Voice From The Back: Carpet sales (2004)

The Voice From The Back Column from the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Carpet sales  

The designer and poet William Morris was a committed socialist who had to live with the irony that, although he wanted the abolition of the wages system, the only people who could afford his carpets, tapestries and furniture were the very rich. The following item in the Independent (6 October) illustrates this. “A William Morris carpet that cost £113 new in 1883 was bought for £193,760 in an auction at Sotheby’s in London yesterday. The flowered design, a synthesis of medieval and eastern motifs, was one of only two examples known with a cream and apricot background. It was made for a house in Holland Park, West London, measuring 17ft 5ins by 13ft 6ins.” £193,000 for a carpet – something to bear in mind when you are looking for a bargain at the January sales!

Embarrassed, moi?

“A giant oil company once headed by Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, used its British subsidiaries to flout American sanctions against Iran . . . Their exports – estimated to be worth more than £30m a year – have continued despite sanctions introduced by the US government nine years ago barring Americans from trading or ‘facilitating business’ with the Islamic state. The new findings will embarrass Cheney, President George W Bush’s running mate in next month’s elections. Cheney has described Iran as ‘one of the world’s most dangerous regimes’” (Times, 17 October). He “earned” $44m during his tenure at Haliburton, continues to collect deferred compensation of $150,000 a year and owns $18m in share options. The gap between political rhetoric and economic reality has never embarrassed hypocrites like Cheney.

Dying for work

A TV programme entitled ‘Britain’s Secret Shame’ (BBC, 3 November) illustrated the extent of corporate manslaughter in this country. It reported that about 250 workers die at work every year due to the negligence of their employers. Prosecutions rarely take place, convictions are even rarer, and then it is usually only smaller firms. Attempts to introduce legislation have all failed because the owning class warn the government that more stringent legislation would be too costly. Just another example of how inside capitalism profits are more important than the workers who produce them.

Dying for profit

“Britain’s largest drug company drew up a secret plan to double sales of the controversial anti-depressant Seroxat by marketing it as a cure for a raft of less serious mental conditions, the Observer can reveal today. The contents of the 250-page document have alarmed health campaigners who accuse the firm, GlaxoSmithKLine (GSK) of putting profits before therapeutic needs by attempting to broaden the market for the drug which has been linked to a series of suicides . . . Concerns about the addictive properties of Seroxat saw the government ban its prescription to people under the age of 18 last year. This followed a review which found children taking it were more likely to self-harm or commit suicide” (Observer, 7 November). It seems the company were attempting to move sales from $1 billion to $2billion by pushing it to people who were not clinically depressed. When there is money like this to be made even the “respectable” shareholders become murderous drug pushers.

Dying with poverty

Under the headline ‘Desperate plight of cancer sufferers living in poverty’ (Times, 9 November) reported as follows: “At least three quarters of the million Britons with cancer suffer from financial hardship brought on by the disease, including enforced job losses, discrimination and poor benefit allowances, according to research. A report by Macmillan Cancer Relief suggests that the disease costs patients hundreds of millions of pounds, for which they have little or no financial cover.” Needless to say this poverty only applies to the working class, as those capitalists unfortunate enough to suffer from the disease have at least the consolation that they will receive the best of care and that their families will not suffer financially.

Who cares?

Twenty years ago an explosion at the chemical factory in Bhopal in central India killed more than 15,000 people, and survivors are still trying to cope with the effects of this horrendous disaster. “Yesterday, half a million people who were in the path of the lethal cloud that spewed out of the chemical plant received a second compensation payment of £300 to £1,200” (Times, 13 November). This is in addition to a first payment of £500 per person from the company responsible Union Carbide. Dow Chemicals, who now own Union Carbide, refuse to clean up the site which still holds 25,000 tons of toxic waste. Another example of capitalism’s priorities. Make a couple of bucks, kill 15,000 and leave an area full of children who have difficulty breathing and are painfully dying, who cares? Socialists do.

