HOUSE HUNTING?

Abramovich's house, on a landscaped hillside, includes this swimming pool with
rock waterfall.

"He thinks nothing of shelling out as much as £30 million for a single footballer. So for Roman Abramovich, the £54 million price of his new Caribbean holiday home will have been a drop in the ocean. The owner of Chelsea football club bought the 70 acre estate on the exclusive island of St Barts. The Gouverneur Bay Estate was once owned by David Rockefeller of the American banking dynasty and most recently by software tycoon Jeet Singh. ... Mr Abramovich, who is worth more than £5 billion, bought the lavish waterfront property in September in the most expensive deal ever for a Caribbean island." ( Daily Mail, 23 December ) RD

THE DISTORTIONS OF WAR

Capitalism by its very nature must deceive and distort reality in order to hide its exploitative nature, thus it can use terms like "fair wages" when they really mean "fair robbery". It is however in the pursuit for markets and sources of raw materials during war that its chicanery reaches new heights. No country in the world has a "Ministry of Aggression" they are all called the Ministry of Defence. Likewise when non-combatants and civilians are killed in wars they are not murder victims. They are classed as "co-lateral damage". Here is another recent example of language distortion to hide the heinous nature of the profit system. "A second British soldier has died after being wounded in a suspected "friendly fire" incident in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence has said. The soldier, from 3rd Battalion The Rifles, has not been named but his family has been told. He died on Tuesday, having been wounded in a fire fight near Sangin, central Helmand Province, on Monday. A soldier killed in a separate suspected friendly fire incident has been named as L/Cpl Michael Pritchard." (BBC News, 22 December) "Friendly fire"! That is hardly any consolation to the victim's family, but like "co-lateral damage" it is the language of the cheats and deceivers that defend the profit system.  RD

GREEN SHOOTS OF RECOVERY?

Among the residents at Bergen's County Housing, Health and Human
Services Centre is Kevin Howley, right, with Angela Altschuler, a
volunteer

Financial "experts" keep claiming that capitalism has recovered from economic crisis and point to the increase in some stocks and increases in bankers bonuses as evidence of that recovery. They completely ignore the mounting unemployment and the repossession of workers houses. Here is a recent example of homelessness in the USA. "That insecurity is becoming more common in the suburbs these days. Officials say that homeless shelters are suddenly filled to capacity, with some suburban communities resorting to housing families in motels, for the first time in years. On Long Island, Nassau County officials have seen the number of people seeking shelter rise by 40 percent compared with this time last year, while in Suffolk, the number of families seeking shelter for the first time rose by 20 percent. In Connecticut, in an annual one-day survey taken in January, the number of people in emergency shelters was 33 percent higher than the year before." (New York Times, 11 December) RD

AN EXPENSIVE TIPPLE

"Fancy a tipple to celebrate that bonus? At the World Bar, an exclusive Manhattan Lounge overlooking the headquarters of the United Nations, staff are ready to serve up a $50 cocktail blending Remy XO cognac, Pineau des Charentes and Veuve Clicquot champagne topped with a layer of 23-carat liquid gold. The World Cocktail is a popular purchase during good years for Wall Street bankers ..."

( Observer 13 December ) RD

ART AND MONEY

Safety in Old Masters:
Raphael fetches £29 million

Away back in the 19th century Oscar Wilde remarked of someone " A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." One wonders what he would make of an art auction that took place in December 2009. "The Old Masters auction at Christie's took a total of £68.4 million, including £20 million paid for a Rembrandt portrait painted in 1658, soon after the artist was declared bankrupt. (First Post, 9 December)

During his 63 years Rembrandt produced 600 paintings, 300 etchings and nearly 2000 drawings. He lead a hand to mouth existance but now some parasite buys his paintings for £20 million. That's how capitalism works. RD

