FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE IS RACIST
Black people in U.S. have worse health outcomes than White people, report shows

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay News

A new state-by-state report shows that Black people in the United States have worse health outcomes than White people, which further confirms racial disparities in healthcare across the country.

 Photo by Joshua Woroniecki/Pixabay

Race-based gaps in health care and health outcomes persist in every region of the United States, a new state-by-state report card shows.

Racial and ethnic disparities woven throughout America and its system of health care mean that people of color are more likely to die younger from preventable illnesses than White people, according to a racial equity scorecard developed by The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health research group.

"We found that health equity does not exist in any state in the U.S., not even in states with historically stronger health systems," said report author David Radley, a senior scientist with The Commonwealth Fund. "In every state, we see that health system performance is markedly worse for people of color compared to White people."

As a result, Black Americans and Native Americans are more likely in most states to die from diabetes complications, breast cancer and other conditions that are treatable with timely access to high-quality health care, the report found.

RELATED Study: Fewer Blacks would die from COVID-19 if treated at same hospitals as Whites

For the report, the researchers assessed each state based on 24 different indicators of health system performance bunched into three groups: health outcomes health care access and quality of health care services.

"In almost every state, health system performance experienced by White people is better than the average performance achieved among people in all groups," Radley said.

The report identified six states with the best health care in the land -- Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon and Rhode Island -- but serious racial inequities persisted even in those states.

RELATED Study: Black children twice as likely as white children to die after surgery

"Our analysis exposes a range of deep-seated racial and ethnic health care inequities within all 50 states and the District of Columbia," said Dr. David Blumenthal, president of The Commonwealth Fund.

Racial disparity persists

Only in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Mississippi did health care for White people fall below the national average for all groups, the findings showed -- but people of color fared even worse.

RELATED U.S. health spending 'disproportionately' tilted toward White people

"What's notable here is that even though health system performance in each of these states was lower overall, Black, Latino and Native American populations in these states still experienced far worse health care than White people, and in fact saw some of the lowest performance scores for any group in the country," Radley said.

Health care inequities crop up in a number of different ways, all related to different racial groups and the specific challenges they face: State uninsured rates are generally higher and more variable for people of color than White people.

Probably related to that, White people are less likely than all other groups to experience big medical bills that bar them from health care.

RELATED Study: Non-whites more exposed to environmental hazards

Black Americans covered by Medicare are more likely to be hospitalized or go to the emergency department for a condition typically well-managed through good primary care.

Black, Hispanic and Native Americans are less likely than Whites and Asians to receive an annual flu shot.

"While it's striking to see how deeply entrenched and damaging these inequities are, it is of course no surprise," said report co-author Dr. Laurie Zephyrin, The Commonwealth Fund's vice president for advancing health equity. "The root causes of these inequities have been in existence for decades -- centuries, even."

Those inequities have a direct impact on health outcomes, the report found.

For example, breast cancer is more likely to be diagnosed at later stages in Black women, when it is harder to treat and more often fatal.

And in nearly all states where data are available, Black and Native Americans are more likely than other racial and ethnic groups to die from complications caused by poorly controlled diabetes.

Expanding Medicaid would help

"It is important to realize that these statistics translate to people, real people experiencing firsthand the impacts of racial inequities on their health, their well-being and their lives," Zephyrin said.

So, how to address these inequities?

A good start would be to ensure universal, affordable and equitable health coverage, through actions like expanding Medicaid.

Twelve states continue to balk over expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Health Act, and people of color bear the brunt of that decision.

"You're not going to see a narrowing of disparities in states like Mississippi unless you provide health insurance coverage for everyone in the state," Zephyrin said.

Steps also need to be taken to strengthen primary care, improve delivery of health care services, and reform medicine to rid it of racial discrimination.

"More than a third of Black and Latinx adults report that they, or household members who have seen a health care professional or have been in the hospital overnight, experience one or more forms of discrimination -- including not being offered the best available treatment, being denied or delayed access to needed health care services, and not being referred to see specialists because of their race, ethnicity or the language that they speak," Zephyrin said.

Finally, communities can help people of color by addressing societal issues that have a direct impact on the everyday things that influence health -- affordable housing, access to healthy food, stable income, and personal safety, Zephyrin said.

"We know these drivers of health impact about 80% of our health outcomes," Zephyrin said.

More information

The Kaiser Family Foundation has more on racial equity in health care.

Copyright © 2021 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

 

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Wolff Responds: Capitalism's False Defenses

In this Wolff Responds, Prof. Wolff refutes the 2 main arguments made by conservatives to absolve capitalism from the injustices and inequalities it creates; the first, that capitalism has increased our standard of living, and the second, that unlike socialism, capitalism is not responsible for mass deaths.

Wolff Responds is a Democracy At Work  production. We provide these videos free of ads. Please consider supporting our work. Visit our website democracyatwork.info/donate or join our growing Patreon community and support Global Capitalism Live Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff at https://www.patreon.com/gcleu.

