|
Is This The Way In Amarillo?
"In March,2005 a nuclear warhead almost exploded in Texas. The near miss
accident occurred in Amarillo, when workers at the Pantex nuclear
weapons
plant bungled the dismantling of a W-56 warhead, a weapon 100 times
stronger
than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War 2. Details of
the averted catastrophe have been kept under wraps until last month,
when the
 Department of Energy
(DOE) fined the company that operates the plant, BWX
Technologies, $110,000 for safety violations. In a letter obtained by
the
Project on Government Oversight (POGO), technicians at the plant blamed
the accident on severe working conditions, including mandatory 72 to 84
hour work weeks. One nuclear scientist told POGO that he "would not
work on his car engine if he were fatigued from a 72- hour work week,
and sure as hell would not work on a nuclear weapon." (The Nation, 18
December) $110,000 fine is hardly reassuring but what is worse is the
news that the plant has set its 2007
production aims for a 50 percent increase.
|
|
Viva Las Vegas?
The city of Las Vegas likes to promote itself as a tourist paradise of
fun and
entertainment, but there is another side to it. "This is a boomtown,
but it is also
scattered with signs of bust - namely homeless people. And the city is
taking a
hard line against them. With mixed success in the courts and on the
streets,
Las Vegas has tried sweeping away their encampments, closing a park
where they hang out, making it a crime to feed them, even passing a ban
on sleeping within 500 feet of faeces." (Associated Press, 18 December)
The mayor has even proposed moving the homeless to an abandoned prison
30 miles outside the city. The area has a population of 1.8 million but
has 14,500 homeless. The mayor may seem heartless, but capitalism is a
heartless society.
|
|
Post Xmas
Blues
At a time when many workers are reeling from
credit card demands and other
reminders of our debts it is heartening to know that this is not the
fate of everyone. "Sales of high priced items such as designer shoes
and celebrity jewellery are breaking records, while John Lewis's
director of retail operations, Gareth Thomas confirmed that the
department store group is poised to record its best ever performance.
... Sales have been buoyed up by shoppers buying flat-screen
televisions for second and third rooms. ...
Mark Henderson, chief executive of tailor Gieves and Hawkes, said:
`There is a
definite return to formality and a flurry of sales of traditional
dinner jackets starting at £1,200`" (Observer, 24 December)
Fellow workers, as you sit watching your third flat-screen television
in your
traditional £1,200 dinner jacket you must often reflect that capitalism isn't
such a
bad system after all.
|
|
New York, New
York
"Food or rent? That is the daily choice faced
by about 1.2 million of New York's
8.2 million people. Faced with that choice, mostly they pay rent and
rely on
emergency or charity food to survive, poverty activists say. ... Hunger
is not
unique to New York. More than 12 million households - or 35 million
Americans - struggled with hunger in 2005, according to the US
government. ... About 3,800 people were living on the streets in 2006,
according to New York City statistics."
(Reuters, 26 December) When Sinatra sang about "The City that never
sleeps", he was telling the truth - it must be hard to sleep on the
street with all that traffic.
|
|
The Insecure
Society
In Dundee after the Second World War the NCR
company in Dundee employed
over 7,000 workers, but over the years this has fallen to less than
1,500. So
when Bill Nuti, the company's chief executive announced 14 months ago
that
he was "one million per cent committed to the Dundee operation" the
remaining
workers felt relieved, but capitalism doesn't work that way. "A total
of 650
factory workers in Dundee were dismissed via transatlantic videolink by
their
American employer yesterday after being told that production was to be
switched to cheaper plants overseas. Employees at NCR, which makes
automatic teller machines, were summoned to a meeting at midday
yesterday where amidst angry scenes, the job loses were announced by
videolink by Bill
Nuti, the company's chief executive." (Times, 12 January)
|
|
Priorities
Two items appearing in the same
newspaper on the same day illustrate the
priorities of British capitalism. "Patients face much tougher rationing
of treatments and restricted access to breakthrough drugs
if the Government does not rethink its plans for health spending, the
NHS's treatment regulator has told the Times. Professor Sir Michael
Rawlins, the head of the National Institute for Health and Clinical
Excellence (NICE), cited treatments ranging from new life-saving drugs
to free food for the elderly in nursing homes as examples of care that
could suffer if ministers slowed the rate of spending, as expected."
And ... "Tony Blair defended his policy of intervention and said that
more money would have to be spent on the Armed Forces to improve
conditions and equipment, enable Britain to stay a warfighting powerand
face the threat of
terrorism." (Times, 13 January)
|
|
 |
Contents Page Previous page 19 This page as image
Socialist Party
|
|
|
