Starvation, poverty and disease are market driven.

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

What a tragedy. A beautiful little boy who should be experiencing all the pleasures that a healthy and well fed young life can offer. I can barely look at it without wanting to take him in my arms and caress the little man; hold him like I have my own little ones, or the way we hold our pets.  A mother or father whose kisses and hugs bring such joy to the recipient and the giver is waiting for that moment when starvation and lack of water, ensures he breathes his last breath. It's not a nice death is it?  Look at the body and the physical pain it brings to the child and the emotional pain to the adult, herself, not far from death's door. 

The scene in the picture is indeed horrific. It is heart wrenching, sad, makes us angry and makes us want to cry at the same time.  But let's get something clear in our heads. What we see in the picture, a starving boy being given water by his equally deprived mother, or female guardian, is not something that occurs because of a lack of resources or money.  The condition prevails not because people in that particular part of the world are lazy or stupid or can't govern themselves.  It is not as some might argue, god's wrath, or the devil's work or the work of any supernatural beings or ghostly demons. It is not because of overpopulation or that there's too many people on the planet.

This young boy will die of starvation amid plenty.   He will die of diseases that were cured long ago.  The cause of these events is political and economic.  Society has infrastructure and that infrastructure is put in place by directing capital and labor power to do so.  The trillion or two the US has spent in Iraq would solve world hunger, would eliminate what we see here forever.

The infant mortality, disease and starvation that engulf millions of people in this world is a product of the market, of capitalism.  The communities in which these people live have little public infrastructure, no water system, no sewage system and instead unsafe water and sewage flows openly in the streets if at all. There is no medical and health care system in place. Diet is poor and shelter is inadequate. The money is there to remedy this.  But the owners of capital, capitalists as the Wall Street Journal calls them as opposed to many anti-capitalists who choose words like corpocracy, plutocracy, meritocracy, oligarchy and other terms to avoid calling them what they are, will not allocate capital to buy labor power and the necessary materials necessary to end this savagery.

According to Global Issues:
10.6 million children died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy

1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation

The money is there to change this:
A conservative estimate for 2010 finds that at least a third of all private financial wealth, and nearly half of all offshore wealth, is now owned by world’s richest 91,000 people – just 0.001% of the world’s population.

The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).

The world spent close to $2 trillion on military hardware in 2012 with the bulk of that coming from the US, the worlds largest arms dealer by far. Corporations are hoarding trillions, private capitalists have stashed away some $26 trillion or more in offshore tax havens. Poverty and most disease can be eliminated, but capitalism cannot do it; it is the cause of it.

The US president Obama, Hilary Clinton and all the other representatives of wall Street and the system that perpetuates the misery we see in the graphic, are prepared to bomb Syria because of the deaths of less than 2000 people.  But the policies that these people institute and defend to the teeth kill millions of children and adults yearly; their deaths are not accidents, they are the product of conscious decisions by human beings.

These conditions and the endless wars that we currently see begun by primarily by the US government  cannot be eradicated under the present economic system we know as capitalism.  It is not simply that they cannot be eradicated in what is often called the developing world, they are on the increase in the advanced capitalist countries also. As an earlier blog pointed out, the cost of making the world safe for US corporations is not only causing untold environmental damage and misery for the world's populations, it is also driving US workers further in to poverty and debt.  Even the US troops are facing cuts to necessary services.  This will hasten the crisis in the US military much like the crisis that occurred during the imperialist war against Vietnam.

It is pointless feeling guilty about having a better life than the woman and her child in the picture.  We are not individually responsible for it and guilt is a pointless emotion that accomplishes little.  We can collectively end it though.   I was talking to a group of young men the other night, they were all well educated and relatively financially secure. They had good jobs but when it came to understanding the forces at play in society and what was going on in the world around them, especially US capitalism's role in it, they were clueless and actually accepted that they were oblivious to much of what is going on.  This is nothing to be proud of even though, the forces against us in the US are considerable as we are faced day in day out with an ideological  offensive from the 1% about the merits of their system and how there's opportunity for all if we take the bull by the horns.

Throughout the world,  workers are fighting back against the capitalist offensive.  Working class women that fill the factories of Bangladesh have waged street battles against factory owners and their hired thugs.  Chinese workers have struck foreign multinationals for higher wages and better conditions and won raises of as much as $20% and this is without independent unions.
Indigenous people throughout Latin America, India, Indonesia and the entire world are leading the struggle against the environmental devastation caused by the energy giants and mining companies.

