CLASS DETERMINED BY OWNERSHIP

You can always rely on the political experts in the HM government to come up with facts that are blindingly obvious. "Published this month, the all-party parliamentary group report, 7 Key Truths About Social Mobility, confirms the OECD's findings that the UK has the lowest social mobility rate compared with any other "developed" country and warns that "it does not appear to be improving". Key findings from the report include the discovery that, by the age of just three years old, the "class" of British children is already defined. Also, half of all British children's future prospects will be determined by the circumstances of their parents." (Aljazeera, 27 June) All over the world we live in a class divided society wherein the majority own little or nothing but their ability to work for a wage or a salary and must sell this ability to the owning class who live off the resulting profit. We don't need "experts" to tell us this. RD

Fact of the Day

The six heirs to the Walmart fortune are worth as much as over 40% of all American households.

The Walton family was worth $89.5 billion in 2010, the same as the bottom 41.5% of U.S. families combined, according to Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. That's 48.8 million American households in total.

Glasgow branch of the Socialist Party

MARYHILL COMMUNITY CENTRAL HALLS
BRANCH MEETING AT 8.30pm
WEDNESDAY JULY 18,
 

HOW LENIN DISTORTED MARXISM

SPEAKER RICHARD DONNELLY

“Of all the distortions of socialism that we have to deal with probably the most obvious one is that the USSR had something to do with socialism. The failure of the USSR to deal with the problems of the working class has been portrayed as the failure of socialism. In this discussion session I hope to have a look at how this distortion became possible and how many workers have become confused about Marxism and Leninism.”

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LIQUIDITY PROBLEMS

Times are tough even for members of the capitalist class as this news item shows. "Landscape artist John Constable's The Lock has become one of the most expensive British paintings ever sold, fetching £22.4m at auction at Christie's in London yesterday. The sale is also highly controversial. .... But as the BBC reports, the Constable's sale by Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza has prompted Sir Norman Rosenthal, one of the European art world's most respected art curators, to resign as a trustee of Madrid's Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in protest. The baroness called the sale "very painful" but said she was forced to part with the painting because the current economic crisis had left her with "no liquidity"." (The Week, 4 July) The Baroness once the beauty queen Miss Spain has been finding things tough recently but £22.4m should keep the wolf from the door for a little while we imagine. RD

doom and gloom

Insolvency body R3 figures could mean 274 retail businesses and 30 hotels in Scotland had a "high risk" of failure. A further 1,238 retailers and 137 hoteliers were "vulnerable to failure" in the next year.

 R3 indicated 26.15% of all retail firms and 17.99% of all hotels were at risk.

 A report last week by accountancy firm PKF suggested Edinburgh's hotels may struggle later this year to compensate for a poor performance in the spring. Its hotel survey for May reported a fall in both occupancy rates and revenues for the third month in a row.

Fact of the Day

In 2012, the World Economic Forum calculated that 1 per cent of the world's population - just 70 million people - own half of the world's wealth.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/as-long-as-the-rich-can-speculate-on-food-the-worlds-poor-go-hungry-20120630-219ja.html

Past Reflections 2

 Another installment in the recollections of members and once again from Glasgow member Victor Vanni.

The party’s heyday began with WW2 and lasted into the early 1950’s. During this period party activities and membership grew and this certainly applied to Glasgow branch. Huge audiences attended indoor and outdoor meetings and from 1945 to 1948 the branch even had a rented shop and eventually enough members to form a second branch in the city until 1961 when the two branches amalgamated.

By the time I joined in 1963 the branch’s activities were really expanding. Several parliamentary and council elections were contested while new, successful outdoor speaking stances were established, but the big day of the week was Sunday when two outdoor meetings were held in both Glasgow and at The Mound in Edinburgh. If Donnelly was the speaker in Glasgow then Shaw spoke in Edinburgh with the order reversed the following week.


