The Gold of the Gods

While 30% of India’s poor have to live on Rs 32 per day in villages and Rs 47 in cities, in houses of mud and straw, with no clothes worth the name to cover their bodies, no water or nutritious food and no toilets to ease themselves when alive, and cannot even afford to die because of no money to bury or cremate them after death, the gods in over 16 religious shrines in India have income which runs into crores. They live or travel out in silver and gold bedecked sanctums and chariots, clothed and ornamented in the finest of fine clothes and jewellery, fed sumptuously and sung to sleep. As the income of religious organisations has boomed, so have opportunities for spending offered by crass commercialisation and new technology. The increase in wealth is being flaunted through elaborate spending on ritual and festivals.

The richest of all the temples in India, the Padmanabhaswamy temple, located in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, is estimated to have around $20 billion. The golden idol of Mahavishnu in the temple wears antique gold ornaments and golden crowns, and holds a golden bow. The gold necklace adorning the deity is 18 feet long and weighs around 2.5 kg.

The second richest temple, that of Lord Venkateswara at Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, is visited by approximately 60,000 visitors who donate around Rs 650 crore to the temple in a year. The gold on the deity itself weighs 1,000 kg.

Similarly, the Siddhivinayak temple’s dome over the Ganesha idol in Mumbai is coated in 3.7 kilos of gold. On average, the annual income of the temple is Rs 48 crore.

Even Shirdi Sai Baba, who had renounced all riches in his life to lead an ascetic existence, is said to have gold and silver jewellery worth approximately Rs 32 crore and silver coins worth more than Rs 6 lakh. The temple gets donations worth Rs 350 crore every year.

The growing reserves of bullion with religious bodies have raised the annual Ganeshotsav insurance cover sought by Ganpati mandals to record levels this season, while the ordinary man on the street has no insurance cover at all, inspite of government promises. The richest mandal in Mumbai, GSB Seva Mandal at King’s Circle, has purchased insurance cover worth Rs 300 crore higher than before due to the 15 kg silver mandap which now houses the Lord, who is adorned with 68 kg of gold and 315 kg of silver. The organisers handling Lalbaugcha Raja have not only insured their own pandal for Rs 51 crore by paying a premium of Rs 13.2 lakh, but also covered immersion processions across Mumbai.

http://thewire.in/68622/religion-commercialisation/

If you think that mankind created the gods contact:

The World Socialist Party (India): 257 Baghajatin ‘E’ Block (East), Kolkata – 700086,

Tel: 2425-0208,

E-mail: wspindia@hotmail.com

Website: http://www.worldsocialistpartyindia.org/

Land-Grabbing

We are entering a new and even more dangerous stage of the global land rush," Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam International's executive director, said. "Land contracts are being signed and projects are breaking ground without the full consent of communities living there. Conditions are ripe for increasing conflict."

Last year, 185 land rights activists were killed in 16 countries surveyed in a report by campaign group Global Witness.

International land deals, often for giant agriculture projects, now cover an area the size of Germany and a growing share are getting up and running, fuelling fears that local residents will be displaced, the anti-poverty group Oxfam said.

More than 1,500 large-scale land deals have been signed in the last 16 years with many covering areas populated by communities who don't have formal title deeds to the territory. Most large-scale land deals happen in Africa or South East Asia, but investments are also taking place in Eastern Europe, the United States, Latin America and other regions. About half of the signed land investment deals cover territory claimed by indigenous groups or local residents. Less than half of the deals involved prior consultations with residents, while only 14 percent of the agreements took place with informed consent from local land users, Oxfam adviser Luca Miggiano explained. "This isn't happening and millions of people are being displaced."

Quote of the Day (food)

“Research consistently demonstrates that world hunger is not a problem of supply, but rather of poverty, lack of democracy and unequal access to land, water and other resources, especially for women.”  - Adrian Bebb, senior food, agriculture and biodiversity campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe 

Tweedledum-Tweedledee and the Lesser Evil

Tonight is the first televised debate between Clinton and Trump. The unabashed apologists for the capitalist system have resurrected the discredited theory of the “lesser evil.” Trump must be defeated at all costs! To lend credence to their “lesser evil” line, the “progressives” loudly declare that Trump is a fascist to scare voters into line. They allege voting for Trump is equivalent to being a “Putin lover.”

Under the pressure of capitalism, politics converge. That does not mean all the political parties are identical or are becoming identical but that they merely increasingly tend to act in the same way in essential respects, where fundamental needs of the system are concerned. Supposed progressives are obliged to make use of the repressive measures which the conservatives advocate because the maintenance of the system demands it. Lesser Evils behave at every important juncture exactly like the Greater Evils, and sometimes even worse. Capitalists use elections as a “mandate”. Your vote does count in elections. It becomes a mandate for the crimes of the next four years. The lesser evil has proven wrong in practice and we are tired of being blackmailed into voting for enemies of the world’s people.