Greek workers, Portuguese workers, women and gays in Russia, are all refusing to be cowed by the worshipers of the market. And we saw the rise of the Occupy Movement in the US that challenged the repressive laws of the 1% and battled the new beefed up security apparatus built in anticipation of the resistance that will occur to the increased offensive of capital.

And here in the US, we should not underestimate the developments that have occurred around Obama's eagerness to bomb Syria.  The outpouring of opposition has been intense and this has caused the 1%'s representatives in Congress to push back against Obama's war drive.  In a twist of irony, it looks like old Putin might have thrown Obama a lifeline brokering a deal with Syria's Assad to have the UN take charge of that country's chemical weapons stash.

This development is very positive and when we consider the ongoing global resistance to the capitalist offensive we should be inspired and optimistic about it.  But we must take the bull by the horns, we must accept firstly in our own consciousness that the present state of affairs will eventually lead to the end of life as we know it, market driven wars and environmental catastrophe all in the pursuit of profits will ensure it. We must recognize that the most destabilizing force in society today and the reason for much of world poverty is US capitalism.  American's cannot find a solution to our problems within the borders of our own nation state.  The solution to the starvation we see in the graphic, the endless wars and driving back our own 1%'s austerity agenda lies in the building of a global movement.  Capitalism is global and the fight against it's destructive effects must be global.

Replacing an economic system of production where a tiny minority of individuals own the means by which we produce the necessities of life and who set these forces in motion only for personal gain, is our goal.  Capitalism is an anarchistic unplanned system of production, it cannot advance humanity.  It is, as we say here, past its expiration date.  Only a democratic socialist economy and political system can solve the crises that capitalism creates.

A couple of things to remember:
The Soviet union was not a socialist or communist society.
Socialism is not a utopian idea it's just a different way of constructing human society
Sweden, Finland or a national health service is not socialism or communism
Obama is not a socialist (for my American brothers and sisters only)
Capitalism overthrew feudalism and socialized production
Socialism will take it one step further and socialize ownership of the process of production, distribution and exchange. It brings economic democracy.

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The Restaurant lobby, the other NRA

With fast food workers around the nation walking off the job tomorrow I thought it would be of interest to readers to know a bit more about the  National Restaurant Association. This piece below is from AlterNet.

The Other NRA: How the Insidiously Powerful Restaurant Lobby Makes Sure Fast-Food Workers Get Poverty Wages and Have to Work While Sick

Fast-food workers feed their families on a pittance while the big corporations resist fair pay and sick leave.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/L. Kragt Bakker

August 27, 2013  |  

 

Editors note: This is the first in a series of reader-supported—i.e. crowdfunded —articles about the powerful National Restaurant Association and the plight of low-wage workers who are being screwed at every turn by industry lobbying tactics and misleading propaganda. An amazing 387 AlterNet readers contributed more than $5,500 to support this ongoing investigative project. Many of the donors are listed at the end of the article.

 

While thousands of fast-food workers were preparing to walk off their jobs earlier this summer to seek raises to $15 an hour, the industry’s corporate lobbyist, the National Restaurant Association, was celebrating a string of political victories blocking state minimum wage increases and preempting local sick day laws.

 

In June, the NRA boasted that its lobbyists had stopped minimum wage increases in 27 out of 29 states in 2013. In Connecticut, which increased its state minimum wage, a raise in the base pay for tipped workers such as waitresses and bartenders vanished in the final bill. A similar scenario unfolded in New York State: It increased its minimum wage, but the NRA’s last-minute lobbying derailed raising the pre-tip wage at restaurants and bars. The deals came despite polls showing 80 percent support for raising the minimum wage. 
 
The NRA’s lobbying didn’t stop there. It also told members that it blocked a dozen states this year from passing laws that would require earned paid sick leave, which is what New York City and Portland, Oregon adopted. Meanwhile, it boasted that six states, including Florida, passed NRA-backed laws that preemptively ban localities from granting earned and paid employee sick time. “These are horrible things, but there are amazing things that are happening to change it,” said Saru Jayaraman, co-director and co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), which has been working a dozen years to slowly change the industry’s exploitive business model and labor practices. “And there will be increasingly important stuff coming up.”    