These meetings at the Mound were my own favourites. The afternoon meeting was usually good but, the evening meeting was the big event, especially during the three weeks of the Edinburgh Festival when the large audiences included visitors from all over the world and the party’s case would always get a good reception. These meetings created enough interest to get Donnelly interviewed on TV at The Mound and we had a regular following who came every week to see our opponents get a drubbing. These meetings paid-off by getting new recruits for the party and soon there were enough to form an Edinburgh branch.


When the Glasgow contingent returned from Edinburgh they would head for the new branch premises to meet other branch members and swap stories about the meetings in both cities. These premises were provided by the generosity of Sid Earp, a veteran Canadian comrade, who was visiting Glasgow and they enabled the branch to hold its meetings and classes there until 1969 when the building was emptied prior to demolition.


But not all speaking stances were successful. An example of this was in the early 1970’s when the branch decided to try holding outdoor meetings in nearby Paisley, a town with a violent reputation. The meeting was held at 3pm on Saturday afternoons in Dunn Square at Paisley Cross but there was trouble ahead. The problem was that when the pubs closed at 2.30pm local yobs would come to Dunn Square to continue drinking until the pubs re-opened  and they gave us a hard time just because we came from Glasgow.


There were some unpleasant incidents but the end came when at one meeting a burly member of the audience was so angered by one of the yobs that he picked up the man and threw him on to a wooden bench which shattered leaving him howling in agony amid the wreckage. We never went back to Paisley after that.


There are other articles in the SOCIALIST STANDARD dealing with branch history. They are the September 1979 and May 2004 issues. There is also an excellent verbatim report of a debate in Edinburgh in 1970 between us and I.S. The party was represented by two Glasgow members.
Vic Vanni    

CRISIS IN CALIFORNIA

We are quite used to hearing of the awful financial straits that exist in European countries such as Greece and Spain but capitalism's crisis is world wide and it even affects the USA. "Stockton filed for Chapter 9 protection on Thursday, making it the largest American city by population ever to declare bankruptcy. The filing comes after officials were unable to reach a deal with the city's creditors to restructure hundreds of millions of dollars of debt under a state law designed to help municipalities avoid bankruptcy. Stockton, a river port of 290,000, is the first California city to file for bankruptcy since Vallejo, which did so in 2008." (New York Times, 28 June) Capitalism is a world wide system when it enters recession it effects even formerly prosperous California. RD

End of the Dream

No, not third division Rangers FC but the United States of America.

The "American dream"- consisting of the traditional ideals of freedom, equality and an upward social mobility achieved through hard work - turns out to be a myth, according to Howard Friedman, a statistician and health economist at the United Nations. The United States, the land of opportunity is no more.

Friedman drew this conclusion after systematically comparing the United States to 13 other wealthy countries in five key areas: health, education, safety, democracy and equality. All wealthy countries with GDP per capita exceeding $20,000, and have populations of more than 10 million. They are: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Portugal, The Netherlands, South Korea, Spain and the United Kingdom.

In the last 30 years, the gap between rich and poor has widened. The top 1 per cent of US citizens saw their incomes grow by 275 per cent between 1979 and 2007, according to the Congressional Budget Office. At the same time, the bottom one-fifth of US citizens only experienced income growth of 18 per cent. The US has very little socio-economic mobility compared to other wealthy nations. Canada has nearly twice the level of socio-economic mobility as the US.

"The amount of support poor people get in the US is much less than in any other country in terms of social benefits. There's not much of a safety net to help you out. On the other hand, if you do well, you can do very well in the US. In America, if your parents were poor, you were more likely to be poor compared to other countries. The top student from a poor neighborhood has roughly the same chance of graduating from college as the worst student from a wealthy neighborhood" said Friedman.

