From Columbus to Clinton (1992)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

All awful things come to an end. This one ended on 3 November with the election of Bill Clinton as leader of what he called in one of his speeches "the greatest country in human history". After a year of endlessly repeated “Gahd Bless America" and pseudo-debates on network TV between toothpaste models posing as politicians, a minority of the US population decided to vote for Big Mac instead of Wimpy. Faced with the choice between capitalism or capitalism they opted for. . . . Capitalism.

The most remarkable thing about the Presidential contest was that neither side addressed the most pressing question of all: How is it that in the richest country in the world nearly a quarter of the workers are living below the government’s own poverty line? In cities like Detroit and New York and Houston vast numbers are homeless, long-term unemployed, without any health insurance and empty of hope. A quarter of all US families (and 70 percent of black US families) have only one parent, and one in three of them are existing beneath the poverty line. 40 percent of Hispanics and 45 percent of blacks in the US face official poverty.

In 1970 7.5 million American families lived below the government-defined "near-poverty level" (of $13,700 per year for a family of four or more, in 1992 values); twenty-two years later the number of families living below that level has doubled to 15 million, constituting 44 million workers. Again, in 1970 less than half of US families were bringing in two wages, whereas in 1992 there has been an 11 percent increase in the number of two-wage families (to 56 percent), but still the number facing officially-defined poverty has doubled. Furthermore, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, real wages (i.e. the buying power of workers’ incomes) are falling, so that in real terms the average US wage in 1992 can buy 19 percent less than what it could in 1972. In short, the workers are getting poorer.

Rhetoric
Neither Bush nor Clinton were prepared to go beyond rhetoric in relation to the problem of poverty. Bush has a lousy record of neglect for those in need. Following Reagan, his Administration operated on the callous basis that the market would sort out those whose needs should be satisfied. Of course, the market responds to profit and not needs not backed up by purchasing power. Bush has presided over a nation where the public provision of health care has been slashed (in Detroit every single non-private hospital has been closed down and they have been transferring the psychiatric patients to prisons after the state of Michigan decided to cut all welfare expenditure); free education has been discredited (the 1980s saw such cuts in Californian public schooling that now only the most impoverished children are sent to what were once regarded as the best schools in the USA); whole inner city areas have become crime-dominated, drug-infested wastelands (for the first time in twentieth century US history a majority of Americans no longer live in cities) and the level of street violence and murder is rising unstoppably.

In the light of such a dire state of affairs the Republican rhetoric of sickening Christian moralising must have offended a lot of American workers. Clinton was afraid to make anything more than indifferent noises about "change" in relation to the poverty issue because he feared that any talk of helping the most disadvantaged workers would lose him the support of the less disadvantaged wage and salary slaves. Clinton’s campaign exhibited all the lack of commitment or willingness to offend the rich which would make him a prime candidate for leadership in the British Labour Party.

Clinton did not win; Bush fell asleep at the wheel and lost. Clinton’s reputation is based upon the ability to indulge in empty phrasemongering of the "gahd bless you all" variety and a semi-eloquent knack of saying nothing. For example, in an interview in the September issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Clinton spoke of the need for greater American prosperity, then stating "we are going to have to reconcile ourselves . . .  to having a higher percentage of people at lower wage levels". In short, American prosperity under Clinton will mean more workers earning less than they do now. The American workers can look forward to more of the same: falling wages, unnecessary poverty, accompanied by plenty of flag-waving and toothy smiles.

The real Columbus
Of course, 1992 was not only the year of “the greatest country in human history” deciding which hollow grin to be stuck with for the next four years; it is also the year of national celebration of the arrival of Columbus to America five hundred years ago.

Most Americans know less about the real Columbus than they know about Clinton’s shady love life. In Britain the 1492 industry hit rock bottom with the production of the relentlessly unhilarious Carry On Columbus. There has been an ongoing row in the London borough of Lambeth where the local council refused to allow the erection of a Columbus statue outside the Archbishop's Palace because it would be offensive to local black people.

The memory of Columbus should cause offence. The European “discovery" of America as a land fit to exploit was accompanied by one of the most vicious exercises in human annihilation in the history of property society. When Columbus was governor of Espanoia, the first Spanish colony in America, 50,000 natives were killed within the first six months. They were not killed by accident or even neglect, but as a result of a calculated policy of destroying or enslaving the native Indian population whose lives prior to “discovery” had been characterised by communistic sharing and mutual aid.

Central Mexico, with a population of 25 million, ten times that of England at the time of its “discovery”, was reduced to a population of little over a million by the end of the sixteenth century. In western Nicaragua 99 percent of the native population was exterminated: from a population of 1 million to 10,000 in just sixty years. Peru and Chile had a population diminution from over 9 million to less than half a million due to the genocide.

According to Professor David E. Stannard's highly informative book American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992):

  All told, it is likely that between 60 and 80 million people from the Indies to the Amazon had perished as a result of the European invasion even before the dawning of the seventeenth century.

That workers are being asked to celebrate this vast global plunder is evidence of the sickness of capitalist national ideology. While Bush piously tells Serbians to refrain from barbarous nationalist deeds, he and his friends, including Clinton, urge us to commemorate the barbarity of Columbus and the murderous robbers who appropriated America as their own.

The truth is that we have more to learn from and to respect about the native Americans who were killed off (only half a million survive in the modern USA, many still confined to squalid reservations) than from their persecutors. The truth is that a clear line runs from Columbus through to Clinton: the line of ultimate deference to the rights of property, and Gahd bless all those who own it. Socialists want neither their imaginary gods, their lousy flags, their oppressive governments nor their arrogant nationalism. We want a world without nations, states, classes or the curse of poverty. In the struggle to achieve that Clinton is our enemy; he is the enemy of anyone unwilling to succumb to the history tyranny of property.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: The Road to Nurenberg (1993)

The Between the Lines column from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Something dangerous is happening. Mind manipulation has become one of the growth industries of the late twentieth century. Three examples from the year just gone: the use made of the media by Clinton, Perot and Major. Each in their own way showed that leaders with money can afford to have contempt for democratic debate.

The Clinton Presidential campaign was a masterpiece of saying nothing winningly. Millions of Americans were sucked within the emptiness of Clinton's fake-smile reformism. They abdicated their power to control their own lives to a man committed to the continuation of their exploitation — a man advised by well-paid media consultants (i.e. propagandists) whose task was to trample all over their political intelligence.

The bizarre earthiness of the Perot campaign appeared to be a contrast to all that. But it was not. The key to the Perot style was the appearance of the man next door being projected with the aid of millions of dollars on to a Texan billionaire whose class interests were diametrically opposed to those with whom he chatted from the screen as if he leaning over the fence. The entire Perot campaign was a media hoax, made possible solely by the possession of huge funds.

The Tory election victory last year was again a victory of form over content: of the myth of Major, the local lad made good, over Kinnock, the unreliable loser. These were big moments in what could have been wide, intelligent popular debates. That is certainly what workers looked for when they campaigned for the vote. The danger is not just that these perversions of democracy are happening, but that they go un-noticed, unchallenged. It is as if arrogant media men who believe that the dignity of human intelligence is degradable to a sordid exercise in mind manipulation have invaded our living rooms and, through the medium of TV, created a world where workers are mere followers, extras in the movie of life, spectators upon our own world.

How odd it now seems that half a century ago workers thought that they were fighting to defend democracy. What they were fighting for, amongst other economic aims, was to preserve and consolidate the more subtle dictatorship of capital of Britain and America against the crude thuggery of fascistic and naked dictatorship. A chilling reminder of that Nazi moment in history was BBC2's showing of Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 propaganda classic, Triumph of the Will (12.05am, Saturday 19 December). This was the famous film in which Hitler's presence at a Nurenberg rally was presented as an inspiring romance of nationalist inspiration. It had an enormous impact, apparently causing German cinema audiences to weep with uncontrollable joy.