Too often the media appraises candidates on the basis of what they say about themselves, not by their actual deeds and real class role. For any organization claiming to be socialist to endorse a capitalist party is a shameful betrayal of principles they allegedly stand for. The reason real socialists never support candidates of capitalist parties is that there is nothing more dangerous for the workers than endorsing a class enemy. The Socialist Party seeks that fellow workers become conscious of themselves as a class and of their power in society. Genuine socialists understand that political consciousness begins with the recognition of the fundamental class division: the working class versus the ruling capitalist class. Success demands the working-class to be independence from all capitalist parties.  The Socialist Party is for socialism, not only in the United States, or Great Britain. We are for world socialism as the only way to abolish all the evils of modern class society. The crucial social problems which prevailed prior to the election of Hilarity Clinton will continue to prevail once she is elected. That is why we stand for socialism now and that is why we dissent so vigorously from the view that a socialist opposition to Clinton makes one a “tool of Trump.” The working class should not support any of the presidential candidates as neither of them benefits the working people of the United States. Their policies differ only in minor respects. The “lesser evil” fallacy serves only to keep people chained to the duopoly of the Democratic/Republican political system – Cholera or the Plague. The Socialist Party is intent upon using the electoral arena for its long-term struggle for socialism, not to gain immediate amelioration by a reform platform of palliatives. The ruling elite uses the line of opting for the lesser of two evils as a way to divert and detour the working class into a dead-end, a way to politically disarm people and demoralize them, a way to keep the working class chained to the treadmill of capitalist politics. By not voting working people will register their rejection of pro-capitalist candidates. The enormous success of the lesser-evil political system is in getting about half the people simply not to vote and forcing those who do to vote, in favour of what they oppose.

It is no coincidence that the same politicians who supported Clinton foreign policy aggressions also accepted devastating cuts in domestic social programs too that proceeded to dismantle a thin “safety net,” and remove substantial past gains won by the poorest workers. This happened because the “lesser evils” did little to stop it. The Damnocrats are just as driven to cut back the gains of the working class as the Republicans; they just use a somewhat different approach. And they get away with their attacks more easily than the Republicans because they are the “lesser evil” and the unions and the  liberal lobby groups decline to organize an opposition to the Democrats, less the “greater evil” gets into office

 We want a new party, an anti-capitalist party, an anti-war party, a party for the environment and mankind. We want a word socialist party. The Democrats and Republicans are in the pockets of big interests and cannot be reformed. We must start now to build a party that will speak for the workers. We cannot wait for ‘ideal’ conditions which never come. We believe capitalism must be overthrown. Socialist revolution is the only way to end capitalism.

Stir Crazy

At any moment, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, there are more than 2.3 million people in America’s 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories.  In some parts of the country, there are more people in jail than at college.

One out of every three people who are locked up tonight are sitting in a local jail, not a state or federal prison. 11 million people cycle through them each year.:

Jail churn is particularly high because at any given moment most of the 722,000 people in local jails have not been convicted and are in jail because they are either too poor to make bail and are being held before trial, or because they’ve just been arrested and will make bail in the next few hours or days. The remainder of the people in jail — almost 300,000 — are serving time for minor offenses, generally misdemeanors with sentences under a year.

In California, there were 762,002 arrests for misdemeanors in 2014 alone. Of these, 92,469 were for drug possession, 1,265 for glue sniffing (a “crime” of the truly poor and desperate), and another 90,061 for being drunk in public. The largest single category, however, was driving under the influence, or DUI, with 151,416 arrests. That’s a total of almost 335,000 people arrested in one state in one year for crimes connected with the use of either legal or illegal drugs. Add to that the 58,569 people arrested for petty theft, imagine similar figures across the country, and you can see how the jails might begin to fill with record-setting numbers of prisoners.

There are almost 15,000 children behind bars whose “most serious offense” wasn’t anything that most people would consider a crime: almost 12,000 children are behind bars for “technical violations” of the requirements of their probation or parole, rather than for a new specific offense. More than 3,000 children are behind bars for “status” offenses, which are, as the U.S. Department of Justice explains: “behaviors that are not law violations for adults, such as running away, truancy, and incorrigibility.”4

Turning finally to the people who are locked up because of immigration-related issues, more than 22,000 are in federal prison for criminal convictions of violating federal immigration laws. A separate 34,000 are technically not in the criminal justice system but rather are detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), undergoing the process of deportation, and are physically confined in special immigration detention facilities or in one of hundreds of individual jails that contract with ICE.

At any given time, 80,000 to 100,000 inmates in state and federal prisons are held in “restrictive housing” (aka solitary confinement).  And those numbers don’t even include county jails, deportation centers, and juvenile justice institutions.  Rikers Island, New York City’s infamous jail complex in its East River, has 990 solitary cells. And keep in mind that solitary confinement -- being stuck in a six-by-nine or eight-by-10-foot cell for 23 or 24 hours a day -- is widely recognized as a form of psychosis-inducing torture.

The US imprisons the largest proportion of people in the world; or that, with 4% of the global population, it holds 22% of the world’s prisoners; these prisoners are disproportionately brown and black.

700,000 arrests on marijuana-related charges in 2014... Of that total, 88.4 percent -- or about 619,800 arrests -- were made for marijuana possession alone, a rate of about one arrest every 51 seconds over the entire year.

In a “stop-and-frisk” policy where police searched New Yorkers on the streets of their city five million times between 2002 and 2015. Nearly 90% of those stopped were, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, “completely innocent” of anything and of the remaining 10%, only one-quarter, or 2.5% of all stops, resulted in convictions -- most often for marijuana possession. But hundreds of thousands of people, mostly young African American and Latino men, lived with the expectation that, at any time, the police might stop them on the street in a humiliating display of power. In a landmark 2013 decision, a New York federal court found the police department’s stop-and-frisk policy unconstitutional.

Portugal “decriminalized the use of all drugs” and decided to treat drug addiction as a public health problem rather than a criminal matter. The results? Portugal now has close to the lowest rate of drug-induced deaths in Europe -- three overdose deaths a year per million people. By comparison, at 45 deaths per million population, the United Kingdom’s rate is more than 14 times greater. In addition, HIV infections have also declined in Portugal, unlike, for example, in the rural United States where a heroin epidemic has the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worried about the potential for skyrocketing infection rates.