Voice From the Back: A Society of contrasts (2008)

The Voice From the Back column from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Society of contrasts

Everywhere you look today the contradictions of capitalism become more and more obvious. Great wealth alongside great poverty, starvation amidst plenty and a technology that makes space travel possible yet is unable to stop the destruction of war. Two recent examples of the obscenity of capitalism leapt from the pages of the media recently. “Caviar House & Prunier, on Piccadilly, has taken delivery of the Almas, a rare golden caviar once reserved for the Tsars of Russia. Despite the price – £920 for limited edition 50g tins – the shop claims a four-year waiting list.” (Times, 19 August) “The price of rat meat has quadrupled in Cambodia this year as inflation has put other meat beyond the reach of poor people, officials said on Wednesday. With consumer price inflation at 37 percent according to the latest central bank estimate, demand has pushed a kilogram of rat meat up to around 5,000 riel (69 pence) from 1,200 riel last year.” (Yahoo News, 27 August) Does this system not disgust you? We must abolish it.

Marx and modernity

Away back in 1867 Karl Marx in Das Capital explained how the so-called primitive accumulation of capital was based on robbery and murder. In Peru today a similar process is taking place. In Britain we had the highland clearances and the enclosure acts, in Peru it is the expulsion of the indigenous population. “Peru is considering sending in the army to break up protests by Amazonian Indians who claim the government is preparing a massive land grab in the country’s remote jungles. … The government has responded to an appeal for talks by declaring a state of emergency in three states and threatening protesters with military action. “Indigenous people are defending themselves against government aggression,” said an Amazon Indian rights campaigner, Alberto Pizango. “This is not an ordinary or everyday demonstration. The Indians have told us they are not afraid. If the government declares a state of emergency they prefer to die there and show that this government violates human rights.” Relations between indigenous groups and the President Alan Garcia have become increasingly hostile as the government has sought to exploit what are thought to be rich oil and gas deposits in lands owned by Amazon Indians. Energy companies have pushed deep into supposedly protected areas in the past year, leading to clashes with some of the most remote tribal peoples left in the world.” (Independent, 21 August)

US gap widens

Socialists often meet with the argument that while capitalism may have been a terrible system in the past, with the awful gap between rich and poor, today we are gradually improving things and such inequalities no longer exists. So what do the anti-socialists make of these recent statistics? “The rich-poor gap also widened with the nation’s top one percent now collecting 23 percent of total income, the biggest disparity since 1928, according to the Economic Policy Institute. One side statistic supplied by the IRS: there are now 47,000 Americans worth $20 million or more, an all-time high.” (San Francisco Chronicle, 2 September) Eighty years of reform and now the gap is even wider.

Behind the rhetoric

Capitalist statesmen often speak of high ideals like freedom and democracy but behind the high-sounding rhetoric there is usually a harsh reality. A recent example was the US vice-president’s speech in Georgia. “Speaking in Georgia on Thursday, Cheney slammed Russia’s “illegitimate, unilateral attempt” to redraw the country’s borders and promised ongoing support for Georgia’s efforts to join NATO. The Vice President’s trip was accompanied by a $1 billion aid package announced in Washington Wednesday, for the purpose of rebuilding Georgia’s shattered economy and infrastructure. Upon arriving in Azerbaijan on Wednesday, Cheney told the people of that country and their neighbors in Georgia and Ukraine that “the United States has a deep and abiding interest in your well-being and security”.” Fine words indeed, but behind them was a more sordid reason than concern for the well-being of the Georgian citizens. “Vice President Dick Cheney, on a tour of former Soviet Republics, was working to shore up U.S. alliances in the wake of Russia’s military humiliation of Georgia – a mission whose outcome could have profound consequences for Washington’s efforts to maintain and expand the flow of oil and natural gas to the West while bypassing Russia. ” (Time, 4 September)

The Indian Rupee trick 

Many Asian countries are depicted as “third-world” where an undeveloped economy leaves millions starving, but here is an example of an Indian capitalist who has learned the trick of exploiting workers to make a fortune.” Vijay Mallya, the founder and chairman of fast-growing Kingfisher Airlines, launched his first international route yesterday linking Heathrow with India’s IT capital Bangalore – a daily service that puts the carrier in head-to-head competition with BA. …The father-of-three, ranked 476th in Fortune’s list of the world’s wealthiest people, has 26 homes around the world and 260 vintage cars. He made his fortune as chairman of Indian drinks group United Breweries, the Kingfisher-beer owner that last year acquired Scotch whisky maker Whyte & Mackay for £595m.” (Daily Telegraph, 5 September)

September 11, 2001: reflections on a somewhat unusual act of war (2006)

From the September 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the fifth anniversary of the al-Qaeda attack on New York and Washington, we reflect on this act of war and try to place it in its true political and moral context.