Viewed today the film's propagandist zeal to aggrandise the Fuhrer and turn the worshipping followers into a single, amorphous mass of robotic dancers to the fascist will, seems transparent and even faintly ridiculous in its pretensions. In Iran, Iraq, China and many more dictatorships too numerous to list the transparency might be less evident: what would be more obvious is the similarity to the backward propaganda methods of those states.

But Riefenstahl was in the mould of 1984, and by and large we can say that 1984 has passed and the uncouth propaganda of leader-worship has not triumphed. But the road from Nurenberg has not led to democracy. It has led to the triumph of sophisticated media trickery. We shudder — and rightly so — at neo-Nazi fools performing imitation goosesteps. and other more sickening acts, in the streets of Germany, but the biggest threat will not come from them. It will come — it already does come — from those whose dismissal of the intelligence of the majority is not reflected in the culture of the jackboot: it is exhibited by the culture of TV-run politics. It is no more sensible to let a factory owner organise his workers in a strike than to allow these money-governed mind-manipulators to tell us how and what to think. Something dangerous is happening and it is only the vitality and will to organise ourselves for ourselves that can overcome it.

Steve Coleman

Arming the world for profit (1995)

From the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists never need to be reminded that there is an insane logic to capitalism, that capitalism continues to throw up obscene contradictions that appear to consign the human species to a downward spiral towards oblivion. The world arms trade for instance.

Britain is the world’s second biggest arms supplier. There are 145,000 workers in this country employed directly or indirectly in the arms trade. If we add to this figure the number of Britain’s armed forces, regulars and reserves, the figure jumps to 750,000 people gaining an income from the maiming and killing business. Which means for every two employed in hospitals and clinics, etc saving lives and helping people, there is one employed in doing the exact opposite, albeit unwittingly.

Most of us are familiar with the hackneyed justifications for Britain’s share (20 percent) of the world arms trade. It goes something like: “If ’we’ didn’t sell arms, someone else would.” The reality is that arms sales generate profit, and for capitalists where there is the potential for profits, then morals and principles go out of the window.

Arms dividend
We were led to believe that the end of the Cold War would initiate a "peace dividend". Money hitherto spent on arms would be rechannelled into social programmes such as health, welfare and education. Capitalism was finally going to put on the humanistic guise that the threat of "communism" had prevented it doing in the past. If anything, however, the post-Cold War set-up now means that the West can sell arms anywhere, even to countries that had previously been dependent on Russia.

While it is true that "Third World" countries now only purchase one-third of the arms they did in 1988. the vacuum is being filled with arms sales to newly-developing countries like Brazil. Pakistan. Indonesia and China. Hence, mid-November saw the US Defence Secretary, William Perry, "opening the door to a possible sale of advanced fighter jets to Latin America at the start of a six-day trip to improve military ties with Brazil and Argentina". (Guardian, 17 November).

Days previously, the Observer (13 November) ran a headline about a secret UK arms deal with Indonesia worth £2 billion, inclusive of military hardware and military training for the Indonesian army.

Between May and November this year, the UN Security Council and the EU lifted arms embargoes on three countries famous for aggression and repression — Israel. Syria and South Africa. That these countries already possess the wherewithal to defend themselves against potential enemies — both South Africa and Israel have a nuclear capability — matters little to Western governments. The profit motive comes first.

And such is the thirst for profit that Western governments are prepared to sell arms to both sides in a conflict. During the Iran/lraq war some 26 countries were arming both sides, fuelling a war that lasted 8 years, killed 1.000,000 people and cost $600 billion. During Pakistan's and India’s most recent stand-off and General Zhia’s intimidating sabre-rattling that threatened to pitch Hindu against Moslem, it was Britain that saw to it that both countries were armed to the teeth should insults come to blows. Furthermore, Britain is currently arming five countries with internal conflicts.

In November 1991, Douglas Hurd was telling Europe to stop aiding foreign countries with repressive regimes, declaring that "governments who persist with repressive policies should not expect us to support their folly with scarce resources". Two months later, the Guardian would prove Hurd a hypocrite when they reported that “Britain provides military training for 110 countries . . . Training in Cambodia includes sabotage and mine-laying courses" (15 January 1992).

When asked whether it is still government policy to export landmines in spite of a UN resolution banning their export, Roger Freeman, Minister for Defence Procurement replied: “We are not going to export them . . . except in certain circumstances when we’re dealing with a friendly nation". Douglas Hurd expressed similar sentiments, believing "there is nothing wrong with selling arms to friendly countries to allow them to defend themselves” (Observer, 13 November 1994).

These absurd statements pose the question: if there are so many "friendly" countries, how come there is so much war in the world? Again, why does Britain have a defence procurement programme for 1994-5 totalling £9,363 million? And on what basis can Britain justify its £12 billion contribution to the £32 billion Eurofighter 2000 project?

Sales drive

In recent months. President Clinton has launched an overseas arms drive in an attempt to bolster the sagging US arms industry, if it was ever sagging in the first place. The US government had previously insisted that arms exports are only sanctioned when they serve US interests or help US allies.

Any war or potential conflict now has huge spin-offs for the arms-dealing governments of the West. No sooner had the Gulf War ended when Middle East orders for arms worth $28 billion were secured by the US. Since the end of the Gulf War, world arms sales to the Middle East have totalled $55 billion, $14 billion of which has been supplied by Britain. British sales include 88 Blackhawk helicopters, 94 Hawk and 48 Tornado aircraft and 18 Challenger 2 tanks.

In the Middle East, the very fact that Saddam is still in power is being used by the US as a ploy. With an unpredictable "madman" in the Middle East, having fought two wars in ten years and having already lobbed missiles at Iran, Israel, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the existence of Saddam serves US interests. So long as he remains in power he scares his neighbours, who are only too happy to turn to Western arms dealers for the arms with which to defend themselves. Recall also Clinton's recent attempt to portray North Korea as the new Asian bogey man, prompting neighbouring countries to put in huge orders for Western state-of-the-art defence systems.

“A war on poverty," wrote Tory MP Alan Howarth in the Guardian (17 November), “would be a more cost effective strategy than stacking up arms against imaginary enemies or selling them to regimes which have no commitment to peace." Maybe, but rechannelling money spent on arms into social programmes is not going to happen. Capitalism, by its very nature, breeds competition and conflict, and consequently, nationalism, jingoism and war. Arms sales are endemic to this process. That is the insane logic of capitalism. 

John Bissett

Guinea Pigs and Mind Games (1995)

From the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last year has seen a steady stream of reports from the United States about the biological and nuclear weapons testing programmes of the US government and its agencies. As many have suspected, the US has been using military and civilian human “guinea pigs" for several decades in bio-warfare and radiation experiments. Some disclosures have come via requests from concerned individuals under the US Freedom of Information Act while the Department of Energy has released a number of documents which reveal America’s true nuclear heritage.

The liberal Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary offered “full disclosure” early last year of the decades of abuse of an unwitting population by the government, military and scientific establishment. Reports in the US media have so far focused on the release of information concerning the horrific injection of humans with plutonium without informed consent. Rather less has been reported about the facts which first came out, “that throughout the forties and fifties the military dropped radioactive dust over vast areas of the Western States . . .  in an on-going test of the biological effects of radiation poisoning” (EMF, ELF and Cold War Nuclear Guinea Pigs by Jim Martin in Flatland 11).