As fast-food workers across the country prepare for a second nationwide walkout over wages on Thursday, most Americans have little idea how profitable and politically aggressive the corporate mainstays of America’s second biggest employer have become. While labor activists have had victories in 2013, such as New York and Portland passing sick leave laws, and New Jersey poised to raise its minimum wage via a ballot measure this fall, the restaurant industry’s lobbying powerhouse is at war with the industry’s workers.

“It’s an old-boy network. It’s very old-school thinking. It’s very, very conservative,” said Paul Saginaw, founder of Zingerman’s food companies in Michigan, which employes 600 people and unlike the NRA, supports better benefits for employees like healthcare. “There has to be some pressure put out to provide better lives for people.”

Most Americans are unaware that millions of people who work in the industry—especially the 2.5 million fast-food preparers and servers who earn an average of $8.74 an hour, according to federal labor statistics—are not just teens in their first job, but adults with families to support. They may not know there’s a separate minimum wage for tipped workers, $2.13 an hour, that hasn’t changed in 22 years—although 32 states have raised it slightly. They may not realize that they, as the restaurant-going public, subsidize owners via cash tips, even as the NRA routinely tells legislators its industry cannot afford to pay better wages or basic benefits.

Most Americans don’t know that restaurant salaries are so low that the industry’s 12.2 million workers use food stamps at twice the rate of the U.S. workforce, and are three times as likely to be below the poverty line. Or that women earn less than men in similar jobs. Or that restaurants are among the biggest low-wage employers of people of color. Or that virtually every chain—except for In and Out, according to ROC—don’t want to pay living wages and benefits or offer real opportunities for advancement.

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Goodwill paying disabled cents an hour for the pleasure of working.

If charities worked there would be no poor people. The collective salaries for Goodwill Inc CEO's is $30 million. Not bad.

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Defending the indefensible

Source: AlterNet

Note: US is ranked 27th in median wealth.  Graphic did not appear with original article.

by Michael Roberts

Greg Mankiw is professor and chairman of the prestigious economics department of Harvard University.  He is also author of the most widely used textbook on economics by university undergraduates.  So he could not be more ‘mainstream’.  Mankiw has a blog (http://gregmankiw.blogspot.co.uk/) and just published a new paper entitled,
Defending the 1% (http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/defending_the_one_percent.pdf).

Mankiw is trying to be provocative and clever in this paper by arguing that there are perfectly good economic and even moral reasons for the top 1% of income earners in the US to have their huge share of total income.  In 2010, the top 1% had 17.4% of all income earned in the US, by any measure a very extreme level of income inequality.  As has been documented in many studies, that share of income going to the 1% has risen sharply from just (!) 7.7% in 1973.   Mankiw seeks to justify (defend) this more than doubling of the income of the 1% against the cries and protests of the Occupy movement.  He feigns to show sympathy with their ‘principles’ but his paper aims from beginning to end to refute all the arguments of ‘the left’ that this inequality is morally wrong or inefficient by using the principles of mainstream economics and a “healthy dose of political philosophy”.

His first defence is the one most used, namely that the reason the top 1% have had a rising share of income in the last 40 years has been the growing gap between the skills and education of workers.  ‘Skill-biased technical change’ has increased the demand for skilled labour and so incomes for the skilled have risen faster than the unskilled.  Mankiw quotes the usual study of his fellow Harvard economists, Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz  who have described this as a “race between education and technology.”   But there are plenty of other studies that argue something different has been going on.  In a working paper from the OECD, Kaja Bonesmo Frederiksen (Income inequality in the European Union, OECD Working paper 952, 16 April 2012), found that the reason that the top 10% did better was down to several factors: a decline in progressive taxation, rising capital gains from property and share ownership, so-called performance related pay, weaker trade unions and globalisation – indeed all the elements of the neo-liberal era – and not better technology skills (see my post, http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/apples-robots-and-robber-barons/).

The differences between the pay of the skilled and unskilled is not much different in the US compared to the UK or Europe.  And yet, as the OECD working paper shows, the ratio of the share of real disposable income growth going to top 10% over growth in income going to the bottom 10% averaged 2.6 times for the European Union, 9.1 times for the UK and a staggering 21.9 times for the US.  That means the top 10% of income earners in the US got 22 times more growth in income that the bottom 10% between the mid-1980s and 2008, while in France and Greece income growth for the bottom 10% was faster than for the top 10%!   So the most ‘neo-liberal’ capitalist economies saw the most unequal expansion in incomes.

