IWD 2 - Anatomy, Nature and Fate: The 'Woman' Question

HOMAGES

Today is International Women's Day.

Over the millennia, thinkers human and divine, all of them male, have taken up the woman question:

Regarding their anatomy:

Aristotle: 'Woman is an incomplete man.'

Saint Thomas Aquinas: 'Woman is the misbegotten product of some defect in the male seed.'

Martin Luther: 'Men have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and accordingly they possess intelligence.

Women have narrow shoulders and wide hips, to keep house and bear and raise children.'

Regarding their nature:

Francis de Quevedo: 'Hens lay eggs and women lay men.'

Saint John of Damascus: 'Woman is a sicked she-ass.'

Arthur Schopenhauer: 'Woman is an animal with long hair and short sight.'

Regarding their fate;

Jehovah said to women, according to the Bible: 'Thy husband shall rule over thee.'

Allah said to Muhammad, according to the Koran: 'Righteous women are obedient.'

Eduardo Galeano from 'Children of the Days'

IWD 1 - Challenging The Status Quo

 GICH, Pakistan – In the rural mountain villages of northern Pakistan, tradition has long dictated that men own and operate the shops in the local bazaar.
The male shopkeepers peddle their goods from simple wood or cement stalls facing the road, selling everything from food, tea and spices to car and bicycle tires and plastic shoes from China. Often, men do the shopping, too.
But here in Gich, a small town northwest of Gilgit, entrepreneur Chan Bali has turned tradition on its head.
After completing training at the Central Asia Institute (CAI)-supported women’s vocational center in 2012 Bali opened a tailoring shop, making her the first woman business owner in Gich – ever.

“I thought, I can do something for myself,” Bali, a mother of four, said. “I can stand on my own feet.”
She challenged tradition, with the full support of her family. “My husband is in the Pakistan Army,” said Bali, who declined to give her age. “He’s the one who has given me the idea. He said, ‘If you learn then you have to do.’”


Created more than a century ago as a way to show solidarity with women fighting for labor and voting rights in United States and Europe, IWD has spread throughout the world. It is an official holiday in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, although not in Pakistan, according to the IWD website. In the United States, IWD is part of an annual month-long celebration of women’s history.
The United Nations theme for IWD 2014 is “Equality for women is progress for all.”

 The pivotal role of women in development is indisputable. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, “Countries with more gender equality have better economic growth. Companies with more women leaders perform better. Peace agreements that include women are more durable. Parliaments with more women enact more legislation on key social issues such as health, education, anti-discrimination and child support. The evidence is clear: equality for women means progress for all.”


But everyone, not just the women, have a role to play, Ban Ki-moon said.
“I also have a message for my fellow men and boys: play your part,” he said in his annual IWD statement. “All of us benefit when women and girls – your mothers, sisters, friends and colleagues – can reach their full potential.”


In Bali’s case, her husband encouraged her and “helped me negotiate [rent] with the owner of this building.”
Her simple one-room shop in a cement building is filled with tailoring supplies and equipment. The wooden planks on a floor-to-ceiling shelf are stacked high with fabric, yarn and thread. She has two hand-cranked sewing machines and one electric machine. She has hired and trained one employee and started an apprentice program, with 10 “students” who come for lessons from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day.
She is a role model, showing what women can do when they stretch their wings.

  QUOTE: Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us. – Christabel Pankhurst

Taken from here

A remarkably apt quotation from Christabel Pankhurst from around a century ago. SOYMB may choose to tweak it slightly - 'Remember the dignity of your humanity. Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us. Women, men, Workers of the World Unite.'
JS

Cricket: Supporting The Wrong Side Gets Kashmiri Students Suspended

“If one harbors anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” – George Orwell

  A private university in Meerut suspended all Kashmiri students when a sub-section of them celebrated Pakistan winning a recent Cricket match. According to reports in leading Indian newspapers [1], the authorities initially decided to suspend only the people who had shouted slogans, but later decided to suspend all Kashmiri students according to the recommendations made by a three-tier inquiry. The vice-chancellor told reporters that the students' gesture was completely unacceptable. Comments about this incident on social media ranged from aggressive and farcical (some variant of mailing the suspended students to Pakistan), to tacit acceptance of the policy but disapproval of its universal application to all Kashmiri students. A few people called for the arrest of the students, and a ban on ever being employed by the government. A few others called for their execution as terrorists.

  The unifying emotion to all the responses was, unsurprisingly, an overflow of misplaced nationalism. A few students celebrating in a corner of the country, somehow, dealt a blow to the national identity of a billion people. Never mind the absurdity of the notion that pride in one's nationality is of paramount social and cultural importance, since the nation one belongs to is determined purely by luck, as a consequence of the accident of birth. Never mind the constitutional assurance provided to every citizen that their freedom of speech will be unimpeded.

  One tweet regarding this incident remarked, “This is why the right to free speech has restrictions.”. Ironically, this is exactly the scenario where an absolute right to free expression, without restrictions, is direly needed as, popular speech, by definition does not need to be protected. It is unpopular speech, which might be offensive to some section of society, that needs protection. These ideas, are by no means either original or profound, and has been expressed at different points of time by many notable people including Søren Kierkegaard, Salman Rushdie, Kurt Vonnegut, George Carlin and Stephen Fry among others. 

   There can be no ethical justification for arbitrary boundaries on a map determining whether an expression of joy is worthy or unworthy. 

   In the rest of the article, I will try to place this incident in historical context. In 1846, the Muslim majority region of Kashmir, with a distinct language and culture was 'sold' to King Gulab Singh for Rs. 7,500,000 in return for acceptance of absolute British sovereignty. Throughout the next hundred years, the Hindu ruler kept the Muslim population poor, illiterate and oppressively taxed [2], and faced mass agitations that he brutally suppressed using State forces. 

   In the spring of 1947 King Hari Singh orders the police to fire on demonstrations in favor of joining Pakistan, burns whole villages and massacres innocent people [3]. In retaliation, Pashtuns from North West Frontier Province in Pakistan with Poonch rebels invade Kashmir . The King decides to ask for help from India, who agree to send the Indian army only on Kashmir's accession to India. King Hari Singh agrees to this, contravening all previous accession regulations which called for a plebiscite to determine whether princely states would join India, Pakistan or be Independent.

    It is important to note that at that point of time, and since then, all opinion polls suggest that a majority of the people in the region want Kashmir to be independent, a lesser number want Kashmir to accede to Pakistan and a minuscule number want to maintain status-quo. At that time, Pandit Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister, and Sheikh Abdullah, the first Prime Minister of the state of Kashmir gave assurances that the accesion of Kashmir was ad-hoc to be resolved by a later plebiscite. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 47 called for a similar plebiscite. India, for a while, maintained that a plebiscite was imminent and then in an Israel-esque U-turn decided that the requirements for a plebiscite were obsolete as the “geography and demographics of the region are permanently altered”, since 1947.

   Meanwhile, most investigations carried out by international agencies show that forced disappearances, extra-judicial killings torture, rape and sexual abuse, by the Indian army to sustain dominance in the region fueled by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), are widespread [4]. For some time, the number of civilian deaths attributed to the Indian Army in the region are higher than those attributed to Islamic militants [5]. 

   Indian authorities routinely deport internationally reputed journalists, like David Barsamian and threaten the others for trying to pry into Kashmir [6]. The few investigative journalists who manage to escape the net have uncovered horror stories, completely unreported in the Indian media, of the army's atrocities. A few of them are particularly scarring like that of the 60-year-old man (6), kept in solitary confinement by the army for one month. During that time, he wasn’t given anything to eat, but his own flesh. They cut the flesh from his body and served it to him. This was all he was given to eat for a month.