As an act of war, the al-Qaeda attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre was somewhat unusual, though not unprecedented, in three respects. 

First, the method used was non-standard. Standard military practice is to blow things and people up by dropping bombs or firing shells and missiles on them. But flying planes right into the target has been done before. Japanese kamikaze pilots used the technique against US warships in the Pacific during World War Two.

Second, al-Qaeda is a non-state actor. Such actors rarely have the capacity to carry through such a complex and costly operation. Therefore al-Qaeda must have had financial backing from wealthy sponsors – Osama bin Laden himself comes from an extremely wealthy family – and the support, or at least complicity, of one or more powerful states. In general, arranging wars is a pastime for members of the capitalist class, though they get hirelings to do the dirty work for them. Working people don’t command the necessary resources.

Finally, it is a little unusual for the US to be on the receiving end of a military assault from abroad. For a comparable attack on the continental United States, you have to go back to 1814, when the British army entered Washington and burned down theWhite House and the Capitol.

In other ways the attack was not unusual in the least. As an atrocity it was par for the course. The death toll, initially estimated at 6,500, was later revised downward to about 2,800. Atrocities on a similar or larger scale are committed routinely by the US in other countries.

To take just one example, 3-4,000 civilians were killed in the invasion of Panama in December 1989. Even if we start the reckoning with September 11, we find that the US was quick to even the score. According to an independent study, 3,767 Afghan civilians (hardly any of them connected with al-Qaeda) had been killed in bombing raids by 6 December, 2001. This figure does not include the far more numerous indirect casualties resulting from the creation of refugees and the disruption of food and other supplies.

Betrayal

The attack should not have been a total surprise, a bolt out of the blue. After all, it was merely the next step in a war that Osama bin Laden had formally declared on the United States in August 1996. He had built up a far flung network of front companies, banks,”charities,” and NGOs (e.g., the World Union of Moslem Youth) to raise funds and recruit young fighters for the war. He had already attacked American assets abroad, notably the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, and there was ample intelligence warning that a major attack on US soil was in the offing. So the parallel with Pearl Harbor is pretty weak.

And yet September 11 clearly did come as a shock to Bush. That was because the attack came from forces that the US, its sidekicks Britain and Israel, and the Bush family in particular had long regarded as friends, allies and partners. This explains why Bush ignored the warnings – just as Stalin ignored warnings of impending attack by Nazi Germany in 1941 and felt “betrayed” by Hitler when the attack came American, British, and Israeli ruling circles saw the main threats to their economic and strategic interests in the Moslem world as coming from “communists” and secular nationalists backed by the Soviet Union (e.g. Nasser in Egypt, Ghaddafi in Libya, the PLO). When Khomeini’s theocracy took power, Iran was added to the list of enemies, together with associated Shi’ite Islamist movements in other countries. Sunni Islamist movements, however, were encouraged – largely on the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” although also because they seemed more interested in imposing ritual conformity on their own communities and in fighting “communism” than in challenging the substantive interests of the “infidel” powers.

The Islamists were also beneficiaries of the “neo-liberal” economic policies of Western institutions. In Pakistan, for example, the secular state schools collapsed in the 1980s as a result of IMF-mandated public spending cuts. This left the Saudi-financed religious schools (madrassas) as the only educational option available to boys who were not from wealthy families. (Girls, needless to say, didn’t even have that option.) It was from these madrassas that the Taliban drew its recruits.

Moreover, relations with the leading Sunni Islamist power, Saudi Arabia, were and still are vital to Britain and the US in economic terms. The Saudi capitalist class, led by the royal family and influential families like the bin Ladens, not only sells these countries’ oil but uses much of the proceeds to buy arms from them and invest in their economies.

There are close and long-established personal and business ties between wealthy Saudis and British and American capitalists and politicians, including the father of the current US president and several members of his administration.

The Saudi-US alliance also entailed close military cooperation, above all in the fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden went to Pakistan in 1979 as an official of the Saudi intelligence service to finance, organize, and control the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance in collaboration with the CIA. It was here that Osama, who had trained as an engineer and economist with a view to taking part in the family business, acquired his taste for war. 

