It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
It was long thought these fossils came from an eagle. Turns out they belong to the only known vulture species from Australia
The Conversation July 21, 2022 The extinct species may have been a relative of the living Griffon Vulture (pictured). Shutterstock
In 1905, a fragment of a fossil wing bone discovered near the Kalamurina Homestead, South Australia, was described as an extinct eagle and named Taphaetus lacertosus, meaning “powerful grave eagle”.
Now research published by myself and mycolleagues can reveal this species was no eagle at all. It was an “Old World” vulture, which we have renamed Cryptogyps lacertosus, or “powerful hidden vulture”.
This is the first time one of these scavenging raptors has been found to have lived in Australia. Living more than tens of thousands of years ago, we believe Cryptogyps likely died out with ancient Australia’s megafauna. There’s much about the species we’ve yet to find out.
Here’s me at the Flinders University palaeontology lab, holding the fossil vulture tarsus (left) and a tarsus of a living vulture species (right). Author provided A puzzling absence
Vultures are birds of prey that feed almost exclusively on decaying flesh. They play a vital role in their ecosystems by speeding up the consumption of carcasses. In this way, they assist in redistributing nutrients, and help limit the spread of diseases.
They can be divided into two groups. “New World” vultures inhabit North and South America and belong to their own distinct family. “Old World” vultures are found in Africa, Europe and Asia, and belong to the same family as eagles and hawks.
Considering they’re so widespread today, it’s surprising vultures long appeared absent from Australia. It’s even stranger when you look at the fossil record across South-East Asia, where vulture fossils have been found as far south as the Indonesian island of Flores. Surely they could have flown a little further?
What’s more, the Australian environment would have been well-suited to support vultures until about 50,000 years ago. Back then, megafaunal marsupials were widespread and abundant across the continent, and would have provided plentiful carcasses for scavengers. The shape of a scavenger
We aren’t the first to consider there might be vultures in Australia’s fossil record. Other palaeontologists have previously suggested some Australian bird fossils could belong to vultures, and the Kalamurina “eagle” was one such example.
My colleagues and I wanted to find out if this really was the case, and so we began comparing the fossil bones of Cryptogyps to a wide range of living birds of prey, including vultures.
Being scavengers, vultures have a very different musculature and bone structure to eagles. This fact proved to be crucial in confirming Cryptogyps lacertosus was indeed a vulture.
A silhouette size comparison of a Wedge-tailed Eagle (left) and Cryptogyps lacertosus (right), and tarsi comparisons of both below.
Ellen Mather, Wedge-tailed Eagle silhouette derived from photo by Vicki Nunn.
The material used in our research included the original wing bone from the Kalamurina Homestead, two identical wing bone fragments from the Wellington Caves in New South Wales, and two “tarsi” (lower leg bones) – one from Wellington Caves and the other from Leaena’s Breath Cave in Western Australia. All of these bones are thought to belong to Cryptogyps.
Close examination of the bones, and comparison to eagles and vultures from around the world revealed their muscle scars and structure are more vulture-like than eagle-like, especially for the tarsi. This strongly indicates they belonged to a scavenger.
To further test this, we placed the fossils in an evolutionary tree with other birds of prey. Our results confirmed what the comparison suggested: Cryptogyps was indeed a vulture, and potentially a close relative of the Griffon Vulture found across Europe and Asia. The life and death of a species
Based on the leg bones, we can infer Cryptogyps didn’t actively hunt and grab prey with powerful talons. Rather, it would have scavenged dead animals as vultures do now.
At this point in time, we don’t have enough of the skeleton to know exactly what Cryptogyps lacertosus looked like, or what it ate.
It could have been a social species, gathering in large flocks around the corpses of megafauna such as Diprotodon or Protemnodon. Or perhaps it was a solitary bird, searching and feeding alone, or in pairs. It may have fed on the soft insides of the body, or may have preferred the tougher muscle and skin.
Gaining this information will require more discoveries in the future. What isn’t in question, however, is that like all vultures today Cryptogyps lacertosus would have played an important role in ecosystem health.
Fossils of Cryptogyps are believed to date from the Middle to Late Pleistocene, somewhere between 770,000 and 40,000 years ago. Its extinction was very likely related to the demise of Australia’s megafauna around 60,000–40,000 years ago.
As large-bodied animals died off, the supply of carcasses scavengers need to survive would have dwindled significantly. Starvation would have become common, breeding attempts less successful and eventually the total population would have fallen below the threshold needed to survive.
Other more generalist raptors such as Wedge-tailed Eagles and Black Kites subsequently filled the reduced scavenging niche.
The Wedge-tailed Eagle is the largest bird of prey in Australia today. Shutterstock
Australia has the sobering distinction of being the only continent to lose its vultures entirely. Sadly, around half of all living vultures today are endangered and under threat of extinction.
And the consequences of this decline have been dire, including increased disease transmission in both animal and human populations, potential impacts on the nutrient cycle, and the restructuring of ecosystems. Ellen K. Mather, Adjunct associate lecturer, Flinders University
Raw chicken baits attracting vulture bees in Costa Rica. Credit: Quinn McFrederick/UCR
A little-known species of tropical bee has evolved an extra tooth for biting flesh and a gut that more closely resembles that of vultures rather than other bees.
Typically, bees don't eat meat. However, a species of stingless bee in the tropics has evolved the ability to do so, presumably due to intense competition for nectar.