President Clinton, recognising the potential danger of such disclosures to the authority of the US state, has distanced himself from O’Leary, characterising her stance as “very emotional”. Indeed, in recent months O’Leary has announced that the scope of the inquiry will be limited due to what she terms “national security" considerations. Even so, sufficient information has come forward about the fascistic methods of bio-warfare testing used on the US working class to cause widespread concern, if not in some quarters outright panic. The revelations thus far are only the tip of an extremely dangerous iceberg, and given the nature of some of them, we can only wonder at those horrors that have been deliberately kept secret.

But enough has been disclosed to reveal the true nature of the American ruling class's contempt for its subjects. Here is a cross-section of recent disclosures in the US of experiments in bio-warfare and radiation testing over the last fifty years, (additional sources: Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Flatland magazine and Lobster):

• 1942-6 Dr Joseph G. Hamilton of the University of California hospital at San Francisco proposed a radioactive aerosol as a military weapon. Experiments were conducted giving “lethal dose” exposures to terminal patients. At least one of the “terminal” patients had been misdiagnosed: he only had an ulcer.
• 1945 in Miami, Florida, radioactive needles were placed in an Army private's nostrils. At the Vanderbilt University Medical Center 751 late-term pregnant women were given radioactive water 30 times background radiation levels at a free clinic.
• 1948-52 Twelve “battlefield radiation” tests were carried out over Tennessee and Utah. The US Air Force dropped radioactive cluster bombs dispersing as much as 15,000 curies in open-air fall-out tests.
• 1951 In Virginia, aspergillus fumagatus, a potentially lethal bacterium, was released upon mainly black workers at the Norfolk Naval Supply Center.
• 1951 In a nation-wide test 235 newborn babies were injected with radioactive iodide. In Memphis six out of every seven babies selected were black.
• 1957 Mainly non-English speaking Eskimos in Alaska were given an apple and orange each for their participation in Army tests to inject them with radioactive iodide.
• 1963 At least 34 underground nuclear tests in the US released significant levels of radiation into the atmosphere.
• 1953-65 The CIA initiated a full-scale mind-control programme under the code-name MK-ULTRA. Experiments included lobotomics, electroshock, sensory deprivation and drugs According to the book Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, “nearly fifteen hundred military personnel have served as human guinea pigs in LSD experiments conducted by the US Army Medical Corps". In one experiment, black inmates at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital were given LSD for 75 days in gradually increased doses. The US government has paid out millions of dollars in recent years to settle lawsuits brought against them over MK-ULTRA.
• 1966 In a case since well-documented in the British press, retarded children in a school in Massachusetts were given doses of radiation in their breakfast cereal
• 1970 A recent Freedom of Information Act request produced a NASA report entitled Implantable Biotelemetry Systems, describing the development of radio receivers which could be implanted in the brain. Many US citizens claim to have undergone surgery for such implantation and lawsuits are currently pending.
• 1973 Prisoners in Oregon and Washington agreed to have their testicles dipped in radioactive water for the princely sum of S5..00 per week.

It has been estimated that it has cost $200 billion in the US alone to clean up after the nuclear research of the Cold War. The human cost is incalculable. Furthermore, it is likely that the experiments conducted in the US have been replicated to certain degrees in other countries with nuclear programmes like Britain, Russia and South Africa. And bio-warfare experimentation continues to be a growth area not only in the "acceptable” and "democratic” citadels of capitalism like the US but in the up-and-coming gangster states also, from Iraq to North Korea.

Meanwhile in Britain it has just been revealed in an answer to Shadow Defence Secretary David Clark by the Director of the MOD’s Porton Down militaiy research establishment that LSD experiments were carried out on British troops in the 1960s. Clark says he is deeply concerned about this — and well he might be, for it was Labour in power for much of the time when the experiments were being carried out. According to a report in the Sunday Times (6 November) retired military personnel are still suffering severe side-effects from horrific experiments, including where they were strapped to a table before being administered with high doses of hallucinogenic drugs. It is claimed that large numbers were involved in brutal tests at Porton Down — 7,000 alone from 1944 to 1959 and many more thereafter. The Sunday Times states that “some were told that they would be assisting with research into a cure for the common cold; instead they say they were given nerve gas”.

What could illustrate the barbarism of the capitalist system better, even during so-called times of peace? Here for all to see is the competitive drive towards armed conflict ensuring that nation states treat the working class alternatively as cannon fodder and as guinea pigs for their inhumane and murderous experiments. As socialists have always contended, capitalism is not worth dying for, it is clear that less and less is it a system worthy of working-class support either - civilian or military. •

Dave Perrin

No ideas please — we're followers (1992)

From the April 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

This has been the no-ideas election. It has been an insult to our intelligence. Whatever important right to make the working-class voice heard the Chartists of the last century were fighting for, it was not for this foul process of bribery by reform, propaganda by smear, and policy formulation by opinion poll.

But for the pitiful enthusiasts of either side—the Major minors and the pink-rosed tame Kinnockites—nobody believes for one minute that anything big divides the contestants for power. The pathetic Lib-Dems—less “preparing for power” than preparing for a dodgy deal with the highest bidder—and the half-cooked Greens with their dream of a green and pleasant capitalist land, are about as inspiring as a Heinz sponge pudding with ready-made custard.

The Communist Party, once destined to win a few hundred votes in safe Labour seats where life is so bad that Bucharest looked good, is no more, and apart from a few latter-day Leninist nuts the Left is left to cheer for Kinnock and hope that he dies painfully. The fact is that none of them, from Lamont’s lunatics to Lord Sutch and the avowed lunatics, have an idea worthy of more than three seconds’ contemplation.

If the electoral scenario has been bleak here, pity the American voters, the victims of seduction by such mindless wonders as Tsongas. Clinton, Buchanan and Bush. The only clear result so far is that most people who could vote won't, and those who do are motivated by opposition to the nonentities who are worse than whoever they have wasted their primary votes on. The prospect of a race between Bush and Clinton, assisted by multi-million dollar ad campaigns and enough balloons to give a birthday party for every starving African child, is as dull as it is wretched.

Both the British general election and the US Presidential race are cynical exercises in mass manipulation. This trickery is paid for by those who are concerned to tranquilise the political imagination of the majority. A sleeping working class, either abstaining from voting or abandoning power by voting for leaders, is an exploitable working class which represents no threat. The workers, who run society from top to bottom by producing and distributing all wealth, are many; the idlers who own and control the means of life are very, very few. This election is about ensuring that the many follow the few.

The great ideological crisis

The defenders of the profit system ought to be laughing right now. After all, do they not claim to have defeated “communism"? To be sure, the state-capitalist perversions of the profit system have been falling as fast as . . . well, as fast as British businesses, seeing as a comparison is required. And here lies the cause of the absent laughter by the profit system’s friends. How convenient it would have been for them if the bogus communist regimes had fallen at a time when capitalism was expanding—employment rising, businesses opening, banks doing well, the distinct stench of corporate corruption far away. But this is not the situation these political conmen must defend. Try as they might, it is hard for them to brush aside the tragedy of millions on the dole, record bankruptcies, house repossessions, kids begging on the streets, chaos in the NHS, BCCI, high interest rates facing workers in debt, growing racism, inner-city squalor and poll tax resentment . . . the litany of capitalist maladies is endless.