BABIES AND BOMBS

The charity World Vision is running an appeal for funds that it calls Child Health Now. It recently took a full page advertisement in The Times (16 November) that illustrated the plight of the world's poorest children. It reported that twins in Zambia had severe diarrhea but that the clinic they attended had only enough drugs to treat one of them. The untreated one consequently died and joined the estimated two million children that die every year of this untreated condition. The advertisement then went on to point out "A simple mixture of salt, sugar and water that costs just a few pence can save a child's life, without requiring hospital treatment." The death of a child for the lack of something costing a few pence is shocking enough but the charity then claimed "Today, World Vision launches its Child Health Now campaign, calling for an end to preventable child deaths. ...If the UK government, and the international community, channeled more aid into simple community provisions, like vitamins and rehydration salts for children cut off from health systems, the lives of six million children a year could be saved." What the well intentioned World Vision do not understand is that we live inside a capitalist society where the priority is making profit not saving children. As we reported in the July 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard "Military spending worldwide rose by 4 per cent to $1.46 trillion." Immense expenditure to protect markets, sources of raw materials and profits, yet millions of kids die for the lack of a few pence. RD

IT MUST BE OBVIOUS

Socialists have no time for so-called "think tanks", usually they are just a crowd of plonkers that tell us we are lucky to be exploited by such nice people as the owning class but here is one that stumbled on something worthwhile. "Hospital cleaners are worth more to society than bankers, a study suggests. The research, carried out by think tank the New Economics Foundation, says hospital cleaners create £10 of value for every £1 they are paid. It claims bankers are a drain on the country because of the damage they caused to the global economy. They reportedly destroy £7 of value for every £1 they earn. Meanwhile, senior advertising executives are said to "create stress". The study says they are responsible for campaigns which create dissatisfaction and misery, and encourage over-consumption." (BBC News, 14 December) Of course think tanks, because they are servants of capitalism see everything in terms of pound notes, but even they must see that all useful work and a lot of useless work is carried out by the working class. The owning class produce no wealth whatsoever. All they do is consume wealth and of course fund "think tanks" that very occasionally say something worthwhile. We imagine a few workers employed by the New Economic Foundation may be looking for a new job after their employers read this report. RD

A THIRD WORLD WAR?

Capitalism is an explosively competitive society. We have had two world wars. One was supposed to be "the war to end all wars" the other was supposed to be a "war for democracy". That was all nonsense of course. War inside capitalism is the logical outcome of competition for sources of raw materials, trade routes. Markets and spheres of political dominance. Where is the next powder keg of competition? No one knows, but here is a possibility. "At the crossroads between east and west in the desert nation of Turkmenistan, a quiet battle is under way for natural gas, oil and influence, and the U.S. and Europe are losing out to China and the Muslim world. There's a lot at stake: the Central Asian country has the world's fourth-largest reserves of natural gas and substantial oil reserves, putting it in the same energy league as Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iraq. Plus, its position just north of Afghanistan could be hugely beneficial to NATO as it seeks more reliable supply routes to its troops on the ground there." (TIME, 29 November) Socialists are as clueless as everyone else about where the next conflict will arise. What we are certain about is that thousands of men and women will die in conflicts in the future over their master's quarrels. We are also certain that only world socialism can stop such a tragedy. RD

Onward Christian Bankers

Onward Christian Bankers

Williams

Turner

Banking, insurance companies and the myriad financial off-shoots that make up the City of London are central to the running of modern capitalism. They produce nothing of course but then neither do the industrial capitalist class. It is probably a bit unfair to say the City produces nothing. It certainly produces nothing useful, but it certainly produces hypocrisy in large doses. "As bankers last month began gearing up for a bumper bonus season, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican church, bemoaned their lack of repentance. “We haven’t heard people saying, ‘Well, actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, empty’,” Mr Williams told bankers in September. Such rhetoric echoes that of Lord Turner over the summer, when the chairman of the Financial Services Authority spoke in moralistic terms about the need for banking to become ‘socially useful’ again. Hector Sants, his chief executive, has even explained his move to a regulatory job in terms of a sense of Christian ‘duty’ to give something back to society after a 30-year career in money-making." (Financial Times, 7 October) We expect Archbishops to utter hypocritical nonsense, after all it is their stock in trade, but when financiers rant on about "Christian duty" and banking becoming "socially useful" it is a bit hard to bear. Speed the day when banks and other financial institutes are part of the unlamented history of capitalism along with all its apologists, both religious and secular.
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This item is from, November's Voice From The Back regular column in Socialist Standard, published since 1904 by The Socialist Party of Great Britain.
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THE AMERICAN DREAM?

"Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street." (Huffington Post, 13 December) RD