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The Coercive Laws of Competition

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In this episode of ACC, Prof. Harvey examines 2 schools of thought within the Marxist tradition, one that focuses on the falling rate of profit, and the other that explores the rising mass. Harvey argues that both schools miss an important contradiction that separates each of them from the other:  the role of competition. The coercive laws of competition are crucial for both falling rate of profit and rising mass. He explains why.

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Why the environment needs a shorter working week

The debate around how we move towards ecologically sustainable ways of living is the most pressing discussion of our times. The shorter working week has a crucial role to play.

The debate around how we as a species move towards ecologically sustainable ways of living (i.e., within our planetary limits) is perhaps the most pressing discussion of our times. The shorter working week has a crucial role to play. In a simple formulation: working less is both necessary and desirable from an environmental perspective.

Changing the metrics

With climate breakdown already at our doorstep, the pressing need to change course from capitalist models of growth has spawned new disciplines and approaches within the field of economics. One such approach is referred to as degrowth – a genre of research and activism that has been active for many decades, originally inspired by the political ecology of Gorz.

Those who advocate for degrowth define its approach as being first and foremost a critique of growth. Economic growth is unsustainable per se, because it is inseparable from greenhouse gas emissions and other negative environmental impacts. In contrast to accounts that stress the need for ‘green growth’ or ‘socialist growth’, degrowth advocates demand the dethroning of growth as a goal, and in its place, installing a political economy focused on using fewer natural resources in order to organise life and work. Rather than advancing an economic model destined for austerity, scarcity and recession (the socio-economic consequences usually associated with a flat or non-growing economies), degrowth and postgrowth advocates argue in favour of economic metrics and objectives that advance alternative modes of living, based on principles of sharing, conviviality, care and the common good. As leading ecological economist

Giorgos Kallis and his colleagues summarise:


Sustainable degrowth may be defined as an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level, in the short and long term. The adjective sustainable does not mean that degrowth should be sustained indefinitely but rather that the process of transition/transformation and the end-state should be sustainable in the sense of being environmentally and socially beneficial. The paradigmatic proposal of degrowth is therefore that human progress with-out economic growth is possible.

A transition to degrowth must involve abandoning GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as a measure of success for an economy, and fundamentally recalibrating what we value. In short: change the metrics. Rather than viewing perpetual growth as an end in itself, a sustainable degrowth approach would implement measurements that are geared towards, and that capture, societal well-being, ecological sustainability and social equality.

Reducing our carbon footprint by working less

For advocates of degrowth, the transition to a new economy will be undergirded by a range of policy measures that actively encourage economic activity based on resource circulation rather than resource extraction. These tend to include a basic income (creating an income floor irrespective of an individual’s earnings or employment status), a wide range of universal services (free public transport, housing, healthcare and education) and a high rate of tax and regulation on private assets (encouraging lower levels of consumerism and more environmentally sustainable uses of energy and resources).

One of the key components of a degrowth programme relates to working time and its reduction. Working less not only reduces the sheer amount of resources being used as part of the labour process, but it also reduces the amount of carbon-intensive consumption that comes with what Juliet Schor calls the ‘work and spend’ cycle. In a study that assessed the environmental impacts of twenty-seven Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, Schor and her colleagues estimated that reducing our working hours by a quarter could reduce our carbon footprint by as much as 30 per cent. For the average British worker, this would mean cutting our weekly forty-two hours of work to just over thirty-one hours – or, a four-day week.

In the US, a degrowth-inspired study evaluated the carbon footprint held by individual items consumed by households with shorter or longer hours. In short each item of expenditure per household, reported via surveys, was ranked according to how carbon- intensive its production was – from packaged meals to pieces of clothing and so on. Their conclusion? ‘[H]ouseholds with longer work hours have significantly larger carbon footprints’, demonstrating a worrying correlation between increasingly unsustainable consumption and high workload lifestyles. This study is consonant with anecdotal everyday experience, where early starts and late finishes bequeath takeaway meals delivered by moped, ready meals thrown into the microwave because we’re too tired to cook or an early morning breakfast deal wrapped in layers of plastic.

These findings underline an important facet of the argument for reduced hours: we must have a significant reduction in our working time, not only because the work we do is so carbon intensive, but also because of the consumption that occurs at the fringes of our working lives.

The Green New Deal: an opportunity for better working lives

The advocates of degrowth have made valuable contributions, not least in highlighting the problematic aspects of the pursuit of economic growth. Yet, an ardent commitment to degrowth often fails to account for the ways in which certain areas of the economy will need to grow very quickly in order to cut carbon emissions at the rates required. As economist Robert Pollin has argued, the key objective for governments around the world should be to decouple consumption from fossil fuels at both the macro and micro levels (in consonance with degrowth argu-ments) while also investing massively in green energy infrastructure as its replacement. The net result of this could well be that economies (GDP) grow rapidly while still advancing a viable climate-stabilisation project. This adds nuance to green strategy: the problem isn’t necessarily growth per se, but specifically which areas of the economy grow, and to what extent.

Other critics of degrowth point to the strategy’s lack of political nous. It is hard to find within de-growth an implementable or politically viable strategy that acknowledges issues of political governance, power relations and consent-building. Although degrowth modelling shows that work could be redistributed on a macro level to all workers in the form of work-sharing, it tends to lack any detailed plans for how this could be actually implemented, even at the national scale (leaving global degrowth aside for a moment). Questions also remain, for example, around the situation of those who currently work in industries that would need to be abolished under a sustained degrowth strategy, or around the safeguards (if they are at all possible) that will need to be in place to protect wages as the economy shrinks.