   In July 2011, the State Human Rights Commission of Jammu and Kashmir (SHRC) released a report documenting 2,156 unidentified bodies in 38 unmarked graveyards, a relic and testament to the last 50 years of forced disappearances.

Kashmiri children have grown up watching unexplained graveyards populate their villages and with macabre stories like the above. And when these children become young adults and celebrate Pakistan's victory, the rest of the Indian population calls them thankless and undeserving of this country. They are right. Kashmiris do not deserve constant torture, confinement, unexplained deaths that India has provided them with for the last two hundred years. They deserve to exercise the right of self-determination which is the cornerstone of modern democratic society and be independent. At the very least, they deserve the minuscule amount of freedom to cheer for the opposing team at a sporting event. 

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” - Howard Zinn

By Subit Chakrabarti  From here with references

Global Warming - Good For Business

"For most of the planet, the specter of global warming is ominous, but as journalist McKenzie Funk reveals in his book Windfall: The Blooming Business of Global Warming there are those who view the Earth's dangerous meltdown as a golden opportunity...Funk's original, forthright take on this little-discussed profit-taking trend in the climate change sweepstakes is very unsettling."

In short, Funk reports on the long line of individuals, corporations and financial investors who are betting on climate change to make a huge profit from catastrophe.

The following is an excerpt from the introduction:

For three decades we have all known, at some level, about global warming. As a point of scientific inquiry it is older, first identified by the nineteenth-century researchers John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius, but as a source of popular anxiety and conversation it dates to the first sophisticated computer models of the early 1970s and the first World Climate Conference in 1979 and landmark congressional testimony by the NASA atmospheric physicist James Hansen in 1988. It has been around long enough to become a cliché—I thank it for the heat wave I'm experiencing in Seattle as I write this—and long enough to have birthed a newer cliché: the idea that we have so changed the planet with our engineering and our emissions that we now live in the Anthropocene, a new geologic epoch of man's own creation. Long enough, certainly, for something to have been done about it. In the new millennium, which has brought us Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, Lord Nicholas Stern's seven-hundred-page Economics of Climate Change, and a string of failed climate legislation and UN conferences, the warnings have been ever louder and more sustained.

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, our principal contribution to the climate and the principal driver of warming, has only been rising. It is now 40 percent higher than preindustrial levels, higher than it has been anytime in the last 800,000 years. In New York's Madison Square Garden, a seventy-foot doomsday clock, recently unveiled by Deutsche Bank, is tracking greenhouse-gas levels in real time: 2 billion metric tons added each month, or 800 a second, for a total of 3.7 trillion tons and counting. The ticker has thirteen red digits, but when you stare at it from Seventh Avenue, the last three are a blur. They're spinning too quickly to see.

This book is about how we're preparing for the world we seem hell-bent on creating. It's about climate change, but not about the science of it, nor the politics, nor directly about how we can or why we should stop it. Instead, it's about bets being placed on a simple, cynical premise: that we won't stop it anytime soon. It's about people, and mostly it's about people like me: northerners from the developed world—historically the emitter countries, as we're called—who occupy the high, dry ground, whether real or metaphorical.
I'm interested in climate change as a driver of human behavior—as a case study, the ultimate case study, in how we confront crisis. Warming will reshape the planet, and in broad strokes we already know how: Hot places will get hotter. Wet places will get wetter. Ice will simply melt. Poor, mostly tropical countries, those least responsible for the consumption that fuels the factories that produce the emissions that cause the warming, will be hit hardest, but wealthier, higher-latitude regions—Europe, Canada, the United States—are not entirely immune. The change is so vast, so universal, that it seems to test the limits of human reason. So it should not be surprising that the ideologies that led us here, those that have guided the postindustrial age—techno-lust and hyper-individualism, conflation of growth with progress, unflagging faith in unfettered markets—are the same ones many now rely on as we try to find a way out. Nowhere is humankind's mix of vision and tunnel vision more apparent than in how we're planning for a warmed world.

The idea that people are irrational has lately been in vogue. We can thank the global financial crisis for that. Behavioral economists have reminded us that the market, far from being a collection of fully logical individuals, is hostage to Keynesian "animal spirits," the emotions, prejudices, impulses, and shortcuts that are part of nearly every human decision and every financial bubble—and part, no doubt, of our apathy about reducing carbon emissions. In the United States, nearly 98 percent of the federal climate-research budget goes to the hard sciences, which have produced mounds of evidence for global warming—enough to make a believer of anyone who gives it an honest look—and produced increasingly refined computer models predicting an increasingly dire future. One recent prediction, from MIT, is of a median warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100 if we don't curtail emissions—a temperature spike that could entirely melt the polar ice cap in summertime, turn much of Central America and the southern United States into a dust bowl, and wipe island nations off the map. The remaining 2 percent of the federal research budget goes to social scientists, such as those with Columbia University's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, who probe what may now be the most important question: If we know the risks, why aren't we doing anything? The center's director, Elke Weber, suggests that at both levels where humans make their decisions—emotional and analytical—there are roadblocks. The emotional block: What we don't see doesn't scare us. "The time-delayed, abstract, and often statistical nature of the risks of global warming does not evoke strong visceral reactions," Weber writes. At the analytical level, there is, along with the tension between individual and systemic risk—an apparent tragedy of the commons—something economists call hyperbolic discounting. It goes like this: Offer to give someone either $5 today or $10 next year, and he'll probably take the $5.

Among many activists, politicians, and scientists, the assumption is that climate change now suffers mainly from a PR problem: If the proper nudges can be found or the reality of it finally made visceral, the public will take action. Unspoken and scarcely examined is a second, much bigger assumption: that "taking action" means trying to cut carbon emissions. That taking action will take a certain shape: Green roofs. Carbon caps. Green cars. Solar panels. Footpaths. Forests. Fluorescent bulbs. Bicycles. Insulation. Algae. Inflated tires. Showers. Clotheslines. Recycling. Locavorism. Light-rail. Wind farms. Vegetarianism. Heat pumps. Telecommuting. Smaller homes. Smaller families. Smaller lives. We hope our collective fear of global warming will push us inevitably toward collective behavior. But what if the world as we know it goes on even as the earth as we know it begins to disappear? There's another possible response to melting ice caps and rising sea levels, to the reality of climate change—a response that is tribal, primal, profit-driven, short-term, and not at all idealistic. Every man for himself. Every business for itself. Every city for itself. Every country for itself. There's the possibility that we take the $5.

Taken from here

In many areas the public is taking action, as can be recognised from the last paragraph: individual and local action. And while the public takes action those with the power probably laugh behind our backs. What power does the public have to make any serious impact on the problems of global warming or any other matter that should be in the public domain for serious discussion and decision making policies? How does the public gain the power, currently denied to it, to be the driving force in decisions that impact on the vast majority of the world? Capitalism and its profit motive is the problem, the stumbling block for the public - it is that that must go before we will be in a position to seriously address the problems facing us all. The only alternative for the long haul is socialism.
JS 

There's No Such Thing As A Middle Class

Dear Middle Class:
Fuck you.
Perhaps I should back up a bit and try that again.

One of the most frustrating things for me on those occasions when I get suckered into listening to the mainstream media is the lamentation and hand wringing over the shrinking middle class.
While I don’t have any money in the bank and the only assets I have are a computer a video camera and a rusty old mountain bike, most people would look at where I live and where my children go to school and label me squarely in the middle class.
I usually accept that label.
It is easier than telling the whole world that am in my mid forties with no savings, no retirement plan, no 401K- and I live the life of a new media freelancer; check to every increasingly small check. These facts would make my middle class friends uncomfortable.