Americans spend on average nearly two to four times more on healthcare than any other wealthy country, yet have lower life expectancies. Americans are confident that the US education system is one of the best in the world, but again, the data indicates that this perception is not supported by facts. In 1960, the US had the 12th-lowest infant mortality rate in the world, but it sank to 34th by 2008.  The US used to have the highest rate of college education and now it barely makes it into the top 15

A Chinese report on the US said that in the last 20 years, incomes of 90 per cent of US citizens have stagnated, while incomes of the richest 1 per cent have grown by 33 per cent. According to the report, the US has the largest prison population in the world per capita and the highest rate of incarceration. One out of every 132 Americans is behind bars. In his book, Friedman notes that US incarceration and homicide rates are 10 times higher than Japan's. "There's an interesting financial incentive. Not all prisons are run by the state. Those privately run prisons make profits when people are put into jail, so they support laws that improve incarceration," he said

Nothing new in New Zealand

New Zealand today has one of the worst rates of income inequality compared with other developed or wealthy countries. Two-income families are increasingly worse off than single-income families were a generation ago.

Inequality has increased here faster than in any other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country. Most of the increase has been the result of larger rises in overall incomes for the top 20 per cent of income earners; and incomes for the bottom 20 per cent have decreased over the two decades from the mid-1980s. To make things worse, wealth is even more unevenly distributed than income and the level of wealth inequality is twice that of income inequality.

The most recent statistics available show wealth inequalities have increased to the extent that the top 10% of the population accounts for 51.8% of the country's net worth, while the bottom 50% of people owns just 5.2%

Over 500,000 people live in households with "negative wealth" - that is, they have more debt than income - and half of New Zealand income earners cannot afford to save.

Those on middle incomes are also bearing the brunt of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, among them 200,000 children living in poverty. Federation of Family Budgeting Services chief executive Raewyn Fox  said she had seen a large increase in the number of people who might be considered "well off" coming in for advice on how to handle their money. She said easy access to credit (another ploy of the rich) was a trap that too many people fell into, without giving thought to the future and something tipping the balance and leaving them in a financially dangerous position.

truth - the wounded casualty of war

“The human rights situation in Libya now is far worse than under the late dictator Muammar Gaddafi,” stated Nasser al-Hawary, researcher with the Libyan Observatory for Human Rights. Hawary is no fan of the Gaddafi regime. The former Salafist and political oponent of Gaddafi was imprisoned numerous times as a poitical dissident by Gaddafi’s secret police. Hawary emerged from his periods of incarceration beaten and bloodied, but not broken.

Despite the interim National Transitional Council’s (NTC) pledge to bring the more than 6,000 detainees currently in detention to trial or to release them, only some have been freed while the atrocities committed by pro-revolutionary rebels have been overlooked. Armed militias controlling the streets and enforcing their version of law and order is a problem even in the major cities where the NTC has supposedly retaken control.

“All the young men here have guns,” former rebel fighter Suheil al Lagi tells IPS. “They are accustomed to sorting out political differences and petty squabbles this way, or they rob people using weapons. The high unemployment and financial hardship is aggravating the situation...This is not the new Libya we fought for and we may have to take up arms again if the corruption and greed continue. This time against the new government,” warns al Lagi.”

Meanwhile in Syria, amidst the slaughter, the propaganda and misinformation war carries on unabated. A government attack on the Syrian village of Tremseh was described by the media as a massacre of innocent civilians. The BBC's Jim Muir says the UN initial findings are more in line with the government's claims that it was attacking what it calls "nests of terrorists" or rebel hideouts.

SPEND, SPEND, SPEND

All over the world capitalism is experiencing an economic recession. Even formerly booming Japan is feeling the pinch with markets in free-fall. Amidst this period of uncertainty and fear there is of course one section of the population that continues to spend, spend, spend as usual. "An apartment that is believed to be the most expensive one-bedroom property in the world is on sale in Tokyo with a price tag of a cool Y1.8 billion (£14.72 million). .... The price means that 1 square foot of the property costs £3,320.33. The owner of the penthouse apartment – whom Sotheby's would only identify as a successful and married businessman – spent 18 months completely refurbishing the property from a four-bedroom family home." (Daily Telegraph, 13 July) The owning class continue to indulge themselves no matter the economic world climate. RD

What is wage slavery?