If degrowth economics largely remains at the – still undoubtedly useful – level of economic calculation and critique, then a green political strategy that might succeed in implementing the necessary reforms is still some way off. One of the most exciting and tangible political developments that might change this, however, is the idea of a ‘Green New Deal’ (GND). While the GND is very much a concept under construction – as evidenced by the multitude of iterations in the world – its origins can be traced back to New York Times journalist Thomas L. Friedman. In an article entitled ‘A Warning from the Garden’, Fried-man argued that in order to reverse climate change, an industrial and fiscal strategy that matched the ambition of the Roosevelt administration was required. Ann Pettifor, in her book The Case for the Green New Deal, shows how Colin Hines, a Greenpeace staffer and campaigner, then took up the challenge outlined by Friedman by commissioning a report that proposed in detail what a GND would consist of. In the report, a GND would be a frame-work of joined-up policy proposals that aims to address the ‘triple crunch of the credit crisis, climate change and high oil prices’.

What do today’s GND proposals offer in terms of radical transitions and inspiring plans, more than eighty years down the line from the original New Deal? What are the aspirations for workers under a Green New Deal? Or, in other words, what is the new deal aspect of the GND and what ambitions do GND advocates harbour for working time reduction?

The answers we can find to these questions are thin on the ground. One of the central pillars of the US version of a GND consists of a jobs guarantee – a policy proposal aimed at providing a universal solution to the dual problems of unemployment and low wages. A jobs guarantee is a policy framework whereby the government is obliged to provide a job to whoever wants one. Premised on a commitment to leave nobody behind during radical reshaping and transformation of the economy over such a short period of time, it has thus become a central pillar of many versions of the GND. In doing so, it attempts to provide both a mechanism for addressing those whose livelihoods would be adversely affected by a GND (for example, people working in carbon- intensive industries) while also strengthening worker power (the jobs created under a GND would be unionised and permit collective bargaining).

In the US version, as outlined by Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, a jobs guarantee programme is constructed under the remit of three key pledges: 1) the creation of millions of good, high-wage jobs; 2) the provision of unprecedented levels of security and prosperity for all people of the US; 3) counteraction of systemic forms of injustice. However, although a jobs guarantee could address some of the fundamental issues affecting workers today (precarious, low-skill and poorly paid work), it rarely gives any consideration to the relationship between sustainability and working time that is so prevalent in degrowth economics.

Similar issues play out in the interpretation of the GND in UK politics. In the 2019 general election, the Labour Party decided to recontextualise the GND under the banner of a ‘Green Industrial Revolution’. Putting aside the feasibility of a green industrialism and its ability to sustain ‘good’ jobs on a mass scale, we have to question the desirability of re-envisioning the working and social conditions associated with nineteenth-century industrialism. As we saw in the introduction, Engels’s investigation into the conditions of working-class life in Victorian England paints a bleak picture of social deprivation, inequality and extreme forms of exhaustion; industrialism tends towards overwork and exploitation.

There is a tendency, in short, exemplified by both the jobs guarantee and the green industrial strategy, for advocates of a GND to aggrandise labour and labouring within its green strategy. One example we can draw on here is Ann Pettifor’s The Case for the Green New Deal (2019), in which she argues that the GND economy will ‘be labour-intensive’, due to the shortfall created by switching from the highly efficient fossil fuel energy to less efficient renewable energy. She also goes on to detail how ‘activities that cannot be powered by the sun’s energy will be undertaken by human energy: labour.’ The British GND, she says, will ‘mobilise a “carbon army” of workers to under-take and maintain the transformation’.

Pettifor has aspirations that the work created by a GND will be meaningful due to the work being under-pinned with ‘skills, training and higher education’. As she says, ‘The promise of the GND is that the work-force will be rewarded with meaningful tasks; resourced with skills, training and higher education.

While no one can argue with the aim of the creation of ‘meaningful jobs’ or ‘gaining skills’, such terms sound hollow to the ears of those who have heard the promises of ‘employability’ and ‘upskilling’ since at least the New Labour years. Can we really expect the millions of newly-created GND jobs to be meaningful and fulfilling, somehow turning around centuries of standardisation, routinisation and man-agerial discipline that are the hallmarks of modern labour markets? Will work under a GND – whether it is rewilding landscapes, retrofitting homes, maintain-ing energy infrastructure and so on – not involve arduous, repetitive, standardised and managed work too? Following Smith, Keynes, Marx, Russell and the everyday experience of countless millions of workers over the past few centuries, we remain sceptical about plans that claim to be able to eliminate the pains of work simply by changing one’s profession and by having greater job security.

