Single Worker May Slit Throats Of 600 Dogs Per Hour, 8 Hours A Day, For 40 Years

Robert J. Barsocchini 

Every workday, for eight hours a day, often for many years on end, a worker gets up and has breakfast, then goes in to the office, picks up a blade, and starts slitting the throats of live dogs. That day, he or she will personally slit the throats of about 600 or more dogs per hour, every hour, all day, and will often do this for 20, 30, or 40 years.

But it gets even stranger. There are many thousands of these workers all doing this at the same time in thousands of locations around the country and world. And the strangest part: they are not actually slitting the throats of dogs, but an even smarter and more complex sentient, emotionally-nuanced species: pigs.

Studies have found that pigs are not only smarter than dogs, but also smarter than three year old children.

However, as Marc Bekoff, PhD, notes in Psychology Today, maybe this shouldn’t matter.

Bekoff writes that “cross-species comparisons are relatively meaningless and get us on a slippery slope … because some people claim that supposedly smarter animals suffer more than supposedly dumber animals and that it’s okay to use the dumber individuals in all sorts of invasive and abusive ways. There are absolutely no sound scientific reasons to make this claim and indeed, the opposite might actually be the case, but we really don’t know. Lori Marino, founder of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, Inc., who also works on The Someone Project, says it well: “The point is not to rank these animals but to re-educate people about who they are. They are very sophisticated animals.” I’ve emphasized the word who because these animals are sentient beings, whos, not whats.”

“…the claim that it’s okay to slaughter pigs, for example, rather than dogs, because dogs would suffer more, is misleading and vacuous and there are no data to support it. All of these mammals, and all other mammals, are sentient beings who share the same neural architecture underlying their emotional lives and who experience a wide spectrum of emotions including the capacity to feel pain and to suffer.“

“…mice, rats, and chickens”, Bekoff writes, “display empathy and are very smart and emotional.”

Compassionate individuals are thus all the more alarmed to learn that standard practices of the major companies like Foster Farms involve stuffing dozens of chickens together into large plastic bags and sealing the bags so the chickens suffocate to death. Trying to escape and live, many of the birds claw and peck at the bag, poking holes in it. The excruciating suffocation process can last an hour or so. At that point, if there are any birds left alive, workers dump them into a second bag to continue the death process.

Bekoff continues:

“…when we pay attention to solid evolutionary theory, namely Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolutionary continuity, we see that we humans are not the only smart, sentient, and emotional beings. Indeed, it’s bad biology to rob non-humans of their cognitive and emotional capacities and we’re not inserting “something human” into these animals that they don’t already possess.”

“…the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, underwritten by world-renowned scientists, notes that available scientific data show clearly that all mammals, and some other animals, are fully conscious beings. It’s clear that the time is right for a Universal Declaration on Animal Sentience that involves people personally taking responsibility for the choices they make when they interact with other animals.”

Bekoff concludes with an observation on the direction society is going, and where Indian society has directed us for millennia: “…as people come to realize that they are eating pain and suffering, non-animal meals will likely become more common.”

Indeed, with information increasingly accessible, more and more people are learning about how terrible animal products (including ‘organic’, ‘free-range’ ones) are ethically and for their health, how much better they can feel and how much longer they can live on unprocessed, plant-based diets, and how the vice of consuming animal products in the major wealth-extracting, Western countries (and some others) is depriving a starving world of healthy, plant-based foods.

These areas have long been researched by scholars, and the arguments in favor of people in wealthy countries eating animal products have all been thoroughly debunked.  Yes, all of them. Knowing this is simply a matter of looking into it a little and rejecting dogmatism and ignorance in favor of evidence and reality.

If you live in a Western country, do some good-faith research (starting with the sources provided for you above), and still decide to exploit animals for your taste-bud pleasure, you may recall that some indigenous societies have beliefs that involve the spirits of animals returning to exact vengeance on their tormentors and killers. As with some facets of ideas from other belief systems, scientific evidence has since emerged to support this kind of thinking: every time you eat an animal product, you are likely increasing your chance of premature death through disease. The animals are defenseless in life, but their ‘spirits’ may come back to haunt you, as they do for hundreds of thousands of people every year in the United States alone.

(As someone who ate animals and animal products for many years, I am not out of the woods, myself, but a plant-based diet may be helping to reverse any damage I have done.)

The Commons As The Response To The Structural Crises Of The Global System

Michael Bauwens


The Connecting the Dots series has convincingly shown a number of interconnected reasons why the global system is in crisis, and why there is no way out without a structural transformation of the dominant neoliberal system. In our contribution, we want to stress the key importance of what we call a “value regime,” or simply put, the rules that determine what society and the economy consider to be of value. We must first look at the underlying modes of production — i.e. how value is created and distributed — and then construct solutions must that help create these changes in societal values. The emerging answer for a new mode of value creation is the re-emergence of the Commons.

With the growing awareness of the vulnerability of the planet and its people in the face of the systemic crises created by late-stage capitalism, we need to ready the alternatives and begin creating the next system now. To do so, we need a full understanding of the current context and its characteristics. In our view, the dominant political economy has three fatal flaws.

Pseudo-Abundance

The first is the characteristic need for the capitalist system to engage in continuous capital accumulation and growth. We could call this pseudo-abundance, i.e. the fundamental article of faith, or unconscious assumption, that the natural world’s resources are infinite. Capitalism creates a systemic ecological crisis marked by the overuse and depletion of natural resources, endangering the balance of the environment (biodiversity extinction, climate change, etc).

