Life under Capitalism

Save the bluefin tuna!

Green politics, Life under Capitalism, Natural World
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Bluefin Tuna

Over at Environment 360, marine biologist Carl Safina explains why a fishing ban on bluefin tuna is sorely needed:

Twenty years ago, I first proposed a ban on international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna. The population that breeds in the Gulf of Mexico was down by about 80 percent. The population that breeds in the Mediterranean was down by half. Now, things are worse, and the principality of Monaco has made another proposal to ban international trade in this species. It is gaining momentum, and on March 3 the United States announced its support for the initiative. The European Union, which has been wavering in the face of pressure from its fishing industry and Japan, should now end its fence sitting and get behind this proposal.

Such a trade ban is enacted under a treaty called CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species). CITES is why, for instance, there’s a ban on ivory (which is why there are still elephants in Africa).

So why is it that the danger to the bluefin tuna populations has been known for decades, yet nothing yet has been doen about it? Money:

Because bluefin tuna fishing worldwide is driven by prices paid in Japan, where individual fish have sold wholesale for up to $175,000, every population is depleted. A population in the tropical Atlantic, which in the 1960s had yielded the highest-ever catches of bluefin anywhere in the Atlantic Ocean, appears extinct. Formerly thriving fisheries in the North Sea are gone. In some recent years, U.S. boats have landed only about 15 percent as many fish as two decades ago. The European population is now in a plummeting tailspin.

Driving all this, remember, is prices paid in Japan. An international trade ban would quell the intensity of the fishing. But a lot of money is at stake.

You would expect an industry that depends on the bluefin tuna for its existence would be careful not to overexploit it, but the irony of the situation is that the closer it is driven to extinct the more valuable it becomes, as long as there are loons willing to pay such absurd prices for a single fish. Sure, once the tuna is extinct the industry will crash, but until then somebody will make huge profits, which is why it was worth it to delay a ban for two decades and still oppose it now.

It’s a dynamic you see time and again in environmental issues, with immediate profits trumping less immediate but clear dangers. It’s why it took two decades to get the bluefin tuna ban back on the agenda again, but also why it took a similar timespan to get an ozone layer treaty, why we’re still trying to get proper CO2 treaties, and so on ad infinitum. In all these examples the danger is clear and understood, the science behind it is uncontroversial, but vested interests (industrial users of CFK gasses in the case of the ozone layer, the fishing industry in the case of the bluefin tuna) are powerful enough to thwart implementation for years or even decades.

This is why we’re currently flooded with newspaper articles throwing doubt on the IPCC reports on climate change –when you look into the accusations there’s little meat to them, but as long as they sow some doubt in the casual reader they help reduce the demand for action. Here in the Netherlands we’ve had the environment minister herself throw doubt on the IPCC and get angry with the scientists to “get the science right”, based on no more than a few minor errors in the reports, but errors which got a lot of media attention.

Just a middle class drudge with a grudge

Crisis? What Crisis?, Life under Capitalism, US politics
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Last thursday a man flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas and the worst part about it is that it didn’t come as a surprise or shock. I’ve been expecting something like this to happen for some years now and my first thought was that this is what you get when you have an rightwing Democrat in the White House more interested in buying off bankers than getting health care for ordinary Americans and an opposition movement driven by emotion and barely sublimated racial hatred. That the first target would be an IRS building is not surprising either — few people like a visit from the taxman and taxation has been a bugbear of wingnuts as long as the US has existed. It seemed likely this was some raged-up teabagger made mad by repeated exposure to Glenn Beck

But it turned out Joe Stack was somebody much more dangerous. His suicide note was of course selfserving, but far from loony. His lifestory as presented there could be the story of millions of struggling middleclass people, grown up with the belief that hard work and smarts would make him rich, only to be knocked down time and again by circumstances outside his control, as well as the simple fact that he wasn’t as smart or crafty as he thought he was. He saw how the big boys behaved and thought he could do the same, only to be smacked down because he couldn’t. His was the rage of the little man, the one who can never catch a break, always gets caught when he tries to cut a corner yet sees others get away with murder.