But I digress. The reason I say “fuck you” to the middle class is that holding onto the status of middle class requires a poor class.
There would be no middle, without the poor. That 1 in 5 kids in the United States live below the poverty line is both immoral and a requirement of our system. This system holds as its very center, heartbeat and myth of the American Dream the cherished “middle class.”

George Carlin frames it this way:
“The upper class keeps all of the money and pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes (and) does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class… keep ‘em showing up at those jobs.”
So what is to be done? We hoist ourselves on our own petard when we allow the Koch brother fueled narrative that Wal-Mart and Fast Food workers who are struggling to attain a living wage should be grateful to have a job, any job, in this climate.

We know our elected officials are not responsive to the people, but to the ruling elite and yet we still argue over Obama or Romney or Pelosi or Boehner as if these politicians are even listening to us.
We cling, no worse, we teach our children to invest in the false American Dream that if we only work a little harder, or go into more educational debt that we would be able to grasp the brass ring and wear proudly the label of American Middle class.
That label would be made in Bangladesh, mind you, by a child working six days a week 16 hours a day and making 30 bucks a month but you would be proud to wear that middle class label just the same, and in doing so do you- we, I- not only endorse the conditions of poverty that, because of its very existence, defines the middle class, we insure that poverty will continue.

We need new language, a new system based on equity and fairness and not on exploitation and oppression and until then I say fuck the middle class.
I quit it.

From here

"We need new language, a new system based on equity and fairness and not on exploitation and oppression" - Sad to say this individual and many others like him haven't yet stumbled upon the World Socialist Movement, the SPGB or this blog, SOYMB. Comments are open at the link for anyone having a few words of enlightenment to pass on. And remember - www.worldsocialism.org/spgb
JS

Beware The Risks in Overseas Farmland Investing

Morgan Stanley for a while owned farmland in Ukraine while the Municipal Employees’ Retirement System of Michigan was part of a consortium that recently bought 50% of Australia’s almond-producing land. Worldwide, farmland is a hot investment area, but it’s also controversial, opaque, illiquid and sometimes relies on local operation that presents a risk of fraud.
The reputational risk in these investments lies in their frequent characterization in the blogosphere as being a form of colonialism and coming at the expense of food production for local consumption. The Oakland Institute is a leading proponent of this view and just published its latest critique of farmland investing, focused on the U.S. Public pensions, in particular, are often sensitive to such criticism.
Another risk inherent in these investments is that they’re dependent on local knowledge and operation. Harvard University may have been the victim of fraud in a purchase of forest land in Romania, while Morgan Stanley sold its Ukrainian farm after encountering trouble with local officials and theft, according to a report by Bloomberg. Harvard and Morgan Stanley are heavyweight investors but there may be a greater risk for smaller, less-experienced investors chasing such big boys into this modish asset class. David Thelander of advisory firm Thelander Advisers said all potential investors in farmland should ask themselves whether they have “staff and resources in place to carry out due diligence.” Caution is also in order because farmland investment management firms, especially overseas, aren’t likely to have the same experience of working under tight regulatory scrutiny as, say, as registered investment advisory firm in the U.S., Mr. Thelander said.

From Nicholas Elliott at Wall Street Journal
 See more here

N.B. Caution is advised purely to protect the investment and investors' subsequent returns. There's no mention of what occurs on the ground for those falling victim to the effects of the investments. Interesting to note there may be 'reputational risk' from the blogosphere which may characterise the investments as 'a form of colonialism and coming at the expense of food production for local consumption.'

JS

 

 

Seismic Tests In Amazon Imperil Indigenous People

Sometimes one shouts out loudly and involuntarily at the breathtaking disregard of those on the crusade for profits over people. This happened to be one of my moments even though I've long realised there are no lengths to which capitalism will go. Air, water, soil, animals, people - even those who have only just, or yet to discover, what drilling is: all are dispensable in the grand scheme of things.
JS

On January 27, 2014 Peruvian government regulators approved plans for gas company Pluspetrol to commence drilling in a once-protected reserve for indigenous peoples in the Amazon rainforest. The approval comes after Peru quashed a decidedly critical environmental impact report on the operation by the Culture Ministry (MINCU), the resignation of the Culture Minister and other Ministry personnel, and heavy criticism from Peruvian and international civil society.
A subsequent MINCU report requested that Pluspetrol cancel plans to conduct seismic tests in one specific portion of the reserve because of the “possible presence of [indigenous] people in isolation,” yet it didn’t object to tests across a much broader area.
The planned operations expand the Camisea gas project, Peru’s biggest energy development, with active well platforms already in the indigenous reserve producing gas. Almost three-quarters of Pluspetrol’s operation overlaps the reserve, created in 1990 and given greater legal protection in 2003.
The reserve’s inhabitants live in what Peruvian law calls “voluntary isolation” or “initial contact,” having little-to-no contact with outsiders and thus lacking immune defenses. Pluspetrol concedes that contact with the reserve’s inhabitants is “probable” during drilling, and that such peoples in general are thus susceptible to “massive deaths” from transmitted diseases.

Read more here



 

India: Oil Minister becomes Minister for Oil and the Environment.

 

Excerpts from two recent articles regarding the ongoing struggle in India between corporations and corporate-friendly politicians against farmers, scientists and democracy-seeking organisations. Links are given to both articles where further information and more links can be found.

 

1.

 

Can genetically modified (GM) food crops be kept out of India? Things seemed positive when, as Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh put a moratorium on GM eggplant (BT Brinjal). However, he has now been replaced. Veerappa Moily, India's Oil Minister, is now also India's new Environment Minister. Moily has approved field trials of 200 GM food crops on behalf of companies like Monsanto, Mahyco, Bayer and BASF. Monsanto's shares surged by 77 percent as soon as Moily's decision was announced.

For his efforts, Oily  has been called a "corporate mole," and the Coalition for a GM Free India and Greenpeace condemned Moily's action as "unscientific, anti-people and reeking of vested interests."

Rajesh Krishnan, convener, Coalition for a GM Free India said:

"The writing on the wall is clear now. The UPA government is against the interest of the citizens, our farmers and the welfare of the nation. It is hand in glove with the multi-national GM seed industry that stands to gain immensely from the numerous open field trails of GM crops.”  

 

Last November, hundreds of scientists raised serious concerns about open air field trials of GM crops in  India  by writing a letter to the Prime Minister . Their letter coincided with the release of a compilation of 440 scientific research studies on the impact of GM crops on the environment and health. The scientists demanded that the recommendations of the TEC be accepted. In their letter, they said that the final report of the TEC has recommended against the deployment of Bt food crops in  India  until their safety is established, and recommended avoiding Herbicide Tolerant GM crops.

Like Shiva, the scientists are not saying that trials have to be stopped, as trials can happen in a glasshouse environment. However, they warned against open field trials as the impact of such food crops must be established. As there is no code of practice and no infrastructure to conduct large scale open field trials, the scientists suggested that open field trials should not take place.   

 

Open field testing is part of the GM sector's plan to win the battle to dominate and control the food chain by any means possible. It cannot win the scientific debate. It cannot convince people to freely choose its products. But it seeks to win by various insidious means, not least by infiltrating official bodies and contamination - by all means necessary.

 

from Colin Todhunter - more here

 

2.

