- In mid-town Toronto a building is being demolished so they can build condominium apartments there. That's nothing new but what is unusual is that some people are upset that this is the only building in the world built during the brief reign of King Edward VIII that bears his logo. To satisfy these outraged citizens, the developers have agreed to preserve the facade. We have global warming, war, terrorism, poverty and hunger, Ebola, and so on, and these people get upset at the supposed disrespect to the memory of a playboy/parasite, a guy who was not up to the herculean task of shaking hands and making boring speeches prepared by someone else, and used his girl friend as an excuse to get out of those onerous tasks. For a system built on 'value', Capitalism sure distorts people's values.
- An analysis by Andrew Powell-Morse of ticket market place Seatsmart showed that lyrics of pop songs have fallen to the intelligence of eight year-olds. This was his finding after analyzing 225 songs that had spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard charts for pop, country, rock, R & B, and hiphop for any given year in the last ten. In the final reckoning, it's a degenerate culture reflecting a degenerate economic system where anything goes as long as it makes money.
- The New York Times of June 21 included an article by a Brazilian commenting on his country's economics in the last few years. He, Like many others were optimistic in 2003 when Lula de Silva and his Workers' Party came to power with the expectation that the old inequality and oppression of previous administrations would blossom into an equal and just society. Now the old disappointment has returned as corruption scandals, an economic recession, and opportunistic alliances with former rivals have returned the working class to virtually where it started. The Brazilians should have known better – as long as you have capitalism, you will have inequality, insecurity, and, of course, the class system.
- Pope Francis has used his position to speak out for the poor and to put an emphasis on serving the poor. He has invited Latin American priests who founded a movement for social change (once scorned by the church authorities as Marxist, can you believe!). Murdered arch bishop Oscar Romero, shot to death in 1980 has bee beatified (?) and is one step away from sainthood. Pope Francis wants to create a 'poor church for the poor' to get closer to the masses. All this, of course, will do nothing to alleviate poverty and cynic might say the church is looking for more people they can frighten into believing.
- The International Monetary Fund has issued a report detailing the high cost of burning dirty fuels (New York Times May 31). It says that many countries are compounding the problem when their governments subsidize the price to below cost and not taxing the products enough to account for the damage that burning fossil fuels causes to human health and to the climate. The IMF calculates that subsidies this year will amount to $5.3 trillion or 6.5% of the world's gross domestic product. Not surprisingly, the biggest polluters such as China and the US account for $2.3 trillion and $699 billion respectively. Staggering figures when we are so short of cash for health, education, proper infrastructure etc. But even worse is the estimate that eliminating subsidies and taxing higher would reduce premature deaths caused by air pollution by fifty-five per cent, or about 1.85 million yearly!
- In the journal of our companion party in the UK, mention is made of the fact that in Qatar thousands of labourers from Nepal are treated no better than slaves. Companies handling construction work for the 2022 World Cup of Soccer infrastructure forced them to stay by denying them promised salaries and withholding necessary worker ID permits making them illegal aliens. The precarious situation created by the employers has forced the workers to beg for food. Thousands of Nepalese workers in Qatar face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern day slavery as defined by the International Labour Organization. So whether its slave labour camps in North Korea, sweat shops in the third world, or workers in Qatar, slavery continues, not to mention wage slavery. Capital will find a way to keep nineteenth century conditions going in the name of profit. Socialists advocate not the abolition of these conditions, but the abolition of the economic system that causes it.
- Bill and Hilary Clinton recently revealed that since January 2014, they have received more than $25 million for giving one hundred speeches. Contrast that with the fact that millions are trying to survive on less than a dollar a day. Surely one must wonder if there isn't something wrong with the way society works. What were the Clintons saying in their speeches? Whatever the content, the theme never changed, 'preserve the status quo'. Socialists say damn the status quo, let's work for a world without such outrageous extremes.
- A recent edition of "America Unearthed" took place in Rockwall, Texas, so named for the underground wall in a rural area that is thought to have once been above ground. The limestone wall measures three miles by five and a half feet and is seven stories high. Is it man-made or natural? We do not know. Many geologists and archeologists have analyzed it and do not publish their findings because big developers do not want the site to become an archeological attraction, presumably because it could be a lucrative development. Money talks, good intentions walk.
- Here's an example of how a government or an influential (read wealthy) person can get their agenda across to the masses. The Toronto Star (May 30), reports, "Deep inside a four-storey marble building in St. Petersburg, hundreds of workers tap away at computers on the front lines of an information war, say those who have been inside." Known as Kremlin trolls, they work twelve-hour shifts flooding the internet with propaganda aimed at stamping Putin's world vision on Russia and around the world. One worker referred to going to work as entering an Orwellian universe. Bashing out 160 blogposts on each shift, they simply repeat what they are told. For this they are relatively well paid at 40 to 50 thousand roubles a month ($950 to 1,250 Canadian). Obviously, Putin has large amounts of cash at his disposal. This type of activity is used by big capital such as the coal industry in the US touting that coal is clean and environmentally green, or tobacco or sugar soaked food is good for you. The ideas of an epoch are those of the ruling class.
