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Wouldn’t it be nice if people, for once, didn’t decide to make money of the misery of others? (I know, I know. Capitalism would collapse the End Times would start, et cetera). One news story that caught my eye was the tomfoolery going on with some Immigration Consultants and their business of getting Syrian refugees to Canada.
“CBC News has learned about a troubling aspect of the drive to bring Syrians to Canada: professional immigration consultants, in partnership with some refugee sponsorship groups, are charging refugees thousands of dollars in arrangements that critics say are unethical and violate federal rules on sponsorship.
The immigration consultants have been targeting Syrians living in the Gulf states, many of whom are there on work permits and are able to earn a living. In that sense, they are potentially a more lucrative client base than those in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.”
Well so far, not bad. I’m sure unethical people wouldn’t try to game the system to rich themselves based on the misery of others…
In the case of one such agency, information available online and documents obtained by CBC News reveal that the consultant is not only charging prospective refugees thousands of dollars to process their applications but also asking them to pay the full cost of their resettlement up front, which violates the financial guidelines of the Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program.
Whoops, there we go. The dark side of what humans are capable of has come front and centre once again. Would more people be left in trouble without these private companies working their magic? Would it be wrong to legislate them out of the picture?
I understand that the entrepreneurial spirit thrives in conditions such as these, but I think in the case of refugees we should prioritize their safety rather than the profits of these so called ‘Immigration Consultants’. Let’s close with what Jackie Swaisland has to say on the issue, as she frames the problem quite concisely:
“There are still people who are incredibly vulnerable. There are still people who don’t know what tomorrow holds for them, or they are in dire circumstances,” she said.”So, to sort of charge those individuals, even if they can technically afford to pay for it, a large fee for your services, I think that becomes unethical.”
Unethical, indeed.
[Source:cbc.ca]
A tonic against the slash and burn capitalism we’re supposed to worship.
It is always nice to see the various economic classes looking out for one another. When the assets of the top are threatened, the bottom must suffer. Easy math, really.
This excerpt from an interview with Michael Hudson on Counterpunch.
Peries: Look forward to it, Michael. So Michael, some mainstream news outlets are saying that this is the China contagion. They need someone to blame. What’s causing all of this?
Hudson: Not China. China’s simply back to the level that it was earlier in the year. One of the problems with the Chinese market that is quite different from the American and European market is that a lot of the big Chinese banks have lent to small lenders, sort of small wholesale lenders, that in turn have lent to retail people. And a lot of Chinese are trying to get ahead by borrowing money to buy real estate or to buy stocks. So there are these intermediaries, these non-bank intermediaries, sort of like real estate brokers, who borrowed big money from banks and lent it out to a lot of little people. And once the small people got in it’s like odd lot traders in the United States, small traders, you know that the boom is over.
What you’re having now is a lot of small speculators have lost their money. And that’s put the squeeze on the non-bank speculators. But that’s something almost unique in China. Most Americans and most European families don’t borrow to go into the market. Most of the market is indeed funded by debt, but it’s funded by bank lending and huge, huge leverage borrowings for all of this.
This is what most of the commentators don’t get. All this market run-up we’ve seen in the last year or two has been by the Federal Reserve making credit available to banks at about one-tenth of 1 percent. The banks have lent to big institutional traders and speculators thinking, well gee, if we can borrow at 1 percent and buy stocks that yield maybe 5 or 6 percent, then we can make the arbitrage. So they’ve made a 5 percent arbitrage by buying, but they’ve also now lost 10 percent, maybe 20 percent on the capital.
What we’re seeing is that short-term thinking really hasn’t taken into account the long run. And that’s why this is very much like the Long-Term Capital Management crash in 1997, when the two Nobel prize winners who calculated how the economy works and lives in the short term found out that all of a sudden the short term has to come back to the long term.