 Mr Moily, India’s Oil Minister, who is also India’s new Environment Minister, did what he was appointed to do – Approve field trials of 200 GMOs, of wheat, rice, corn, cotton produced by companies like Monsanto, Mahyco, Bayer, BASF in one fell swoop. This blind and blanket approval is anti-science, anti-people, anti-farmer, anti-democracy. It is a threat to our Seed Freedom and Food Freedom.
Most approvals granted by Mr. Moily are for GMOs which are bt crops or ht (herbicide tolerant) crops. Bt crops are engineered with a gene from the Soil Organism, Bacillus Thuringiensis to produce a toxin in the plant to control the Bollworm. Monsanto’s Bt Cotton (trade name Bollgard) and Bt Baigan are examples of such Bt crops. Herbicide Tolerant plants introduce a toxic gene to make the plant tolerant to the company’s proprietary herbicide. In the case of Monsanto, the HT crops are Roundup Ready soya, corn and cotton. Since crops with genes for producing bt toxin and herbicide resistant genes produce poisons,in lay language we could call these poison producing plants. That is why they need to be assessed for biosafety which means health and environmental safety in the context of GMOs. It is only when such safety can be guaranteed through lab and greenhouse tests should we allow open field trials which are precursors to commercialization.


The Rules for Biosafety in India are contained in the 1989 RULES FOR THE MANUFACTURE, USE, IMPORT, EXPORT AND STORAGE OF HAZARDOUS MICRO ORGANISMS GENETICALLY ENGINEERED ORGANISMS OR CELLS
(notified under the EP Act, 1986).

Two Environment Ministers have been removed because they were implementing these rules in letter and spirit.
Jairam Ramesh was removed as Environment Minister after he put a moratorium on GM eggplant, the BT Brinjal, after listening to scientists, farmers, citizens in 7 public hearings organized across the country. The public hearings on Bt Baigan were the highest expression of science and democracy.

Jayanthi Natarajan was removed because she was upholding the Biosafety laws and she refused to sign on the dotted line with the Agriculture Minister, Shri Sharad Pawar, to allow GMO field trials in a joint affidavit to the Supreme Court in the GMO case.

Moily’s approvals violate all the scientific principles of Biosafety and Food Security. They are also sub judice, since the Supreme Court is hearing the matter.

Jayanti Natarajan was trying to ensure she does not do anything to undermine the independence of the judiciary. And this is why she was replaced by Moily, to bulldoze approvals before a robust Biosafety framework is evolved, just a few months before the elections.
The Government has also been trying its best to totally undo the Biosafety rules and replace them with industry friendly deregulation law drafted as the BRAI (Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India). This law could not be passed by parliament because of protests from citizens and Parliamentarians.

 

From Vandana Shiva - Read on here

 

Subsidising Corporate Welfare: Business As Usual

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 An overview of the 2014 US Farm bill

After a lot of dilly-dallying, the US has finally passed the US Farm bill 2014. The earlier Farm bill 2008, which makes budgetary provisions for agriculture and food security, had expired in September 2012. Anyway, with US President Obama putting his signatures on Feb 7, the bill has come into existence. Probably to tide over the push and pulls from political opponents (backed by Corporate interests), this time the bill is for 10 years. The 2014 Farm bill makes a budgetary provision of almost $ 1 trillion ($956 billion to be exact), which includes $ 756 for food security programmes. 

A cursory look at what the bill contains clearly shows that the emphasis once again is on the faulty industrial agriculture. It replaces old subsidies with new ones, raises the minimum price growers receive for certain crops, and of course has cut down the food stamps programme. While signing the bill, Obama said: "This bill helps to clamp down on loopholes that allowed people to receive benefits whether they were planting crops or not. And it saves taxpayers hard-earned dollars by making sure that we only support farmers when disaster strikes or prices drop. It's not just automatic." 

But not everyone agrees. Dan Sumner, an economist at the University of California at Davis said: "Those programs could create problems. That’s the kind of assurances that the U.S. government is willing to provide that most farmers in the world, in fact, don’t have access to. With the backing of the government US farmers can produce more and export more. Ultimately, that drives down world prices and it’s a little tougher for farmers in developing countries to compete with that." (New US Farm bill reaps controversy, Voice of America. http://www.voanews.com/content/new-us-farm-bill-controversy/1847016.html).  

Bulk of the budgetary allocation is actually for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (SNAP) that goes to provide food security to an estimated 47 million hungry. Although the SNAP budget has been cut by $ 8.7 billlion from what was earlier proposed, it still shows how crucial is this safety net in a country which calls itself the Mecca of market economy. $756 billion is proposed to be spent in the next ten years on feeding the hungry. Interestingly, the US had objected to India's paltry food security assistance of about US $ 20 billion a year at the recently concluded Bali WTO Ministerial. US finds nothing wrong in its own $ 75.6 billion/year support in the name of food security, but finds the Indian food security initiative to be WTO incompatible !

Regarding the farm incomes, the bill allows farmers to choose between Agricultural Risk Coverage (the Senate Program variable support levels) and Price Loss Coverage (the House program with fixed support levels) on a crop-by-crop basis. According to Daryll E Ray and Harwood D Schaffer of the Agricultural Policy Analysis Centre of the University of Tennessee "If prices remain high for the next 5 years, the ARC will provide most grain farmers with a superior level of coverage. On the other hand, if prices fall and remain there for a sustained period of time, the PLC will provide farmers with the best coverage. For both programs base acres and yields can be updated."

Accordingly "Reference prices for the PLC program are wheat, $5.50/bushel; corn, $3.70/bushel; grain sorghum, $3.95/bushel; barley, $4.95/bushel; oats, $2.40/bushel; long grain rice, $14.00/hundredweight (cwt).; medium grain rice, $14.00/cwt.; soybeans, $8.40/bushel; other oilseeds, $20.15/cwt.; peanuts $535.00/ton; dry peas, $11.00/cwt.; lentils, $19.97/cwt.; small chickpeas, $19.04/cwt.; and large chickpeas, $21.54/cwt.

"It is interested to note that in the previous counter-cyclical program, the target price for corn, barley, and grain sorghum were all the same—$2.63 per bushel. Now the reference price for corn is $3.70 while grain sorghum is $3.95, and barley is $4.95. Not coincidentally grain sorghum is important in House Agricultural Committee Chair Frank Lucas’ state of Oklahoma, while barley is important to House Agricultural Committee Ranking Member Colin Peterson’s northern tier farmers." #

 

Devinder Sharma

From here

Torture Regimes Receive Largest Sums Of US Aid

The top ten recipients slated to receive US foreign assistance in 2014 all practice torture and are responsible for major human rights abuses, according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other major human rights organizations.

The violators and degree of aid they are expected to receive are: 1. Israel – $3.1bn, 2. Afghanistan – $2.2bn, 3. Egypt – $1.6bn, 4. Pakistan – $1.2bn, 5. Nigeria – $693m, 6. Jordan – $671m, 7. Iraq – $573m, 8. Kenya – $564m, 9. Tanzania – $553m, 10. Uganda -$456m

Each of the listed countries are accused of torturing people in the last year, and at least half are reported to be doing so on a massive scale.
Financial support for such governments could violate existing US law mandating that little or no funding be granted to a country that “engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture.”

The United States remains a signatory of the United Nations Convention against Torture, ratified in 1994. That the top ten recipients of US assistance all practice torture calls into serious question the Obama administration’s overall stance on and understanding of fundamental human rights.

from here

WHAT WE SAID (8)

The work of the Social Revolution can only be accomplished by men and women with a clear understanding of the economics of capitalism, that therefore a clear and definite program is the first essential, and in the interest of maintaining that definite program of the party it is imperative to expel out of the said party all speakers, writers, or even members who are not in the strictest harmony with its ‘clean cut’ principles,The work of the Social Revolution depends in the last analysis upon the growth of class-consciousness amongst the working class, that therefore the chief task of a socialist political party is to educate and direct that class consciousness along correct line. Therefore it must be made possible for all who have accepted the central principles of common ownership to become members of the party irrespective of their knowledge or lack of knowledge of economics, and that the development of the political struggle of the socialist movement must be depended upon to clear the minds of the members.