Scarcity Engineering

The second characteristic of capitalism is that it requires scarce commodities that are subject to a tension between supply and demand. Scarcity engineering is what we call this continuous attempt to undo natural abundance where it occurs. Capitalism creates markets by the systemic re-engineering of potentially or naturally abundant resources into scarce resources. We see this happening with natural resources in the development of “terminator seeds” that undo the seeds’ natural regeneration process. Crucially, we also see this in the creation of artificial scarcity mechanisms for human culture and knowledge. “Intellectual property” is imposed in more and more areas, privatizing common knowledge in order to create artificial commodities and rents that create profits for a privileged “creator class.”

These first two characteristics are related and reinforce each other, as the problems created by pseudo-abundance are made quite difficult to solve due to the privatization of the very knowledge required to solve them. This makes solving major ecological problems dependent on the ability of this privatized knowledge to create profits. It has been shown that the patenting of technologies results in a systemic slowdown of technical and scientific innovation, while un-patenting technologies accelerates innovation. A good recent example of this “patent lag” effect is the extraordinary growth of 3D printing, once the technology lost its patents.

Perpetually Increasing Social Injustice

The third major characteristic is the increased inequality in the distribution of value, i.e. perpetually increasing social injustice.

As Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows us, the logic of capital is to concentrate more and more wealth into fewer hands through compound interest, rent seeking, purchasing legislation, etc. Our current set of rules are hardwired to increase inequality and injustice.

Enter the Commons

To what degree does the Commons and peer-to-peer production function as a potential solution for these three interrelated structural crises of capitalism?

Commons are resources that are owned and managed neither by private corporations nor by the state. Instead, they are governed by their user communities. As the late Elinor Ostrom has shown, Commons have managed and maintained a healthy resource base for extremely long periods. Both private capitalism and state-centric development have been detrimental for the environment and the maintenance and regeneration of natural resources.

Digital networks (such as the internet) have recently enabled a new type of Commons where the knowledge required for human action and value creation has been mutualized. This has led to global open design communities, which jointly create open knowledge pools (e.g. Wikipedia), free software (e.g. the Linux Operating System) or open designs to enable physical production (e.g.Arduino motherboards, WikiSpeed cars, WikiHouse housing projects, etc.).

Commons-based peer production emerges when technology enables the creation of open, contributory systems that create Commons. Unlike physical resources (which need to be managed tightly), these digital Commons can be open for use by all of humanity (on the condition of having network access of course).

In what way do the Commons and peer-to-peer dynamics represent a potential response to the three systemic crises we’ve described?

As a first approach, we offer the following theses:

1. Under capitalism, the design of products and services is led by the desire to retain market scarcity, and therefore, to create commodities. In this context, corporate-driven innovation is always characterized by planned obsolescence. The global open design communities engaging in peer production and mutualization of productive knowledge have no such perverse incentives. These communities design to ensure participation and are “naturally” inclined to design sustainable products and services. Of course, this is not to say that relying on peer production is entirely sufficient to obtain full sustainability. The point is that peer production does not structurally create the need for unsustainable production.

2. Innovation under our current system actually depends on artificial scarcity and the intellectual property regime. The privatization and patenting of knowledge and technical solutions hampers the widespread distribution of necessary innovations. No such impediments exist in the open contributory systems of peer production communities, where innovation anywhere in the network is instantly available to the whole.

3. Peer production, independent of the profit motive, invites and facilitates the creation of solidarity-based forms of economic entities. Being generative towards human communities, these entities are more likely based on socially just forms of value sharing. This condition, though, requires that the value generated by peer production communities is not captured by extractive economic entities. In fact, this is the central locus of political and social struggle when peer production emerges in the context of the dominance of an economic system based on value extraction from human communities and the environment. The self-organizing characteristics of peer production, however, also enables the creation of new economic forms that are generative, and which can therefore produce more justice in the economic system.

The Revolution Is Already Happening

All over the planet, citizens are organizing to solve these three systemic crises. Their responses take three forms:

1. The sustainability and ecological/environmental movements, attempting to find solutions for the planet’s survival;

2. The “Open,” “Commons” and “Sharing” movements, stressing the need for shareable knowledge and mutualized physical resources;

3. The cooperative and solidarity economy, focusing on fairness.

All three of these movements are vital, yet alone they are not sufficient for a global, systemic response to these crises.To be effective, they must combine elements from the “free” (open/shareable), “fair”(socially just) and “sustainable” movements.

The good news is that Commons-based peer production is the best way to bring these three necessary aspects together into one coherent system. However, for this to happen, the various movements need enabling tools and capacities. An example is the open source circular economy(encompassing open and sustainable approaches). Here, open and participatory logistical and accounting systems allow citizens, entrepreneurs and public officials to scale up their circular economy cooperation in otherwise impossible ways.

Similarly, open and platform cooperativism — the convergence of socially just forms of production with shareable knowledge — allows all contributing citizens to create fair, generative livelihoods around the shared resources they need and co-create.

The task may seem daunting, but history shows that value regimes do change; in fact, they’ve changed at least twice in the last thousand years in the European sphere.

Richard Moore, in his wonderful book The First European Revolution, describes how Europe moved from the post-Roman plunder economy to a feudal regime based on land ownership. Rapid development of a new economy came in the 15th century (after the crisis of feudalism), based on making and selling commodities. This would eventually become capitalism.

We’ve seen post-capitalist practices emerging since the late 20th century — for example, the 1983 invention of the universally available browser. Citizens have been empowered to create value through open contributory systems; these create universally available knowledge, which in turn can be used for material production. This new value regime is now emerging globally, and can be paired with an ethical, generative economy to create sustainable livelihoods for those who contribute to the common good. These are the dots that we must connect in order to help usher in the post-capitalist world.

