The Rich of New York

According to Forbes data, over the last two years, the collective net worth of New York's 53 billionaires rose from $210 to $277 billion -- a 31 percent jump. In contrast, the city's entire municipal budget is now about $70 billion, meaning that the 53 wealthiest New Yorkers have about four times the city's combined annual spending on police, roads, schools, parks, social services, transportation, sanitation, and firefighters.

Median household annual income in New York is now $50,895 and a person working full-time at the minimum wage would earn $15,080. That means that those 53 billionaires now have as much money as five million average families and 17 million minimum wage workers.

The wealthiest New Yorkers pay less into the system than everyone else. According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, in 2010, the top one percent of earners in the city (households earning more than $567,253 annually), earned 37 percent of the city's income, and paid only 28 percent of the tax revenues. Yet the lowest 20 percent of households (earning below $9,131) earned the same percentage of the city's income as the percentage of the city's taxes they paid. The next lowest 20 percent (earning below $20,440) actually paid a greater share of taxes than their share of income.

People on the right are fond of the expression “class warfare” when anyone calls for the mobilisation of the oppressed working class. Well, we could use not just a little class warfare but a lot. We should be spoiling for a fight. Now’s the time for firebrands, rabble-rousers, and troublemakers. To the barricades, figuratively speaking, comrades.

The not so golden state

 California, often thought of as the land of plenty, is "in fact the land of poverty." said David Grusky, a sociology professor who serves as the director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.

According to new research by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality and the Public Policy Institute of California, the poverty measurement, which takes into account housing costs in addition to income, found that 25 percent of children and 22 percent of all Californians are poverty-stricken. The percentages would be even higher if not for the state and federal safety nets, including CalFresh, the state's food stamp program; CalWORKs, the state's cash assistance program; and the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, the study found. If these programs were not in place, the child-poverty rate would increase by another 12 percentage points. In overall numbers, more poor children live in California than in any other state. Out-of-pocket medical costs, which the Census Bureau doesn't take into consideration when calculating the official poverty measure, often push the elderly into poverty.

 California's immigrant population is also highly affected by poverty, in part because undocumented immigrants are not eligible for safety-net programs, the study found. Nearly 30 percent of the state's immigrant population lives in poverty -- a figure that is much higher than official government estimates.

On Strike! Today Colombia; Tomorrow Europe?

Today it’s Colombia: the peasants’ strike

 

Since 18th August, more than 200,000 Colombian peasants, both

men and women, as well as transport workers and miners, have

mobilised against the policies implemented by the government of Juan

Manuel Santos. The people who provide food for the nation have said

“basta!” [enough] and have declared a strike in the agricultural sector.

It has been met with repressive action from law enforcement 

agencies. 

 

With the strike, the agri-sector is saying “basta” to the lack of

investment in public services for the rural population, “basta” to falling

incomes, “basta” to the fact that 77% of the land is in the hands of

13% of the population and “basta” to the privatisation of seeds. 

 

Three years ago, resolution 970 was passed. The consequence was that in

2011, 1,167,225 kilos of seeds were confiscated from small farmers

and destroyed by the ICA (the Colombian Agriculture Institute) as they

were not registered. The crops affected included potatoes, maize,

wheat, peas, and beans. 

The struggle of the Colombian people is a global one.

They are fighting the brutal consequences of a new order

for food production that favours multinational companies and banks.

It is a system that converts food into a raw material or a value on the

stock exchange, excluding the role of peasant farmers. It is a new

order whose spearhead has been the deregulation and globalisation

of the markets for food produce. This has been made possible by the

free trade treaties backed by the US and Europe. 

Everything points towards the next phase of the struggle taking place 

in Europe, where right now the EU and the US are negotiating the 

biggest free trade agreement in history. 

Agriculture is one of the key issues in this treaty.

 

* Currently they are trying to amend resolution 970. 

