alanjjohnstone
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On re-reading, I offer my apologies to many in the meat trade. When native born workers better their lives, they leave the chicken and pork and beef factories and they are replaced by new-comers. So not all those in the slaughterhouses or meat-processing factories are sociopaths. Many are desperate migrants hoping for a job, any type of job, no matter how unpleasant. And one which always has openings available is the meat industry.
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was about immigration more than food adulteration. But it was the latter the rich learned from the book, not the former.
We live in a brutal and violent society. Acts of cruelty are committed everyday and the vast majority of us are unconcerned. Our video Kid’s Stuff starts with an observation that if we don’t experience it first hand, we don’t require to think about it or make any connections
Supermarkets place meat already nicely filleted on spotless shelves inside shrink-wrapped plastic, all the blood miraculously missing, all the smell of flesh gone. I’m of the age that I recall traditional butchers that had the animal carcasses hung from hooks on full display and I remember the stink.
I’ve worked with several people who had jobs in abattoirs and a shared personality trait I found in them, was a lack of empathy, not only for the animals but for other people’s suffering. Anecdotal evidence, I admit. But confirmed by others I have spoken to. Like soldiers in a war, those involved in the meat industry are brutalised by their jobs.
I’ve said before, it will not be by the will of the wider community that meat-eating will disappear but by the fact that those willing to perform the task of killing animals will not be stepping forward. A few may do so in rural areas shooting rabbits or pigeons or what not but it will not be on any industrial scale. And those religions that call for prayer and blessings with the ritual slitting of animals throats and their bleeding will also happily wither away.
As sociopathic personalities melt away because of peoples new relationships with one another, so will those who carry out the savagery of providing meat on the table.
We are distanced not just from how domesticated animals are reared, but how they are slaughtered. Out of sight – out of mind. JO is doing us a service by being our conscience. Continually reminding us of the barbaric practices of society.
Let us not forget, that only by building a new society will all the ills of the world begin to end. JO understands this, only too well.
The Party is not made up of angels and saints. Many of us, too, are flawed individuals and we carry the baggage of how we ourselves were brought up. But to help in the task of social evolution, we as individuals must abandon aspects of that upbringing, the nationalism, the racism, the sexism, the homophobia, to many just a few prejudices socialists are required to jettison so that we can achieve the cooperative commonwealth.
We have not made it a condition of membership to be a vegetarian or vegan, nor advocates for non-violence and pacifism. JO understands this. We have not made it a rule that we should embrace sack-cloth and ashes of monks. Billionaires are very welcome to join the Party. Hedonism nor abstinence as far as I know are not forbidden. (as an aside, I recall at the 70s conference when the Libertarian Communist group surfaced, one party wag coined the description of us as Libertine Communists)
However, we do reflect our fellow-workers, and in many ways, we are part of the forefront of change, so I would expect to see a rise in vegetarian/vegan lifestyles, and an increased awareness of our speciesism. Socialism is the only hope we have where we have the possibility of living in harmony with one another and with other living creatures.
But I will not treat all life-forms as equal. I’m very pleased that humanity succeeded in the eco-cide of the smallpox virus, that we are well on our way to make polio extinct and i hail the day we exterminate the tuberculosis bacteria from the face of the Earth.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/05/13/future-grabs
More support for PI
“Don’t criticize the lesser of two evils on the left or your voice will be banished.”
Marcos, Doctors Without Borders has sent a health team to the Navajo Nation.
“The international group typically sends health professionals to conflict zones around the world during medical disasters and the coronavirus pandemic marks the first time it has dispatched teams within the U.S.,”If the Navajo Nation were its own state, it would have the highest per capita rate of confirmed positive coronavirus cases in the country, behind only New York.
“You’re telling people, ‘Wash your hands for 20 seconds multiple times a day,’ and they don’t have running water. Or you’re saying, ‘Go buy groceries for two or three weeks and shelter in place and don’t come out,’ but people can’t afford groceries for two or three weeks,”
I think I will take responsibility for that statement, ALB.
And I think I tried to demonstrate the lockdown was detrimental to working people. I believe you concurred that those with informal dominated economies which also lacked social safety nets, lockdowns inflicted more damage than benefit.
As for Europe and America, lockdowns did not equalise the death rates between the poor and the rich, so whose benefit was it really for?
The Ogala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux nations in the US state of South Dakota continued on Monday to reject attempts by Republican Governor Kristi Noem to force the tribes to take down coronavirus health checkpoints on their land. Noem had threated legal action if the checkpoints on federal and state highways were not removed within two days, a move that would violate both tribal sovereignty as well as existing agreements between the state and Sioux governments.