The Pew Charitable Trusts wondered what would happen if states treated fewer thefts as felonies by raising the dollar cutoff for a felony prosecution.  Pew asked: Would there be more minor theft because the penalties were lower? (Some state felony thresholds were, in fact, shockingly low. Until 2001, in Oklahoma, stealing anything worth more than $50 would throw you into that category. Even that state’s new limit, $500, is still on the low side.) The Pew researchers examined “crime trends in 23 states” that have raised the dollar threshold for felony theft and concluded that it had “no impact on overall property crime or larceny rates.” In fact, since 2007 property theft has been declining across the country, with no difference between states with higher and lower felony thresholds. So at least in the case of petty theft, threatening to send fewer people to state prison does not seem to raise the crime rate.

Even when never convicted, those arrested often end up spending time in jail because they can’t afford bail. And spending time in jail can cost you your job, your children, even your home. That’s a lot of punishment for someone who hasn’t been convicted of a crime.

The US does not have a justice system, it has a penal system. There exists a bedrock belief that America is the greatest country in the world and therefore has nothing to learn from other countries.

Alienated from life

Hikikomori”, is defined by the Japanese Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry as people who have stayed in their home for six months or more without going to school, work or venturing out to socialise. Psychologists say this is not caused by laziness. Tamaki Saito, a Japanese psychologist has described living with the condition as being “tormented in the mind”.

"They want to go out in the world, they want to make friends or lovers, but they can't,” 

541,000 15 to 39-year-olds are estimated to be living in isolation. An accurate picture of who is suffering from hikikomori is difficult to determine given the reclusive nature of those suffering from it.

The condition is far more common in men, who face huge pressures to succeed early in life, both at school and in their careers. It is also more prevalent among the well-educated.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/young-people-japan-hikikomori-anxiety-a7329396.html

Why Co-ops?

The Socialist Party often comes across proponents of various cooperative schemes such as Richard Wolff with his Workers Self-Directed Enterprises or Gar Alperovitz and his Pluralist Commonwealth. All very well-intentioned models of how they would like to see the capitalist economy transformed to be in the interests of the workers.

These professors, however, having studied cooperatives ventures should know a lot better than propose them. But their supporters who have read and absorbed the claims made by Wolff and Alperovitz can be perhaps excused for not being aware of the very long history of cooperatives and imagine them to be some sort of recent innovation.  

When socialists criticise coops we are not delving into abstract theory nor predicting hypothetic futures. The first cooperatives arose almost at the same time as modern capitalism got going, way back in the 1840s. So when we subject coops to scrutiny there are nearly 200 years of history to base an analysis upon. It is no guessing game, no conjecture but simply looking at the historic record. After almost 200 years of experience surely by now, a conclusion on the worth of the cooperative movement can be made.

However, the short-comings of the coops need not have waited as so long, because for some social activists in the 19^th Century had already come to a judgment on the merits of coops.

The Chartist agitator, Ernest Jones, wrote:

“I contend that co-operation as now developed, must result in failure to the majority of those concerned, and that it is merely perpetuating the evils which it professes to remove… That the co-operative-system, as at present practised, carries within it the germs of dissolution, would inflict a renewed evil on the masses of the people, and is essentially destructive of the real principles of co-operation.  Instead of abrogating profitmongering, it re-creates it.  Instead of counteracting competition, it re-establishes it.  Instead of preventing centralisation, it renews it—merely transferring the role from one set of actors to another… your co-operative ranks are thinned, your firms find, one by one, they can no longer in make the returns equal the expenses, they cannot sell as cheap as the capitalist, they can therefore no more command the market, their co-operative fires die out in quick succession, stores and mills close over their deluded votaries—and the great ruin will stand bald, naked, and despairing in the streets.” 

The present enthusiasts have cooperatives backside-forwards. Coops are not the means towards socialism as argued by Wolff but they are the end. Only in socialism can we really achieve cooperative values and have the work-places for production and distribution organized cooperatively. It is why the socialist society aimed for was so often described as the cooperative commonwealth in the 19^th and early 20^th Century.  

Who is to blame?

The 0.01 percent — the 16,000 wealthiest Americans — have as much wealth as 80 percent of the nation’s population, some 256,000,000 people. Their shared wealth comes to $9 trillion. And at the end of 2015, a mere 536 people in the United States had a collective net worth of $2.6 trillion.

Economically vulnerable populations are often told that immigrants “take our jobs” and drag down wages. Is it true? The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine appointed an interdisciplinary task force to look at that question. It found that, on the contrary, “immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the United States.”

Immigration, the report says, has “little to no negative effects on overall wages and employment of native-born workers in the longer term.” Native-born teenagers who have not finished high school may work fewer hours, at least in the short term. (They won’t lose jobs.) As far as the downside goes, that’s pretty much it.

On the upside, “the prospects for long-run economic growth in the United States would be considerably dimmed without the contributions of high-skilled immigrants” who create jobs for highly-paid and lower-income workers alike. And the study found that recent immigrants tend to have more education than earlier immigrants. “Immigrants,” the report concludes, “are integral to the nation’s economic growth.”

But if immigrants aren’t weakening wage growth and job prospects, who is? Perhaps no group bears more responsibility for the plight of the working class than billionaires. 