A documentary about resolution 970, titled ‘Colombia 970’ can be watched here: 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kZWAqS-El_g

 

from here

Sweet Profits

Land covering an area the size of Italy has been taken from indigenous communities around the world by suppliers to the biggest names in the food and drinks industry, according to a new report by Oxfam.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are among the companies criticised for their links to land disputes, with the charity alleging that nearly 800 large-scale land deals by foreign investors have seen 33 million hectares taken into corporate ownership globally since 2000. The research also highlights alleged disputes with British food giant ABF  – claims that poor communities from Brazil to Cambodia are losing their homes to make way for lucrative sugar crops.

Sally Copley, Oxfam’s campaigns director, said: “We need to be sure that what we eat and drink does not make the poorest and most vulnerable across the world homeless or landless...”

Sex, Just Another Commodity

There Are No Hot Chicks In Mostar

Armed to teeth with the newest tech gadgets and dressed in tailored jeans and a fitted blazer, a middle-aged British man drank his macchiato and fiddled with his iPad a few tables away from where I was sitting in a crowded bar in Mostar, Bosnia. The waitresses wore clingy miniskirts and even tighter low-cut t-shirts, and whenever they walked by our fashionable tourist’s table, he leered at them unabashedly.

Since he was by far the best dressed and most attractive man in the whole place, the waitresses eagerly danced around his table, showing off their linguistic skills and attending to his every wish.

When the time came to order another drink, the spiffy British tourist confidently took hold of the blonde waitresses wrist and asked her for her number. Without a moment’s hesitation, the young girl wrote it down on a napkin and then drew (and mimed) some directions which I wasn’t able to decipher.

Not more than 10 minutes later, a different waitress approached the smoothly shaven and audacious guest to ask him if he would like to try one of the local cakes or pastries. In the same manner with which he procured the first girl’s digits, the Omega-wearing vacationer serenaded the second waitress, who promptly scribbled her contacts on the flip side of the same napkin that held the first girl’s number.

After concluding a prolonged gaze at the waitress’ behind as she walked away towards another table, the British tourist suddenly looked in my direction and our eyes met. He gave me a crooked grin as he folded the napkin and put it in his wallet, and then said: “Man, there are so many hot chicks in Mostar. So little time, and so many of them.”

Surprised and susceptible to peer pressure, I raised my eyebrows at him and smiled awkwardly. I wish I had frowned instead and shook my head in disgust. I wish I had stood up and shouted the following screed in his direction:

‘If you only knew that the girl you plan to use shares a nine square-meter bedroom with her younger brother and her grandparents, then maybe you wouldn’t be able to see her as nothing more but another hot chick. If you knew that three sacks of flour are stacked next to her pillow because her family cannot fit them anywhere else in their shabby one-bedroom, then maybe she would be a bit more than a piece of ass to be enjoyed during your Balkan excursion. If you knew how many times she had to blush in embarrassment and apologize to her friends and guests for the uncontrollable farts and burps that emanate from her bedridden grandfather, then maybe you wouldn’t be able to reduce her to a mere sex object. If you only knew that she had to heat up water in buckets to wash herself and to serve her family a three-day-old cabbage soup before coming to work, then maybe it would have been a bit more difficult for you to reduce her to an expendable commodity.”

The reason that I knew all of these things was because the second waitress is my cousin.

I wanted this man to know that objectifying women anywhere is detestable, and that it takes a real jackass to do it in a third-world country. But next to my lack of courage, there was something else which prevented me from speaking out: I recognized a bit of myself in this man. I was reminded of numerous occasions on which I had “accidentally” dropped my American passport on the floor, or inserted a word or two of English into a conversation when in the company of attractive Bosnian girls.

Regardless of how hard I tried to link my indignation at the British man’s actions to some kind of corresponding personal virtue, I wasn’t able to come up with anything convincing. It didn’t work. There was nothing there. Upon arriving at this realization, I suddenly felt petrified.

Milan Djurasovic is a Bosnian American collage artist, blogger, and a book author.
from here with one of his collages

A Shit-Load Of Profit

At £60 a cup, civet coffee is made from collecting the droppings of the wild civet who eat and partially digest the coffee beans. But an increase in demand has led to battery-cage conditions with animals kept in tiny spaces to mass produce the coffee for the global market.
Trapped and caged in a cramped conditions. Force-fed, gnawing at its legs and passing blood in its urine. These are the conditions that the civet, a small cat-like mammal in Indonesia, are kept in to produce the world's most expensive coffee.
Tony Wild is a coffee expert who introduced the coffee to the UK ten years ago. Now he is calling on retailers to stop stocking the product, shocked by what the industry has become.