Now, it’s amazing how today’s press doesn’t get it. For instance, in the New York Times Paul Krugman, who you can almost always depend to be wrong where money and credit are involved, said that the problem is a savings glut. People have too many savings. Well, we know that they don’t in America have too many savings. We’re in a debt deflation now. The 99 percent of the people are so busy paying off their debt that what is counted as savings here is just paying down the debt. That’s why they don’t have enough money to buy goods and services, and so sales are falling. That means that profits are falling. And people finally realized that wait a minute, with companies not making more profits they’re not going to be able to pay the dividends.
Well, companies themselves have been causing this crisis as much as speculators, because companies like Amazon, like Google, or Apple especially, have been borrowing money to buy their own stock. Corporate activists, stockholder activists, have told these companies, we want you to put us on the board because we want you to borrow at 1 percent to buy your stock yielding 5 percent. You’ll get rich in no time. So these stock buybacks by Apple and by other companies at high prices can push up their stock price in the short term. But when prices crash, their net worth is all of a sudden plunging. And so we’re in a classic debt deflation.
“The real world of capitalism is one in which capitalists demand state intervention on their behalf while opposing government intervention on behalf of their employees or the poor. In a broader sense, the state is the guarantor of the capitalist system, providing the framework of laws and protections it needs to exist. Taxpayers fund the state, thereby ensuring capitalism’s viability. Capitalism cannot exist without a host state, just as corporations cannot exist without property laws, state charters, copyrights and patent protections, and a host of other government “interventions.”
— Brian Oliver Sheppard, The Inefficiency of Capitalism
An anti-government protest placard is seen outside Downing Street during a march to protest against the British government’s spending cuts and austerity measures in London on June 20, 2015. The national demonstration against austerity was organised by People’s Assembly against government spending cuts. AFP PHOTO / BEN STANSALL
Well, let us pause in complete shock as the Tories institute more cutting of public services and benefits. You may have heard that Austerity is the new black in terms of doing shitty things to societies. Austerity has destroyed Greece and rightly the people of Britain are fighting back.
“Thousands of demonstrators staged an anti-austerity march in London on Saturday, in the first major public protest since Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron won a general election.
Opposition politicians, trade union bosses and celebrities were among the crowds marching through the capital’s financial district.
Protesters called for the halting and reversal of spending cuts imposed by the previous coalition government and further measures proposed by finance minister George Osborne.
“We have seen a huge impact on our work at primary school,” said Sian Bloor, 45, a teacher from Trafford near Manchester.
“I regularly bring clothes and shoes for children and biscuits for their breakfast, just so they get something to eat. You can see how children are being affected by the cuts.” Bloor said.”
The wealth from the Regan-Thatcher era STILL hasn’t trickled down. This must be some very sticky money as seems to be residing in the hands of the upperclass and corporations who have gerrymandered the British polity to benefit them and screw the rest of society.
“Placard-waving protesters marched from the Bank of England and filed past the nearby Royal Exchange, as the sound of drummers filled the air, creating a festival atmosphere.
Some of the placards read: “Austerity Doesn’t Work”, “No to Cuts”, “Get the Tories Out” and “Austerity is Class War”.
“It will be the start of a campaign of protest, strikes, direct action and civil disobedience up and down the country,” said Sam Fairbairn of organisers the People’s Assembly.
“We will not rest until austerity is history, our services are back in public hands and the needs of the majority are put first.” Fairbairn said.”
The message from the people is always the same – more equal distribution of wealth, reinstatement of public utilities and welfare. The stuff that makes society prosper and run well. Of course, given the current neo-liberal fetish the Western world is stuck in, all of these things are the darkest of evils.
“Cameron clinched an unexpected election victory on May 7 that gave his centre-right Conservative party an outright majority in parliament for the first time in nearly 20 years.
The victory was widely seen as an endorsement of the Conservatives’ austerity programme and is likely to see a continuation of cuts to public spending as they seeks to curb a budget deficit of nearly $140 billion.”
