctor,  from Georgia, who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology responsible for crafting US government policy.

A recent Gallup Poll suggests that 46 percent of Americans think God made humans within the past 10,000 years, while only half the nation believes in evolution.

MONEY TO BURN

Being rich has lots of problems. For instance what do you spend all that loot on? A couple of American fat cats have thought of a couple of ways. "Bob R. Simpson is the co-chairman of the Texas Rangers. He also just spent one million dollars on a penny from the forties. Sounds crazy to us, but what do we know about pennies? Oh yeah! We know that they are usually only worth a penny, which usually equals one cent. So what's the deal, Bob? Also, in an unrelated story, some 15-year-old girl in Texas drove a $300,000 Lamborghini to school. Rich kids will do the darnedest things." (Yahoo News, 21 September) Starving kids? Who cares? Let the kid drive the old banger to school. RD

CAN OF BEANS, ANYONE?

The owning class like to outdo each other in the conspicious consumption of luxuries and to satisfy their needs Electrolux has launched what must be the world's most expensive domestic kitchen. "An arsenal of blast-chillers, sous-vide vacuum packers and ovens powered by computer hard drives, all apparently designed for super-rich MasterChef obsessives, has gone on sale with a lettuce-wilting price tag of £76,000, rising to more than £200,000 if you want the very best ovens. Cupboards, drawers and work surfaces are your own business, adding upwards of £100,000 for the best finishes, say designers. Welcome to the quarter of a million pound kitchen. ... "I am sure some people will buy it only because they believe it's the pinnacle of what is on the market," said Henrik Otto, the designer. "But on the other hand they probably have a private chef who will use it for them. [The market] is people who holiday in the Caribbean, fly there on their private jet and own their own island." (Guardian, 20 September) In a society where millions of people try to exist on on couple of dollars a day billionaires are spending a quarter of a million pounds on a kitchen. That is capitalism in action. RD

Equal Education for All ?

Only seven children from the poorest areas in Edinburgh got grades last year that could place them at St Andrews University or other very competitive courses at Edinburgh and Glasgow. Figures released by the Scottish government under freedom of information legislation also revealed that only 220 of the poorest children within Scotland, who are defined in their background areas via postcode, achieved high grades. Just 2.5 percent of the 8,842 fifth year students from the poorest areas got three or more As in their higher exams. Edinburgh’s state schools are falling behind far more poorer areas in Scotland, as only 1.4 percent of children from its most deprived neighbourhoods are achieving the minimum needed grades for universities or degree courses. As few as 50 got grades good enough to compete for places at Oxford.

Professor Lindsay Paterson, professor of educational policy at Edinburgh university, said "It's not just that Edinburgh's figures are extremely low but that the inequality in Edinburgh is extremely high."

SOME STAGGERING STATISTICS

The basis of capitalism is the working class producing a surplus value over the cost of their wages that allow the owning class to live in ease and luxury. How great that surplus value has become in modern capitalism was recently illustrated by some American statistics. "Just how rich are the Waltons? According to the latest edition of the Forbes 400, released yesterday, the six wealthiest heirs to the Walmart empire are together worth a staggering $115 billion. ..... The average Walmart worker earns just $8.81 an hour. At that wage, the union-backed Making Change at Walmart campaign calculates that a Walmart worker would need 7 million years to earn as much wealth as the Walton family has (presuming the worker doesn't spend anything)" (Mother Jones, 20 September) RD

A FRUIT AND NUT CASE

Capitalism is a social system based on class ownership and sections of the owning class are always in disputes over this ownership. They have legal battles sometimes leading to military battles over the ownership and access to sources of raw materials and markets. Recently there has been a legal dispute over the ownership of a particular colour. "Is chocolate the first thing you think of when you see Pantone 2685C? It might be if I tell you that it is the technical name for Cadbury Daily Milk's distinctive purple. And it does indeed "belong" to Cadbury, after a decision in the High Court yesterday that the confectioner's purple packaging constitutes a trademark." (Times, 2 October) This dispute arose over Cadbury's rival Nestle objection to Cadbury registering the colour as a trademark in 2004. Nestle had already lost in 2008 but decided to appeal the judgement of the Registrar of Trade Marks. Only capitalism with its emphasis on ownership could have highly trained legal minds battling for years over who "owns"a colour. Madness. RD

Fact of the Day

India's health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said 39 million Indians are pushed to poverty because of ill health every year and around 30 per cent in rural India did not go for any treatment due to financial constraints. 60 per of total health expenditure in India was paid by the common man from his own pocket in 2009. The report states that about 47 per cent and 31 per cent of hospital admissions in rural and urban India were financed by loans and sale of assets.

Slaving away in the hospitals

Fears that patient safety may be put in danger by overworked and tired staff were raised today amid warnings that some surgeons and nurses in the Lothians have been working seven days a week solidly for three months. Staff are said to be clocking up 72 hours every week.

Some NHS Lothian staff members – such as surgeons, anaesthetists and  theatre nurses – are being offered extra shifts at evenings and at weekends, as part of the effort to reduce the number of patients waiting longer than the target of 12 weeks for treatment.

NHS Lothian employee director and former vice-chairman Eddie Egan, who raised the issue with the board. He said: “We need to get the waiting list numbers down, but I’m speaking to people working seven days a week and they’ve been doing that for three months in high-pressure environments. I am concerned that staff are being put under pressure. People are feeling  morally obliged to turn up, even if they’re exhausted, because they know patients will be cancelled if they don’t. It’s  potentially putting patients in danger. If you’re working seven days a week, in evenings and are possibly on call, it  reaches a point where you have to query – are people safe?”

 MSP Margo MacDonald said "Think of people with driving jobs who are not allowed to drive for too many hours because they need sleep and rest. If that’s true for drivers it’s certainly true for surgeons and nurses.”

Tom Waterson, Lothian branch chairman for Unison, said  “No-one should be working more than 48 hours in one week,” he said. “The working time directive was not brought in to save money, it was brought in to protect health.”