It is often said that the workers’ movement should have immediately launched strikes to avert the war. After all, hadn’t socialist international congresses declared such a policy. The SPGB however had previously explained the practice of canvassing support for socialism from non-socialists and the outbreak of the war amply demonstrated its truth. No ‘socialist’ party in Europe could say prevent mobilisation because no ‘socialist’ party could have the slightest reasonable prospect of having such a call obeyed. Had the socialist parties of France and Germany been able to declare general strikes, particularly in the transport, there would have been no war between France and Germany. But the French government knew, the German government knew, all observers around the world  keow, that the socialist organisations  could not have carried out such a threat even had they made it. Both politically and industrially their revolutionary organisations were ephemeral phantasms not solid bodies. Their votes were not from class-conscious workers, cast from knowledge and understanding of the socialist case,  but votes garnered by opportunistic appeals. A socialist party, as such, is helpless if it relies on the mandate of non-socialists. Only the power socialist majority has the power to stop the war machine.

World War One did however later spark off a class war, particularly within the engineering industry and on the Clyde where the militancy of the workers and their shop-stewards acquired it the title of Red Clydeside. The Socialist Party offered their support for their actions.

England's Engineers

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1910s/1917/no-154-june-1917/englands-engineers

Engineers have recently fought for the repeal of the Munitions of War Amendment Bill. For that particular purpose they fought solidly and well. The masters tried their damnedest to beat and overwhelm them with lies and conquer them with hunger. They placarded the Midland towns with crafty official notices. They tried to split the strike with lies and scorn and they tried to split it with bribes and threats. Yet the engineers ignored splendidly the Government promises, official and outside opinion, together with the cowardly threats.

For years the engineers were half-asleep. Hopefully, innocently, patriotically, they abandoned all those rules which they held to be valuable and precious in their union. Soon after the original sacrifice, as early in the war as the Autumn of 1914, they were bound to the benches and engines by sheaves of laws. Act after Act took away their strength as a fighting union. The men they trusted told them that the Allies could never win the war if the union remained as strong, or the men as free, as in the days of peace, so the engineers, like other large bodies, cheerfully gave over the ripest of their plans of advancement, the richest of their trade-union possessions. For it was promised by those they trusted that not a hair of their heads would be hurt through any concessions they made.

Then  Acts were passed in a trice; rapidly passed, almost secretly passed, so that after a few months of warfare the workers of Britain had their customary weapons of defence broken or blunted and the finest of trade union safeguards cast into the official dust-bin. The engineers, like the rest, surrendered the trade-union defences of their personal welfare in what they considered to be the national interest. The unions were emasculated....
... There was no relief from their insufferable toil. Holidays were stroked out. The intense strain, which commonly they experience, was increased. The Government pacified them with flattery and their trusted men lectured them on patience. Nevertheless the engineers began to regret the day when they broke their own weapons of defence and made their unions a dead letter...
...The Clyde trouble of Christmas 1915 is perhaps the best specimen of these sectional and local revolts. The principle of the men was strong, but they were driven down by lies, hunger, victimisation, deportation of their leaders, and, what is more important still, because the strike was local.

It is the mass of engineers only, and not a locality of engineers, who can successfully fight. Ten thousand engineers on strike in a town may gain something in a month for that town's men—or they may not; fifty thousand spread over one industrial area may force amendments to an  objectionable Bill from a reluctant Cabinet, while one hundred and fifty thousand men who leave their engines, with all their force concentrated on one particular principle, striking at a vitally important time, stand a good chance of getting what they ask for...However, considering the difficulties in their way, the engineers' struggle has been splendid...

...Slowly, too slowly, the workers are finding out their true friends and true principles, their cunning enemies and their delusive ways. The change they make must be vaster than the repeal or modification of one Bill or the establishment of one unconnected wish. The thing that would bring them rest and peace can be done with one wish stroke. Instead of abandoning the political machine to ambitious wiseacres and unscrupulous plotters, and letting them, in the secrecy of Cabinet conclaves, everlastingly scheme to set the social changes on you, see to it that those who are now proven the enemies of your class are no longer sent to represent you. Fill their places with class-conscious men of your own ranks, controlled and guaranteed by the political organisation of your own class.

Engineers! At an early date you will be confronted with other trouble. We want your demands to be more exacting, and more deep the principles you struggle for. Fight with your brothers of other industries for these bigger and nobler things as earnestly and solidly as you recently fought. Fight politically as well as industrially, then, with the principle of the class struggle to guide your fighting, you cannot help but win.

Read our Declaration of Principles on the back page of this paper; earnestly consider them; join with us and help to establish them. Then will slave and master be abolished, and a real peace come, to all, including England's engineers.

Socialist Standard 
June 1917

Protecting the bankers

Philippe Lamberts, the Belgian Green MEP who helped devise the restrictions of the EU's cap on bankers' bonuses has called for the UK government to be sued for allowing banks to sidestep the new rule.  He said it was clear the UK was failing to implement EU law and accused the coalition of having no interest in halting "absurd remuneration packages". He urged the European commission to take the UK to court for allowing bankers to bend the rules which limit bonuses to 100% of salary or 200% if shareholders approve. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/mar/04/bankers-bonus-cap-architect-says-sue-uk-government

Barclays and the bailed-out Lloyds Banking Group are expected to reveal they are handing their bosses Antony Jenkins and António Horta-Osório new share awards, on top of their salaries, to prevent their overall pay falling as a result of the cap. Lloyds has already announced that Horta-Osório is receiving a £1.7m bonus for 2013 and is likely to reveal a payout from a long-term incentive plan of around £2.9m. This follows HSBC's move to pay its chief executive, Stuart Gulliver, an additional £32,000 a week in allowances on top of his £1.2m salary, and after Virgin Money raised the salary of its boss, Jayne-Anne Gadhia, to £637,000 from £550,000 as a result of the restriction. Royal Bank of Scotland, which is 81% owned by the taxpayer and paid out £567m in bonuses after making an £8bn loss.

"What we are witnessing now is an attempt by the major banks, with the support of the British government, to circumvent the rules and that is to compensate what we did on terms of structure, by just raising the fixed rate of remuneration," said Lamberts.

The chancellor, George Osborne, is challenging the bonus cap in the EU's highest court. The Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, is also opposed to the restrictions. The MEP insisted "People like David Cameron and George Osborne are part of the same club. These are people who are really out of touch with reality. They are part of the same class, so I think it is natural for them to defend their interests."

There is a rather consistent pattern in the government policy to business and particularly the financial sector. The chancellor warned that the UK would leave the EU unless the Lisbon Treaty was changed to prevent the imposition of financial services legislation that might rein in the City. In January, George Osborne set out one of the key demands Britain will be making  and  must be met if Britain is to stay inside the EU and it is "cast-iron legal protections for the City of London."

 60% of the EU's financial services industry located in the UK and the  government regards its prosperity as a matter of national security, its interests to be weighed against other geopolitical considerations such as our membership of the EU and even above and beyond the principle that the violation of the borders of sovereign states such as Ukraine by Russia may demand economic and  financial sanctions.

It is clear different rules apply to the Square Mile.

