UNITED KINGDOM: The globalization of greed

We are WAISfully grateful to John Heelan for giving us the exact record of the session in the UK parliament to which "The globalization of greed" referred. Hansard gives the precise wording of the exchange on 10 April:

"Q11. [44186]Paul Flynn (Newport, West): On Friday last, when the final shift was worked at the heavy end of the Llanwern steelworks, it was announced that the steel boss who axed 6,000 steelworkers' jobs last year was to be rewarded with a bonus of 130 per cent., bringing his salary up to almost £500,000. Why, in almost every crisis of this kind, do the workers end up losing out and losing their jobs, but the steel bosses and bosses of other industries are allowed to gift themselves fortunes?

The Prime Minister: I do understand the concerns that my hon. Friend has raised. All I would say is that, as a result of the money that we are putting into those areas, the work that the Employment Service is doing, and the strength of the economy overall--some 26,000 jobs have been created in Wales over the past few years--we at least give people who lose their job the best chance of getting a new one. In respect of the bonus paid to the chairman of the company involved, I am afraid that that is not a matter for me".

John says "Your comment is correct: "it was beyond his power to do anything" about the bosses awarding themselves large bonuses while at the same time engineering major lay-offs of their workers. The reason is that the Blair New Labour (notionally socialist) government is in fact a slightly watered down version of Conservatism (capitalist) and is beholden to the owners of those businesses for their contributions to the Labour Party. (Previous Socialist governments were in similar debt to the trade unions for their contributions to the Labour Party).

The weekend papers carry analyses of the times Blair and his ministers have taken action to support sales efforts on behalf of major donors to the Labour Party-- two last week being Blair jetting off to Prague to sell fighter aircraft for BAe (who paid £12 million towards the Millenium Dome fiasco) and the awarding of a national contract for providing 30 million smallpox vaccines to a hefty contributor to Party funds. This follows previous examples, one of the most notable being the U-turn made on prohibiting advertising on Formula One racing following a a £1 million pounds donation to the Labour Party by the promoter.

The sleaze of successive UK governments (of whatever political flavour) is diminishing the faith of the electorate to the extent that the turnout in the 2001 General Election, at 59.4%, was the worst since 1918. More people declined to vote that voted for both the major parties combined".

My comment: The US and the UK are fooling themselves if they think that they can sell this system to a skeptical world. In the US there is the additional problem of hiding behind the Constitution, which Americans revere with inerrancy. Any sane person would view with astonishment the decision of the Supreme Court that money is a form of free speech. This takes us back to the rotten boroughs of 18th-century England. The US badly needs electoral reform, but the Supreme Court ruling has given a pretext to derail such reform proposals in Congress. I have seen a report claiming that Kathleen M. Sullivan, Dean of Stanford Law School supports the opponents of reform. I hope the report is mistaken.

Ronald Hilton - 4/15/02