In short, the Green New Deal fails to tackle one of the key issues that remain when it comes to its vision of the new society. Critics such as Sharachandra Lele emphasise that without considerations of ‘multi- dimensional wellbeing’, Green New Deal positions are at risk of becoming single-minded programmes that maintain the spirit and practices of industrial-ism by prioritising merely mass job creation at best, and – at worst – GDP growth. Lest we forget, neither environmental sustainability nor job creation in and of themselves are sufficient for a ‘good society’. The key is to couple these with individual well-being (including freedom), collective equality and the ongoing sustainability of these things across generations.

Working less is both necessary and desirable

From our point of view, degrowth, post-growth and Green New Deal strategies all demonstrate the need to place working time reduction at the centre of any post-carbon political economy. And not only does such a reduction offer a relatively simple and effective way of reducing carbon emissions, it also provides a clear purpose and vision to the new economy we so badly need – one built on both environmental and social justice. Although the content of a Green New Deal is still being worked out, in both its international and national contexts, it offers the most promising political and economic means for achieving a post-carbon political economy beyond neoliberalism and perhaps beyond capitalism itself.

This, however, does not mean abandoning strategies of degrowth or post-growth economics, but instead incorporating them into the development of GND political programmes. In this sense, we must avoid simply understanding degrowth and GND approaches as a binary choice that renders their synthesis impossible.

Coalition-building across environmental economics and progressive political movements could help to articulate how transitioning to a post-carbon economy appeals to the ways in which capitalism perpetuates not only environmental injustice, but also social and economic injustices on a planetary or universal scale.

Although still in their infancy, some GND proposals are cottoning on to why working time reduction is both an environmental and social justice policy. The Green New Deal for Europe initiative (GNDE) proposes a (green) Public Works programme (in the same vein as the original New Deal) involving mass retrofitting of homes, investment in worker cooper-atives and in repair and reuse facilities. The millions of jobs required by such a transformation will, in the GNDE plan, involve shorter working weeks, acting as a pioneer for the rest of Europe’s labour markets to follow. This chimes with the arguments of various degrowth and post-growth economists: reducing working time could be a key strategy for redistributing wealth and avoiding mass unemployment.

Equally, it is inspiring to see prominent GND advocates Kate Aronoff and Thea Riofrancos pushing for reduced working time as part of their core set of GND demands. Although the authors still maintain the need for a jobs guarantee, they are well aware of the woes of the contemporary workplace – ‘the domination of the workplace still keeps most of us unfree’ – and see the obvious benefits of working time reduction being part of green political strategy:


Under a radical Green New Deal, with efficiency gains and automation controlled by people rather than bosses, we could meet everyone’s needs working far less than we currently do – and we should. Study after study shows that shorter workweeks lower carbon footprints – the shorter the better. To cut carbon, we need to work less and share the remaining work more evenly.

Instead of reducing the number of hours some people work in order to maintain jobs and wages (the conventional economic approach seen in times of capitalist recessions or depressions), work would be shared by reducing the working time of all workers, thereby expanding free time for all while avoiding unemployment or underemployment for some. Such a strategy would also help the necessary transition workers will need to make, from resource-intensive industries that will require winding down to more sustainable forms of work.

If we are to offer a new political economy – one that aims to deliver both social and environmental justice – a Green New Deal should not only promote job security and higher wages, but also reduce the amount of time we spend on the job: ‘Redefining work is crucial – but so is reducing it.’ The Green New Deal is an opportunity to recast the economy in a way that treats workers as complete, rounded human beings, with capacities far exceeding the drudgery and monotony of working life. Above all, a shorter working week imbues the GND with that key ingredient of any political project: hope and desire for a better life. There is a huge opportunity here that green movements have yet to properly exploit. Aronoff et al. once again:


Carbon-free leisure doesn’t just mean wholesome hobbies like hiking and gardening – we’re firm believers in eco-friendly hedonism. Give us time for long dinners with friends and plenty of organic wine; outdoor adventures enhanced by legal weed grown and harvested by well-paid agricultural workers; skinny-dipping in lakes that reflect moon and starlight.

Reducing the working week must be one of the key components of this post-carbon economy for the two reasons we have argued for: it is a low-cost, high-impact instrument for reducing carbon emissions and would demonstrably improve working and social life. In that sense, a GND with less work is both necessary and desirable.

- this excerpt is taken from Overtime: Why We Need A Shorter Working Week by Kyle Lewis and Will Stronge
Further reading:

COP26: a radical climate reading list. 10 books to help us radically fight in a world on fire.

The Climate Crisis and COVID-19: an activist focused reading list looking at what we need to do to move beyond these interconnected crises.

Environment and Ecology: Verso student reading (encorporating books looking at the climate crisis and political economy, the global green new deal, and more).

Radical Futures: books to help us re-imagine new futures.



Overtime
by Kyle Lewis and Will Stronge

Paperback
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144 pages / September 2021 / 9781788738682

“Overtime is a stirring call to action in the fight for a shorter working week. Crucially, Lewis and Stronge remind us that no victories for workers have ever been won without struggle. Overtime is a critical text for socialists seeking to understand how the world of work has changed, and how to imagine a world in which our lives are no longer dominated by it.”