"These are the only bees in the world that have evolved to use food sources not produced by plants, which is a pretty remarkable change in dietary habits," said UC Riverside entomologist Doug Yanega.
Honeybees, bumblebees, and stingless bees have guts that are colonized by the same five core microbes. "Unlike humans, whose guts change with every meal, most bee species have retained these same bacteria over roughly 80 million years of evolution," said Jessica Maccaro, a UCR entomology doctoral student.
Given their radical change in food choice, a team of UCR scientists wondered whether the vulture bees' gut bacteria differed from those of a typical vegetarian bee. They differed quite dramatically, according to a study the team published today in the American Society of Microbiologists' journal mBio.
To track these changes, the researchers went to Costa Rica, where these bees are known to reside. They set up baits—fresh pieces of raw chicken suspended from branches and smeared with petroleum jelly to deter ants.
The baits successfully attracted vulture bees and related species that opportunistically feed on meat for their protein. Normally, stingless bees have baskets on their hind legs for collecting pollen. However, the team observed carrion-feeding bees using those same structures to collect the bait. "They had little chicken baskets," said Quinn McFrederick, a UCR entomologist.
For comparison, the team also collected stingless bees that feed both on meat and flowers, and some that feed only on pollen. On analyzing the microbiomes of all three bee types, they found the most extreme changes among exclusive meat-feeders.
"The vulture bee microbiome is enriched in acid-loving bacteria, which are novel bacteria that their relatives don't have," McFrederick said. "These bacteria are similar to ones found in actual vultures, as well as hyenas and other carrion-feeders, presumably to help protect them from pathogens that show up on carrion."
One of the bacteria present in vulture bees is Lactobacillus, which is in a lot of humans' fermented food, like sourdough. They were also found to harbor Carnobacterium, which is associated with flesh digestion.
"It's crazy to me that a bee can eat dead bodies. We could get sick from that because of all the microbes on meat competing with each other and releasing toxins that are very bad for us," Maccaro said.
The researchers noted that these bees are unusual in a number of ways. "Even though they can't sting, they're not all defenseless, and many species are thoroughly unpleasant," Yanega said. "They range from species that are genuinely innocuous to many that bite, to a few that produce blister-causing secretions in their jaws, causing the skin to erupt in painful sores."
In addition, though they feed on meat, their honey is reportedly still sweet and edible. "They store the meat in special chambers that are sealed off for two weeks before they access it, and these chambers are separate from where the honey is stored," Maccaro said.
The research team is planning to delve further into vulture bee microbiomes, hoping to learn about the genomes of all bacteria as well as fungi and viruses in their bodies.
Ultimately, they hope to learn more about the larger role that microbes play in overall bee health.
"The weird things in the world are where a lot of interesting discoveries can be found," McFrederick said. "There's a lot of insight there into the outcomes of natural selection."Newly identified bacteria may help bees nourish their young
More information:Laura L. Figueroa et al, Why Did the Bee Eat the Chicken? Symbiont Gain, Loss, and Retention in the Vulture Bee Microbiome,mBio(2021).DOI: 10.1128/mBio.02317-21
Hidden chamber found in Vanguard Cave – part of Gorham's Cave Complex in Gibraltar
Vanguard Cave. Credit: Gipmetal77 modded by Victuallers/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0
A team of researchers with the Gibraltar National Museum has found a hidden chamber in one of the caves that make up Gorham's Cave Complex in Gibraltar. They have posted a press statement on their website describing what they have found in the chamber thus far.
Prior research has shown that bothmodern humansand Neanderthals lived in parts of Gorham's Cave Complex in Gibraltar, though not at the same time. Both groups left behind a treasure trove of artifacts, including tools, butchered remains of animals and fossils. For that reason, the site has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2012, a team at the Gibraltar National Museum studied the caves. As part of that mission, they sought chambers they believed were hidden in the caves. Such chambers are common in caves formed close to the sea due to environmental factors. Over the course of nearly a decade, the search for hidden chambers came up empty. Then, as one group was searching the back of Vanguard Cave, they found evidence of soft sediment, which they believed could be hiding achamber. Some digging proved their hunch to be correct; behind the sediment plug, they found a large chamber.
The chamber was located higher up than the cave and was approximately 13 meters long. The amount of sediment in the plug suggested that the chamber had been sealed for tens of thousands of years. On its floor, they found the remains of a Griffon vulture, a hyena and a lynx, animals fully capable of climbing up into the chamber. But they also found the shell of a dog whelk—a type of sea snail, which the researchers note would not have been able to climb up into the chamber. This, they note, suggests something carried it up there. The team also found scratches on the walls of the chamber, though they were unable to discover their source.
Initial estimates suggest Neanderthals likely were living in the area during the time the chamber was open, though the researchers have not yet found any evidence. They plan to begin digging in the chamber floor to see what other evidence might be found.
The discovery of a chamber at least 40,000 years old in a Gibraltar cave previously inhabited by Neanderthals could lead to groundbreaking new finds about their lifestyles, according to researchers.
Archaeologists from the Gibraltar National Museum have been working since 2012 to find potential chambers and passages blocked by sediment in Vanguard Cave -- part of the UNESCO World Heritage site Gorham's Cave Complex.
