Day: 21 August 2019
Syriza: Greek capitalism’s repair crew
In January 2015 there was dancing in the streets of Athens as a left-wing anti-austerity party, Syriza, a ‘coalition of the radical left’, made up of various left and Green groups, Eurocommunists and some Trotskyists, had just won the Greek elections. There was rejoicing too amongst like-minded people outside Greece. The fightback against austerity was…
Coffee: the disaster of a good harvest
Two bumper harvests in Brazil have flooded the international market with so much coffee that the price farmers can get has plummeted to below $1 a pound (BBC News, 11 July). Since coffee is a cash crop that farmers sell instead of growing food they could actually eat, when the price hits the floor farmers…
Big Pharma
This is your capitalist brain on drugs Drug firm Pfizer has discovered that its own arthritis treatment drug Enbrel also seems to cut the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by up to 64 percent (New Scientist, 15 June, p7). Great, you might think. Over to Pfizer to start cranking out Enbrel by the container load. Oh…