Mankiw wants to dismiss the arguments of Joseph Stiglitz (The price of inequality, 2012) who argues that the top 1% have scooped the lion’s share of incomes because of ‘rent-seeking’, namely the ability to appropriate incomes produced through protectionism, cronyism and favourable regulations on tax and profits.  Mankiw says that ‘rent-seeking’ is no worse than 40 years ago, but this is an assertion without evidence in the same way that he criticises Stiglitz as making.

Mankiw insists that “the very wealthy get that way by making substantial economic contributions, not by gaming the system or taking advantage of some market failure or the political process”.  Yet it is difficult to imagine that the chief executives of top companies have done so well because they are so much more skilled than 40 years ago rather than just because they have been able to siphon off more corporate profits through their control of company boards.  Mankiw denies that is the case because non-quoted private companies pay their chief executives even more than the boards of quoted companies pay theirs.  What that proves I don’t know, except that family companies can pay the head of their tribe whatever they like without any reference to wider shareholders.  The UK’s High Pay Commission found that chief executives  of large companies are often paid 70, 80 or over 100 times the salary of their average worker, when three decades ago the ratio usually stood at 13 to 1.

According to the UK’s Financial Services Authority, 1800 bankers in the City still earn more than £1m a year after the banking collapse. So income rewards are not related to performance, but to the power of capital.   The UK’s Institute of Fiscal Studies found that bankers’ bonuses had played a large part in creating this divide. “If you look at who is racing away, then half the top 1% of high earners work in financial services,” said the IFS researcher.  Mark Stewart, a professor of economics at Warwick University, has shown that “almost all the increase in inequality has come from financial services” in the past 12 years.  But Mankiw tells us that these investment bankers are “most talented” and therefore should be “highly compensated”.   He sort of admits that the earnings of the top investment bankers might just be ‘rent-seeking’.  So what society needs is to “devise a legal and regulatory framework to ensure we get the right kind and amount of financial activity”.  But “that’s a difficult task”.  Indeed it is.

Mankiw goes on: “a well-functioning economy needs the correct allocation of talent.  The last thing we need is for the next Steve Jobs to forgo Silicon Valley in order to join the high-frequency traders in Wall Street.  So we should not be concerned about the next Steve Jobs striking it rich but we want to make sure he strikes it rich in a socially productive way”.   If Steve Jobs is so ‘socially productive’, how does Mankiw suggest that we ensure such people are paid for their value contribution rather than all the income going to ‘rent seekers’ in unproductive jobs like footballers or commodity traders?  He has no answer in this paper. But anyway, who is to say that the great ‘innovators of  technology’ must be rewarded more than those who do just as important jobs like nursing, refuse collecting, sewage etc.  And indeed, many of the great inventions, discoveries and technological advances have been the product of teamwork and cooperation and not down to some hugely talented individual.

Mankiw also seeks to defend the 1% by arguing that their skills and cleverness are inherited: “smart parents are more likely to have smart children”.   So the reason some have more income than others is that they inherit their cleverness from their parents and there is nothing we can do about it.  It is a genetic inequality.  What Mankiw mistakes here is genetic differences with inheritance.  Genes may be passed on, but there is no reason why incomes or wealth should be passed on from parent to child.  The top 1% of income earners can perpetuate their income status for their children, but not because of their genes but because of their influence.  Take the current scandal that internships in lucrative companies can be arranged by rich parents working in them or knowing the contacts, while equally clever poorer kids don’t get a look in. 

Okay, Mankiw says, let us assume that there are serious inequalities of income that are ‘unfair’.  What can be done about it?  Apparently little.  Mankiw correctly points out that the US  income tax system is already progressive.  In other words, the more income you ‘earn’, the more you pay as a percentage in income tax.  The poorest fifth pay just 1% of their income in federal taxes, the middle fifth pay 11%  and top 20% pay 23%, while the top 1% pay 29% of their income in tax.  So federal taxes are progressive.  So what’s the problem, says Mankiw.

But federal taxes are not the only taxes that people pay (see my post, http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/romney-and-the-47/).  People also pay sales taxes, VAT, insurance taxes, capital gains tax and payroll taxes.  And these are not progressive at all.   Then there are the subsidies, allowances and exemptions from tax usually paid to the better off.  There is every reason to conclude that the whole taxation system could be way more progressive and so bring about greater equality of incomes.