Last month, they found the 13-meter (42-foot) deep chamber at the back of the cave, along with a number of discoveries including lynx, hyaena and griffon vulture remains, as well as scratch marks on the walls made by an unidentified carnivore.
Clive Finlayson, director and chief scientist at the Gibraltar National Museum, told CNN Tuesday the most impressive find was perhaps a large whelk, or a marine mollusc, because it suggested the newly discovered parts of the cave had been inhabited by Neanderthals.
"The whelk is at the back of that cave... it's probably about 20 meters from the beach," he said. "Somebody took that whelk in there... over 40,000 years ago. So that's already given me a hint that people have been in there, which is not perhaps too surprising. Those people, because of the age, can only be Neanderthals."
Neanderthals, heavily built Stone Age hominins that disappeared about 40,000 years ago, lived in Europe long before Homo sapiens arrived.
Finlayson said the team had also found the milk tooth of a Neanderthal around 4 years old, and hypothesized that they could have been dragged into the cave by a hyaena.
Entering the cave for the first time gave Finlayson "goosebumps," he said, adding it was one of the most exciting discoveries of his career -- unique for the quality of the preservation and the possibilities of new information it presented.
"How many times in your life are you going to find something that nobody's been into for 40,000 years? It only comes once in your lifetime, I think."
Evidence of an earthquake around 4,000 years ago was also visible due to a change in ice formations, with a previously formed ice curtain cut off and stalagmites growing under it.
The discovery is only the first stage of a long excavation, and Finlayson told CNN the chamber was only the roof of the cave, with a great deal of work remaining to uncover the rest of it.
"As we dig, it's only going to get bigger and bigger and bigger," he said. "So the chances are we have an enormous cave there. And as we go down there may even be so passages. So it's extremely exciting."
Finlayson said the remaining work would take decades if not longer, and that he hoped to use technology to take DNA samples from the sediment and uncover more clues of Neanderthal lifestyles, including burial rituals -- and potentially find footprints too.
‘Our culture is dying’: vulture shortage threatens Zoroastrian burial rites
Inadvertent poisoning of scavengers across Indian subcontinent is forcing some communities to give up ancient custom
Sonia Gulzeb Sat 4 May 2024
THE GUARDIAN
Traditional Zoroastrian burial rites are becoming increasingly impossible to perform because of the precipitous decline of vultures in India, Iran and Pakistan.
For millennia, Parsi communities have traditionally disposed of their dead in structures called dakhma, or “towers of silence”. These circular, elevated edifices are designed to prevent the soil, and the sacred elements of earth, fire and water, from being contaminated by corpses.
Bodies are placed on top of the towers, where they decompose, while vultures and other scavengers eat the flesh on the bones. After being bleached by the sun and wind for up to a year, the bones are collected in an ossuary pit at the centre of the tower. Lime hastens their gradual disintegration, and the remaining material, along with rainwater runoff, filters through coal and sand before it is washed out to sea.
“We are no longer able to fulfil our traditions,” Hoshang Kapadia, a Karachi resident in his 80s, said. “We’ve lost a way of life, our culture.”
Kapadia explained that the purpose behind the Parsi burial customs was to “take less and give more” to the world. “The whole idea is not to pollute the earth,” he said
Vultures gather on a Parsi ‘tower of silence’, circa 1880. Offering one’s deceased body to the birds is regarded as the devout Zoroastrian’s ultimate act of charity.
Photograph: Sean Sexton/Getty Images
Karachi, which is built upon a river ecosystem on the western bank of the Indus River delta, is home to only 800 Parsis out of a population of 20 million people. The city has just two remaining towers of silence, both barely functional.
Another Karachi Parsi, Shirin, said: “The vulture’s mystical eye is believed to aid the soul’s cosmic transition, and offering one’s deceased body to the birds is regarded as the devout Zoroastrian’s ultimate act of charity.”
“The massive urbanisation and environmental changes in Karachi have led us to revisit our burial rites, as dakhmas were usually built on top of hills in locations distant from urban areas.
“Our tradition is dying. Our culture is dying in a time of increasing environmental change.”
Unlike many scavengers, vultures are classified as “obligate”. This means they do not opportunistically switch between predation and scavenging, as their mammalian counterparts do, but rely solely on locating and feeding on animal carcasses.
In recent decades, vultures have been dying in large numbers across the Indian subcontinent, primarily due to inadvertent poisoning with the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, which is extensively administered to cattle in India and Pakistan.
When these cattle die, vultures feed on their carcasses and ingest the drug, which causes painful swelling, inflammation, and ultimately kidney failure and death in vultures. Research in 2007 estimated that about 97% of the three main vulture species in India and the surrounding region had disappeared.
Bombay, the Parsee Repository for their Dead, an illustration from 1722.
Photograph: CPA Media Pte Ltd/Alamy
The Parsi community in India is exploring captive vulture breeding and the use of “solar concentrators" to expedite the decomposition of bodies. As the solar concentrators only work in clear weather, some have been forced to opt for burial instead.
Kapadia said: “Parsis in Karachi [are forced to] opt for alternative methods of disposal, such as cremation or burial in designated Parsi cemeteries, as the two towers of silence in Karachi are barely functional”. He added that when vulture numbers declined at the towers of silence, some community members suggested creating a small captive group of vultures in an aviary to continue the traditional practice.
To prevent the extinction of vulture species, scientists have recommended banning the use of diclofenac in livestock, a move so far taken by India, Pakistan and Nepal. Captive-bred vultures have also been released into the wild in India in a bid to boost the threatened populations.