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

Yet all of the electoral contestants defend capitalism as not only a tolerable system but the best one, and not just the best but the only possible one. Vote for more of the same, they implore, all else is utopia. Even the pitiful Labourites, once the advocates of at least the tiniest of radical dreams, is now so much in love with capitalism that the Bank of England is to John Smith what a brothel is to a sailor. Where once Labour leaders would lyingly speak of some kind of an alternative to the profit system (even though it was only the sterile state-capitalist non-alternative), now Kinnock asks no more than that he may be allowed to run capitalism better than the Tories.

Not only the politicians themselves, but the commentators and the professors have run out of ideas. They are like Chekhovian caricatures, awaiting the grinding completion of history in a soon-to-come, never- to-arrive moment of stabilised capitalism.

In contradistinction to the intellectual bankruptcy of those who profess to be the ideas-people. the situation within the wider world of material reality is everywhere pregnant with contradiction and change. The rapidity with which the dramatic overthrow of the state tyrannies in Eastern Europe and throughout the Russian Empire took place is proof of the electrical current that makes history live for those with the vision to be part of it.

The mess of nationalist conflict and the virtual economic collapse that faces the new "free" states could lead to anything— except stabilised capitalism. The war in the Gulf, fought at a time when the political "experts" of capitalism told us that the world was at last safer if not safe, has left a mass of unresolved problems. In Africa, where they starve while dictators spit at democratic aspirations, the struggle for change is far from dormant. In America an economic crisis, accompanied by deep and unhealable cultural divisions, is producing the greatest collapse of confidence in US history—one which the usually conservative BBC commentator. Alistair Cooke, predicted could end in civil war.

What a time this is to be alive. Who can resist the urgency of taking a stand, offering ideas and solutions? Only the mentally strangled, suffocated by the theme tune of Neighbours and tamed into a political consciousness which will follow the crook with the best advertising slogan, can sit back in passive acquiescence. If ever the age of political valium addiction should end, when could be better than now?

But not only do all of the electoral contestants stand for more of the same old failed system; they dress up their support with the most puny of Big Ideas. Major’s Social Charter; Ashdown’s Proportional Representation; Bush’s New World Order; Clinton and Kinnock’s New Deal for America/Britain (delete as appropriate and swallow the contents in case they cause a bush fire). Nothing less exciting could be offered. Never in the course of political history has so little been offered to so many by such prats—and at a time of such possibility.

 

A big idea

Here is a big idea: take the whole world and everything in it and let it he owned and controlled by the people who inhabit it. Let us no longer produce for profit hut solely for use. Let us do away with money and have free and equal access to available goods and services. Let us break down every national border and have a democratic global community, organised locally, regionally and worldwide. Let us stop tormenting ourselves with the nonsense that human nature makes us useless and foolish. Let us recognise that humanity is intelligent and co-operative and capable of living in harmony.

That is the vision. It is no utopia. It is realisable. It has never been tried. It offers a solution to the madness of having a world of potential abundance while millions starve and are deprived in a thousand different ways. It is a big idea. So big in fact that the little parties of capitalism — Labour. Tory, Republican, Democrat — can only deal with it by ignoring, distorting and ridiculing it.

The most exciting and empowering aspect of this big idea (call it World Socialism—call it Gladys if the word socialism offends you) is that it can only come about when the majority whose passivity gives leaders their power stop following and start uniting consciously and democratically.

Despite all the dishonest cynicism attached to this election, we do not dislike the ballot box. On the contrary, used by conscious men and women ballot boxes can be explosive. They can reflect the growing will, and ultimately the will of the overwhelming majority, against leadership and for World Socialism. When the workers of the world use their brain boxes and the ballot boxes, the consequence will be that the age of electoral following will end and John Major can go back to the circus.

Steve Coleman

Economic interests predominate (1997)

Book Review from the March 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Green Backlash by Andrew Rowell, Routledge, London, 1996.

If you have any doubts about the strength of the economic tide the world environmental movement are attempting to swim against, this book is worth looking at. Again, it is the environmental movement themselves who best illustrate the quagmire in which capitalism leaves them.

This is an intensely factual, encyclopaedic book, with all the accompanying pros and cons. Rowell sets the scene well, describing the "political influence" the environmental movement expected to enjoy as Clinton took power in the US. Of course this all seems like a bad joke four years later: "By the end of the 103rd Congress, the Clinton administration had a worse environmental record than either the Bush or Reagan administration”.

This political anti-climax is not itself what Rowell means by a "green backlash". Specifically, he is referring to the large network of anti-environmental organisations and campaigns which have sprung up to combat the environmental movement (most notably in the USA although Rowell looks at examples from around the globe). These often come in the guise of grass-roots campaigns yet are set up by the interests of big business or politicians.

From Nigeria to Newbury and from Greenpeace to Gingrich. Rowell has unearthed no end of facts. The main weakness of this comprehensive survey is the almost complete absence of any historical context. Yes, economic interests may predominate now but wasn’t this also the case one hundred years ago? Rowell very briefly mentions the fight-back of business against the gains made by workers earlier in the century but there is no meaningful comparison drawn.

Rowell does show how the "green backlash" arose spontaneously as a reaction to threatened business interests. So successful is he that (perhaps unwittingly) he removes the need for a theory of centrally-planned conspiracy. This again leaves us to question whether the book is not just rehearsing a familiar story, rather than exposing a new, 1990s phenomenon. 

Dan Greenwood

The new US bogeyman (1995)

From the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Back in December 1992, Ronald Reagan gave a speech in which he announced that “the end of the communist tyranny has robbed much of the West of its uplifting common purpose”.

The “common purpose” he had in mind was the US’s old claim to be defenders of democracy and global peace that “communism” had threatened for so long. In a nutshell, Reagan was mourning the end of the Cold War, which had taken away every pretension the US had to play globocop, using its hegemonic passport to interfere everywhere from Grenada to Korea.

For five years the US has tried to sell its old image to the world, looking for bogeymen to defend us from under every rock. First came Saddam, then the warlords of Somalia and later on Kim II Sung in North Korea. Now Iran is being held up as a threat to the interests of “the international community”, and once again the US is inviting the world to listen to its prophecies of impending doom and to swallow its rhetoric of possible salvation beneath the stars and stripes.

Current US hype stems from Russia’s recent agreement to build a nuclear power station for Iran at the Gulf port of Bushehr at the cost of $1 billion (supposedly capable of producing material to equip 23 atomic warheads) and is strengthened by Iran’s annual $2.5 billion spending spree on Chinese and Russian military hardware (inclusive, lately, of two Russian submarines) and the recent Iranian deployment of 6,000 troops on the Gulf islands of Queshm, Sirri and Abu Musa.

More recent US-lsraeli rumours state that Iran, with the help of Libya, has acquired a hefty arsenal of Rodnong ballistic missiles from North Korea, and that the two states are jointly working on a project to increase their range and destructive power. All of which must be set against the backcloth of Iran’s attempt to stop the indefinite and unconditional extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as favoured by the US, Britain, Russia and France.

What commentators found a little more than coincidental was the fact that the cant regarding Iran’s threat to world peace coincided with the Index International Arms Exhibition in the United Arab Emirates in March, at which the US, Britain, France and Germany would compete hard for business.

Dr Rosemary Hallis of the Royal Institute of International Affairs said as much, pointing out that “it has been used as a justification to sell more defence equipment to the Arab peninsular”. Middle East expert Heine Kopietz agreed that it was all “hype” and that “the Pentagon is not at all convinced that Iran is aggressive” (Guardian, 24 April).

Weeks earlier, the Speaker of the Iranian parliament was trying to calm the fears of neighbouring countries, scared silly by US rumours, declaring them that “Iran guarantees your security and stability ... [that neighbouring countries] . .. should not, therefore, provide the excuse for aliens to come to the region and create a market for the sale of their weapons by creating an adverse climate” (Independent, 6 April).