Keep It Local! The Complementary Currency Alternative

David McCarthy & Maria Reidelbach


New alternative and complementary currencies are a growing worldwide trend, and many states in the US have created their own local curriencies. Our local alternative currency, the Hudson Valley Current, has members in several counties straddling the Hudson River, just above New York City. It began with just a few of us; each coming to the idea from very different places. There was a libertarian who didn’t like central control of the monetary system, a Buddhist economic theorist yearning for a more equitable system of exchange, a second-generation newspaper publisher striving to create a better environment for his kids, an activist artist with a social practice working among struggling local farmers, a veteran of Occupy Wall Street committed to creating a sustainable economic system and an accountant with an abiding interest and experience in time banking and other alternative money systems.

“Alternative currency” simply means money other than the official government-issued currency. The term “complementary currency” highlights the quality of functioning alongside the existing monetary system, rather than attempting to replace it. The local type of alternative or complementary currency is created to strengthen local economies and it strengthens Transition efforts to create more resilient communities.

There are various types of local currencies which can differ quite fundamentally, and there are also many nuances in the details of design and implementation. For example, perhaps the most well-known Local currency in the United States, Berkshares, are issued as paper money and available at local banks in exchange for U.S. Dollars.

Chris Hewitt, ED Hudson Valley Current (HVC) (far L), Susan Witt, ED of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics (2nd from L), Adrian Alcalá. President of the Board of Directors of BerkShares, Inc (Center,) Maria Reidelbach HVC (2nd from R) David McCarthy HVC (far R). Photo taken at the Schumacher Center in May 2014.

The Hudson Valley Current is a digital, mutual credit based system. It is not convertible to dollars. The issuance (creation) of Currents takes place through the exchange of goods and services. Each member begins with an account that includes a “line of trust” (also known as a “line of credit”). When one member pays another member, the money is created as a credit and a debit on the members accounts. The mutual credit that backs the Hudson Valley Current is interest free. This is a significant fact in light of the oppressive role that interest-bearing debt, and money issued on that basis, plays in the conventional economy.

All local currencies have the intent and effect of encouraging people to trade within a specific region. Studies show that buying locally has a strong multiplier effect in terms of the circulation and retention of money within a community or region. Local currency encourages and enhances that behavior, simply because the currency must be used in that area. Local currency also builds awareness and a sense of economic community — qualities that are sorely lacking in the impersonal national and international levels of the economy. Hudson Valley Current Board of Directors

Hudson Valley Current Board of Directors

We held regular study and work group meetings for several years to learn about all these aspects of currency, economics, and more. We read and discussed the opinions of thought leaders like Thomas Greco and David Korten. We sponsored events, showing films about money followed by Q+A panels. We tabled at festivals and conferences and were able to introduce the concept to hundreds of people, sign them up to our email list, and welcome many as members. The local Transition movement, which consisted of a several efforts like a tool library and free health care clinic, as well as an enthusiastic core group of more than 100, helped us coalesce and spread the word among interested community members. Gradually, we discovered like-minded folks and formed a more formal group with a board of directors, a fiscal sponsor, and a small office and staff that consisted of a part-time executive director and an intern.

We reached out to other local currency projects, from those in neighboring counties and states to those across the globe. Our neighbors in Massachusetts, founders of Berkshares, provided very valuable advice. We decided to begin with a membership comprised only of locally owned businesses to create a robust economic base for our currency. We also chose to use an electronic mutual credit platform, not only because paper money is more expensive to produce and to secure, but because mutual credit literally creates money, and therefore opportunity, by virtue of its very structure. As described above, it is not limited by the amount of paper money printed, it is created as needed by the exchange of goods and services.

At the end of 2013, we launched a beta-test of the system using a well-regarded international platform called Cyclos. We put out a call for fifteen (15) local volunteer businesses to serve as test-case guinea pigs. Due to the complexity of creating a local currency, our beta test period has lasted for many months, during which we’ve learned a lot and ironed a lot of kinks. For instance, communicating the concept of local currency has proven to be maddenly difficult–as difficult as explaining how US dollars work. Like walking, it’s much easier to simply do, than explain how! As of mid-2015, this word-of-mouth test has grown to over 200 business members who have exchanged over 110,000 Currents. In addition to boosting the activity of our local economy, we’re forging connections among local businesses that keeps more money local and promotes both financial and relationship prosperity.

From the outset until now as we near our formal launch, our group has gone through many experiences together. We’ve worked hard to learn the best ways to work collaboratively as a group, to apply new economy thinking and a triple bottom line mentality (people, planet, prosperity) to all of our decisions. We’ve joined with a wonderful group of supportive local people and organizations: financial wizards, doctors, executive coaches, our local BALLE business group, the local farmers association, and more.

We immersed ourselves in emerging New York State regulations aimed at money systems like Bitcoin which threatened to put us out of business, and we successfully strategized with government officials to keep that from happening to us and other alternative currencies. We’ve been fortunate to have received grant money to help us do all this. Together, we’ve geeked out over the minutia of money systems. We’ve laughed, shouted, even gone head-to-head at times as we steadily work toward our goal.

As we work we are discovering that as varied as our core group’s motives were, others we meet are bringing their own compelling reasons to create and use a complementary currency. We all sense the deficiencies of the US dollar and the virtues of a homegrown system of neighbors helping neighbors, keeping local what we can, supporting a strong local eco-system of food, clothing and shelter.

What is Money Anyway?

There is a significant educational side of local currency. At some point people will ask themselves, “What is money anyway?” Just posing that question is a positive outcome in and of itself. Aside from thinking about the way money functions, and perhaps more importantly, it gives people the opportunity to become conscious of their attitudes and feelings about the use of money.

What is Trust and Its Boundaries?

Currency systems, because they use a token that represents the value of goods and services, are always based on some kind of trust, promise, or agreement. Even Bitcoin, which claims to be a system where “no trusted third party” is required for transactions (a fact that should obviously give us pause), relies on trust in human creations like mathematics, cryptography, and the Internet. In the case of government-issued money, agreements are based on law and authority. With local currencies organized by civil society, community-based trust is the quality that is required and nurtured.