Osama fell out with the Saudi royal family in 1991 when they allowed the US to set up military bases on the “holy” soil of Arabia following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But even in exile Osama received frequent visits from relatives, who provided a channel of communication between him and the royal family. An understanding appears to have been reached. Osama would abstain from attacking targets inside Saudi Arabia and in return no action would be taken against his Saudi supporters, who included various members of his own and of other wealthy families (such as Khalid bin Mahfouz, the “banker of terror”) and even certain royal princes. And the Saudi authorities did protect these people, refusing to provide US intelligence agencies with any information that might compromise them. 

So September 11 originated in a “betrayal” by the Saudi capitalist class of their American friends, allies and partners. How can we account for such strange ingratitude to those to whom they owe their vast riches? It probably has to do with the circumstances in which the Saudi capitalist class came into being. It did not make itself through independent entrepreneurial activity. It was made when oil was discovered in Arabia (in 1938) and property rights in that oil were vested in the pre-existing royal house. It is a class of bedouin patriarchs turned rentiers who became capitalists by investing their revenue. As a result, it retains to some extent a pre-capitalist mentality that it expresses in religious terms, and has a deeply ambivalent attitude to the capitalist world in which it now operates.

The endless “war on terror”

Despite the shock effect, US ruling circles did not necessarily regard September 11 as an unalloyed evil. In his book The New Crusade, anti-war analyst Rahul Mahajan draws attention to a document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, issued in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative think tank with links to the Bush administration. The authors call for increased military spending to preserve US “global pre-eminence,” but add that such a programme will be politically impossible unless there is a “catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor”.

The purposes for which the fear generated by the al-Qaeda attack was exploited suggest that it filled this bill. The threat of “terrorism” has been used to push through military programs ranging from anti-missile defence to germ warfare. Thus, a vast lab is being built near Washington called the National Biodefence Analysis and Countermeasures Center, where in violation of the 1972 biological and toxin weapons convention the most lethal bacteria and viruses are to be stockpiled (Guardian Weekly, 4-10 August, 2006). What a tempting target it will make for terrorist infiltration or attack!

The “war on terrorism” unleashed in the aftermath of September 11, against first Afghanistan and then Iraq, is not – so Mahajan argues – a war on terrorism, just as the “war on drugs” is not a war on drugs. Combating terrorism and drugs are both low priorities, and the “wars” against them are covers for the pursuit of higher-priority interests.

In Afghanistan the US had turned against the Taliban (previously welcomed as a force for “stability”), mainly because they were unwilling to host oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to Pakistan, and was looking for a pretext to overthrow them. Capturing Osama was that pretext, for it was obvious that the chaos of war would create ideal conditions for him to escape.

Iraq was invaded to secure control over its oil and in the hope of establishing a new strategic beachhead in the Middle East. Saddam had no ties with Islamic terrorism, just as he had no nuclear weapons. To the likes of Osama he was not even a genuine Moslem. Bush demanded of his experts that they find ties between Iraq and terrorism; when they replied that there were none, he pretended not to hear and reiterated his demand. In October 2001 Vice President Dick Cheney declared that the war on terrorism”may never end — at least, not in our lifetime”(Washington Post, 21 October, 2001). Am I alone in finding this suspicious? Ordinarily in a war it is considered important for morale to hold out some prospect of victory, however remote. Does Cheney want and need the “war” to go on forever?

The torture system

To sustain the facade of the “war on terror” it is necessary to arrest lots of people. As there is no real evidence against them, they are held without trial in secret facilities throughout the world, where – like the victims of Stalin’s purges – they are tortured to extract the non-existent evidence. In her book The Language of Empire, Lila Rajiva describes for us the sickening tortures at Abu Ghraib, the prison complex outside Baghdad that the US occupation authorities took over from Saddam. The accounts and photos (some taken as exposés, others as souvenirs) are monotonous in their sameness. This is a clue: it strongly suggests that the torture is not a spontaneous practice of jailers and interrogators but a system designed by government experts and approved at the top.

The system goes by the code name R21 and is taught to British and American military intelligence personnel at the British Joint Services Interrogation Centre at Gilbertine Priory, Chicksands, near Bedford (Guardian, May 8, 2004). It is designed to shock Moslem cultural sensibilities. Victims are stripped naked and hooded, savaged by dogs, and forced under threat of beatings to masturbate and simulate sexual acts in front of sniggering female soldiers (another triumph for sexual equality). That’s just for starters, of course; it gets worse. I leave it to the reader to ponder what this means for the relative merits of Western and Middle Eastern “civilization.”