An IMF study confirms that increasing inequality, especially at the very top of the wealth and income scale, is weakening economic growth. “In contrast,” the report found, “an increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent (the poor) is associated with higher … growth.” And higher growth means more jobs.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a world-leading expert on inequality, writes, “Our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven our economic growth.” But instead of ensuring that lower-income and middle-class people share in economic growth, the opposite has been happening: even after last week’s improved economic news, most of the economy’s gains are still going to the wealthiest Americans.

Thanks to political science research published at Princeton University we know that political decision-making in this country is driven by corporate and ultra-wealthy elites, not by the democratic majority. This oligarchical usurpation of influence has led office holders at all levels to implement policies that kill jobs, depress wages, and increase inequality. These policies include government spending cuts, tax giveaways to the wealthy and corporations, bad trade deals and economically destructive deregulation. Billionaire cash is also impeding efforts to reduce the climate change and environmental destruction that has already caused irreparable harm to the planet.

Know what also reduces inequality, helps create jobs, and raises working people’s wages? Unions.

 It isn’t immigrants who are weakening the collective bargaining power of the American worker. Billionaires like the Koch Brothers are financing anti-union court cases and flooding our political system with cash to eliminate one of the 99 percent’s most effective tools for economic self-improvement. Right-wing corporations and billionaires are conducting class warfare on the 99 percent and environmental warfare on the planet.

VW and the UAW

In 2008, the governments of the city of Chattanooga, the county of Hamilton County, the state of Tennessee, and the United States all collaborated to provide Volkswagen (VW) with a $577 million subsidy package, the largest taxpayer handout ever given to a foreign-headquartered automaker in U.S. history. The bulk of the subsidy package, $554 million, came from local and state sources. The federal government also threw in $23 million in subsidies.

The package provided to VW included "$229 million from the state for training costs and infrastructure; $86 million in land and site improvements from the city and the county; state tax credits worth $106 million over 30 years; and local tax abatements worth $133 million over the same period. In exchange the company promised to create 2,000 jobs in Chattanooga, bringing the price tag for each promised job to $288,500.

According to a 2015 study by the Center for Automotive Research, auto workers at VW in Chattanooga had the lowest hourly pay and benefits of any employees in a U.S. car factory. The starting hourly wage rate for an assembly line worker at Volkswagen is about $15 an hour, or approximately $31,000 a year. A full-time production employee can top out their pay in seven years at a wage rate of $23 an hour, or about $48,000 a year. That makes the top pay at Volkswagen less than 80% of the estimated annual median income for Hamilton County. Third-party contractors hired by Volkswagen to work on the line in the plant and the network of auto suppliers servicing the factory pay even lower hourly wage rates.

Tennessee's billionaire governor, Bill Haslam, who happens to be the richest politician in the country, has expressed little concern over whether or not the jobs brought to the state were high paying. In fact, it appears that he is proud that they are not. In official material directed to foreign companies by the Haslam administration, the governor touted a pro-business environment in which companies can exploit a "low-cost labor force" thanks to the state's "very low unionization rates." (That's alongside the boon of state and local taxes that are "some of the lowest in the region.")

At the Chattanooga VW plant, workers also face a brutal lean-production management model on the assembly-line floor that works to squeeze higher productivity from a scant and beleaguered workforce. The working conditions on the assembly line are so physically demanding that many production workers cannot see working at VW as a long-term career.

In 2013, the United Auto Workers (UAW) decided against organizing around the salient issues in the plant and instead chose to frame their entire organizing campaign around collaboration with the company to form the first German-style "works council" in the history of the United States. The UAW's strategy was exclusively predicated on advancing what the union championed as an innovative form of labor-management partnership.

The UAW even went so far as to sign a neutrality agreement with Volkswagen which committed the union to "maintaining and where possible enhancing the cost advantages and other competitive advantages that [Volkswagen] enjoys relative to its competitors." When pressed to account for why the union would make such a shocking concession, then-UAW president Bob King issued this reply:

“Our philosophy is, we want to work in partnership with companies to succeed. Nobody has more at stake in the long-term success of the company than the workers on the shop floor, both blue collar and white collar. With every company that we work with, we're concerned about competitiveness. We work together with companies to have the highest quality, the highest productivity, the best health and safety, the best ergonomics, and we are showing that companies that succeed by this cooperation can have higher wages and benefits because of the joint success.”

In July 2014, Volkswagen announced that it was planning to invest $600 million into expanding the Chattanooga plant, adding additional assembly lines. More than a third of that investment will initially come from state and local governments who agreed to pump more than $230 million of upfront tax dollars into the project to woo VW into expanding in Chattanooga rather than at its other major North American plant in Puebla, Mexico. Combined with other property tax breaks, TVA incentives, road projects and other potential tax credits, Volkswagen could qualify for more than $300 million of grants, credits and other government assistance over the next decade.

The expansion of the Chattanooga plant brings the total subsidy package provided to Volkswagen up to about $877 million dollars.

In 2015 VW acknowledged that it produced over 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide that contained software allowing them to cheat nitrogen oxide tests. In November 2015, the Chattanooga VW plant stopped the production of the diesel Passat. VW agreed to a partial settlement with federal and state authorities of over $15 billion. How have the local and state government responded to the news of VW's rampant criminality and corruption? Speaking to reporters about VW and the scandal, Governor Haslam said, "We're married to them. We want this plant to be a success." Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger, meanwhile, told reporters, "We need for the plant to be successful. It's important to our economy." The state is too invested in VW -- politically and financially -- to be in any position to truly hold the company accountable for its actions.