– Grace Blakeley, author of The Corona Crash

This urgent and timely book shows what a shorter working week means in the context of capitalist economies and delves into the history of this idea as well as its political implications. Drawing on a range of political and economic thinkers, Lewis and Stronge argue that a shorter working week could build a more just and equitable society, one based on collective freedom and human potential, providing scope for the many to achieve a happier, more fulfilling life

Verso Books
09 November 2021

Was Steve Jobs the ultimate post-modernist?

Neoliberalism sought to revive capitalism with a seductive, populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism. Steve Jobs made it happen.

Umberto Eco, not entirely joking, argued that Apple resembled the Catholic church and had a Jesuitical genius for developing user-friendly interfaces to keep the faithful abased before its altar. Meanwhile, its main rival Microsoft was Protestant:

The Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ‘ratio studiorum’ of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the Kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation. DOS [Microsoft’s oper- ating system] is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revellers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

Certainly, Jobs envisaged the Apple Mac, which was launched in 1984, as salvation, if by salvation one meant deliverance from woeful technology. It had been the result of a small research team he headed at Apple in the early 1980s to produce what he called ‘the most insanely great computer’, featuring a revelatory gizmo called a mouse, by means of which users could navigate an unprecedentedly graphics-rich interface more easily than with mere keyboard commands.

The Apple Mac made its first public appearance during a commercial break in the 1984 Super Bowl, in an advertisement made by Ridley Scott, director of such nightmarish films as Blade Runner and Alien. Glum, grey workers (played by extras whom Scott, filming in the UK, had reportedly hired from Britain’s skinhead community) sat in a vast grey hall listening to a portentous Big Brother declaiming from a huge screen:


Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology – where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

But, as Big Brother set out his philosophy, there was a disturbance in the hall. A young, blonde woman started to run towards the screen carrying a sledgehammer. You might think she looks like an escapee from a Leni Riefenstahl movie about the unstoppable athletic prowess of the übermenschen; but that would be to miss copywriter Steve Hayden’s point. Unlike the glum drones she passed as she ran, this woman was in colour, with bright orange shorts and a white singlet bearing a line drawing of the Apple Mac on it. Four goons with nightsticks pursued our heroine, but they could not stop her hurling the sledgehammer into Big Brother’s telescreen.

The successful candidate for the role, Anya Major, was a model and discus-throwing athlete. In the ad, her sledgehammer hits the target. Suddenly, the gloom is bathed in healing light. ‘On January 24th’, another voiceover announced, this time not from the sinister Big Brother, ‘Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like [Orwell’s] Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ The screen faded to black as the voice-over ended, and the rainbow Apple logo appeared.

A few months after the ad was broadcast, George Orwell’s estate sent a cease-and-desist letter to Apple and the Chiat/Day advertising agency, claiming that the commercial breached copy-right. It had little effect. Indeed, the commercial has since been hailed as a masterpiece, winning many awards and in 1995 topping Advertising Age’s chart of the best commercials.

One of the reasons it won so many awards is that it tapped into contemporary American fears that computers could enslave the masses and invade their privacy. A Harris poll, taken the previous September, found that 68 per cent of Americans believed ‘the use of computers had to be sharply restricted in the future in order to preserve privacy’. At the time, the New York Times reported, the Internal Revenue Service had begun testing the use of computerised lifestyle information, such as the types of cars people owned, to track down errant taxpayers, while an FBI advisory committee recommended that the bureau computer system include data on people who, though not charged with wrongdoing, had associated with drug traffickers.

In this context, Apple’s Super Bowl advertisement effectively suggested that large computers, such as those manufactured by International Business Machines (IBM), then the dominant computer maker, were part of an Orwellian surveillance state, while personal computers manufactured by Apple were a revolution against such computerised Big Brothers. In a 1985 Playboy interview, Steve Jobs cast IBM as the great enemy of innovation, and framed the battle as nothing less than a battle of light versus dark in the race for the future. ‘If, for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years’, he said. ‘Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.’

Some experts were sceptical. ‘The notion that a personal computer will set you free is appalling’, Joseph Weizenbaum, computer science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the New York Times. ‘The ad seems to say the remedy to too much technology is more technology. It’s like selling someone a pistol to defend himself in the event of nuclear war.’ What the Apple Mac represented, at least for its enthusiasts, was the potential for a democratic social revolution that would undermine state power and harness the power of the people. ‘The Apple ad expresses a potential of small computers’, one communications expert told the New York Times. ‘This potential may not automatically flow from the company’s product. But if enough people held a shared intent, grass-roots electronic bulletin boards (through which computer users share messages) might result in better balancing of political power.’

Steve Jobs was an unlikely person to revolutionise the computer industry. He was a college dropout who visited India seeking spiritual enlightenment from Zen masters, and cited as his leading intellectual influence a venerable West Coast hippie. His parents, Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian immigrant Abdulfattah Jandali, put Steve up for adoption not long after his birth in San Francisco in 1955. He was adopted by used-car salesman Paul Jobs and his wife Clara. Raised in Cupertino, California, Jobs met Steve Wozniak while at high school. Wozniak was a technical wizard with whom Jobs collaborated on making and selling what they marketed as ‘blue boxes’ – gizmos that users could use to piggy-back on phone lines in order to make free (and illegal) calls.

