October 25^th’s New York Times contained a special full-color insert titled “Corporate Social Responsibility - Designing a Sustainable Future”. The introduction, given by the President and CEO of Business for Social Responsibility Aron Cramer, tells us that “Consumers are paying more attention to the sources of the food they eat and the safety of the products they buy for their children”, implores business to heed “a new urgency for business strategy integrate social and environmental impacts with opportunities”, and goes on to say “The most exciting chances to leverage business success for broad social benefit involve innovations that deliver new products…”

You don’t have to be fluent in business-speak to realize what he is saying; people are buying more and more “green” goods and services, and capitalists can make money from it if they pay attention. The insert contained other articles on the following: Yahoo! Green’s Carbon Footprint calculator, Greenpeace helping Coca-Cola revamp its refrigeration technology, DuPont’s latest efforts in Frankenfoods, delivery of women’s reproductive health care to under 25 year-old sweatshop workers in Asia, and some marketplace innovations made by an outdoor apparel and a household chemical company. All of these are intended to show you that companies big and small are changing their practices to become more “sustainable” - part of what capitalism means when it says “green”. Just to drive the point home are small green graphics of a globe, a 3-member family, the recycling symbol, and what looks like a tulip. Finally, nestled at the page bottoms (but by no means hidden) as if it was some kind of sick inside joke, the sponsors of this insert reveal themselves in ink-intensive splendor - Shell and ConocoPhillips.

Make no mistake, capitalism isn’t sustainable, and it isn’t suddenly going to start caring about the environment. In fact, it has been systematically exploiting and destroying whatever it touches since the Industrial Revolution. But they want you to believe it so that you buy their new “green” products (and hopefully don’t sic your congressman on them) and pretend everything is ok. It’s the newest frontier in branding. See, they realize that buying products and services that are associated with the “green” phenomenon has quietly become a way for the affluent West to assuage the guilt some feel when they realize what the results of their lifestyles of conspicuous consumption have been to the planet and its less fortunate population. For example, the concept of buying carbon credits, where people or corporations pay to invest in companies researching some green technology or another in order to “offset” their massive carbon dioxide emissions is the fashionable equivalent of the old 10 Hail Marys after confession. It does nothing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by one molecule, but it looks like one is kinda-sorta-maybe doing something about the problem of way too many greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Regardless, the credit buyers feel and look better and capitalism gets healthier for it. If I go on, I could turn this into an exposé of the various ways capitalism tries to make green by seeming green, but it will probably just depress you and is not my point.

The Associated Press reported this week that in 1989, bridge inspectors had warned that pigeon droppings were accumulating on the steel beams of the I-35W bridge connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul. Apparently, the ammonia and acids in the droppings, the inspectors said nearly a decade ago, could corrode the beams.

This span collapsed August 1st of this year, killing 13 people and injuring more than 100. It is not yet clear if the bird droppings had been the cause of the terrible accident last month, but this story illustrates how terribly accident-prone is the capitalist system. Such a system simply does not have the money available to perform the necessary checks, cleanings, and repairs of the thousands of similar bridges in the United States to the advisable extent (as advised by professional bridge inspectors).

The United Nations is sixty-two years old, but should have been pensioned off years ago. Those present at the birth were naive in the extreme for thinking that in signing the charter they would come within light years of saving “succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Surely, even an historian such as Simon Sebag Montefiore can appreciate that there have been many more wars since 1945 than he has fingers and toes!

Socialists knew at the birth of the UN, or rather its earlier incarnation, the League of Nations, shortly after the ‘war to end all wars’, that as an agency for bringing peace and prosperity to all it was doomed to failure, because:

“…the ‘League’ is a mere phantasm, a spineless, parchment entity which can have no power or influence in the real world - the world of strife for economic interests.” (Socialist Standard, July 1919)

Fifty years ago we repeated this fact, one which “most politicians, British and foreign, have always been well aware of…But politicians, if they are to keep their jobs, must profess to have an answer. After each world war the working class has looked to its “leaders” for a scheme to prevent the next one. No politician in these circumstances could hope to win votes without some solution to offer…” (Socialist Standard, February 1957)

Just over ten years ago we asked:

“Is it irony, or just plain coincidence, that the world’s top five arms suppliers (USA, Britain, France, China and Russia) just happen to be the five permanent members of the UN Security Council? Indeed, does this fact not make a mockery of any pretensions they have of proving the world with ’security’?”

Adding: “Just how secure the world really is can be judged by the fact that there have been over 300 conflicts since the establishment of the UN Security Council after world War Two and that 30 still rage and that more are threatened.”

The article concluded:

The demand to keep smiling – or, in fancier language, to maintain a “positive outlook” – is pervasive in American culture. Song lyrics and gurus drum the demand into our heads, and we echo them, telling ourselves things like “Mustn’t complain!” and “Must look on the bright side!”

The philosophy of the compulsory smile goes back at least to 1936, when Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People appeared. His first two pieces of advice are “don’t criticize, condemn or complain” and “give honest and sincere appreciation.” How you can always be honest and sincere if you have to be appreciative, whatever your true feelings may be? Don’t ask me!

The entertainment industry is celebrated as the pacesetter of nonstop smiling in the Irving Berlin song There’s No Business Like Show Business:

There’s no people like show people.
They smile when they are low.

The second verse elaborates:

You get word before the show has started
That your favorite uncle died at dawn.
Top of that, your ma and pa have parted
You’re broken-hearted, but you go on.

