Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

The high cost of bugs

Did you see that report in The Sydney Morning Herald and 
elsewhere that the bill for fixing up the year 2000 problem (the "Y2K bug") 
in the Pentagon's computers — so that warheads won't detonate or missiles 
be launched by malfunctioning computers on January 1, 2000 — will be a 
cool US$2.5 billion (A$3.98 billion)?

The same article reported that in Russia, the cost of de-bugging the 
Soviet-era computers that control their nuclear weapons and atomic reactors 
is approximately half a billion dollars (US$500 million or A$796 
million).

Am I being overly suspicious or is the Pentagon squandering public money? 
Again?

As to Russian nuclear missiles, the Herald article quoted a certain 
Professor Andrei Terekov.

The good Professor is apparently one of the new breed of private enterprise 
Russian academics: as well as being Professor of Mathematics at St 
Petersburg University, he is also, it seems, "a director of Lanit Holding" 
which the Herald describes as "a firm that is helping Russian 
companies" with their Y2K bug problems.

According to Professor Terekov, the Russians have successfully debugged 
their nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems ("the problem with 
strategic weapons has been solved"). However, he says the country's air 
defence and early warning systems have not yet been fixed ("there are still 
problems with infrastructure" as he puts it).

Boris Yeltsin has accepted an offer of expert aid to fix the Russian air 
defence and early warning systems: from NATO! (Yeltsin's purchase of 
property in Western Europe is allegedly unrelated.)

* * *

Out of touch

The British Communist newspaper The New Worker was startled by an 
article in Rupert Murdoch's up-market flagship The Times last month. 
The article attacked the proposal for a minimum wage in Britain on the 
grounds that it could double the costs of employing an au pair.

According to The Times, a minimum wage will affect "lower paid 
female workers such as nurses, for whom an au pair is often the only 
type of childcare they can afford".

Commented The New Worker: "It makes you wonder what planet these 
journalists are living on. Do they really imagine working class households 
have ever been able to afford au pairs?

"And what is an au pair if not a low-paid female worker? And what 
was all that fuss a week or so ago about the dangers of employing cheap, 
unskilled nannies?"

* * *

Economic genocide

An interesting exchange of email dropped into our electronic mail box 
last week from the USA. Briefly, one Lawrence Court proposed that someone 
in New York ("someone who is nearer to the centre of things") could look 
into the possibility of bringing a class action against the IMF for what 
they have done to Brazil.

Court felt sure that if such a case could be launched other countries that 
have been devastated by global currency speculation and loan manipulation 
would soon join in.

Although I feel sure the US ruling class would not let an adverse court 
decision deter them from their drive for total global domination, assuming 
you could even get an adverse decision, nevertheless the idea has 
tremendous propaganda value.

It would certainly focus attention on the machinations of the IMF, the 
banks and the speculators.

As Court says: "The effect would be profound and far-reaching. Not only 
would it expose what has been going on, for the whole world to see, and 
enable a fight-back by the people, but also it would act as a deterrent in 
regard to future action of a similar kind." He then goes on to characterise 
the recent spate of devastating, hostile raids on various countries' 
currencies and reserves, the manipulation of capitalist crisis to destroy 
national economies and leave them at the mercy of global banks and 
corporations, as "economic genocide".

Considering the effects of such actions it's not a bad description.

Court's piece was responded to — enthusiastically — by someone signing 
himself "Wendell W Solomons" who commented that he had counted "something 
like 20 mega raids" on national currencies during the last 18 months!

Solomons makes the telling observation that the upswing in such economic 
raids is only possible because of the overthrow of the USSR, which had "a 
devastating effect for the informal system of checks and balances in 
international affairs.

"The left-wing opposition of the past 60 years had curbed the naked greed 
and avarice that we now find being uncorked."

Referring to Court's proposed class action case against the financiers, 
Solomons points out that "Harvard's Jeffery Sachs was the man who with the 
active support of Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers, promoted and 
propagandised (on Federal money) the privatisation (alienation) of the 
socialised assets of 324 million people [in Russia] before a commercial law 
infrastructure was developed in Russia."

Addressing himself directly to Court, Solomons observes that, as far as 
Russia is concerned, "with 7,000 factories still not functioning" and its 
population "reducing in number by one million a year, your term genocide 
seems quite starkly in order."