Friday, May 24, 2024
‘Let’s challenge the false economic narratives’ – Grace Blakeley & Jeremy Corbyn
You have a very powerful collective organisation at the top of society and then an isolated, atomised mass of people everywhere else… The alternative is to say lets get together and do this ourselves – let’s join in and participate in political movements.
Grace Blakeley
Ben Hayes reports from the latest Arise Festival event ‘Jeremy Corbyn and Grace Blakeley in Conversation’ held to celebrate the launch of Grace’s new book: Vulture Capitalism – Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom.
Over 2,500 people joined an online forum hosted by Arise: A Festival of Left Ideas between economist Grace Blakeley and MP for Islington North Jeremy Corbyn to discuss her book Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom. Introduced by Arise’s Matt Willgress, attendees to the event reported tuning in from 57 different constituencies and 9 countries across the world.
Blakeley outlined how she sought to ‘challenge some of the biggest false narratives around economics’ with the book, including that socialism is purely defined by large state involvement in the economy and that capitalism can fundamentally be relied upon to deliver freedom. Emphasising the importance of analysing whose interests the state serves to understanding an economy, she pointed to an example of multinational corporation in aerospace manufacturer Boeing, arguing that its ties to the US government and military illustrated how many of those who profit the most from the American economy receive significant help along the way. Blakeley also reflected on the role of culture in maintaining the existing system- pointing out that whilst those in power keep it “through cooperation and class solidarity”, whilst promoting “individualism and division” to the majority- and called for an alternative base of pressure to be built up representing their interests.
Corbyn echoed this critique of the US economy’s relationship to the concept of freedom, and pointed to a domestic example of the post-privatisation water industry as an example of a “toxic” link between the government and large private firms. Praising Vulture Capitalism for “calling into question many of the common economic assumptions”, he called for socialists to build greater clarity on the model that they are seeking to develop. Corbyn also shared the emphasis on the role of culture in both maintaining and changing existing orders, highlighting the potential role of the trade union movement and its profile in wider society to “help build a world of solidarity” instead of “worshipping individual wealth and sharp elbows”.
Questions raised by those watching online covered topics including the government’s promotion of Freeports and Special Economic Zones, the economic policy of a likely Labour government, how the left can get its arguments out in the media, building participation in mass organisations, the 1976 Lucas Plan, international co-operation, democratic reforms, and building a culture of unity.
Blakeley argued that the creation of Freeports and Special Economic Zones illustrated how freedom for capital is prioritised above all else, and also emphasised the importance of understanding imperialism to any serious economic analysis. Calling for the left to throw itself into institutions based on collective interests, she warned that without a movement for positive change rooted in communities the growth of reactionary politics was likely.
Corbyn slammed Freeports as “being based on the illusion of development when in reality they represent an abdication of responsibility”, and called for “a message based on hope”- reflecting on how during his time as Leader of the Labour Party he aimed to make it a “community-based force”. Noting the successes of the social movement model of Brazilian trade unionism in defeating the Bolsonaro government, he raised the possibility of calling ‘People’s Forums’ in developing a sense of shared interest and participation. After commending Blakeley’s book for “giving us a greater understanding of the situation”, he concluded by stating that it was “our job to turn it around”. You can watch the full event below.
You can watch the full event on YouTube here or listen back on the Arise Festival podcast here.
You can buy Grace Blakeley’s book, Vulture Capitalism, here.
It seems that the Harpocrites while extolling their increase in funding development aid, forgot that Afghanistan is nowhere near Africa except perhaps in the dictionary.
All the recent focus on aid levels, however, could hide the fact that Canadian aid also needs to be made more effective, ie, it should be spent on poverty alleviation. Harper has mandated Afghanistan to become the largest recipient of Canada's largesse. This led world-renowned development economist Jeffrey Sachs to complain, "…the money going to Afghanistan and Iraq is really not development aid but security spending."
The G8 countries are spending $120 billion annually to deal with conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they can't find half that amount to deal with HIV/AIDS, Lewis said.
Meanwhile Harper announces an new policy direction for Canadian aid in order to end any association of HIS government with past, Liberal, governments that pushed for greater aid for Africa.
Answering a question in the House of Commons yesterday, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay pointed out that "Canada will double its international assistance from 2001 to 2010, with assistance to Africa also doubling in that time frame." Canada plans to increase its Africa funding to $2.1 billion for 2008-09, from $1.05 billion in 2003-04, and African aid makes up 40 per cent of all Canadian foreign aid. What's more, Canada's foreign aid budget is growing by eight per cent per year.
The Prime Minister’s Office was unable to provide documentation to prove his claim. A senior Canadian official said Canada’s aid budget for Africa will amount to $2.1 billion in 2008-09, but DATA, an aid agency co-founded by Bono, estimates Canada will need to increase aid by $479 million this year and next to meet its commitment. Only Japan and Britain are on track to meet their promise, DATA says.
Stronach said the amount set aside by the Conservative government falls $700 million short of that, and Harper is responsible.
Layton said the prime minister has reduced Canada's commitment to foreign aid while telling the world that it wasn't doing so.
"Mr. Harper simply isn't telling the truth and when it comes to life-saving foreign aid, that's despicable," Layton said.