Taking responsibility for co-creating a currency, as opposed to leaving it to established authorities, brings up many important questions, such as “Are we–as individuals and a community–psychologically and fiscally healthy enough to trust and be trusted? What are the boundaries of that trust? Do we realize that by sticking only with national currencies, we are putting our trust in our government and private banks? Is that trust warranted?”

Trust is a key component of resiliency and even human survival. The flavor of the Transition Movement tends toward the idea that we had better start exploring those trust issues now, even if it sometimes takes a little extra work. As we build for the future, we are motivated by an important resiliency factor: local currencies can function independently of national currencies if and when those currencies, and their associated financial systems, break down.

Despite the many valid arguments in favor of local currencies, there are significant challenges to their implementation. In particular, we humans have very strong habitual patterns around money use. We resist transaction methods that challenge our routine. A critical mass of businesses, both in numbers and variety of offerings, must be reached for a currency to become sustainable.

A local currency is not a complete fix of an economic system. It does not directly address wealth building or the distribution of wealth. However, some types of alternative currencies, notably mutual credit based systems, offer potential for significant economic benefits through increased local economic activity, liquidity, and so prosperity.

At a deeper level, we should note that a local currency is not an automatic antidote to our materialism, or our complacency in depending on the modern global economy. But it does offers a way beyond these patterns if we are willing to make the effort. Developing and using a local currency is an important “piece in the puzzle,” and nurturing such systems is a very strong form of economic activism.

Jobs losses continue in Australia as slump deepens

Terry Cook

Major companies in Australia are responding to the growing world recession and slowing demand by restructuring their operations to destroy jobs and slash costs in an ever-more ruthless fight for market share and profits.

While the reality of Australia’s mounting jobs crisis was buried during the recent federal election—the Liberal-National coalition claimed it would create “jobs and growth” and Labor said it would generate “full employment”—the job destruction continues.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the official unemployment rate rose to 5.8 percent, up from 5.7 percent in June. The ABS data, which counts anyone who has worked for just one hour a week as employed acts, however, cloaks the real level of joblessness. An alternative survey by Roy Morgan Research has revealed that in June 2.326 million Australians, or 17.9 percent of the total workforce, were either unemployed or under-employed.

Just days after the July 2 federal election, rail freight operator Aurizonannounced that it would slash 300 jobs, including managerial, train crewing and yard operations staff. These cuts are on top of the 3,000 positions axed since the company bought Queensland Rail. The state-owned operation was privatised in 2011 by the Queensland state Labor government.

The job destruction at Aurizon, which is a major coal hauler, further highlights the impact on the Australian economy of the continuing collapse of the mining boom amid falling commodity prices and declining demand in China and throughout Asia.

Aurizon has announced that the amount of coal it hauled in the past 12 months has fallen to 207 million tonnes, down from 211 million tonnes this time last year.

Recent research by the National Australia Bank (NAB) estimates that another 50,000 jobs will be axed in the mining and resources sector over the next two and half years. The predicted job losses follow the estimated 46,000 mining and resources jobs eliminated between 2012 and 2015. The NAB research says that investment in the sector is expected to plummet by over 70 percent during the next three years.

According to mining analysts, the value of projects currently underway in resource-dependant Western Australia is now only $1.6 billion, well below the $50 billion three years ago. In Queensland, Australia’s other main resources state, sector employment has fallen by 23,000 since November 2013.

In June, giant mining company Glencore announced that it will start axing jobs at its Tahmoor coal mine in New South Wales (NSW) during the next 12 months. It plans to shut down all operations at the pit by 2019 at the cost of 350 jobs. The price for metallurgical coal produced at Tahmoor has dropped from over $US300 a tonne in 2011 to around $94 today.

Last month Keech Australia, which produces steel castings for the mining sector, said it was eliminating 24 jobs, or a quarter of its workforce, at its Bendigo plant in Victoria.

Job cuts continue to mount across other major sectors, including communications, transport and the auto industry.

In early July, car-maker Holden announced it would axe 320 jobs at its Elizabeth assembly plant in South Australia by October and another 200 jobs at its Port Melbourne engine plant in Victoria by the end of the year. The company plans to eliminate the remaining 1,000 jobs at its Elizabeth facility when it ends all production in Australia in 2017.

Ford Australia and Toyota continue to move towards wrapping up their Australian operations in Victoria by the end of this year and 2017 respectively, at the cost of 3,350 jobs. Industry specialists estimate that closure of the three car-makers will lead to the loss of up to 150,000 flow-on jobs, including thousands at auto parts manufacturers and other suppliers.

This month BlueScope Steel announced that it will slash another 30 jobs at the slab-making section at its Port Kembla plant on the NSW south coast. These cuts follow the elimination of 500 positions last year with the collaboration of the steel unions. In 2011 the union worked with the company to axe 1,000 jobs and cut costs by $200 million a year.

In March BlueScope Steel said it was on track for a full-year profit of around $250 million, up from the $2.2 billion in losses it chalked up between 2011 and 2014.

In June poultry-processing company Ingham announced that it will shutter its Cardiff plant, near Newcastle in NSW, by the end of August at the cost of over 350 jobs.

In July, Australia’s largest communications provider Telstra said it was destroying 326 customer service jobs nationally, most of them in Perth and Melbourne. The latest shedding comes on top of the 400 job losses announced last October at Telstra call centres in Tasmania, Western Australia and Queensland.

This month, the government-owned Airservices Australia announced 600 redundancies, after reporting a loss of more than $10 million this financial year, down from a $4.5 million profit last year. It was the company’s first loss in two decades. The redundancies are part of a 12-month restructuring plan aimed at slashing operational costs at the air-navigation service provider by more than $100 million.