Put it all together and we have a formula for maximizing corporate profits that mixes equal parts political opportunism with class collaboration. Following the Great Recession, voters were desperate for jobs. Politicians, campaigning on bringing jobs to voters, are willing to provide massive subsidies to companies willing to locate in their voting districts. The union, desperate to organize new bargaining units from which to collect dues and to be seen as a legitimate partner with corporate and political elites, actually agrees to "maintain" and "enhance" the competitive advantages corporations gain by pushing private business costs off onto the public while providing jobs with lower wages, reduced benefits, and deteriorating working conditions. Meanwhile, the public believes they are getting "good jobs," while the actual quality of those jobs continues to decline. The companies laugh all the way to the bank. With their backs to the wall, unions like the UAW can no longer put off organizing auto makers and suppliers that choose to locate their plants in the South, but they will not succeed by promising to "work in partnership" with the companies. Labor organizers in the South will usually be working in an environment in which both business and government are hostile to unions. When the UAW narrowly lost the VW vote in 2014, the union should have learned a valuable lesson. The company might have formally committed to being "neutral," but the business and political elites in the South made no such agreement. If unions fail to win over the broader working class, they have no chance of winning representation elections -- especially in states like Tennessee, where only 6% of all workers belong to a union, and in cities like Chattanooga, where the unionization rate is even lower, at an abysmal 3.4% of all workers.

To win, unions will not only have to jettison the pipedream of courting management with promises of maximizing worker productivity and containing costs. Rather, they will have to return to their militant roots: connecting shop-floor fights with community organizing. All of this is easier said than done. But we are currently faced with the atrocious working conditions and ever-diminishing wages and benefits of manufacturing jobs, the spread of poverty throughout our communities. The time is ripe for organizers to begin harvesting the fruits of our exploited labor.

Taken from here, an article by Chris Brooks on the Truth Out website

Blair pleads persecution

Tony Blair is angry at the pursuit of British soldiers for alleged war abuses. The former prime minister said he was “very sorry” soldiers were being put through such an “ordeal”, and said the process looking into claims should never have been set up.

Why is a war criminal’s opinion so valued?

Water pollution

More than half the rivers of Asia, Africa and Latin America have become more dangerous in the last 20 years, with steep rises in organic and pathogen pollution. According to a new UN study, more than 300 million people on the three continents are at risk from water-borne diseases. The latest UN Environment Programme report on water quality argues that the “worrying” rise in pollution is a threat to vital food sources and to the economic wellbeing of three continents.

Around 3.4 million people die each year from water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, infectious hepatitis, polio, cryptosporidiosis and other infections, and many of these diseases are linked to human excrement in water. In Latin America, 25 million people could be at risk; in Africa, 164 million; and in Asia, 134 million.

One of every seven kilometres of all river stretches in the three continents is now affected by severe organic pollution. Saline wastewater from mines, irrigation systems and homes already affects a tenth of all river stretches and makes it even harder for the poorest farmers to irrigate their crops. Between 1990 and 2010, this increased in almost a third of all rivers on the three continents. More than half of the phosphorus load in 23 out of 25 of the world’s major lakes was delivered by humans from fertilisers, pesticides, livestock waste and human sewage.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/pollution_is_turning_rivers_into_sources_of_disease_and_death_20160924

Goa and the Iron Ore

Goa, famous for its stunning beaches, is also India's third-largest iron ore producer. Mining is as important to Goa as its tourism industry. Goa's mining belt covers approximately 700-square kilometers and is mostly concentrated in four areas - Bicholim in the north; and Salcete, Sanguem and Quepem of the state's south. Only around 20 percent of the existing mining leases are currently operational. But years of unbridled development have led to massive land grabbing by the real estate lobbies and illegal miners. Until the 2000s, Goa's mining industry had been controlled by a few families. After that, the infrastructure boom in China triggered an unprecedented mining in the state. The mining mafia, in collusion with political groups, committed large-scale environmental and legal violations. The environmentalists estimate that the loss to the public exchequer owing to illegal mining amounted to a staggering 4.6 billion euros.

It was only after the public protests and the subsequent setting up of a judicial commission that the government suspended all mining in Goa in September 2012. But now the mining has been reopened in the state, aiming to increase exports amid a slump in raw materials. The Indian Supreme Court has imposed an annual cap of 20 million tonnes of iron ore extraction. Furthermore, it ruled that no lease would be granted for mining within the radius of one kilometer around national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.

The Goa Foundation, an environmental group whose public interest litigation eventually led to a ban on illegal mining in 2012, demands even stricter regulations.

"It is a very sensitive issue. The caps on mining are proposed to ensure that the minerals are available to the future generations and that there is no irreversible damage to environment and society," Claude Alvares, the foundation's director, told DW. 

If you seek to permanently protect the environment contact:

The World Socialist Party (India): 257 Baghajatin ‘E’ Block (East), Kolkata – 700086,

Tel: 2425-0208,

E-mail: wspindia@hotmail.com

Website: http://www.worldsocialistpartyindia.org/

Turning a blind eye to atrocities

Britain has blocked European Union efforts to establish an independent international inquiry into the war in Yemen. The Netherlands had hoped to garner broad support for its proposal that the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva set up an inquiry to examine civilian deaths in Yemen, where the Saudi Arabia-led coalition is accused of committing war crimes.

Instead, with the UK refusing to give its backing, the Netherlands’ proposal for an international inquiry – submitted on Friday by Slovakia on behalf of the EU – was replaced with a much weaker one that the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights (OHCHR) dispatch a mission “with assistance from relevant experts, to monitor and report on the situation ... in Yemen”. This falls far short of what human rights groups and the OHCHR had wanted.