- "Plan to rehire 4,000 Greeks leaves Europeans aghast as a 1.2 Billion Euro bill becomes due." was the secondary headline in an article in The Toronto Star (May 30). Imagine, how horrifying it must seem to the economists that four thousand cleaners and civil servants who lost their jobs to austerity cuts ordered by Greece's creditors, should have a chance to earn a living again! Apparently, according to economic think tanks, German and French families (of four) would be on the hook for 4,350 Euros given that the total figure will be $160 billion of French and German exposure to Greek debt should an exit from the European Union be necessary. Why the families would foot the bill when the capitalists expropriate most of the wealth is another matter.
- The World Health Organization recently reported that air pollution is killing hundreds of thousands of Europeans each year and released figures to prove it. Six hundred thousand died prematurely in fifty-three European countries in 2010 due to fine particles in the air. Nine out of ten Europeans are exposed to a concentration above WHO guidelines. The annual cost to governments is $1.6 trillion due to the premature deaths and related illnesses. That figure represents ten per cent of Europe's gross domestic product. The worst country is Georgia that lost thirty-five per cent of its GDP for this reason. Some point to Sheffield's efforts to clean its air and Sweden's clean-up of its lakes, but it's a case of too little too late. However, it's not too late to support socialism and get cracking on the right track to solve the problem.
- The Toronto Star (May 23) reported that after ISIS took control of Palmyra two hundred and eighty soldiers and citizens loyal to the Assad regime were executed and let their bodies lie in the streets as a warning to all who would oppose them. Shades of Bloody Sunday, Tiananmen square, and hundreds of other atrocities over the years. With a world still divided into competing entities this is bound to continue in one form or another. The end of capitalism and the establishment of socialism will be the end of humankind's prehistory and the beginning of our real history.
- Well, at last we know why there are huge income gaps between the workers and the owning class. A team of (vulgar) 'economists' has put out a research paper that states that income gap is not due to differences between high and low earners in one company, but rather the difference is due to the widening gap in wages between different companies. Take Apple and McDonalds, for example, pay differences are not because the executives are getting greater increases than the ordinary workers but because the average pay at Apple rises faster than at McDonalds. Obviously another attempt by capitalist toadies to explain away the gap. It's still there and getting bigger, but notice no mention is made of the idle investors who are raking in the money faster than anyone and giving no equivalent for what they get.
- It sometimes seems that the environment and global warming have disappeared from the news, from election platforms, from the public consciousness. This is a result of a major planned effort on the part of think tanks and editors in many places. Also, the doubters were handed information from a UN study in 2013 that claimed that warming of the earth was slowing down. Now a research paper from the scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that contradicts the UN report has been published. According to NOAA the rise in temperatures since 2000 have been 'virtually indistinguishable' from the rate of the previous five decades. "A whole cottage industry has been built by climate skeptics on the false premise that there is currently a hiatus in global warming" (Toronto Star, June 6). Strange how that kind of news can get into the media.
- Under Ontario's Employment Standards Act, that is now under review, there is no limit on how long a company can employ workers as temporary before giving them permanent status. There is nothing to prevent employers from paying temporary workers less than those on permanent status (if there is such a thing today!). There is nothing to prevent them from hiring their entire work force on a temporary basis if they wish. To quote the head of Toronto's Workers' Action Centre,"If the employer knows he can hire you and doesn't have to pay benefits, doesn't have to pay you a pension, and can hire you for a lot less, there's no incentive for him to hire you permanently." This is especially so as the average wage for temporary workers is $15 per hour compared to $22.40 for permanent workers. Making workers permanent would, naturally, cut into profits. Changes to the above act, if legislated, could improve conditions for some temps but socialists say let's legislate the act to put capitalism out of business where squabbling over meagre handouts from capital will be a thing of the past.
- Barack Obama is calling for federal legislation that would require companies to guarantee workers' paid sick days. At present, forty million American workers do not get paid if they are off work sick. Since San Francisco started sick pay for city employees in 2007, nearly twenty cities and three states have also passed sick pay laws. McDonald's and Walmart stores are both making changes to their sick pay policies. We can only guess that this is to stem the growing discontent among the work force experiencing the stress that capitalism creates.
- The good news from the city of Toronto is that the city has a $190 million surplus from the 2014 budget year. Don't get too excited, though, much of that surplus comes from not hiring staff to fill positions when city workers retire or quit, a total of 1,200 jobs. This fact is not as newsworthy as a surplus so it doesn't make the headlines. Now, transportation services say they cannot repair the roads and Parks and Recreation will not be able to prune the trees. Our services are continually being cut back in spite of greater wealth being produced so that more of the profit can be taken by those who simply hand money over to professional investors and contribute nothing.
- On May 28, political and business leaders from fifty-eight countries came together for an economic conference that included Middle East youth unemployment on the agenda. The rate for unemployment there is the world's highest at 29.5%. As a former Jordanian labour minister said,"If the unemployed do not find a decent living, they look for the alternatives and the alternative is the so-called Islamic State." A delightful choice for the youth anywhere and a typical one under capitalism where those in need do not get much choice at all.
- As a school bus driver for nine years, one SPCer notes that the younger the students are, the more they chat, interact, and enjoy each others' company. Conversely, the older they are, the less they socialize and become engrossed in their electronic devices. With internet, email, texting, etc. people are less interested in each other. That is proved by the fact that membership in historic social clubs has decreased all over the world. The technology is wonderful but has de-humanized us. It is interesting to speculate how this and future technology will be used in a socialist world.
For socialism, John & Steve.