Policy on the run is Harpers foreign affairs specialty. Like last years support for Israels war on Lebanon. Now he goes and does it again.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper signalled a major shift in Canadian aid policy yesterday, saying that Canada's primary focus is moving away from Africa and toward the Western Hemisphere.
"Canada's sole focus and primary focus is not necessarily Africa, but we remain engaged there, we will meet our targets and will move forward with that plan into the future," Mr. Harper told reporters at the G8 summit.
His push to deal with development aid in our Hemisphere bodes ill, premised as it is with hemispheric bilateral agreements in the context of an expanding North American Union. Harper clearly has mixed up the concept of Aid and Trade.
This hemisphere is not in need of development Aid, rather it is in need of Fair Trade. Instead we have Free Trade Zones, which are anti-union tax free havens for American and Canadian manufacturers, and the attempt to import Latin American workers into Alberta as cheap labour for the Tar Sands.
Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) Analysts expect that--as occurred in Mexico--CAFTA will attract foreign direct investment and boost Central American exports in certain sectors, but will provide little benefit to the rural and urban poor of the region.
The Central America-Dominican Republic-United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) includes seven signatories: the United States, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The U.S. Congress approved the CAFTA-DR in July 2005 and the President signed it into law on August 2, 2005. The CAFTA-DR has been approved by the legislatures in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Approval is pending in Costa Rica. The export zone created will be the United States' second largest free trade zone in Latin America after Mexico.
The United States is implementing the CAFTA-DR on a rolling basis as countries make sufficient progress to complete their commitments under the Agreement. The Agreement first entered into force between the United States and El Salvador on March 1, 2006, followed by Honduras and Nicaragua on April 1, 2006, Guatemala on July 1, 2006, and the Dominican Republic on March 1, 2007. The U.S. Government continues to work with Costa Rica to ensure timely and full implementation of the Agreement.
in the region, and strengthens protections for U.S. In addition to tariff reduction, CAFTA-DR provides new market access for U.S. consumer and industrial products and agricultural products. It also provides unprecedented access to government procurement in the partner countries, liberalizes the services sectors (see also financial services), protects U.S. investmentspatents, trademarks, and trade secrets. The Agreement covers customs facilitation and provides benefits to small and medium-sized exporters. Provisions are also included that address government transparency and corruption, worker rights, protection of the environment, trade capacity building, and dispute settlement.
At the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, the Hemisphere's leaders may at last give serious consideration to the establishment of free trade from Argentina to Alaska. But the meeting will also give critics an opportunity to cite economic uncertainty and political instability in much of Latin America as a reason to oppose the trade initiative. With the Andean region from Venezuela to Bolivia in varying degrees of turmoil, and with Argentina on the brink of possible default, trade liberalization is under attack.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) (Spanish: Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas (ALCA), French: Zone de libre-échange des Amériques (ZLÉA), Portuguese: Área de Livre Comércio das Américas (ALCA)) was a proposed agreement to eliminate or reduce the trade barriers among all countries in the American continent. In the latest round of negotiations, officials of 34 nations met in Mexico on November 16, 2003 to discuss the proposal. The proposed agreement was an extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico and the United States. Against the market are positioned Cuba, Venezuela and later Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, which entered the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas in response.
Discussions have faltered over similar points as the Doha round of World Trade Organization (WTO) talks; developed nations seek expanded trade in services and increased intellectual property rights, while less developed nations seek an end to agricultural subsidies and freer trade in agricultural goods. Similar to the WTO talks, Brazil has taken a leadership role among the less developed nations, while the United States has taken a similar role for the developed nations.
Talks began with the Summit of the Americas in Miami on December 11, 1994, but the FTAA came to public attention during the Quebec City Summit of the Americas in 2001, a meeting targeted by massive anti-corporatization and anti-globalization protests. The Miami negotiations in 2003 met similar protests, though perhaps not as large. The last summit was held at Mar del Plata, Argentina in January 2005, but no agreement on FTAA was reached. 26 of the 34 countries present at the negotiations have pledged to meet again in 2006 to resume negotiations.
This Hemisphere is rapidly industrializing which cannot be said for Africa which is being divided up by Imperialist interests including China. It is still in thralls of being hewers of wood and drawers of water for the G8 and G20 countries.
And development Aid is going into the pockets of private capital investment companies known as Vulture Funds, which in more developed countries are also known as Hedge Funds. Vulture Funds encourage ponzi get rich quick schemes.
Real development funding would be directed to villages and people, not governments, as the success of Micro-credit has shown.
Economic growth in Africa has picked up considerably in recent years to an estimated 5.9% in 2007.
But this has not come about as a result of any concerted action by the leaders of wealthy nations, insists, Sir Mark.
"A key driver of this growth has been high commodity prices," he points out, questioning whether the prosperity will last.
In the meantime, "the aid figures in many areas seem pretty disappointing" and global trade talks have stalled, he says.
"Progress is slower than I would have wished, than we all would have wished," he says.
Market access
President Museveni puts it more starkly.
Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa says the West must do more
"Almost all African countries are pre-industrial," he says, paraphrasing the voice of the West: "'You must stay producing the cocoa bean. I will process it for you. Stay in your place. Don't move up the value chain.'
"The G8 countries should not assume they have an advisory role in Africa," he says, insisting African governments are capable of deciding themselves how to bring about development.
"Where we need assistance now - or at least not obstruction - is in two areas: cheap electricity and infrastructure.