From change.org here - where Tony Wild is calling for public pressure to stop Harrods selling the product as a good example to other retailers.
Profit, even from a drink extracted from faeces, commodification of anything and everything, in this case so the wealthy can be seen to be ultra-fashionable?
Exploitation at every conceivable level - that's capitalism.
JS

The Immigrant War

In practice, most migrant workers, especially those working in low-waged jobs, enjoy few of the rights stipulated in international conventions. In Singapore, a major employer of migrant workers, migrants working in low-waged jobs are officially prohibited from cohabiting with or getting married to a Singaporean citizen. Under most existing temporary migration programs in North America and Europe, migrants do not enjoy equal access to welfare benefits given to citizens and long-term residents.

A  thought-provoking book review.
In The Immigrant War by Vittorio Longhi  finds that "even when someone does succeed in crossing a border, even when they obtain a permit and find a steady job, they are still faced with this 'implacable war' against migrants." Migrants do the worst jobs at the lowest pay, he says, for which they "face xenophobic propaganda that is so functional to what Michel Foucault would call 'biopower,' or the 'subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.'"

Longhi quotes Foucault because he sees anti-immigrant hysteria as part of a system of control. But what makes Longhi's view more than just one more litany of abuse are two elements. He sees this control - the way migrants are employed - as a system for extracting profits, not just the bad acts of evil people. And he shows that migrants can and do resist. "They change from being passive victims to become new, conscious social agents, capable of fighting for their own rights and contributing to the revival of a wider protest."

 In his examination of the Persian Gulf, where the system of social control is the most elaborate and is based on labor contracting through guest worker programs. Undocumented migration exists in the Gulf, but at levels much lower than in the United States or Europe.
Longhi describes a brutal system in which "the social exclusion, terrible living conditions and abuse reserved for migrants are possible thanks to the entry quota mechanism, to the criterion of kafala (sponsorship), which binds the migrant to a short-term contract with a sole employer." As a result, while the average per capita income of a Qatari citizen is $88,000, a contract construction worker from Nepal gets $3,600, and a Filipina domestic worker $2,500.
The point is clear. An elaborate system for contracting labor exists to produce huge wage differentials, and therefore profits for employers. The consequences for workers are disastrous, despite the fact that families and whole towns in countries like the Philippines or Nepal have become dependent on the money sent home out of those low wages.

Longhi also describes a reality even less well known - the rebellions of migrant workers in the Gulf, and the support they've received, not only from European unions, but from the barely-legal unions in those countries themselves. Protests in Bahrain, for instance, were organized with the help of that country's new union federation. Its leaders were among those demonstrating in the Pearl Square protests in Manama, put down by its monarchy with bloody violence. In France, he describes rising labor militancy among immigrants similar to that taking place in the United States. Raymond Chaveau, coordinator for work among "sans papiers" [undocumented] workers for the CGT, the traditional left labor federation, says employers use the lack of legal status to create "reserves of low-cost labor," which he describes in the classical Marxist term as "the industrial reserve army." By organizing, restaurant workers - "this reserve army in the kitchen" - have won increasing numbers of permanent jobs - 6,000 in 2007, 12,000 in 2008, and 13,000 in 2009.

Longhi asks, "What would happen if the 4.5 million immigrants living in Italy decided to down tools for a day?" But he then takes his question an important step further: "And if the millions of Italians who are tired of racism supported their actions?" In fact, these were the elements of a manifesto of Italy's "A Day Without Us" movement of 2010, showing the kind of cross-fertilization that is taking place among migrants and migrant social movements internationally. Longhi's arguments are most convincing when he makes a strong case for the way the activity of migrants themselves, especially when it's supported by unions and progressive social organizations, can win important improvements.

Adapted from here,