From this I infer that you might be let off smiling duty if a parent rather than just an uncle has died. You might get a few days’ “family leave.” But when you return your smile must be firmly back in place.

Dear fellow Socialists of Great Britain:

Malawi is much in the news . Not for any particular reason other than music icon Madonna is visiting and being rumoured to be planning another adoption of another Malawian youngster . Malawi’s economy is said to be 1% of Scotland’s - about half the size of Falkirk’s .The country’s population is 12.6 million people , one million of whom are orphans . More than half the population lives below the poverty line . Malawi is ranked as the 10th poorest country in the world by the United Nations . Life expectancy in Malawi is now as low as 36.5 years, five years lower than it was 50 years ago.

Latest edition of Scientific American focuses on fashion and the African perspective .

Just as Africa’s youth find themselves choosing between Western music and clothes and those rooted in their own tradition, they are now faced with two opposing images of beauty — the Western ideal of an ever thinner frame and the African one of a buxom and well-rounded figure.

Writing in the Ecologist magazine at the height of the Make Poverty History campaign last year, Dr Vandana Shiva (an Indian author and environmentalist) said, “by robbing the poor of their resources, livelihoods and incomes. Before we can make poverty history, we need to get the history of poverty right. People don’t die for lack of incomes. They die for lack of access to resources.”

According to Dr Shiva, what makes poverty is that people are no longer able to live “off the land”; instead they are forced into becoming consumers. “People”, she says, “no longer have access to resources such as water and land because these have been appropriated and/or destroyed by mega corporations and industrial agribusinesses. Poverty is a final state, not an initial state of an economical paradigm, which destroys ecological and social systems for maintaining life, health and sustenance of the planet and people.”

Was there really a plot to blow up transatlantic airliners or were the police just using a pretext to fish for information by rounding up and questioning people they suspected were up to something without knowing precisely what?

Will ministers eventually say, as they did after the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes and after the raid on that house in Forest Gate when another innocent man was shot, that it’s better to err on the side of safety? Better a few innocents are shot than a terrorist act in which hundreds die?

The fuss over the Danish cartoons of Mohammed has not been the only recent event that has raised the issue of free speech. There was also the government’s failed attempt to make it more difficult to criticise religion. There were the trials of the BNP leaders and of the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza. The elected mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, was required to appear before an unelected body with the power to eject him from office for a remark made to a journalist from the gutter press. David Irving was arrested in Austria for holocaust-denial. All these were attempts – either by law or by direct action – to punish people for expressing an opinion.

We in the Socialist Party have always insisted on the advantages, for the advancement of the cause of socialism, of the fullest possible freedom of expression of political and social ideas, including when these take the form of religion (since all religions hold views on how society should be organised and are in this sense political). No view should be prevented from being expressed. And no view (not even religion) should be exempt from being criticised.

If capitalism was a circus, the current hype created by the UAE Company buying six US ports is a sideshow. The Bush administration accepts the move as capitalism as usual, while congress and media pundits run around like the sky is falling, trying to whip the citizens into a fury.

I don’t understand what the big deal is. These ports are already owned by a foreign company, based in London, and even after 9/11, only 5% of all cargo containers brought in on the huge cargo ships are searched. It seems to me that the chance for terrorists to use a cargo ship to attack the US has come and gone, and that congresses questions should be pointed to searches, not the actual ownership.

If you and your family, friends and neighbors were the last people left on Earth, would you be able to survive, assuming access to fresh water, plants and animal life? As humans we have come a long way, but if we are to go much further we must reassess the direction we are taking in terms of survival and the quality of our lives. Few of us are unaware of the AIDS crisis in Africa, famines and wars worldwide, melting ice caps and ozone holes, yet we continue to follow the same well-trodden path which brought us these disasters.

Millennia ago, our ancestors lived crude and superstitious lives, but they were cooperative and self-sufficient. Over time a few learned to make implements out of metal rather than wood or bone and became highly respected for their skills. Indeed, they were sometimes regarded as magicians and treated like demigods. When some took their show on the road and traded with distant communities, they became the prototypes for the international capitalist. For the first time, farmers became dependent for their livelihood on implements made from materials from faraway places not accessible to them and by techniques of which they were totally ignorant.

Early this evening, Kenneth Lee Boyd became the 1,000th person to be executed in the United States since 1976, the year the capital punishment was brought back by the US Supreme Court.

This milestone is a good time to take a quick look at capital punishment. It, like prisons, is a product of capital society, and would have no place a socialist one. Capital punishment is a form of revenge that is being placed on the guilty, people who, if living in a socialist society, probably would never of even had a chance to commit the crime.

You can’t watch TV this week without hearing about Carl Rove, Lewis Libby, and a CIA agent’s cover being outed. This news is now being used as ammunition against the Bush administration, while Bush supporters are trying to limit his involvement in the matter. While this story is making all the major news outlets, this has little impact to the rest of us. It is not just politics as usual, but capitalist politics as usual. In a society filled with presidents, advisers, and super secret spy agencies, scandals should be assumed as commonplace.

What this scandal does do is take our minds off the rest of the world. With a major Washington DC scandal, might we forget about the inability to get supplies to hurricane victims in the south? Might we forget about the government’s inability to properly prepare Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, and Florida for hurricanes?

We would like to alert our readers to the Harrass The Brass website. While not socialist, HtB is a usefull website showing the depth of resistence to the Iraq war on the part of “Coalition” worker-soldiers.