In an attempt to get other nations to fall in line with its get-tough-on-lran policy, the Clinton administration set an example by halting all commerce with Iran, blocking the contracts that Exxon, Texaco, Mobil and Caltex had with Iran, involving up to 650,000 barrels of oil per day, a deal worth $4.25 billion to the Iranian economy.

US attempts to isolate Iran economically were even evident in Azerbaijan where pressure was put on the Azeri government to halt a deal giving Tehran a five-percent share in a $7.4 billion contract to develop three oilfields in the Caspian Sea.

Russia too has been threatened with a withdrawal of nuclear co-operation with the US unless they cancel their $1 billion deal with Iran—a threat that brought a swift response from the Russian ambassador to Iran, who announced that “Moscow will not accept any advice from America about its relations with other countries, in particular with the Islamic Republic of Iran” (Guardian, 18 April).

For once, few countries seem to be taking the US seriously, least of all those in Europe. The Pentagon and the Commerce Department were warning in early March that abandoned US business would only be picked up by other countries.

Indeed, the Times (2 May) would go on to report that “British industry is ready to pick up the Iranian orders made available by the ban”. British capitalists, after all, are Iran’s fifth biggest trading partner, with exports of £289 million and imports of £133 million.

Economic catastrophe

The US would have us believe that they are simply aiming to frustrate Iran’s nuclear ambitions by direct economic action. Iran, however, as the US government is well aware, is facing economic catastrophe already, as well as political crisis. By the end of 1994, Iran had foreign debts totalling $16 billion. The rial is steadily being devalued and January saw the price of foodstuffs rocket by 30 percent and rioting in Tehran.

Iranian street culture, reported the Observer (12 February), “is dominated by petty crime, prostitution and drugs. Police turn a blind eye to most offences”. Such is the situation that government employees are accepting bribes just to supplement their wages and Iranians are reported as having to offer a bribe to get a hospital bed.

When Rafsanjani came to power, the West saw in him a “pragmatist” who would at least restore the US-lran relationship they had enjoyed before the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. After two terms in office, Western hopes have been dashed chiefly because all moves to stabilise relations with the West have been blocked by radical mullahs unable to conceive of coexistence and compromise.

Some commentators believe that Iran’s political and economic situation, aggravated by the US attempt to cast them in the mould of international pariah, together with next year’s contentious parliamentary elections, might foster a regression to a more radical foreign policy and bring about a military showdown with the US.

The US over years has become quite adept at profit-oriented long-term scenarios. So it would come as no surprise to Socialists if, under the guise of wishing to save the world from nuclear terrorism, the US is wittingly sowing the seeds for an Iranian civil war or, worse, a second Gulf War.

By intimidating Iran, manipulating their religious and secular sensitivities, they may force the mullahs to go on the offensive, if only to deflect Iranian attention from domestic ills. Bordering states are even nurturing ideas that they can now challenge Iran over disputed territory, lulled into a false sense of security because of the huge arsenals they have amassed, and more importantly, because a precedent has been set for the West to come to the aid of threatened Gulf states should things get out of hand.

March found Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd in Abu Dhabi openly siding with the United Arab Emirates in its dispute with Iran over strategic Gulf islands. Such shit-stirring is what the Gulf region needs least of all at the moment. It is enough that the people living here have to put up with reactionary regimes without living with the additional threat of war sparked by the hype churned out by the agents of Western capitalism. But, in a world ruled by the laws of capitalism, such is the price that has to be paid for living on a coast along which flows 40 percent of the world’s oil.

John Bissett

State Murder in the USA. (1993)

From the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The law and order card is always the trump that struggling governments use to divert attention away from the crisis created by the capitalist system they help to run. Just as crime, law and order have been at the forefront of the political agenda in Britain, so too is this the case in America now if all else fails, there is always the scapegoat, the working class, potential miscreants and criminals who are responsible for social decline.

The only Western industrialized state that still applies the death penalty is the United States. Just as grotesque, in this land where its constitution proclaims the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", is that come election time candidate’s stance in the capital punishment debate can win or lose him or her a seat in Congress or the Senate.

In 1988 Democrat Michael Dukakis voiced his opposition to the death penalty and lost many votes in the presidential elections. Bill Clinton, as Governor of Arkansas, was all too aware of this when he later sanctioned the execution of a mentally subnormal teenager — he had in mind the 80 percent of the American electorate who belong to the pro-capital punishment camp.

To what extent Clinton’s victory last year in the race to the White House depended on his pro-death penalty views is open to question. But his views on the death penalty and on crime in America in general are now being used by Democrats to regain the political initiative. Basically, Clinton wants $3.4 billion funding for a plan that will put an extra 50,000 police officers on the streets. He also wants to expand the number of crimes punishable by death and to limit death row inmates to one habeas corpus appeal within six months of sentence. He also believes the law's governing the sale of handguns should be tightened calling for a 5-day waiting period for handgun purchases!

If any department in the American Establishment is devoid of logic it is certainly that which is responsiblc for law and order. In 1990 (the last year for which statistics are available), 37,155 Americans died of gunshot wounds. If this is not an abominable figure (3.000 have died in Northern Ireland since 1968), there are an estimated 200,000,000 firearms in circulation in America. Yet the Clinton camp have revealed no plans to curb the individual’s "right" to possess a firearm.

At present some 2.500 prisoners await execution on death row in 36 states. The statistics here are just as baffling. Between 1973 and 1988, executions and the lengthy appeal process they entailed cost Florida tax payers $57 million. Which is $3.2 million per execution. At the same time, a prisoner held in maximum security cost $40,000 per year — twice the cost had he been educated at Harvard. In the state of Texas the cost of an execution case is the equivalent to the cost of imprisoning three men for "life".

Anyone with a grain of common sense will realize that an extra 50.000 police officers, all with arrest quotas to meet, will mean a jump in prison statistics. Clinton could only say this on the matter: "The plan is tough. It will put police on the streets and criminals in jail" (Guardian, 12 August).

Perhaps no-one has told him that there are some one million prisoners in the United States, housed in federal, state and county jails the highest incarceration rate in the world, with imprisonment, rising at the rate of 13 percent per year, and the criminal justice system processing 1,500 new prisoners per day. Little wonder that new prison construction costs are running at $6 billion per year.

Against all the crass statistics on the vast amounts spent on imprisonment must be set the penny-pinching when it comes to executing death row inmates. States that do use the death penalty arc finding it cost efficient to use the lethal injection method of execution - the equipment costs a pittance.

Oklahoma has been using the lethal injection method since 1977. Apparently prison authorities did not want to fork out the $60,000 needed to fix the electric chair while, the $200,000 asking price for a gas chamber was out of the question. Surely a bullet to the head would have cost the state no more than one-dollar per year!

1977 was also the year that Texas’ Governor claimed lethal injection would "provide some dignity with death". Where is the dignity in being forcibly strapped into a chair by men in uniform and injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs?

In all forms of execution the prisoner suffers pain and trauma. Sitting in the gas chamber in 1983. Jimmy Lee Gray convulsed for eight minutes before dying. In 1985 William Van Diver took 17 minutes to die in the electric chair, requiring five charges. Observers reported seeing his flesh smoke. Even where lethal injection is used, groans have been heard 18 minutes into the execution.

Any true Socialist is appalled at the idea of the state having the right to execute its citizens. The death penalty in any form is a blatant violation of human rights — the most undignified and irreversible of all punishments. How do you resurrect an innocent man? State executions are in reality the state taking revenge on the wage-slave for a mistake he or she committed because of the frustrations caused by the contradictions of the capitalist system that they are conditioned to exist in.