The checkpoints are part of the measures the tribes have put in place to stop the spread of the pandemic in their territory.
Harold Frazier, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux, said “we will not apologize for being an island of safety in a sea of uncertainty and death…You continuing to interfere in our efforts to do what science and facts dictate seriously undermine our ability to protect everyone on the reservation.”
https://www.dw.com/en/native-american-tribes-reject-coronavirus-checkpoint-threat/a-53393465
Austerity comes to the Arabs.
https://www.dw.com/en/riyadh-slashes-welfare-as-oil-and-coronavirus-effects-kick-in/a-53391229
Saudi Arabia has unveiled plans to triple valued-added tax (VAT) from 5% to 15% and stop monthly payments to citizens, an allowance of 1,000 riyals ($267, €240) a month to state employees, who make up two-thirds of total employment
Although the government rarely releases statistics, it is estimated that around 20% of the 34 million Saudi population live in poverty. According to a 2017 UN report, the anti-poverty measures taken by the government were “inefficient, unsustainable, poorly coordinated and, above all, unsuccessful in providing comprehensive social protection to those most in need.”
FYI, a more sympathetic view of the film
FYI, George Monbiot
“…Population is where you go when you haven’t thought your argument through. Population is where you go when you don’t have the guts to face the structural, systemic causes of our predicament: inequality, oligarchic power, capitalism. Population is where you go when you want to kick down…”
Nations can always invest in the preparations for a possible future war, engaging in military exercises, stockpiling weapons and ammunition and supplies that may never be used.
But when it comes to other scenarios such as a pandemic, such precautions are neglected.
The government has kept the Exercise Cygnus report secret since it was first circulated in Whitehall three years ago. A copy was leaked to the Guardian, which is publishing the document in the public interest.
Martin Green, the chief executive of Care England, “It beggars belief. This is a report that made some really clear recommendations that haven’t been implemented. If they had put in place a response to every one, we would have been in a much better place at the start of this pandemic.”
“…Along with the International People’s Assembly, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research produced a 16-point declaration that includes immediate relief and long-term measures. In our most recent dossier, we look carefully at one of these policies, the call for a Universal Basic Income (UBI). We lay out our critical view of the UBI scheme, offering our assessment of why this must be an undiluted universal scheme and why it must be funded by taxes on the wealthy and on profits rather than merely by dismantling other social service schemes. We take a socialist approach to the UBI, insisting that it be a supplement to other social wages rather than perpetuate the myth of the ‘deserving poor’ to sift out who should qualify and who should not…”
For that further analysis on UBI
Scroll down to Part 3
“…We should be clear about the limitations of the UBI. The UBI would free the enormous surplus population from unemployment and destitution, but it would not emancipate people from either the money form or from the power of the capitalist state. Cash disbursement means that cash would still be needed to buy essential goods and services, which could otherwise be provided on a need basis without the exchange of money (public education, as an example, or public food distribution systems). Part of the attraction of a UBI for the neoliberal bloc is that they would put cash in the hands of the surplus population, who would then be able to buy goods and services that they would otherwise not purchase. The social relations of capitalism are not threatened by the UBI, which is merely a social welfare scheme within the norms of the capitalist system. In the context of widespread hunger and desperation, such a scheme should not be scoffed at, even if it has immense limitations in scope and implementation…
…If the UBI scheme is not a substitute for the social wage, but a supplement to it, and if the UBI scheme is truly universal, then it has the potential for being a valuable demand within the capitalist system to alleviate the suffering of many while continuing to work towards the abolishment of the capitalist system. If it is a substitute for the social wage and if it is targeted, then it is no longer a universal basic income, but a dangerous mechanism to commodify and privatise social benefits and to exacerbate divisions within the working class…
…One of the questions raised about the UBI is how states are expected to pay for it, and, based on that, what the actual income payment would be per working-age individual. The neoliberal solution is to shut down other social programmes, incorporate that money into one corpus, and then make cash payments from there; this is unacceptable from a socialist standpoint because it privatises social goods that should be treated as a universal human right. Instead, a socialist mechanism for payments would rely upon at least four different sources:
A wealth tax.
The enhancement of the tax jurisdiction and dismantling of tax havens and tax shelters.
An increase in taxes on socially undesirable sectors (armaments, for example).
An increase in profit taxes.To ensure that the state will be able to collect this income, which would otherwise fly off to tax havens, it will need to initiate capital controls. A UBI scheme that is not implanted as part of a suite of measures to develop economic sovereignty would merely become unaffordable and therefore seen as a failure because it would either be inadequate (if unfunded) or too much of a burden on the existing budget (if there are no new taxes)…”
And if wishes were horses, every tramp would ride, goes an old saying.
