January 2023

Is the Iranian regime about to collapse? Protests in every major city suggest it’s possible and if so, not before time. For nearly fifty years the population has been crushed by a medieval theocratic dictatorship which has executed tens of thousands of political prisoners and Muslim ‘apostates’ (non-believers). All this in the wake of a revolution which rejected the hated western-backed shah, together with other western-associated concepts like freedom of thought and women’s equality.

Now, because the regime has been printing excess money, the rial/dollar rate has gone from 42,000 in December to over 900,000 in mid-January. The biggest irony? Far from abolishing capitalism, some of the protesters are demanding the return of the shah’s son as ruler!

We’ll probably never know whether the kidnapping of Maduro has been timed to distract from Trump’s domestic political woes. What we do know is that this latest act illustrates the nonsense of the concepts of international law and national sovereignty.

When one mob within the global capitalist class perceives that its interests are threatened by another mob, it doesn’t take too long for the gloves to come off and the violence to begin.

The propaganda machine is up and running, claiming the kidnapping was about ‘stabilisation’ of the region and the orange clown saying that the US ‘will take care of the country’. Nonsense. It’s just another turf war in the gangster society we know as capitalism.

Around 7 million people in the UK have asthma, of whom some 58,000 suffer ‘really scary’ attacks that require hospitalisation. These severe sufferers will be heartened to know that Depemokimab,, a new ‘ultra-long acting’ medicine that only needs to be taken twice a year, has just received UK approval, having shown it can reduce the number of severe attacks by 72 percent (Sunday Times, 28 Dec).

An ‘important step forward’ then, showing how capitalism has our welfare at heart? Er, not entirely. The paper added that the drug ‘will reduce the time patients need to take off work, as well as free up NHS resources’. Money priorities linger like a bad smell, even over positive news stories.

A recent report endorsed by the economist Joseph Stiglitz warned that the world is facing an ‘inequality emergency’, as an overwhelming share of new wealth goes to those who are already the richest. The economic chasm between them and everyone else will deepen with over $70 trillion passed down to their heirs over the next decade.

But what’s new? We already knew that a tiny proportion of the population owned the vast majority of wealth. The percentages make little difference to most of us whose only resource is the energy we sell to an employer. And that will continue until we vote to bring in a completely new kind of society based on production for need rather than profit.