Free trade is another key to African development, President Museveni says, insisting that "Western countries have denied us access to their markets - deliberately".
Investigative reporter Greg Palast looks at the battle to end "vulture funds", where companies buy up debts of poor nations cheaply and then sue for the full amount.
At the close of the G-8 Summit in Germany last Friday, leaders of the world’s richest countries reiterated their commitment, first made in 2005, to cancel all of the debt owed by the world’s poorest countries. However, so-called “vulture funds,” or companies that buy up third world debt at rock-bottom prices and then sue the countries for the full value and more, are undermining any promises of debt relief. In February, BBC investigative journalist Greg Palast exposed on Democracy Now! how one vulture fund, Donegal International owned by US resident Michael Sheehan, was trying to collect $40 million dollars from Zambia after buying one of its debts for $4 million dollars. Soon after, Congressman John Conyers and Congressman Donald Payne brought this up with President Bush, and urged him to ensure that the G-8 summit would close the legal loopholes that allow vulture funds to flourish.
“Vulture Capitalism is not just a muckraking book, a collection of juicy scandals. Where a New York Times investigation ends is where Grace Blakeley really begins her work, which is to “look at how capitalism really looks.”
Vulture Capitalism is, at one level, a really good read, for the scandals that it brings together in one volume – like the Boeing 737 MAX debacle, where the pursuit of profits, lack of regulation, and corporate cost-cutting culture resulted in two crashes that killed hundreds of people, or the ways most of the $800 million allocated by Washington for the Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) to enable workers to get through the COVID 19 pandemic actually ended up with their employers. Among the direct or indirect beneficiaries of the PPP were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s wife, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the notorious far-right conspiracy theorist. All owned businesses or were part-owners of enterprises that siphoned off PPP dollars meant for workers.
But don’t get fooled by the title, which was probably the bright idea of the publisher’s marketing department. Vulture Capitalism is not just a muckraking book, a collection of juicy scandals. Where a New York Times investigation ends is where Grace Blakeley really begins her work, which is to “look at how capitalism really looks.” For her, the scandals illustrate not just the doings of corrupt individuals or corporations but the larger, deeper, more encompassing structural corruption that is embedded system of capitalism itself.
Market Versus Plan
Blakeley begins her deconstruction of capitalism by taking up the market-versus-planning debate that continues to animate the economics profession. Neoliberals make out state planning as the greatest enemy of the market, the source of all the inefficiencies, distortions, and screw-ups in what would otherwise be a plain-sailing economic journey. Keynesians say the economy must be managed or “planned” to avoid market failures. Blakeley comes out straightforwardly and declares the debate to be largely a false one. Giant corporations can have a major distorting influence on the market, and their size and resources enable them to plan production not only at a corporate but at a social level. Effective control of the market by a few giants allows them to do large-scale planning even as they compete with each other.
Blakeley is refreshingly an unapologetic Marxist, and Marx could not have articulated his insights on the relationship between the market and planning for a contemporary audience better than her:
Capitalism is a system defined by a tension—a dialectic—between markets and planning, in which some actors are better able to exert control over the system than others, but in which no one actor—let alone individual—can control the dynamics of production and exchange entirely. Capitalism is a system that teeters on the knife edge between competition and coordination; this tension is what explains both its adaptability and rigid inequalities.
So, the real conflict is not between markets and planning, but the ends of planning, with accumulating profit being the goal of planning under capitalism, and—in theory at least—the general interest being the aim of socialist planning.
Making Economics Accessible
Blakeley does not introduce a new theory about the way capitalism works. “Most of the ideas discussed in this book are not new,” she tells us right from the beginning. “My argument is constructed based on the analysis of the work of well-known economists, with which academic readers will already be familiar.” She wants to make their ideas accessible to people. Given the well-deserved reputation of orthodox economics being the contemporary equivalent of the medieval theological preoccupation with how many angels could stand on the head of a pin, this task is not to be sneered at, since the alternative that many opt for is conspiracy theory, which is the default mode of analysis in populist circles on both the Left and the Right.
But making economic theories accessible does not mean making their ideas sound simplistic. Even when it comes to economists Blakeley disagrees with, like Friedrich Hayek, Ronald Coase, and Joseph Schumpeter, she is not dismissive and accords their views the critical analysis they deserve.
In the case of Schumpeter, for instance, the notion of the process of “creative destruction” destroying monopolies may have once been a powerful reflection of the dynamics of early twentieth-century capitalism. But it is a theory that has outlived its usefulness, Blakeley contends, because today’s corporations, with their massive assets, can control the process of technological innovation, buying out or stifling the growth of innovative corporations that may threaten their stranglehold on the market.
Blakeley brings aboard not only political economists to help us understand the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. She draws on the insights of the French thinker Michel Foucault to show that neoliberalism not only seeks to shape the economy but the personalities of people as well. Foucault pointed to the creation of the entrepreneurial self or homo economicus who is engaged mainly in terms of maximizing his self-interest. This self-conceptualization has the effect of undermining the possibility of collective action, resulting in the “destruction of society itself, and its replacement with a structured competition between individual human capitals—but on a fundamentally unequal playing field.”