The resentment he felt is on clear display in passages like this “Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours“. The sheer dichotomy between his own experiences and what he sees on the news each evening is what fuelled his rage, something surely we’ve all shared at one point or another. I certainly have. In Stack’s case, this rage finally metamorphosed into action. Sadly, if fittingly, this action was against the wrong target killing the wrong people. He gets angry at multibillionaires and ends up murdering the same people as him just because they work for the IRS.

Joe Stack won’t be the last angry middleclass white dude going for a spot of self destructive terrorism. The economic crisis and the blatant way in which the system is being gamed will see to that. Wall Street may think the recession is over or almost over, but for millions of middle class families barely holding on it is just beginning. They are the ones who have the most to lose from it, they are the ones whose anger and rage will stoke more of these atrocities, is stoking the teabagger movement and which will make sure shit will be burned down if better alternatives will not emerge.

Pat Robertson is right

Life under Capitalism, Poverty, Race, US Foreign Policy
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Haiti has been punished for its founding sin over the centuries. But it’s not the earthquake or any other natural disaster that’s the punishment, nor is what ever diseased idea of devil worship this old asshole has dreamt up that’s the sin. The real sin for which Haiti has been punished ever since it was founded, was the simple fact that it was the Black slaves who won their independence for themselves, forming an intolerable beacon of freedom and independence:

By late 1803, to the universal astonishment of contemporary observers, the armies led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines had broken the chain of colonial slavery at ‘what had been, in 1789, its strongest link’. [7] Renamed Haiti, the new country celebrated its independence in January 1804. I have argued elsewhere that there have been few other events in modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant order: the mere existence of an independent Haiti was a reproach to the slave-trading nations of Europe, a dangerous example to the slave-owning us, and an inspiration for successive African and Latin American liberation movements. [8] Much of Haiti’s subsequent history has been shaped by efforts, both internal and external, to stifle the consequences of this event and to preserve the essential legacy of slavery and colonialism—that spectacularly unjust distribution of labour, wealth and power which has characterized the whole of the island’s post-Columbian history.

Since its independence Haiti has been kept poor through domestic repression supported by foreign interference, which started with having had to pay France restitutionj (!) for the loss of its slave colony, through US supported dictatorship after dictatorship up until the present day, with the UN “peace force” stationed in Haiti since 2004 after the wrong man had been president for too long:

The real goals of the occupation that began on 29 February 2004 are perfectly apparent: to silence or obliterate all that remains of this support. During the first week of their deployment, the Franco-American invasion force operated almost exclusively in pro-Aristide neighbourhoods and killed only fl supporters. Their new puppet Prime Minister Gérard Latortue (a 69-year-old ex-un factotum and Miami talk-show host) publicly embraced the convicted mass-murderer Tatoune and his ex-army rebels in Gonaïves as ‘freedom fighters’—a move interpreted by the New York Times as ‘sending a clear message of stability’. [54] Latortue’s ‘national unity government’ is composed exclusively of members of the traditional elite. On March 14, the Haitian police began arresting Lavalas militants on suspicion of unidentified crimes, but decided not to pursue the rebel death squad leaders, even those already convicted of atrocities. The new National Police chief, Léon Charles, explained that while ‘there’s a lot of Aristide supporters’ to be arrested, the government ‘still has to make a decision about the rebels—that’s over my head’. [55] On March 22 Latortue’s new Interior Minister, the ex-General Hérard Abraham, announced plans to integrate the paramilitaries into the police force and confirmed his intention to re-establish the army which Aristide abolished in 1995. [56] In late March, anti-Aristide death squads continued to control the country’s second largest city, Cap Haïtien, where ‘dozens of bullet-riddled bodies have been brought to the morgue over the last month’. [57] While scores of other Aristide supporters were being killed up and down the country, the us Coast Guard applied Bush’s order, in keeping with usual us practice (but in flagrant violation of international law), to refuse all Haitian applications for asylum in advance.

