There’s cheats and there’s cheats...

From the World Socialist Movement discussion forum

copy of e-mail to BBC, Sky News ITN and Channel 4 News

Dear Sir or Madam

There’s cheats and there’s cheats, apparently, as there’s victims and victims

As a viewer, I’m watching all the coverage of the John Darwin and his wife Anne, the alleged insurance fraudsters and the huge expense that TV stations and newspapers are expending to cover this story. They are alleged to have cheated insurance companies of some 200 thousand pounds?

A couple of months ago, however, the Office of Fair Trading signalled an investigation into the allegations that the main supermarkets are colluding to cheat the public over the price of milk, butter and cheese. Today, 7 December2007, the Office of Fair Trade announced that the supermarkets were indeed guilty of cheating the public of 250 million pounds.

The Darwins’ alleged cheating, like those who actually cheat the government in benefit fraud etc are not directly cheating working class people, but insurance companies. Is there more urgency among the media to expose the cheats of government and private companies than the cheats of working class people? It rather seems so.

The supermarkets are cheating against the principles or ideologies of both‘free trade’ and of ‘competition’, which are bound into capitalist law and aresaid to create the condition for cheaper goods and services. The supermarkets broke this law. A supermarket doesn’t operate itself; it needs human involvement to direct its operations, legal and illegal.

Why, then, both months ago and today are not the faces of the supermarket individuals, (the directors, who orchestrated the cheating and law breaking), handcuffed arrested and all over the TV and newspapers branded as ‘cheats’? Oh no, don’t tell me, that they too like the cheating police chief, the cheating British Airways directors, the cheating Virgin Atlantic directors and the cheating politicians too are getting off ‘toff free’? In Great Britain, a worker who has cheated is a branded a cheat for life, so why are not a company and its cheating directors cheats for life?

Incidentally, the man called Branson who owns or certainly runs the cheating Virgin Atlantic, is being allowed to buy Northern Rock Bank, the bank that’s gone bust, and be in charge of peoples savings?

Ah, Loony Tunes or what!

Yours
JB Books