Advising or pulling the strings ?

Gordon Brown is creating a special council of business leaders to advise him directly as Prime Minister. It will meet two or three times a year and will advise Mr Brown on whether government policy is helping or damaging Britain's competitiveness. Members will be available to Mr Brown to give him advice as and when needed.

BUSINESS COUNCIL MEMBERS
Damon Buffini, Permira
Stuart Rose, Marks & Spencer
Tony Heywood, BP
Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco
Arun Sarin, Vodafone
Stephen Green, HSBC
Sir John Rose, Rolls-Royce
Mervyn Davies, Std. Chartered
J-P Garnier, GlaxoSmithKline

Gordon Brown - muppet and puppet

The New King of Wall St.

It is never ending , isn't it ? The ostentatious wealth of the capitalist class .

From the Guardian :-

Stephen Schwarzman, enjoyed personal earnings of $398 million last year. When Blackstone goes public, he will receive a windfall of at least $449 million and he will retain a stake in the business worth $7.7 billion.

Schwarzman, founded Blackstone in 1985 with an investment banking colleague, Peter Peterson, who served as US commerce secretary in the Nixon administration.

Mr Peterson, took home $212 million last year and will get $1.88 billion by selling shares at Blackstone's flotation.

A third senior executive, Hamilton James, enjoyed annual income of a $97 million and stands to receive $147 million .

Vice chairman Tomlinson Hill got $45 million last year

Chief financial officer Michael Puglisi received $17 million

Seven more executives will have shares worth a combined $380 million on flotation.

A 60th birthday party hosted by Mr Schwarzman featured private performances by Rod Stewart and Pattie LaBelle, an all male capella group serenading him with "happy birthday" and a troupe of elite cadets from New York's Knickerbocker Greys to lead guests to their seats. The guest list included Donald Trump, mayor Michael Bloomberg and the perfume heir Leonard Lauder.

Wealth Gap Widens

A previous blog revealed that under Tony Blair the gap between the richest and the poorest had widened . The Scotsman confirms that indeed this is the case .

The think-tank , Compass , has issued a report that finds that people living in the affluent London borough of Kensington and Chelsea now live, on average, 10.9 years longer than people from Glasgow. That inequalities in mortality rates for children born to working-class mothers compared with middle-class ones have also grown since 1998.

The publication said the share of national wealth owned by the richest 1 per cent in Britain had risen from 17 per cent in 1991 to 24 per cent in 2002, while the share of the country's riches held by the bottom 50 per cent of people had dropped from 8 percent to 6 per cent. It warned that massive house-price rises and huge pay hikes for executives in industry and commerce were fuelling the growing gap between rich and poor.

"The super-rich have, during Tony Blair's premiership, been accumulating wealth at close to four times the rate of the ordinary person." says the report

The poor , more probably than not , disillusioned by all the previous broken promises of the politicians are now deserting the democratic process. The difference between voter turnout between the highest and lowest social classes had reached 17 per cent - the gap in voting habits was "probably wider than at any point since the abolition of property requirements" in the early part of the 20th century .

Rather than political apathy , the Socialist Party entreats the working class to acknowledge the class war , to intensify the class struggle , but also to finally transcend Capitalism itself by building Socialism .

Capitalism , the Co-opting System

The Socialist Courier isn't known as a blog page for arty criticism but The Independent carries a story featuring the "guerrilla" graffiti artist known as "Banksy" who has a few pearls of wisdom .

"...The money that my work fetches these days makes me a bit uncomfortable, but that's an easy problem to solve - you just stop whingeing and give it all away. I don't think it's possible to make art about world poverty and then trouser all the cash , that's an irony too far, even for me."

"I have been called a sellout, but I give away thousands of paintings for free, how many more do you want?"

"I think it was easier when I was the underdog, and I had a lot of practise at it."

And the most poignant observation from him:-

"I love the way capitalism finds a place - even for its enemies. It's definitely boom time in the discontent industry."

Capitalism is a Cancer

Bucharest will witness a protest demonstration of a grisly kind today. The streets of the Romanian capital will be filled with cancer patients pleading with a government that they say has turned its back on them.