Let us hope for another election soon in Britain, perhaps people will get their priorities straight then.
This is taken from the interview titled: Does Capitalism Cause Drug Addiction? The piece that I am going to excerpt is about how we view addiction in society. If we are to believe Hari, it isn’t about a failure in moral rectitude or falling into a drug laden trap of compulsion; but rather it is the atomization and rampant consumerism in society that causes the addictions we see today.
“Drugs are not what we think they are. Addiction is not what we think it is. The drug war is certainly not what we’ve been told it is. And the alternatives aren’t what we think they are.
And there were two people here in Canada who really helped me to think about this. One is guy called Bruce Alexander. He’s someone you will know the work of. If you had said to me four years ago, say, “What causes heroin addiction?” right, I would have—I would have looked at you like you were a little bit simpleminded. I would have said, “Well, heroin causes heroin addiction, right?” There’s a story we’ve been told about addiction, how it works, for a hundred years now, that’s so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that it seems like our common sense, right? We think if the first 20 people on the rows here, if we all used heroin together for, say, 20 days, there are chemical hooks in heroin that our body would start to physically need, right? So, on day 21, we would need that heroin. We would physically crave it. And that’s what addiction is; that’s how we think it works.
And the first kind of chink in my doubt about that was explained to me by another great Canadian, Gabor Maté in Vancouver, who some of you will know the work of, amazing man. And he pointed out to me, if any of us step out of here today and we’re hit by a bus, right, God forbid, and we break our hip, we’ll be taken to hospital. It’s very likely we’ll be given a lot of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It’s much better heroin than you’ll score on the streets, because it’s medically pure, right? It’s really potent heroin. You’ll be given it for quite a long period of time. Every hospital in the developed world, that’s happening, right? If what we think about addiction is right, what should—I mean, those people should leave as addicts. That never happens, virtually never happens. You will have noticed your grandmother was not turned into a junkie by her hip replacement operation, right?
I didn’t really know what to do with it. When Gabor first explained that to me, I didn’t really know how to process that, until I met Bruce Alexander. Bruce is a professor in Vancouver, and Bruce explained something to me. The idea of addiction we have, the one that we all implicitly believe—I certainly did—comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They’re really simple experiments. You can do them yourself at home if you’re feeling a little bit sadistic. Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction.
Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.
There was a really interesting human experiment going on at the same time as Rat Park, which kind of demonstrates this really interestingly. It was called the Vietnam War, right? Twenty percent of American troops in Vietnam were using heroin a lot, right? And if you look at the reports from the time, they were really worried. They thought—because they believed the old theory of addiction. They were like, “My god, these guys are all going to come home, and we’re going to have loads of heroin addicts on the streets of the United States.” What happened? They came home, and virtually all of them just stopped, because if you’re taken out of a hellish, pestilential jungle, where you don’t want to be, you can die at any moment, and you go back to a nice life in Wichita, Kansas, you can bear to be present in your life. We could all be drunk now. Forget the drug laws. We could all be drunk now, right? None of you look very drunk. I’m guessing you’re not, right? That’s because we’ve got something we want to do. We’ve got things we want to be present for in our lives.
So, I think this has—Bruce taught us about how this has huge implications, obviously, for the drug war. The drug war is based on the idea that the chemicals cause the addiction, and we need to physically eradicate these chemicals from the face of the Earth. If in fact it’s not the chemicals, if in fact it’s isolation and pain that cause the addiction, then it suddenly throws into sharp contrast the idea that we need to impose more isolation and pain on addicts in order to make them stop, which is what we currently do.
But it actually has much deeper implications that I think really relate to what Naomi writes about in This Changes Everything, and indeed before. We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”
I’m very happy to see that some places in Canada are starting to turn on to this sort of thinking – Medicine Hat Alberta for instance where they are working toward eradicating homelessness – by giving people homes to live in – because it is cheaper to do so that the current methods.
**update** John Hari speaking on a TED talk about addiction.
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