But Mankiw appears to reject the case for government applying any redistributive  policies at all.  After all, he says, if you are born with two kidneys and somebody else has two failing ones, government should not be able to enforce the removal of one of your kidneys to give it to the other person.  Mankiw equates the forcible removal of a person’s kidneys with the democratic decision of a government to make top earners pay more to help lower earners and spend of public goods!
Mankiw prefers what he calls a “just deserts” perspective – namely that a person should get an income congruent with his contribution to society.  On this perspective, there should not be higher taxation of those earning more because they are only receiving their ‘just deserts’, an income that matches their ‘marginal productivity’.  Mankiw thus presents us with the neoclassical concept of marginal productivity – a concept hugely discredited as bearing no resemblance to the reality of capitalism (see Fred Moseley’s critique of Mankiw and marginal productivity,http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue61/Moseley61.pdf).

Mankiw discusses only the inequality of income in the US.  But global inequality is even greater (see my post, http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/20/) and clearly not the result of just technology and skill differences, but instead the product of trade and capital flows dominated and controlled by rich capitalist economies over weaker ones.

And Mankiw only talks of inequality of income.  But under capitalism, private (not common) ownership of financial assets, real estate and the means of global production is key.  So inequality in these ‘social’ assets is much more important and even greater than with incomes (see http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/free-markets-and-global-wealth).  The power of capital dominates and exploits labour and thus enables the 1%  to reap the benefits of the value created by the 99%.  Mankiw has nothing to say about this.

Marx never advocated ‘equality’, if we mean by that completely equal incomes or personal wealth for each person or household unit in a society.  But neither was the Marxist perspective one of ‘just deserts’.  Instead, it was “from each according to his/her abilities; to each according to his/her needs”.  People (Steve Jobs) may have different or ‘unequal’ abilities, but a commonwealth would provide for all according to their needs.

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The world is rich. The problem is the rich control the world.

by Richard Mellor
Afscme 444, retired

We hear day in day out about the massive poverty and hunger that exists in the world. NGO’s and various non-profits have been around for decades appealing for assistance in feeding the world’s poor.  In the third world, water is as precious as gold.  Sewage and water sources run parallel in the streets due to the lack of modern infrastructure systems.

More often than not, the experts in the universities and think tanks of the 1% drag the age-old Malthusian explanation out of the closet.  There is simply an overpopulation problem. It is the poor that are to blame, if only they’d have fewer children.

But as I have pointed out in previous blogs, it is not too many people that are the problem.  It is not the lack of medical knowledge or technical expertise that leads to staggering infant and adult death rates in some parts of the world. It is the lack of social infrastructure and the capital needed to provide it.

The world produces enough food to feed everyone according to Hunger Notes.org 17% more calories today than it did 30 years ago.  But food is a commodity and its production does not take place if the end product cannot be bought and the value added during the production process realized.  The capitalist class would call this lack of demand. But in the world of the market, if you can’t pay you can’t play. No money for food, then you starve. This is the absurdity of capitalism that Marx wrote about, that we starve amid plenty. He wrote in 1848:

“It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”

Unicef estimates that between 2000 and 2010 92 million children died form hunger and diseases, “…many of the illnesses and conditions that children suffer are easily preventable, technically.”  says Global Issues, in other words, they are really what we might refer to as “man made” deaths.  They are in actuality, market induced deaths. Almost 2 million children a year die form diarrhea due to lack of safe drinking water, another market induced crisis with which even the UN seems to agree:

“We reject this [Malthusian perspective that global water problems are a problem of scarcity and population growth]. The availability of water is a concern for some countries. But the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability.” (2006 UN Human Development Report P. 2)

The cost of bringing people safe water is negligible when compared to the concentration of wealth.  “The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).” says the World Bank.  The world’s richest, Business Week claims, have a collective net worth of $2.8 trillion.  Either way you measure it, there is plenty of money in the world. These characters spend half their time hiding this wealth to protect it, form ex-wives, estranged children and the rest of us. But how do they get it?

Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is squabbling with his wife over a $9 billion nest egg

Dmitry Rybolovlev

and who has his cash stashed all over the world, made most of his money (including $500 million in art, $36 million in Jewelry and an $80 million yacht) “…from the sale of two potash fertilizer companies for a combined $8 billion…” Business Week adds.

