Life under Capitalism

How capitalism aids swine flu

Published on April 28, 20092 Comments

Mike Davis has an article in the Socialist Worker (US) about the swine flu, specifically how several profit driven business practises aid and abet the creation of virulent forms of swine flu and retard the fight against the threatened pandemic:

But the mythology of bold, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the U.S. and Britain, which prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot Lines, rather than dramatically increase aid to epidemic frontlines overseas–as well as to Big Pharma, which has battled Third World demands for the generic, public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche’s Tamiflu.

[…]

Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political will to monitor livestock diseases and their public health impacts, but the situation is hardly better north of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals.

Similarly, a decade of urgent warnings by scientists in the field has failed to ensure the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to the countries in the direct path of likely pandemics. Mexico has world-famous disease experts, but it had to send swabs to a laboratory in Winnipeg (which has less than 3 percent of the population of Mexico City) in order to identify the strain’s genome. Almost a week was lost as a consequence.

[…]

This has been a transition, in essence, from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, unprecedented in nature, containing tens, even hundreds of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems, suffocating in heat and manure, while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates and pathetic progenies.

[…]

Last year, a distinguished commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a landmark report on “industrial farm animal production” underscoring the acute danger that “the continual cycling of viruses…in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human-to-human transmission.”

The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (a cheaper alternative to sewer systems or humane environments) was causing the rise of resistant Staph infections, while sewage spills were producing nightmare E. coli outbreaks and Pfisteria blooms (the doomsday protozoan that has killed more than 1 billion fish in the Carolina estuaries and sickened dozens of fishermen).

Compare and contrast the difference between the mass firings of agency workers at the BMW mini plant this February: workers angry and upset, but cannot do anything with their anger while their union abandons them in favour of staff workers.

With what happened when the workers at various Visteon plants in the UK and Ireland got told they were all sacked: quite spontaneously the factories were occupied in an attempt to force the owners to at least give all sacked workers the compensation they had a right to.

In one case, justified but ineffective anger, in the other equally justified anger and well directed action. What’s the difference? Better union reps? A more militant climate in general? some proper lefties on staff that took the lead here? Seeing examples from abroad that inspired the Visteon workers?

It is important to get answers to these questions, as this sort of direct action is the first line of defence of us workers against the crisis. in the BMW sackings the union knew since before Christmas that these people -socalled temp staff that in many cases had been working there for years– was going to be sacked, but did nothing to defend them, but deemed these sackings a necessary sacrifise to safeguard the jobs of staff workers. This will happen again, as the current unions are ill prepared to handle the crisis, have evolved to be part of the system and think in terms of compromise rather than resistance. As just one example we have the shameful spectacle in the Netherlands of unions agreeing to fifteen percent pay cuts to avoid firings at the post office despite massive profits, without even bothering to fight these cutbacks. You cannot trust the unions to defend your rights, so we need to get back to the roots of worker solidarity and do it ourselves, as the Visteon workers seemed to have realised.

The big takeover

Published on March 23, 2009

Matt Taibbi on how Wall Street is using the recession for yet another power grab. Key paragraph:

So that’s the first step in wall street’s power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people — to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG — are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation’s top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm’s fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone — then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee — collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.

On this side of the Atlantic things are slightly better, but again we see how the government and the banks are conspiring together to exclude democratic controls from their decision making. Parliament has had no say in the emergency measures taken by our finance minister, while parties like the Christian Democrats are abusing the sense of urgency to force through long desired measures like raising the mandatory retirement age to 67 from 65.

Dutch Finance minister attacks shareholders

Published on March 4, 2009

It’s a bit late, considering even I already argued this same point four months ago. Bos also ignores the role his own ministry has played in fermenting this crisis. After all it’s the ministry of finance, through the various insitutions it controls that’s supposed to safeguard the financial markets and which failed miserably. They completely missed the problems with the Icelandic banks for example, gave their blessing to the takeover of ABN Amro which destroyed four banks and counting and in general stayed true to the neoliberal partyline of minimal interference as the market knew best.

The anger at the bankes is understandable, but it was the whole system that failed. The recession isn’t caused by a few too greedy CEOs, but because capitalism always encourages short term greed no matter the consequences and the measures and safeguards that were put in place after the last Great Depression were deliberately dismantled from the seventies onwards. Something in which succesive finance ministers actively colluded. The Netherlands should become more American in its approach towards the markets, with less state control and more freedom for business. The current recession is the logical end result.

The reality of unemployement in Britain

Published on January 14, 2009

The BBC has an excellent human interest article up on their website about the reality of being on the dole and trying to find a job. Some extracts:

Carl, 24, and Lauren, 20, have been together for nearly a year. They are both unemployed and receive benefits.

Lauren has been out of work for a year, and Carl for three years. They live in a deprived former mining village in the north of England where – a generation or two down the line from the pit closures – unemployment levels remain high.

[…]

Both Carl and Lauren left school at 16 without any qualifications and initially found work.

Carl drove a forklift truck at a local firm and has also done some window-fitting work. Lauren has worked as a packer at a factory and last winter had a temporary job in a pound shop.

She has also done part one of a college course in childcare.

Carl says employers usually ignore young people, and the jobs going are often so insecure and poorly paid they are not worth coming off benefits for.

[..]

“Everything that’s in the newspaper, you need qualifications. And at the jobcentre they don’t help you out much. They tell you to get a job and stuff like that, but then they just tell you to look on the [electronic] ‘job points’. I’d like them to help me out better,” she says.

Having nothing to do except search for jobs “makes you feel depressed”, says Lauren, who has two siblings also out of work.

“If I had the money and the chance I’d go back to college,” she says.

[…]

They say they had both hoped for a better life than their parents. They believe it is harder for young people now than in previous generations.

A sad indictement of Labour’s accomplishments over the pat decade. Gordon Brown boasted he had ended the cycle of boom and bust, but while he pinned all his hopes on London as the world’s number one financial centre and regenerating failed northern industrial cities with identikit city centre redevelopment schemes, he completely failed people like Carl and Lauren. People who unlike their parents and grandparents would never have a lifelong job as a highly skilled industrial worker because all the old industries were gone. People who didn’t have the opportunity or the ability to go to university to get that highly paid white collar job and escape their decaying town. Brown and Labour should’ve spent the last decade rebuilding Britain’s industry but instead decided that people like Carl and Lauren would be best of working in some call centre easily outsourced to Mumbai or selling dieet lattes to their betters. Eleven years of New Labour have been wasted for them and now the credit crunch is really starting to bite they’ll be joined by millions more.