Stephen D. Shenfield | Author and Translator
Climate: up against the 'growth machine'
- Published on 28 September 2019
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This past week the climate crisis has been in the spotlight. Last Friday (September 20) was the first Global Climate Strike, with four million taking to the streets in 185 countries (reported figures vary). Protests continued over the weekend. On Sunday afternoon (September 22) our comrades in the World Socialist Party of India held a rally on College Square, Kolkata under the rousing slogan ‘Save the Planet, Share the Earth.’ Then on Monday (September 23) the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York opened with the eloquent appeal of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg.
On yachts and tropical diseases
- Published on 16 August 2019
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Huge numbers are hard to visualize. A billion dollars, let’s say. That’s the sum you have to accumulate to get yourself listed as a billionaire in Forbes magazine and denounced by Bernie as a member of the ‘billionaire class.’
Start with a wad of twenty $100 banknotes. That makes $2,000. Then imagine a suitcase packed with 500 of those wads. That makes a million. Then imagine entering a big storeroom with 100 of those suitcases lined up on shelves. That still gives us only one tenth of a billion.
Or we can tackle the problem in another way. We can ask what can be done with a billion dollars. What can be bought with that much money? What can be achieved?
Waste and want: Grapes of Wrath revisited
- Published on 01 August 2010
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In his famous novel The Grapes of Wrath (Chapter 25), John Steinbeck described how food was destroyed during the Great Depression:
Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground.
The people come for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges… A million people hungry, needing the fruit – and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships… Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out [with nets]. Slaughter the pigs and bury them…
And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must be forced to rot.
The strange existence of Las Vegas
- Published on 08 September 2019
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Las Vegas is Spanish for The Meadows. A settlement was established there in 1905. Before that it was just an oasis in the Mojave Desert.
Nothing strange about an oasis in the desert. A well with water for the weary traveler and his camels. Trees to shade them from the hot sun while they rest. I see it in my mind’s eye.
Prisons do not make us safer
- Published on 27 November 2019
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Like many other ‘law-abiding citizens,’ I used to be reluctant to advocate the full abolition of prisons, despite knowing that prisons are a very inhumane institution. The logic behind my reluctance was that prisons, inhumane as they may be, do nonetheless serve to isolate from the general public many ruthless, violent, and sadistic persons and thereby protect us ‘law-abiding citizens’ – that is, people who do not deliberately violate the law except when cheating on their taxes.[1] Prisons make us safer – or less unsafe – than we would otherwise be.