But how did he come to own these huge operations; and in such a short period?  It’s quite simple really and one of the reasons Gorbachev was so popular with the B movie actor and US president Ronald Reagan and the global 1%. Gorbachev was a former leading Stalinist bureaucrat.  He was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the period when one of the most repressive totalitarian regimes in history began to draw its last breath and collapse under its own bureaucratic weight.

Gorbachev and his old buddies including many former KGB thugs like Putin who reached the ranks of Lieutenant Colonel, wasn’t about to go down with the sinking ship. What happened in a nutshell, and why we see so many prominent Russian millionaires and billionaires is that the old KGB and moribund party men appropriated the collective and collectivized  wealth of the Soviet and Russian people.  The US capitalist class welcomed the plunder and their former KGB credentials were a thing of the past as long as capitalism could flourish.  That’s where Rybolovlev and other Russians like him got their wealth.

No doubt readers are getting a bit bored with it but there is a need to hammer it home to counter the propaganda of the world’s bourgeois that there is not enough money to feed, clothe, house and provide humanity with a decent and productive life. I am talking about the claim by the Tax Justice Network that wealthy individuals, (we’re not talking corporations here) stashed as much as$32 trillion in offshore accounts in 2010 in order to avoid taxes.  This amounts to the combined GDP of the U S and Japan. “Fewer than 100,000 people own $9.8 trillion of offshore assets..”  BW claims.  This exists as more than 9 million people die worldwide each year because of hunger and malnutrition; 5 million of them are children.

This situation is not something that cannot change.  It is not an insoluble dilemma. It is not the fault of the victims, of  “human greed” in the abstract or of “natural disasters” or the by-product of supernatural squabbling between a benign god and his disgruntled fallen angel. It is a very simple; the Russian billionaires for example attained their rapid billionaire status simply through the transfer of the collective wealth of society to individuals including the means for generating that wealth.  We solve the problem by transferring collective wealth, and more importantly, the means by which it is created, the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, from private individuals to the collective.

Through this process, we can emerge from the depths of depravity to the apex of civilization.  True freedom.

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War on Iran, War on Terror: No war on homelessness

By Richard Mellor

The Wall Street Journal reports today that for the first time, more than 50,000 people slept in New York City’s homeless shelters each night in January this year.  This is the size of a small town and it doesn’t include those that sleep on the streets; the sick, the disoriented and mentally damaged victims of capitalism and the free market.

The Huffington Post pointed out that there was19 million vacant homes in the US in 2011. This recent figure on NYC homelessness points out that it is families that are swelling the ranks.  Homelss families have risen 7.8% in Boston, 18% in Washington DC (the seat of government in the US) while the number of children sleeping in shelters in NYC has risen 22% in the last year. A staggering 21,000 children, a figure the Wall Street Journal calls “unprecedented”and equal to 1% of NYC’s young people slept in a shelter each night in January.  In this world city whose mayor, Michael Bloomberg has a net worth of $27 billion and is home to the United Nations, Wall Street, millionaire film stars and corporate law offices, homeless families have increased 73% since 2001 and  21,000 children have no permanent housing. This is nothing less than criminal.

This is occurring as Obama and Biden are assuring US corporations and the Israeli Lobby that war with Iran is not off the table and the absurd War on Terror shifts its focus to uranium and natural resource rich Mali and Saharan Africa. What is off the table is a war against speculators, coupon clippers and slumlords.  What is off the table is the war against poverty and homelessness, by-products of their precious market.

Trillions of dollars are spent on predatory wars fought by US workers on behalf of Wall Street and the corporations and 22 veterans a day commit suicide as a result of it. The bankers that wrecked the economy were bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of trillions of dollars.  Rich individuals are known to have stashed more than $26 trillion, the equivalent of the combined GDP of the US and Japan in offshore accounts to avoid taxes and all this as public services are slashed, jobs eliminated and wages driven downward contributing to further homelessness; even the WSJ can’t ignore this reality but goes no further than that.

The voices of opposition are muted. The heads of organized Labor whose worldview mirrors the bankers, coupon clippers and other wasters whose actions decimate our social welfare and pollute the environment, plead with the bosses and their representatives in the Democratic Party to return to the good old days, “Please, please, just be a little nicer.”