The Security Council resolution that mandated the invading Franco-American troops as a un Multinational Interim Force on 29 February 2004 called for a follow-up un Stabilization Force to take over three months later. In March, Kofi Annan duly sent his Special Advisor, John Reginald Dumas, and Hocine Medili, to assess the situation on the ground. The ‘Report of the Secretary-General on Haiti’, published in April, took the obfuscatory euphemism of un discourse to new levels. ‘It is unfortunate that, in its bicentennial year, Haiti had to call again on the international community to help it overcome a serious political and security situation’, wrote Annan. The circumstances of the elected President’s overthrow were decorously skirted, the Secretary-General merely noting that: ‘Early on February 29, Mr Aristide left the country’. The toppling of the constitutional government was deemed to offer Haitians the opportunity of ‘a peaceful, democratic and locally-owned future’. [58]

It’s this history of domestic and foreign exploitation and repression that has not only kept Haiti poor, but has so ill prepared it for this earthquake. It costs money to make a city earthquake proof and that money had been stolen from the Haitians years ago. The tens of thousands or more of deaths are the result. But at least both the presidential palace and the UN mission were hit as well.

UPDATE: and of course the earthquake is just another opportunity to exploit the country…

Crime Does Not Pay (but Warcrime Does)

Corruption, Life under Capitalism, Tony Blair
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It’s nice that The Guardian has opened up a contest to look into the web of front companies Tony Blair has set up to manage his wealth and income, but the true outrage remains how much money he has “earned” in the first place:

Blair is estimated to be in the process of receiving up to £14m, making him one of Britain’s wealthiest ex-prime ministers. This includes a £4.6m memoirs deal with Random House.

He is also receiving a series of US fees from the Washington Speakers Bureau for making speeches estimated to include a £600,000 signing-on fee; consultancies with the US bank, JP Morgan and with Swiss insurers Zurich Financial Services; and commercial consultancy deals through his private firm, Tony Blair Associates, with regimes in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates among others.

The growth in Blair’s personal wealth was illustrated in May 2008, when he agreed to pay £5.75m for the late actor John Gielgud’s Buckinghamshire residence, described as “a small stately home”.

This was in addition to the £4.45m paid earlier for a London home in Connaught Square, together with an adjoining mews house.

All quite legal and above board, the rewards of years of hard work doing favours for the Americans and international business. He may be despised and hated the world over, but those who fancy they rule it appreciate their faithfully servant and have rewarded him accordingly.

Another reason not to want the Olympics

Life under Capitalism, Sport
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Draconian infringes on personal liberties to keep the sponsors happy:

The law, enacted in July as The Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games By-law, will be in effect from Jan. 1 to March 31. Under the law, Vancouver residents also can’t post unauthorized signs advertising products that compete with sponsors such as Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. or Toronto-based Royal Bank of Canada, the country’s biggest bank. Existing signs and store banners already approved by the city would be exempt.

“It’s a really slippery slope,” Shaw said.

People and companies are also prohibited from displaying unapproved signs and handing out any advertising matter, “capable of use or used to convey information or direct or attract attention for a commercial purpose.”

That might include T-shirts promoting companies such as Burger King, a competitor to Olympics partner McDonald’s Corp. of Oak Brook, Illinois, or Bank of Montreal, a competitor of Royal Bank, Eby said.

“A T-shirt might be considered a sign,” Eby said. Signs that mock or disparage Olympic sponsors would also violate the bylaw, he said.

Amsterdam’s city authorities already have nanny statist tendencies, a habit of deciding a rainbow flag is against “the character of a building” but twenty square metre big IPhone or Sony adverts are all right. With the Olympics this would only go into overdrive.