“At one time in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, a hundred and fifty years ago, working for wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery,” so said Noam Chomsky. In the decade between 1846 and 1855, more than three million immigrants came to the United States, with a vast majority of them settling in the free states of the North. By 1855, foreign-born residents were becoming a majority group; immigrants approached or exceeeded half the total population of several Northern cities.The growing industrial economy of the North swallowed these new workers into its factories, employing them for long hours at low wages. These manufacturing jobs were repetitious and sometimes hazardous. And from their meager earnings, Northern labourers had to pay for every one of life's necessities. For some Southerners of the period, the situation of Northern workers looked a lot worse than slavery. In fact, they argued, unlike the "wage slavery" of the North, the slavery system in the South provided food, clothing, medical care, and leisure to slaves, caring for them throughout their lives.

When you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress. The invisible hand of the market clamps on to workers invisible hand-cuffs. Capitalism cannot function unless it subordinates workers, so the employers close ranks and built their class domination backed by the power of the State. But workers are not commodities; they are human beings.

Class inequality increases over time because employers pay workers less than the value of what they produce. However, this exploitative relationship is hidden by the lies that a) employers create jobs and b) workers are lucky to have them. In fact, labour creates all wealth, and capitalists are lucky that workers keep producing it for them.

We are taught that workers who are better off have achieved this position at the expense of workers who are worse off — that men benefit from the oppression of women, that whites benefit from the oppression of blacks, that workers in richer nations benefit from the exploitation of workers in poorer nations, and so on. If this were true, then class solidarity would be impossible. Fortunately, it’s not true at all. There is no middle class. There are only workers with "half-decent" jobs, and workers who don’t have decent jobs. The purpose of pitting workers against one another is to prevent unity. Accepting the lie that some workers benefit from the oppression of others does not serve the need of the oppressed to end their oppression, nor does it serve the need of the working class to unite. On the contrary, it feeds the employers’ strategy of divide and rule. The presumed beneficiaries of oppression feel guilty around their oppressed co-workers who, in turn, feel resentful toward their more ‘privileged’ brothers and sisters. Only employers benefit when workers are divided. The differences in wages and benefits between various sections of the working class go to the employers.  When workers unite, they raise the living standards of all workers.

Capitalism is not a system of fair exchange as argued by free-marketeer propertarians. The interests of employees and employers are sharply at odds.This creates conditions of conflict and employers have to take ever-stronger measures to exert and maintain control. Hostility and resentment among workers thrives. When workers challenge the employers’ right to dictate what happens in the workplace, they challenge capitalism itself. The word of the manager is the law, and endless time and energy is expended rationalising its essential goodness. But where is a person less free than in the typical workplace? Workers are denied bathroom breaks. They cannot leave to care for a sick child. Some workers have been reduced to little better than slave-like conditions. In the current climate of unemployment, the worker has little choice but to submit. And pretend to like it. A medieval peasant had plenty of things to worry about, but the year-round control of daily life was not one of them. Historians points out that in pre-capitalist societies, people toiled relatively few hours over the course of a year compared to what we work now. They toiled and sweated during harvest-time when there was an urgency, true, but there was ample free time during the off-seasons. Holidays were abundant through fairs and holy days – as many as 200 per year. Marx saw that modern industrial production under capitalist conditions would rob workers of control of their lives as they lost control of their work. Unlike the blacksmith or the shoemaker who owned his shop, decided on his own working conditions, shaped his product, and had a say in how his goods were bartered or sold, the modern worker would have little autonomy. His relationships with the people at work would become impersonal and hollow. Clearly, the technological wonders of our capitalist system have not released human beings from the burden of work. They have brought us more work. They have not brought most of us more freedom, but less.

Many working people have unconsciously accepted the conditions that exist as somehow natural, unaware of how the machine is constructed and manipulated to favor elites. Fear and frustration can even make us crave authority. We collaborate in our own oppression. Workers should not permit themselves to be treated like machines, ruled by despots determined to drive down what few freedoms and rights we possess, and to crush our physical and mental health, all in the interest of wage slavery and accumulation of capital.