Last month Virgin, Australia’s second largest airline, said would reduce its fleet of ATR turboprop aircraft, ditching all of its E190 aircraft with the elimination of an undisclosed number of jobs, in a bid to cut over $850 million in costs.

The West Australian newspaper also announced in June that it will axe at least 30 editorial jobs. Seven West Media, the newspaper’s parent company, plans to slash another 20 staff at the Sunday newspaper after finalising a planned takeover.

Ruling maintains ban on Russian track and field athletes from Rio Olympics

George Gallanis

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) announced Wednesday it was upholding a ban issued last November and confirmed last month by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) on participation by the Russian track and field team in next month’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The CAS, which is considered the final adjudicator for international sport disputes, denied an appeal filed by the Russian Olympic Committee and 68 Russian athletes.

The IAAF decided to suspend the All Russian Athletics Federation from membership in the world track and field organization after reports were published charging the Russian government and sports authorities with overseeing the doping of Russian athletes with performance enhancing drugs at past Olympic events and other international competitions.

Some of the banned Russian athletes may be eligible to compete as “neutral athletes” in the summer games, although the CAS has insisted that it has no say in the matter, which must be decided by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The groundwork for the CAS decision to uphold the ban on Russian track and field athletes was laid by the call issued Monday by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) for all Russian athletes, not just track and field competitors, to be banned from the Rio Olympics. WADA alleged in its statement that the Russian government, including President Vladimir Putin himself, played a principal role in coordinating and administering illegal performance-enhancing drugs to large numbers of Russian athletes. It called for all Russian government officials to “be denied access to international competitions, including Rio 2016.”

WADA also urged the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the governing body of international soccer, to launch an investigation into possible doping by Russian soccer players. This would place at risk Russia’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup in 2018.

On Tuesday, the International Olympic Committee held an emergency meeting but put off a final decision on whether to impose a blanket ban on the Russian team. The IOC is set to meet Sunday to discuss what punishment the Russian Olympic team will receive. There is no precedent in Olympics history for the banning of an entire national team.

Commenting on the matter, IOC President Thomas Bach said: “The findings of the report show a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sports and on the Olympic Games. Therefore, the IOC will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organisation implicated.”

The WADA report, authored by Richard McLaren, was based on a series of documentaries broadcast last year by the German public television channel ARD and claims made by Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov published by the New York Times last May. Rodchenkov, who was in charge of a WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow, said he personally oversaw many of the doping procedures, particularly those that took place at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

It is entirely possible that the Russian team engaged in some form of doping with the involvement of the state. Olympic medals are valuable currency in the promotion of Russian nationalism, a key ideological prop of the Putin regime.

That being said, there is no question that the singling out of Russia on doping charges is politically motivated. It is being driven by the United States as part of Washington’s economic and military offensive to isolate, destabilize and ultimately dismember the Russian Federation. That, in turn, is seen as essential to realizing the overriding goal of establishing US imperialist hegemony over the entire Eurasian continent.

The claim that Russia is some kind of outlier and affront to the “Olympic spirit” is a cynical fraud. The Olympics have long exemplified the money-grubbing corruption and national chauvinist politics of the professional sports industry. Doping is rampant and practiced by virtually every country.

Since 1986, when the International Olympic Committee changed the rules to allow professional athletes to compete in every phase of Olympics competition, any lingering connection to the principle of amateur sports has been severed. The Olympics have become a crass spectacle of corporate commercialism and flag-waving patriotism. In the process, the pressure on athletes to win at any cost—and the monetary reward for gaining a gold medal—have grown immensely.

Bribery scandals have become routine. One of the worst was the payoff by US officials and boosters to members of the International Olympic Committee for voting to locate the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. An ensuing investigation found the IOC members accepted bribes as well during the bidding for the 1998 Winter Olympics and 2000 Summer Games.

As for doping, there is nothing that compares to the decade-long fraud carried out by Lance Armstrong, who rode for the team of the US Postal Service, a government-sponsored corporation. In October 2012, the US Anti-Doping Agency released a report declaring that the US Postal Service cycling team had run “the most sophisticated, professional and successful doping program the sport has ever seen.”

California, sixth largest economy in the world, has highest poverty rate in US

Marc Wells

Earlier this month, the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy (CCSCE) released a report titled “California Jumps to the World’s 6th Largest Economy; Leads All States in Growth in 2015.” With a whopping $2.46 trillion gross state product (GSP) in 2015, California’s economy is now behind only the US, China, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom, having surpassed France and Brazil’s gross domestic product (GDP).

The Golden State has also the highest real GSP growth among US states in 2014, at 4.15 percent, well above the national 2.36 percent growth rate. It is also the state with the highest poverty rate, including among children.

The figures should be viewed within the context of the profound changes occurring in the world economy in the last few years, not as the result of a substantial economic development. In 2015, Brazil, not long ago considered one of the leading emerging economies, lost 27 percent of its GDP, while France saw its wealth diminish by 15 percent.

California is home to 131 billionaires, according to Forbes, making it third in the world for number of billionaires, after the US and China. Recent data shows that these individuals collectively own wealth of $560 billion, mostly derived from the tech industry, finance, real estate and media. This is the equivalent of GDP in countries like Argentina and Taiwan.

The most staggering aspect of this data is that California is, at the same time, the state with the highest poverty rate in the US, based on the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) criterion, with an average of 23.8 percent for the years 2010-2014.

The SPM is considered a more accurate method of poverty measurement since it includes, in addition to income data, items such as tax payments, work expenses, expenditure data on basic necessities (food, shelter, clothing and utilities) and is adjusted for geographic differences in the cost of housing.

