Articles with the Tag capital it fails us now

How capitalism aids swine flu

Life under Capitalism, Science
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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).

And then the crisis hit the real economy…

Dutch politics, economic crisis
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A government short time working scheme set up to help companies that saw their monthly turnover and orders plummet since October reduce salary costs without redundancies was opened this Sunday and already has 64 companies applying, including the steel manufacturing giant Corus. Under the scheme a company introduces mandatory worktime reductions for its staff, with the shortfall in salary paid for by unemployment benefits. For any company hit hard by the growing recession but still viable it’s a good way to cut salary costs without compulsory redundancies of employees it might very well be hardpressed to replace if the crisis proves to be only temporarily, as economists are predicting for the Netherlands.

Unfortunately however the scheme is strictly limited in both duration and resources. It ends on the first of January and it only has a budget for 200 million euros. What’s more, to be eligible for the scheme a company has to have had a thirty percent loss of turnover for at least two months, leaving a lot of other struggling companies out in the cold. Compared to the lavish treatment the banks got in the last few months, billions spent with little oversight, this seems remarkable stingy. Yes, you need banks to keep the rest of the economy in capital, but that doesn’t mean we can let other parts of the economy go to waste.

Capital, it fails us now

economic crisis, Life under Capitalism
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This crisis has been a real eye opener, hasn’t it, in that it made visible how much of the world economy was based on credit driven overconsumption, both on a consumer level as in the more rarified air of Wall Street. Ever since “communism” was “defeated” we’ve forgotten how wasteful capitalism is. we’ve been conned into believing there was no alternative, that we could not control its destructive tendencies and at best we could hope to only migitate some of its worst excesses, but that ultimately we were locked in a race to the bottom that would however somehow bring us untold riches someday, if we followed the rules of the free market. The fall of the Berlin Wall spelled the death knell for the perverted version of “communism” practised in the USSR, could this recession bring the same for thriumphant capitalism?

Because one thing is certain. We do have the resources, the abibilty and the ingenuity to make everybody in the world rich without destroying the planet and without engaging in the dance of mutal assured destruction that is free market capitalism. But it would mean the end of the priviledged classes and they’ve never given up their power without struggle. One good suggestion to start the struggle comes from Ian Welsh, on how to stop the obscene bonuses and salaries managers and CEOS have awarded themselves over the years:

The simplest thing is to just count all income equally, tax it all at the same rate, don’t allow deductions beyond a certain level (50K or so) and tax all income above, say 1 million at 90%, 95% for all income above 5 million. Don’t allow too much income deferral and there you go. Slap on some “in kind” rules for corporations (yes, if your corporation pays for your car, that’s salary) and while there will always be loopholes, you’ll still rein in the worst excesses.

This of course presupposes a government anywhere in the western world on the side of the workers, rather than the rich, which might be a problem…

Dear Wouter

Dutch politics, economic crisis
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Dear Wouter, what do you think? 350.000 euro is not too much to ask, is it?

Well done. The plan you and Jan Peter cooked up with your colleagues this weekend worked a treat. Sure, it cost a bob or two, almost 250 billion euro by my account (17 billion to buy up Fortis & ABN/AMRO, 20 billion to safe guard saving accounts and now some 200 billion to make the banks lend each other money again), but it worked. The stock market recovered beautifully, with the Amsterdam stock exchange having its second best day ever yesterday.

Which brings me to the reason I’m writing you this letter. You see, it’s not just the stock market or the bankers that have lost their confidence in the Dutch economy. Yes, it’s true, even I have become gunshy due to the credit crisis. I was planning to build an extenstion to our kitchen while we were remodeling it, but these plans unfortunately already had to be dropped. I couldn’t raise the credit to do everything we wanted to do, nor did I want to run the risk of getting stuck with bad debts, especially now the interest is getting so high on them.

Therefore I would like to use your help in this crisis of confidence. Because you’ve done such a marvelous job for people who need much more than me, I’m sure you can also fulfill my modest request. What I’m asking for is almost a rounding error compared to the huge sums of money you’ve already given away to people who’ve done much less to stimulate the economy than I have done. All I need is a straight forward cash injection of 100,000 euros, plus a guarantee for another 250,000, just in case my mortgage supplier gets shirty.

Be honest: who’s more deserving of your support? The losers in the banks and credit companies who caused this crisis in the first place by wasting billions buying dodgy merkin mortgages, not to mention tens of millions on their hot shot stock brokers who told them these were good ideas? Or me and others like me, who’ve been working hard to keep the economy growing by working hard and doing our best to inject cash into the market through kitchen remodelings or by spending it on essential investments like that big plasma television screen I saw in the shopping centre the other day.

Yours sincerily,

Martin Wisse

P.S. In return for your support I’m of course more than willing to make a pledge not to ask for a salary higher than that your pal Balkenende, as you’ve also asked of all your public sector executives. Is the board in charge of your new state banks Fortis and ABN/AMRO also prepared to pledge this?

The Dead go Unburied! Where’s the outrage?

economic crisis, Life under Capitalism
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Says The Mail on Sunday:

With undertakers unable to extend credit, some poor families are having to wait more than two months before receiving government help paying for funerals, the weekly tabloid said.

Bereaved families can apply to the Department for Work and Pensions if they can prove they are receiving state benefit payments and cannot afford to foot the bill.

Around 27,000 people per year receive cash for funerals from the DWP’s Social Fund, totalling 46 million pounds (78 million dollars, 58 million euros).

Where’s the outrage over this national disgrace? Where is the indignation about Britain having become such a third world nation it cannot even afford timely funerals for its decenthardworkingfamilies? The tabloids are quick to predict doom and gloom whenever a strike does even so much as mildly inconvience a sub-editor, with warnings about a return to the “Winter of discontent” when “the dead were left unburied”, but this time? Not so much. You’d think waiting times of more than two months rate more than just a small article in the Mail on sunday when the largely fictitious accounts of the late seventies are still trotted out as dire warnings thirty years later, but nary a peep.

But then this doesn’t concern the comfortable middle classes, as they all have decent insurance for this. And if it doesn’t happen to the middle classes, it doesn’t exist. People who are so irresponsible as to work a job on which they can’t even afford their own funeral have only themselves to blame. They should’ve become merchant bankers erm stock broker erm strike>estate agent never mind…

But still, 46 million pounds to pay for 27,000 funerals? That’s some 1700 pounds per funeral. Not exactly cheap, is it?