Letters - 30 June 2010

Capitalism Produces Food for Profit, Not for Health

I was happy to read the article on health care “reform” in the last issue of CHALLENGE. It explained why health care can’t be guaranteed for all people in a capitalist system. (See 6/09/10 issue) We also need to understand that what makes us healthy isn’t just being seen by a doctor. Our whole lifestyle — including stress at our jobs, satisfaction with our relationships, exercise and diet — determines how healthy we are. Capitalism doesn’t allow workers to choose a life that will be happiest and healthiest.

We don’t have to wait for a communist revolution to start living better. I would like to see my friends and comrades look into the scientific evidence about the benefits of a plant-based, vegan diet. I became a vegan over ten years ago for ethical reasons. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about nutrition and how to eat healthfully.

In the book “The China Study,” Dr. T. Colin Campbell presents an overwhelming body of comparative studies that show diets high in animal products (meat and dairy) are correlated at 95% or higher with cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, autism and Alzheimer’s. Our likelihood of suffering something like breast cancer, which we commonly think is determined by genetics, actually has much more to do with our diet and physical fitness level than genes. But, as Dr. Campbell discusses in the book, if we can master our own health by changing our lifestyle, we don’t need expensive surgeries or medicines.

The pharmaceutical and medical industries stand to lose profits, not to mention the meat and dairy producers whose interests are represented by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other government bodies. We need to find good science to expose these lies, and show others why capitalism just doesn’t work.

Healthy Red

The Capitalist ‘Oil Curse’ in the Niger Delta Exceeds the Gulf Spill

After Katrina came the murderous BP exploding oil well. Some people in the Gulf region must be mad enough to think about revolution! Meanwhile, because of media racism, few know that the oil spills and degradation in the oil-producing Niger Delta in Nigeria are even larger than this new Gulf spill. Residents there have been living with and protesting them for 50 years. They, too, need the revolutionary PLP.

Some economists speak of the “oil curse,” so terrible are the normal effects of capitalist production on oil workers and residents. The media focus on a few disasters that affect U.S. or Europe, ignoring the chronic racist oil curse and making us think the oil industry’s pursuit of profit and power is basically fine. Not true! And that’s in “peaceful” times. The other curse of oil under capitalism is that it breeds genocidal imperialist wars.

An article by John Vidal in The Observer, May 30, 2010, spells it out. More oil has been spilled in the Niger Delta every year than has been leaked in the Gulf of Mexico. On May 1 a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the Delta in seven days before it was stopped.

“We are faced with incessant oil spills from rusty pipes, some of which are 40 years old,” said a resident. A community leader in Ibeno said: “Oil companies do not value our life, they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and fishermen cannot sustain their families. It is not tolerable.” 

With 606 oilfields, according to Vidal, the Niger Delta supplies 40% of all the crude the U.S. imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy has fallen to 40 years over the last two generations, and half the population has no access to clean water. Nnimmo Bassey of Friends of the Earth says that oil companies in Nigeria largely ignore their spills and cover them up.

Writer Ben Ikari says: “When I see the efforts being made in the U.S. I feel a great sense of sadness at the double standards.” Bassey continues: “The Gulf spill can be seen as a metaphor for what is happening daily in Nigeria and other parts of Africa.”

Judith Kimerling, a CUNY professor, writes in her book “Amazon Crude” about similar effects of the oil curse in Ecuador. The Jayne Cortez poem “U.S./Nigerian Relations” sums it up in two lines: “They want the oil/But they don’t want the people.” In a marching song, Bassey wrote of the “gallows called oil rigs/Drilling our souls,” then went on: “We know our dreams/Won’t burst like crude pipes.” The Delta rebels know our revolutionary dreams mean we’ve got to fight back.

Community groups, NGOs and rebel bands fight the oil curse daily, ignored by the media, but they can never plug the leak at the bottom of all this: the profit system itself, which, as Bassey says of the oil companies, is indeed “a danger to the planet.” Communists everywhere need to join and spark these struggles until our Party builds an international revolutionary movement out of our class’s daily battle to survive.

African Studies Teacher