Boris Johnson last week rejected the need for such an inquiry, arguing that the UK was “using a very, very wide variety of information sources about what is happening to acquaint ourselves with the details” about Yemen. The revelation that the UK neutered EU attempts to bring about such an investigation is likely to raise questions about its motives. Since the conflict began, the UK has sold more than £3bn worth of weapons and military equipment to the Saudis and defence contractors hope more deals are in the pipeline.

Polly Truscott of Amnesty International said, “It’s shocking. The UK ought to be standing up for justice and accountability, not acting as a cheerleader for arms companies.” 

World leading charity Oxfam has also joined the opposition to the deadly Saudi war on Yemen. The aid agency has urged the UK Government to stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia, calls are growing for more aid to ease the suffering caused by the war in Yemen.

Also, 200 doctors and health professionals signed an open letter to the international trade secretary calling for the UK to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Fox has been touring Gulf states looking to boost UK exports. He is due soon in Saudi Arabia, where there are hopes he will broker a new deal for British-made Typhoon jets.

Pakistan - Poverty is the cause of hunger

Despite having surplus food to feed its population, 43% of thePakistan’s citizens remain food insecure with 18% facing a severe shortage, said World Food Program (WFP) Country Director Lola Castro  who declared Pakistan a food-sufficient country with largest irrigation system, but also a place that remained incapable of serving its large population. 

Around 15% of the population under the age of five is acutely malnourished. Close to 43% children (around 10 million) face stunted growth and are chronically malnourished, said Castro.

“The problem is not food production, but poverty and illiteracy that bar people from access to food with required calories and nutrition,” said Castro. “Children and women are the most vulnerable as far as food insecurity is concerned. In cases where they do get food, it is nowhere near the required level of calories and nutrition, especially for mothers and growing children. Close to 18% of the country’s population gets less than 1,700 calories per day, making them severely food insecure. The requirement for a healthy individual is at least 2,350 calories per day.”

Alternative medicine

Because the bile of Asian black bears is big business, the animals are often abused and killed in bear farms throughout Southeast Asia. Illegal bear farms have cropped up in several Southeast Asian countries. Captured Asian black bears are kept there under terrible conditions, often malnourished and in tiny cages, so their captors can draw bile from their gallbladders. Many of the animals suffer this torture for years, and many do not survive.

Estimated number of bears held captive in bile farms in Asia: 25,000

Black market price of an Asian black bear in Laos: $1,000

Annual GDP per capita in Laos: $1,500

Price for a complete gallbladder in South Korea: $7,500

Mni wiconi:“Water is life.”

Anti-oil pipeline activists have adopted the Sioux saying Mni wiconi: “Water is life.” It’s a fitting maxim. The Bakken Pipeline (Dakota Access Pipeline)  is 1,172 miles of 30-inch diameter pipe from North Dakota's northwest Bakken region down to a market hub outside Patoka, Illinois, where it will join extant pipelines and travel onward to refineries and markets in the Gulf and on the East Coast. If that description gives you déjà vu, it should: The Bakken Pipeline is only seven miles shorter than Keystone's proposed length. The Bakken Pipeline will in effect replace the "defeated" Keystone XL Pipeline and move oil to the same areas.

The media is now focused upon the protests at Standing Rock where campaigners from 260 indigenous ‘nations’, the largest of any such gathering since Wounded Knee in 1973, have rallied. Standing Rock is a political struggle for the right to assemble, protest and to create change. It is not just a fight to stop construction vehicles from digging up the soil but has also become about the preservation of the Indigenous way of life to determine their own destiny, the right to function without the U.S. government meddling in the internal affairs of native Americans.

“Now is a good time for activists concerned about preserving livable ecology from the profit gluttony of capitalism to return to the upper Midwest for a different, more “revolutionary” kind of politics. The nation’s unelected dictatorship of money and oil knows very well that politics is about more than elections. The petro-oligarchs pursue their government-corrupting pillaging of the common good and profit-addicted poisoning of the well to fuel their never-ending growth on a year-round, 24/7 basis,” said one article.

The rich get richer, the rest get poorer

Since the late-1970s, the top one percent of families have been steadily accumulating a larger share of the nation's wealth (total assets people own net of their debts), recessions notwithstanding. In 2012 (the most recent available data), the top one percent of families (1.6 million families, each with at least $4 million in assets in 2012) held about 42 percent of all the wealth. Although still below the 1928 peak of 51 percent, the growth has been spectacular, almost doubling in close to 40 years.

As large as income inequality is, the 42 percent wealth share held by the top one percent of families far surpasses the 22 percent income share held by the top one percent in the income distribution.

By contrast, the share of wealth held by the bottom 90 percent (almost 145 million families) has been depleting steadily, falling from a high of 36.4 percent in 1984 to 22.8 percent in 2012. The income share of the bottom 90 percent is less, but still severely, skewed, standing at almost 50 percent in 2012.

The rich are entrenching their wealth. The wealthy are growing their wealth by more than their income as they pull even further away from the bottom 90 percent. Since 1979, the real average wealth of the top one percent of families has grown 245 percent -- from 4 million dollars, on average, to almost 14 million dollars (in 2010 dollars) per family. Over the same period, the income growth of the top one percent of families, although impressive, has not been as spectacular, increasing by 178 percent.

The real average wealth of the bottom 90 percent, by contrast, fell dramatically after the Great Recession, plummeting from the 118 percent growth mark reached in 2006 to a 40 percent increase in 2012. The real average wealth of the bottom 90 percent of families, which was $60,000 (2010 dollars) in 1979, rose to a peak of $130,000 in 2006, before falling to almost $84,000 in 2012. Over the same 1979 to 2012 period, the bottom 90 percent of families also saw their real average incomes decline by 9 percent.

