28,000 dead and rising, and volunteers are still working 24/7 to find survivors, while others help with aftercare, and relief and medical aid begin to reach affected areas. As usual, workers across the world will be donating money, and we applaud the humanitarian efforts.
But now the recriminations start over shoddy building standards that ignored modern safety regulations in an active earthquake region. It has largely been newly built buildings that collapsed because building regulations were evaded for private gain, or not enforced. The Turkish government is now issuing arrest warrants for building contractors in a bid to deflect blame, even though they’ve been ‘selling’ cheap amnesties for years in a bid to promote a housing boom.
As always, capitalist priorities are starkly opposed to human welfare: profit matters more than keeping people safe.
‘The maximum intensity for this earthquake was violent but not necessarily enough to bring well constructed buildings down,” says David Alexander, Professor of Emergency Planning and Management at University College London.
“In most places the level of shaking was less than the maximum, so we can conclude out of the thousands of buildings that collapsed, almost all of them don’t stand up to any reasonably expected earthquake construction code”‘ (BBC News, 9 February).
You know why? Because cowboy builders and property owners can save money that way. It’s only poor people who suffer, and who cares about them, right? Earthquakes would kill far fewer if it weren’t for capitalism prioritising profit over safety and common decency.
‘Was Marx right after all?’ This is the question that Germany’s most widely read weekly magazine asks on the cover of its New Year edition.
Fear seems to have gripped the editorial office of Der Spiegel. Something is very wrong with capitalism. As they themselves explain, this fear is widely shared within the ruling class.
The article quotes Ray Dalio, a hedge fund manager worth $22bn, who believes ‘capitalism urgently needs to be fundamentally reformed. Otherwise it will perish, and deservedly so.’
The Financial Times is equally alarmed. Goldman Sachs and Bosch are cited among the corporate giants questioning the resilience of the market in the face of looming catastrophe (tinyurl.com/bm24yv5b).
The world’s biggest luxury group, LVMH, enjoyed yet another year of record revenues and profits despite the rising cost of living.
Sales reached almost £20 bn. LVMH brands include Tiffany’s, Christian Dior, Sephora, Hennessey, Moët and designer label, Louis Vuitton whose revenue surpassed $21.7bn for the first time (BBC news). It ensures chief executive, Bernard Arnault, remains the world’s richest person.
While for us lesser mortals, the humble onion has become a luxury shopping item. The price of onions rose in the Philippines to more than the cost of most meat, and above the country’s daily minimum wage. The BBC reports that Philippine custom officials are on a special look-out for onion smuggling.
Railways minister, Huw Merriman, let the cat out of the bag when being questioned by Parliament’s Transport Select Committee, by conceding that the rail strikes had cost the UK more than settling the disputes months ago would have.
His reason for not reaching an agreement was that if the government had settled with rail workers, it would have set a precedent for other public sector unions. ‘We have to look at what teachers are being given, and what nurses are being given as well,’ he said.
It was an admission that ‘prolonging the rail dispute was part of a deliberate strategy that was dictated by the government’s concern to keep down the pay of rail workers, nurses, ambulance workers and teachers’ (bbc.in/3D1rJtl).
If you’re a worker born after 1969 you’ll be delighted to learn that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is thinking of announcing for the March budget that the official retirement age, set to rise to 68 in 2046, may now take effect in 2035.
Wondering how the state was going to pay the huge pandemic bill? It’s not, you are, by working longer and saving the state billions in pension payments. And this despite life expectancy not rising but falling since 2020.
Think that’s bad? Iain Duncan-Smith’s think-tank (which first proposed Universal Credit) wants to raise the pension age to 75.
There is a better solution – abolish capitalism.
Dementia is a growth market, rising from 900,000 today to 1.6 million predicted to be suffering by 2040.
Gordon Sanders who owns Runwood Homes, a care home business, paid himself £21m in five years. He owns a mansion in Essex (£4m) and a flat in London’s Knightsbridge (£4.7m). In the last two years, the company made £43m profit on turnover of £301m – a 14 percent margin. The five largest care home chains made £578m in profit in 2020 – a 22 percent average return
Helen Wildbore of the Relatives & Residents Association, said: ‘Supporting people affected by dementia should be an honour and a privilege, not a way to make millions. This highlights the sad reality of care as a commodity…’ bit.ly/3iPo7UI.
Oxfam’s latest report, ‘Survival of the Richest’, confirms the old saying that money always goes to money.
Britain’s richest 685,000 now have more wealth than 48 million UK people combined. The richest 1% of Irish people have more than a quarter of the country’s wealth and they gained 70 times more wealth than the bottom 50% in the last 10 years.
Oxfam Ireland said, ’This rising wealth at the top and rising poverty for the rest are two sides of the same coin, proof that our economic system is functioning exactly how the rich and powerful designed it to…’ (Independent).
Yes, the system works. Just not for the likes of you.
Don’t throw petrol on a burning fire seems like sensible advice. Don’t poke the bear seems to be also good advice but one that Western ‘leaders’ seem determined to ignore. News that France is to supply Ukraine with AMX-10 RC light tanks, while the UK plans to send Chieftains, is disturbing, while plans by the USA and Germany to send the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Marder Infantry Fighting Vehicle are even more so.
At what point will Russia consider western states have openly declared war on them and respond accordingly?
The Socialist Party has been, since 1904, consistent in its opposition to armed conflict. The question is, who does the continuing conflict between Russia and Ukraine benefit? Answer, not the working class of either state.
Only recently nurses were being hailed as heroes. Now they are so financially desperate that more than half of NHS trusts and health boards are either providing or planning food banks for their workers. The trusts are also considering meal voucher programmes, subsidised canteen menus and free-breakfast initiatives.
NHS Charities Together call it ‘heartbreaking’ that healthcare staff working under such pressures are having to use food banks. ’This is unprecedented’ (bit.ly/3X1Bikk).
Unprecedented, no, disgrace, yes. The ugly truth is, Britain’s tax-paying rich don’t want to pay to keep workers healthy, and would love to abolish the NHS. But governments know that would be political suicide, so they condemn it to death by a thousand cuts instead.