After dropping out of college in 1972, Jobs worked as an engineer at videogames maker Atari, where he was relegated to night shifts because of his reportedly poor hygiene. After returning from India, where he had received guidance from a Zen Buddhist master, Jobs met up again with Wozniak, whom he urged to quit his job so that the pair could make computers.

Apple Computers was born in Jobs’s parents’ garage in 1976. The pair named their first product, a version of Wozniak’s circuit board, Apple I, and sold it for $666.66 – a sum that allegedly had no diabolical numerological significance (Wozniak just liked to repeat numbers). Apple II was a home computer featuring colour monitor and keyboard, both unusual at the time. In 1980, when Apple went public, the twenty-five-year-old Jobs made an estimated $217 million.

There was more to Steve Jobs than hippie innovator, however. He loved to launch his new products wearing a black turtleneck and blue jeans, as if to say: ‘I’m not a suit, and we don’t make products for suits.’ On one hand, Jobs was performing the role of countercultural icon; but, on the other, he turned the release of a new gadget into a quasi-religious event, with Apple acolytes lining up like pilgrims at Lourdes, each hoping to be cured not of some infirmity, but of a desire that could only be assuaged by shelling out for a 64GB iPod or an iPhone equipped with a voice-activated assistant.

Umberto Eco was right – Apple was Catholic. Indeed, that thought was picked up by Byung-Chul Han, who would later describe another of Jobs’s inventions, the iPhone, as a modern rosary that is handheld confessional and effective surveillance apparatus in one. ‘Both the rosary and the smartphone serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control’, Han explained. ‘Power operates more effectively when it delegates surveillance to discrete individuals.’

In this sense, not only was Steve Jobs a brilliant innovator; he was also thoroughly post-modern. Jobs’s post-modernism consisted in making us desire our own domination. He was selling conformity masquerading as personal liberation, and Apple was monetising what appeared countercultural.

This astute merger of cunning self-presentation and corporate branding reached its apogee with Apple’s ‘Think Different’ ad campaign, which ran from 1997 to 2002 and responded implicitly to IBM’s slogan ‘Think’. The ad yoked together figures as disparate as Einstein and Gandhi to promote the idea of individual genius liberating humans from their shackles. Jobs, ran the implicit suggestion, was the latest in a historical line of liberators – though the ad-busters who scrawled over Apple’s billboards thought otherwise. For them, Jobs wasn’t a liberator, but a great dictator.

When he died in 2011, Jobs’s legacy was ironically marked in Hong Kong. Demonstrators wearing Steve Jobs masks and dressed in black turtlenecks and jeans pretended to present new iPads outside an Apple store. In fact, they were protesting against conditions at Foxconn factories in China, where Apple products are made. Steve Jobs’s legacy was not just cool products for countercultural hipsters, but anti-suicide netting beneath the windows of dormitories for exploited Foxconn workers.

Jobs’s genius consisted not just in founding Apple and revolutionising personal technology, but in creating a liberation theology that, in the next few decades, converted many into believing computers and phones could deliver power to the people. That article of faith depended not just on hardware like Apple Macs, but on what came to be called the internet.

The internet was conceived not as a tool that could give power to the people, but as a means of ensuring the state could function in the event of nuclear war. Jobs beguiled his customers with the purported countercultural cachet of his products. They seemed to promise an end to oppressive surveillance, while in fact not only making it more subtle and effective, but also making capitalists very rich. This, to put it mildly, is not what Steve Jobs’s hippie mentors had had in mind. Neoliberalism sought to revive capitalism with a seductive, populist, market-based culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism. Steve Jobs made it happen.

Social critic Rebecca Solnit argued that Apple’s Super Bowl ad of 1984 did not so much herald a new era of liberation as an age of unprecedented conformity and oppression:

I want to yell at that liberatory young woman with her sledge- hammer: ‘Don’t do it!’ Apple is not different. That industry is going to give rise to innumerable forms of triviality and misogyny, to the concentration of wealth and the dispersal of mental concentration. To suicidal, underpaid Chinese factory workers whose reality must be like that of the shuffling workers in the commercial. If you think a crowd of people staring at one screen is bad, wait until you have created a world in which billions of people stare at their own screens even while walking, driving, eating in the company of friends – all of them eternally elsewhere.


- the above is an excerpt taken from Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern by Stuart Jeffries, a radical new history of a dangerous idea.
29 October 2021

France bans wild circus animals and mink farms


Consigned to history: The new law will ban use of lions such as these of the Amar Circus in 1946 Paris. (AFP/-)

Anne Pascale REBOUL and Adam PLOWRIGHT
Thu, November 18, 2021, 

The French parliament voted Thursday to end wild animals being used in live circus shows and outlawed mink farming, in new animal-rights legislation hailed as a step forward by campaigners.

Performances of wild animals such as lions, tigers or bears will be prohibited in two years, and owning them outlawed in seven years, under the wide-ranging law that has been under debate since 2020.

The new regulations, once signed into law by President Emmanuel Macron, will also ban live dolphin shows and mink farming, meaning the country's last mink producer will close.


Macron's centrist Republic on the Move (LREM) party called the legislation "a historic step in the animal rights combat," while former actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot welcomed "a major advance".