At its peak, mighty US capitalism could not provide its own population with the basic necessities of life. In its decline it has become mired in debt, increases its plunder of the natural world and the former colonial countries and is forced to put its workers and middle classes on rations.  It is taking from the American workers all that we won through a century and half of struggle and is doing so with the help of the leaders of the Trade Union movement.  This will not continue unabated.

Nineteen million vacant homes amid mass homelessness. “As many as 3.5 million people experience homelessness in a given year,1% of the entire U.S. population or 10% of its poor), and about 842,000 people in any given week..) according to some data.  Yes, America the free.

Why can't they just go get a job?

The difference between the capitalist system and its predecessors is this: We starve amid plenty; we lack shelter as structures become dilapidated as they remain unoccupied; we are denied health care because we can’t pay for it. We become impoverished amid abundance.

US capitalism is more threatening in decline than in its ascendance.  It is armed to the teeth. It supplies more arms to humanity than the rest of the world combined. Its corporations dominate the world and own the rights to everything from corn seed to water. It is a truly dangerous animal in its demise.  As we used to say, even a match glows bright moments before it is extinguished and US capitalism will become more ruthless as its global influence wanes and its dominance threatened.

US workers are yet to see the worst, the likes of New York’s Mayor Bloomberg, Warren Buffet, Donald Trump, the gnomes of Wall Street and the owners of industry are not finished with us; they will defend their system and it will be done on our backs.

The US working class will not take this lightly forever, fill shelters, complain without action, withdraw form the struggle. This country will explode at some point and we will see what we have seen in Europe if not at a greater level; our history is a revolutionary one.

Workers will be forced to draw the conclusion that there is a far greater threat to our well being than al Qaeda, and its domestic. They will look forward for alternatives as they struggle to defend what we have. Capitalism will be challenged.

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Capitalism cannot solve the global crisis, it is the cause of it.

by Richard Mellor

We have had a number of commentaries on this blog about global poverty and the consumption of the world’s resources.  This also connects in to the issue of overpopulation as there are those who place overpopulation as the dominant feature in the crisis of global capitalism and as the cause of environmental destruction; lets call them neo-Malthusians for want of a better word.  It is too many people that are at the root of the crisis and not enough food to go around.

If you search this blog or the internet enough you will quickly discredit this argument and discover that it is the way food is produced and allocated that is the issue not too many hungry mouths.  The US throws away and wastes enough food to feed a few countries not that it would be of the quality most people would want to eat in ordinary circumstances.

The data site, Global issues gives some relevant data regarding consumption.

Globally, the 20% of the world’s people in the highest-income countries account for 86% of total private consumption expenditures — the poorest 20% a minuscule 1.3%. More specifically, the richest fifth:

• Consume 45% of all meat and fish, the poorest fifth 5%
• Consume 58% of total energy, the poorest fifth less than 4%
• Have 74% of all telephone lines, the poorest fifth 1.5%
• Consume 84% of all paper, the poorest fifth 1.1%
• Own 87% of the world’s vehicle fleet, the poorest fifth less than 1%

 "Runaway growth in consumption in the past 50 years is putting strains on the environment never before seen." their report says. The other aspect of this is important.  There is much talk about raising living standards and bringing democracy and vibrant market capitalism to the underdeveloped world.  But if other countries adopted the consumerism, the useless products, the 2500 sq. foot houses for two people. The cars, waste, garbage produced by a country like the US the environment could not support it, life as we know it would cease on this floating sphere.  Life would not cease, but life for us would. We must not underestimate this. 

We blogged some time ago about poor women in India who agreed to be sterilized for a cell phone.  Some deal.  But the overpopulation argument always seeks a solution among the poorest among us. The poor have too many children and are consuming the world’s food, there’s just not enough land to go around.  But these statistics show that this is not the case. 

In 1995, Americans spent $8 billion on cosmetics.  The Europeans spent $50 billion on cigarettes and $105 billion on Alcohol. The two continents spent $17 billion on pet foods.  Meanwhile, the State of Human Development resource published by the UN declared in 1998 that the cost of basic social services in “all” developing countries would be (in billions):

Basic education for all	6
Water and sanitation for all	9
Reproductive health for all women	12
Basic health and nutrition	13

So the entire “underdeveloped” world can receive these basic social services for all at a cost that is less than half of the wealth possessed by three American coupon clippers, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune. Does this make any sense?  Is this what people can honestly call civilization?

I think there’s something amiss.

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