Other indexes also show an increasing level of social inequality in California. The Gini coefficient, a measure of statistical dispersion and variance of inequality, ranks California at eighth place. With an index of 0.471, it is one of the most socially polarized states in the US. The most recent data is six years old and, considering a massive rise of living costs since 2010, the state’s current Gini coefficient is likely much worse.

California also has the highest child poverty rate in the nation. A report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows that 27 percent of California children—more than 1 in 4—live in poverty. A nearly equal percentage of children live near the poverty threshold. All told, half of the children in the state are poor or nearly poor.

Skyrocketing rents are the greatest burden on working class families. Exorbitant housing costs represent a veritable crisis for working families, often absorbing more than half of their income. In areas like San Francisco, rent costs are forcing sections of workers to move away from the city. In the case of teachers, this is leading to staff shortages in the classroom.

Home ownership for Millennials is virtually unattainable. A recent survey showed that among this group, 89 percent in San Diego, 83 percent In Los Angeles, and 81 percent in San Francisco see home ownership as unrealistic.

Christopher, a student from Los Angeles, told the WSWS he doesn’t think he will ever be able to buy a home: “Most definitely not. I can’t see that being possible. With the way that housing prices are rising every year, by the time that I feel like I have enough money to even get a nice place, the cost of living will be too high to afford a house.”

Rachael, also a student from Los Angeles, struck a similar chord: “I had to take out a loan through school to afford rent. I am a full-time student, which makes it difficult to work full-time hours. Housing is so expensive because the state has no affordable housing ordinates set up. Rent control is practically nonexistent.”

Rachael also rules out home ownership. “It’s seriously out of my realm of imagination,” she said. “For our parents’ generation being a homeowner was unquestionable, but with my friends it’s not something we think about or plan for because it feels too unrealistic.”

Reality stands in stark contrast to the American Dream. The economic and social crisis has thrown tens of thousands on the streets. Homelessness and food insecurity are so pervasive that a recent study by California State University shows that 8 to 12 percent of students are homeless, and 21 to 24 percent go hungry.

Such levels of poverty and inequality are the direct result of the crisis of the capitalist system and the policies implemented by federal, state and local governments. In fact, inequality is a dominant feature that clearly expresses the system’s inability to further develop its productive forces and satisfy human needs, despite record levels of wealth.

The implementation of financial policies like “quantitative easing” and bank bailouts adopted by the US government in response to the 2008 world financial crisis meant a vast transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top, while social programs such as food stamps, unemployment benefits, public education and welfare were systematically slashed or dismantled.

Similar measures of austerity were also implemented at state level. In California, the brutal budget cuts imposed in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis were never restored despite a much-celebrated surplus in recent years. Public education, state worker benefits, the CalWORKS welfare-to-work program, MediCal and mental health care were all subject to brutal assaults.

Just as at the federal level, where both the Bush and Obama administrations pursued harsh anti-worker policies, California governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown adopted measures aimed at redistributing wealth in favor of the rich, demonstrating the equally destructive role of both big business parties. A crucial instrument for the enforcement of such policies has been the trade union apparatus, fully subordinated to the dictates of capital.

California is a stark example of the diseased state of capitalism, but it is the rule, not the exception. There is plenty of wealth to resolve social problems. There is no reason in the 21st century for child poverty, hunger or homelessness to plague the existence of millions. However, the crisis of capitalism aims at redistributing social wealth for the privilege and benefit of a small oligarchy of ultra-rich.

Study shows funding down, tuition up at US public universities and colleges

Buster Haycook

A report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CPBB) shows that years of cuts in state funding for public colleges and universities have driven up student tuition. This has led to faculty reductions, fewer courses offerings and campus closings.

While some states are beginning to restore a portion of the deep cuts in funding prompted by the 2008 financial crisis, overall, state funding for public two- and four-year colleges still remains far below pre-recession levels.

According to the report, nearly every state has failed to keep higher education funding on par with inflation, and many have actively cut funding. Half of the states in the country have cut funding per student by more than 20 percent.

One state, Arizona, has cut funding per student by more than 50 percent at public universities and colleges. A CBPP graph shows that six states—Louisiana, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Idaho and New Hampshire—have cut funding by 30 to 40 percent.

In only four states—Montana, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming—was per-student funding for the last school year above its 2008 pre-recession levels. Forty-five states spent less per student in 2015-2016 than they did before the recession. Alaska spending stayed statistically stable.

Tuition at public four-year institutions rose in 34 states over the past year, increasing by an average of $254, or 2.8 percent. In nine states, average tuition rose by more than 5 percent, while Louisiana hiked tuition at its four-year schools by more than 7 percent, about $540.

States across the country recently approved tuition increase caps, which allow universities to keep state funding low as long as they observe the set maximum tuition increase. At the University of Michigan, some administrators have questioned whether or not they even need to raise tuition, due to the university’s massive endowment.

College tuition rates have soared compared to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which averages the prices of consumer goods and services, reflecting the cost of living. The Business Insider notes that while the CPI increased 120 percent from 1980 to 2014, college tuition rose by a staggering 260 percent during this time period. Even the top 1 percent of families in the United States, who have little trouble affording college tuition, have seen tuition rates outpace their 170 percent income growth.

As tuition has skyrocketed, college enrollment at public colleges and universities has risen almost 9 percent as funding has dried up. This has led many students to take on massive student loan debt.

Rising tuition costs make choosing a college a difficult decision for high school students and their families. Low-income students are particularly affected. Without access to information about available financial aid, many low-income families do not believe that they can afford college and therefore do not pursue it, deciding it is not worth the financial risk.

