2-15-06, 8:44 am
Tuesday the 24th of January this year was not particularly momentous: nothing catastrophic or startlingly rare or even extraordinary happened. It was, really, a typical day – for these days.
•The Ford Motor Company announced that it would close fourteen plants across the USA. Thirty thousand jobs would be axed.
This decision, made with a minimum of fuss by Ford’s Board, will have a devastating effect on individuals, families and communities who depend on the auto industry for their livelihoods.
The adverse effects will flow-on like ripples in a pool via all the small businesses that supply Ford with components and the multitude of shops and other businesses whose customers are wholly or partially drawn from amongst Ford’s employees.
Amidst the present high levels of credit card debt, the elimination of 30,000 jobs (and all the ancillary jobs that go with them) will throw an enormous number of people into poverty. Many will lose their homes; families will break up under the stress.
The perpetrators of this social outrage, however, will not be punished. God forbid that the executives of Ford should have to compensate the victims of their savagery!
•Mining giant Rio Tinto announced a record profit. Curiously, they did not offer a bonus to all their employees.
Their share price, however, jumped to a massive $70 a share, adding a huge amount to the value of executives’ share holdings and to the overall book value of the company.
They had decided that the massively over-inflated stocks for gold and oil had peaked and would shortly begin to fall rapidly, so they were selling while the price was still high and they could be sure of a tidy profit.
And some people will actually try to tell you that this is the best system on which to base a global economy!
•Mind you, for some people it is good. January 24 was the day they announced that Australia’s richest man, Kerry Packer, would be given a State funeral at taxpayers’ expense (and in the Opera House, too)!
Now why should a billionaire like Packer be given a state funeral? It couldn’t be for his vigorous support of conservative governments (Liberal and Labor), could it?
No, of course not, so it must be for his life-long efforts, through his magazine and TV empire, to dumb-down the nation’s culture.
•From the very rich to the very poor: on January 24 the newly-appointed Federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, eager to get started on cutting support programs for Aborigines, announced blandly that “the Aboriginal community is eager for self-sufficiency”.
The media, instead of savaging him for such a fatuous – and mendacious – remark, reported it at face value. Clearly, the new Minister subscribes to the PM’s mantra that the solution to the problems of poor people with no jobs is for them to become entrepreneurs and start their own businesses!
•Business – all heart, as usual: It was also announced on the 24th that farmers in Victoria and South Australia whose sheep had been injured in that week’s bush fires could not destroy any of the burnt and dying animals until an insurance assessor had counted and verified their claim. Any sheep shot before being seen by the assessor would not be compensated for.
Injured sheep would just have to suffer until the assessors had been.
•The US Attorney General claimed on the 24th that President Bush had been given carte blanche powers after September 11. A spokesman for Congress said such powers were requested, but had been rejected “on the record”.
The request had never been re-made. Bush’s reaction was the self-serving aphorism, “illegal actions are required to defend liberty”.
•It is not just islanders of the South Pacific who are losing their homelands to rising sea levels caused by global warming. Farmers in the Pampas region of Peru are also seeing their farms disappearing under rising waters.
With no assistance forthcoming, they have been forced to become fishermen, trying to scratch a living by fishing the waters now covering their farms.
•A Swiss member of the European Parliament given the task of investigating claims that some European governments cooperated with the US and in particular with the CIA to run illegal prison centres across Europe, reported that he was convinced the claims were true.
He also reported that finding hard evidence of the civil rights abuses was very difficult, due to the covering up of evidence. Governments allegedly involved had refused to co-operate in his investigations.
Allegations included the involvement of certain European governments in torture on behalf of the US of supposed terrorist suspects or flying them on to countries like Egypt where torture is standard practice. Such actions are in direct contravention of European Human Rights laws and agreements.
His report singled out the governments of Poland and Romania for their role in these illegal detentions and democratic rights abuses. The extreme reactionary, anti-communist governments of these countries (especially that of Poland) are more often held up as examples of “the success of post-Communist democracy in Eastern Europe”.
This was by no means all the news stories on January 24th. As I said, it was a typical day in this stage of the crisis of capitalism.
From The Guardian