Circus owners denounced it, however, while some campaigners said it did not go far enough.

As well as the measures targeting circuses, the new law will raise the maximum penality for mistreating animals to up to five years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros ($85,000), and will tighten restrictions on the sale of pets.

Loic Dombreval, the LREM co-sponsor of the law, conceded that other controversial issues had not been included within the scope of the legislation, which won cross-party support in both houses of parliament.

"There will inevitably come a day when... we will debate sensitive issues such as hunting, such as bull-fighting, or some animal-rearing practices," said the lawmaker, who is also a veterinarian.

- Broad support -

Polls show that a vast majority of French people support the ban on wild circus animals, and dozens of cities and towns around the country already bar them.

Public opinion in Europe has moved decisively against animal circuses, once a popular form of family entertainment, following revelations about cruel treatment and campaigning from rights groups.

Several events in France in recent years have added momentum for the ban, including the death of a sickly performing bear called Mischa in 2019 that had been rescued from animal trainers, as well as the shooting of an escaped tiger in Paris in 2017.

The tigress, named Mevy, escaped from her enclosure at the Cirque Bormann-Moreno and began roaming the streets of the French capital before being gunned down by her owner in the name of public safety.

France lags behind around 20 European countries that have either banned or heavily restricted the use of animals for entertainment already.

- 'Arbitrary law' -

Environmentalists and more radical animal rights groups had wanted the new law to improve the conditions inside industrial animal farms.

The group L214, which had sought protections for the "more than a billion intensely farmed animals" in France, welcomed the legislation but said it "lacked courage".

The group has made a name for itself in France by sending its activists undercover into abattoirs and then publishing videos of the often shocking scenes of animals being mistreated or cut up while still alive.

Farms that make foie gras pate in France -- which force-feed birds such as geese and ducks to artificially bloat their livers -- have also long been targeted by campaigners, but their operations will not be changed by the new law.

Hunting is staunchly defended by supporters as a traditional rural pastime that is essential to keep animal populations under control, while bull-fighting remains part of local culture in some southern French towns.

The 120 circus owners in France are likely to protest against the new restrictions and have warned that some animals might end up abandoned.

"It's an arbitrary law because there are not mistreated animals in our circuses," William Kerwich, head of the circus animal trainers' union, told AFP.

He said there would be a reaction from his members on Monday, and a legal appeal.

The new legislation also bans the use of wild animals in television shows, nightclubs and private parties.

The French fur industry has fought a dogged rearguard action in recent years against the ban on mink farms and luxury fashion houses going fur-free.

reb-adp/js/har

Poll: Americans' support for death penalty remains steady at 5-decade low

Nov. 18 (UPI) -- Americans' support of the death penalty has remained relatively unchanged -- and at a five-decade low -- over the past four years, a Gallup poll released Thursday indicates.

The survey found that 54% of American adults favor the use of the death penalty as a punishment for those convicted of murder, down from 55% in 2020. That figure has remained mostly steady since 2017, when there was a 5% drop from 2016.

Support is at its lowest point since 1972, when 50% of Americans said they favored the death penalty.

Among Republicans, 77% favor the death penalty, while 55% of Independents and 34% of Democrats favor it. By age, 41% of people 18-34 favor the death penalty, while 59% of people age 35 and older favor it.

Gallup has been asking Americans if they're in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder since 1936. The highest support was in 1994, when 80% favored it, and the lowest was in 1966, when 42% favored it.

The death penalty has lower support when Gallup asks a similar, but separate, question -- whether Americans support the death penalty when life imprisonment without possibility of parole is offered as an alternative. In 2019, the last time that version of the question was asked, 60% preferred life imprisonment while 36% preferred the death penalty.

The waning support for the death penalty has coincided with a similar decline in executions carried out each year. There were 17 executions held in 2020, down from 22 held in 2019 and the fewest of any year since 1991. The judicial system imposed 18 new death sentences last year, the fewest in more than four decades, according to a December 2020 report by the Death Penalty Information Center.

While the COVID-19 pandemic was responsible for delaying some executions and death penalty-eligible trials, the DPIC said the nation was on pace for a near-record low even before the disruption caused by the pandemic.

"At the end of the year, more states and counties had moved to end or reduce death-penalty usage, fewer new death sentences were imposed than in any prior year since capital punishment resumed in the U.S. in 1970s, and states carried out fewer executions than at any time in the past 37 years," DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham said at the time the report was released.

Gallup surveyed 823 adults between Oct. 1-19 with a 4% margin of error.

World Athletics sticking to testosterone-cutting regulations - Coe

Thu, 18 November 2021,

Burundi's Francine Niyonsaba was barred from running her favoured 800m after falling foul of World Athletics regulations (AFP/STEFAN WERMUTH)

World Athletics will stick by its own "mature" regulations on intersex and transgender athletes, president Sebastian Coe said Thursday, after Olympic chiefs failed to nail down a uniform position and passed responsibility to individual federations.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) said Tuesday that it would not set competition criteria for intersex and transgender people, instead asking individual sports' governing federations to act as they see fit.

