The Tiny Tips column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard
Kylie Jenner, the 27-year-old billionaire and car enthusiast, was recently spotted with her sister Kendall Jenner driving her $3 million Bugatti Chiron in Beverly Hills. Known for her impressive car collection, Kylie gave fans a rare glimpse of herself behind the wheel rather than posing next to her fleet.
‘Everything outside the Christian framework — including secular music, television, and books — was discouraged. Just as I signed multiple purity pledges throughout my preteen and teen years, promising to avoid not just sex, but even impure thoughts, we were taught to practice absolute abstinence from dangerous ideas’.
While official data is still somewhat sketchy, it’s estimated that 12,000 illegal transplants are performed annually, about 10% of the total number of transplants conducted each year. The organ trade is immensely profitable, generating between $840 million to $1.7 billion in revenue for a relatively small number of traffickers, according to estimates compiled in 2017. Organ trafficking survives, in part, because the demand from affluent consumers in the advanced capitalist West is so high and the legal supply of organs – primarily (about 80%) kidneys, but also lungs, livers and cornea – barely keeps pace. Many people wait at least two years to qualify to receive an organ transplant legally and thousands die every year – about 25 daily, according to the World Health Organization – because no organ becomes available in time to save them. Where do the illegally harvested organs come from? Primarily from North Africa and South Asia. Organ traffickers prey on poor and vulnerable rural dwellers, offering cash in exchange for an organ, usually a kidney.
This is about the Arctic. You have Russia that is trying to become king of the Arctic with 60-plus icebreakers, some of them nuclear-powered. Do you know how many we have, Jesse? We have two, and one just caught on fire. This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources. This is about, as the polar ice caps pull back, the Chinese are now cranking out icebreakers and pushing up there as well. So, it’s oil and gas. It’s our national security. It’s critical minerals.
The response provided by South Africa’s elected officials has so far been both lacking and sinister. It targets migrants with few political allies in the country’s fractured political scene, increasingly characterized by populism, highlighting problems without solutions.
As long as the capitalist system continues, we will never be able to escape from the shackles of economic crisis, war and massacre, ecological destruction, and workers’ sacrifice. The only solution is the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement with communism, a society in which the means of production are no longer in the hands of capitalists or the state, but are socialised, in which production and distribution are in harmony with humanity and nature.
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