More than 370,000 patients have been diagnosed with cancer in Romania but only 76,000 are in treatment, according to official estimates. This year's budget for cancer treatment has been set at 336 million lei (£65 million), a fraction of the amount spent in other EU member states. The UK, with a population less than three times as big as Romania's, spent £4.3 billion on cancer in 2005-06. Many women with breast and gynaecological cancers who had had surgery and radiotherapy are unable to get chemotherapy.

In September, the government ordered a ban on newly trained doctors joining two-year oncology [ the study and treatment of tumors ] courses to qualify as specialists - the first EU member state to obliterate the specialty of oncology - replacing it with a 4 month course instead .

The government also introduced a new system for distributing drugs to cancer patients on 1 April. Previously, it had been handled by hospital pharmacies, but now patients can take a scrip from their doctor to a city pharmacy, and take the drugs at home. But the pharmacies are reluctant to supply the drugs because of bad experiences in the past with underfunded government schemes. The Ministry of Health has big debts from past years and they are sceptical that the government will pay this time . "Cancer drugs are expensive and no one wants to invest a lot of money in buying them and then find re-payments are blocked." . Thousands of patients were left without treatment.

Organisers of the protest in front of the Ministry of Public Health accuse the government of neglecting the suffering of cancer patients. They say ministers are withholding investment because they view cancer patients as economically unproductive.

Referring to the Minister of Health, Eugen Nicolaescu, a Federation of Cancer Patient Associations spokeswoman said :-

"He is an economist, not a doctor. He sees just figures and money, not human lives..."

And what do we read in The Herald .

A spokeswoman for the BMA in Scotland said:"It is no longer financially feasible to deliver everything to all people..."We need to have a sensible debate about rationing in Scotland in context of the Scottish health service."

While Dr Andrew Walker, health economist at Glasgow University, said:-

"...the Scottish Medicines Consortium, which guides the NHS on new drugs, already performed a cost benefit analysis to determine what should be made available to patients...As an economist I would like to see the same sort of model for the other 85% of the health service"

Rich List and P*ssed

With the imminent publication of The Times 2007 Rich List , there will be many commentaries on it . The first i have read is from the BBC .

The fortunes of Britain's wealthiest 1,000 people grew 20% in a year .

The UK Office for National Statistics reported that average UK earnings including bonuses rose by 4.6 % in the year to February 2007 . Average earnings excluding bonuses on regular pay, rose by 3.6 % . The retail price index measure of inflation stands presently at 4.8%.

The £19 billion fortune of Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal ensured he kept his title as Britain's richest person. Mr Mittal's fortune grew more than £4 billion from from £14.8 billion in 2006 .

The Duke of Westminster fortune grew from £6.6 billion to £7 billion.

Once again , the figures irrefutably confirm that the capitalist class are becoming increasingly richer and the working class are growing poorer and poorer .

Who owns the Moon

In a previous blog we reported on the possible future exploitation of the Arctic regions . Here we pass on a BBC report on how The Moon is now up for grabs .

Nevada, entrepreneur Dennis Hope has taken advantage of a loophole in the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty and he has been claiming ownership of the Earth's Moon - and seven planets and their moons - for more than 20 years. Hope says he has so far sold more than 400 million acres (1.6m sq km) , that has already made him $9 million (£4.5 million).

But the real development that is about to take place is that, within a matter of decades, the Moon will be much more than a scientific outpost; it could become a vital commercial frontier.

President George Bush in January 2004 committed the US to returning to the Moon by as early as 2017. He said the US aimed to establish a long term lunar base by around 2020.

China - which has already successfully launched two manned space missions - has announced a similar timetable.

Russia, for nearly 50 years one of the world's leading space powers, may not be far behind.

Europe, Japan and India have also expressed an interest.

Large private companies and rich entrepreneurs have also seen a new business opportunity.
One of the biggest is US space contractor Lockheed Martin, which is currently developing technologies that will enable future lunar residents to exploit the lunar surface.
In particular it is working on a process which will convert moon dust into oxygen and water. It may even be able to turn it into rocket fuel.

But this is peanuts compared to what scientists believe is the real prize lying in the moon rocks.

Data collected from the Apollo Moon landings have indicated that large deposits of an extremely rare gas called helium 3 are trapped in the lunar soil. Plans are already afoot in the US and Russia to strip-mine lunar helium 3 and transport it the 240,000 miles (385,000km) back to Earth.

The Moon, claims Prof Jerry Kulcinski of the University of Wisconsin-Madison , could become the Persian Gulf of the 21st Century.