ANOTHER WORKER DIES

Socialists look at the world differently from other people. maybe that is why this piece of information makes us sick. " Kane Gorny, 22, from Balham, south London, phoned 999 from his bed at St George's Hospital, in Tooting, because he was so thirsty. The inquest heard a nurse failed to give him his diabetes medication and police were sent away when they responded to his call in May 2009. .... Recording a narrative verdict at Westminster Coroners' Court, deputy coroner Dr Shirley Radcliffe said: "Kane was undoubtedly let down by incompetence of staff, poor communication, lack of leadership, both medical and nursing, a culture of assumption." (BBC News, 12 July) Let us face it, if Kane Gorny had been a member of the owning class he would have had the best possible medical attention and he would be alive today. Being a member of the working class in Britain today could mean that you or your children die at 22 years of age just like Kane. RD

DESPERATE WORKERS

In their desperate struggle to survive many workers from Africa try to get to Europe by any means possible. "The only survivor of 54 Africans who tried to cross to Italy in an inflatable boat has described throwing overboard the bodies of fellow passengers who died during the voyage. Abbes Settou, from Eritrea, who was rescued by Tunisian fishermen, said the migrants, including three members of his family, and ten women, slowly died of hunger, thirst and exhaustion." (Times, 12 July) According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) some 170 migrant have died attempting the Mediterranean crossing this year. Capitalism's hellish conditions force workers into unbearable situations. RD

take a pill

Half a million more anti-depressant pills have been prescribed for Scots.  5,015,323 anti-depressants which include Prozac and Citalepram were dispensed by the NHS in 2011-12

Fact of the day

Data of the Delhi government states that the per capita income in the national capital is 176, 000 Rupees yearly, but the truth seems to something different as one person dies of huger or poverty in every week here. An under-estimate according to those in the field.

"Autopsies of the abandoned and homeless are completed in a routine fashion. The investigating officers hardly ever try to find their relatives and attempt to understand the reason behind the death,'' said an NGO worker. Not all the deaths accounted for. Many are never brought to public notice

Trump in a bunker

There has been plenty of coverage of Donald Trump's newly opened golf course and his campaign agains wind-power but less about just where his enormous wealth came from. In March 2011 Forbes estimated Trump's net worth to be $2.7 billion, with a $60 million salary. Many praise his “success” as if it were self-made.

Trump was born in New York City in 1946, the son of real estate tycoon Fred Trump. Fred Trump’s business success not only provided Donald Trump with a posh youth of private schools and economic security but eventually blessed him with an inheritance worth an estimated $40 million to $200 million. It is critical to note, however, that his father’s success, which granted Donald Trump such a great advantage, was enabled and buffered by governmental financing programs. In 1934, while struggling during the Great Depression, financing from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) allowed Fred Trump to revive his business and begin building a multitude of homes in Brooklyn, selling at $6,000 apiece. Furthermore, throughout World War II, Fred Trump constructed FHA-backed housing for US naval personnel near major shipyards along the East Coast.

In 1974 Donald Trump became president of his father’s organization. During the 15 years following his ascension, he expanded and innovated the corporation, buying and branding buildings, golf courses, hotels, casinos, and other recreational facilities. In 1980 he established The Trump Organization to oversee all of his real estate operations. Trump eventually found himself in serious financial trouble. In 1990, due to excessive leveraging, The Trump Organization revealed that it was $5 billion in debt ($8.8 billion by some estimates), with $1 billion personally guaranteed by Trump himself. The survival of the company was made possible only by a bailout pact agreed upon in August of that same year by some 70 banks, allowing Trump to defer on nearly $1 billion in debt, as well as to take out second and third mortgages on almost all of his properties. If it were not for the collective effort of all banks and parties involved in that 1990 deal, Trump’s business would have gone bankrupt and failed.

Nor should his anti-government intervention rhetoric be treated seriously. In 2005 Trump supported a Supreme Court decision on Kolo v. New London, which affirmed the government’s ability to transfer land from one private owner to another for the purpose of economic development in the area. Trump has taken advantage of eminent domain laws on multiple occasions, once even demanding that an elderly widow give up her home so that he could build a limousine parking lot.