Migration - the facts?

The government has prevented the publication of a cross-departmental report that found one impact of immigration is smaller than has been claimed.

It suggests "displacement" - the number of UK workers unemployed as a consequence of immigration - is well below the figure used by ministers of 23 for every 100 additional immigrants even though Department for Work and Pensions research at the time showed that the displacement impact of migration on low-skilled British jobs was mixed with only patchy evidence.

The work, an extension of Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), a group of independent academics,  research, estimates that the cost to existing British workers of new arrivals is much lower. The prime minister's office has prevented publication of the report, which has been ready since last year. Research finding that immigration is easier to absorb than previously thought is politically unhelpful. In fact, the latest labour market statistics published show that 87% or 367,000 of the 425,000 new jobs in the UK economy in the past year went to British workers. Only 54,000 of the extra jobs in the economy, or 13%, went to foreign nationals.

Meanwhile,  EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmstrom, Sweden's former Europe minister, insisted that there was no "concrete" evidence of so-called benefit tourism in the UK.

"You have a generous benefit system but so do many other countries so I don't know why this debate is so intense in the UK," she said. "But I've also failed to get any concrete evidence that there is a massive abuse of benefits. We've asked for that evidence but we've not received that evidence, that there's a massive abuse of benefits." She added " ...Just because there is a growth in racist parties saying we should close our borders.

Quote of the Day

TV presenter working for the Kremlin-funded broadcaster Russia Today (RT) has denounced as "wrong" her country's "military intervention" in Ukraine.

"I can't stress enough how strongly I am against any state intervention in a sovereign nation's affairs," Abby Martin declared in her news programme. "Just because I work here doesn't mean I don't have editorial independence. What Russia did was wrong." She added. "I will not sit here and apologise for, or defend, military aggression," she went on to say press coverage of the Ukrainian crisis was "rife with disinformation" and "disappointing from all sides of the media spectrum".

SOYMB would be very interested if anyone can direct us to a BBC news presenter who expressed similar sentiments on air during the Iraq war about the British role and the BBC's reporting in that illegal war?

FLOODGATE Part 2 of 3 - poem

FLOODGATE

Part 2 of 3. The Somerset Leveller!

(Prince Charles visited the Somerset Levels

flood victims a few days after Minister,

Owen Paterson, was heckled & jostled)

Prince Charles, ‘Environmentalist’,

Has done his level best;

To reassure all flooded folk,

In his fact-finding quest.

But history repeats itself,

We’ve seen these sops before;

The bromides and the platitudes,

The populace in awe!

King Edward, many years ago,

In Nineteen-Thirty-Six;

Observing closed Welsh collieries,

Demanded a ‘quick-fix’.

He cried out “Something must be done!”

And thought it was a crime;

Although within three weeks he had,

Served out his Royal time. (1)

And if you ask exactly what,

Was done in the King’s rule,

The answer, unsurprisingly,

Was ‘zilch’, ‘nix’ and ‘naff-all’!

For then as now some foolish plebs,

Cheered loud till they were hoarse;

So confident that Royalty,

Would change things in due course.

Today the flooded residents,

Up to their knees in mud;

Were being sold the usual pup,

And flogged a Royal dud!

Prince Charles may walk on water to,

Those leading all the cheers;

But it proves how politically,

They’re wet behind the ears!

(1) The King visited 19/11/1936

and abdicated on 11/12/1936.

 © Richard Layton

Rape as a Cost-Benefit Analysis

Campus sexual assault is a major safety concern that university administrations have major financial incentives to underreport.
 
In 2012, it was revealed that the University of Montana and the city of Missoula were being investigated for a mass cover-up of sexual assaults on campus. Eighty reported assaults were either ignored or not prosecuted over a three-year span. Senior administration of the school was personally involved in attempting to silence victims and skew reports, and the football coach and athletic director at the center of the inquiry were fired. On February 14, the US Department of Justice reported that the Missoula County prosecutor's office "systematically discriminates against female sexual assault victims in conjunction with the cases stemming from the University of Montana.

Sexual assault on college campuses is not a new problem, but it has arguably become an increasingly severe one. Rana Sampson states in her report "Acquaintance Rape of College Students" for the United States Department of Justice, "Rape is the most common violent crime on American college campuses today." As more attention focuses on the issue and how to curb and prevent it, the conversation has relied heavily on addressing awareness, education and reporting. While that all is important, serious questions remain about the factors behind the heightening of the problem. How has the campus environment become increasingly unsafe? Why have senior administration and university presidents become more personally and deeply involved in covering up rape, rather than protecting their students? High rates of campus rape may be a symptom of the growing Academic Industrial Complex - specifically, how the increase of private money influences administrative handling of sexual assault, and particularly, how it is silenced.


A growing trend since the late '90s and early '00s has been the deregulation of college and the NCAA. The push to deregulate higher learning, particularly management, occurred under the guise of making college more affordable and more accessible. The result has been the opposite, with universities morphing into public corporations. College administrators are increasingly positioned under the direction of CEOs (as they continue to take places on corporate boards), instead of the public and the state. This means corporations have more control and influence over how policies are leveraged and the image of the institution. So whether rape is a prevalent problem on campuses or not the demand to maintain the facade that it isn't is very high.

Safe learning environments are of the utmost importance to parents and students when deciding which college to attend. Sexual assault is a major safety concern, and parents and students are trusting administrations when they report low to zero instances of rape. Additionally, if a campus appears to have a problem with violence, it is less likely that private donors and businesses are going to have an interest in funding it. Therefore, in the realms of both admissions and outside funding, universities have major incentives to underreport the crime.
With the deregulation of the NCAA, college coaches now have close to unlimited access to potential future athletes without risk of recruiting violations. This opens up an array of perks that coaches can offer as a way to entice athletes (young men in particular) to come play for their team. A popular perk coaches offer is access to young women and sexual assault without consequence. This standard is set for athletes before they even begin college. Coaches also still actively recruit young men being criminally investigated for rape. Young men are given the message - by college officials - that before they join the team, objectifying and victimizing women is something they're entitled to do, and that they will be protected from repercussions.

Ed Cunningham, an ESPN college football analyst, framed recent sexual assault allegations against four Vanderbilt football players as an "isolated incident," saying, "But these are young men. They are given a place in society where they are not always going to follow the rules." In this "rules"-based frame, the issue of sexual assault is positioned as an issue of, "Be careful because you might get in trouble, or someone might get you in trouble."

In a system in which authority figures are covering up, making excuses for and even encouraging sexual assault by athletes, the people who are "supposed" to be holding these men accountable are the ones dismissing the gravity of their actions. Middle Tennessee State coach Rick Stockstill treats the issue of sexual assault by his players as an interference in the success of their season: "Talk to your team about it, and do your best as a coaching staff and as a team to not let it be a distraction." When the value of BCS bowl game, play off, and March Madness appearances are at a premium, the importance of preventing rape or holding athletic culture accountable for it is at an all-time low - and in many places - nonexistent. Colleges are raking in more and more money from sponsors, televised games and championship titles. Private donors interested in keeping up successful seasons and programs are also providing schools with millions of dollars. Rape becomes an inconvenient reality - one that must be hidden to ensure profits.

