Is capitalism institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic? In theory, it shouldn’t be. The cultural, ethnic and gender identity of the workers it exploits shouldn’t make any difference, it’s their ability to work and make profits for their bosses that ultimately counts.
But capitalism isn’t a context-free algorithm, it’s composed of humans with messy cultural legacies. One way to get the measure of your friendly local capitalism is to look at the people it employs to protect itself from the likes of you.
Now, in ‘one of the darkest days in the 200-year history of the force’, a new report has branded London’s Metropolitan Police as ‘institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic,’ with ‘discrimination baked into it’.
So, that’s the police then. Draw your own conclusions.
20 March is UN International Happiness Day, and this year’s theme is ‘Be Mindful. Be Grateful. Be Kind’.
The official website helpfully tells us ‘There are lots of big and worrying issues in our world right now’. It goes on: ‘We can’t always change what is happening, but we can choose how we respond.’
You are advised to ‘create a happier and kinder world together […] By tuning in to your feelings, looking for what’s good and sharing kindness you can nurture yourself and help make things better day by day.’
What a load of pious crap.
The real cause of the ‘big and worrying issues’ is the casino economics of capitalism. The truly kind and mindful approach would be to ditch it.
The trade association Comité Champagne is to launch a £350-a-bottle of Bollinger champagne. Comité Champagne said the rich have been largely unaffected by soaring inflation and were seeking out specific vintages and more valuable bottles (Guardian 10 March).
‘Yes, the cost of living crisis and inflation affects most people, but the ultra-high net worth people we are selling to are very insulated… their spending power certainly hasn’t decreased.’
Cult Wine Investment said champagne prices, ‘don’t affect the richest people. Luxury goods are doing better than ever during a cost of living crisis – I’d arguably say luxury is doing better than it ever has done. The cost of living crisis has really shown us the scale of wealth inequality.”
23,003 people died during 2022 after spending at least 12 hours in an A&E waiting for care or to be admitted to a bed, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (Guardian, 28 Feb).
That equates to roughly one every 23 minutes, 63 every day, 442 a week or 1,917 each month.
The College said its findings, while ‘shocking’, were ‘unsurprising’ as it reflected the fact that emergency departments are often overwhelmed and unable to find patients a bed in the hospital.
Just another grim reflection of capitalism’s priorities: profits for the rich, but don’t go to too much trouble to keep the poor alive. There’s plenty more where you came from, after all.
As much as a third of the already cut UK overseas aid budget is now being spent on housing refugees in the UK. More than £1bn of the UK’s aid budget was spent on refugees in the UK in 2021. Save the Children estimates that the amount of aid spent on in-country refugee costs could be as high as £4.5bn in 2022-23.
The Parliamentary International Development Select Committee described the trend as unsustainable and unprecedented.
The MPs say it has been a political choice by the government to spend so much of the aid budget on refugees in the UK, and insists it is not required to do so by international rules defining legitimate aid.
Greece reinforced border controls along its frontier with Turkey to halt people made homeless by the earthquakes that have devastated south-east Turkey and northern Syria. Hundreds of extra border guards began patrolling the Greek-Turkish border.
‘The mass movement of millions of people is not a solution,’ said Greece’s migration minister, Notis Mitarachi.
Actually, migrating away from an active tectonic area is a solution, but not one capitalism would ever condone.
Greater numbers of refugees are risking their lives to travel in vastly overcrowded boats from Turkey to Italy. 59 refugees, including a newborn baby, were found dead on Sunday after their vessel ran aground in rough seas off Calabria. They had started their journey from the Turkish coast.
In 2020 and 2021, the richest 1% of the world’s population took nearly 2/3rds of all new wealth – six times more than that earned by the poorest 90% of workers.
And while billionaires get richer, global poverty is increasing, Oxfam warns. In the past decade, the richest 1% of people on Earth sucked up half of all new wealth.
“Since 2020, for every dollar of new global wealth gained by someone in the bottom 90%, one of the world’s billionaires has gained $1.7 million,” said Oxfam. In the meantime, global poverty is getting worse, not better, surprise surprise.
This is what Eyüp Muhçu, the head of the body that represents architects in Turkey, said to the BBC on the subject of the recent earthquakes.
“The priority of the central government was not to make the cities safe, but to implement some projects that were solely planned for maximising profits. For this reason, 65% of the current building stock in Turkey is risky. And no measures have been implemented regarding these risky structures.”
Never was it more literally true to say that profit kills. As long as capitalism lasts, the rich win while the poor pay, and avoidable tragedies like the Turkey/Syria earthquakes will recur, in which blind greed turns a natural event or an accident into a deadly catastrophe.
The FTSE 100 tracks the 100 largest companies listed on the London stock-exchange and it hit a new all-time high at over 8,000 points on Thursday (bit.ly/3Ed5rp7).
FTSE 100 dividends are forecast to hit a record high this year, with shareholders expected to receive £85.8bn, up from £79.1bn in 2022.
Share buybacks, where companies acquire and cancel their own shares as a way of returning cash to investors, also rose during 2022.
In the meantime, the cost of energy for households around the world increased between 62.6 and 112.9%. As a result, it is estimated that an additional 78 – 141 million people worldwide could be pushed into extreme poverty (go.nature.com/414cY3F).
Entire cities flattened as high-rises, put up on the cheap with virtually no regard for safety, or via paid regulation ‘amnesties’, simply pancaked. At least 30,000 now dead, but the UN expects that figure to double at least, with perhaps up to 100,000 more bodies still lying underneath the rubble.
Volunteers are still working around the clock to find survivors, but everyone agrees that it is probably too late. Now, every 15 minutes when they pause to listen, there is only silence. Across the border in Syria, almost no relief efforts whatsoever have been possible.
A furious backlash might bring down the Erdogan regime in Turkey. What most deserves blame though is the system behind the corruption: capitalism and its profit motive.