And yet the people who authorize all these horrors know very well who is responsible for terrorism (the Islamist variety, that is) and where they are to be found. But no bombs have been dropped on the wealthy suburbs of Riyadh. No scions of the bin Ladens and bin Mahfouz, no princes of the House of Saud have been stripped naked, set upon by dogs or sexually humiliated. That’s class justice for you! A few incidents, however regrettable, can’t be allowed to spoil British and American relations with a vital ally and business partner.

Stefan

The Liberian crisis in perspective (2003)

From the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century rendered slaves in America redundant. Mechanised production methods turned slave labour into a fetter on production and consequently a drag on the profits of slave owners. To solve the problem, the slave owners and their representatives (US government) formed an NGO called the American Colonisation Society whose task was to ship slaves to their original home of Africa. This is how the American slaves came to be dumped in present-day Liberia.

Today this small country is deeply embroiled in a senseless internecine war that has seen thousands killed and many more maimed or displaced; this mainly because of the abundant natural resources found there. The Guinea Coast of West Africa has recently been found to be replete with oil deposits and natural gas and Liberia is said to possess one of the largest reserves of these. It is also generously endowed with precious minerals (gold, diamonds and quite recently 8 kymbalyte sites have been discovered). Its dense forest cover harbours timber, rubber, etc in addition there are abundant maritime resources.

Some people unfortunately seek to explain the problem in Liberia as being tribal in character. But like the ones in Congo, Ivory Coast and indeed all conflicts the world over, the tribal/ethnic element is a mere smokescreen. The real causes are found in the economic interests of the warlords and their sponsors and financiers in the big business community.

The wealth and resources of the region are owned and controlled by western business companies and the local leadership to the exclusion of the people. However, bereft of any revolutionary solution to this state of affairs, some seek to constitute themselves into a force that would replace the puppet local leadership and in turn control these resources not in the interests of the masses but for themselves. Thus they aspire to shift the balance of forces in favour mainly of new capitalist groups abroad that are also seeking to break the monopoly of the existing (mostly ex-colonial) business companies. But as the whole sordid affair resolves around personal monetary interests and profits, the alliances are not always as sincere and smooth as expected and loyalties easily shift. In an interview Charles Taylor granted Baffour Ankomah, the editor of New African magazine on 20 June 2002, this particular Liberian leader said “during the war there was full co-operation between me and Washington, and then we got into a different phase. And God willing, we’ve got to get back to the original place where I want to do business with America, I want to engage it”.

Arms industry

Prominent among the business interests deeply involved in the Liberian crisis and indeed all wars are those in the arms industry. Arms dealers do not only find warlords great partners, they actually instigate them and then stoke the fires of conflict. Even where countries are under UN arms embargo, the sanctions are circumvented through various means the most common being done through forging the end-user certificate. In the case of Liberia a 64-page UN report released at the end of October 2002 revealed that Liberia clandestinely bought and received more than 200 tons of weapons between June and August 2002 in spite of the 1992 UN arms embargo which was strengthened in 2001.

As for the rebels, it is no secret that weapons are openly sold to them by the almighty gunrunners, sometimes with the tacit connivance of UN “in the field”.

The immediate cause of the carnage is that the US, UK, Guinea and Sierra Leonean Kamajors (traditional hunter/warriors) have ganged up with a few Liberian rebels called LURD to cause havoc. The idea is to wage a proxy rebel war, get the Liberians to become fed up and rise up against the government. This fact was revealed by a confidential report of an Ecowas Military Mission to Liberia dated 14 June 2002.

When Charles Taylor “escaped” from prison in the US and went to Liberia and launched his rebel war in December 1989, he was in the good books of the US capitalists. The reason for his incarceration was an alleged embezzlement of some $900,000 which Samuel Doe’s government accused him of. At that time Taylor was the Director General of the state-owned General Services Agency. But at the same time Doe’s dictatorial rule had become so unpopular that change was imminent. The Americans knew this and actually needed a replacement. Thus the apparent orchestration of the jailbreak by the US authorities. He flew to Ghana from Boston but was immediately arrested by the Ghanaian authorities, as they believed it was impossible for an African to escape from a top security prison in the US. Needless to say the Americans in all likelihood got the Ghanaians to set him free. But before he captured Monrovia after years of fighting, he had a falling out with the Americans. It is believed that NPLF rebel fighters had cornered and wiped out President Doe’s Israeli commandos and the Israeli government vehemently protested to the US. And that was it.