Trump made clear his own interpretation on the creation of his wealth: “Over the years I’ve participated in many battles and have really almost come out very, very victorious every single time. I’ve beaten many people and companies, and I’ve won many wars. I have fairly but intelligently earned many billions of dollars, which in a sense was both a scorecard and acknowledgment of my abilities.”

Yet, from the moment of his birth, Trump was set up for success. The large inheritance left to him by his father, coupled with the contributions and the protections of society and the US government made his ascension to the Forbes 400 list almost inevitable. Nevertheless, Trump fails to recognize this phenomenon and continues to express his belief that he did it alone.

Who is being milked?

Milk has probably played an important role in many a youths personal history, whose first paid job was perhaps as a milk-boy delivering it to door-steps. The importance of milk in the global food story can’t be overestimated. Mankind first learned the value of keeping animals alive for dairy production as early as 9,000 to 7,000 B.C.

Dairy farms are on the verge of extinction. The price farmers are paid for milk is set to fall. The latest cuts will see farmers being paid around 25p a litre for milk, compared to more than 30p it costs to produce.  Today’s milk business is dominated by a handful of large supermarkets and processing dairies, Wiseman, Unigate and so on. Milk is plentiful and cheap, with supermarkets frequently using it as a loss-leader. Dairy farmers sprayed thousands of liters of milk outside the European Parliament in Brussels on Tuesday, creating a "milk lake" to protest against low prices. Protesters from around Europe, including Italy, Germany, Ireland and France blocked off a square with tractors. In the UK thousands of farmers protested at Parliament. The "milk lake" was intended to symbolize an oversupply of milk in the European market, with protesters ringing cowbells and denouncing moves to phase out production quotas, resulting in more milk on the market and lower prices - excess milk production and less little farmers are getting paid. Marc Tarabella, a "socialist" member of the European Parliament, said the protesters had a just cause. "Their fight is also ours," he said. "How can we accept that some workers are working at a loss? Working to lose money? We cannot close our eyes to this human and social drama."

In Britain dairy farmers are being pushed to the brink by the latest cuts to the price they are paid for their milk, farming leaders warned as more than 2,500 farmers gathered in London to protest against the reductions. The farmers are angry at the latest round of cuts of up to 2p per litre, which come on top of similar cuts in the spring, recently announced by major milk processors. They say the cuts will force many farmers out of business, pushing up the price of milk for consumers in the long term.

National Farmers' Union deputy president Meurig Raymond said: "These latest cuts are the feed bills, the wages, the housekeeping and will take us well into loss-making territory, with many farmers losing up to 6p per litre. Society has to recognise what these dairy farmers have been put through by a market place that doesn't work and is not fair."

Robert Wiseman, one of the dairies announcing cuts, said: "The decision follows a collapse of in the value of cream in each litre of farm gate milk over the last 12 months. We have done everything we can to minimise the reduction in our farm gate milk price but we must now reflect the substantially lower returns from the markets which we serve."

The farmers' complaints against supermarket prices are not entirely misplaced, but their real problem in large part is due to plummeting world prices. Production at the world's four biggest dairy regions has increased simultaneously. New Zealand is up 9 per cent, Australia rose by 3.6 per cent and the US and European Community by 2 per cent.

Many dairy farmers, in their bid to drive down costs, now keep their cows off pasture, feeding them instead on high-energy cereals and maize, and on high-protein crops like soya. Herds are getting bigger, and some farmers are choosing to keep them inside for much of the year or even all of it. US-style mega-dairies — in effect, battery-farmed cows — are now threatened for the British countryside. Professor Ton Baars, a global expert on the health qualities of dairy foods, says milk produced this way contains lower levels of key disease-fighting nutrients, such as omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins and the anti-cancer substance CLA. From a health point of view, the best milk comes from cows grazing fresh pasture in which there are plenty of clover plants and deep-rooting herbs such as plantain, dandelion and chicory.

