Babylonian Times

BUSH’S TAX CUTS CUT BUSH’S TAXES
Following implementation of George Bush’s new tax policy, Bob McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal advocacy group whose statistical analyses are respected by mainstream economists, analyzed the returns. He found the Bush-backed tax cuts saved the president nearly $31,000 on his 2003 bill. Dick Cheney, meanwhile, saved $11,000.

“What can you say? They’re rich, so you’d expect them to benefit from a tax cut for the rich,” McIntyre said.

SELLEBRITY
As a new book called Celebrity Sells makes clear, it’s official - celebrity sells. Readers irritated to fury by the spectacle of Prunella Scales stomping ‘amusingly’ around Tesco followed by an understandably pained Jane Horrocks might be even more repulsed to know that this one campaign actually earned Tesco an extra £2.2 billion. That’s £2.2 billion sucked from the public purse and straight into the Tesco boardroom, where it’s used to make thousands of farmers redundant, turn our high streets into ghost streets, exploit undocumented migrant workers and sell, among other things, whale meat. Good choice of employer! Still, it’s probably marginally better than working for GM primate experiment sponsoring Sainsbury’s - right, Jamie Oliver?

Celebrity Sells (by ‘advertising legend’ Hamish Pringle) oleaginously boasts that it ‘demonstrates the awesome power of famous names’. Even publicist Max Clifford, interviewed on Richard and Judy about the book, looked fairly sick at this unpleasant fact. Happily, the one thing the book doesn’t seem to be selling is itself - hardback copies, which originally went on sale at £16.99, could be found on Amazon at the knock down price of £10.94 a couple of weeks later.

In contrast, other celebrities have been doing been doing their bits (and using them) to spread general understanding worldwide. A muscled-up Kevin Bacon speaking out on climate change. An unusually humble Chris Eubank protesting against the current situation in Iraq (and never mind the fact that he also worked for McDonalds and Nescafe; evolution takes time). Danny Glover is currently touring and speaking out against the US-led coup in Haiti. While Ruby Wax has just pulled out of participating in an Israeli Independence festival in London. ‘It’s because I don’t agree with what Israel just did,’ she declared, referring to the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Go! Buy their books/ see their films/have strange, lonely fantasies about them now!

CHRISTIANS ON THE CASE
Watch it, right-wing, fundamentalist Armageddon-heads. Church leaders across the world may have been remarkably silent while you shifted their peace love and tolerance sort of message to a bombs, bombs, and more bombs sort of message, but now the real Christians are coming. Grass roots Christians, like the Jesus Christians, for example, who are going so far as to suggest that Mr Bush is not, in fact, entitled to pursue a policy of extermination and destruction just because something he calls his God told him to. While in Britain and abroad, Christians are currently being mobilised to, of all things, boycott Pepsi, or more precisely, Pepsi’s new can. The problem, apparently, is that Pepsi has a new ‘patriotic’ can coming out, with pictures of the Empire State Building and the Pledge of Allegiance on them. Unfortunately, say the Christians, Pepsi have left out two small words from the Pledge - ‘Under God’. ‘Pepsi won’t be offended when they don’t receive our money that has the words ‘In God We Trust’ on it’; fulminates one devout cola lover, urging his fellow Christians to ‘forward this to others fast’.

CAPITALISM REPRESENTS ACCEPTABLE POLICY
No, really it does. Capitalism Represents Acceptable Policy is a new, campaigning website designed to kick other more stupid websites firmly in the goolies. ‘We’, the site announces proudly, ‘want a world where civilised people can consume without fear, pollute without prejudice and secure unlimited access to global resources without guilt (or images on TV of starving children)’. The website features the first ever pro-capitalist marches, whose participants wave banners proclaiming ‘More roads! Less Trees!’ and ‘Bombs Not Bread!’. It would seem, on closer inspection, to be something of a joke. Even without the acronym...

GOOGLE WHACK
Corporate Watch was recently pleased to hear that it is something called a ‘googlewhack’. ‘This is not a bad thing’ reassured the kind person who sent us the info. ‘It just means that, out of the 3 billion pages that Google (the internet search engine) holds, yours is the only one containing the words ‘zoologists’ and ‘courgette’ on the same page’.
One in 3 billion? We looked it up, and, good grief, it was true. In all the world, only the Corporate Watch Newsletter Issue 16 contains the words zoologists and courgette on the same page. We knew we were unique.