That partly explains the breaking away from Taylor of Prince Y Johnson to form the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL). It is interesting to note that no sooner had the UN Special Court on Sierra Leone been constituted than Prince Johnson intimated from his exile home in Nigeria that Liberians including Taylor be brought in to face war crime charges. This sour relation with US drew Taylor more and more close to the French capitalists who looted Liberian timber and other resources in return for an unflinching and consistent support in the war effort.

But things got worse with the Americans when Taylor began castigating the US for not having done anything meaningful to Liberia throughout its life as an American satellite state. He claimed for instance that the 1926 Firestone factory was only set up to rip off Liberian rubber and that Lamco situated at Bomi Hills only succeeded in creating a deep hole in the ground as the iron was depleted. But the straw to break the camel’s back was Taylor’s rejection of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton oil deals. Desmond Davies, editor of West Africa magazine writes in the 26th May – 1st June 2002 issue:

“Liberia is another country in which Halliburton (once operated by US vice president Dick Cheney) was keen to do business. This may come as a surprise, given the antagonistic stance the Bush administration has taken towards President Charles Taylor’s government. But Halliburton knows how to apply pressure on embattled governments in the hope of getting concessions."

It seems that a couple of years ago Halliburton’s representatives made Charles Taylor an offer he could not refuse: “give us oil-drilling rights and we will help remove the international pariah status of the Liberian government”. (By the way, there is oil in Liberia as in the case of neighbouring Sierra Leone.) Taylor, who was keen to see UN sanctions removed, agreed and Halliburton was asked to draw up an agreement.

The company’s representatives duly returned with an agreement. But one wise head at the Central Bank in Monrovia asked for a second opinion. The agreement was referred to a Canadian oil lawyer, who is based in the US, to go through it with a fine-tooth comb.

After serious perusal of the agreement, the lawyer came back with his verdict: the deal was not in the interest of Liberia and, therefore, the government should not sign. That was it. And that’s how Taylor came up with “Liberia is not for sale”.

Given the failure of Halliburton to secure a deal in Liberia, it is not surprising that the US administration wants to see the back of Taylor.

In fact as far back as 1997 when Taylor won the elections CNN’s Diplomatic Licence programme “predicted” that his government would not last a year or six months. So desperate was the US in seeing Taylor out that while he was away attending the peace talks in Ghana last June the US embassy in Monrovia unsuccessfully attempted to oust him through vice president Blah.

UN experts (under US control), who in spite of the untold suffering and the countless deaths, recently described the effect of the UN sanctions on the people as “negligible”, explicitly expressed that the crisis in Liberia is according to the agenda of the powers that be. The UN also showed its involvement in the affair when it demanded financial reports how Liberia spends its income.

In November 2002 Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf admitted in an interview with a local newspaper the Analyst that the opposition was not prepared to assume leadership. And yet the US, as reported by Radio France International on 6 August, is pushing for Johnson-Sirleaf to step in as interim president when Taylor is finally pushed away. On the other hand it was clear at the Ecowas-led summit in Ghana that both rebel groups (LURD and MODEL) do not have any know-how to deal with the issues that go beyond waging a war of terror. They do not have a political agenda, not a policy document to guide them.

But perhaps the last card for the US is the indictment by David M Crane, the American chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Americans feared that the peace talks in Ghana could abate or even halt hostilities altogether in Liberia. In that case general election, due to be held in October 2003 would go ahead peacefully. Now, in spite of Taylor’s “problems” (which many Liberians seem to understand were imposed by some outside forces) he would win. So to forestall such an unwanted possibility, the indictment that was judicially approved on 7 March was finally slapped on Taylor on 4 June in time to prevent cessation of the massacres.

Finally it was instructive to hear the South African authorities claiming rather naively that the stepping down of Taylor would be an example of an African solution to an African problem. But what else could they say as loyal sycophantic servants of US-led capitalist interests? The problem in Liberia is not African; it is not western; it is a global, profits-making issue! It is big business. But above all the solution is not Taylor stepping down. It is the profit system getting out.

Suhuyini

World View: Yes, inaction is not an option (2002)

From the April 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

“What the Pentagon has done with this is sound military conceptual planning.” This was the US Secretary Colin Powell commenting on the leaked 50 page Pentagon report entitled: “Nuclear Posture Review” – proof, if ever it was needed, that the lunatics have finally taken over the asylum.