Those who advocate the death penalty tend to use the time-honoured argument that the death penalty is a deterrent, that it helps to reduce crime. However, throughout the world, no sociologist nor any export hired to study the subject has been able to demonstrate conclusively that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to the commission of the crime for which it is exacted. Moreover, there is no proof that the abolition of the death penalty will lead to the nightmare consequences predicted by its propagandists.

In the United States in 1985, FBI research revealed that the number of law enforcement officers killed was almost four times as high in states with the death penalty than in states without it. This stark revelation led reformers to conclude that legal executions may actually stimulate violent crime by exemplifying society’s approval of killing.

The equation Capitalism = Mass Inequality. Frustration. Murder for Gain State Execution is backed up by further statistics. Since 1972, 60 percent of death row inmates were unemployed at the time of their crimes. Of the 2.500 on America’s death rows, 65 percent were in low-paid, unskilled jobs. A study carried out on the Texas judicial system found that prisoners with court appointed lawyers were over twice as likely to be given the death penalty as those who could afford a reputable defence team.

The American criminal justice system is also racist with black people murdering whites 11 times more likely to face execution than for white people murdering blacks. In Florida the ratio is 40-1! Of all men executed for rape since 1930, 90 percent were black. There are six black people in prison for every four in higher education.

State executions is capitalism at its ugliest. It is the state giving up on the individual and admitting that the social system under capitalism is not working — that the only solution to capital crimes is death.

As Clinton refuses to address the real problems facing America, and to look to solutions that have already been tried and failed in the past, American wage-slaves can expect a tough time ahead should they look for a quick way to bridge the gap between poverty and wealth.

John Bissett

Yawn in the USA (1992)

Editorial from the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

If it was not tragic it would be funny. With a mixture of anguish and amusement, socialists look on as the multi-million dollar campaigns to elect the most important political leader in the world drip down the middle of our TV screens.

The US Presidential contest is a sick, slick manipulation of what is declared to be a democratic election. To begin with, only millionaires or those backed by millionaires can afford to run televised, mass-appeal campaigns. Most US states have laws designed to prevent small parties from even being on the ballot paper: tens of thousands of nominations must be collected before you can even appeal to voters as an electoral contender. The TV networks and the press are subsumed by the petty irrelevancies of which candidate has the most extra-martial liaisons, whose wife looks cutest and which party can provide the catchiest ten-second sound bite.

The election is a farce. Rarely was this more clearly seen that at the Republican Convention when Bush and Quayle accepted their nominations; their speeches were of the emptiest rhetoric, but crowds of media men were placed in the audience to cheer at their every empty promise, laugh uproariously at their every semi-witty jest and, most sinister of all, burst into pre-arranged "spontaneous" bouts of slogan-chanting, Goodbye Gorbachev, but Stalinism is still alive and well in the Houston Astrodome.

The differences between the two big parties are negligible—more minute than ever. Like the British Labour Party, the US Democrats have adopted the view that the only way they might beat the Republicans is by kidding the voters that they are the Republicans. Bush or Clinton—who in their right mind cares? Certainly tens of millions of American workers don't, for it is anticipated that half the electorate will not vote next month.

As in Britain, liberal reformists are tempted by what they see as the lesser evil. The Nation, that journalistic symbol of wishy-washy niceness, hopes that Bush will lose, but its editorial of 14 September shows just how pathetic the case for the Democrats is: "in almost every category of capitalist economic growth—income, profit, gross domestic product, employment—Democratic administrations do better than Republican ones". As if that were a reason why workers, whose exploitation is the source of capitalist economic growth, should vote for their most efficient fleecers.

The truth is that US capitalism is in trouble, and social problems which they thought they could avoid are exploding all over the place. Vast numbers of homeless, a drug epidemic, 12 million hungry, over 20 million illiterates, riots in LA and more brewing in other deprived city areas, a multi-trillion dollar budget deficit and the collapse of welfare, huge numbers of bankruptcies. What American workers need to hear is the case for an alternative to the profit system: the case for production for use and not profit. There will be no Land of the Free until we have a world where all have free access to the abundant wealth that we can produce.

But instead of the voice of sanity, the Republicans have been infiltrated by crazy Christians, no more in possession of their reason than the Muslim fundamentalists. Their leader, and a definite Republican hopeful for 1996, is Pat Robertson who told the Convention in Houston that feminism "encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians". With God on their side these loony leaders are asking the millions to put their faith in them.

In these we trust? (1999)

From the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is it a coincidence that so many of capitalism's Great Men - its leaders and captains of industry - are so utterly unworthy as human beings?

By all accounts, including his own, Bill Clinton is a mendacious, sleazy rogue, whom you would trust to look after your shares but not your younger sister. Clinton's own analysis of his condition, after taking priestly counsel, is that he's a sinner. His process of repentance has involved dropping bombs on Iraq, for which he has been praised as a defender of global peace, and parading around America exhibiting his ubiquitous smirk. It is the insolent smirk reminiscent of a southern Baptist choirboy caught nicking the church collection whose only resource of defence, after months of righteously denying the charge, is to bite his lip and utter hoarsely "I was looking after it for Gaad".

Christopher Hitchens, who has watched the US President perform his political vaudeville routine for years, wonders aloud whether the White House is occupied by a psychopath; apparently, a group of leading US psychiatrists met to consider the President's condition and a majority arrived at this diagnosis. (London Evening Standard, 6 January). He is certainly a persistent liar whose personal affairs smack less of the liberated Sixties than of the latter days of the Roman Empire. And yet he is the twice-elected leader of the most powerful nation-state within global capitalism. It is perhaps fitting that a sterile, degenerate, obsolete social system, incapable of providing material comfort or security for the majority of the population, is presided over by a character who would not be appointed by anyone responsible to run a youth club or a school for girls.

Crowd of scoundrels

Is it a coincidence that so many of capitalism's Great Men—its leaders and captains of industry—are so utterly unworthy as human beings? In Britain we have witnessed the fall of Cabinet Ministers who, until their moments of disgrace, were depicted as the embodiments of political virtue. Mandelson, who was Batman to Blair's Robin, was caught borrowing money to fund his domestic mansion from a tax-evading millionaire whose business dealings Mandelson's own government department were supposed to be investigating. Robin Cook's ex-wife has described the Foreign Secretary as an adulterous drunk. Meanwhile, the European Parliament (in a bid to remind us of its existence in time for the June elections) has been feeling the collar of numerous cheats, frauds and criminals within the European Commission. The Commission's defenders have responded with the defence that, as a percentage of the EU budget, there is no more corruption there than in the governments of the fifteen member states. Oh, that's alright then.

It is surely unsurprising that capitalism's leaders should be such a disreputable crowd of scoundrels. After all, they are elected to run a system which thrives by robbing workers of the fruits of their labour and pursues competition by ruthless dishonesty, culminating in wars in which men, women and children are indiscriminately slaughtered upon the altar of profit. The system requires a certain brand of callousness at its nerve centre. To be elected, leaders need to tell complete lies with a straight face. Either that, or they must be dopes (Reagan) or masters of self-deception (Clinton). Running capitalism is not a career for an undamaged human being.

But let's not deceive ourselves. Even if capitalism was run by saints—and, according to New Labour, they don't come much more angelic than St Tony—it would not take long for the system to wipe away their virtuous intentions. The simple reason for this is that politicians do not manage capitalism but it manages them. Although they pose as leaders (and may sometimes imagine that they are actually in charge) their job is to justify before the public the results of the economic anarchy over which they have very little control. So, Blair might be committed morally to helping the poor and being kind to little children, but when the Treasury officials call for a callous attack on the benefits of single mothers and the disabled he does so with large doses of pious excuses; when the Pentagon ordered him to send British troops as bag-carriers in the Iraqi bombing Mr Nice suddenly became a cheerleader for a gang of contemptible thugs.