Farmers’ relentless drive for cost savings has put increasing pressure on the long-suffering dairy cow. A milch-cow is now forced to produce twice the volume of milk provided by her 1960s forbears, and it’s taking a heavy toll on her health, fertility and lifespan. Actress Joanna Lumley has taken up the cudgels on behalf of dairy cows. She’s heading an animal rights’ campaign aimed at giving them the sort of protection in European law that’s provided for battery hens. One of the key guarantees she’s seeking is the animals’ freedom to graze fresh pasture, at least in summer.

The rule of the market - it is the whey of the world

As others see us

"Scottish author, Robert Louis Stevenson of Treasure Island fame, penned a novella that many consider to be a foundation stone of modern fiction’s addiction to substances, transformation and death – The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll liked to swallow chemicals turning himself into something unpredictable, Mr. Hyde. It’s a good metaphor for the calamity that is tearing Scottish soccer apart.

Think of Scottish soccer as a test tube in Dr. Jekyll’s lab marked with skull and cross bones, WARNING – DO NOT SHAKE! Sitting at the top of the mix is the colors of Irish green and British blue – green is the substance called Glasgow Celtic Football Club bonded to the blue known as Glasgow Rangers Football Club. Mix them up and they can explode but when they sit side by side at rest they produce something called the Old Firm, a successful alliance of opposites that has largely dominated Scottish soccer, economically and culturally, for over a hundred years. The elements that make up their wholes would require too long a label to delineate – suffice to summarize it as an emulsion of historical grievance, religious division, sectarianism, and nationalist politics that produces a soccer clash unrivaled anywhere in the world. The Old Firm is the defining intense soccer rivalry. Super hot, beyond sport.

But now things have changed. The tube has been ruptured. The blue half of the mix has evaporated. Rangers have been declared bankrupt due to many years of mismanagement. They consumed a hubristic formula of reckless expenditure in an effort to destroy their other half, Celtic. They failed. And were left weak to the point of death like Dr. Jekyll.

They have been discharged from the top Scottish league. The league rules and the animosity of rival clubs and their fan bases dictated their plunge. They now face the prospect of starting from scratch in the bottom division of Scottish football, three levels below the top tier. The economic implications are negative. Fears for other teams evaporating are real. Rangers worked the pump of investment in the Scottish game – their games with Celtic broadcast globally, a premium brand – the Old Firm was the bank that all the other clubs had an interest in. No Old Firm game and it could mean less or no money from TV contracts, and therefore less monies to share with the other clubs. The prospect of Scottish soccer boiling down is now a possibility.

The Scottish Football Association believes it may be the end for the Scottish game should Rangers not be allowed to return to the top flight within a year. Besides the economic armageddon for the clubs, the chiefs have warned of “social unrest” if Rangers are exiled to the deep. It’s an extraordinary claim that social strife could result as a consequence of a soccer club going bust. The commentary from Scottish soccer fans has ranged from celebratory dances on Rangers grave to dire warnings of revenge when/if Rangers return from the shadows.

Dr. Jekyll was unrecognizable after swallowing the poison – disfigured, mean and hostile – and finally death. Will Scottish soccer follow the script or synthesize a new beginning free from the mix of the Old Firm chemistry?"

http://blog.sfgate.com/soccer/2012/07/10/the-strange-case-of-scotlands-rangers-football-club/

 The price paid by Charles Green for Rangers included a £1.5 million fire sale for Ibrox Stadium, Murray Park and the club’s valuable car park. The knockdown value was approved by administrators Duff & Phelps despite them valuing the assets at three times that price just two weeks earlierat over (£4.5million) . And when David Murray sold the club to Craig Whyte two years ago, he had the same land, bricks and mortar assets valued at £110 million. The difference between the valuations compared with what they actually sold for has left fans scratching their heads.

The report also revealed that Green also factored in a fee of £2.75 million to buy the contracts and registrations of the club’s players, which would have been worth £25 million in an open market.

Rangers made trading losses of almost £4 million from the time it was placed in administration. Duff & Phelps have collected almost £3 million in fees from Rangers.


Stop supporting capitalism !