What was so special about this “Review”? It contained contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons on seven countries that the US claim are the biggest threat to world peace: China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria and Libya. It orders the US military to plan for the use of smaller nuclear weapons, suggests the arming of Cruise missiles with nuclear warheads and identifies four instances when the US must launch a nuclear attack: an Arab-Israeli conflict, war between China and Taiwan, an attack by North Korea on South Korea and an attack by Iraq on any of its neighbours.

Coming within a year of the US trashing of numerous international treaties regarding weapons proliferation and, bearing in mind the US response to the 11 September attack on mainland USA and the belligerent tone of President Bush’s recent State of the Union Address, this is news to be taken seriously. It hints at US unilateralism and a new era of unchecked US aggression in defence of the interests of its corporate elite.

Such US aspirations, however, are not recent, for they can be traced right back to the 1820s and the “Monroe Doctrine”, which announced that the Americas belonged to the USA. Now, all US excesses can be rationalised by a quick thumb over the shoulder in the direction of Ground Zero. The US, having suffered considerable loss of life in the 11 September attack last year, have found in that atrocity the pretext to pursue their goal of “full spectrum dominance” – military domination of the world.

No sooner was this news out, when US vice president Dick Cheney flew off for a ten-day tour of the Middle East. Though ostensibly the trip was an attempt to iron out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, few commentators did not suggest that the real reason for the visit was to drum up support for a full-scale attack upon Iraq . Prior to his visit to the Middle East he stopped over in Britain to ask a complacent Tony Blair whether he could afford any US attack on Iraq 25,000 British troops.

The signs of a coming US attack upon Iraq have been visible for some time now. For months, US military instructors have been in northern Iraq training Kurdish fighters. Five thousand mothballed military vehicles in Kuwait have been overhauled and 24 Apache attack helicopters have arrived in Kuwait. Moreover, In the wake of the recent anthrax scare, investigators worked round the clock in a desperate and futile bid to find the Saddam link, before concluding it was probably the work of a home-grown crank. And in recent weeks, Washington has continually reminded us that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and must be prevented from using them, whilst negligent of reports from the UN Special Commission that Iraq’s arsenal is now down to 5 percent of its 1990 level and seemingly oblivious to questions relating to how he has amassed such deadly weapons, considering the stringent sanctions which even outlaw the export of ping-pong balls to Iraq.

Twelve years after the war with Iraq, the US now looks serious about “regime change”. Back then though the overthrow of Saddam was not part of the US agenda. Having initially led the Kurds of northern Iraq and the Marsh Arabs of the South into believing that they would get US support if they rose up against Saddam, they then sat back and watched as Saddam almost annihilated them. It had occurred to them that Saddam might be holding the country together, stopping the spread of militant Islam, and that an Iraq minus Saddam might divide into warring factions and further threaten US interests in the region.

US allies in the Middle East – Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – have shown little enthusiasm for US plans for Iraq, all voicing reservations and fearful of the consequences. Turkey, another US ally, who has many times loaned its airfields to the US for its operations against Iraq, believes its economy could be damaged by any such conflict, and King Abdullah of Jordan has warned of the “catastrophic effect” that any aggression towards Iraq would have on the Middle East. Seemingly, only Tony Blair, George Bush’s cheerleader, has agreed that Saddam must be stopped, citing, in Republican fashion, Saddam’s elusive weapons of mass destruction and, like the true political amnesiac, never querying the weapons of mass destruction the US and Britain have stockpiled or the nuclear weapons in the hands of another Middle Eastern aggressor – Israel.

While the defenders of “freedom” attempt to whip up support for another Gulf War, on the pretext that Saddam Hussein is a terrorist, the rest of us can recall that both the US and Britain backed Iraq in its war with Iran, even providing it with arms, and that they were silent when Iraq used chemical weapons on Iranians in 1984 (four months later the US even reopened its embassy in Baghdad) and again when Saddam used chemical weapons on the Kurdish village of Halabjah in 1988, killing 5,000 civilians.

And remember the ferocity of the first US war with Iraq, when Saddam invaded Kuwait and threatened US oil interests in the region? It lasted 42 days, during which time 110,000 “Coalition” aerial sorties were flown and 88,500 tons of bombs were dropped. It left an estimated 100,000 dead, including tens of thousands burnt to death retreating from Kuwait along the Basra Road. Sanctions imposed since then have devastated Iraqi civil society and have killed over 1.5 million including 500,000 children under the age of five – results the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide classifies as “genocidal conduct” and a convention the US refuses to comply with.