Capitalist politics, having run out of reform policies to waste its time upon, has now become largely a contest for popularity between various moral postures. In the USA the only mitigating factor on Clinton's side is the repulsive Christian dogmatism of his Republican prosecutors, whose complacent individualism and ethical authoritarianism has turned parts of their country into a cultural Bedlam inhabited by a hard minority of True Believers, others without any hope at all and a significant minority who will believe anything. And in Britain the best strategy for Blair in the midst of government disarray is to let Michael Howard appear on the TV saying how disgusted the Tories are by government corruption. The battle for power under capitalism is largely a matter of electing (to use Bob Hope's phrase about the 1988 presidential contest) the evil of two lessers.

Pathetic followers

One of the saddest things about leaders is not how they behave but how their followers are forced to behave. The political follower is a miserable, pathetic specimen. These are people—usually with no material stake in their leader's success—who will go the ends of the earth to defend the Great One's reputation. In America one has witnessed Democrat-supporting feminists who have had to appear on TV defending Clinton's sleazy relations with his young intern and arguing that women like Paula Jones, an employee who was sexually molested by the President, are unreliable witnesses. Just like the deluded leftists of the 1930s who were forced by their own blind loyalty to justify every brutal crime of "Comrade Stalin", so one has New Labour supporters today who will nod approvingly at Blair's new-Tory policies when they would have been marching in the streets had the Tories introduced them. (Would the National Union of Students have adopted such a belly-up approach to tuition fees if the Education Secretary had not been David Blunkett?) Capitalism's leaders disgrace themselves—and, as that's what they're paid to do, why should we throw our hands up in horror? But the way they diminish and degrade their supporters is truly loathsome.

So, Clinton falls on his knees before the American people and, smirk intact, asks Gaad and the gullible to forgive him. The gullible have shown themselves to be a majority in the (non-) opinion polls and Gaad has not responded—unless Hurricane Mitch can be regarded as a provisional comment from the all-loving deity.

There will come a day—unless our leaders blow us up before it comes—when people will look at film footage of Clinton and laugh at the comedy of our times. They will wonder how so many people were taken in by such a terribly bad act. They will wait for the hollow statements, the rehearsed gestures and the sterile clichés to be trotted out and they will mimic them in the way that a certain generation learned to copy catchphrases from Monty Python sketches. They will have no leaders and will look upon their ancestors who followed as poor, deluded creatures who were insufficiently educated to tell these con-men where to get off. How soon that day comes depends quite simply on how soon we develop sufficient consciousness and organisation to tell the leaders to get lost (as they invariably do anyway) and to replace the Rule of Leaders with a Society of Equals.

Steve Coleman

Food for Thought (2015)

From the July 2015 Socialist Party of Canada Newsletter

- In mid-town Toronto a building is being demolished so they can build condominium apartments there. That's nothing new but what is unusual is that some people are upset that this is the only building in the world built during the brief reign of King Edward VIII that bears his logo. To satisfy these outraged citizens, the developers have agreed to preserve the facade. We have global warming, war, terrorism, poverty and hunger, Ebola, and so on, and these people get upset at the supposed disrespect to the memory of a playboy/parasite, a guy who was not up to the herculean task of shaking hands and making boring speeches prepared by someone else, and used his girl friend as an excuse to get out of those onerous tasks. For a system built on 'value', Capitalism sure distorts people's values.

- An analysis by Andrew Powell-Morse of ticket market place Seatsmart showed that lyrics of pop songs have fallen to the intelligence of eight year-olds. This was his finding after analyzing 225 songs that had spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard charts for pop, country, rock, R & B, and hiphop for any given year in the last ten. In the final reckoning, it's a degenerate culture reflecting a degenerate economic system where anything goes as long as it makes money.

- The New York Times of June 21 included an article by a Brazilian commenting on his country's economics in the last few years. He, Like many others were optimistic in 2003 when Lula de Silva and his Workers' Party came to power with the expectation that the old inequality and oppression of previous administrations would blossom into an equal and just society. Now the old disappointment has returned as corruption scandals, an economic recession, and opportunistic alliances with former rivals have returned the working class to virtually where it started. The Brazilians should have known better – as long as you have capitalism, you will have inequality, insecurity, and, of course, the class system.

- Pope Francis has used his position to speak out for the poor and to put an emphasis on serving the poor. He has invited Latin American priests who founded a movement for social change (once scorned by the church authorities as Marxist, can you believe!). Murdered arch bishop Oscar Romero, shot to death in 1980 has bee beatified (?) and is one step away from sainthood. Pope Francis wants to create a 'poor church for the poor' to get closer to the masses. All this, of course, will do nothing to alleviate poverty and cynic might say the church is looking for more people they can frighten into believing.

- The International Monetary Fund has issued a report detailing the high cost of burning dirty fuels (New York Times May 31). It says that many countries are compounding the problem when their governments subsidize the price to below cost and not taxing the products enough to account for the damage that burning fossil fuels causes to human health and to the climate. The IMF calculates that subsidies this year will amount to $5.3 trillion or 6.5% of the world's gross domestic product. Not surprisingly, the biggest polluters such as China and the US account for $2.3 trillion and $699 billion respectively. Staggering figures when we are so short of cash for health, education, proper infrastructure etc. But even worse is the estimate that eliminating subsidies and taxing higher would reduce premature deaths caused by air pollution by fifty-five per cent, or about 1.85 million yearly!

- In the journal of our companion party in the UK, mention is made of the fact that in Qatar thousands of labourers from Nepal are treated no better than slaves. Companies handling construction work for the 2022 World Cup of Soccer infrastructure forced them to stay by denying them promised salaries and withholding necessary worker ID permits making them illegal aliens. The precarious situation created by the employers has forced the workers to beg for food. Thousands of Nepalese workers in Qatar face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern day slavery as defined by the International Labour Organization. So whether its slave labour camps in North Korea, sweat shops in the third world, or workers in Qatar, slavery continues, not to mention wage slavery. Capital will find a way to keep nineteenth century conditions going in the name of profit. Socialists advocate not the abolition of these conditions, but the abolition of the economic system that causes it.

- Bill and Hilary Clinton recently revealed that since January 2014, they have received more than $25 million for giving one hundred speeches. Contrast that with the fact that millions are trying to survive on less than a dollar a day. Surely one must wonder if there isn't something wrong with the way society works. What were the Clintons saying in their speeches? Whatever the content, the theme never changed, 'preserve the status quo'. Socialists say damn the status quo, let's work for a world without such outrageous extremes.

- A recent edition of "America Unearthed" took place in Rockwall, Texas, so named for the underground wall in a rural area that is thought to have once been above ground. The limestone wall measures three miles by five and a half feet and is seven stories high. Is it man-made or natural? We do not know. Many geologists and archeologists have analyzed it and do not publish their findings because big developers do not want the site to become an archeological attraction, presumably because it could be a lucrative development. Money talks, good intentions walk.