The IOC has struggled to establish a uniform position after a two-year consultation with more than 250 participants which included the publication of a framework on the issue.


"I read the framework document," Coe said at the end of a two-day World Athletics Congress.

"It's very much in alignment with everything that we believe very strongly in: the principle of fairplay, open competition."

World Athletics has introduced controversial rules governing testosterone levels.

Female athletes like Burundi's Francine Niyonsaba and South African Caster Semenya who have unusually high levels of testosterone, which gives them added strength, are prohibited from competing in races between 400m and a mile unless they undergo treatment to reduce the levels.

"I'm very happy that we have our mature regulations that are in place... our regulations will remain in place," Coe said.

"It's very important that we follow the research that we've done. We've got longitudinal work that now goes back nearly 10 years.

"The fundamental principle here is about fairness and inclusion and the regulations themselves were upheld by the Court of Arbitration (for Sport)" which said they were "seen as necessary, reasonable and proportionate and that appeal was dealt with by the Swiss Federal Tribunal".

"We share the need to make sure that everything is within the framework of human rights and we're very comfortable that that's exactly where we are," concluded Coe.

The IOC said it was seeking to promote a "safe and welcoming environment for everyone involved in elite-level competition".

"It must be within the remit of each sport and its governing body to determine how an athlete may be at a disproportionate advantage compared with their peers."

The IOC said most high-level competitions are staged with men's and women's categories.

It added it wanted these categories to be fair and safe, and that athletes would not be excluded solely on the basis of their transgender identity or sex variations.

lp/mw

Racism target cricketer Rafiq apologises for anti-Semitic messages

Thu, November 18, 2021, 

Former Yorkshire player Azeem Rafiq has admitted sending anti-Semitic messages when he was 19 (AFP/Handout)

Azeem Rafiq, a former English cricketer who this week said he had lost his career to racism, admitted Thursday he had sent anti-Semitic messages as a teenager.

The Times newspaper uncovered messages sent to former Warwickshire and Leicestershire player Ateeq Javid, in which Rafiq is seen to make disparaging comments about an unnamed Jewish person.

Rafiq, tweeting about those remarks on Thursday, said: "I have gone back to check my account and it is me -- I have absolutely no excuses.

"I am ashamed of this exchange and have now deleted it so as not to cause further offence," the 30-year-old Pakistan-born cricketer added.

"I was 19 at the time and I hope and believe I am a different person today. I am incredibly angry at myself and I apologise to the Jewish community and everyone who is rightly offended by this."

Rafiq, a Muslim, was widely praised for giving a disturbing account of the racism he suffered during two spells with Yorkshire to a parliamentary committee on Tuesday having previously said the abuse had led him to contemplate taking his own life.

The former off-spinner, whose case has led to further revelations at other county clubs, later said he expected the "floodgates" to open in a crisis that threatens to engulf English cricket.

Rafiq told the committee: "Do I believe I lost my career to racism? Yes, I do."

He also mentioned a number of former teammates, including ex-England internationals Matthew Hoggard, Tim Bresnan and Gary Ballance, the latter still at Yorkshire, had used racial slurs towards him.

The fallout for Yorkshire over the scandal has been devastating, with sponsors making a mass exodus, resignations from top administrators and the club suspended from hosting lucrative international matches.

But Rafiq warned that the county could not move forward until head coach Andrew Gale and director of cricket Martyn Moxon had left the Headingley-based club.

Gale is himself currently suspended pending investigations over a historical anti-Semitic tweet, with former England batsman Moxon signed off with a stress-related illness.

Rafiq accused Gale of constant racial abuse and Moxon of systematic bullying.

jdg/nr

Tamil Rights Group takes Fight for Justice to the International Criminal Court

The Tamil Rights Group (TRG) is seeking Justice for Eelam Tamils at the International Criminal Court (ICC). The group, together with the Tamil Refugee Assistance Network (TRAN) has submitted an application requesting a preliminary investigation to crimes committed by Sri Lankan officials, including deportation, and persecution.

The application is under article 15 of the Rome Statue in the International Criminal Court (ICC), which deals with aggression on a state level, including war crimes . "Twelve years have passed since the United Nations first started trying to hold Sri Lanka accountable for its gross violations of human rights, and international humanitarian laws," Tamil Rights Spokesperson Katpana Nagendra said. The complaints date to the end of the 26-year long civil war. Approximately 25,000 people were internally displaced according to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR).

"The current regime has not only unilaterally withdrawn from the United Nations Human Rights (UNHC) Council Resolutions that the state itself co-sponsored in 2015, but President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has also publicly vowed to protect the armed forces from any domestic or international accountability measures," Nagendra added. The application argues that ICC would have jurisdiction to investigate crimes against humanity based on a precedent set in a previous ruling on case between Myanmar/Bangladesh, where Myanmar was not a party to the statue, while Bangladesh was. They're arguing that the crime of deportation ends at the final destination. Many Eelam Tamil refugees have fled to Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada, which are all countries that are party to the Rome Statue

The Tamil Rights Group are being represented by David Matas, and Sarah Teich. 

 To read the full communication visit their website

Laura Steiner, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Milton Reporter, Milton Reporter