The dramatic increase in wealth inequality is also illustrated by the stunning growth in the ratio of wealth held by the top one percent to the bottom 90 percent of families. In 1979 the real average wealth held by the top one percent was 67 times larger than the bottom 90 percent. By 2012, this ratio had increased to 165 times, while the disparity in real average income between the top one percent and the bottom 90 percent expanded from 14-to-1 to 42-to-1.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37731-the-state-of-the-united-states-on-wealth-inequality

Farming for the Future

A few times in the past, the SOYMB blog faced criticism that we over-emphasised organic argriculture rather than promote the current methods of farming. Let us be clear, the choice on how we produce our food in the coming new society will not be made by the blog or the Socialist Party but will be a decision for the generation that have the task of implementing sustainable ways of growing food in socialism. Whatever chosen will be fit for purpose and not picked for profit.

This is a recent New York Times article on the future of farming

In farming there are legitimate fears about soil erosion, manure lagoons, animal welfare and nitrogen runoff at large farms — but it’s not just environmental groups that worry. Farmers are also concerned about fertilizer use and soil runoff. That’s one reason they’re turning to high-tech solutions like precision agriculture. Using location-specific information about soil nutrients, moisture and productivity of the previous year, new tools, known as “variable rate applicators,” can put fertilizer only on those areas of the field that need it (which may reduce nitrogen runoff into waterways). GPS signals drive many of today’s tractors, and new planters are allowing farmers to distribute seed varieties to diverse spots of a field to produce more food from each unit of land. They also modulate the amount and type of seed on each part of a field — in some places, leaving none at all. Before “factory farming” became a pejorative, agricultural scholars of the mid-20th century were calling for farmers to do just that — become more intensive. farm sizes have risen significantly. It is precisely this large size that is often criticized today in the belief that large farms put profit ahead of soil and animal health. But increased size has advantages, especially better opportunities to invest in new technologies and to benefit from economies of scale. Buying a $400,000 combine that gives farmers detailed information on the variations in crop yield in different parts of the field would never be sustainable on just five acres of land; at 5,000 acres, it is a different story.

Large farmers are responsible for 80 percent of the food sales in the United States, though they make up fewer than 8 percent of all farms. A vast majority of the farms are family-owned. Very few, about 3 percent, are run by nonfamily corporations. Large farm owners (about 159,000) number fewer than the residents of a medium-size city like Springfield, Montana. Many food shoppers have difficulty comprehending the scale and complexity facing modern farmers, especially those who compete in a global marketplace. For example, the median lettuce field is managed by a farmer who has 1,373 football fields of that plant to oversee. For tomatoes, the figure is 620 football fields; for wheat, 688 football fields; for corn, 453 football fields.

How are farmers able to manage growing crops on this daunting scale? Decades ago, they dreamed about tools to make their jobs easier, more efficient and better for the land: soil sensors to measure water content, drones, satellite images, alternative management techniques like low- and no-till farming, efficient irrigation and mechanical harvesters. Today, that technology is a regular part of operations at large farms. Farmers watch the evolution of crop prices and track thunderstorms on their smartphones. They use livestock waste to create electricity using anaerobic digesters, which convert manure to methane. Drones monitor crop yields, insect infestations and the location and health of cattle. Innovators are moving high-value crops indoors to better control water use and pests. These technologies reduce the use of water and fertilizer and harm to the environment. Modern seed varieties, some of which were brought about by biotechnology, have allowed farmers to convert to low- and no-till cropping systems, and can encourage the adoption of nitrogen-fixing cover crops such as clover or alfalfa to promote soil health. Herbicide-resistant crops let farmers control weeds without plowing, and the same technology allows growers to kill off cover crops if they interfere with the planting of cash crops. The herbicide-resistant crops have some downsides: They can lead to farmers’ using more herbicide (though the type of herbicide is important, and the new crops have often led to the use of safer, less toxic ones). But in most cases, it’s a trade-off worth making, because they enable no-till farming methods, which help prevent soil erosion. These practices are one reason soil erosion has declined more than 40 percent since the 1980s.

Wheat breeders, for example, using traditional techniques assisted by the latest genetic tools and information, have created varieties that resist disease without numerous applications of insecticides and fungicides. Nearly all corn and soybean farmers practice crop rotation, giving soil a chance to recover. Research is moving beyond simple measures of nitrogen and phosphorus content to look at the microbes in the soil. New industry-wide initiatives are focused on quantifying and measuring soil health. The goal is to provide measurements of factors affecting the long-term value of the soil and to identify which practices — organic, conventional or otherwise — will ensure that farmers can responsibly produce plenty of food for our grandchildren.

Improvements in agricultural technologies and production practices have significantly lowered the use of energy and water, and greenhouse-gas emissions of food production per unit of output over time. United States crop production now is twice what it was in 1970. That would not be a good change if more land, water, pesticides and labor were being used. But that is not what happened: Agriculture is using nearly half the labor and 16 percent less land than it did in 1970. In 1900, about 40 percent of the United States population was on the farm, and 60 percent lived in rural areas. Today the respective figures are only about 1 percent and 20 percent. From the 1940s to the 1980s, the number of farms fell by more than half, and average farm size tripled. A result is that romantic, pastoral images of farming from yesteryear are far from representing reality.