Private enterprise has clearly benefited from deregulation and expanded its takeover of higher learning. So what are the stipulations when corporate money is invested? College administrations already scramble to give corporate donors the impression their campuses are safe and free of rape to maintain their schools' reputation. Corporate money - and the reputation of the corporation - makes the requirement to appear flawless even more imperative. In the context of sexual assault, victims become the problem, and so to make the issue of sexual assault disappear, victims are the ones who are made to disappear. Much as employees in business settings are fired for reporting sexual harassment and rape, and students at universities are, and will be, treated in a similar manner (sometimes through expulsion, or even institutionalization. Additionally, schools create hostile environments for students who've spoken up about their victimization. Take University of North Carolina sophomore Landen Gambil, who filed a federal complaint against the university for its treatment of assault survivors. The university has now charged Gambil with an honor code violation, for creating a "hostile environment" for the person who assaulted her. When protecting capital interests is the priority, the policies that address sexual assault work to shield donors, administration and rapists.

In a capitalist setting, dehumanization for power and profit is nothing new. However, we have not traditionally considered campus rape as a problem associated with, or as a result of, capitalism because so many colleges are intended to be public institutions focused on supporting students' efforts to get an education. Colleges are not supposed to be corporations. Yet this is what institutions of higher learning are rapidly becoming. When the focus of academia evolves into profit-making rather than providing education, safety risks and concerns of individuals become insignificant, and exploitation of people occurs - much like what happens with unregulated businesses, this is a side-effect of capitalism.

Sexual assault is especially inconvenient for capitalist interests because of the expenses attached to addressing survivors' needs. According to the US Dept. of Justice, "Overall, rape is believed to carry the highest annual victim cost of any crime." Rape is expensive, and so, it's cheaper for colleges to settle lawsuits than it is to deal with the crime. Settlements are a standard tool of capitalism. For example, in 1977 it was discovered that it was more cost-effective for Ford to settle lawsuits of Pinto victims than it was to make the minor fix to make the car safer. Between the cost of rape as a crime and the loss of revenue it would mean for colleges and their corporate counterparts, settling Title IX lawsuits is worth the risk and cheaper than protecting students. Sound unbelievable?

The Obama Administration performed a cost-benefit analysis of rape in another institution that also has perpetual high rates of sexual violence: prisons. This was done via the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The analysis was aimed at assessing the costs of addressing and protecting incarcerated people from sexual assault, versus not doing so. PREA, much like the Clery Act for colleges, was intended to make information about prison rape public, in an attempt to hold prisons accountable for the sexual violence occurring within the institutions. The act also involved conducting a study on the frequency and severity of the problem. The point was to put a monetary value on stopping prison rape. (PREA also divides rape into categories and creates a hierarchy of sexual assault, much as the government did with the Clery Act and Campus SaVE Act.) If our federal government is deciding whether or not to protect citizens from rape in an institution based on how much it costs, it seems possible that some college administrations are capable of the same.

"Within the logic of market capitalism, it is rational for a University to pressure survivors of sexual violence to keep quiet as a way to protect their bottom line," founding director of Project Nia, Mariame Kaba, tells me. "But, 'rational' or not, the actions of these universities are turning victims of violence into accomplices in exploitation by dehumanizing them and by minimizing the harm that they've experienced from rape. Survivors are consistently told - by the antiviolence movement and by authorities - that reporting assaults to the legal system is the main way to validate their claims. Yet universities, caught up in free-market motivations, are often incentivized to discourage survivors from speaking up. The bottom line: The university climate has become hostile to survivors, and either way, they are the ones who lose."

From here, with links

First Nations Land Under Threat From New Marriage Laws

Laws that protect Canadian couples in the event of a breakup were extended to First Nation communities last month when the Matrimonial Real Property Act (MRPA) came into effect. But critics say it’s just another move toward dismantling First Nation communities.
In pushing this bill to become law, Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt said, “It is unacceptable in this day and age that people living on reserve are not afforded the same rights and protections as those living off reserve.”

“It’s all just optics. It makes white people feel good about themselves,” said activist and Aboriginal lawyer, Joan Jack.
And she says it’s a slippery slope from the MRPA to privatizing reserve land.
“It’s not about giving people rights, it’s about money. Because there’s no money coming from the federal government for housing for infrastructure. So therefore they need to turn everything into (private) lands so people can borrow money from the bank, build a house, build a driveway and the government doesn’t have to pay for anything,” Jack said. “It’s about assimilation.”


full article here

As the two previous posts have pointed out, 1) we are all people (One World-One People) and 2) diversity is important (The Politics Of Food).
This post points out the necessity of capitalism to commodify everything in order to keep profits rolling in. Is this what the world's people want, or would they prefer to celebrate and protect their diversity, the diversity of their food, their traditions, their culture, their humanity? Socialism, as a system, has a principle to de-commodify everything - to put decisions and policy making into the hands of the vast majority who, after all, are the ones affected by those decisions and policies.
 JS


 

The politics of Food

Food, how it is produced and how it is consumed, has become a much discussed political topic about choice and decision-making. This report contributes to the debate

Globalization has helped increase local supplies of energy-dense food crops, but at a significant cost to global food security and human health, according to a new study by the University of British Columbia, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The comprehensive study of global food supplies thoroughly documents for the first time what experts have long suspected—over the last five decades, human diets around the world have grown increasingly similar by an average of 36 percent. The trend has the potential to boost obesity, heart disease and diabetes rates, and places food production at increased widespread risk to drought, insect pests and diseases.

The emerging 'standard global food supply' described by the study include several crops that were already staples a half-century ago—such as wheat, rice, maize and potato–as well as more energy-dense foods that have risen to global prominence more recently, like soybean, sunflower oil and palm oil. Wheat is a major staple in 97.4 percent of countries and rice in 90.8 percent. Soybean has become significant to 74.3 percent of countries. In contrast, many crops of considerable regional importance—sorghum, millets, rye, sweet potato, cassava and yam—have lost ground.

"More people are consuming more calories, protein and fat, and they rely increasingly on a short list of major food crops, like wheat, maize and soybean, along with meat and dairy products, for most of their food," says the study’s lead author Colin Khoury at the Colombia-based CIAT.

"These foods are critical for combating world hunger, but relying on a global diet of such limited diversity obligates us to bolster the nutritional quality of the major crops, as consumption of other nutritious grains and vegetables declines."

The reports recommendations are the adoption of a wider range of varieties of the major crops worldwide to boost genetic diversity and thus reduce the vulnerability of the global food system in the face of challenges that include climate change, rising food demand, and increased water and land scarcity. This action is especially important for certain crops, like banana, for which production is dominated by a very few, widely grown commercial varieties. The use of diverse plant genetic resources—including farmers’ traditional varieties and wild species related to crops—which are critical for broadening the genetic diversity of the major crops. More vigorous implementation of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture is required to better safeguard and share these genetic resources internationally, and increased investment in crop research. Finally, enhance the nutritional quality of the major crops on which people depend—for example, through crop breeding to improve the content of micronutrients like iron and zinc—and make supplementary vitamins and other nutrient sources more widely available.

One World - One People

People who live in ethnically diverse streets are less racially prejudiced than individuals living in highly segregated areas and their increased tolerance is due directly to the experience of a more integrated society, a study has found. The attitudes of the most prejudiced people who did not mix at all with ethnic minorities became more tolerant over time as a result of living in areas were others were mixing on a daily basis, the researchers found. They feel more tolerant towards them purely because they witness positive interactions between different racial groups, it discovered. The researchers who carried out the work have called the effect “passive tolerance” where a positive effect can be seen simply by living within a diverse community.

The findings emerged from the analysis of seven previous studies on community relations carried out between 2002 and 2012 in England, Europe, the United States and South Africa, and specifically tried to rule out the idea that the results can be explained by tolerant people being more likely to live in mixed neighbourhoods. To eliminate the possibility that more tolerant people tend to live in more ethnically diverse areas, which would introduce bias to the results, two of the seven studies were conducted over several years to see how peoples’ attitudes changed over time, the researchers said.

