Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Two parties, no cash and unwanted oil
The two-party system has served capitalism very well over the years, as we know. Now, however, more and more people are waking up to the fact that being offered a choice between two versions of the same capitalist policy is no choice at all. In Australia, Britain, the US, Canada and elsewhere, more and more people are turning to alternative or, as the Yanks call them, "third party" candidates. This is not confined to individual voters. In Britain, the rail union RMT has been getting into trouble with the leadership of the Labour Party, to which it is affiliated, for publicly supporting alternative parties such as the Scottish Socialists. "Getting into trouble" may in fact be a bit of an understatement. The Labour leadership gave the RMT an ultimatum to stop supporting what they regarded as Labour's electoral rivals, but the union's members voted to ignore the ultimatum and continue their support for alternative parties. So a couple of weeks ago the RMT was actually thrown out of the Labour Party. The irony of this is that the RMT was one of the organisations that founded the Labour Party in Britain over a century ago. The times are slowly, but certainly, a'changin'.* * * Capitalism at work
Still in Britain, the Department of Trade and Industry has just announced that the number of company failures in the last quarter of 2003 fell by 22.5 percent compared to the same period the previous year. Whoopee! And what caused this jolly result for British capitalism? Well, it wasn't because the economy had "picked up" and the mass of the people now had plenty of money to spend, that's for sure. No, although it was caused by a "consumer spending boom". But to achieve that "spending boom", businesses have been encouraging people to use their credit cards or store cards, and in the process amass hefty debts. A guy from transnational accounting outfit Pricewaterhouse Coopers told the British Guardian Weekly that "increased consumer spending is filtering through to businesses with a significant fall in company failures". "However, the increase in consumer debt has led to record levels of personal insolvencies." In other words, a massive increase in the number of people going bankrupt because they can't pay their bills. Official figures released this month disclosed that personal bankruptcies in the last quarter of last year were up by a third. In fact, people were going bankrupt at the rate of 111 a day! And what is the government (the Labour government, remember) doing to alleviate this financial catastrophe that is already affecting thousands of Britons? Why, introducing new laws, to take effect in April, reducing the stigma attached to going bankrupt. Who says capitalism isn't a caring system?* * * War poisons the sea
Did you see the recent newspaper reports about the growing environmental threat from sunken WW2 warships in the Pacific? Makes scary reading. As the US and Japan fought for control of the Pacific, they sank one another's warships at a fearsome rate. In one study, 12 Pacific island governments have mapped more than 3852 sunken warships. And some of them were big ships: the study just mentioned listed 23 aircraft carriers, 22 battleships and about 50 oil tankers. These ships carried a lot of oil, and as the sunken vessels inexorably rust away, the oil just as inexorably leaks out. Three years ago 24,000 gallons (109,000 litres) of aviation fuel leaked into Ulithi atoll in Micronesia from the wreck of a WW2 US tanker. US authorities, as part of their clean-up of the leaking fuel, subsequently pumped a mere two million gallons (9m litres) of oil out of the wreck. But big wrecks, with similar quantities of oil, abound, and in waters close to Australian shores and the Great Barrier Reef. According to another article in the Guardian Weekly, "more than 150 large ships were sunk close to the Solomon Islands -- and at least 270 in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea". Just north of the Great Barrier Reef lie the wrecks of the US aircraft carrier Lexington and the US fleet tanker Neosho, just two of the vessels sunk in the Battle of the Coral Sea. These two wrecks alone are believed to contain more than five million gallons of oil. Asterio Takesy, the Director of the South Pacific Regional Environmental Program (SPREP), has called on the US and Japan to help the vastly poorer governments of the Pacific Island states to clean up the mess left behind by the US and Japanese armed forces. Otherwise, the leaking oil threatens to kill off their coral reefs and fish stocks, and with it the tourism on which they largely depend. So far the US and Japanese Governments have treated this call with the same disdain that they have given to the call that they remove or render safe the vast amounts of land-based fuel and weapons dumps that they left behind across the Pacific.