Monopoly capitalism and food prices

The 2008 financial crisis was a worldwide mess, but it was preceded by a crisis that hurt the poorest countries most: A massive spike in food commodity prices, beginning in 2007. A UN index of global cereals (like corn, rice and wheat) registered prices 2.8 times higher in 2008 than in 2000.

The financial crisis abetted the spike, as investors fleeing the housing bubble poured money into agricultural futures, a bet on the basic math of population growth. But, though prices have come down as markets calmed, these cereals today are still about twice as expensive as they were at the beginning of the century. Besides the 44 million pushed into poverty in 2011, according to the World Bank, the resulting discontent led to riots and protests around the world, playing a role in the Arab Spring that toppled governments first in Tunisia then in the Tahrir Square uprising that toppled Egypt’s government in 2011.

Several main culprits were identified by international organizations like the United Nations and researchers investigating the topic: One was the cost of oil, which could be found at $30 a barrel in 2000 but rose to well over $100 a barrel in 2008. The second were advanced economies like the EU and the US increasing subsidies for biofuels (pdf), which boosted the price of cereals while diverting production away from food.

The first of these arguments isn’t convincing. By 2009, oil prices were less than $50 a barrel, and while they rose again to above $100 a barrel in 2011, by 2014 they again dropped without a commensurate change in food prices. While the biofuel subsidy argument is compelling, it’s not clear that the affect is large enough to explain all of the increase in food prices.

Some investigators noted that fertilizer prices also spiked, but attributed that to rising fuel costs. Now, new research has refined the fertilizer argument and identified global cartels as the culprit. Large food production is enabled by fertilizers derived from nitrogen and potassium that provide key nutrients to plants in otherwise exhausted soil. The largest firms involved include Canada’s Potashcorp, Mosaic in the US, Russian Uralkali and Belarussian Belaruskali.

“Because of the weakness of OPEC, cartels like it have received much less attention than they should,” Hinnerk Gnutzmann, an economist at the University of Hannover, told Quartz. “The fertilizer industry has much smaller cartels but more effective in their niche.” 

The leading global fertilizer companies have generally operated not as direct competitors, but through cooperation, quietly agreeing on prices for their products, according to the research. That allows them to take the most advantage of market shocks by hiking prices en masse. Gnutzmann and Piotr Śpiewanowski of the Polish Academy of Sciences argue that this is the main reason for rising food prices during the food crisis of 2007-8. 

“Our results imply that a doubling in fertilizer prices leads to a long-run food price increase of 44%,” they write. “In the 1974 and 2008 crises, fertilizer prices more than tripled; fertilizer is likely key to understanding food prices in both ‘normal’ and ‘crisis’ times.”

One real-world sign that their hypothesis is correct? A recent-bust up among some of the fertilizer cartel’s coziest members has coincided with a fall in food prices. China and India, with growing populations and growing wealth, are increasingly important customers for fertilizer. In 2013, China decided that the government would negotiate the import of potash, a mineral that is a key ingredient in fertilizer, rather than leave it to individual Chinese firms. The leverage from China’s decision broke up a key partnership between Russian and Belarusian potash companies which controlled about a third of the global fertilizer market. Since then, fertilizer prices, and food prices, have slowly begun to drop, as cooperation between the firms turned to competition.

Turkey - Poverty amid Luxury

According to the newly-released income and living conditions survey of the Turkish Statistics Institute (TÜİK), the rich have become richer while the poor have become poorer. 

Turkey’s richest 20 percent have a share of 46.5 percent of the national income, up from 45.9 percent last year. The share of the poorest 20 percent has fallen from 6.2 percent to 6.1 percent. 

In the current situation, 6.6 million people in Turkey are living under the absolute poverty line. Their monthly incomes are less than 416 Turkish Liras. If you add to this figure the poor segment who earn less than 520 liras a month and the relatively poor who earn less than 624 liras per month, we understand that a total of 16.7 million people in Turkey are fighting poverty. This 16.7 million makes one-fifth of the country.

67.9 percent of the population is in debt, where the roofs of 39 percent of the families leak, where 43 percent cannot have heating at home, where 35.8 percent cannot access protein sources needed for health and where 71.4 percent do not have the means to take a week-long vacation?  In Turkey, 4.6 million children’s very basic needs such as nutrition, heating and clothing are not met. Out of four children, one child is poor. 

In the eastern Black Sea and Northeastern Anatolia regions, one in every three children is poor. Almost half of the children living in Southeast Anatolia, which corresponds to 1.2 million children, cannot meet their nutrition, heating and clothing needs. This is based on data from 2013. Who knows where these figures have gone with the recent war environment?

According to Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK) data, the number of people who hold a bank account worth over 1 million liras has increased 22 percent in the last 10 years to reach 77,210 people in 2014.  In other words, at one extreme there are 6.6 million people trying to live on less than 416 liras a month and at the other extreme there are 77,000 people who have more than 1 million liras in the bank.

The luxury market in Turkey between 2010 and 2014 expanded at an average of 10 percent every year to reach 5.3 billion liras. In 2018, this figure is expected to reach 7 billion liras. On one hand there are millions who are not able to meet their basic needs; on the other hand, there are thousands who want to show their status with automobiles, designer shoes and bags, and who spend a lot on luxury personal care products brands.  We have to realize that the total of more than 5 billion liras spent every year on clothes, jewelry, luxury cars and yachts does not contribute to sustainable development, social justice, education or scientific advancements and that it does not have any meaningful return to humanity.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/luxury-and-poverty-hand-in-hand-in-turkey-.aspx?pageID=238&nid=104211&NewsCatID=507