The State under Capitalism
According to neoliberals, the contradiction between market and planning is a manifestation of the larger conflict between the market and state as the principal organizing principle of the economy. The reality is that both the market and the state serve the interest of capital. For the most part, this is not done in a direct, instrumental fashion like extending benefits and perks to individual capitalists, though there is no lack of cases where government contracts or legislation favors particular business interests, as the cases of Boeing and the PPP debacle illustrate. More important is the fact that the state pursues the “general” and “long-run interest” of the capitalist class. Instead of conceiving the state as an instrument of the capitalist class, one must see the state as an institution or set of structured relations that “organize capitalists into a coherent group, conscious of its interests and able to enact them.”
Blakeley is expressing here the view articulated by the French philosopher Louis Althusser, the Greek-French political economist Nicos Poulantzas, and the American political sociologist James O’Connor: that the state is characterized by its “relative autonomy” from economic power relations because its primal role is to stabilize a mode of production that is marked by sharp social contradictions. Perhaps the best conceptualization of this relationship between the political and the economic was provided by O’Connor who saw the relative autonomy of the state as stemming from the tension between its two functions: that is, it has to balance the needs of capital accumulation that increases the profits of the capitalist class and the system’s need for legitimacy to maintain stability. Welfare spending by the state may cut into capital accumulation, but it is necessary to create political stability. This tension gives rise to a stratum of technocrats to manage the tradeoffs between the two primordial drives of capital accumulation and legitimation. Management of this tension, which expressed itself in, among others, the trade-off between inflation and unemployment, was erected into a “science” by the followers of John Maynard Keynes, but this drew the ire of Hayek and his followers, who regarded the Keynesians tinkering with the market as courting economic inefficiency and subverting political freedom.
But Blakeley puts things in perspective. Keynes’s technocrats may engage in social spending but the purpose is to keep the system stable and preserve the class division between those who benefit from the system because they own the means of production and those who are exploited by it despite their being the beneficiaries of some crumbs from social spending. Proponents of reform capitalism were elated by the massive government stimulus programs during the Covid 19 pandemic, but, as in the case of the PPP—where workers received one dollar for every four allocated by the program, with the rest going to business owners like the Trump fanatic Marjorie Taylor Greene—it was the corporate elite and its allied upper middle entrepreneurial and professional strata that cornered most of the benefits of the U.S. government’s fiscal spending and monetary easing policies.
Needed: Another Book
Vulture Capitalism focuses on the class division between owners and workers central to capitalism and its ramifications throughout the system. There are, however, key dimensions of capitalism that Blakely does not tackle but which are central to understanding how it operates. Among these are the social reproduction of the system, where gender inequality and patriarchal oppression play a decisive role, and the way racism stratifies and differentiates the working class, providing what the great sociologist W.E.B. Dubois called a “psychological wage” that coopts white workers into supporting the system. But there is only so much one can pack into as single volume, so it can only be hoped that Blakeley will come out with another volume that will bring to these and related issues the same clearsighted analysis and engaging style she displays in her current book.
Also deserving of further analysis is democratic planning. The final section of the book presents us with examples of exciting possibilities for progressive planning, such as the detailed plan proposed by the workers of Lucas Aerospace Corporation to turn this British arms manufacturer into a producer of socially useful commodities and the innovative “participatory budgeting” formulated by the city government of Porto Alegre that spread to over 250 other cities in Brazil. Blakeley’s discussion of various democratic and socialist initiatives is a valuable complement to the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s book Envisioning Real Utopias.
It would have been useful, however, for Blakeley to draw out lessons from the failure of central planning in the Soviet Union and how democratic planning would be different, since many people associate socialist planning with the Soviet Union. Here, it would also be important to contrast Soviet central planning with Chinese planning, which allowed market forces to develop non-strategic sectors of the economy while restricting foreign investment in sectors considered strategic and prioritizing the transfer of technology from transnational corporations to key industries. True, there are some major problems with China’s technocratic development model, but an annual growth rate of 10 percent over 30 years and the radical reduction of poverty to two percent of the population (according to the World Bank) is not to be ignored, even by partisans of democratic planning, especially since, despite its technocratic bias, the “Chinese Model” is finding so many partisans in the Global South. Indeed, what else can one take away from the Biden administration’s adoption of industrial policy in its effort to catch up with China except Washington’s moving away from neoliberalism and the triumph of planning?
Again, you can only pack so many topics into one volume, but I raise these concerns related to democratic planning in the hope that, whether in articles or in books, Grace Blakeley will apply to them the same analytical acuity and clear exposition she has displayed in analyzing class conflict, the market, and the state in Vulture Capitalism.
In the Introduction to this book, Grace Blakeley says her aim is to show that “capitalism is not defined by the presence of free markets, but by the rule of capital; and that socialism is not defined by the dominance of the state over all areas of life, but by true democracy.” How far does she succeed?
The first premise is amply illustrated – from the huge sums of government money thrown at the under-regulated and cost-cutting American aviation industry, to the state bailouts for the US car industry which allowed Ford and others to continue to pay huge dividends to shareholders. Embracing neoliberalism has certainly not resulted in a smaller state: what has changed under its system is who benefits.
Pandemic piñata
The Covid pandemic underlines this. The US’s “Paycheck Protection Program” saw workers receive just $1 out of every $4 distributed through the initiative. The rest went to business and has mostly never been repaid. Many of the companies involved use tax havens to cut their tax bills. Several members of Congress benefited financially from the scheme, as did lobbyists. Meanwhile, millions of workers lost their jobs or were evicted by companies that received public money.
