Money-grubbing Olympics
Some people who watched the recent Olympic Games were interested less in the prowess of the athletes than in their potential for advertising endorsements.
Advertisers are looking for athletes with sales-appeal—no charisma, no contract, and one ad-man predicted that Carl Lewis’s ninth gold medal wouldn’t help him because “He's won before and no one liked him ’’(New York Post, 31 July).
And athletes should know when and when not to shed a tear:
“They're allowed to cry for joy when they win, but any athlete who cries because they've lost can forget about endorsements. ”
But patriotic tears could be more rewarding than mere tears of joy:
“The guy who won the high jump came close to crying during the National Anthem, but he held back, one tear could have been worth tens of thousands of dollars. ”
Maybe the next Olympics will see medals for those athletes who land the most lucrative advertising contracts.
Marriage of convenience
The decision by Boeing, the world’s biggest maker of civilian aircraft, to buy Rockwell, the aerospace and "defence” company, for three billion dollars, is more bad news for America's European competitors.
A spate of similar take-overs in America has produced a handful of industry giants and put European rivals at a competitive disadvantage because they have remained independent—and relatively small.
“But this attitude may be changing—Efforts to create a pan-European aerospace industry capable of matching US rivals gathered pace yesterday when the new chairman of Aerospatiale called on his fellow industrialists to “regroup” their interests ” (Guardian, 9 August).
For any industry' to survive in today’s capitalism it must “regroup” into bigger but fewer economic units—witness what’s happening in banking, insurance, car manufacturing, brewing, retailing, etc., and Europe’s fragmented aerospace and defence industry is belatedly catching on.
Hard Times Down-Under
We have received a pile of newspaper cuttings from a sympathiser in New Zealand which tell some familiar stories.
They tell of strikes involving teachers, telecom workers, air-traffic controllers, and many others, the health service is collapsing, one-fifth of the population lives below the poverty line, pay and benefits have been cut, etc.
A less familiar story concerns an employer who has ordered his workers to have their “bowel movements ” in their own time only:
“It's a completely reasonable request. It's a personal discipline" (Sunday Star Times, 7 July).
Presumably, this superman has disciplined himself to crap on cue, but for mere mortals it’s a case of “When you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go!”
Workers in New Zealand are clearly having a tough time, but for some the screw has been turned just that little bit tighter.
Orwell’s “Lesser Evil”
The revelation that George Orwell named “crypto-communists” and “fellow travellers” to the British secret service drew noteworthy comments form some prominent left-wingers.
For example, Christopher Hill, the communist historian, claimed that Orwell’s writing was always ambiguous, and added that “Animal Farm was precisely an attack on communism. ” How an “ambiguous” writer could write “precisely” Hill didn’t say, but presumably he still defends the “communism” which Orwell so brilliantly attacked.
And Tony Benn curiously excused Orwell’s act on the grounds that “the biggest terrorists in the world are states”, possibly forgetting that he had been part of the British state when he was a Labour cabinet minister.
Orwell’s denunciation of the Russian dictatorship was wholly admirable, but in naming names he sided with one bunch of exploiters in its sordid quarrel with another, and that was utterly deplorable.
Big-time con-artists
A vicar at the C of E’s General Synod speaking on Camelot’s running of the National Lottery, described the lottery as evil, and added that “Punters are being deceived on a grand scale. ”
Yes, this is the same C of E which has for centuries been telling folk that after they die they will live on in one place or another., that once upon a time a luckless Israelite got himself done-in as payment-in-advance for their sins, that the meek shall inherit the earth, etc., etc.
When it comes to deceiving punters “on a grand scale” then Camelot has got nothing on the C of E.
Naive Greens
Anyone who wonders why we are so critical of the “Greens” should consider the following.
The United Nations commissioned a group of international economists to advise on the best way of achieving a sharp reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (Big Issue, 4 August).
Aubrey Meyer, a Green activist, discovered that the economists are working only on the cheapest way of tackling global warming:
"Their task was to work out the slowest rate of increase in emissions that the world could afford. It was putting economics before lives."
And yet Greens remain convinced that this problem can be solved within the capitalist system which creates it.
1 comment:
That's the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
Post a Comment