Workers' Fight workplace bulletin editorials, 4 May 2009

The end of Britain's occupation of Iraq was proclaimed last Thursday. By the end of May, the remaining troops should be repatriated, leaving a few hundred soldiers to "train" the Iraqi army.

Predictably, Brown's ministers congratulated themselves about what they called "a job well done". Never mind the 200 men, women and children, who were killed in April, in Baghdad alone! Far from being the "stable new country" hailed by the government, Iraq remains torn apart by the rival armed thugs produced by the western invasion!

Never mind either, the devastation of the war. Six years after the invasion, the 3.5 million inhabitants of Basra still do not have a working sewage and refuse system, despite the potential catastrophic health consequences this may have in such a hot climate.

Nor do they have regular electricity supplies. The invaders may boast of having restarted oil production, for the benefit of Western oil majors, but the factories which survived the bombings are left to rust for lack of electricity. As a result, over 20% of the population of Basra is jobless and depends entirely on NGOs for food.

What happened to the "reconstruction", which ministers boasted so much about, then? Official figures tell part of the real story. While £6.4 billion was spent on military expenditure for the war and occupation, only £744m went to "reconstruction". But even that is misleading: a large part of this sum went to "security" projects, like Basra's brand new detention centre. Turning the screw on the Iraqi population was always far more important than repairing the devastation caused by the invasion!

By a cynical twist, Britain's "end of occupation" coincides with the organisation of a high-powered "Invest in Iraq" conference in London. Brown has invited the whole of the Baghdad government and a host of Iraqi businessmen to wine and dine with representatives of a hundred or so British companies. Six years on, the City is preparing to reap the profits of the bloodbath of Iraq!

Yes, this was all there really was to this criminal war. 179 British soldiers died, 800 were severely wounded or disabled, tens of thousands of Iraqi were killed in the British zone of occupation alone, all that for the greed of the City barons!

The "swine flu", which emerged in Mexico, is now treated officially as a pandemic. But, as usual, the populations of the rich countries stand to be far better protected than the poor majority of the planet. It is one thing to provide cheap surgical masks, whose effectiveness is questionable. But containing the spread of the disease by, at least, detecting infected individuals before they can contaminate others and isolating them, is quite another, which only the richest countries can afford. Even in Britain, one of the world's richest countries, the hospital facilities and the staff required are just not there, especially after the wholesale hospital closures of the past decades.

As to curing patients, it is quite simply a luxury. Not that the scientific know-how is in short supply. Scientists all over the world have been working round the clock to isolate the "swine flu" virus. They have already produced reliable tests and should soon be able to provide an adequate vaccine. But although most of them are working in state-funded laboratories, their results are kept secret. Instead of pooling their findings together, many different teams work in isolation from one another, thereby wasting precious time and effort.

Why? Quite simply because there are huge profits at stake for the pharmaceutical sharks.

Because, in this capitalist society, nothing comes for free, not even the right to live! And the capitalists will stop at nothing to boost their profits, not even when this may result in the death of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. This is yet another indictment of a form of social organisation which is incapable of catering for the needs of the majority.

Much like the "swine flu", today's economic crisis is a pandemic of sorts, a "capitalist pigs' flu". Except that there is no vaccine against it, as the costly failure of the bankers' bailouts has shown.

There is a cure, however, for all the ills of this bankrupt system. But that is the task of the working-class majority of the world, joining forces in order to replace this inept system with a social organisation free of the private profit madness and organised to cater for the needs of all, rather than for the greed of the capitalist few.