- Here's an example of how a government or an influential (read wealthy) person can get their agenda across to the masses. The Toronto Star (May 30), reports, "Deep inside a four-storey marble building in St. Petersburg, hundreds of workers tap away at computers on the front lines of an information war, say those who have been inside." Known as Kremlin trolls, they work twelve-hour shifts flooding the internet with propaganda aimed at stamping Putin's world vision on Russia and around the world. One worker referred to going to work as entering an Orwellian universe. Bashing out 160 blogposts on each shift, they simply repeat what they are told. For this they are relatively well paid at 40 to 50 thousand roubles a month ($950 to 1,250 Canadian). Obviously, Putin has large amounts of cash at his disposal. This type of activity is used by big capital such as the coal industry in the US touting that coal is clean and environmentally green, or tobacco or sugar soaked food is good for you. The ideas of an epoch are those of the ruling class.

- "Plan to rehire 4,000 Greeks leaves Europeans aghast as a 1.2 Billion Euro bill becomes due." was the secondary headline in an article in The Toronto Star (May 30). Imagine, how horrifying it must seem to the economists that four thousand cleaners and civil servants who lost their jobs to austerity cuts ordered by Greece's creditors, should have a chance to earn a living again! Apparently, according to economic think tanks, German and French families (of four) would be on the hook for 4,350 Euros given that the total figure will be $160 billion of French and German exposure to Greek debt should an exit from the European Union be necessary. Why the families would foot the bill when the capitalists expropriate most of the wealth is another matter.

- The World Health Organization recently reported that air pollution is killing hundreds of thousands of Europeans each year and released figures to prove it. Six hundred thousand died prematurely in fifty-three European countries in 2010 due to fine particles in the air. Nine out of ten Europeans are exposed to a concentration above WHO guidelines. The annual cost to governments is $1.6 trillion due to the premature deaths and related illnesses. That figure represents ten per cent of Europe's gross domestic product. The worst country is Georgia that lost thirty-five per cent of its GDP for this reason. Some point to Sheffield's efforts to clean its air and Sweden's clean-up of its lakes, but it's a case of too little too late. However, it's not too late to support socialism and get cracking on the right track to solve the problem.

- The Toronto Star (May 23) reported that after ISIS took control of Palmyra two hundred and eighty soldiers and citizens loyal to the Assad regime were executed and let their bodies lie in the streets as a warning to all who would oppose them. Shades of Bloody Sunday, Tiananmen square, and hundreds of other atrocities over the years. With a world still divided into competing entities this is bound to continue in one form or another. The end of capitalism and the establishment of socialism will be the end of humankind's prehistory and the beginning of our real history.

- Well, at last we know why there are huge income gaps between the workers and the owning class. A team of (vulgar) 'economists' has put out a research paper that states that income gap is not due to differences between high and low earners in one company, but rather the difference is due to the widening gap in wages between different companies. Take Apple and McDonalds, for example, pay differences are not because the executives are getting greater increases than the ordinary workers but because the average pay at Apple rises faster than at McDonalds. Obviously another attempt by capitalist toadies to explain away the gap. It's still there and getting bigger, but notice no mention is made of the idle investors who are raking in the money faster than anyone and giving no equivalent for what they get.

- It sometimes seems that the environment and global warming have disappeared from the news, from election platforms, from the public consciousness. This is a result of a major planned effort on the part of think tanks and editors in many places. Also, the doubters were handed information from a UN study in 2013 that claimed that warming of the earth was slowing down. Now a research paper from the scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that contradicts the UN report has been published. According to NOAA the rise in temperatures since 2000 have been 'virtually indistinguishable' from the rate of the previous five decades. "A whole cottage industry has been built by climate skeptics on the false premise that there is currently a hiatus in global warming" (Toronto Star, June 6). Strange how that kind of news can get into the media.

- Under Ontario's Employment Standards Act, that is now under review, there is no limit on how long a company can employ workers as temporary before giving them permanent status. There is nothing to prevent employers from paying temporary workers less than those on permanent status (if there is such a thing today!). There is nothing to prevent them from hiring their entire work force on a temporary basis if they wish. To quote the head of Toronto's Workers' Action Centre,"If the employer knows he can hire you and doesn't have to pay benefits, doesn't have to pay you a pension, and can hire you for a lot less, there's no incentive for him to hire you permanently." This is especially so as the average wage for temporary workers is $15 per hour compared to $22.40 for permanent workers. Making workers permanent would, naturally, cut into profits. Changes to the above act, if legislated, could improve conditions for some temps but socialists say let's legislate the act to put capitalism out of business where squabbling over meagre handouts from capital will be a thing of the past.

- Barack Obama is calling for federal legislation that would require companies to guarantee workers' paid sick days. At present, forty million American workers do not get paid if they are off work sick. Since San Francisco started sick pay for city employees in 2007, nearly twenty cities and three states have also passed sick pay laws. McDonald's and Walmart stores are both making changes to their sick pay policies. We can only guess that this is to stem the growing discontent among the work force experiencing the stress that capitalism creates.

- The good news from the city of Toronto is that the city has a $190 million surplus from the 2014 budget year. Don't get too excited, though, much of that surplus comes from not hiring staff to fill positions when city workers retire or quit, a total of 1,200 jobs. This fact is not as newsworthy as a surplus so it doesn't make the headlines. Now, transportation services say they cannot repair the roads and Parks and Recreation will not be able to prune the trees. Our services are continually being cut back in spite of greater wealth being produced so that more of the profit can be taken by those who simply hand money over to professional investors and contribute nothing.

- On May 28, political and business leaders from fifty-eight countries came together for an economic conference that included Middle East youth unemployment on the agenda. The rate for unemployment there is the world's highest at 29.5%. As a former Jordanian labour minister said,"If the unemployed do not find a decent living, they look for the alternatives and the alternative is the so-called Islamic State." A delightful choice for the youth anywhere and a typical one under capitalism where those in need do not get much choice at all.

- As a school bus driver for nine years, one SPCer notes that the younger the students are, the more they chat, interact, and enjoy each others' company. Conversely, the older they are, the less they socialize and become engrossed in their electronic devices. With internet, email, texting, etc. people are less interested in each other. That is proved by the fact that membership in historic social clubs has decreased all over the world. The technology is wonderful but has de-humanized us. It is interesting to speculate how this and future technology will be used in a socialist world.

For socialism, John & Steve.

Energised by contempt (1996)

Book Review from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics by Anonymous (Chatto & Windus, 1996, £15.99 hb.)

Actually, despite all the hype, it's quite good. Whoever wrote it knows how to use words. They know how to stab politicians in the back too. Whoever wrote this novel clearly worked on the 1992 Clinton primary election campaign. They saw the man for the pseudo-caring, vulgar little swindler that he is. Read this novel and, if you ever did before, you will it hard to take Clinton seriously again.  This novelist does to Clinton and those like him what Tariq Ali's Redemption did to Tony Cliff and Ted Grant. Great stuff: all leaders deserve to be exposed in such nakedness, grotesque for all to witness.

The language of this novel drags vulgarity to new depths, but there is no sense of it straying from reality. The cynical role of the spin doctors is depicted superbly. Not that there are any longer specifically US phenomena: features of an uglier, inferior political culture. These days Major calls European leaders "a bunch of shits" and his cabinet colleagues "bastards". As for the power of spin, read Nicholas Jones's new hardback, Soundbites & Spin Doctors (Cassell, 1996, £17.99) or Margaret Scammell's Designer Politics: How Elections are Won (St Martin's Press, 1995, £15.99) to remain in no doubt that manipulating the media is now the key part of any successful election campaign in Britain. The old cry "that Britain will soon be as bad as America" has now virtually come to pass. Despite the insights of the accounts by Jones and Scammell, the sordid strategy of utter dishonesty, energised by almost complete contempt for those who vote, was most powerfully presented in Primary Colors—a work of fiction, but only just.

Steve Coleman

Postscript: It was revealed in July 1996 that the author of the novel was Joe Klein.