In 2012, nearly 50 percent of low-income students enrolled in some form of post-secondary education. Over 80 percent of students from families in the top 20 percent income bracket enrolled. Income, more so than test scores and academic records, has been shown to be one of the main deterrents preventing the pursuit of higher education for students from lower income families.

Tuition increases are likely a reason for families who choose a less-selective public institution, which has been shown to decrease a student’s future earnings. Even high-achieving students who grew up in low-income families are likely to select colleges based upon financial constraints.

Various media outlets have placed blame for rising tuition costs on instructors’ pensions and allegations of administrative fraud. But, as an article from the Washington Monthly points out, the number of full-time professional administrators and their support staffs far outnumber the total number of educators employed by universities throughout the country:

“Alas, today’s full-time professional administrators tend to view management as an end in and of itself. … For many of these career managers, promoting teaching and research is less important than expanding their own administrative domains. Under their supervision, the means have become the end.”

This is a change from the past, where professors would often cycle through administrative positions and most always return to teaching or research. While many of these support positions are valuable to students’ success, the bloating of higher-level administrative staff and their salaries is not in students’ interest.

Many of the major universities have generated massive endowments, which guarantee their own stability outside of state funding. Smaller public universities do not have such massive endowments, and they are virtually nonexistent at community colleges.

The University of Michigan, a public institution, has a $10 billion endowment. The Wall Street Journal reports that UM President Mark Schlissel, pulling in $772,500 annually before perks, has been guaranteed a minimum salary of $225,000 when he returns to the faculty, as well as $2 million to open a new biology laboratory.

The resources exist for quality affordable education. The National Priorities Project reports that military spending in the fiscal year 2015—$598.5 billion—accounted for 54 percent of all federal discretionary spending. This massive figure included spending for war, nuclear weapons, international military pursuits and other Pentagon-related spending.

The Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality insist that high-quality higher education, including continuing education for adults, is a social right and a necessity in a modern society.

US air raids kill more than 200 civilians in northern Syria

Thomas Gaist

Airstrikes by the American-led war coalition killed as many as 212 civilians in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo on Tuesday, according to estimates published Thursday by Al Jazeera.

The original civilian death toll produced by the strikes was reported to be 56. The strikes, which were allegedly carried out with significant support from the French military, “pulverized entire families, including young children,” the Washington Post reported Thursday.

The carnage in Aleppo is merely a foretaste of the slaughter being prepared by Washington against the Syrian city of Raqqa and Iraqi city of Mosul. The bombings, carried out in total disregard for civilian lives, serve notice that Washington and its allies are ready to carry out large-scale war crimes in pursuit of strategic domination over the Middle East.

Planning sessions for the attacks on Raqqa and Mosul were held this week, attended by leaders from the US-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other governments aligned with Washington’s “anti-Islamic State coalition.”

In addition to hashing out the details for a massive urban assault against areas inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis, the talks included discussions over a package of new military escalations throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

The stepped-up NATO military operation, to be conducted in the name of the “war against Islamic State,” includes deployments to Iraq, Syria, and Libya. The NATO powers also agreed to contribute additional forces for naval operations in the Mediterranean, as part of “Operation Sea Guardian.”

With the US military and its proxy forces on both sides of the Syria-Iraq border now in the final countdown for the offensives, it is already clear that the assaults will be bloody affairs. They are predicted to produce hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the Pentagon is planning for an extended ground occupation, aimed at “controlling the population” and modeled on the lessons of the 2003-2011 US occupation of Iraq, once Islamic State militants are cleared from the area.

The US-led coalition seeks to “collapse ISIS control over Mosul and Raqqa,” and is planning for large-scale “stabilization and governance efforts,” geared to “hold, rebuild and govern their territory,” US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said.

“Mosul is now increasingly coming upon us. We have it in sight,” anti-ISIS coalition spokesman Brett McGurk declared Thursday.

Having committed an additional 560 US troops to Iraq last week, bringing the official US troop presence there to nearly 5,000, Washington is pressing for greater troop contributions from its allies. The Australian government announced Tuesday that it will send forces to Baghdad in support of “counter-terror” training programs for Iraqi forces. NATO plans to expand efforts to train Iraqi military officers, in an effort to bolster the imperialist-controlled Iraqi government in Baghdad. The alliance is already training hundreds of Iraqi officers at camps in Jordan, and plans to expand its training programs into Iraq itself.

Secretary Carter made clear Wednesday that Washington expected all of its major allies to get on board with the “war against ISIS.” He called for material support from NATO allies, along with commitments of more trainers and advisors.

“We’re all going to need to do more,” Carter said, following discussions Wednesday morning.

“Today, we made the plans and commitments that will help us deliver ISIL the lasting defeat that it deserves,” he stated. “We’ve pursued a number of deliberate decisions to accelerate our plan.”

Just prior to Wednesday’s conference, Secretary Carter met with French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, who confirmed that Paris would deploy the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle in support of the US-led aerial bombardment of Iraq and Syria.

On Thursday, Le Drian made clear the global scope of the war preparations being implemented under the banner of the “war on terror” and the “war against ISIS,” which extend from West Africa straight across to Central Asia. He called for stepped-up NATO deployments to sub-Saharan Africa, citing the need for operations focused on the Lake Chad Basin.

“We must also help the poorest countries which are on the front line (near) Lake Chad,” the French Foreign Minister said, highlighting Niger, Chad, and Nigeria for targeting by NATO forces.

The Turkish coup, US militarism and the collapse of democracy

Bill Van Auken

One week after the abortive military coup to overthrow Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, there remains no doubt that Washington had a major hand in the bloody events that shook Istanbul and Ankara.

Turkish military commanders with the closest ties to the Pentagon have been directly implicated in the attempted overthrow, including the commander of the Incirlik air base, where the US stores its largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in Europe and from which it carries out its bombing campaign against Iraq and Syria. Multiple aircraft supporting the coup flew out of Incirlik under the eyes of the US military. After it became apparent that the coup would fail, the Turkish base commander asked the US for asylum.

