Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Talking of greed
There is no Nobel Prize for greed, so Forbes Magazine, the mag rich people read, fills the gap with its annual list of the world's richest people. For the last nine years the man at the top of the list has been Bill Gates, who as founder of Microsoft parlayed mostly other people's innovations into market domination for his company and a massive fortune (US$46 billion or $63 billion in our money) for himself. If there were a Nobel Prize for greed it would surely go to Gates. While around a quarter of the US population live in trailer parks and run down tenements (those that have a home at all), Gates makes do with a garish mansion costing a mere US$60 million. His little shack has a thirty-car garage. Ostentatious? Self- indulgent? Gross? You bet! However, as we have noted before, the US economy is in big trouble. The value of the US dollar has fallen substantially against its European rival, the Euro, and Bill Gates' fortune has accordingly lost ground against at least one rival "entrepreneur". The fortune of Ingvar Kamprad, the Swedish founder of "assemble it yourself" furniture manufacturer IKEA, is now assessed as US$53 billion (over $72 billion Australian). Kamprad set up IKEA in 1943, when the rest of the world was enmeshed in WW2. Sweden, like Franco Spain, was nominally neutral but strongly supported the Axis. Trading with Germany but invaded by no one, a financial conduit for both sides, Swedish capitalism did quite well out of the War. After the War, Kamprad moved to another neutral country with very accommodating tax laws, Switzerland. The May 30th 2004 Sunday Telegraph, reporting the Fortune rich list, gushed over Kamprad's "avuncular charm" and his penchant for using public transport and shopping around for a cheap haircut. That someone with a personal fortune of $72 billion baulks at paying more than $13.50 for a haircut smacks not so much of the common touch as of miserliness, but we'll let that pass. As anyone who has ever bought IKEA furniture will tell you, Kamprad's shops are not famous for their low prices! Another whose shops are clearly not as low-priced as they could be is Karl Albrecht. With his brother Theo, Karl founded the Aldi supermarket chain. Aldi's gimmick was, supposedly, cheap, no-frills shopping. We had one in Wyong for a while, and certainly the shop's decor was pretty basic. I did not find their prices all that low, however. Certainly they were not so low as to prevent Albrecht accumulating a fortune of a cool US$23 billion ($31.4 billion) from "cheap, no frills" shopping. Also in Fortune's top ten was the family of the late Sam Walton, boss of retail giant Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has been much in the news lately, mainly over its anti-worker employment practices. A notorious payer of minimum wages (as little as US$8 an hour), Wal-Mart has also been sued for "time shaving" — doctoring employees' time records so they appear to have worked less hours than they did and are consequently paid less than they should be. This sharp practice is now rife in US chain stores where managers are given a payroll budget, but the budget allows workers insufficient time to complete the work. When the work goes over the time allotted, the payment for the extra time often comes out of the manager's salary. It's a big incentive for managers to force workers to work harder and faster, or to "shave" the computer records of hours worked and pay the workers less according to the amended records. Beth Terrell, a US lawyer representing workers suing Wal-Mart for doctoring time records, points out: "These employees can scarcely afford to have time deleted. They're barely paying their bills already." Which is why the Walton family can enjoy life among the ten richest billionaires in the world. They may not win the Nobel Prize for greed but they are certainly contenders.* * * World of magic
The new Harry Potter film opened last week amidst lots of media space given over to the witches and wizards that inhabit J K Rowling's very imaginative concept, in which the "world of magic" coexists (sometimes uneasily) with the normal, everyday, non-magic ("Muggle") world. Her early novels in the series have a lot of humour in them; the later ones (written for older children) are much darker, with real danger, pain, death even torture. One very prominent aspect of the novels that gets far too little attention from bourgeois critics, however, is the strong anti- racist theme that runs through all the books. All her villains, the "dark wizards" and their obnoxious progeny like Harry's schoolboy enemy Draco Malfoy, are racists. They pursue a racial purity in "all wizard" families, untainted by "dirty blood" brought in by intermarriage with non-magical folk. They seek to "purify" the wizarding world by actually exterminating those, like Harry's friend Hermione, who have non- magical parents. These are powerful issues to explore in children's literature and Rowling does it well. Those who think the series is just another middle-class boarding school collection — an impression the films to some extent support — should read the books.