A near constant of this site is that a once progressive capitalism – the predominant system for organising social relations to produce and daily reproduce the material conditions of human existence – now threatens us and most other life forms with extinction.
My focus, given capitalism’s advanced stage of imperialism, is a propensity – hard wired into laws of motion which require ceaseless expansion – to global confrontation in a nuclear age.
That, and levels of inequality as dysfunctional as they are morally repellent and destabilising.
Others focus on its reckless disregard, equally baked in, for a trashed and overheating planet.
“Insulate Britain” activists block a road in Essex
But today’s focus is on one of the many other negative outcomes when private profits override human need. Regulars on this site know of my love-hate relationship with the output of Richard Murphy: tax specialist, bird-watcher, Quaker, erstwhile fast food junkie, fen dweller, professor of economics in my own steel city, champion of modern monetary theory, scourge of ‘austerity’, clueless shill for empire in the Ukraine and doubtless much besides …
… homo sapiens sapiens being nothing if not complex.
Only last month I wrote, apropos his talk of Crimea having been “seized” by Russia one month after the US-backed coup of February 2014, that:
Professor Murphy shows not for the first time a lazily armchair abuse of his platform by pronouncing on matters he knows not the first thing about.
Can’t say I care either for the way he holds court below the line to a commentariat bordering on the fawning. All the same, I frequently quote him with approval on what he does so well: above all his damning of the immiserating consequences for the many, further enrichment for the few, of UK prime minister Keir Starmer and his economically illiterate chancellor, Rachel Reeves.
Here though he’s in good form on a different topic; the epidemic – especially in Britain and the USA, where ‘free markets’ have gone further even than the West at large in eclipsing all other considerations – of junk food addicts cultivated as such using sophisticated and lavishly funded toolkits for psychological assault. I speak of commercial propaganda in both the narrow sense of advertising, and the broader sense – from product placement and celebrity endorsement to society-wide conditioning on what constitutes the good life – of a chronically market-dictated ‘developed’ world.
One last generalisation before we get to Disgusted of Ely. Not a fortnight ago – see Method in madness: Trump’s tariffs Part 3 – I quoted the Reverend Chris Hedges, pace Karl Marx:
Politics in late stage capitalism will become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content, and abjectly subservient to the dictates of corporations and oligarchs.
Bear this in mind while digesting Richard’s ire over a UK Health Secretary no less in bed with said corporations and oligarchs than are his colleagues at 10 and 11 Downing Street, London.
Craving the dopamine hits that Wes Streeting is dedicated to providing
April 29, 2025
I cannot help but note this report from The Guardian yesterday:
Consuming large amounts of ultra-processed food (UPF) increases the risk of an early death, according to an international study that has reignited calls for a crackdown on UPF.
Each 10% extra intake of UPF, such as bread, cakes and ready meals, increases someone’s risk of dying before they reach 75 by 3%, according to research in countries including the US and England.
They added:
UPF is so damaging to health that it is implicated in as many as one in seven of all premature deaths that occur in some countries, according to a paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
I am, to be candid, astonished that the suggested figure is as low as that. Diabetes, heart disease, cancers of all sorts and dementia are amongst the most common causes of death and the risks of all of them are increased significantly by ultra-processed food and the sugars within them, as I have noted here, often.
These may look tempting:
So do most ultra-processed foods. The companies that make them know what they are doing, just as the tobacco companies did. They are seeking to make you an addict. I know. I was one. I will be in recovery forever now. It’s a trade-off I am willing to make.
What we need is a government that is willing to act to end the abuse promoted by these companies. Until we do, the health of people in this country will decline.
Our economic well-being will also decline.
So, too, will our healthy life expectancy.
Demand for the NHS will grow exponentially.
And all because we’re hooked on the dopamine highs that the sugar kicks in ultra-processed foods, in particular, are chemically designed to deliver, so that we crave the next hit long before we should really need to eat again.
There is no excuse for Wes Streeting not to know that. But as Upton Sinclair once said:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I suspect Streeting suspects his whole future career depends on feigning such ignorance. He is an ethical black hole.
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