It emerged Wednesday that a warning of the impending coup had come from Russia, which relayed intercepted radio communications between the coup plotters to Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, known as the MIT. The warning was shared with the Turkish president in time for him to flee barely a half an hour in advance of a special operations squad sent to the seaside resort where Erdoğan was vacationing with the mission of either killing or capturing him.

Is it plausible that the CIA and the US military, with their massive deployment in the region and the world’s most extensive electronic surveillance network at their disposal, would not have been aware of the same communications?

If they weren’t relayed to the Turkish government by the American military and intelligence apparatus, the reason is clear. They were in on the coup plot. Obama didn’t want Erdoğan warned; he wanted him dead.

Then there was Washington’s original reaction to the coup, which came from Secretary of State John Kerry, who was in Moscow. Kerry limited himself to expressing American hopes for “stability and peace and continuity within Turkey.” There was no mention of defending a democratically elected government against military overthrow, not to mention any expression of concern for the fate of the country’s president, Erdoğan.

What precisely Kerry was referring to in voicing support for “continuity within Turkey” can only be understood in the context of the last 70 years of US-Turkish relations. In 1947, at the outset of the Cold War, the US promulgated the Truman Doctrine, committing itself to the defense of both Greece and Turkey against what it alleged was Soviet aggression.

US aid, military advisors and an aircraft carrier group were rushed to Turkey to assist it in rebuffing Moscow’s demand for free passage through the Turkish Straits, the strategic passage connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. In 1952, Turkey was brought into NATO and, over the course of four decades, remained a pivotal country in the US military drive against the Soviet Union.

In the interests of maintaining this “continuity,” Washington supported a series of military coups in Turkey, the first in 1960 against Turkey’s prime minister, Adnan Menderes, whose fate (he was hung) was sealed after he turned to Moscow for economic aid.

Erdoğan, first as prime minister from 2003 to 2014, and then as president, has posed similar problems. In the interests of securing the grip of his right-wing Islamist party, the AKP, he has pursued a nationalist policy that has repeatedly antagonized Washington. In 2003, Turkey refused to allow the US to use its soil to attack Iraq. In 2010, it failed to back the US drive for UN sanctions against Iran. And in 2013, it shocked Washington and NATO by announcing plans to purchase a Chinese anti-missile system.

Relations have further deteriorated over the war for regime change in Syria, where Turkey is the principal backer of Islamist militias tied to Al Qaeda, while Washington has increasingly solidified ties with Syria’s Kurdish militia, which is in turn aligned with the PKK, the Turkish Kurdish movement with which Ankara is at war.

Most recently, there is Erdoğan’s apology to Moscow over the deliberate shoot-down of a Russian warplane in November 2015 and a move toward rapprochement with the government of Vladimir Putin.

In the wake of the coup, Erdoğan spoke with Putin well before a phone call with Obama. And, in a conversation Tuesday with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Erdoğan declared, “We are determined to resolve regional issues by joining hands with Iran and Russia, and with our efforts to return peace and stability to the region.”

US imperialism has no intention of brooking such a strategic realignment in the region. Resort to an attempted military coup was no doubt a criminally reckless policy. If it had succeeded, the likely result would have been a civil war and a death toll that would have made the bloody US-backed coup in Egypt pale by comparison.

US imperialism has already wrecked Iraq, Libya and Syria, killing and maiming millions in pursuit of its geo-strategic interests, so why not Turkey as well?

The tensions with Turkey have emerged in the context of a global eruption of American militarism. The coup took place barely one week after a NATO summit in Warsaw outlined plans to execute a massive escalation of military deployments on Russia’s western border and preparations for a direct, i.e., nuclear, confrontation with Moscow.

In Asia, US imperialism has made it clear it intends to use a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration against Chinese claims in the South China Sea as the pretext for a major military escalation against Beijing.

To that end, the Obama administration dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to Australia to deliver bellicose speeches threatening China with US military might and, more pointedly, to instruct the Australians that, whether they liked it or not, they would be dragged into the US war preparations. “It’s never a good bet to bet against the United States,” he threatened.

The US is moving toward a military confrontation on a scale not seen since the end of the Second World War. It is determined to crush all obstacles in the path of its war plans. Great shocks are coming in the wake of the American November elections, if not even before.

The growth of militarism and preparations for world war are incompatible with the maintenance of democratic forms of rule anywhere on the planet. The drive to war is intensifying and accelerating a turn toward dictatorial methods in country after country, a turn that is rooted in the profound crisis of world capitalism and the unchecked growth of social inequality and class tensions in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown.

In Turkey itself, the defeat of the imperialist-backed coup has spelled not some flowering of democracy, but the consolidation of a right-wing dictatorship in which Erdoğan has arrogated to himself the power to rule by decree, while carrying out the arrest and firing of tens of thousands of people thought to oppose him and moving to restore the death penalty.

In answer to moralizing capitalist critics in the West, the Turkish president has retorted that he is only doing the same thing as French President Francois Hollande, who is now ruling under what is becoming a permanent state of emergency, imposed on the pretext of combatting terrorism but directed against mounting social tensions and working class unrest.

Whether the abortive coup of July 15 marks the end of the attempts by the Turkish military to seize power is itself an open question. With fully one-third of its general staff under arrest, the country’s armed forces are in a state of turmoil. Moreover, Washington is not about to passively permit Turkey to drift out of its strategic orbit.

The Turkish events have provided a stark lesson for the working class. It is impossible to defend basic social and democratic rights outside of a unified international struggle against imperialist war and militarism and the capitalist system in which they are rooted.