When asked what he estimated the number of Iraqi dead were after the first Gulf War, Colin Powell remarked: “Frankly, that’s a number that doesn’t interest me much”. His predecessor, Madeline Albright, when asked to comment on the half a million Iraqi children that had died of starvation disease and replied: “the price is worth it.” These are the type of people calling the shots in Washington, working closely with the Pentagon and the White House and in the interests of world peace!

When we recall the horror of the first Gulf War and juxtapose it with the statements of successive US Secretaries of State and indeed the recent revelation that the US will hit with a nuclear weapon whoever it wishes, regardless of international opinion, we realise that the job of securing world peace can never be left to politicians. Defending the belligerent stance of the US, George Bush recently said that “inaction is not an option.” It’s a sentiment shared by socialists. For it is the inaction and complacency of the working class that enables such horrendous injustices to go on. For almost a century we have warned of the dangers of political apathy, of trusting in leaders, of accepting all that governments say without question. Our silence, more than anything, is what Bush and Blair and Co. will depend on in coming months, that same silence the master class toasts each day. Our inaction is an important element in our continuing exploitation, for the master class see in it our consent for their excesses.

As the saying goes, it takes two to tango. Capitalism may well breed war, but our apathy is very much a part of the process. Bear the above in mind in coming months when the US fleet heads off to the Gulf.

John Bissett

Archetypal Fat Cats (2004)

Book Review from the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bad Company: The Strange Cult of the CEO by Gideon Haigh. Aurum £6.99

They used to be called something like ‘general manager’, but nowadays the main term for the head of a big capitalist company is ‘chief executive officer’. While they are nominally salaried employees, their pay as archetypal fat cats is so high that they are in fact clearly members of the capitalist class.

It was the growth of limited liability from the early nineteenth century that gave rise to the modern capitalist corporation and hence to the CEO Firms were originally run by their founders (or their heirs), but the owners faced the debtors’ prison if they went bankrupt. So few would buy shares in a company unless they could be personally involved in supervising how it was run. Limited liability meant that shareholders were no longer personally liable for any misdeeds or bankruptcies, so owners could delegate day-to-day control to a salaried manager, with a board of directors overseeing the whole thing.

As the title of this short volume suggests, the CEO has become a kind of cult figure, with in many cases a celebrity status and a pay packet to match (averaging over $30 million a year in large US companies in 2002, for instance). Many CEOs work long hours, apparently, though of course a lot of this time is spent in luxury hotels and swanky restaurants, and they are seemingly surprised when their employees fail to share their taste for sixty-hour weeks. Their income is reinforced by the curious idea of a ‘guaranteed bonus’, and of a ‘golden parachute’, paid to them if they are sacked by the board of directors.

And what does a CEO do in return for this generous remuneration? It’s clear that they do not in any real sense run the company, since big corporations are far too complicated to be managed by individuals. Rather, they concern themselves with the company as a business, often having little detailed idea about what it actually produces, and give orders that others have to implement. The impression gained from Haigh’s book is that if the share price keeps rising, irrespective of any medium- or long-term benefits to the company, then shareholders and directors are happy. Reducing costs by cutting staff is a favourite, and none too sophisticated, approach.

With golden parachute in pocket, a number of CEOs go into politics - President Bush’s cabinet, for instance, is full of them, from Dick Cheney to Donald Rumsfeld. As Haigh quips, “the Bush administration is more a CEOcracy than a theocracy.” The extent of this cosying-up is fairly new, but governments do not have to be full of ex-businessmen in order to serve capitalist interests.

Haigh makes the useful point that, while workers are urged to keep wage demands in check so that they can compete with other workers (especially those in other countries), CEOs instead always want to be paid more so as to be in line with their counterparts overseas — the idea of ‘internationally competitive’ has different meanings for bosses than for workers. While he is well aware of the absurdities of CEO pay, he has some odd ideas about the way capitalism works. For instance, he claims that “Companies do not exist to make profits; they make profits in order to exist” He seems to think this is an important correction to a common myth, but in whichever version it just means that companies are motivated by profit-making. Nevertheless, his book does give a useful picture of what CEOs do and don’t do, and of why we have no need of them and their fellow-exploiters.

Paul Bennett