Likewise in the UK, “dozens of large companies that had accessed government support through the Bank of England’s Covid Corporate Financing Facility went on to lay off workers and pay out dividends to shareholders.”
Similarly, all of France’s top companies received some form of government support and paid out 34 billion euros to shareholders while cutting 60,000 jobs around the world. A recent report noted that “public assistance to the private sector now exceeds the amount paid out in social welfare.”
In Australia, a colossal A$12.5 billion of government money was given to companies that were “largely unaffected “ by the pandemic. All over the world, the same picture emerges.
The precedent for such largesse was set during the financial collapse of 2008. Although the crash is often blamed on corporate greed, in reality the investment banks would never have taken the risks they did without the implicit insurance of the central bank, and behind it the government. The crisis’s global dimension “was driven as much by crooked coordination between powerful actors as it was by unrestrained ‘free market’ capitalism. And when the crisis did hit, once again the state stepped in to shield powerful vested interests from the consequences of their own greed.” Prosecutions in its wake were almost unheard of.
Permanent subsidies and rigged rules
Big corporations expect a government bailout in a crisis, but for many industries public subsidies are a permanent state of affairs. The fossil fuel industry gets a staggering $5.9 trillion of public money worldwide.
In the world of exports, ‘free markets’ don’t really explain the dominance of the companies of the Global North over poorer countries, for all the neoliberal rhetoric about free trade. Attempts by the Global South to use industrialization to escape the cycle of dependency enshrined in their export of raw materials, have repeatedly been thwarted by richer countries, whether by direct political interference – as in the US-sponsored coup in Guatemala in the 1950s – or through Western-imposed trade rules. These prevent governments in poorer countries from protecting their fledgling industries against Western imports, themselves often state-subsidised.
Investor-state dispute settlements (ISDSs) are part of this international architecture, dreamed up – and arguably rigged – by the West. When after a lengthy legal battle, the Ecuadorian courts ordered Chevron to pay $9.5 billion in compensation for a massive toxic waste spillage in the country’s rainforest, the company closed all its Ecuadorian operations and launched an ISDS claim, which overturned the judgment. To add insult to injury, the Ecuadorian government was then ordered to pay $800 million of the company’s legal costs.
Blakeley concludes: “ISDSs are part of a growing body of international law that, with the active support of powerful states, has helped to routinise corporate crime on a mass scale.” They can be used to get compensation for companies whenever a government passes a law to discourage smoking or protect the environment. Canada, Mexico and Germany have all been forced to abandon or dilute environmental regulations and pay compensation to corporate polluters in recent years.
And this is just one mechanism that allows Western capital to penetrate overseas markets on unequal terms. The state-assisted exploitation of less developed countries can be violent and barbarous. “One of the first things the US government did with occupied Iraq was sell off state assets en masse. In doing so, the planners of the 2003 US invasion sought to share the spoils of the invasion with US businesses and introduce the disciplining hand of American capital into Iraqi society.”
Blakeley is hardly the first economist to highlight capitalism’s monopolistic tendencies. But what’s new here is how today’s giant companies use their privileged position not just to corner the market or raise prices, but to establish for themselves as much sovereignty as possible. This applies not just internally, for example in the case of Amazon’s ruthless approach to suppressing trade union organisation, but also externally, as with corporations involved internationally in human rights abuses.
In this sense, modern corporations constitute a form of private government, hierarchically centralised and controlled, and often unconstrained by the national laws of weak governments – in poorer countries especially, but not exclusively. And in many fields, such companies are empowered to act using force – from private armies to outsourced contracts for immigration detention and removal activities.
Democratic alternatives
Blakeley’s focus on economic democracy as an expression of nascent socialism is a lot shorter. The 1976 Alternative Plan for Lucas Aerospace was a significant milestone, but it may be overstating its importance to say “it provided inspiration for workers all over the world for the next several decades.” In any case, as one reviewer pointed out, “it was swatted aside by management.”
However, the author does produce some interesting examples of human cooperation and democratic planning: the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation which refused to allow its labour to be used for harmful purposes; the Union of Farm Workers’ occupation of land in Andalusia after the death of the fascist dictator Franco in 1975; the Brazilian Workers Party’s experiment in participatory budgeting pioneered in Porto Alegre in 1989, which spread to over 250 cities in Brazil and another 1,500 around the world; the People’s Plan in the Indian state of Kerala in 1996; the post-2008 Better Reykjavik initiative in which 40,000 people pitched ideas to improve Iceland’s capital in an online consultation; the Preston Council experiment in Community Wealth Building; and quite a few others. While the levels of genuine popular participation in these experiments vary considerably and most proved short-lived, they do demonstrate the potential of this kind of democratic planning.
For Blakeley, the 1970-3 Popular Unity government in Chile showed that “it is possible to begin building democratic institutions at scale.” However, it also underlined that full control of the state apparatus is vital, to prevent not just capital strikes and flight, but also the possibility of a violent military coup of the kind that toppled Allende.
Democratising society through activity in trade unions and community campaigns falls some way short of this critical goal. The author’s section on “Democratise the state” says nothing about dismantling its repressive apparatus.
Vulture Capitalism is certainly worth reading for its well-argued critique of contemporary capitalism and the historical alternatives it explores. However, as with many books in this vein, how we proceed from the current mess to a more enduring socialist alternative is less clear.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