“We have shown that positive contact between people belonging to different ethnic groups leads to more tolerant societies overall,” said Professor Miles Hewstone of Oxford University who led the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “Astonishingly, we don't just see reduced prejudice among people who have direct contact with ethnic minorities. It isn't even confined to those whose friends have contact with minorities. Simply living in a neighbourhood where other people are mixing with minorities is enough to reduce racial prejudice,” Professor Hewstone said. “If two white people with identical views went to live in different postcodes for a year, the person in the neighbourhood with more mixing between ethnic groups would likely leave more tolerant. We would see this effect even if they never personally spoke to people from other ethnicities.” He continued “Our results clearly show that districts with the most mixing between ethnic groups lead to the highest reductions in racial prejudice. Although our recent longitudinal studies were conducted in Germany, there is no reason to believe that these effects would not be the same across the world. The cross-sectional studies conducted in England, the US, and South Africa certainly support this idea,” Professor Hewstone said.

The Real Welfare Scroungers

The Guardian carries a penetrating and devastating article by George Monbiot on agriculture policy.

In July 2013 the British government imposed a £26,000 cap on the total benefits a household can receive. In the same month it was pursuing a different policy in urgent discussions in Brussels: fighting tooth and nail to prevent the imposition of a proposed cap precisely 10 times that size (€300,000, or £260,000). The European commission wanted this to be as much money as a single farmer could receive in subsidies. The British government was having none of it. It won, with the result that this measure is now discretionary – member states can decide whether or not to cap farmers' benefits. Unsurprisingly, the British government has decided not to.

 Farmers comprise just 0.3% of the population of England and 1.4% of the rural population.  The biggest 174 landowners in England take £120m between them. A €300,000 cap would have saved about £70m. Why should a cap be imposed on the poor but not the rich?

The address of Eustice's ministry, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is 17 Smith Square, London SW1. The address of the National Farmers' Union is 16 Smith Square, London SW1.  Rural policy and farming policy are, to the government, synonymous; 98.6% of rural people are marginalised by the decisions it makes.

As  rules and penalties regulating the ordinary recipients of benefits have become so onerous that many find them almost impossible to meet, the rules and penalties attached to the benefits the rich receive are being reduced. The conditions attached to farm subsidies (which are called cross-compliance) are already so weak as to be almost non-existent.

For example, there are several rules which are meant to encourage farmers to protect their soils from compaction and erosion. Their purpose is to sustain fertility, to defend water supplies and the ecology of the rivers and to prevent flooding. Not one of these measures appears to be either functional or enforceable. All farmers receiving subsidies must complete a soil protection review.  Once every 100 years on average, an inspector from the Rural Payments Agency will visit the farm. If the inspectors identify a soil erosion problem, they have the power to offer guidance about how to rectify it. And that, in practice, is it. There are hardly any cases of this guidance being followed up with even the threat of action, let alone the imposition of any penalties. And even the guidance, now promises to be "slashed". Most inspectors have no expertise in soil erosion. So all they tend to do during their centennial visits is to ask the farmer whether he or she possesses a soil protection booklet. If the answer is yes, that's job done, even if their soil is rushing off the fields and into the rivers. To discover whether or not farmers are causing a related problem – soil compaction through the use of heavy machinery in the wrong conditions – inspectors need to dig holes in the fields with a spade, to look at what has happened to the soil layers. But they do not possess the power to conduct an "invasive investigation" (that is, digging a hole). So they are not permitted even to detect, let alone enforce, a breach of the compaction rules. Even these unenforceable non-rules are deemed too onerous for farmers growing a crop that both strips and compacts the soil faster than almost any other. Because the rows are planted so far apart, and because the soil is left bare through autumn, winter and much of the spring , maize causes more severe erosion than any other cereal crop. Yet maize growers are entirely and mysteriously exempt from the erosion rules. A soil scientist, Robert Palmer, calculated that so much compaction and erosion is caused by maize growing that a 10-hectare field causes the run-off of 375m litres of water. Maize expanded 24% between 2012 and 2013, much of it in sensitive catchments. This is a formula for repeated flooding.  In the catchment of the River Tamar in Devon, one study suggests, soil is being lost at the rate of five tonnes per hectare per year.

 There is the complete absence of enforceable regulations on the phosphates farmers spread on their fields, which cause eutrophication (blooms of algae which end up suffocating much of the freshwater ecosystem) when they run into the rivers, poorly regulated use of metaldehyde, a pesticide that is impossible to remove from drinking water, the use of neonicotinoid insecticides for all other purposes, without any idea of what their impact might be on animals in the soil and the rivers into which they wash and licensed before any investigation was conducted.

There is just one set of rules that are effective and widely deployed: those that enforce the destruction of the natural world. Buried in the cross-compliance regulations is a measure called GAEC 12. This insists that, to receive their money, farmers must prevent "unwanted vegetation" from growing on their land. (The rest of us call it wildlife habitat.) Even if their land is producing nothing, they must cut, graze or spray it with herbicides to get their money. Unlike soil erosion, compaction and pollution, breaches of this rule are easy to detect and enforce: if the inspectors see trees returning to the land, the subsidy can be cut off altogether. Many of the places in which habitats might otherwise be allowed to recover – principally the highly infertile land in the uplands – are kept bare by this rule. It's another means by which floods are hard-wired. The government has just raised the incentive to clear such land, by announcing that hill farmers will now be paid the same amount per hectare as lowland farmers – equalising the rate upwards, not downwards.

The amount of public subsidy paid to the owners of grouse moors may soon be going up by 84%. These are among the richest people in Britain. The management of their land to maximise grouse numbers involves the mass destruction of predators and the burning of blanket bogs, causing floods downstream and releasing large amounts of carbon. The British government currently spends – on top of the £3.6bn in farm subsidies disbursed in this country – £450m on research and development for the food and farming industries. Much of this money could be characterised as corporate welfare. Yet a search of the British government's website finds not one mention of regenerative permaculture. Not a penny of public money is being spent on investigating its potential here.

As George Monbiot puts it: “It's not hard to see how land that is now being pillaged, eroded, polluted and wrecked could be allowed to remain productive – even to produce more food for people than Britain does today while also supporting a vibrant ecosystem.”

Indeed for even in th 19th Century that supposed dry crusty old economist Karl Marx was writing on the declining fertility of soil under capitalism. From Capital, volume 1, on "Large-scale Industry and Agriculture":
“Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil...But by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism...it compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production, and in a form adequate to the full development of the human race...All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility...Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”

 Marx  emphasised  it was both necessary and possible to rationally govern human relationships with nature, but this was something "completely beyond the capabilities of bourgeois society." In a future society of freely associated producers, however, humans could govern their relations with nature via collective control, rather than through the blind power of market relations. There was a need for planning and measures to address the division of labor and population between town and country and for the restoration and improvement of the soil. Marx’s asserted that a concept of ecological sustainability was of very limited practical relevance to capitalist society as it was incapable of applying rational scientific methods and social planning due to the pressures of competition.

Land in capitalism is a commodity as Engels explains:
 “To make earth an object of huckstering — the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence — was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering. It was and is to this very day an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And the original appropriation — the monopolization of the earth by a few, the exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life — yields nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth.” (Frederick Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy)
 As he also pointed out elsewhere this drive for profit can lead to ecological catastrophe:
“ What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees--what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!”

Marx offers a vision of the nature of a future society in Capital, Volume 3:
“From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation or all simultaneously existing societies taken together are not owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of households].”